Another Classic - Pork Chops with Apples

What's a chop? What's a steak?

A bone in beef rib-eye is a steak. A pork loin cut is a chop.  A beef T-bone is a steak, a lamb T-bone is a chop. Huh?

The pork in this recipe is a sirloin chop. Or steak. Who knows. It depends on what the butcher thinks he can get more money for.

Another great, fast, inexpensive meal

Here we have a great lunch, spicy pork chops with apple and yellow beet salad.

The pork is seasoned simply with olive oil, chipotle powder, garlic powder and salt and pepper then grilled in a cast iron pan.

The salad is dressed with walnut oil and this great French cider vinegar. Each of these is expensive but the amounts used  on this plate costs pennies.

The bread is a ciabatta toasted over a gas burner. It stays soft in the middle but the outside gets crusty and smokey.

The beets are raw yellow beets that I sliced so thin you can see through them.

The pork is easy to make if you have a heavy bottomed frying pan. You can use a non-stick pan too if the bottom is not too thin.

You want to take the pork chops out of the fridge at least ten minutes before you cook them. If you take them right from the fridge they won't be as tender.  Cook them over medium heat so they brown and take them out just as they firm up. Let them rest for a couple of minutes before you eat them.

A hunk of meat, crusty bread and a flavor salad in about 15 minutes. Total cost for the meal: about two bucks!

It's Sushi Day

(Note: I wrote this onstage in the middle of Brahms' German Requiem, waiting for my cue. Right in front of a large, strong, well rehearsed choir and a fine, large orchestra. Not bad place to be.)

If you think you need years to learn how to make sushi you are dead wrong. In Japan sushi is restaurant and home food. It was originally a way of preserving food for lunches. Think of it as their version of a PBJ.

Simple ingredients. Great food.

 I was lucky enough to have friends of Japanese ancestry when I was growing up and I ate plenty of raw fish back when most Americans thought it was poison.

In 1980 I got to go to Japan with an orchestra. I was the only one who who was used to Japanese food. After a few days whenever they served us something they weren't used to they would all offer it to me. Awesome!


 I remember when we got served huge, incredibly fresh prawns. Oh man oh man.

If you have never eaten octopus you are missing out. You buy it already boiled and tender at the Japanese market but my favorite way to make it is getting it raw and grilling it for a long time in olive oil. Some other time..  

Like so many Americans now my kids grew up eating and loving sushi.

Making it home is easy, fun and way cheaper than eating out. I spent 20 bucks on fish for this lunch and it made a lot of sushi for 4 people and yes, we have leftover ingredients like rice wine vinegar and nori.

Notice the knife blade is almost parallel to the cutting board.

Aside from the fish you need some short grain rice, a bit of rice vinegar, sugar and the Japanese ingredients, none of which cost more than 2 bucks, and there is plenty left over.  To make the seasoning for the sushi rice, we put a little water in a bowl and add the sugar and rice vinegar in small amounts and keep adding until it tastes right.  I know it's not traditional but I like to put a little fresh lemon juice in the solution.

Spreading the vinegar mixture over the rice.

The rice takes 20 minutes to cook, 10 minutes to rest and a few minutes to cool off. Traditionally the chef cuts the rice and sprinkles it with the vinegar mixture while the apprentice fans it to cool it quickly.

Today my son Phil helped out, waving the Gordon Jacob horn concerto frantically at it while I cut the rice and mixed in the solution.

I'm sure my critics would say that's how I play the Gordon Jacob concerto.

With rice and condiments, here is lunch for 4.

Here is a finished serving plate. It really doesn't take much time as aside from making the rice all you have to do is slice stuff up.

The fish we have here is hamachi, octopus, scallops with the roe and innards and marinated mackerel. To make them more interesting I floured and lightly fried the scallops.

Along with the fish we have shiso leaves,  nori seaweed sheets that I waved over a flame and shredded, sliced cucumber, wasabe, pickled ginger, and takuan, which is daikon pickled with rice bran.


On this plate, starting at the top is the fried scallops on top of shiso leaves, then on the left is takuan and on the right is cucumber and below the scallops are octopus, yellowtail and vinegared mackerel.

Today we served sushi Chirashi or 'scattered' style. Instead of making rolls or lumps we simply put the rice in the bottom of a bowl and topped it with the fish and stuff.

This was Phil's bowl. Not a bad lunch.





I have a hot tip for you today. We use Kikkoman Organic Soy Sauce. Not because it's organic, but because it tastes awesome. A really fine flavor unlike the usual dull soy sauces.  It smells and tastes great.

The Cure for Bland Food

Today I was inspired as I set slabs of bacon to cure in my fridge. I actually took my son out for Japanese food for lunch today. More on that later.

I know what a lot of you are thinking - there's a lot of sodium in them thar foods. It's true of you ate nothing but cured food you'd be in salt overload but that's not how I eat. These foods are condiments or sides designed to make other food taste good.

Well known cured foods include ham and salami and lox.

Some of my favorite cured foods

 

Curing is the rubbing or soaking food in substances that remove moisture from the cells of the food and through osmosis replaces the moisture with a solution that is downright inhospitable to bacteria. Usually it's sugary or salty. It's a method that has been used for thousands of years to preserve and improve food.




Pickled foods are almost always cured. Pickling is the action of acetic acid (vinegar) on foods. Some pickles don't list vinegar as an ingredient. In that case the vinegar comes as a result of the action of beneficial bacteria created in the salty environment.

My mom used to make great pickles in a ceramic crock in the garage. She's British and the spiciest thing I ever saw her eat is ketchup - except for those pickles, which she cured with jalepeños. 

Here we have some of my favorites including my ubiquitous peppers and onions, boquerones, salt-cured capers,  Trappey's pickled tobasco peppers and my mother's recipe for quick cucumber and onion pickles.

Salt cured fish are wonderful. Not only do they have a wonderful flavor but the enhance the taste of other food.  These boquerones aren't too fishy, like some anchovies or oilier fish like herring or mackerel. 

These fish also bring umami to your food. Umami is the mouth-watering flavor that seems to have the effect of bringing out the savory qualities of other food. It's found in many seafoods including oily fish, clams, seaweed, etc.

Trappey's pickled tobasco peppers are a nice treat. They are spicy but not really frightening. The liquid they come with is a handy seasoning, a little bit spicy and sour from the vinegar. I love to eat them with fried chicken or well cooked meats.

Capers are a fun food, at once flowery and salty. They are the unripe bud of a small bush. I planted two of these in my backyard last month. It will be years before I get any buds.  The ones in the picture are salt-cured, just packed in salt with no water or vineger. They taste more flowery than the ones packed in water or vinegar.

Of course you see one of my favorite cured foods, onions and peppers.

The cucumbers on the plates here were pickled overnight in a solution of salt and sugar. I make it like my mom did, simply slicing the cucumbers and onions and adding salt and sugar to the water until it tastes right. I've never measured it but you can tell when you taste it if is right. There was almost always a bowl of these in the fridge when I grew up.

Slabs of my home cured, hot almond smoked bacon

Note: For lunch my wife and son and I went to one of our favorite local restaurants, a place serving Silicon Valley for many years. Tomisushi has the usual Japanese menu items but the qualtity is there in everything.

It's the kind of place where everybody at the table says 'you have to try this' when the food arrives. Even the miso soup is delicious. Chicken teryaki tastes smoky and not too sweet. The sushi is always high quality and the fried foods come out greaseless and crunchy.

One of the World's Best $2.50 Lunches

Beautiful, cheap and delicious. Just like me!

Oh yes, here it is. The chicken is really high quality fresh chicken I bought at my favorite Chinese Market.


I poured some olive oil in a bowl and mixed in some of my spice rub. I rolled the chicken around in it and rubbed it into the skin. I put it on a foil lined tray and into a 425° oven for five minutes, then I turned the heat off.


When they just firm and done all the way through I took them out. Simple and delicious.

Cost: at $.89 a pound they were a real bargain. The two cost about $.60. Let's add a tablespoon of olive oil and some spices and call it $.70.

Lettuce is really expensive right now and quality is difficult to find. But I found these little gem lettuces for $1.59 each. It's dressed with hazelnut oil and a 10 year old balsamic vinegar. Not trendy right now but very tasty. On top for a quirky garnish is some enoki mushrooms and below is a few sliced almonds to add some depth.

Cost including the few drops of expensive oil and expensive vinegar and the mushrooms and almonds: about $.85

The sourdough was toasted over a flame and topped with onions and peppers and boquerones, those fishy little fish from Spain.

Cost: about $1.

Yum factor is very high for this meal. Cost is really low. I made a big pile of this chicken since the whole family is here all of a sudden. While the chicken was in the oven I made the onions and peppers.  When the chicken was done I cooked the Branzino I had for lunch yesterday. There were a lot of good textures in this meal too. The chicken skin was cruncy and flesh nice and moist. The bread was really crunchy and had a flame-toasted flavor. The lettuce was cruncy too and the little bit of hazelnut oil on it make the almonds taste really nutty.

Good stuff all around. Glad I got to eat it.

An elegant little appetizer

I like to use a big sharp knife!

Today's blog is about presentation. If you know a few rules you can make plates that would make a 3 star restaurant proud.

First here is how to cut cucumbers so thin you can see through them, without losing any fingers!

Notice how the knife rests against my fingers. 

Using a big sharp knife means all you have to do is guide the knife. The weight of the knife and the sharp blade do the cutting for you. Since you don't have to press you have more control.



If you are more comfortable with a smaller knife use it. In any case try to make the cut in one sweep of the knife to get a clean cut. Going back and forth creates an uneven surface.

One rule to remember in knife work is that no sharp part of the knife, the tip or the blade, should ever be pointed at a part of your body! If you keep that in mind you will never get cut.

Here we have a very simple geometric pattern.  It will showcase whatever we put in the middle.

This is a zester, which removes the zest or outer layer of a citrus fruit. The side you see has sharp ridges and the other side is smooth.

I like this kind of zester because it makes strips and I can cut them into the size and shape I want.

Here I have cut up a single Kalamata olive and put some long shreds of orange peel on top. You see how you hardly notice the cucumber or the plate now? They frame the olive.

Major faux pas here, enough to get you detention in cooking school. When your food extends beyond the rim it looks sloppy and casual.

 Here is the finished dish. You can add whatever goodies you have, from a little chunk of left over steak or pork or chicken to a fine cheese or an oyster. All I have here is a tiny chunk of orange, an almond roasted in walnut oil, a small piece of mozzarella and a piece of Italian sausage. The olive and orange mixture has a touch of olive oil and the specks you see are black pepper. Good eating, nice looking and it probably cost a quarter for all the food.