Tart time!

I have a love/hate relationship with savory tarts: I love eating them, but they always come out looking like a hot mess. That is, until I tried the tomato/basil tart from Cooking my Way Back Home, an excellent new cookbook from Mitchell Rosenthal (and I'm basing my evaluation entirely on the fact that includes a recipe for both Poutine and Bacon-Wrapped Oysters).

You can get the recipe here, and I have to say, it was both one of the easiest and most satisfying tarts I've ever made (can't wait to make it in the summer when the tomatoes are actually decent) :

Performance Enhanced Ramen Noodles

Chinese New Year is upon us once again. And while I don't pretend to understand why it is sometimes late Jan, sometimes early Feb., I know it is the year of the Dragon, which apparently is a good time to be born (nudge nudge).

Anyway, like any good holiday, food is central, so obviously I'm going to take full advantage. This year I'm going uber-traditional, with some over-the-top ramen noodles.

Hold on a second, my telegraph is buzzing...oh...apparently ramen is a Japanese invention. Well, I haven't made this big of a geopolitical culinary faux pas since I congratulated the French foreign minister for France's greatest culinary contribution, the taco.

Ok, back to the food-I'm looking through Momofuku for some ramen inspiration. Wait, the telegraph is buzzing again-shit, just found out the author, David Chang, is Korean-American; guess this meal has nothing to do with Chinese cuisine, but rather loosely-pan-Asian.

Like most of Chang's recipes, we start off with pork, specifically pork shoulder crusted with a 50/50 salt and sugar mix. Roast it in a low (250) oven for about six hours, until it is falling apart (essentially pulled pork):

I've got homemade ramen noodles on my to-do list, but I'm going with the packaged ones tonight. For the sauce, I whip up some of Chang's ginger scallion sauce, which is apparently his answer to ketchup, as in, it goes on everything. Altogether, not a bad pairing at all (don't forget to bring sriracha to the party):

Musical selection, tangential Asian themed: Tom Wait's Big in Japan.

Cassoulet-Step 2

Second step in my cassoulet series is pretty simple-make the sausage. Again, following the sage advice of Paula Wolfert, I'm going with a simple Toulese sausage, a pork sausage flavored with pancetta, garlic, and nutmeg.

Otto von Bismark once remarked that laws are like sausage, one is better off not seeing them made. I gotta say, he's probably right; meat gets ground up, spices are added, and the whole mess is stuffed in a casing (probably some animal's intestine). Delicious? Yes! Aesthetically pleasing? No way.

I'm on a sous vide confit campaign, so, like the duck, the sausage get packed with duck fat, vacuum sealed, and take a few hour bath.

Next up: the assembly.