On a whim, we bought a 15-lb ham Tuesday night. (This is all that’s left of it.)

For the past 3 days we have been facing the consequences.

Last time this happened to us (because yes, ham is not just a food, it’s an event), we ended up freezing a great deal of it and promptly forgetting about it until months later when it was unearthed as mysterious pinks slabs encrusted in quite the lovely assortment of ice crystals.

This time, I’m determined not to let that happen. So after our first night of just eating the ham straight-up (with a side of REALLY AWESOME spring pea soup), I’m looking for ways to incorporate it into various things so that it will disappear slowly, but surely, into our tummies rather than the back of the fridge.

So far, I’ve come up with 2 ways of doing this, which means we’ve been successfully eating ham for three days straight. If you know me, you know this NEVER happens. I seem to have an allergy to lack of variety in my diet.

Anyway, I figured these recipes for leftover ham are shareworthy, because if they’re good enough to make me eat ham for 5 consecutive meals, I think they’re pretty darn good. Both are rather easy, and perfectly suitable for a weekday dinner too. And the leftovers are awesome, which is a plus if you have to hurriedly cram something into a Tupperware the next morning to avoid spending $10 at Boloco or someplace.

Onwards to the recipes:

Ham, Cauliflower & Leek Frittata

(I apologize for the iffy photo taken on my phone…)

Ingredients:
2 leeks, thinly sliced
1 cup ham, cubed
2 cup cauliflower, chopped
2 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
12 large eggs
2 teaspoon dijon mustard
2 tablespoon unsalted butter
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Method:

1. Whisk eggs, mustard, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, and the hot sauce in a large bowl; set aside.
2. Heat butter and olive oil in a large cast-iron skillet over medium heat until butter has melted. Add leeks and cauliflower; cook, stirring, until soft, about 5 minutes. Add ham; cook, stirring, until heated through, about 2 minutes.
3. Preheat broiler.
4. Add egg mixture and stir to combine. Cook, using spatula to pull eggs away from sides, allowing uncooked egg to run underneath, until almost set, about 8 minutes.
5. Broil until center of frittata has sent, about 1-2 minutes.

View recipe on Yumbox »

Swoon-Worthy Mac and Cheese

Ingredients:
1-2 cup ham, cubed
1 pound pasta, rotelle or elbow shaped
1 cup pepper jack cheese
1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded
1 cup parmesan cheese, shredded
1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded
3 cup broccoli florets
3 cup milk
2 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon chili powder
chives, chopped

Method:

1. Make sure everything is chopped beforehand. Preheat oven to 375˚ F.
2. Boil pasta until al dente. In last 5 minutes of pasta cooking, dump the broccoli florets into the same pot and let it steam/cook. When done cooking, drain and set aside.
3. While pasta is cooking, melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add olive oil. Stir in flour and cook for 1 minute until very lightly browned. Add milk, a tiny bit at a time, stirring in between to avoid lumps forming. Add butter, salt, pepper, and mustard and chili powders. Keep stirring until mixture is bubbly. Lower heat if necessary to keep it from exploding. Add cheese and stir until smooth. Turn off heat.
4. Put drained pasta, broccoli florets, and ham in a large 9″x13″ baking pan and distribute evenly. Pour sauce on top. Sprinkle mozzarella on top evenly.
5. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until top of cheese is bubbly and golden. Yeah!

View recipe on Yumbox »

I’ve made pork tenderloin before many times, but it was always hard to tell when it got done, and whether it would be juicy or a log of shoe leather by the end. I also could never seem to get a nice crust on the outside. So finally I decided to get down to learning how to do it right. The recipe I used tonight came from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, which is a sizable compendium of classic French recipes generously annotated by both Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. The recipe is simply called Sautéed Pork Filet or Tenderloin. It was pretty standard, following your classic “sear, bake, and make sauce” procedure. However this time around I made sure to follow the recipe to the letter. And when I deviated, I noted what went differently, why, and how I fixed it. As a result I think tonight’s pork tenderloin was the best I’ve ever made.

I learned a bunch of things in the process, so I shall write them down here in case you too might find them useful. What follows is my version of the recipe, adopted from and even more thoroughly annotated than J&J’s version (if such a thing were possible).

Tina’s Julia & Jacques’ Pork Tenderloin

Ingredients
1 small pork tenderloin (about 1 lb.)
10 apricots
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tbsp minced shallots
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/3 cup beef broth
1/2 tbsp jam (such as black currant, plum, or, in my case, lingonberry)
1/2 tbsp ketchup
fresh parsley or basil for garnish

Method

1. Cut the pork tenderloin into 4 equal-sized chunks and salt/pepper it.
   Jacques says to angle the knife differently each time so you end up more with a series of tetrahedral hunks about 2″ thick at the center, than with round discs. At first I did not know what difference this made, but I realized that this helps you actually brown the entire exterior of the meat, instead of ending up with just the top and bottom browned (as would be the case for a disc-shaped piece).
2. Preheat oven to 350˚ F. Heat vegetable oil in pan on high heat.
   Here is where I began to deviate from the original recipe. First, J&J say to set the oven to 200˚. The oven is for gently roasting the pork after you sear it quickly in the pan, so the inside cooks up all juicy and tender. I found that 200˚ was too low, but this may also be my oven being an old batty apartment oven. Let’s just say you, too, have an old batty apartment oven. Go with 350, otherwise your pork will never be cooked to an edible state in time and you will end up with cold sauce in the pan waiting for it. Secondly, I accidentally used olive oil (reflex…), which was dumb. Olive oil has a low smoke point and it isn’t suitable for high-heat activities like searing… let’s just say our kitchen had an interesting haze for much of the evening. You should definitely use a vegetable oil such as canola. Thirdly, medium-high heat to me is a 7 out of 10 on my electric coil-style stove on the largest burner (8″ diameter). The different burner sizes vary significantly in heat output, so I would say, be sure to save the big burner for this step. Finally, use a non-nonstick pan because I find that nonstick pans just don’t heat up well enough. Also, you’ll never be able to deglaze it without also ripping off all the nonstick coating. I used my 9″ Cuisinart stainless steel frying pan for this.
3. Sear the meat for 5 minutes total, turning throughout.
   First step to happy searing is to really heat the oil up real hot. Heat it until it gets that ripply look on the surface. This is where I often trip up because I’m impatient and the electric coils heat up super slow (I’m a gas stove kind of Tina, alas.) Then when the oil is hot, put the meat in the pan. It should hiss mightily at you. If not take the meat out and keep heating the oil, then try again. When searing, make sure your pan is big enough for at least 1″ of clearance around each chunk or else you will get steaming action and not frying. If there isn’t enough clearance, do 2 batches. One area which I personally have a lot of trouble with is knowing when to flip. I discovered that 2 minutes on aforementioned 7/10 heat is enough to get a perfect golden brown crust on the first side, but the first side only. And no peeking. Afterwards, I begin to turn the chunks every 1 minute or it starts to burn. After 5 minutes and 3 or 4 turns you should have all sides cooked to a crusty, even, golden hue. If not, you will know next time whether you should adjust the heat on your stove up or down.
4. Lower heat to medium. Put the meat in an oven-proof dish and pop it in the hot oven.
   This is to finish cooking the insides, which right now is straight-up raw. At this point, set the mental timer for 10 minutes exactly. At 10 minutes, open the oven and poke the meat. If it feels completely squishy still, give it another 5. Meat should still yield a bit to the poke when you take it out. This will result in medium to medium-rare meat. (I did extensive research, a.k.a. reading the first 10 links in Google, on whether rare pork is OK. The consensus is that nowadays, it is just as OK as rare beef, as food safety standards have improved drastically since the 60s when everyone was scared of trichanosis poisoning.) In any case, 10-15 minutes will result in meat that is still a little pink in the center, but really juicy and nothing like the awful leathery stuff you get when cooked to FDA specs of 155˚ internal temperature. Totally worth the sliver of a risk of dying, if you ask me.
5. Make the sauce: in the pan where you cooked the meat, add shallots and sauté for 30 sec. Add red-wine vinegar, stock, and port. Deglaze pan. Add apricots and reduce for 5 minutes on a gentle boil. Stir in jam and ketchup.
   This step is pretty self-explanatory. The jam essentially thickens the sauce into a beautiful glossy sheen, as Jacques explains in the sidebar. It’s a great trick. Look ma, no flour. Anyway, if you have everything already measured out, making the sauce will beat the roasting meat to the finish line. In which case you can turn off the heat, cover the sauce to keep it warm, and wait for the meat to finish. Use your newly emancipated attention to check up on the meat assiduously so it doesn’t get over-cooked.
6. Take meat out of the oven, arrange on plates, and pour the yummy leftover pork juices into the sauce. Stir, pour sauce over meat, and serve!
   

That’s it. It’s really quite easy once you figure out what your own oven/stove’s equivilant of high and medium heat are. So I guess it really comes down to practice. I’m happy to say next time I make this I’ll have this extremely verbose guide to refer to, and it just might come out as awesome as this time.

***

PS: Yang and I have decided I should publish a book called “Difficult, Unhealthy Dinners,” along the lines of this one. Because I champion fat-and-black-bits-laden foods the world over (hey, Julia says it’s totally OK in moderation) and I seem to have a knack for making easy recipes sound hard. But I think maybe we’ve got it backwards. Many recipes that claim to be easy are actually pretty hard to master. They only seem easy because they are written with an economy of words. You can only learn by doing, for instance, that your oven temperature will be way off and the supposedly “quick” recipe will take twice as long and can no longer be relied upon to produce what it claims to be perfect done-ness. So the purpose of this book would be to make easy recipes seem hard by making them super-long, but of course in doing so they will be easy again because you will be totally prepared when your oven is way off from what it’s “supposed’ to be. And of course all of the recipes will feature ample amounts of fats, sugars, and crunchy blackened crusts. Oh yes.

I love French onion soup in restaurants, the way they come in a little clay bowl all bubbling over with melty cheesy goodness. They can do that because they can stick the whole bowl in a hot oven and let it broil the bejesus out of the cheese. But we can’t, mostly because my mom and Yang teamed up against me to prevent me from purchasing 4 ramekins for $3 at TJ Maxx.

But it’s okay, I’m not bitter. Because I figured out another way to get practically the same delicious result.

Basically first you make French onion soup in a pot on the stove. I prefer Elise’s version over at Simply Recipes, even though she, too, says to do the oven bit at the end. Simply ignore step 3, and do like follows instead:

First you get some bread. Hamburger buns split in half will also do. This is what we had.

Then you get some garlic and put it through the garlic press (Anthony Bourdain be darned). Then you smear this lovely garlic mush over the top of each bread piece. Then you brush the top with olive oil…

…And stick it in the toaster oven on “bake” for however long it takes for the top to get golden brown.

Then you put cheese on top of the bread. We had slices of Swiss, which, if you fold the corners in, kinda fits perfectly on a Trader Joe’s hamburger bun. Now you know…

…And switch the toaster oven to broil, whereupon it doth broil until the cheese bubbleth.

And then, when the bread is yummy, and the soup is done, you do this:

+

=

In the end, equally delicious as the restaurant version, AND we managed to use up 4 more onions out of our Costco onion bag. Hooray!

ADDENDUM: The only downside is that hours later, I still can’t sit in the kitchen without eyes stinging and nose running. I need to work on this.

I think I know now why the cake wreck blog took off so quickly, and why it’s actually gotten popular enough to be made into a book. Cakes are immensely prone to wrecks. At every stage of the process, from mixing the batter to baking to getting it out of the cake pan to frosting can go disastrously wrong. It’s also that many things normally considered excusable in other forms of food-making suddenly seem heightened in their awfulness when you’re making a cake. People have high standards for cakes. Not only must it taste good and have good texture, it must be structurally sound and beautiful. No one cares if a stir-fry or a spare rib doesn’t stay stacked in a three-layer tower, or crumble when you try to roll it. No one cares if it looks disheveled and thrown together, which often actually adds to its devil-may-care culinary appeal.

Today, my cake roll adventure, which may or may not have ended in a wreck this time (you judge), took from start to finish a total of four hours. Cookies, muffins, and even cheesecake? Half an hour for certain, I can do it. Cake, particularly this cake roll, was a challenge. Every step of the way I was a nervous wreck. A nervous cake wreck. This was exacerbated by the fact that I had to fulfill certain stringent requirements with regards to the color of the cake (I’ll explain). Furthermore, if anything went horribly wrong, I couldn’t exactly start over because there are no replacement ingredients to be bought today, it being Thanksgiving and whatnot. (By the way, what a funny grammatical construction. But I guess it’s cool for me to be colloquial. It being that no one reads my blog and whatnot. =D)

Cake rolls are notoriously hard… for me at least. (OK ex-roommates. Stop laughing now.) My last attempt ended up in a smushed cake… uh, casserole. Basically the darn thing fell apart when I tried to roll it. This time I did my research ahead of time. I learnt that a good spongecake is required. Spongecake is bouncy and resilient and kind of stretchy. You could roll and unroll that sucker all day long and it’d keep its structural integrity. Although you probably would not want to eat it afterwards. Here is the recipe I found and used:

Orange Sponge Cake Roll

I made some modifications as I didn’t actually want the cake to taste of orange. So I left out the marmalade and subbed blueberry jam. I also didn’t have cake flour so I followed these tips to make my own approximation thereof. Finally, I halved the sugar, as this was being made for a Chinese parents type of crowd and they do not like their cakes all sugared out.

The cake itself went pretty well, up until the point I got it out of its pan. I had not greased the wax paper well enough. Whodathunk you had to grease something that was already waxed? I ended up spending way too long peeling off wax paper in little shreds, and the cake cooled completely before I could roll it up in a towel to set its shape. I stuck it back in the oven, at which point it then overbaked slightly and got a little harder than it should have been. Oh well, next step.

I then spread the cake with Acadia National Park wild blueberry jam, which is awesome. This step went well. Then I rolled it back up. This step went well, too. It did! You can look at the pictures at the end if you don’t believe me.

There was a problem.

Okay, so I mentioned before there was a color requirement. My cake had to be… blue. This is is because I was making it for Thanksgiving dinner at Yang’s house, and his mom decided that the theme of the dinner is to be colors. And I was assigned the most impossible color. Blue. Nothing is blue in nature that’s meant to be edible. Not even blueberries are blue! Technically speaking. She told me she gave me blue was because I’m the most creative. Sigh.

The problem was that, because of this color requirement, I had put a tiny bit of blue food coloring in the batter. When I was mixing the batter, it looked reasonably blue. A little teal, perhaps, from combining with the yellow of the egg yolks. But after baking, the color was decidedly green. And not even a nice, springly vegetal green… it was sickly blue-green. I made a blue-green cylinder. By Jove, it did not look delicious at all.

My original plan was to sprinkle powdered sugar over the whole shebang and be done with it. I now knew that was not going to be okay. This blue log deal had to be frosted.

I was like, This is cool, I can frost this thing. I’ve made awesome buttercream frosting before. But then all sorts of stuff went wrong. The butter wouldn’t melt consistently. Then it melted into pure hot liquid. Then I beat in too much sugar and it got hard, so I added milk. I added too much milk, and it was basically water until I added all the powdered sugar we had in the house. It was still runny as hell. I was all @#$%^&@!* at the ceiling. Then I realized we had a small reserve of powdered sugar that Nika’s mom brought over. I went for it, but not before siphoning off half of the goo. I mixed all of the sugar in the goo and it turned into frosting consistency. WHEW.

I frosted that sucker. And here it is: blue roll cake.

Off to the party!

This book was awesome. First and foremost, it is hilarious. It is the kind of hilarious that is enhanced with a pinch of abject horror, but it is not sad like the way watching The Office is sad and soul-crushing. No, there is something strangely… uplifting about Bourdains account of his drug-ridden, half-crazed, sleep-deprived, machismo-driven careen through cookdom.

I like its contrasts. Sometimes it is fast and noisy action, other times it’s quiet introspection. Topics swing wildly between the gory and brutal realities of dinner rush in the kitchen, and sweetly touching descriptions of Bourdain’s love for food and all those who share this love. In one chapter, Boudain will be reveling in the playful, hubristic terrors of his crazed, drug-induced reckless young life, the next, he’ll be feeding himself platefuls of humble pie.

Though the writing style is extreme and pocked with exaggeration, he is great at maintaining perspective so I am content to romp along through his accounts of gasp-worthy excesses and crimes. Because I know by the end he will be able to wrap them up into some sort of personal critical response. Crazy as Bourdain’s life was, he has clearly done some soul-searching and introspectating, and the results are written all over this book.

He’s a great writer and has a surprisingly handy and beautiful way with words. It borders on the poetry of the insane. Because his background is what he says it is, I am never sure if the occasional gem of a turn-of-phrase is the effect of some lingering crack in his bloodstream or if he really is just that smart of a writer. Actually that is dumb; of course he is very smart. It comes through in the way he refers to important historical events like they were everyday household concepts. I kept having to look stuff up on Wikipedia, and not just the French words. And there’s also that endearing self-deprecation he constantly foists upon himself. Nothing says “smart guy” like someone who knows the limit of their smartness.

Finally, he’s made me want to learn French cooking. He’s turned me off of silly platings with squeezie bottles and towering stacks of scallops for a bit, but I do want to know how to make a good demi-glace, ever so much. Now where can I get me some veal bones in the US?

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