This Is Just To Say: Butternut Squash And Blue Cheese

The CSA is deep into winter squash mode and they’re starting to pile up on the counter, so I figured we should make a dent in the backlog. I looked up “butternut squash” in Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus and saw blue cheese and butternut squash as a good combination. Also, it seemed like it could work nicely with the pork chops we were having. Also, I had a hunk of blue cheese left over from the other night when we made a wedge salad, so . . . you see where this is going.

Jen was immediately taken with the combination: “How’d you figure this out?” (I gave credit to the book, obviously).
Definitely worth doing again.

This Is Just To Say: Cooking Collard Greens In Ghee

I don’t know if it was the greens — i.e., CSA and tender and good, so not supersized, intense supermarket collards — or what but simply cooking blanched greens (4 minutes) in ghee, salt and white pepper was fantastic.

This Is Just To Say: Ghee On Toasted Bagels

Just that, I had some bagels frozen in the, uh, freezer and instead of butter I used ghee. It was good, especially on the onion one that I usually try to avoid.

This Is Just To Say: Garam Masala And Slow-Cooked Pork Butt

I wanted to try just one spice (or whatever, you know what I mean) to so what’d be like. I slathered a three- or four-pound butt with garam masala, and slow cooked it for about five hours at 300 degrees in a cast iron thing. So if you’d like an introduction, I’m happy to do it!

This Is Just To Say

This is just to say . . . we had a leftover bottle of a Tuscan wine made from 55% Sangiovese, 25% Syrah and 20% Merlot (a 2011 Ruffino Il Ducale, which I’m pretty sure was brought over here by someone) that tasted great — great! — with our bastardized Zuni-style roasted chicken. I wouldn’t have expected it to work because, you know, it’s red and it’s chicken and it’s leftover and we — or at least one of us — doesn’t know shit about wine (really), but this was awesome. When you tasted it with high-heat chicken fatty roasted chicken, the wine’s flavors jumped out and sharpened into something beyond what what there. One of those revelatory pairings. It turns out that “Il Ducale Toscana is the perfect accompaniment to herb-roasted chicken . . .” And, indeed, if you Google something long enough, you’ll find some evidence to support that: “Pair Sangioveses with rare steaks, roasted game birds (or wild boar), rich chicken or mushroom dishes or anything with tomato sauce” — “rich chicken”; I’ll take it.