The Hollow Leg Diner: August 2010

The 8th Annual LBJCB Drummer Reunion was held last weekend in Long Beach. I thought I would do my part and volunteer to bring some food. I told the organizers that I would get the chips and salsa and make some carnitas. A normal person would have bought a couple of bags of chips, a few gallons of salsa and a little pork. Unfortunately, I am not normal. I don't know what various compulsive disorders I suffer from, but I am sure that I cannot limit myself to JUST bring the chips and salsa. Go big or go home is evidently my starting point. It just gets worse from there. The morning before the reunion I went to North Gate Market to get the produce I would need for making salsa. I will qualify the following events by saying that I've never had any formal restaurant or catering training, so I have no idea of how to calculate yield for meat and vegetables. I went into the store thinking that there would be over a hundred people at the event and that somehow translated into at least 20lbs of salsa. Don't try to do the math; it was just a WAG. Honestly, I had no idea how much food I needed. So I start rolling through the produce department, filling bags of onions, tomatoes, chiles and various other veggies. I actually filled (and I do mean filled) four of those plastic produce bags with Roma tomatoes. I think I had three large bags of onions. After I was done in the produce section, I began to notice that the shopping cart was getting hard to move. At that point, I think I had at least forty pounds of veggies. And I kept shopping! Yes, I had to get more. I went by the carneceria and thought "Maybe I should grab some more pork shoulder." After all, I only bought twenty pounds of pork at Costco the night before. You cn never have enough carnitas.....right? So I got another 8lbs of pork. I also got a beef tongue. I figured, "If they like the carnitas, surely they'll want some lengua tacos as well." Lengua it is. And I might as well get a gallon can of chiles en escabiche in case anybody likes that sort of thing. After an hour or so of roaming the store, making one impulse buy after another, it was finally time to check out. As I'm struggling to push the cart to the checkout lane, all I can think of is that time I had to push that car into the gas station. You get the picture.

Well, I got out of North Gate and headed home. Of course, I had to stop at Von's to get a couple of things that I forgot at North Gate. I grabbed a couple of giant bags of shredded cheese to augment the large block of pepper jack that I bought at Costco the night before. You never know when you'll need a lot of shredded cheese.

Home, finally. It took three trips with our little handcart to get all the crap in from the truck. Every horizontal surface in the kitchen, dining room and living room was taken up with food. I immediately fired up the oven to get ready for the pork. I hope I haven't mislead anybody when I said I was making carnitas. I don't make traditional carnitas anymore. I did it a few time to show Lupe that I could make it better than what she was used to. Carnitas is very tasty, but the sight of pork shoulder simmering away in a pot full o' lard is hard to take. I've never been really big on deep frying anything, and this just seemed to be tad unhealthy. Lupe and I started making our carnitas by slow-roasting pork in the oven. If done right, the finished product is nearly indistinguishable from traditional carnitas and is much healthier (well....I mean it's pork shoulder- it ain't that healthy, but at least it didn't take a three hour bath in lard). Slow-roasting will give you a very tender, succulent pork that still has the crispy bits that make it seem like traditional carnitas. We roast our pork in a 325 oven for several hours. I use an open roasting pan that is loosely covered with foil. The foil comes off for the last hour or two. The surface gets nicely browned and a little crispy, but the interior meat is juicy and tender. I usually use pork shoulder for this dish. I heavily season the pork with a dry rub and kosher salt. I also throw a few chopped tomatillos, jalapenos an onion and a handful of garlic cloves in the bottom of the pan. The veggies give off a lot of moisture and keep the pork moist until the fat starts to render out. There is a balance that you have to achieve with the veggies and meat. Too much veg and the meat will stew in the liquid. I try to just add enough to keep the lower third of the pork covered in liquid. I flip the meat every hour or two to make sure it stays moist.

So, with the pork in the oven, I turned to making the lengua. This is another slow-cooked gem. I filled my stock pot with a couple of gallons of water, added onion, garlic, a handful of morita chiles and salt. The tongue went in the pot and I let it simmer for the next six or seven hours.

Now that the meat was cooking, it was time to make beans. Yeah, at some point along the way, I decided that I should make frijoles de olla. Why? I don't know. I make good beans. I like making beans. I thought I needed more food. I don't know. I just made the damn beans. Four cups of pinquito beans went into the crock pot and were covered with water. I added a chopped onion, six cloves of garlic and a couple of morita chiles. I didn't have any smoked ham hocks this time so the smokiness would have to come from the moritas. With all the slow-cooked stuff started it was time to start making salsa.

I had absolutely now idea what I wanted to do for the salsa other than salsa fresca and tomatillo. Lupe had already said that she was going to make the tomatillo salsa. She makes a great roasted tomatillo, jalapeno and tomato salsa. The salsa fresca is a lot of prep, but is easy to make. The scale of the whole thing just kicked my ass. I don't like using a food processor for salsa, so everything is chopped by hand. I should probably not be so anal about that when I'm making large batches. I think I spent at least an hour just dicing tomatoes. I've never made so much salsa before. It was awe inspiring. Like a beaver looking at the Hoover Dam and saying, " That's a damn big dam." At the end of two hours I just sat there staring at two giant bowls of salsa. "That's a lot of salsa" I said wearily. As I sat at the dining room table resting, it suddenly dawned on me; I haven't even gone through a quarter of the produce yet. Holy crap! Once more into the breech. I girded my loins, grabbed my knife and trudged back into the kitchen to wage war on more tomatoes.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that I was going to try to make some non-traditional salsas. I always want to try something new. Lupe hates that. "That's not how Mama makes it" is what she says. I just like trying new stuff. This time it was using dried chiles. I toasted a bunch of ancho, guajillo, California and negro chiles in my cast iron skillet. After toasting they went into a pot of water to steep for a while. After they were softened, I pureed the chiles. I added some of the steeping liquid and returned the mixture to the stove to simmer for another our or so. I used the reduced chile sauce as a base for several other salsas. I still need to play around with this idea some more, but it was fairly successful. Next time I should add more chile de arbol for heat and bite. I mixed the chile sauce with roasted tomato and onion for one salsa. In another, I used roasted tomato and a mixture of roasted pasilla, Anaheim and jalapeno chiles.

When Lupe got home I quickly put her to work roasting tomatoes, tomatillos and a variety of chile (jalapeno, serano, pasilla, Anaheim and habenero). She worked like a trooper for the next three hours, roasting stuff out on the barbecues. When all the roasting was done she made her tomatillo salsa.

The first batch of pork was out of the oven by about 5 in the afternoon. I quickly shredded the pork and cleaned up the pans for batch #2. I started the second batch at 6pm, so I knew that I wasn't going to finish until at least 10 or 11pm. I also started another batch of beans about this time. With the pork roasting, I turned my attention to the chicken. Oh yeah; forgot to mention the chicken. I decided to make chicken tacos as well. I had at least 20lbs of chicken thighs in the fridge. Might as well use them; right? I broke out the boning knives and started skinning and boning the thighs. I think I boned at least 40 thighs. I'm not one of those freaks at the Tyson plant in Arkansas who can bone a chicken in milliseconds. This took me a while. Nothing quite so nasty as spending an hour or so cutting chicken (well, actually....doing it 8 hours a day, five days a week would kinda suck more). After boning I chopped up all the thigh meat. I mixed it up with olive oil and plenty of spices (my chile powder mix plus salt, garlic and onion powder and a lot of Cayenne). I fried the chicken in small batches in cast iron skillets. As the chicken would have to be re-heated, I took great pains to ensure that it was fried until just done. I probably could have gotten away with searing it a little, but I didn't want it to get too dry.

With the chicken out of the way I started on the roasted veggie salsas. We made 4 separate types of salsa from all the stuff Lupe had roasted on the Q. My favorite was the mild salsa that was made from equal parts of tomato, jalapeno and Anaheim chiles. It is a nice, chunky salsa that has a little heat, but not too much. It really goes well with meats. I also made some hotter salsas. The hot salsa had serranos in place of the Anaheims. The XXX Hot salsa had both serranos and habeneros. Regardless of the heat, I just don't like the flavor of habeneros. I wouldn't have made this salsa if it weren't for requests for a super-hot option. Actually, the roasting tamed the heat quite a bit. The thrill seekers might have been disappointed, but it was still pretty hot.

Around 10pm I had finished with all the salsas and I still had some of the chile sauce left over. I was feeling adventurous so I thought I should try to make a hot sauce. I've never done this before, but who cares. After ten hours of cooking I was punch drunk and willing to try anything. Out came a bottle of white vinegar and I started to experiment. The first effort wasn't that bad. Not aggressively acidic, like a table hot sauce; more of a rich warmth with bite of vinegar. I wanted to try a really spicy hot sauce to finish things up. I added a ton of Cayenne to the chile sauce and used significantly more vinegar. This produced something close to what I was looking for. Very close to the acidity of a Louisianan hot sauce with more body. The flavor profile is different from those hot sauces made from pureed fresh chili. The dried chile base gives this sauce a dark earthiness as opposed to the bright flavors of something like Franks or Tobasco. I need to play with this some more. The white vinegar was too sweet when I got to the acidity level that I was looking for. I might try it with a mix of white and cider vinegar, or possibly a rice vinegar.

By the time I finished all the packing it was 1:30am. Oddly enough, Lupe had predicted this as soon as I told her that I had volunteered to bring the chips and salsa. She knows me so well. She knew that I would get carried away and go psycho on this project. Oh well. I am too old to change. She better just get used to me committing radon acts of large-scale catering.

To wrap things up......
The food was well-received. Getting everything prepped and served at the park was a bit of a challenge. I felt like I was in one of those impossible elimination challenges on Top Chef, where they have to cater a diner for 200 with only a hotplate. In the scramble to set up, I forgot to unpack the 20lbs of cheese and a 4qt. container of carnitas. It just goes to show how much extra food I made. Everybody got plenty of food and I still had 4 quarts of carnitas and an entire beef tongue leftover. Not a problem. Lupe took all the leftovers to Casa Lopez for dinner that evening. While I hung out with the drummers, they enjoyed a big family meal. They even had enough for another meal the next day.

Long day(s), but good food. Sorry about the lack of photos. I was busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest the whole day and never had time to take any pictures. Oh yeah; to answer the question in the title: I do it because I love cooking for people. Nobody's complaining when I make too much grub......except Lupe.

The bloody peasants might get King Arthur's goat (if you don't know, don't ask-just go watch Holy Grail), but they sure can cook. We've been making some simple peasant dishes here at the pseudo-autonomous collective lately. Lots of braising going on around here. That's a good thing, because it gives us lots of time to harvest the filth and debate the relative merits of various political systems.

BTW: Have you ever had an epiphany? You know; one of those moments where a shocking bit of self-awareness gob-smacks your ass. Yeah, I just had one of those. I came to the realization that I act a lot like Dennis, the constitutional peasant, in Holy Grail. Ask me who lives in the local castle and I'm likely to launch into some sort of political diatribe. It's a good thing that I'm right all the time; otherwise I would just be some insufferable tool.

Once again, I have mined the fertile ground of Food Wishes for Chef John's incredible recipes.

Cabbage rolls

This is the first time I've ever tried making cabbage rolls. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. I thought that the cabbage rolls would be bland and unexciting, but they were very tasty.

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images

Not very pretty, but yummy as all get-out.

Ricotta meatballs

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images

>

Awesome meatballs made with ground beef, pork and ricotta cheese; served on top of fettuccini and squash

Chicken D'Arduini The most awesome chicken recipe ever! You have got to make this recipe. Don't be scared off by the anchovies; they're goooooooood.

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images

The giant, kickass Italian family meal

My sister, Lori, her daughter, Kaitlyn, and her boyfriend, Martell, stopped by for a chance at the Gaxiola food lottery. Yahtzee!!! Everybody is a winner. Free food for life.....all in one meal. On one plate, we've got spinach-sausage lasagna, cabbage rolls, chicken D'Arduini and mixed vegetables.

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images

Yeah, I know my presentation and plating skills suck, but it was good. Just shut up and eat.

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images

There's more food on that plate than that kid has seen in the last year. She was a real trooper and finished at least a quarter of her food.

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images

At least Martell appreciated the rather large portion sizes. Maybe the daily football practice has something to do with that.

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images

A happy diner

Braised beef shanks - the ultimate comfort food

I found some nice beef shanks at North Gate, so I decided to try another of Chef John's recipes.