Egg, Kale & Mustard Greens with Bacon Lardons & Arugula Flowers

Kale and Mustard Greens, that's the name of the game. Grab yourself an sharp knife...the bigger the better. Bunch the greens into a dense pile and start slicing. I cut them into thing strips, but do whatever the hell you want, I don't have to eat what your mistakes.

Toss the chopped/sliced greens into a large bowl. Now it's time to make it rain...olive oil that is. Drizzle the greens with some good olive oil, toss on a little bit of sea salt and black pepper, maybe a little minced garlic. Go nuts. I think i put some red pepper flakes in there, but thats because I'm crazy. All that nuclear drinking water as kid.

Get a huge saute pan or wok or pot and a big wooden spoon. Drop in the greens and start cooking. How long should you cook them...you figure it out. I'm not one of those people who wants to eat soggy mush that once was a vegetable. I like my greens to still have a bit of bite to them. Pick off a couple of pieces while you cook it and stop when you see fit.

Radish time.

There are several ways you could tackle this.

a) simply slice and throw them in at the end.

b) eat them immediately.

c) cook in butter

d) saute with greens

I chose to slice them thin and saute them in butter. Radishes and butter go hand and hand.

Now it's time for the bacon. Take a slap of it and cut off a 1/4 to a 1/2 inch thick slice. Now cube it. There you have it...bacon lardons.

It's a thing of beauty, but quit drooling over it and throw it on some cast iron.

Once you've successfully cooked your lardons, sauteed the kale, mustard greens & radishes, and poached an egg, you have my permission to throw it all together on a plate. Seeing as my arugula had sprouted some flowers, I decided to pick a few and throw 'em on top. They taste pretty radical. Like a spicier, floral (duh) arugula and they look cool.

Behold!

Kale From Red Hook

Kale!

It's good and it's even better when you fry it!

After you saute the leafy part of the kale, and you notice that you still have those hard stalks sitting on your counter that you forgot to throw away...DON'T!

Take those stalks and cut 'em down to a few inches long. Into a bowl goes some buttermilk, salt, pepper, and smoked paprika. Throw the stalks in. Toss them around for a minute and let them sit.

Now mix some flower with some salt and pepper and smoked paprika. Take each Kale stalk and coat them in the flower mixture. Once that's done, let them sit for a minute or two or until a pot of oil is ready for frying. Yea you heard me...FRYING. These little puppies are gonna be Buttermilk-Fried-Kale Stems. I know, I know...I'm a genius. I've turned your would-be compost into gold. You're welcome.

That's the fried stems paired with a jalapeno-cheddar-biscuit (thanks Quinn), toasted fennel and garlic sausage (thanks butchers), sauteed kale (RHCSA), and pasta salad (thanks Quinn's Mom).

Whiskey, Pork & CSA

It's been a while, but we haven't slowed down. We've been baking, curing meats, grilling and then some, but now we are blessed with a CSA share from a not so distant farm located in the outskirts of....what....Brooklyn. Yes sir. Our farm share comes from a farm only a few blocks away from our little place in Red Hook. It's the Red Hook Community Farm.

Our first meal was a great one and it went a little something like this...

Pork Steaks (cross section of a shoulder), kudos to the butchers over at the Meat Hook, smothered in a serious Garlic Scape marinade. The garlic scapes came straight from the farm and were all squirly.

I gave those wiry stalks a quick chop, added some olive oil, salt, pepper, honey, and Jameson, bitches.

The whiskey baby. Just add a shot or two. Trust me it's good. Pigs are alcoholics anyway, didn't anyone ever tell you that, so why not give them some whiskey in death?

Now put it in a blender or a food processor or a mortar and pestle and beat the shit out of it.

Once you've blended it to smithereens, smother those pig parts in the green slime and let it sit for a few hours or overnight.

Doesn't that look good? Almost like it's covered in nuclear snot. Yummy.

So you've let it sit in the slime for a while now, huh? Fire up that grill to high, or get a blazing charcoal hell-fire going and slap those pig puppies on. Don't worry, you won't burn them. They'll cook up in only a few minutes per side.

Let 'em rest for a minute or two and then go to town...thank me later.

I Left My Heart In Bushwick

Tonight was a good night. It was filled with pork, beer, bones, and pizza. Can you top that? As a matter of fact, you can.

Tony Bennett was the icing on the cake. I didn't want to take a photo of him because it would have required the flash on my shitty little camera phone, but trust me it was him. There was some early speculation to the situation as we sat at the bar in Roberta's, but as we schemed about the whole thing, we heard the owners being introduced to him as Tony.

Could it be? Was this really the Tony Bennett? Was he in an amazing shit hole looking pizza place in the middle of Bushwick!?

Oh it was baby and I don't mean to make Roberta's sound like a dump. It's just, when you see the tiny, cinderblock-built building from the street, it doesn't look like much, but trust me, it is much... way much! Their pizza is worth the travel alone, even if you live in the Bronx. I would kill a bum, or more preferably a Wall Street whore for a margherita pie with some speck (that's delicious cured ham-porky goodness). I mean fuck. Pizza and pig, why not. I'm gonna die from a heart attack or some sort of cancer, why not cram salty pig into everything and while you're at it, throw Tony Bennett into the mix. He can sing I left my heart in that salt cure, or better yet, in the pizza oven along with some fucking amazing pig love.

So take my advice, and not lightly, take it heavily... GO TO ROBERTA'S! Maybe you'll see Tony Bennett.

Coffee

So the house-roasted coffee came out pretty damn good. It was smooth, with a nice deep chocolate taste. I'm giving myself a pat on the back right now.

Thanks Stumptown

Living in Red Hook, Brooklyn is awesome, but one of the many cherries on top of it all is that it is home to the new Stumptown coffee roastery. You'd think that there would be the most wonderful scents of coffee floating through the air at all times, but there just so happens to be some sort of weird food packing warehouse around the block, which equals shit smell. Well, too bad I guess.

So, today I ran out of coffee, Stumptown of course, and I was in a state of panic. If you came by, you would have found me curled up in the fetal position in the corner of my kitchen hugging my coffee grinder with the last remnants of my precious drug stash. You would have gotten bitten if you came near me, trust me. Due to my love of free shit, I went over to Stumptown's Red Hook roastery to inquire about some burlap sacks in the trash and just as I imagined, they were there. In all their burlappy greatness, there they were, just chillin' in the trash. What does a good ol' nature loving whore do... he takes a few, to do what with, I don't know. I took them nonetheless.

So the Quince and I get home and I freak out at the rattling noise coming from a couple of the burlap coffee sacks. HOLY SHIT, it must be coffee! What do you know, it's a handful o' coffee beans. They were green, unroasted, raw berries. Awesome. Another experiment to be done.

I've now become some sort of super-urban coffee farmer. I'm not picking the beautiful berries off a tree. Instead, I'm dumping what little crop I can harvest from a trashed burlap sack, then digging through it to get every last forgotten morsel, and finally picking the dropped berries from the ground. Look mom, I'm a farmer!

From there, it was cleaning the berries of any dirt and dust, most likely gathered from our apartment's floor and not the trashed burlap sacks.

Into the cast iron they go!

Make sure you stir every so often. They might burn if you don't. I just picked up the cast iron pot, with pot holders of course (don't be stupid), and gave it a few tosses. That was done every ten minutes or so.

After an hour or two, the berries were transformed into something very recognizable... coffee beans of course. What were you expecting? It's not like they were going to just turn into a pot roast or even worse, Carrot Top.

Remember when he looked like that. Still kinda freakish, but in a non-horrific way.

The coffee went through various colors, from green to your average dark roasted beans. Take a look.

Ain't thems purdy.

Check back tomorrow for how the cup of coffee from these beauties comes out.

OMFG...It's Breakfast Time!

To start the day, I did what I always do.

Grind

Boil

Pour

Stir

Wait

Press

Pour

I'm talking about the wonders of a french press. In my mind, there is no other way to make coffee. It's thick, dark, and robust, and I'm not talking about you know what. If you like your coffee, then get yourself a french press. I swear by it.

Another thing that I'll swear by is the coffee made by the boys at Stumptown. I first fell in love with their coffee on a cross country trip a few years ago. On a recommendation from a friend/coffee roaster, I wound up at the foot of Mount Stumptown. It was in Portland, Oregon and no, it wasn't actually a mountain of any kind. It was a place of coffee worship. Nevertheless, the coffee made me mess my pants and I've been hooked ever since.

Luckily for me, the owner and paternal father of Stumptown just happened to move a neighborhood away from me in Brooklyn. He also opened up a roastery, which is located down the street from my apartment, but it gets better. Every time I buy a bag of Stumptown beans, I get to stare at the numbers stamped on the bottom of the bag, which let me know that I'm about to enjoy some f'ing awesome coffee that was brewed only a few days prior to my purchase. Can it get any better?

If you don't know already, I am a total meat whore, and even more so... a total pork whore, but why the hell not. Is there anything on earth that comes close to the taste of cured pork parts? I think not. When you crave a bit of cured pork goodness, there is nothing else that will satisfy that need. In more recent food porn times of my life, I've begun experimenting with curing pork. I've conquered bacon, guanciale, and now I'm working on coppa. It's really not that hard and it's extremely rewarding. You get to cut your bacon to any thickness you want. I like mine super thick, which makes it a bit difficult to cook. You've got to cook it low and slow, but isn't everything cooked that way so much better?

Egg time. These eggs were purchased just yesterday at the Grand Army Plaza farmers market, which means they are local and farmed responsibly. The price wasn't too bad either, only $4.

Some wonderful Vermont Cheddar Cheese from Cabot. Damn good cheese.

Now that you've cooked that thick bacon and removed it from the cast iron pan, crack a couple of eggs into the pan of bacon fat. Fry those babies, or what could have been babies, up. Add a little sea salt, cracked black pepper, and fresh rosemary. Remove from pan and place on a sliced open baguette, add a slice of bacon and cheddar cheese. Now go and enjoy the shit out of that breakfast sandwich, but don't forget that cup of coffee.