I love living in the city, but as time passes, I long for a house with a yard, and more importantly, a garden. For my birthday, my dad’s birthday and mother’s day, we visited my folks in Wisconsin and despite it being too early for much in the garden (seeds are still in jars), the perennials were popping up. Asparagus and green garlic in particular. While I have had my fair share of asparagus this year, green garlic has not gotten the attention it deserves from me due to the mad rush for other Spring produce.

When I saw that there was an abundance of this young garlic in the furthest South row of the garden, I asked if I could bring some home along with an armful of wild chives and, the weed, garlic mustard. With full grocery bags full of allium along with the garlicy weed, I needed to make a decision how to best move forward. I am not one to acquire to pickle, but looking ahead, I knew that using all of the great stuff at its peak would be difficult, so I made the call to pickle.

I have mentioned a few times here, that my favorite commercially available pickle is Smokra from Rick’s Picks. I love the tartness of the pickle combined with the smokey and spicy addition to the brine. With the green garlic reminding me of the Calçot, it almost seemed natural to come up with a pickle brine for it that includes the hot smoked pimenton, my favorite Spanish ingredient that isn’t ham.

After cleaning and cutting the garlic, I blanched the stems, shocked them, and went to work on replicating the brine. I added additional smokiness to the pimenton with chipotle powder and then some additional warmth with cumin. Other than these flavor additions, the brine is a simple pickle brine. Oddly as I compared the brine side by side with the jar of smokra, I think that the main difference was that smokra did not use cider vinegar as I had. Call it a net win for the green garlic.

A week after I submerged the green garlic is the chilled brine, I cracked the jar open. The garlic had wrinkled slightly from loss of water, but they remained crisp. The smokiness from the brine had fortified the flavors of the green garlic. These stinky pickled straws are not yet so funky to require a light hand in use. The young qualities of the garlic allow for a far broader use than traditional pickled garlic. My favorite so far has been to slice thin with favas and mint. They are not so delicate, however, that they didn’t balance the deeply charred shells of the same favas.

It is strange to me, to think of what I would do with a garden. Certainly, when I currently think of produce, I think of the market, but someday I will be able to walk outside my door likely in a dingy white t-shirt and boxers, embarrassing my daughters, and cut a stem of young garlic and eat it seconds after picked instead of a week after have been pickled. Those are days that, despite the tastiness of these pickles, that I look forward to most.

Smoky Pickled Green Garlic

• Handful of green garlic, cut as bulb transitions to green
• 3/4 cup cider vinegar
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons pimenton
• 1 teaspoon chipotle powder
• 1/2 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon sugar

Step one: Blanch and shock garlic.

Step two: Combine all other ingredients, bring to a boil, simmer for 3 minutes, and remove from heat. Let cool to room temp.

Step three: Add garlic, weigh down garlic to remain submerged in brine. Leave for one week.

Step four: Consume.

The point of this post is not to rub in that I was early to the lamb belly curing party because many of the new versions, one made by me, but there are many others, look, and likely are, far better than my original version of lamb bacon which was too salty. Rather, the point is to keep tweaking and working to make something better – something that is different. The first lamb pancetta was pretty good (better than the lamb bacon), but after making lamb cakes for Easter including lavender in the spice mix, I knew that the floral lavender had a place in a longer-curing lamb application. The floral aroma in the lavender had some of the “Spring” qualities that I so associate with really good lamb and it was what I wanted as part of this roll of pancetta. I wanted to make it a cured meat indicative of the season.

The process starts similarly to most single muscle curing project. Start with salt and sugar and layer on the flavors that you desire. Lavender seemed to hint at a sweeter, more fragrant cure, so I opted for dried mint, in a similar vein, to go with the garlic and black pepper. Also instead of curing using red wine as I had done with lamb bacon or pork tesa, I thought that the flavors and aromas of white wine would work nicely here (a little spoiler: the white wine was the more inspired decision of the cure, it made for a deliciously interesting flavor profile after the drying process). I wanted to add heat, but kept in mind that it could be added as part of the drying process and to keep the cure clean and simple.

After applying the cure and letting it do its magic for a week, I rinsed the lamb belly and let it dry overnight. When it had dried, I added lavender, dried mint, and chili flake.

After coating one side of the cured lamb belly, I rolled and tied the belly and let it hang until it had lost 30% of its hanging weight.

After I pulled the pancetta, I sliced the roll in half and it had dried as I expected. Meaning the roll was not sealed at every junction due to the amount of herbs that I layered on top of the belly before rolling. There were no air pockets in the roll, so no mold was present, but there was a layer of herbs, buds, and chilis flavoring each slice.

This was a tradeoff for including the mint, lavender, and chili in the proportions that I wanted. When I finally cooked it up and had a taste, I was glad that I had done it that way. This lamb pancetta was a drastic upgrade over the first and even bigger over both versions of lamb bacon. The flavors were complex, but still satisfying the hedonist in me. The mint and lavender were both perceptible, but not too forward. Had less been used, their flavors may have been missed. As mentioned above, the flavors of the white wine accented the lamb really well. The pancetta was unmistakably lamby. There had been a few naysayers about local lamb that had mentioned that it was not flavorful, but the flavors here were super-concentrated and could not be mistaken for anything, but lamb.  It was both fatty, gamey, and fresh.

This pancetta would go well with eggs as a great breakfast, but seeing that I was fresh out of good eggs, I settled on a small salad to accompany it.

Klug purple aparagus, preserved Buddha’s hand, and chive blossoms topped Greek yogurt, lemon juice and chives. The brightness from the lemon and Buddha’s hand and the green flavors of the asparagus accented the natural pancetta/yogurt pairing. It was the Spring dish that I was looking for. As summer and fall come, there will be opportunities for evolution in flavors and improvements in technique.

Spring Lamb Pancetta

• 1 pound of lamb belly
• 1 tablespoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon honey
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon lavender
• 1 teaspoon mint
• 1/2 teaspoon pink salt
• 1/4 c white wine

Plus

• Lavender
• Dried mint
• Chili flake

Step one: Combine first set of ingredients and dredge lamb belly in cure. Let sit in fridge for a week, flipping daily.

Step two: Rise the belly and let sit over night uncovered in fridge.

Step three: Apply desire amounts of mint, lavender, and chili. Roll, tie, and hang. Weighting roll before hanging.

Step four: Once roll is 70% of original weight. Remove from hanging chamber and slice as needed.

The business of fancy cocktails is booming right now and along with it the vest and pocketwatch business go as well, but it was a few years ago while dining at Schwa, here in Chicago, I saw the future. It was a Hendrick’s Gin course where they made a gelee from Hendrick’s Gin with ribbons of Cucumber and rosewater. It made me think about gin as a set of flavors and not something to drink on a hot day when I want to relax. After that night where all of the dishes wowed creatively (despite a few that did not flavor-wise), when I had a drink of Hendrick’s, I tasted the juniper, rose and cucumber instead of simply enjoying the fizz of the tonic and the buzz as I slugged the drink down.

I am not a believer that every restaurant needs to have a cocktail program. In fact, of the ones that have one already, I think that about 10% of them use it in a way that accompanies the dinner rather than distracts from it (either intentionally or not). I understand that it is a cash cow, so it is not going anywhere, but I do not understand how a cocktail program complements with a pasta/pizza joint. More recently, however, Michael Ruhlman has put his Friday classic cocktail ritual into the written form. As irascible as he is about naming and convention, it still made me think back to that boundary-pushing meal at Schwa, at the opposite end of the spectrum from conventional, and wonder how the line between the classic cocktail and food could be blurred at home.

The idea struck as soon as someone mentioned an ex-colleague by saying that “he was so gin-pickled that he could barely function.” At that point, most of my brain shifted to thinking about gin-pickling things, and only a small fraction remained in the conversation. The index cards in my mind raced through ideas: pickled liver (bad texture and too on the nose), juniper berries (still may do this, but that is a lot of juniper despite possibly being a cool riff on the ubiquitous pickled mustard seeds), and turnips (no logical connection other than those beautiful baby turnips that are my favorite are in season), but I finally settled on the simple old grocery store cucumber. After all, it was cucumber that was at the beginning of this at Schwa and when most American’s think pickles, they think cucumbers.

On top of it all, it gave me confidence that, unlike a few other ideas, the cucumber is a relatively neutral flavor and you would be more likely to taste the gin without having to load the brine with it so much that the pickle burns as you eat it. After some brainstorming about what goes well with the elements (gin & cucumber), I settled on lime and mint, but I wanted this to remain a pickle and not a gin-soaked vegetable, so bringing in shallots, chili, salt and sugar kept this firmly in the pickle, not garnish, category.

After putting the pickle together, the Weck jar stared back at me each time I went to the fridge and finally after a few days, I cracked it open. The perfume from the gin and mint was clear. When I tasted the pickle, the first thing that popped into my head was ‘this is one of the most refreshing foods I’ve eaten in awhile.’ Refreshment is not something that I typically think of with food (outside of the iced treat section), so it was an odd thought. Clearly the gin, mint and lime were forward, but, as mentioned above, I was concerned this pickle would devolve into something like eating the olive out of a martini glass. It had not. The ratio of vinegar to gin was strongly leaning to towards vinegar and the inclusion of salt, shallot, and chili made certain that you knew that you were not simply eating drink garnish, but food rather with the line blurred slightly between itself and cocktail. It took me back to that dinner at Schwa where their team chose not to play it safe and by stretching made it a meal that inspired pickles years later.

Gin Pickled Cucumbers

Charcuterie making is a hobby that requires patience – hell the whole point is to let time, salt, and fat evolve and enhance over time to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The original intent is to preserve, yes, functionally, but in modern times with all of the tools that come with it, the purpose is now to enhance. It is odd to those who really know me for me to choose a hobby that features a character trait with which I have inherently struggled for decades. I am not a patient person, but project like this one, a long-cured Spanish chorizo, reminds me how patience pays off by showing me that, sometimes, it doesn’t.

Coming off what I consider to be a major victory with the Nduja, I was high on meat life. I felt like everything meat-wise was coming up Millhouse. I had that strut into the butcher shop, the market, and, hell, even the spice shop. It was not like I was neglecting these sausages, but somewhere things went South.

The project basically came about due to excess thawed meat and fat from making the nduja. I truly enjoy fresh sausage and the immediate payoff associated with them, but with a package of bacto-ferm (a starter culture for fermented meats) burning a hole in my freezer, I thought that I’d venture out from the typical and dry cure some sausage. The meat afterthought would turn into chorizo.

The process is not all that dissimilar to making any fermented sausage. You cut, grind, mix, bind, and stuff. Then you start the fermentation process by hanging the sausages someplace warm, I used the oven with the oven light on, for a few days. Once those days are up, you hang the sausages until they lose 30% of their hanging weight.

Since I had already planned to cold smoke some of the other porky products in process, I took one of the three pairs of chorizo links and hung it in the cold pecan hull smoke for 24 hours. Exposing the sausage to smoke, but not heat for that time didn’t change the appearance immediately, but the smell of the smoke reminded me, along with carefully labeling, of the special treatment.

Despite pulling the sausages when the 30% was lost, I was less than pleased with the texture of the sausages. The bind on the sausage was not great and I suspect that the wine fridge keeps humidity too low to dry cure sausages in a way that maintains the internal structure to optimize the dry cured sausages. Not all was lost however, as the flavors were bang on.

The smoky pimenton and funky pork create this amazingly utilitarian product that, once you get it into your rotation, it is difficult to go without it. Considering the texture was less than ideal, I found the best uses for this chorizo was in cooked dishes. From simply rendering a few small pieces, you not only get lovely crispy medallions of smoky pork sausage, but the oil left in the pan is what you really want. That deep red, lush fat which coats even the most boring frozen pea and elevates it to absolutely regal status. It surprises me to no end that in a world where bacon grease has made the transition for poor man’s margarine to rich man’s treat, that chorizo fat has not made the same ascension and is not jarred and sold in luxury food markets. These drippings went to enhancing brussels sprouts along with red wine vinegar and green garlic. It was a colorful, and amazingly delicious, meal onto itself.

Still this project took a little of my swagger back and definitely gave me pause for starting another dry cured sausage project, but it puts patience in perspective to me. Patience is not about waiting for a result that is certain. That is something else altogether. Patience is waiting to see how something turns out and unless results are variable, then you aren’t practicing patience, you are just waiting around.

Chorizo

Adapted from a recipe by The Art of Making Fermented Sausages

• 800 grams pork, cut into small pieces
• 200 grams pork fat, cut into small pieces
• 28 grams kosher salt
• 2.5 grams curing salt #2
• 5 grams sugar
• 6 grams black pepper, freshly ground
• 20 grams smoked pimenton
• 2 grams marjoram
• 10 grams garlic
• 0.5 grams bactoferm
• 15 grams distilled water

Step one: Combine bactoferm and water

Step two: Combine all non-pork ingredients not included in step one.

Step three: Partially freeze pork and fat and grind on medium setting.

Step four: Add results from steps one, two, and three. Mix to bind, making sure to keep exceedingly cold.

Step five: Stuff mixture into hog casings. Prick casings to remove air pockets.

Step six: Hang in oven with light on for three days to start fermentation.

Step seven: Optionally cold smoke for 24 hours. Then hang until 30% of mass is lost.

St. Fergus goes on to discuss common sense cooking and his realization of how common sense does not equate to boring. As one of my favorite local cooks said recently, “Simple isn’t easy” and how one of his best lessons was to start taking things away from a dish to make it better. I have been trying more and more lately to keep things simple, not always being able to hold back, but to do my best to follow that guideline.

Even before reading this essay, I had my walking-through-the-market inspiration moment. Only this was not some fancy farmer’s market with $12 lilacs and people wearing rain boots that had never seen mud. It was in the bulk section of the grocery. My grocery just revamped their bulk section and, as I do my best to buy dried beans, oats, and nuts/seeds in bulk, I was walking up and down looking at all of the product. When I spotted a bin with medium sized white beans labelled “marrow beans”,  there was a spark.

In a kind of after-the-fact complete the circle moment, St. Fergus’s best known dish, in the US at least, thanks to Bourdain, is his roasted bone marrow with parsley salad. It is a simple dish that delivers the maximum amount of hedonism per gram of consumption. The rich marrow spread on toast with parsley and shallots dressed with acidic lemon juice. I have enjoyed marrow a number of ways from simple to less simple, but when I saw marrow beans, I wondered how adding bone marrow to the cooking medium would improve beans. The silliness that followed would likely be frowned up on by food curmudgeons, but it was the next logical step.

As a bean snob and a mangiafagioli, I have favorites that I tend to rely on. My absolute favorites, found while in Charleston, are Sea Island Red Peas from Anson Mills. Cooked in ham stock, they count as one of my favorite foods. Then there are the black beans from Three Sisters garden. Finally, I have a steady rotation of legume miscellany (lima, fave, ceci). I have been open to adding new beans to the rotation and simply the name of these beans drove me to the scoop. When I arrived home, I did a little research that revealed that the marrow bean had a creamy texture and a meaty flavor. It became clear why the name of the bean referred to marrow.

After soaking the beans, I cooked them with garlic, rosemary, bay leaves, and the crosscut bone from a nice piece of Q7 beef shin. The flesh from the shin went into a deep, dark coffee-chili braise, but the bone was reserved for the beans – take it as robbing Peter to pay Paul – but hell not every dish can have a supplement of marrow. After hours of sitting on a low flame, the beans were cooked and the marrow had reduced, darkened, and freed itself from the bone. There were beautiful capsules of fat from the beef and marrow dotting the surface of the cooking medium which has now transitioned from water to deliciously viscous bean stock.

As an aside, as part of the download of information and insight that I gained by reading the amazing “An Everlasting Meal”, count the tips of bean cookery and use as the best of them. Letting the beans rest overnight in their stock improves both the bean and the stock immeasurably, allowing the stock and bean to reach an equilibrium where both are at their peak. I have taken to cooking the beans, resting them, then serving the beans with a slotted spoon, reserving the stock for a post-run treat.

In either regard, the day after cooking the beans, I scooped them into a warm bowl and tasted them. True to the description, the texture was incredibly creamy. I did not necessarily taste bacon, but the body and richness was certainly meaty in nature.

An idea came to me when the marrow slipped from the bone as I removed it from the rested beans. It is silly, but it is far from a leap. It was rooted in an English classic peasant dish, beans on toast, and a riff on the iconic roasted bone marrow on toast with parsley salad. I had a cleaned out roasted marrow bone. I had a pot of creamy marrow beans. I had cooked bone marrow. Within minutes, I had pureed the beans, garlic, and marrow into a sort of English hummus, spooned the mixture into the hollow bone, toasted a little bread and whipped up a little salad of roasted peanuts, sorrel, ramps, and preserved lemons.

It looked just like the roasted bone marrow dish that I have made a few times. The beans, creamy and unctuous like marrow, spooned onto the toast with the salad was not completely mindbendingly rich as whole marrow, but had similar textures and flavors without the risk of getting gout by simply looking at it. It was beans on toast and the beans were delicious. It was simple, with the only fussiness being the vessel for the beans, but it was not boring. It just made sense.

Of the 7 or 8 versions that I have tried over the past few years, I have thought most were decent, but in all of the reading that I have done, only two really fit the bill for what I expected from nduja. The first was made by Rob Levitt, while at Mado, which featured the right texture and face-melting heat, but not the deep red color that I expected (likely because Rob opted for local chilis instead of the Calabrian variety) and the other was made by Craig Deihl and Bob Cook at Cypress in Charleston, which featured the texture, color, and flavor that I had in my mind every time that I searched out nduja. Other versions lacked heat, spread-ability, or flavor generally, but in every case, an nduja sighting became a Paul Revere-type announcement within the appreciative community.

When I first tried Cypress’s nduja, I had, just weeks before, finished hanging these chubs of nduja for a three month rest. I had been, for about a year, starting and stopping the nduja making process every three months or so – sabotaging my own efforts by making excuses like the chilis weren’t right, the bactoferm was expired, the casings were too narrow or the sun was in my eyes.  I had finally acquired beef middles, bactoferm and what seemed to be a metric ton of Calabrian chili powder from sausagedebauchery.com, and once the sun went down, I had no excuses.

Traditionally sausage is made from the front shoulder, but in this case, I had a bunch of scraps from the sirloin and ham cap of a big hog, so I opted to utilize those pieces as well as some fat back. Since I was taking my first crack at making nduja, I worked to be extra precise in separating lean from fat. I also was extra careful with temperature doing most of the work outside in sub-freezing February temps.

Starting with the recipe from Sausage Debauchery and varying it as I saw fit, I gathered all of the ingredients. Given the sheer volume of the chili powder, I wondered if I had misread where the decimal was, but after going back and looking, I moved forward reluctantly.

From this point, it was easy. Lots of sitting around and waiting. After stuffing, the nduja fermented in the oven (with the light on for three days). The great aspect of this move was that the casings went from a yellow slimy appearance to something closer to how a sausage should look. The force meat was an appealing red-orange color.

Next came the cold smoking. In regards to cold smoke, I had a few irons in proverbial fire, so I had been planning on adapting my last bourbon barrel into a smoker. The only problem was finding a hole saw big enough. While I waited for delivery, I started to tinker around with an old Smokey Joe that I found in the alley and my Webber Smokey Mountain smoker. Using some ductwork and a little elbow grease, I came up with a design that would work for this occasion very well. Using the Smokey Joe as my fire box and the WSM as a smokehouse, I smoked the nduja over pecan hulls and apple wood for 36 hours continuously with temps never getting above freezing. Sure, the front yard looked like a meth lab, but only for a few days.

Finally the four chubs of nduja were labeled and hung up for drying. Nearly three months later, I cut the first one down. I was not ready to try it alone, so I brought it to a trusted taster. One that would be gentle, but not so gentle as to allow me to make the same error twice without at least knowing about it.

The color of the nduja was a deep brick red and, even after nearly three months, the smell of chilis and smoke from the pecan hulls wafted from the bag in which I carried the nduja to the tasting. The moment of truth came when he cut the chub open and spread the nduja on the bread. Spreadable. So at least from sight, smell, and touch, I was in the clear.

The taste aspect was, embarrassingly enough. my secondary worry after spread-ability. I had a bit of nduja from a Chicago producer in April that honestly could have been whipped meat product of any kind. There was little heat, no fermentation related funk, and little porkiness. Despite all of that, people went crazy for it. Maybe that phenomenon of low expectations conditioned me. However, the flavor exceeded my wildest expectations. It was hot. Not “chew-cough-chew-drink-swallow-drink-cough” hot, but audible hoots of hotness were heard.

Granted the sausages are a little one-dimensional. There is still funky, smokey pork, but the seasoning is so simple and so voluminous that you aren’t going to get the complexity of some of the other Italian dry-cured arsenal. Nduja just is not that. Nduja is not about restraint. It is straight up hedonism. Put the mustard back in the fridge door. Put up the pickles. Neither help you here. Get a handkerchief and a great glass of wine.

Your first bite of the good stuff, go to Cypress in Charleston, bug Rob to make some again (he cures his for a year, so be patient), or make your own, will make you forget all of the versions that made you wonder what that small group of evangelists were harping on about. The difference is remarkable. Even the versions close to the middle are foodstuffs that do not have readily available comparators and give a hint to how good nduja could be and sometimes is.

Nduja

Adapted from Scott Stegen

• 250 grams Pork meat
• 750 grams Pork fat
• 0.5 grams bactoferm
• 15 grams water
• 200 grams calabrian pepper
• 50 grams sweet pepper powder
• 28 grams kosher salt
• 3 grams curing salt #2

It started at the Green City Market where one of my favorite farmers, Mick Klug, had his rhubarb out with the greens still on them. After a brief scare with my dog (RIP Mojo) about 5 years ago involving him eating a rhubarb scone off of our ottoman, I know good and well that rhubarb greens are toxic to both humans and canines. However, when I returned home from the market, my hands were full attending to my daughters, so I did not have time to strip the leaves from the stalks as I intended to do. When lunch came around, I had asked my wife to pull the bag of mustard greens from the fridge and she unknowingly brought me the rhubarb. Mick had failed to strip the greens. I had failed to strip the greens. My wife had failed to discern mustards from rhubarb. But the words mustard and rhubarb rang out in my head as a possible combination. I am a huge mustard fan and thought that a cool, spring mustard to add to my condiment shelf might be a rhubarb flavored mustard.

A simple mistake from the farmer, by me, and then by my wife led to a spark that led to an idea of combining rhubarb and mustard (not mustard greens, even, which I did later for a nice veg dish with five spice and chili). After a brief search, it became clear that rhubarb mostarda was a thing. It makes complete sense given the tart flavors. Hell, I’ve made cranberry mostarda and when looking to make new rhubarb dishes in the Spring, I always look for cranberry dishes and sub in rhubarb. When you think about it though, besides both mustard and mostarda containing mustard seeds, they are quite different.

I am a mustard freak. I wanted mustard. This meant that I would need to focus the tartness of the rhubarb instead of accentuate it as it would be in mostarda. What better way to narrow and focus that tartness than to bring in the intensely garlic/onion flavor of the rhubarb’s fellow spring food trend – the ramp?

After a number of test batches, I settled on a ratio of mustard to ramp to rhubarb and finished up a jar of the mustard pickling the mustard seeds for a half week with homemade white wine vinegar and a session beer made locally by Two Brothers’.

This Saturday, I stopped by the Butcher and Larder and picked up a slice of coppa di testa and ciccioli to test out the mustard in a way that uses mustard the way that I love to use it best – slathered, bread-free, on great handmade charcuterie. The flavor of the mustard is really unique. It is still mustard, first and foremost, and not mustard flavored fruit condiment. The rhubarb flavor is not at the forefront with the mustard. That is the role of the ramps where that familiar stink leads the way with the mustard, but the finish features that unmistakable tartness. It is this taste that reminds of Spring. You have a little stink, a little tart, but an absence of the sweetness that only comes after the heat of the summer.

The rhubarb also brings a slightly pinkish hue to the mustard. The mustard seeds are pickled and broken up slightly. I prefer the grains of mustard to be prominent and to pop between my teeth. Each bite featuring the explosive punch of mustard which serves as a reminder of the mistakes that led to the mustard itself and that mistakes are not the end of an idea, but often the start of one.

Rhubarb & Ramp Mustard

Makes 300 mL of mustard

• 1 oz. yellow mustard seeds
• 1 oz. brown mustard seeds
• 1/3 cup  white wine vinegar
• 1/3 cup ale
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 stalks rhubarb, sliced thinly
• 2 ramps, chopped

Step one: Combine the mustard seeds, vinegar, salt and ale in a bowl. Let the mixture pickle for three days.

Step two: In a small sauce pan, simmer rhubarb in a tablespoon of water or so until it breaks down almost completely.  Pour into a ramekin, let cool.

Step three: Rinse out sauce pan, and simmer ramps in a tablespoon of water until they soften, but take no color. Scrape into ramekin, let cool.

Step four: Scrape contents of pickled mustard seeds and rhubarb mixture into a blender or food processor. Puree until grains are desired size. Adding water 1 teaspoon at a time, if needed.

Step five: Add cooled ramps. Stir. Taste. Reseason.

Store in a sealable jar or process as you would with any mustard.

The name alone is completely off-putting, but the idea appeals to me as much in its thrift as its use of my favorite parts of the fish – the collar and cheeks. After a great experience making coppa di testa and a not-so-great experience making a terrine of mutton’s head, I was batting .500 in my animal head terrine making, so this way no sure thing, but it is something that I had not seen before and wanted to give it a shot.

Living both far away from the sea and away from my favorite fisherman, my father, left me headless, but as I sped through the market this weekend on my weekly trip, I asked the fish guy if he had any heads in the back. He brought out two red snapper head/carcass combos. I would have preferred an oiler fish, such as salmon, tilefish or mackerel, but when you are begging for fish heads in Chicago, you can not really act like you are looking for something in particular.

Besides the breed of fish, the other downfall was that the entire kit and caboodle was frozen. I understand that fresh doesn’t always mean fresh and that frozen doesn’t alway mean worse than fresh, but I knew that the fish was caught, likely frozen immediately, thawed for butchery, and then refrozen. Not ideal, but at a remarkably low (no) price, I had a good point at which to start.

After thawing the snapper, I brined it for an hour in 5% solution. This time in the brine gave me time to consider flavors. Snapper, to me, reminds me of summer nights eating whole roasted fish with Mexican flavors or better yet, ceviche with copious citrus and chili. I had some young garlic, fresno chilis, and limes on hand. I minced the garlic (both green and white parts) and the chili and zested and juiced the lime. This was the genesis for queso de pescado.

After cooking the snapper in a low temperature water bath until the visible areas of meat were just cooked through, I removed the fish from the bag and pulled the flesh from the bone being careful to remove any bones and skin. Once adding the flesh to the garnishes/flavorings, I tasted the mixture and re-seasoned with lime and salt. The fish was packed into cling wrap lined ramekins, weighed down, and chilled in the fridge overnight.

Once I pulled the ramekins from the fridge, the achy feeling that the terrines did not set came over me. There are good times to be right and there are better times to be wrong. I am glad to be wrong in this instance as the terrines sliced nicely and the pattern of different textures of the snapper’s head was familiar, oddly, when compared to the pig’s and lamb’s head.

Testa sliced with bread, mustard, and pickled padrons

Since the snapper is so light when compared to pork or lamb, instead of a sharp mustard or pickle, I stuck with the Mexican theme and made a thin salsa from lime, fresh tomatillo, onion, and cilantro and used in in the same way as mustard would be used with accompanying a richer head cheese.

The texture on the queso de pescado is very cool. Like a mammalian head cheese, you get firm, soft, and everything in between, but with the little flecks of sharp chili and garlic, you have a little different punch. The brightness from the lime brings an almost ceviche like flavor despite the texture being far more varied than the similarly cold fish dish.

This project was a hoot. It was fun and delicious, but it was kind of like giving your dog his medicine by burying it in a hot dog. I love making terrines and working with odd bits, so this fit the bill, but it did not even edge me towards loving, or even liking, to cook fish. That may be a challenge to my reader(s). Make it fun.

Not every project need be something serious and traditional. As a parent of two little, beautiful kids, these projects sometimes distract me from spending all of my energy engaging with the little girls, but sometimes they engage you in silliness and their creativity. As I try to most evenings, I was reading “Green Eggs and Ham” to my older daughter and she asked where she could get green eggs and ham. I told her that I don’t know, but I’d look around. She likely forgot about it, but I did not.

I had a good idea of how to make green ham. After making chicken saag for dinner, everything that was near the spinach was absolutely green. I knew, from making ham hock rillettes, that the gelatin in the skin and stock could set up pretty much anything and that blended it actually had a neutral color. By adding blanched spinach, I could blend the skin and some of the stock to create a green medium around which set the ham. With that, I simmered the hocks (and some neck bones) in rich pork stock and water, then separated skin from meat from stock.

Next, I took the skin and some stock and blended it with blanched spinach. The color was right on. Next, I whipped the ham into the green mixture using my stand mixer.

Finally, I packed the mixture in a terrine and weighed it down for 72 to set the green ham.

After the brief wait (weight), I unwrapped the ham to see that we had gotten green ham.

If only I had a ham shaped terrine it would have been an improvement, but after tasting the terrine, it was all ham. The spinach was, at it is most of the time, was nearly tasteless. Bordering on being too salty when eaten on its own, it sliced well and was a reasonable proxy for green ham.

I spent the few weeks leading up to making this, off and on, looking for a way to make the eggs with a green yolk, after all, everybody who has been to that bad brunch place and had basil scrambled into eggs knows that not only does it taste bad, but is not actually the same as what Dr. Seuss pictured. He had the egg white, still white, holding a green yolk.

At first, I thought of making a well in an egg white and simply whipping a runny yolk with spinach powder, but that wasn’t going to work for a number of reasons (most of which was that I did not want to give food borne illness or the texture of chalky egg yolk to my daughter). Then I thought about making a quenelle from hard cooked egg yolks and greens, like a deviled egg yolk, but that seemed less than delicious. Finally, after how easy and perfect Arzak eggs were, I had an idea.

Named after noted Spanish chef, Juan Mari Arzak, these eggs are poached in tied off clingwrap. The neatness involved with poaching an egg in a bag keeps the whites looking beautiful and the yolks completely runny, yet cooked. My thought was that I would make an Arzak egg, but with only the yolk and wrap it in something green. Given the season, ramp tops are available and delicious. They also shrink like crazy when cooked, so I figured that they would serve two purposes. First they would be very green, but second, they could shrink around the yolk when cooked in the plastic bag. With that, I blanched a couple ramp tops and bagged the egg.

While the yolk and ramp tops poached (just over 4 minutes folks), I cooked up the egg white and stacked up the green egg on top of the green ham. I was pleased at the appearance, but before I dragged my knife through the middle of the dish I showed my daughter who recognized it immediately. I just wanted to eat it, but she didn’t even recognize that it was three dimensional. She smelled the eggs, touched the yolk, and knew that she had her green eggs and ham.

Once I made the first incision, the golden yolk ran everywhere creating a great contrast in color and the ham and ramp provided a similar salty and savory contrast to the richness of the yolk which has now become a sauce for the eggs and ham. As she loves runny yolks, she was pleased with the egg (she was less pleased with the green ham terrine). Unlike most of these projects, the pinnacle of the project was neither the first bite, nor the last, but rather the look at my daughter’s face when she recognized that we made something that only existed in her books.

Green Eggs and Ham

• 3 small ham hocks
• 1 handful of smoked neck bones
• 10 oz. Frozen Spinach
• 1 pint gelatinous pork stock
• Water
• 1 egg, white and yolk separated
• 2 ramp tops

Step one: Preheat oven for 220 degrees. Cover hocks and neck bones with pork stock and water. Cook overnight. In AM, separate meat, skin, and stock.

Step two: Combine spinach and skin in a blender and puree adding enough stock to keep everything moving.

Step three: Working quickly, whip green mixture and ham in a stand mixer and pour into a cling wrap lined terrine or loaf pan. Weigh down with cans for 72 hours.

Step four: When ready to serve, line a bowl with cling wrap and wipe down the inside of the wrap with olive oil. Place 2 blanched ramp tops in a x-shaped pattern and set an egg yolk at the intersection. Wrap the tops over the top of the yolk and tie off the bag. Poach in simmering water for 4 minutes and 20 seconds. In the mean time, fry egg white.

Step five: Slice terrine and place slice on a cold plate. Then add egg white. Finally, slice open the plastic bag and place “green yolk” on top of white.

It has been a year since I changed lifestyles and got healthier. Things are moving along nicely. Part of that change is moving away from consistently using a combination of animal fat and salt as cooking fat, food, and seasoning all at once. Does that mean that people who eat with health in mind can’t use animal fat for all three? No, but it means that I had to branch out and become more comfortable using other ways of flavoring besides salt and fat. One of my favorite ways to season and flavor dishes has become vinegar, both on its own and as part of mustard and other sauces. The acid facilitates flavor in much the same magnitude, to me, as fat and salt do.

However, as it does often for me, it comes back to the pork. In January, I was at a friend’s home working on a country ham and we got to talking about loving vinegar. She pointed me to a cabinet filled with jars that looked like the dusty shelf on a high school biology lab. On this shelf was a menagerie of homemade vinegars in various types of mothers. For the uninitiated, a mother is a slimy blob made from cellulose and acetic acid bacteria that converts alcohol into acetic acid and in turn, vinegar. In any regard, I was generously gifted two mothers – one honey and one Pere Jacques (a great beer from Goose Island, here in Chicago) to take home and make my own vinegar.

I brought the mothers home (it sounds scandalous, but wasn’t) and went to work. Having just finished reading the great “Ideas in Food“, which had a different way to make vinegar using unpasteurized vinegar and wine, I set out 4 containers to start my first vinegars. Into the big cider jug, went a combination starting the “Ideas in Food” vinegar. Then into the jar with the Pere Jacques mother went a few bottles of New Glarus “Black Top” Black IPA. The beer was novel to me with the combination of the malty molasses flavors along with the piney hoppiness. Finally, I split the honey mother into two jars, one for white wine and, in the other, red.

After settling on which types of vinegar I would make, I covered the jars in cheesecloth and put them up in a dark corner of my cabinetry to do their thing for three months.

While waiting for my vinegar to transform, I was lucky enough to pick up some of Jonathan Sawyer’s Tavern Vinegar. I did not know what to expect and I had little experience in other vinegars. I had tasted some of the aged Blis vinegars and some really aged balsamic vinegars from Modena, neither of which I could afford to use regularly, and I knew that I preferred to use sherry vinegar at home for dressing vegetables and cider for pickling. Once I tasted the Tavern Vinegar’s my whole viewpoint on vinegar was turned on its ear. These tasted like something, not just vinegar. My favorite, the Beer-garlic vinegar, came from humble origins – Busch Light and garlic, but I used the bottle in a little over two weeks. It went on everything. Just like the guy who just discovered sriracha, I used this on steamed and roasted vegetables, lentils, beans, and it kicked me into making salads at odd times of the day and night to get a taste. Despite making my own vinegar, this one is going to be a pantry stable as long as I can scratch up a bottle.

Once three months passed, I pulled the vinegars down from their cabinet hibernation and gave each a taste. Just opening the doors, I knew that at least one of the vinegars was ready from the blast of fumes.

I figured by the looks of the Black IPA jar that we had a winner there. There were now multiple mothers in the jar and upon tasting, the complex beer had reconstituted itself chemically into a fantastically complex vinegar. Over the three months, there was a good bit of evaporation, but I now had 300 mL of Black IPA vinegar.

Next up were the white wine vinegars, both the honey mothered and the unpasteurized vinegar mothered, both of which were on point. Something to note is that using the mothers from my friend seemed to produce the zippier vinegars. In general, the vinegars, as I tasted them, were all sharper than commercial vinegar. This is likely due to commercial vinegars being diluted to a certain level of acidity. To me, I prefer the extra “zing”, so now that I have working mothers, I can make all that I need.

Finally, there was the red wine vinegar, which seemed to transform more slowly. As I had more vinegar than I could use between the Black IPA vinegar and the white wine vinegar, I put the red wine vinegar and most of the “Ideas in Food” vinegar back up to age a little more.

As I was so inspired by Sawyer’s Tavern Beer-garlic vinegar, I chopped, then mashed a few ramps and added the mash to 200 mL of the “IiF” white wine vinegar to put up for a few months to infuse that special ramp flavor into the vinegar.

As with long cured sausages, the waiting is the hardest part, but if it is half as good as the vinegar from the Greenhouse Tavern, then I would be doubly pleased.

7 layer mother with no beer vinegar

As I mentioned before, the plan is to continue to make vinegar using the mothers used in this batch. Hell, the Black IPA vinegar had 7 mothers when I bottled the vinegar. With the complexity of that vinegar, I opted to split the 7 mothers between two different Wisconsin craft beers: first, the Belgian Red from New Glarus brewed with cherries, Wisconsin wheat and roasted barley, lagered in oak tanks and balanced by Hallertau hops aged for a year one full year and, second, the Satin Solstice Imperial Stout from Central Waters a uber-high alcohol imperial stout with strong coffee flavors. We’ll see in July how these turn out.