I’m not sure if the following recipe appears in Morimoto’s cookbook or not, but last Sunday, when I tasted the delicious pork belly sliders at the pre-opening festivities at Morimoto Napa, I decided that I really needed to learn to more about the Iron Chef’s approach to swine. Fortunately, I have a friend and former chef-school roommate who has cooked at one of Morimoto’s East Coast restaurants, so he’s actually executed this pork belly recipe dozens of times, if not hundreds. As I found out, the recipe itself doesn’t really contain any guarded secrets or esoteric ingredients; instead, it [... read more ...]
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I'm still due for a trip up to Diamond Mountain, although Sonoma is more likely in my near future. I'm working on all kinds of different projects, and should hopefully deliver something five days per week through the summer. Do stay tuned.   |
Peach perfect. I had dinner at Ad Hoc on Friday night, and although I’ve offered tepid reviews of this restaurant in the past, I did have a great meal there, I must admit. The night’s menu featured an Italian-themed dinner, which actually began with meatballs, which to me was so much more interesting than salad, Ad Hoc’s typical first-course selection. After the meatballs, it was a perfectly-roasted half-chicken, followed by a cheese course, and about as much tiramisu as I could devour. The cheese plate was garnished with honey, chopped pistachios, and one of my favorite things in [... read more ...] Set adrift on butter, brown sugar, and rum bliss. Although Bananas Foster is widely known as a New Orleans recipe, I never had any experience with this particular dish while I was cooking in the Crescent City. I dealt with plenty of bread pudding recipes, and I had an occasional hand in the hyper-decadent sweet potato-and-pecan pies at K-Paul’s, but Bananas Foster was never part of my repertoire. However, when I was attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park NY, I did have the opportunity to whip up several batches of Bananas Foster while I was [... read more ...] Although the “language” of cooking is essentially universal, the “vocabulary” itself can be very different. As a born-and-raised Westerner, some of the fundamental ingredients of Asian cuisine remain exotic to me, although cooking professionally and living in California have certainly both helped to foster my assimilation. Even so, I didn’t grow up in a household where shrimp chips and salty plum candy were the norm — it was more like Cheetos and chocolate chip cookies for us. I may have mentioned this anecdote here before, but my very recent appreciation for red miso paste actually began with a lemon-miso [... read more ...] Many people may claim to love bacon, but I say that unless you’re willing to make it yourself at home, then it’s probably just infatuation. As my way to gear-up for the BLT season ahead (let’s just call tomato season what it really is), I’m going to spend the next couple of days curing and smoking the pork belly pictured above. Look at it. It’s a lovely porcine specimen — only a shade under three pounds — with a nice, uniform thickness. But despite these auspicious beginnings, this piece of belly is really no more than a meager [... read more ...] |
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© 2010 The Accidental Wino |
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