Nicely Done

Steve has a pic, i need to get a hosting site after Photobucket screwed everyone.

What, these?!

Interesting to see another person munching on the Lion's Mane mushroom. I knew these as Bearded Tooth mushrooms and they are pretty good in spite of their appearance How did it turn out?

There's some good photos coming out of this thread. I think we need a wiki for recipes.

Poor man's Jumblaya: Zataran's Jumblaya mix, sausage, but no shrimp

Thing is, I cooked up a whole package of sausage for it thinking I'd portion it out for at least another meal... but I ate ALL SIX SAUSAGES in the first sitting.

That oughta be good for the ole arteries.

A couple Rib Eyes are in the Camp Chef now, they will be pulled when they reach 115 degree's while i heat up the Sear Box to finish them.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp_oC7m8LIE

Had the company chef make me a Cuban. No.

Corned Beef, Cabbage & Potatoes....

Used a new recipe, best ever

(posted in the made my day thread, too )

Also, got the awesome Corned Beef at a butcher in Auburn called Proper British Bacon.

Great place, and they do more than bacon. Grass-fed, antibiotic-free beef, they also make sausages, jerky, etc.

They sell beer, too.

Great place, I highly recommend it to the southies in the area.

gotta check this place out when i get back and that sushi place in kent.....ahh JP...

Corned beef n taters here too! MMMmmmm!

Went to the Irish Whiskey Tasting dinner, but before i left i threw a couple Racks of Babybacks in the Smoker with Maple Pellets.

I really like the smell of the Maple, they will be done in about 45 minutes.

You're gonna pound ribs at 11:00 at night?

So much for a good night's sleep

Nah, i will slice them after resting and eat tomorrow.

They will be Lunch.

Let me tell you all a story.

Once upon a time, when I was a young teenager, I took a trip with my family to the south of France to visit some friends in their summer home. This summer home was an hour away from the nearest town. That town was an hour away from street lighting. It was in the middle of nowhere, and if I could go back now to relax I would. Sure, there's an hour round trip to get bread, but the bread was fresh every day, and fantastic and flavourful. Lamb was a relatively cheap meat and since the region was a wine-growing region you could collect discarded old vines at the side of the fields where they grew and burn them to cook lamb, which you'd rubbed with the local olive oil, and wild thyme and wild garlic from the garden. It was awesome.

On that trip, we spent a good 3 hours driving to get to a city that some of you may know from a board game - it's called Carcasonne. It's a walled city, so it's pretty old - old enough that it pre-dates easy access to refrigeration for the masses. In an agricultural region with little access to refrigeration you end up with the most amazing "peasant food", and Carcasonne is no exception. It lays claim (with a couple of other cities nearby, to be fair) to being the origin of a dish called "cassoulet" (pronounced "cass-oo-lay" if you don't speak French). The discovery of cassoulet by me as a teenager was amazing. Literally every trip in to the cities on that vacation I asked for it at every place we ate at. It was never bad. It wasn't always the same, but it was always really, really good.

To save you a trip to Wikipedia (if it's too late then sorry) it's white beans, duck confit, sausages and "additional meat" - usually some bacon lardons. There's a sauce with it. What Wikipedia misses out entirely is any talk about its origins. If you're out working in the fields all day but want food when you come back, then there's a technique for that - you keep a small, low fire in the hearth all day with a pot over it. It's a sort of medieval slow-cooker. In this pot you have some duck confit, some sausage, some beans, some chopped up bacon, and a little water. That's it. The long slow cook pulls some fat out of the duck and bacon, and it cooks the beans through. The remaining water and fats make a sauce. But you don't empty the pot because you're going to be working the next day - you just add more duck, more sausage, more bacon, more beans. The best ones have been going for literally years, and build up some amazing complex flavours. The water and fats are held together as a sauce by the starch from the beans.

Why duck confit, and sausages? How are they peasant food? Confit is a preservation mechanism. Before refrigeration you took your duck, broke it down, and cooked it low and slow (again, like the cassoulet - same fire, another pot), tightly packed with some leftover duck fat from previously. This cooks the duck without making it tough, renders out a lot of the fat, pasteurizes the duck so there's no bugs growing on it, and isolates it from the air so no new, live bugs can get on it. It's a preservation technique. When you want to use some duck you dig it out, knock off the majority of the fat back in to the pot for next time, and heat it up to eat. Now you see where the extra fat comes from, too.

Sausages were made and dried again as a preservation technique. Beans were dried for storage, too, and turning pork into bacon is also a preservation technique - especially when it's been allowed to air-dry a bit, which we do less these days where we pay for weight - makers love that you pay for water.

So, with this history lesson complete, you probably want me to post a damn picture already, right? Well, I'm going to. Remember a little bit ago I posted this?



That's the duck legs and thighs on the left. Wings and neck on the right. I'd rubbed them with garlic, added thyme, and cooked them sous-vide for 36 hours at 155. This mimics the long slow cook, and, indeed I could have stored that on the counter for a week or so, safely. I didn't, because I own a fridge. Tonight, I made use of it, in a cassoulet-like dish. Alas, I'm on a low-carb diet - not quite keto, but not far off. Keto with my wife, but I'll eat a sandwich at lunch if that's what's available.

Instead of beans, I went with red cabbage, largely because it felt sufficiently "peasanty" and there was some in the fridge. I took some bacon (not the stuff I made) and cooked it in a pan, low and slow to render out the fat and make it crispy. I added a couple of leftover Toulouse sausages we had, cut into rounds (very untraditonal), and let them render too. I then added the cabbage to cook in the fat.

For the duck, I opened the bag removed the duck, knocked most of the (very soft) fat and the gelled up duck stock off back into the bag, and put the ducks on a wire rack above a baking tray. I put a few mm of water in the baking tray and set the duck under the broiler on the second from top shelf. The water in the tray stops any fat that drips off from just burning up into smoke, but there wasn't enough of it to make it humid enough to stop the browning process. I did need to top it up once, though. The duck browned for 7 minutes per side.

Towards the end of the cooking time for the cabbage, I looked over at the bag of duck fat and duck stock and mentally regarded it as a bag of CONCENTRATED DUCK FLAVOUR. And that's when I remembered that traditional cassoulet literally has a sauce made from whatever juices and fats come from the foods ars they slow cook and I've got a bag of them RIGHT THERE ON THE COUNTER. So I dumped them in to the cabbage, too. That would make something incredibly rich, so, just to balance a little, I added about a half tablespoon of champagne vinegar before I added salt and pepper. I served the cabbage bacon and sausage, topped with a duck leg.



It's no cassoulet, but it was close. The duck was fall-apart tender. The sausage was good, but not quite there, and the bacon was good and nearly crispy - it had been, and then it was softened by the cooking liquids. To make this better I should have taken the bacon and sausage out of the pan to cook the cabbage, and then added them back in at the end to keep their texture. Ah well, next time.