09/16/10 - Oxtails

• 6 cloves
• 1 small cinnamon stick (from a jar)
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
• 2 tablespoons of cumin seeds
• 1 1/2 tablespoons mustard seeds
• 1 small dried red chili (sold in glassy packets at the supermarket)
• our oxtails - about four pounds
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 4 cups chopped onions
• 10 whole garlic cloves
• 2 cups or more chopped celery
• 2 cups or more chopped carrots
• 1/3 cup sliced peeled ginger
• 1 cup dry red wine
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 6 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 6 sprigs of thyme (or about 2 teaspoons)
• 2 five inch sprigs of rosemary (or about 2 teaspoons)
• 2 bay leaves

2) Then we got our big 39 liter Le Creuset oven ready pot. We got this on sale in Seattle and carried it home in our backpack on Kenmore Air. We heated up the olive oil in it and browned the oxtails. This meant turning them every minute or two to get all the sides.

3) We put the oxtails aside and dumped in the carrots, onions, garlic, ginger and celery and cooked them for ten or fifteen minutes. We wanted them all soft and the onions browning a bit.

5) We ground up all of the spices, the cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon stick, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, mustard seeds and red chili in our extra whirling blades of death coffee grinder and mixed them into the pot.

6) Next in were the tomato paste and brown sugar.

7) The oxtails. We haven't forgotten the oxtails. They've been sitting on our cutting board for a while now, oozing juices. At long last, it was their turn, into the pot with them and their ooze.

9) With all the ingredients in the pot, fire up the oven to 375F, put the lid on the pot and bring everything to a boil. Pop it in the oven for three or four hours. Check every hour or so and add water if it has dried out too much, but otherwise you're all set. It's ready when the meat is falling of the bones.

As with many Kaleberg dishes, it doesn't look like much in the picture, but it's mighty good eating.

05/14/10 - French Fry Folly

04/06/10 - Sephardic Gefilte Fish

03/08/10 - Sefrina

We made this version with a 3lb 10oz pot roast from the Clark Family Farm. It had a nice big marrow bone which you can see floating there in the photo. The potatoes were from the Johnston Farm and the eggs from Westwind Farm, so this qualifies as a Port Angeles Farmers' Market dish. We also used dried chick peas, but they weren't from the Farmers' Market. You can make this dish with canned chick peas, but this is obviously not a dish you can throw together in a hurry, so why bother with time saving conveniences?

1. The night before, soak a cup of dried chick peas in water overnight.
2. Start boiling six cups of water in a tea kettle.
3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
4. Take a big casserole with a lid and dump in the chick peas.
5. Add 3 or 4 pounds of beef cut into big chunks. Pot roast is great, but it is better if there is a bone or two.
6. Add six potatoes.
7. Gently tuck six raw eggs into the ingredients so far.
8. Chop up four cloves of garlic and sprinkle them on top.
9. Sprinkle with a few pinches of salt, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon of saffron or turmeric.
10. When the water comes to a boil, pour it on.
11. Cover and put it in the oven for an hour.
12. Lower the heat to 250°F and let it cook for another five hours.

10/31/09 - Something To Grouse About

Cut up the apple into eight pieces. Put a piece of apple, a chunk of butter and as much of the cabbage mix as you can into each grouse. Put the remaining cabbage mix into a flat roasting pan. Put each grouse, breast side up, on a cabbage leaf. Drape two rashers of bacon over it and cover it with another cabbage leaf.

When the birds are basically cooked, remove the upper cabbage leaves. Slide the bacon down to the sides of each bird so it doesn't burn. Raise the oven temperature to 450F and give the grice another 10 or 15 minutes. This should brown the birds nicely. They can be served straight from the oven along with the cabbage.

09/15/09 - Filet of Beef Lucien Tenderet

08/07/09 - Scalloped Oysters

INGREDIENTS

• one BIG loaf of sourdough bread (or two smaller ones)
• 4 10 ounce jars of oysters
• a half gallon of the best milk you can get (we use milk from Dungeness Valley Creamery)
• worcester sauce
• a stick of butter

1. Tear up the bread into crumbs and toast them in the oven on a metal tray. Keep a close watch so they don't burn.

2. Put half the oysters into the baking dish to form the bottom layer. Add a few shots of Worcester sauce.

3. Put half of the bread crumbs on top of the oysters to form another layer. Add a few more shots of Worcester sauce.

4. Put the other half of the oysters into the dish to form a second oyster layer. Add a few more shots of Worcester sauce.

6. Pour in enough milk to wet everything but the topmost bread crumbs of the top layer.

7. Dot the top with chunks of the butter.

8. Bake at 350F for about an hour. Add milk if it is getting dry too soon and to keep the top bread crumbs from burning.

05/24/09 - Deep Fried Chick Peas With Wilted Greens

For the recipe, you will need:

• a pint or so of olive oil
• eight cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
• two cans of chick peas - pour off the liquid in the can and dry them a bit with a paper towel for less spattering
• salt and black pepper
• about a pound of escarole, mixed greens, kale, lettuce, seaweed or such

Deep fry the garlic slices for maybe 30 seconds, until they turn golden. This cooks the garlic and flavors the oil.

Deep fry the chick peas a handful at a time. Give them about two minutes. They'll turn golden brown and shrink. Remove them from the oil and let them cool on a paper towel. Keep deep frying batches until they're all deep fried.

Heat two or three tablespoons of the deep frying oil in a pan. Clean the greens and toss them all in. Toss them around a bit until they wilt. You want to cook them as little as you can, but the cooking time will depend on what you are cooking.

Serve the chick peas and garlic on top of the cooked greens. How's that?

04/27/09 - Russian Easter 2009

We served the traditional meal of blini with salmon roe, Enemies of the Czar, Trotsky's Bane, home made sausage, and pan fried pelmeni. (For more on this, see our recipes page.) For dessert, there was a spirited defense of Moscow against the Monster Napoleon. It took a fair bit of flaming cognac and a lot of dessert spoons to get the proper scorched earth look. We also had a special guest dessert, Trotsky's balm, one of his mother's recipe. It looked suspiciously like a flan, but we know enough to keep our suspicions to ourselves.

04/08/09 - Sweetmeats for Passover

We made four different treats:

• Dates stuffed with almonds
• Prunes stuffed with hazelnuts
• Candied orange peel
• Figs stuffed with candied orange peel

Peel the outer skin off of an orange or two using a vegetable peeler. You don't want the pithy part, just the orange outer layer. Boil a pot of water and dump in the peel for about five or six minutes. In a pot, dissolve about a half cup of sugar in with a quarter cup (or less) of water. Bring it to a boil. Put in the orange peel. If you have a candy thermometer, you want to cook the peel to about 230F. If you don't have a thermometer, let it cook down until the liquid is thick syrup. Lay out a sheet of wax paper, cover it with a quarter cup of sugar. Remove the orange slices from the pot and spread them out on the sugar. Put some more sugar on top. When they are cool enough, toss them around in the sugar.

TIP: Save some of the orange sugar. It can be used to coat dried fruits for making other sweetmeats.

We use calimyrna figs, not the darker mission figs, but you can probably use any kind of fig you want. Cut off the hard nib of the fig. Cut a slit in the fig. Stuff in some candied orange rind and squeeze shut. Roll the fig around in some of the extra orange sugar.

Unless you have a peculiary tough type of prune and need to use a knife, just shove a hazelnut or two into each prune. Sprinkle a few grains of sea salt or other coarse salt onto them for a nice tang.

01/23/09 - Haiga Rice, Uni and Monkfish Liver

Haiga rice is a partially milled short grain rice, so it still has some of its husk or bran. This supposedly makes it a better rice for diabetics, and it also gives it a richer flavor and hearty texture. We followed the recipe from the Seattle Times which involved washing the rice, and then letting the wet rice sit for a half an hour before cooking it. It wasn't at all like brown rice. In fact, it was the best sushi rice we have tasted.

Ankimo has a subtle flavor. There is a mild livery note, but it is a lot like foie gras and unctuous. We served thin slices of it on our potato chips, which were a perfect complement. The sweet potato chips were best, but the combination was rich and delicious, sort of a foie gras Napoleon. Maybe that is reaching a bit, it was a great combination and we ate most of the ankimo in one sitting.

They are sold packed in little wooden boxes like the one shown on the right. Each box has its own little lid so that the boxes can be stacked without the delicate eggs getting crushed.

Our experiment was successful, and we actually got to use that bag of haiga rice. We'll be watching the member specials at Catalina Offshore Products to see if we can come up with any new ideas. If you are interested at all, you can sign up as a member pretty easily. You don't have to be running a restaurant. Hmm, the mackerel filets look kind of interesting, and we've never tasted geoduck clams. There's still plenty of room at the Kaleberg frontier.

12/03/08 - Cardamom Cookies

Bake a batch of these cookies, with or without cookie molds. You might even want to make them a bit thick. These are wonderful shortbread cookies. Shortbread cookies are what Lorna Doones are supposed to be but aren't. Your whole house will be scented with butter and cardamom, and if you like the baking scent of cinnamon, you will be ecstatic with the scent of cardamom. They are perfect for Christmas baking which is when all these old fashioned spices come out of the back of the cupboard and into the oven where they belong.

• 1 cup butter (2 sticks)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 tbsp heavy cream
• 2 tbsp orange zest (or more)
• 1 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 1/2 cups flour

Divide the dough into four parts and press them into flat rectangles. Let them rest in the refrigerator for 15 to 30 minutes or so. (We actually skip this step which is why our cookies aren't much to look at, but they taste just as good as better rested cookies.) Roll the cookie dough out to about 1/8 inch (or as much as 1/4 inch) on a floured work surface. If you have a speculatius cookie mold, you can use this, otherwise just cut the cookies into 2 inch by 3 inch squares and put them on a baking sheet. Bake for about 8-10 minutes at 350F. (We use a convection oven and special baking sheets, so we get quicker results.) Bake until the edges are brown.

10/10/08 - Duck Confit

08/24/08 - Uni Toast

• 320 grams (four flats) sea urchin roe
• 2 tbsp butter
• 6-8 scallions, cut into little slices
• 1/2 cup fresh coriander, chopped
• salt and pepper to taste
• lemon juice to taste (perhaps half a lemon)

We recommend serving this dish with either good sourdough toast or Jasper White's breadsticks.

07/06/08 - Bones Diablo

This is a distinctly unfashionable dish. It is based on prime rib bones. It contains butter and more butter. It makes a Carnegie Deli pastrami sandwich look like a dietary treat. A small portion has enough fat to clog nearly 623,451 aortas. We love it. For safety reasons, you probably can't find a recipe for it in any modern cookbook. In fact, searching Google for "bones diablo" recipe gets you nothing.

We have an old James Beard party cookbook, so we're all good to go. We toasted up the bread crumbs, melted the butter, boiled the tarragon vinegar, roasted the bones and cooked down the veal stock. (Yeah, we have veal stock just sitting around). It didn't take all that long to make. We spiced up the sauce with mustard, worcester sauce, tabasco and lemon juice, and we were soon dining on breaded beef bones.

We are now in a fat induced stupor which will probably last for several weeks, or at least until we get hungry again which may be sooner. Bones Diablo is what beef is meant to be: rich, fatty, and flavorsome. The only known antidote is red wine. For reasons of public safety, we won't include the recipe here, but we may be persuaded to answer discreet inquiries.

04/06/08 - Smoked Steelhead

We started with a half a fish, filleted. That weighed about five or six pounds before we removed the skin. We marinated it overnight in a pyrex dish with one cup of light brown sugar, a tablespoon of peppercorns, two tablespoons of kosher salt and three tablespoons of whole coriander seeds. We rubbed the fish with the mixture and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning, the pyrex dish was full of a thick brown liquid, a mixture of the rub and the water drawn from the fish by the salt. We set up a fire in our trusty Weber grill. We use hardwood charcoal from Hasty Bake. It has a cleaner flavor than briquets. We also throw in a chunk of apple wood from an old stump to give it a little fruit wood flavor.

When the fire is hot with perhaps half the coals turning white, we toss in the apple wood and set up for smoking. That means putting the fish on the grill, but not over the hot coals, and closing the bucket with the vents wide open. In a few minutes, the steelhead is smoking with a white cloud pouring out of the little vent on the grill lid.

We have learned, from a sadly overcooked batch of fish, that we need to keep an eye on the grill. If the fire is too hot, we close the vent a bit more. If the fire has gotten too cool, we have to open the grill for a bit, and sometimes add a bit more charcoal. It isn't like cooking on a stove or in an oven.

Sometimes, the fish is ready in as little as half an hour. That is, if it is thinly cut. Usually, it takes about 45 minutes, or even an hour. Done, of course, is a matter of taste. Once the fish is cooked through, you can smoke it down to leather. We like it a bit more tender, and we find that the flavor ripens after the fish is removed from the grill and let sit.

That's the Kaleberg Labs recipe, and that's some of the fish on the right. We used a real fast shutter to take that snap. You know how long food lasts here Chez Kaleberg.

02/09/08 - Eggs At The Market

The final good news is that Dry Creek Farm is selling stewing hens again. For more on the glories of stewing hens and our coq au vin recipe, see our Stewing Hen Page. You can call Harley and arrange to pick up a frozen bird or two at 360 457 2943. These might be tough old birds, but they are delicious stewed.

01/01/08 - Updated Cassoulet Recipe

11/29/07 - Lacinato Kale Salad

The recipe is simple. Take a bunch of lacinato kale, clean it, remove the stalks, roll it up and cut it into thin strips, perhaps a 1/4 or 1/3 of an inch across. Toss it with a couple of cloves worth of minced garlic, a teaspoon of dried red pepper flakes, a tablespoon of olive oil and lots of lemon. Some lemons are juicier than others, so sometimes a half a lemon will do it, but sometimes we'll need as whole lemon's worth.

It's a light, refreshing salad, and real taste of the North Olympic Peninsula.