If you’ve been following along the past few months you know I’ve been doing a lot of curing and sausage making with lots of different pork cuts. While this isn’t the first time I’ve made guanciale I think the batch which recently emerged from the basement is quite possibly the best I’ve ever made.Continue reading “Homemade Guanciale – So Good!”
Beluga Lentils and Grilled Sausage
There’s a reason you always see sausages with lentils. They pair well together. Over the years I’ve tried to make lentil dishes which stand alone on their merits and have been successful with some. But when paired with sausage the combination is downright magical. I don’t know if it’s the saltiness of the sausage reacting with the lentils or the earthiness of the lentils acting on the sausage. Whatever it is, it works.Continue reading “Beluga Lentils and Grilled Sausage”
Simple Spring Egg Salad
Egg salad reminds me a lot of lunches at my grandparents when I was little. A visit to their house on the weekend usually happened around lunchtime and that meant sandwiches. I really can’t recall ever having anything BUT sandwiches. We never had leftovers for lunch or whatever was lying around in the fridge. If there was a leftover, like meatloaf, it went into a sandwich. Some salad maybe if it was summer and Pop-Pop’s vegetable garden was in full swing, but alongside a sandwich. Always sandwiches.Continue reading “Simple Spring Egg Salad”
Pork Belly Porchetta
Last week I picked up an epic piece of pork belly for another project and couldn’t resist trimming off a chunk for our weekly date night dinner. I was quite excited about it and knew cooking a pork belly porchetta was going to get a “WOW! You rocked it!” reaction from Cheryl (which it did).Continue reading “Pork Belly Porchetta”
Corned Beef Hash: Delicious Simplicity
Corned beef hash. A no-brainer when you stop off at the diner on your way home from the bar at 4am. At least it used to be. On Sunday I surprised Cheryl with this tasty breakfast made from our St. Patrick’s Day leftovers. Yes we still had some corned beef and potatoes, that’s the benefit of cooking a six pound brined brisket, plenty left to chew on!Continue reading “Corned Beef Hash: Delicious Simplicity”
Homemade Cajun Spice Bacon
While I make bacon quite often I’m not usually very creative with it. If it’s good and works, why mess with it? However, a friend recently requested some Cajun spice bacon so I felt I needed to do a trial run in order to nail down a new technique. We we were running low on our previous slab of homemade bacon so the timing couldn’t have been better!Continue reading “Homemade Cajun Spice Bacon”
Jerk Spice Pork Sausage
We just returned from what is becoming an annual thawing out trip to Antigua. This year our plane took off in a snowstorm which as you can imagine made us very happy when we got the beach. What made us even happier though was returning to Chicago to find spring had sprung! And because of the balmy temperatures everything was melting thus freeing our grill from a snow pile. Perfect time for checking to see if it still worked and cook one of my newest tubular meat creations; Jerk Spice pork sausage.Continue reading “Jerk Spice Pork Sausage”
Pork Cheek Ragu with Mushrooms
While rummaging through the freezer last week for some fatback to make sausages, I discovered a package of pork cheeks tucked away in a corner. Needless to say, this excited me greatly, and I had an idea what to make with them: pork cheek ragu. A spin on one of my all-time favorite dishes from a long-since-closed restaurant in my old city of Washington DC.Continue reading “Pork Cheek Ragu with Mushrooms”
The Cubano Sausage
The Cuban sandwich is one of my favorite sandwiches, and ever since I started getting creative with sausage flavors I’ve wanted to make one based on the delicious Cubano. I came up with the idea after eating a ‘gyro sausage’ for lunch one day and thought the Cubano’s flavors (pork, ham, cheese, and pickles) would be pretty easy to incorporate in tubular form. I’m sure someone somewhere has come up with this already, but since I’ve never seen one I decided it was time to give it a go.Continue reading “The Cubano Sausage”
Pane di Chiavari (Olive bread)
This week has been a particularly nasty winter week so I thought it would be a good time to follow through on one of Cheryl’s recent kitchen requests: bake some bread. While looking at my favorite bread cookbook, Carol Field’s Italian Baker, I came across a pretty low maintenance recipe for an olive bread, Pane di Chiavari.Continue reading “Pane di Chiavari (Olive bread)”
The Roaming GastroGnome 