Totally delicious crowd-pleaser. Easy. A little time consuming.

Ingredients:

6 medium onions
12 ounces of the fresh creamy goat cheese of your choice
2 big pinches of salt
Enough olive oil to caramelize the onions

The key to this recipe is really caramelizing the onions. Caramelizing is a slow process where you cook the sugars out of the onions and then you cook the sugar. It all happens in the same pan without you doing too much, but you have to do it slowly; it takes AT LEAST an hour. Don’t add other sweet stuff like sugar or balsamic vinegar. The natural version has a deep fruity sweetness.

As a side note, people often mistake anything that browns food as caramelizing. When you brown meat, you’re carbonizing (read “burning”) it. When you roast potatoes and they come out all toasty and brown, you’re carbonizing them. If you cook the onions too quickly, before the sugar has been drawn out, you’ll be carbonizing them too. Carbonizing is usually a dry process (in that hot pan with the rib eye or in the oven with the ‘taters), caramelizing is usually wet (in the pot with the toffee or, shortly, in the skillet with your onions).

So relax, have a glass of wine and crank up the Koyaanisqatsi and let’s get going.

Take the goat cheese out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature so that it’s softer to work with.

Peel and chop the onions any way you like. Cutting them as rings makes a nice onion-y presentation, but chopping them smaller makes them cook a little more easily. Chef’s choice.

Heat up the biggest skillet/frying pan you’ve got. Add about 4 tablespoons of olive oil (and optionally a pad of butter), get the pan coated by swirling it around and then dump in the onions. Don’t get burned by splashing oil.

Initially, it will seem like you have WAY TOO MANY onions. Don’t be scared, they will cook down to a shockingly small volume. Ultimately, the proportions aren’t terribly important for the first time you make it. The goat cheese is always more delicious with any amount of caramelized onion and the onions are always more delicious with any amount of creaminess, so don’t get worked up about it. I’m happy with the proportions described in this recipe.

So cook them on medium high heat until the start to soften, shrink and break apart (15 minutes). Keep the onions moving. Add the 2 big pinches of salt and lower the heat to medium. Move the onions around every 2 minutes. It’s ok if there’s a little carbonized/burnt edge here and there. After about 30 minutes the color of the onions should be noticeably darker. Move the heat to medium-low.

After 45 minutes, lower the heat to 1 tick above the lowest setting on your burner. If it looks like the onions would be happier with more oil or butter, feel free.

You may notice that the spatula or spoon you’re using to move the onions is crusted with a hard brown goo. Taste it. That is the sweet onion ambrosia you seek. Taste the onions.

You’re shooting for a deep mahogany brown. You should be well on the road to that at 60 minutes, but 75 is probably even better. When they look and taste great, turn off the heat and set them aside.

Get a mixing bowl and put in the goat cheese. Reserve a quarter- to a half-cup of onions and add everything else to the goat cheese. Mix it thoroughly. Taste it.

Now, you could slap this in any bowl, add the topping and be done. Or you could kick it up a notch. Pop the dish in a pie pan to catch potential drips and bake at 400 for 20 - 25 minutes.

It will come out of the oven with a crisped lava consistency. In either case, serve with flatbreads or fresh baguette rounds. Enjoy!

I absolutely love EpP, but it can be greasy, over-cheesed and flat tasting. In this recipe, I try to crank it up with smokiness, lightness and flavor density. Making this dish is more like Shoah than When Harry Met Sally; it’s a grueling marathon that will push the temperature in your apartment over the 4,000 degree mark. And there is a point when you’ll wonder if you should just cut your losses. But it’s so sincerely and completely delicious (and such a major crowd pleaser) that you just have to do it.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 cans Muir Glen Organic Fire Roasted Whole Tomatoes
• 1 ball fresh smoked mozzarella < 1 pound
• 6 – 8 ounces of good grated Parmesan cheese
• 4 Jefferson Market andouille sausages (substitute any tender, spicy, smokey andouille that’s NOT precooked. I’ve not had a better sausage anywhere ever.)
• 2 small to medium onions or one gigantic one
• 1 medium to large eggplant
• 3 – 4 eggs (or as needed for breading)
• Seasoned breadcrumbs (for that traditional feeling)
• 2 cups of unimpressive red wine
• 4 – 8 toes of garlic, squished and roughly chopped to taste
• A good amount of fresh or dry basil to taste
• ½ teaspoon of fresh nutmeg
• Salt, pepper and olive oil as necessary

THE SAUCE

1. Chop the onions. Heat up a sauce pan with some olive oil in it and get them cooking. Add a healthy pinch of salt and pepper. Give the onions a good 10 minutes before you add anything else.

2. Take the andouille, slice them lengthwise and take off the casing. Chop them into chunks and toss them in with the onions. They don’t really need to be “browned”, but you do want them hanging out with the onions so they communicate all the andoo-y goodness.

Let the andouille cook completely with the onions. 12 – 15 minutes.

3. Peel, stomp and roughly chop the garlic and toss it in a minute or two before you add the tomatoes and other ingredients. Grate about half a teaspoon of nutmeg, or as much of one nutmeg nut as you can without grating your fingertips.

If you’re using dry basil, toss in tablespoon or two now so it cooks with the sauce. If you’re using fresh, wash it to make sure it’s not sandy or gritty, then layer it in later when you’re assembling the dish before baking.

4. Open one can of tomatoes and add the contents, whole, to the pan. Add 2 cups of red wine to the pan.

Obviously, you’re not going to cook Kistler or Cakebread into this sauce, but you should use a wine that tastes good and that you wouldn’t mind drinking if it showed up in a glass rather than a sauce.

So we’ve now introduced a “Hurricane Katrina” level of wetness to this sauce. My recommendation is that you let this cook down for about 2 hours UNCOVERED (except for one of those anti-splatter screens). This is the whole point: cook it down and achieve flavor density. You could add tomato paste to thicken it, but it’s not really necessary. Be patient and let the sauce happen. Trust me, you’ll have plenty to do while the sauce shrinks.

THE EGGPLANT

My personal preference is to slice, bread and bake the eggplant, as opposed to frying it. This makes it drier, firmer and less greasy. I suppose you could do them on the stovetop in a cast iron skillet with olive oil, but that usually ends with the smoke alarm blaring and a kitchen smelling like burnt olive oil. As long as you’re not using a Fry Daddy/deep fryer, you’ll be OK.

1. I like thin slices, between an 1/8” and 1/16”. If you have a mandolin (like this fancy one my Mom (“Milliemom”) gifted us from William-Sonoma back during the Punic Wars). The thin slices are part of what makes this a crowd pleaser; people who don’t like eggplant love this dish because the eggplant texture is neutralized. The thin slices are good because they’re more delicate and unlike chewing space shuttle re-entry tiles.

2. Beat three eggs in a bowl (with a pinch of salt) and put breadcrumbs in another bowl. I think the 4c seasoned Italian breadcrumbs give it an old-fashioned taste, but you could also get rustic and make your own.

• Dredge eggplant in beaten eggs
• Dredge eggy eggplant in breadcrumbs
• Put on non-stick baking sheet (no olive oil)

Set up an assembly line so that you can dip the eggplant into the eggs, then the breadcrumbs and then have somewhere to put it (a baking or cookie sheet).

If you can do it with one hand and keep the second hand dry and clean, you’ll be less likely to inadvertently splatter raw egg on the wall and drive a painful wedge between your spouse and yourself.

We have a tiny oven so I invariably have to do 14,000 batches. It’s annoying and time-consuming, especially if you soaked your empty empty head with Makers Mark the night before. Suck it up and press on. Consider a hair of the dog. You could probably get them toastier than the ones I’ve pictured here, but what did you expect, I’m hung over.

ASSEMBLY

So your sauce is nice and thick. Taste it. Do you love it? Is it winey and smokey? Does it need salt? This is your moment to doctor it. If it’s not smoky enough, you could add some liquid smoke. This is not my preference as it makes the Wife a little freaked out (it’s natural, I don’t know what her deal is… she smokes cigars for Christ’s Sake!) and even a small spill can turn the dish into garish bordello of inedible burnt garbage. So be judicious if you choose that path.

1. Liberally coat a baking dish (with good high sides) with decent olive oil. Slice the mozzarella (1/4” – 1/3” slices should do the trick).

2. Build the Parm. Your goal should be three layers, plus sauce and cheese on top. The order of the layers should be:

• Eggplant
• Mozzarella
• Sauce
• (Fresh basil if you’re using it)
• Parmesan

3. Open the second can of tomatoes and split the whole tomatoes by hand and lay them on top. If the parm seems too dry, use the liquid from the can to compensate. Bake at 450 for an hour.

Definitely don’t make SEpP for your used-to-live-on-a-parsley-juice-drinking-holistic-health-commune brother, because he simple won’t eat nightshades.

There’s something about lamb that makes the lovely Adrien and every member of her family purr like kittens (assuming kittens came to America on the Mayflower). We both had a tough week and I wanted to make her something she’d enjoy. But I’m trying to inch the meals more toward Jack Lalanne than Caligula these days, at least so far as cholesterol and red meat are concerned. So what to do? I opted to split the main-course-protein-unit over lamb and scallops. We’d both get some redness, but not too much, a little something breaded from the sea, but not too much.

I popped by the Union Square Green Market for accompaniment. All that caught my eye were some gnarly spuds that appear to have been modeled after the severed digits of an Eastern European alcoholic long before the light of mani-pedis and Bacitracin crept through the iron curtain. So I bought them.

The veggies will take the longest, so let’s start there.

–Little potatoes
–Broccoli
–Small Shallots
–Fresh Dill

If some of the potatoes seem too big (relative to the size of the other potatoes), slice them in half the long way. Put them on a large baking sheet.

Cut off the coarse bottoms of the broccoli stalks. If you’re making a vegetable stock (for some other meal), toss these in. Do not let your spouse convince you to freeze the stalks. If you need to sneak them into the garbage, so be it.

Then, cut the broccoli up into florets or generally small pieces.

Add to the potatoes and set aside. Then, peel and trim the shallots, but make sure to keep them whole and together.

Mix it all together on the baking sheet and season liberally with Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning. You do not need to add salt.

Drizzle liberally with olive or vegetable oil. If you use extra virgin olive oil (“EVOO”), only put the oven up to 400 - 425. If you put it higher with the EVOO, your apartment will get smoky in a bad way and the smoke detector will go off at the worst moment and really kill your buzz. If you use vegetable oil, you’ll be fine. In my opinion, burnt olive oil is not more desirable than plain old oil.

I make the point because you want to give this dish as much heat as you can. The potatoes should be browned, the shallots blistered and the broccoli destroyed. It will take about 55 minutes. Take it out and scrape your victims off the bottom of the baking sheet 3 or 4 times in the 55 minutes. After it’s out, toss a handful of chopped dill in and stir.

While that’s cooking, let’s get the scallops and the lamb prepped. For the scallops, we’re going to make our own breadcrumbs. Don’t freak; as long as you’re not Sling Blade, you’ll own this. Take 2 slices of good multigrain bread -optimally the kind with seeds, nuts and twigs- and toast them. Chop the toast and then try to pulverize it with your hands. It should be crumbs with chunks.

Then rinse scallops and paper-towel them dry. Beat an egg in a bowl and put in a good pinch of salt.

Dip the (dry) scallops in egg, then dredge in breadcrumbs. I recommend a counter setup like this: scallops >> bowl /w beaten egg >> plate with breadcrumbs >> empty plate for breaded scallops. For the amount of scallops shown, 1 egg and 2 pieces of bread should be fine. When done, they should look like this:

Ok, set those aside for a few minutes. We’re going to do the lamb and then cook these in the remaining yummy lamb fat. I got 2 lamb chops, which are quite thick and comprised of two rib bones each. Be prepared to spend $20 - $30 for the 2 chops. Get natural/organic/grass-fed if you can.

I split them so that each one has one rib bone… turning them magically into lamb “pops” as Adrien says. You can do this yourself at home, but it can be a pain in the butt. Ask the butcher to do it if you’re squeamish. Season liberally with salt and pepper.

If you’ve got a cast iron skillet, this is where you bust your move. Another pan could be fine, but I find that cast iron gives a better brown than Teflon. Regardless, get the pan on the stovetop and get it piping hot. Then, put your pops in FAT SIDE DOWN. This renders and crisps the fat. Some spouses derive great pleasure from gnawing on the browned/fatty/boney bits. This step will make that extra-nice for them.

Give them 2-ish minutes in that position. Use tongs to then move them from side to side. Adrien has taught me many things in life, but the most important one is not to overcook her meat. These little guys are so small and so thin that you really want to work with a high heat for a short time (certainly less than 3 minutes per side). Then, take them off the heat to rest under the shiny side of tin foil for at least 10 minutes. Aside from letting the meat rest, this will disperse the heat through the meat yielding a pleasantly pink interior.

While the lamb is resting, drop the scallops in the already hot hot fat and let nature take its course. Again, less than 3 minutes per side is adequate.

The scallops are rustic and nutty. The lamb is rich and a little gamey, the veggies (don’t forget to toss with the dill) are herbaceous and a texture parade: firm brown potatoes, soft, destroyed broccoli, silky blistered shallots. I served this with some fresh ricotta and a onion flat breads to cool the meal down a bit. Bon appetite.

It’s the evening before we head down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and to see our people (Denny, Kettye, Jack and Olive), so we’ve got to have something tasty to regenerate up our airport mana and kick off the trip.

Obviously, we shouldn’t buy anything because it will rot in our storageless “Frat Haus” micro fridge (all it really does is freeze things anyway). So we’ll eat whatever we can forage in the apartment.

It’ll be gutter (“guttah”) but we’ll try to take it to an HNL (“hole n’othah level”).

My one purchased indulgence, a bottle of La Crema (2004 Chardonnay). More expensive than I’d like for a garbage night ($17.99, that’s at least $3 of New York City F-U tax; I can find that same bottle for $14.99 anywhere outside the 5 boroughs), but so tasty and sometimes the lads just need to have a little chardonnay time.

–A day-old roasted chicken from Jefferson Market that miraculously escaped my clutches last night due to circumstances beyond my control.
–Just enough nice bacon (my prostate sent me a beautiful thank you note for keeping away from the nitrates).
–An onion
–Some garlic
–Arborio rice (not pictured)

All of the above and anything else I rummage up along the way is going to end up in the trusty rice cooker.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Arborio rice is too starchy to go in the rice cooker and I’ll end up with a kind of burnt bottom and uncooked top of dish, right? Well, here’s my angle… I’ll use much less rice than I would were I making a RICEY dish. The proportions will end up feeling less carb-y, the onions and chicken will really shine through and if I give it a good stir and scrape every 15 minutes, I’ll be able to integrate the toasty flavor of the bottom rice into the rest of the dish.

Foreshadowing: it comes out nicey, spicey and not too pricey as they say in New Orleans.

On to the cooking. Pour yourself a nice glass of the La Crema. But take it easy, tiger, you’ve got to make it last because wifey may want a glass and you’d probably like a little when you’re actually eating dinner. [insert tiger growl mp3]

Everything in my tiny self-centered universe starts with onions, but if we’re going to use the crack of meats, bacon to give the onions a smokey porky nastiness, we have to start there. So roughly chunk up the bacon and toss it in a skillet on medium heat.

and roughly chop up those onions…

After the bacon has given up it’s magical adipose goo, toss in the onions and some crushed garlic (if you’re feeling as lazy as I am, or finely chopped if you’re a good person. (Oh, the way I abuse my garlic sometimes… It’s like Abu Ghraib for vegetables.)).

As the onions cook, it’s time to clean the chicken. When we get a roasted chicken, if I don’t clean it immediately and throw out the carcass, my lovely Adrien goes feral and gnaws on the bones in a way that sincerely troubles me. I pull off the wings and the butt (that foul flabby sac that goes over the fence last) and distract her with that while I quickly pick off the meat and dispose of what’s left. Voilà!

Combine all the ingredients, including a juice glass of arborio rice and 2 juice glasses of water, in the rice cooker with a cube of vegetable bullion and anything else you find in the fridge. In this case I found a pack of frozen peas. Woo-hoo!

Mix a bit and let cook, stirring and scraping every 15 minutes. Total coking time about 40 minutes. I finish and serve with salt, black pepper, lots of Chipotle Tabasco (seriously, 2 teaspoons is perfect) and sesame oil, which goes wonderfully with the generally sticky, nutty crusty nature of the dish.

Carnitas is a traditional and excessively tasty Mexican pork dish. There are tons of recipes out there, but this one is drop-dead easy and all about the pork.

I chunked-up the recipe a bit as one of the guests was not in an onion-y way (poveracita!). I cooked them separately so that she could set her own onion levels. Soup to nuts, this will take 2 or 3 hours, but you can absolutely watch Back to the Future II (as I did) while you’re cooking. Both the film and the food will get the attention they deserve. Biff, Marty and the Doc sure do get into some trouble in this one!

The combination as a taco has everything: rich roasty-crispy pork, sweet onions and smooth cool guac wrapped in a soft touch of carbs (i.e. the tortilla)…

The idea is very simple:

1. Get some boneless cut of pork with fat on it; 2+ pounds ought to do for tacos for 6. Remember, the whole low fat diet “science” was recently debunked. We all know it’s not good for you, but it might not be as bad as we used to think. Get fatty pork and don’t apologize.

2. Cut it into bite-sized chunks, season with salt and pepper and put it into a skillet that’s large enough to leave the chunks not crowded.

3. Add about a half inch of water (You could add chicken broth, I suppose, but I don’t recall chicken flavor coming from pork, so I’d stick with the water; IT’S ALL ABOUT PORK). It should look like this when the water is almost evaporated:

4. Cook at a medium-low temperture until the water has evaporated

5. Let the pork keep cooking in it’s own fat and brown it like crazy. It should start looking like this:

6. When you’re done, trim out the truly gross chunks of fat and give it a good coarse chop.

(I’ll be upgrading my camera and attention to photographic detail soon).

Then, use some NOT ALL of the rendered fat in the pan to caramelize the onions. Coarsely chop 2 large spanish onions, add them to the pork pan (minus the pork obviously), give them a really good pinch of salt and let them go. Keep the onions moving every few minutes, but have an activity that makes you feel like the onions don’t own you. I recommend drinking, smoking or making the guacamole.

They should start looking like this soon:

Don’t cheat. Don’t add balsamic vinegar to sweeten and color the onions. The onions will get sweet and sticky enough. What you want is that big deep soft natural flavor.

Just a quick note about caramelizing vs carbonizing: The onions are caramelized, the pork is carbonized. Caramelization is cooking the natural sugars in the onions and making caramel. There’s really not much sugar in pork; in browning meat, you’re burning it and making carbon (like what’s left over after a camp fire). Anyone who tells you different is misinformed.

Anyhoo…

So when they’re good and brown and dry-ish and sticky, put them in a bowl and set them aside.

Guac’s easy, right?

2 avocados
2 smashed and finely chopped toes of garlic
1 medium handful of cilantro (give it 2 baths if there is even a HINT of grit/sand)
1 medium-small tomato chopped
1 handful of finely chopped onion
The juice of one juicy lime (2 tablespoons)
Salt

You could add some heat, but I left it out to accomodate a guest who was in a not-so-spicey way. It should start out looking like this and you can just mash it up with a fork.

Or you can do what I did and break out the mini-emersion blender and smooth it out…

To assemble, I chilled the guac and warmed the pork and onions (the Stonewall Kitchen earthenware bowls go right in the oven!). Wrap the tortillas in tin foil and toss them in too. 20 minutes at 300 ought to do.

So put out the guac and onions with spoon and the pork with some tongs or a fork. I love the Chipotle Tabasco sauce with this. Total crowd pleaser. Garnish with cilantro. You could jazz it up by also putting out some jicama with chili powder and a good squeeze of lime. Girls love jicama.

I dropped the ball on presentation for this one, but you get the idea. Just wait till I get that new camera…

Dinner for six on a Sunday evening (leaving plenty of time for the L Word) with one attendee knocked-up and needing some mellow comfort food.

Menu:

Appetizer
Carnitas Tacitos with (Real) Caramelized onions and Guacamole

Main Course
Meatloaf with Crispy Bacon Bits and Porcini
Adrien’s Mac and Cheese

Salad
Watercress Salad with Minty Dressing

As I recall there were only 2 major flubs: First I caramelized the onions in ALL the fat from the carnitas. They ended up just too wet and drippy, making me worry that guests would ooze on the rug. Second, I should have just committed to the tacitos being tacos. I couldn’t find the teensy-tiny tortillas, so I just cut regular taco-sized tortillas in half. It looked stupid and increased the messy factor.

Details in upcoming posts.