What is Victoria Day weekend without friends, family, and some sun? Jenn and I usually make it a foodie weekend, inviting out of town guests to stay with us for several days. The Tulip Festival is usually on its final weekend. The weather is usually sunny. I usually serve up a major feast.

This year, we didn't have any guests staying with us, but I turned to the barbecue to make a feast. Why? Well, the condo maintenance staff set them up early this year, so I've been grilling food for a month now. Also, Jenn's little sister, one of our dinner guests, loves grilled foods.

Can't blame her. We've been enjoying grilled asparagus, wings, and shrimp. Most recently, we seasoned some "colossal"-sized shrimp (count: <10 per lb) and grilled them at medium heat, shell on. When done, we removed the shells and added the slightly smokey shrimp to a Thai-style soup.

Thai-Style Soup with Grilled Shrimp

For our Victoria Day Sunday feast, I started planning the Friday before.

foodiePrints (May 22, 10:02 pm) Planning tmr's cook-out 2 feed friend who will b post 24hr shift at Civic: Think grilled take on http://bit.ly/a35oqm [My Take on Crispy Chicken] & http://bit.ly/3imkNx [Ox Heart Anticuchos]

Not only was Jenn's little sister joining us, but so was a friend of ours, a resident at a local hospital who worked the weekend.

Sunday morning saw me butterfly a broiler fryer chicken, removing the keel bone. I then cured it with a 50:50 cure of salt:sugar and whole spices partially ground with a mortar and pestle. This time around, I added the zest of one orange, star anise, cloves, black peppercorns, and some cinnamon for flavouring. To grill, I washed off the cure and placed it off direct heat, turning it over regularly (every 2-3 minutes). To glaze the skin, I combined equal parts maltose and lemon marmalade.

For the ox-heart, we again sliced it up and marinated the slices in a modified Nuoc Cham, substituting: chile flake for bird's eye chiles and a combination of orange juice and rice wine vinegar for lime. To grill, I skewered them on metal skewers (anticuchos) and placed them on direct heat, set to medium. The Nuoc Cha being so sweet, they would char quickly at high.


Chicken and Ox-heart anticuchos

Our friend brought over marinated Korean-style short ribs. She marinated them in President's Choice "Memories of Korea" Barbecue sauce.

Grilled Korean Barbecue-Style Short Ribs
Incidentally, the prepared sauce can be made by blitzing together diluted soy sauce, sugar, minced garlic, nashi pear (aka: Asian pear), onion, and sesame oil.

With a light vinaigrette dressed cucumber salad and a mesculin salad (a collection of peppery greens), both sourced from the Rochon Farms stall at the Parkdale Market, we had quite the foodie meal. The chicken was unbelievably moist and flavourful, both savoury and sweet with touches of citrus. The anticuchos smacked of umami and brightness from the vinegar. The short ribs were sweet and tasty.

Not bad for a small Victoria Day weekend get-together. As I would later tweet, we essentially tossed a bird on the grill with other pieces of meat, some on sticks.

Last week, the blogger (@cookingstudent) behind one of my favourite food blogs, Cooking School Confidential, posted a piece enumerating some of the kitchen disasters she has learned from. There is the forgotten pot that burned. There is the odd amalgam of ingredients that produced odd textures or flavours. There is the grease fire that caused thousands of dollars of damage. This, after posting dozens of kitchen tips.

Both resonate well with me as I believe cooking requires patience and giving oneself permission to fail, as much as to succeed. I feel the Food Network does food both a service and disservice with how easy its shows make cooking look. In the kitchen, I have no team behind me, no prepped mise, no second takes, no cooks to back me up. Do I want to see celebrity chefs fail? No, but there is something inherently honest about watching Julia Child, in black and white episodes of the French Chef, working through prep, dropping ingredients, and "muddling her way" through producing something edible from a dish that didn't turn out. All, in the single take it seemed her ground-breaking cooking show used to be filmed.

Let's face it, we allow ourselves a single take in the kitchen with our lives heavily caffeinated and our attentions spread thin. With the onslaught of manufacturers stocking supermarket shelves with "innovative" processed products that promise no cholesterol when the ingredient list includes no animal fats to "naturally raised meat" that promises no hormones when hormones have been banned in Canadian livestock for decades, it is a wonder our diets are at all different from the ones Jamie Oliver encountered when filming his "Food Revolution." Teaching kids basic culinary skills is one thing. Teaching a generation to cook again is something else.

I am a novice cook who is forcing himself to develop instincts, where there were none. There is a reason one of the earliest categories I added to foodiePrints was "disastrousEats." Like many novice cooks, I am learning to handle the frustration that comes with failing to accomplish something in the kitchen. And, I want to share my lessons learned.

My kitchen disasters include the forgotten pot that burned, the knife mishap (mine required stitches), and the poorly conceived and badly executed recipe (a particular one resulted in a size-able dental bill). The following disaster is similar to Oliver's elementary kids not being able to identify their vegetables. I got the ingredient wrong when I attempted a former Ottawa food blogger's recipe for a favourite dim sum dish, ginger and green onion tripe.

In this case, I bought the wrong cow's stomach. Apparently, cows evolved four stomachs, each to accomplish something different with the grass they eat. Each is thus different.

Kitchen Disaster
I bought honeycomb tripe.

Honeycomb Tripe

I followed the recipe, augmenting the blanching liquid with chile, garlic, and a dash of kosher salt.

Boiling Cooking Liquid

Unfolded Tripe

Sectioning the Tripe into Sheets

Chopping the Tripe

Tripe, Blanched for 20 Minutes and then Cooled in Ice Water

Stirfrying Frenched Onions to finish

What went wrong? Honey comb tripe is thick and traditionally long and slow cooked. After blanching and stirfrying the tripe as per the recipe, the tripe pieces were inedibly hard.

The recipe called for omasum, not honeycomb tripe. Omasum comes from the third stomach and is layered. Fast cooked, it becomes almost crispy.

I decided to place the inedible honey comb tripe into a pot with some sriracha, some beef broth, and braised it soft.

Sriracha braised honey comb tripe
Now edible, it became dinner as I reconsidered the original recipe.

More after the jump...

As someone who believes in eating nose to tail, I have always been intrigued by Mexican menudo, a hearty tripe soup (or stew) that is reputedly good for curing hangovers. I first encountered menudo while watching an old episode of Chef Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations (Season 5?). He was visiting Mexico and, as he tucked into a bowl, he made light of the soup having the same name as a former Latin boy band, whose lead singer was none other than Ricky Martin.

Like Chichi Wang of Serious Eats, author of a series of "The Nasty Bits" blog entries, I enjoy the texture of slow cooked honey comb tripe: delicate and almost gelatinous. Having grown up exposed to foods from many cultures, I have eaten beef tripe (omasum) at Chinese dim sum, where it is cooked crunchy and served with ginger and green onions (scallions). I have eaten beef tripe (honey comb) stewed in soy with star anise. I have even stewed beef tripe myself in store bought tomato salsa.

Stewing tripe in salsa was essentially my attempting to pair tripe with tomato and chile. It lead me to attempt a hominy-based menudo a year ago, with a small degree of success. Having come across Chichi Wang's attempt at Chef Rick Bayless' Menudo Rojo, I decided to try again, taking lessons learned from my first attempt. This time, I produced something sublimely good.

My Attempt at Menudo Rojo
Wang's recipe borrows from Chef Bayless' Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the heart of Mexico, a reference cook book that has enjoyed almost 22 years of re-prints.

Authentic Mexican, published 1987
I recently came across a first edition at a public library.

Though, I did stray somewhat from Chef Bayless' recipe, making an African Kosayi to infuse chile into the menudo stock instead of a paste from dried chiles.

We will start with the African Kosayi, essentially a spicy red pepper sauce that is somewhat analogous to Vietnamese sriracha. The following recipe comes from an episode of the third season of the Australian Food Safari.

Recipe

Red Peppers

Red Peppers Post Boil

Seeding and Skinning the Larger Peppers

Peppers Pureed

Puree, corrected for Flavour with Vinegar and Sugar

What You'll Need:

• 2 red bell peppers
• approximately a dozen bird's eye chiles
• 5 cili merah chiles
• Any mild vinegar like rice wine vinegar
• Granulated white sugar
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• kosher salt to season

Essentially, any combination of sweet and hot chiles will do, so long as the ration is 1:1 by mass. The peppers I chose just happened to be varieties more common to Asian cuisine.

Method:

1. Place the peppers in a pot with a tight fitting lid, cover with cold water.
2. Place the pot over a burner set to medium heat and bring the water up to a simmer.
3. Lower the heat to medium low and simmer for 25 minutes covered
4. Remove from the heat and let the peppers cool until they are handle-able
5. Drain the peppers.
6. Dawn a pair of latex or vinyl gloves. Do NOT skip this step. Prolonged exposure to hot peppers, cooked or otherwise, can cause the capsaicin to seep into the skin. It burns!
7. For the larger peppers (i.e. not the bird's eye chiles), halve them, remove their seeds, and peel off the skins. Boiling the peppers like this is similar to roasting them. The flesh separates from the skins.
8. For the bird's eye chiles, just pull off the stems. They should come off rather easily.
9. Place the seeded and skinned pepper flesh into a blender along with the stemmed chiles
10. Blend until smooth
11. Strain the puree through a wire strainer. This will remove any errant seeds and skins.
12. Stir in the olive oil
13. Correct the flavour with vinegar and sugar. According to the source recipe, a Kosayi should not be too hot. For the above peppers, I added 2 tbsp each of vinegar and sugar.
14. Season to taste with kosher salt.

For the menudo itself, Chef Bayless' recipe employs pig trotters to impart a stickiness to the stock that comes from slow cooking collagen into gelatin. Please note that the tripe, more common at Chinese dim sum and served in bowls of Vietnamese Pho noodles, is layered omasum, the third of a cow's four stomachs. For this recipe, thicker and more substantial honey comb tripe is required. Omasum may actually dissolve completely from the long stewing in the following recipe.

More after the jump...

With a newly opened large Asian supermarket, Ottawa is being exposed to foods and groceries more common to ethnic communities in larger cities like Toronto and Vancouver. During its grand opening, the supermarket was quite the realization for many that tofu comes in more flavours and varieties than plain; soy sauce comes in several preparations from a multitude of foreign and domestic producers that bottles can fill an entire shelf; ice cream comes in exotic flavours like green tea, mango, taro, and durian; and Asian cultures commonly prepare off cuts like pig's ears and chicken feet.

Indeed, those, familiar with the Vancouver originating T&T chain, know stores have two meat displays besides a long and well stocked meat counter. One carries more standard cuts of meat. The other, glorious offal. Think beef kidneys, two kinds of beef tripe (honey comb and omasum), pig skin, pig heart, duck tongues, chicken hearts, and chicken gizzards, everything shrink-wrapped on styrofoam trays. At the meat counter, you will find more mainstream cuts of beef, pork, chicken, and duck. Interspersed amongst the chops, legs, stew meat, and roasts, you will also find pig trotters and chicken feet. Having never cooked pig's ears, I chose to challenge myself.

Previously Frozen Pig's Ears
And yes, those would be pig's trotters and tripe sneaking into the picture.

Eating cuts like ears, cheeks, snouts, tongues, and trotters means you are eating from nose to tail. This form of consumption seems to be prevalent in old world cultures whose values reflect strong agrarian origins. Raising livestock is an expensive and risky endeavor when considering both feed and care. To ensure return on investment, all the nutritive value from an animal's carcass needs to be extracted. Just about everything is edible, the question is how to cook it.

While an episode of the recently aired season of Top Chef Masters demonstrated French cuisine to be familiar with pig's ears (boiling them soft in a court bouillon), I decided to red braise them. Red braising or red cooking is a Northern Chinese cooking technique that imparts a characteristically dark colour and flavour to the slow cooked meat. At Northern Chinese restaurants, you will commonly encounter red braised pork belly.

Having purchased no pork belly, I slowly braised the ears, let them cool, chilled them, sliced them thin, and served them cold.

Red Braised Pig's Ears
Besides flavouring them, red braising softened the pig's ears, leaving a gentle cartilaginous crunch.

Recipe

Pig's ears braising in a mixture of wine, soy, sugar, and spice

One ear, retrieved after 3 hours braising, laid flat to cool

Two other ears, retrieved after 3 hours braising, laid flat to cool

Pig's ears, chilled, sliced, and served cold

What you'll need:

• 4 pig's ears
• 1/2 cup of dry sherry (a fortified wine) or rice wine
• 2 1/2 tbsp chicken marinade or dark soy sauce
• 2 1/2 tbsp sugar
• 2 whole pieces of star anise
• 1 cinnamon stick

The following procedure involves parboiling the ears to remove scum and encourage flavours and then slow cooking them in a sweet and spice infused braising liquid.

Method:

1. Add the ears (thawed if originally frozen) to a large pot of water and place the pot on a burner set to medium.
2. Bring the mixture up to a simmer, not a rolling boil, and simmer the ears for an hour.
3. Meanwhile, place the sugar, chicken marinade or dark soy, and whole spices (star anise and cinnamon) into a slow cooker with a cup of water. Set the slow cooker to high and stir to dissolve the sugar.
4. Remove the simmered ears from the pot to the slow cooker.
5. Add as much water as needed to cover the ears and bring to a very gentle simmer.
6. Cook for 3 hours.
7. Carefully remove the ears from the braising liquid to a plate. They will be very soft and coloured brown.
8. Let the ears cool to room temperature
9. Cover with plastic and chill in a refrigerator until solid (approximately 3-5 hours)
10. Slice into slivers and serve cold.

As the Serious Eats recipe, on which this one is based, states, ear is an acquired texture as opposed to an acquired taste. Even braised low and slow for hours, the ears retain a cartilaginous crunch.

Next time, I am going to try cooking them in red chili.

Alright, I know a lot of you are most likely repulsed by the idea of eating offal: tongue, heart, liver, kidneys, and tripe. I, however, like to practice nose to tail eating as much as I can. Besides, providing alternative sources of nutrition, off-cuts and offal can provide new textures and flavors to experience.

Typically, I use an oriental method to cook tripe. Today, however, I decided to try a more latin-inspired method for my portion of honey-comb beef tripe.

After washing and slicing the tripe into strips, I placed the tripe into a pot with some hot oil (approx. 2 tbsp) and placed the pot on high heat. The goal: cook out some of the liquid from the tripe before braising it to tenderness. After repeatedly heating and discarding emergent liquid for 5 minutes, I added 3 heaping tablespoons of a prepared salsa. Mine was a mildly spicy salsa that consisted mainly of tomatoes and a handful of herbs. I then added enough chicken stock to cover the tripe and brought the mixture to a boil at medium heat. Afterwards, I added two dried red chillies, covered the pot with a lid, reduced the heat to medium-low, and braised the tripe for an hour.

What emerged was a wonderfully spicy tripe with a soft and chewy texture. Because of the spice from the salsa and the added chillies, every bite provided a warm, but rounded, mouth feel. The heat traveled the length of my mouth and I could feel a warmth at the back of my throat. T'was good eats indeed!

BTW, for some odd reason, the Brits aren't nearly as squeamish as North Americans regarding offal. For instance, take the following screen capture from an episode of Chef Heston Blumenthal's BBC television show, "In Search of Perfection." In this scene, a gentleman is being interviewed for his thoughts on Chicken Tikka Massalla. He seems to have been filmed against the backdrop of a large outdoor market. In case you're wondering, Brawn, otherwise known as head cheese in other cuisines, is jellied pig's head.