Extreme Cooking Blog

The ritual boiling before baking:

Ready to eat with salad in the background:

Tomorrow we’re going to have bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon for brunch. Two days ago I cured a beautiful piece of sashimi-grade salmon. Today it is being cold-smoked from a small fire of pecan logs. Meantime, I’m making the dough for the bagels. The dough will ferment overnight and be boiled and baked tomorrow.

To be continued ….

What started out as a plan to use up some leftovers or expiring food turned out to be a real feast:

• Bread from leftover pizza dough
• Mushroom turnover from some aging button mushrooms and leftover puff pastry
• Tomatoes from the garden – the season has suddenly ended. These were probably the last.
• Aging asparagus, cheese, avocados.

And I made a split-pea soup from the Moosewood cookbook, but needed to make a correction to the obvious omission by throwing in a big chunk of leftover smoked ham shank.

Deboned duck, sautéed in duck fat. Red wine sauce made with stock from bones. Baked figs. Served on brioche toasted in …… yup, duck fat.

Baked-stuffed chayote squash – with cheese and sauce from the recent pizzas.

Totally unexpected. I was making a puree of celery root and apples which involves cooking poaching them in milk. It must have been something in the celery root, but at the end of the poaching, the milk had completely seprated into clear whey and fluffy white curd, redolent of apple:

I was scratching my head trying to figure out what the heck had happened when my precious wife walked up, tried a piece of the curd and immediately announced “Blintzes”.  (She is a million times brighter than I am). I made the crêpes, so she doctored up the curds with some plump raisins and egg:

Fried in butter and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. WOW!

I’m not sure why I love stuffed cabbage so much – all kinds of stuffed cabbage: Swedish-style with brown gravy and lingonberry preserves, Eastern European with a tomatoey sauce, Jewish style with a sweet and sour sauce. Tried this SW French dish today – a giant basketball-sized stuffed cabbage with a soup of carrots and potatoes:

The cabbage leaves are separated using boiling water:

A bowl is lined with cheesecloth, then layered with half of the cabbage leaves, then stuffed with a luscious forcemeat:

Topped with the rest of the leaves and tied up into a tight ball:

Then boiled in stock and served with carrots and potatoes cooked in the same stock.

Leftover baguette dough using Parisian starter, stored in refrigerator for 1 week. Shaped into 90g balls:

Proofed and then stretched:

Then fried in butter in cast iron skillet:

Don’t what to call it. Not hollow like pita or naan. Tasted great with leg of lamb spit roasted over a live fire.