I even bumped into old friends – Jeff Wolfram, an architectural photographer that I’ve assisted from time to time and Ed Bruske, auteur of The Slow Cook and the man to talk about school food around here. I also made some new friends, including Jessica Sidman, who publishes a blog about frozen desserts called The Frozen Fix. I will totally be making her Coconut Ginger Sorbet next summer.

But you don’t care about that. What you really want are pictures of the fooooooood. Very well – I give you little, fat cubes of pork belly.

The ingredients Chef Aaron put together are all local, including the pickled tomatoes he used as garnish. They were made from tomatoes grown right in the restaurant’s garden. This, obviously, is totally rad and completely in line with my thinking about food.

While Aaron prepped the pork belly offsite, there was an incredible amount of onsite preparation that went into the final presentation. It starts here with the pork belly being friend in a skillet with some of the ketchup and then being transferred to a plate to await garnishes as below.

The garnishes included the aforementioned pickled tomatoes, micro cress (I had never seen these before – adorable! And actually quite tasty.), and a pepper cracker. Crackers and pork belly, I hear you ask? As my grandmother would say, “Just eat it!*”

This is a horrible photograph, I know. But it tasted really good, I promise! I know it to be true but I can’t take decent photographs while doing anything else and I was really preoccupied with yakking with folks about my recipe and how awesome Aaron had made it.

Chef Aaron explaining the dish to one of the judges. It probably went something like this:

“Green tomatoes tend to be acidic. To balance that, we add a fatty piece of sheer goodness (AKA pork belly). Then, we pickle some green tomatoes to add some more acidity/sweetness while pairing the ketchup components. Then, we need a little textural crunch element to cut through the mostly soft components. So, we add a little salad of micro pepper cress. This has a very crisp, peppery bite to it. Then, we add a flat bread cracker that will be full of pepper to add more texture and add a classic tomato pairing like black pepper.”

I might be a little biased but I thought it was delicious. It was not only really popular with the East Asian contingent – two different woman told me nearly word-for-word: “You can never go wrong with pork belly.” – but also very popular with the male contingent of the evening’s festivities. One guy, stated very seriously, “This is the best thing here. If the announcers ever give me the microphone, this is all I’m talking about.” Another guy, after hearing the judges’ final results, said, “You guys were robbed. Yours is the best stuff here.”

And then they had to pop my head to get it out of the Pavilion Hall. Heh.

Actually what she would say was “You don’t have to like it, you just have to eat it.” Which I could never come back with a witty retort for, honestly. Hopefully my kids will show me the way.

Of course, I’m still vacillating between chuckling inwardly that my green fruit recipe won a final spot at the Red Fruit Fest and OHMYGODIMGONNABEONSTAGEWITHAFAMOUSCHEF!!!!!1111.

Heh. Wow.

I’d like to say I’ll miss the tomatoes but I won’t. I’ve been eating them all summer and I’m ready for something new. Based on the sheer volume of cowhorns and jalapeños, I’m pretty sure that something new will be pretty spicy.

Now I’m no stranger to Thai basil but I’ve never had it outside of typical Thai food, which is usually made with the sort of ingredients that are rarely found in my kitchen. Well, except for the obvious new bundle of Thai basil. Oh, and fish sauce. Must have that for truly delicious burgers.

I searched for Thai basil recipes on epicurious and stumbled across this one, which has enough crossover with what I happen to have on hand today (namely, onions, garlic, and chicken) to inspire what Wayne humbly calls “The Scrumdillyiciousness” and what I have more humbly dubbed Thai Basil Chicken Mess.

Serves two

Ingredients

• 1/2 pd of boneless chicken
• 10-12 sprigs of thai basil
• 8 cherry tomatoes or equivalent in regular tomatoes
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 onion
• 2 tbsps of fish sauce
• 1 small Carmen pepper, or equivalent
• cooking oil

Preparation

1. Chop the onions coarsely. Chop the pepper finely (and remove any seeds if you dislike even mildly spicy food). Remove the leaves from the basil sprigs and chop finely. Slice the garlic thinly. Cut the cherry tomatoes into quarters.
2. Add oil to frying pan along with the onion, pepper, basil, and garlic. Saute over a medium fire until onions start to turn translucent, stirring occasionally.
3. Slice the chicken in thin strips and add to the peppers and onions. Add fish sauce and tomatoes and saute until chicken is cooked through.
4. Serve as is or, over rice or orzo, as below. Bread and butter mandatory if you’re serving Midwesterners.

Postprandial Notes: This is a really nice blend of Asian and Italian. One of those dishes that came together perfectly and I’m sure I’ll never be able to replicate exactly again. As usual, it’s highly improvisable – regular basil could probably be substituted as could beef or pork strips, a spicer pepper, and more vegetables (perhaps bell peppers).

Fortunately, the New York Times ran this lovely article full of cucumber recipes, including one for Cooked Curried Cucumbers (which has a much lovelier photo of the finished product, I might add. As a photographer I should be ashamed but hey, it’s my kitchen and I was ready to eat.)

I only made slight modifications to the recipe – I didn’t bother to scoop out the seeds, I used rice wine for the cup of dry white wine and I also probably added 1/3 more curry powder.

Postprandial Notes: A nice, lightly spiced, refreshing side dish or condiment as part of a larger spread. They went really well with burgers. I think they could have used a touch more heat or maybe sharpness, which the original white wine would definitely have provided. That said, they are definitely a new summer staple.

There have to be about a billion (almost typed a dillion – ha!) pickle recipes. I am pretty openminded about my pickles – I like most except really sweet bread and butter types. The pickling cucumbers were pretty big and looked like they’d already been off the vine for a few days so I decided to go with something simple with ingredients I already had on hand.

To be honest, the real challenge was finding a big enough container – I had just enough large enough pickles that they didn’t neatly fit into any of the jars I had on hand. After a 30 minute crash course study of cucumber volumes in various glass containers, I decided to use my ceramic nabe.

Ingredients

• 3 pounds-ish pickling Cucumbers
• 8 sprigs of fresh dill, chopped
• 5 fat cloves of garlic, sliced fine & slightly crushed
• 2 cups of vinegar
• 2 cups of water
• 2 tbsps of non-iodized salt

Preparation

1. Put pickles in a suitable storage container, ideally not metal or plastic. Chop the dill and slice the garlic and throw in container.
2. Mix water, vinegar, and salt in a bowl and whisk until salt is completely dissolved. Pour over cucumbers.
3. Close container and park in the back of the fridge for at least 2 weeks before eating.

The pickles about 15 days in. Sampling data was taken at this point and results compiled below.

Postprandial Notes: I used a mixture of apple cider and white wine vinegar for my first batch. They were received pretty well but they’re a bit on the sweet side for my taste. I think I’ll go with a different vinegar next time. I may throw some raw onions and mustard corns in as well. For a different opinion, let’s have a look at Wayne below.

In the famous words of some random kid, “He likes it! Hey Mikey!”

Le Bumblebee: Quelle est? Ah, le belle femme fleur fatale. How is it that she can sleep when I am so near? We must stoke the furnace of love, must we not?
Le Fleur: Le mew. Le purrrr.
Le Bumblebee: This little love bundle. Now she is seeking for us a trysting place. Touching, is it not? Come, my little peanut of brittle. I will help you.

Le Bumblebee (caressing Le Fleur tenderly): You are ze corned beef to me, and I am ze cabbage to you!

Le Bumblebee (intoxicated with the scent of Le Fleur, buries his head in her pistils): I pierce you with the ack-ack of love, flowerpot. Ah, there ees very little difference between men and women. But.. VIVE LE DIFFERENCE!!

Heh. Not this year, no sir! 2010 ain’t no punk@ss moderate year, content with soft breezes and gentle temperature fluctuations.

Nope, 2010 is the year that announced, “I’m gonna be different! I’m gonna dump more snow on the city than it’s seen in over 100 years. I’m gonna be really freakin’ cold and then I’m gonna be really freakin’ hot. Not hot like “Hey Koolaid!”-hot. Hot like fry-an-egg-on-the-nice-flat-hood-of-an-old-Jeep-Cherokee-Classic-hot. Now that’s HOT.”

In concrete terms, it means we’ve had one rainstorm in the most recent three week period. And we’d already hit 39° C/100° F-plus temperatures by late June. LATE JUNE. It ain’t even August yet.

Fortunately, my current addiction to triathlon has revealed a solution to being hot and sticky: getting more hot and sticky. After all, if I’m hot just sitting around the apartment, imagine how much cooler I will feel after baking for an hour or two in the hot sun on a bike/run training brick?

Now, if I were a tomato plant who sat in full sun all day, I might feel differently. I might feel like I was being just a tad whiny about the temperature indoors in the shade. I would probably counsel myself to be a little more grateful – at least, I had shade. Shade which I wouldn’t have if I were a tomato plant. Which, of course, I’m not. No, quite fortunately, I’m not a tomato plant who sits in full sun all day; rather I’m merely the morning and evening waterbearer.

Which brings me back to beans. On last night’s watering foray, I noticed little green bean sprouts poking up through the dirt. Hence this morning’s pictures. It’s the same Dragon’s Tongue bean I planted earlier in the year – if you look closely at the picture below, you can see tiny purple flecks in the veins of the baby leaves.