Makin’ Bacon Jam

 

Makin’ Bacon Jam,
A spreadable form of Ham,
It’s salty and it’s sweet,
It’s concentrated meat!
On a muffin or some toast,
You’re the ultimate brunch host!
Bacon in every bite,
Everything is going to be allllllright.

                                 -William Shakespeare.

Do you ever feel like the dog in this commercial?  IT’S BACON!!

That’s right, folks, we’re cooking with bacon.  As we’ve said a million times before, everything good starts with bacon.  In this case, bacon is the star of the show.  It may sound a little strange, but it’s a lot tasty:  Bacon Jam.  Before you scoff, take a look at this picture:

Who is scoffing now, you young scofflaw?

That’s homemade bread (overachieve much?) slathered in bacon jam and topped with a fried egg.  The whole reason we made bacon jam was so that we could make this for breakfast.  Yummy! 

The inspiration for this delightful concoction came from this food blog (which has fantastic pictures), and the recipe is an adaptation of a Martha Stewart recipe (she makes it in a slow cooker, which is probably how you have to cook things in the slammer).

So what is bacon jam?  It’s essentially bacon, onions, and garlic cooked down real slow until it’s basically nothing.  There’s also a bit of maple syrup, brown sugar, cider vinegar, and strong black coffee to make it sweet and tangy. 

The first step is rendering down a 3 pounds of bacon.  Good Lord I’ve never seen so much bacon in one pot! 

Cooking the bacon in bits like this is a lot easier than cooking whole pieces to perfection.

  

Cooking that much bacon renders a WHOLE lot of bacon grease.  You should strain it and keep it for future culinary goodness.

  

Then you brown a whole mess of onions, and scrape up all the brown bits the bacon left in the pot.

After they start to get translucent, you add in the coffee, syrup, vinegar and garlic.  Shortly after that, you re-add all the bacon back in and simmer…. and reduce… and simmer… and reduce.  For about 3 hours.  Its good to have a lot of TV saved on your DVR.

Remember how full that pot was with bacon and onions?  After 3 hours, this is all of that concentrated into this tiny amount.

Pulse to puree! 

Now, with the miracles of modern science, you can have bacon on every bite of your toast! 

Shrimp PePane

Food TV basically made us the cooks we are today.  I used to be one of those folks who was baffled at the idea that there was a food network.  But if you watch… maybe you get hungry cause what they are making looks so good.  And if you watch enough, it really doesn’t look that hard.  So why not cook it?  As I tell people: I don’t like to cook… I just like to eat.  (I’ve maybe said that twice.  And just now it doesn’t sound as clever as it did at the time.)

Anyhow, PBS has some great cooking shows that are a bit more advanced than the usual food network stuff. We’ve been watching Essential Pépin with Jacques Pépin.  Its very fun to say his name in a faux-French accent.  Pay-paanh!  He is very French and really into teaching some cool technique.  So…onto shrimp!  This is a pretty unique and fancy looking recipe, but it was surprisingly easy to make.

Not much in the way of ingredients on this one.  We got lucky with a great sale at the store on some U15 shrimp at the store.  We used these even though the recipe calls for 16-20.  The numbers indicate roughly how many shrimp would equal a pound.  Whenever you buy shrimp, look for the numbers, not the descriptors, to get the right size.

If you ever have to peel and clean your own shrimp, do yourself a huge favor and get one of these sinister looking shrimp peelers.  You just put the point right under the shell, and push it all the way back.  Takes off the shell and exposes the little nasty bits that you probably want to clean out of the shrimp.

After deveining, we cut about an inch off the tail-end of each shrimp.  We popped those bits, along with salt, pepper, garlic, an egg, and, later, some parsley in the food processor.  Then we make shrimp mousse!

Slightly disturbing, but chock full of shrimp flavor.  This will be the “glue” that holds the whole shrimp patty together.

Holding 4 shrimp on my palm, I smear a healthy layer of the mousse over them.

Then, coat with bread crumbs.  Only the flatness of my hand is keeping this from falling apart, but it was not hard.  This get repeated for the other side.

Then, several minutes of gentle simmering in oil and butter until the coating is golden brown and the shrimp are cooked through.  Shrimp cook really fast, so don’t overdo it on the heat.

At the end, you are left with a crispy shrimp cake, with a lot of good shrimp flavor and a bit of French flair.  Simply cut it in half across the shrimp and it makes it look very fancy-pants.  A bit of vinaigrette on top of the shrimp is a nice touch, as this dish definitely calls for a light sauce. 

A Tale of Two Pies, Pt.2: π R Blueberry

 

Previously, on a Tale of Two Pies…. we made Chicken Pot Pie. 

And now, for the dramatic conclusion…. Blueberry Pie

Yes, Chez Venza is a magical place where one can have pie for dinner and dessert…. on the same night!  High-level negotiations were underway so that there might be a pie appetizer as well, but ultimately  that idea was shelved…. for now.

As with the Pot Pie, this is a quick and easy recipe.  We did not make our own crust… and it was still great.  The apple and the tapioca go into the pie to add body and texture…. you certainly can’t taste the apple in the final product.

A quick aside about apples.  I’m sure we didn’t invent this technique, but just about the only use I’ve found for a melon-baller is to surgically core apples.  I don’t care for melon, really.

The apple gets grated, and then the juice gets all squeezed out.  This might account for the lack of apple flavor in our blueberry pie.

Most of the blueberries get reduced in a pot until they are molten blue goo.

The hot blue goo gets added to the apple along with whole blueberries, tapioca, lemon juice, and sugar.  That’s my wife’s beer, I swear.

Into the the pie pan.  Observe the decorative venting.  I wish I could have been more symmetrical.

This looks odd… it is bits of butter and egg wash, to help the crust brown. 

Mmmmm… blueberry-licious!

Thus ends, the Tale of Two Pies.  To misquote Dickens:  “It was the best of pies….. it was the best of pies!”

Penultimate Bisky Biscuits

Mmmm….I love a good biscuit.  I will judge a restaurant by the quality of their biscuits.  I am what you would call a biscuit snob, and very few places meet up to my high standards.  While I am loathe to admit it, one of my favorite non-homemade biscuits comes from Popeye’s.  So buttery, flaky, melty in your mouth…<insert Homer Simpson gurlging noise here>.

Now when it comes to homemade biscuits, I turn to my mom’s famous biscuits (otherwise known as “Bisky Biscuits”).  I’ve never had a biscuit anywhere else that resembles my mom’s biscuits.  I’m not sure why, because it is essentially a standard Bisquick recipe with a few tweaks.  I have tried many recipes “from scratch,” and they just don’t compete with the Bisquick version.  It may just be that I’m in love with what I used to eat as a kid, but they are my gold standard.

HOWEVER (brace yourself), we have discovered a recipe that comes pretty close to the Bisquick version in excellence and has recently become hard to resist.  I present…Cat-head biscuits.  What on earth is a Cat-head biscuit?  Why, it’s a classic Southern biscuit that is the size of a cat’s head (well duhh).  Apparently, in some part of the country, they actually call them that… who knew!
They are easy to put together, bake quickly, and they come out perfectly tender and flaky.  And they are also enormous.

This recipe comes from Cook’s Country (a subsidiary of America’s Test Kitchen).  The ingredients are pretty standard:  all-purpose flour, cake flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, butter, shortening, and buttermilk.  Part of the secret to this recipe is using a mixture of regular flour and cake flour to get that perfect biscuit texture.


Another unique factor is using both butter and shortening.  Butter has all the flavor, but shortening helps with texture. 


The recipe says to use butter that is “slightly softened.”  I find this odd because most biscuit recipes tell you to use really cold butter.  You want it slightly soft because you are supposed to rub it into the flour with your hands.  This is also an odd step, but I do as I’m told!  (errrr, sometimes)

 

Next you add the buttermilk and stir until just combined.  You don’t want to overmix it.  Part of the charm of this recipe is that it is really quick to put together, and you don’t have to pull out the rolling pin.  You just divide the dough into six giant chunks and arrange them in a round cake pan (the 6th biscuit goes right in the middle).



The biscuits grow up and into each other as they bake, so you have to cut them apart when they’re done.  Man, don’t those look good?!  So soft and buttery and a little tangy from the buttermilk.
So is it true?  Are they the size of a cat’s head?



You bet they are!!