The Dinner Files

I’ve learned to trust a lot of conventional wisdom in the kitchen. New combinations can be great. Trying a new technique with a dish can yield delights. Finding one that works is exhilarating. But often there actually is a reason you’ve never had something before. I’ll never forget the first (and last) time I had that whole lobster-with-vanilla-infused-something. Not. For. Me.

This doesn’t mean I don’t experiment, I do. But my cooking, regular readers will notice, is more about good versions of the familiar; simple flavors well handled; slight twists to old favorites. My cooking is also about frugality, of making use of what is at hand, of not wasting perfectly good food.

I had my eye on those Asian pears from our CSA. They were starting to pile up. I like a crisp, sweet Asian pear as a snack, but even in season I don’t want one every day. And no one else in my house wants one at all – they’re too busy harvesting their own crunchy delights from the apple tree out back this time of year. I made a fennel and Asian pear salad – both major ingredients were very thinly sliced, drizzled with a bit of very tasty walnut oil, sprinkled with sea salt, and topped with a few freshly toasted walnuts. My dashing husband liked it, but said he’d prefer just the fennel.

Sigh.

So I did what I’d been told – by conventional kitchen wisdom – not to do. I baked the Asian pears. I quartered and cored and peeled and chopped 5 of them, tossed them with a tablespoon of cider vinegar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon garam masala, 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, and 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves, and put them in a 2-quart casserole. I then made a topping of 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 1/2 cup butter which I mushed together into a streusel-type thing with my fingers but which one could easily pulse up in a food processor if one didn’t live in completely unreasonable fear of having to wash the food processor bowl and top and blade and whatnot. I spread that mixture over the top and baked it all at 375 for about half an hour – until the pears were bubbling in the middle and the whole thing was a pretty brown.

For the record: Asian pears bake up just fine. They were sweet and tender and held their shape. That said, I’m sure Anjou or Bosc pears would be just as good and probably less expensive. But the advice to eat Asian pears raw is, I think, simply a result of the fact that they are so good raw – crispy and refreshing. If you have a mess of them and want to put them to work in a baked dessert, give it a try. I was delightfully surprised.

And that crisp? The leftovers really do make a most delicious breakfast. I’m just saying.

My absence has been worth it. Seriously. I come to you bearing…. Bourbon Glazed Pears.

I cook a lot. I cook a lot of delicious, scrumptious, delectable food in the process. But I’m a simple girl. Even my elaborate cooking projects tend to have an old-fashioned, homey appeal. Sausage making, for example, or way-too-homemade cassoulets (there is really no need, I learned, to confit your own duck). So even when I come up with something yummy, like those enchiladas earlier this month, I’m not usually surprised or even really excited. Satisfied, I would say, is more often the feeling. But these pears! There is only one way to describe them: I am a genius.

Wait, that’s not really about them, is it?

What happened was this: my dashing husband was not home for dinner. (Wait, didn’t that just happen with the brilliant green beans? Perhaps I should bar him from coming home for dinner ever again….) You see, along with avoiding fried food, he is also “trying to be a vegetarian.” You might think someone either is or isn’t a vegetarian. Not my guy. He would like to be, he says he feels better when he doesn’t eat meat. But he is faced with this problem: meat is delicious. He can’t resist. Plus, he’ll be the first to point out that the non-meat options often available just are not very tasty. So he slips. He has a turkey sandwich at lunch, tries a bite of my carnitas at a restaurant, shares pork-laden dim sum with our son. And he’s lucky. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t really cook much meat. I was a vegetarian for years, formative, starting-to-cook-for-myself years, so meat is not my go-to item. I like meat and notice I get sick less often if I eat it now and again, but it’s not as if he is faced with delicious roasts he must resist every night at dinner.

If I’m going to eat meat, however, I want it to be high-quality meat from animals who lived like animals. So I joined a meat C.S.A. That’s right. I belong to a meat club. Every month I get my share of the animals slaughtered at the lovely Clark Summit Farms in Tomales in Marin County. So my beloved deep-freeze has a fair amount of free-range chicken, grass-fed beef, and well-petted pork sitting around, waiting for my husband not to be home for dinner.

So I defrosted the two pork chops I got in the last share, picked up Ernie from school, and told him on the way home that we were having pork chops for dinner.

“What are pork chops?” he asked.
“They’re meat,” I said.
[pause]
“Mama, what animal is pork chops?”
“They come from a pig,” I answered.
“Oooooohhhh!” he replied as a *huge* grin spread across his face.

So I quickly cooked the chops in a frying pan and set them aside to rest. And then, inspired by the memory of an awesome pork shoulder with garlic, chiles, and pears I did for Sunset (they even made it for me at my good-bye lunch), added a bit of butter to the pan, de-glazed with bourbon (inspired by the Pear Upside Down Cake from the same story), sauteed some garlic and chiles with wedges of peeled pear and amazed myself. I will never serve applesuace with pork again. I will serve sauteed pears. And I’ll probably glaze them with a buttery-bourbony-pork drippings concoction if I can.

Oh yeah, I also made this Butter Braised Savoy Cabbage. It was also fab. Highly recommended. So simple! You could add some caraway seeds if you were feeeling fancy, I suppose, but the simplicity of the butter, cabbage, and salt is terribly effective at being delicious.