"Pasta the Hut"

My first reaction to this video was disbelief. There's no way that Pizza Hut can actually make pasta that is good enough to both pass and get raving reviews as fine Italian food -- the conceptual equivalent of what you would get in a New York Italian restaurant. The Hut doesn't make good pizza; why should they make good pasta?

But no, I thought wrong -- but not about Pizza Hut's inability to make good pasta. They can't. I wasn't wrong about the Hut. I was wrong about people.

What this commercial demonstrates is that people have been buying Ragu brand Alfredo sauce from the market and (unknowingly) at restaurants (even in NY) for so long, that they can no longer tell good pasta from "Pasta the Hut."

Chipotle: chi-pot-"le" . . . seriously

For the life of me, I cannot understand how mispronouncing chipotle as "chipotie" or "chipoltay" became a chronic cultural deformity. You must have heard the Audi-driving woman at the table next to you point to the "chipolteee" bbq sauce and ask, "Is that spicy?" ...seriously.

Anway, this post is not about chipoltay, it's about chipotle, the over-ripened red smoked jalapeno pepper, usually dripping in adobe sauce.

Chipotles have become really popular these days. They're everywhere. I use them all the time. One of my favorite go-to staples is any combination of chicken thighs, coriander seed, sour cream, chipotle peppers, and lime juice (the latter usually as garnish). But chipotles aren't credited with the diverse potential that they really possess. For one, you can only find them in that tasty adobe sauce. It's good, but it has a lot of sugar, something that red smoked jalapenos already have. If you have a garden, grow your own, wait til they turn red, then smoke them (roast them if you haven't means to smoke).

I'll offer one preparation of chipoltles that highlights its fresher side. It's a shredded duck confit and chipoltle dressing atop a polenta cake.

I'll assume the bag directions for polenta are easy enough. I would only suggest using
chicken stock instead of water. After the polenta is cooked, let it cool. Then mix it (maybe 2 cups worth) with 2 eggs, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, and paprika. Shape them into cakes and dredge with flour. Next, pan fry it in a cast iron skillet (or whatever) in oil (have veggie, have olive) until brown on each side.

The confit dressing goes on top, and it's simple -- if you have confit. Confit shouldn't freak anyone out, it's just a way of cooking meat (or anything with fat). Duck is most often confit-ed, and it's easy since it comes with so much fat. Duck legs work the best. The method is to render the fat then cook the meat slowly in its own fat. It's actually a preservation method, like curing, but much richer. So take the duck legs and any other duck fat that the butcher has laying around, and brown them in a skillet. You don't want to cook the meat very much, you just want the fat. Then, with the skin still on, salt the legs, let them cool, and compress them into the smallest casserole dish you have. The idea is to maximize the fat to meat ratio. Then pour the fat over the legs -- again you want as much covered as possible. Put the oven on a pretty low temp (225 will work) and cook for about 2 1/2 hours. Again, let it cool before using.

That sounds like a lot of work, but again, this is a preservation method, so make a lot at once. You can confit any part of the duck. Once it is cooled, open a can of chipotle's, and grab as many as you like. I would use between 2 and 3 for 3 legs worth of meat. Rinse the seeds out of the peppers, and dice them into thin strips. Most recipes ask you to rinse them not only because it reduces the heat but also because of the sauce they come in. Then shred the duck meat and toss it with the chipotles. It will look like a little salad. If you want, roll some corn stalks over a grill and brown up the kernels. Then cut them off and throw them in too. Finally, put the dressing on top of the hot cake. The dressing should be room temp, and the cake should be warm. Garnish with cilantro.

The reason why I say that this is different is that you're not trying to highlight the sauce that the peppers come in, which is usually the case in recipes; they sometimes even ask you to pour more of the sauce into whatever you're making. This is a first or second course.

The Namesake

I think about food at least as much as I think about anything -- hence, "the good life" in the subtitle.

This weekend the wife and took a train to NYC to see a friend on Broadway. For dinner we stumbled wide-eyed into a humid, bustling Cuban cafe. Well, it was just off of Broadway, so it wasn't exactly the hole in the wall, but nonetheless, it was decked out with banana leaves, sour orange marinades, and large, electric, slowly-moving (too slowly to count) palm frond fans. It was here that I was finally able to taste two of the greatest meats in the world, suckling pig and oxtail.

In Russia and Europe suckling pig (a pig who is young enough to suck) is slow roasted whole, usually with minimal seasoning and sauce -- white wine, olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, etc. Unfortunately, this suckling pig was not whole roasted. But lest some Cuban think that he can pull a fast one by me, I confidently scrutinized the pork that I tasted, which was obviously a young one. This pig was marinated then roasted. The marinade is traditional Cuban ingredients, especially sour orange juice, thyme, and allspice. Suffice to say that piglet (don't think Winnie) has a natural delicate saltiness that would wreck any vegetarian.

The Oxtail may have surpassed the suckling pig. It's the tail of a steer, not an ox, and it is sectioned off just you would think -- block sized cut sections of a tail, with a bone in the center and meat around it. What makes oxtail so trippy is that the meat looks like clear gelatin around the bone. When it cooks, it turns brown like meat, and it strips off like shredded beef, but it maintains a gelatinous texture. Oxtail is cooked tons of different ways, in soups, stews, roasted, barbecued, or whatever. This time it was braised in a sweet and sour sauce, also making use of the famous Cuban-Jamaican sour orange juice.

Suckling pig is hard to find, but oxtail is common enough at the market.