sisig

Well, sort of sisig.
This is the story.
Last week, on our final night in San Francisco, we went to eat at the food trucks at Fort Mason.  I know I've already told you this part, but I've got to set the stage.
This is my uncle, Gary.
Gary was at the heart of why I was there with my mother, and why I traveled up to San Francisco after Naya and Oliver's sweet wedding in Carmel. It was a fortifying sort of weekend that left me full of love and hope and good food. Joey went home after the wedding, and I met my mother in San Francisco. In the interest of time, and of getting to talking about that bowl up there, I won't give you all the details, but I will tell you that we were there to do some work on a family rift (you know that rift that most families have in some shape or another? this would be ours), and that long ago, before the rift was so severe, it was Gary and his wife, Sondra, who taught me a whole lot of what I know about how to cook, and how to eat, and how to love food.

And so, on our last night in that full-bellied city, Gary took us to the food trucks. And as he admitted that he had been there several times that summer, we took his recommendations as to how to prioritize. With so many choices, we had to eat wisely in order to draw out the appetite. It was necessary to imagine with each choice that we were eating the very best thing there- the pork buns with pickled daikon (the best!), the fish tacos on homemade tortillas (also, the best!) and finally, the pumpkin and mushroom dumplings (again, the best!). But sitting in my little black folding chair in the middle of the parking lot, one truck kept catching my eye.

It's the brown one there. And finally, at the end of it all, I asked Gary the question that had been humming in my all night.
"What, exactly, is Sisig?"
I take a fair amount of pride in knowing my road (and food truck!) categories, and this one was utterly new to me.
"Oh, it's good!" he told me. "But you'll never be able to fit it in your stomach now. It's brisket over coconut rice with an egg on top."
Yes. I know.
Brisket over coconut rice with an egg on top? Have you ever heard of anything so exciting? I thought (okay, I obsessed) over the combination as we packed up and made our way to the plane. I dreamed of it while I dozed over Kansas. I cursed the 2 feet of snow that fell within hours of our return- I cursed it because it prevented me from getting to the store to buy brisket so that I could create my own sisig NOW.
But then on Monday, I went to The Meat Market, our very own new and wonderful local butcher, and Jeremy gave me the brisket that would become my very own sisig.




After I had the brisket safely in my possession, I did a little research to get more details on this new food. How should the brisket be spiced? Are there any other elements I need to include in there?

I went through at least 10 obscure and cloudy websites on Filipino food before I entirely believed it- there is no brisket or coconut rice involved in sisig. The main ingredient that I needed was actually pigs ears.

I have no pigs ears, although I know of a few places I could get some.

As far as I could tell, I needed some pigs ears and some chicken livers, and a really really hot plate. It would ideally sizzle together with peppers and onions and ginger and a the juice of a fruit called calamansi. Then I would eat it on a street corner in the Philippines with a cold beer, and that would be sisig.



I don't know if Gary had it wrong, or if the food truck was actually selling a version of sisig that the obscure cloudy Filipino food websites weren't aware of. Either way, I had brisket, and I knew what I wanted.

Brisket over coconut rice with an egg on top.

I'm stubborn when it comes to cravings.



And so I'll call it sisig, because that's how it came about, but it's really not quite. It is, however, really, really delicious.  It did not disappoint. And although it might look like a lot of steps, active time is pretty minimal. Very very worth it.


Sisig, sort of
serves 6 to 8


For the Meat:
2 tablespoons olive oil
One 2 lb brisket
1 tablespoon soy sauce or tamari
5 cloves minced garlic
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon chili garlic paste (fabulous stuff! It looks like this:

but if you don't have it, combine about 1 tablespoon of chili powder with 2 cloves minced garlic, adding a drop of soy sauce and a bit of water to get a thick paste
1 red onion, minced
1 bottle dark beer
4 cups water or beef broth
1 dried d'arbol chile

For the rice:
2 tablespoons coconut oil (or butter if that's what you have)
2 cups Jasmine rice
2 tablespoons shredded coconut
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 15 oz. can coconut milk
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon salt

For the final bowl:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups chopped sweet peppers (add in a bit of hot peppers here too if you can)
1/2 onion, sliced
1 tablespoon grated ginger
salt and pepper
1 egg per person

Some sort of sliced pickle, for garnish

Make the brisket:
Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.
Combine the soy sauce, garlic, vinegar, sugar, salt, and chili paste in a small bowl. Rub the mixture over the brisket.  Heat the olive oil in a large skillet or roasting pan over medium high heat. Cook the brisket for a few minutes on each side so that a nice brown crust develops on the meat. Take the meat out of the pan and set it aside on a plate. Add the red onion, shuffle it around for a few minutes, and then pour the beer in the pan. It will bubble and sizzle- scrape all of the brown bits from cooking the brisket into the beer.  Put the brisket back into the pan. Add the water or stock, and tuck the chili pepper into the liquid. Cover the pan with a lid if it has one- otherwise cover it with tin foil.
Put the pan into the oven and forget about it for the better part of the day. Cook for at least 4 hours, but it could be 6 or 7 if that's what works for you.

Make the coconut rice:
I did this in a rice cooker, but if you're making it in a pot instead, you'll need to increase the liquid. Essentially, you'll need as much coconut milk as you usually use water when you cook white rice.
So- in the rice cooker, first melt the coconut oil in the rice cooker bowl. Add the rice, stir to coat it with the oil, and close the lid. Let it it cook for 5 minutes. Then add the coconut milk, dried coconut, water, and salt. Close the lid and set it for the regular cooking cycle.

Then, when the brisket and the rice are ready, finish it up!
Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium high heat. Add the peppers, sliced onions, and grated ginger. Stir stir stir until it's all shiny and starting to brown. Transfer the mixture into a bowl, keeping the pan hot. Add a bit more oil or butter if the pan needs it--then fry one egg per person.

Now the pickle- I leave this one up to you. Do you have a fridge pickle languishing in there from August? This is the moment. I had these beautiful pickled baby squash inspired by Marisa, and they were perfect. You can also make a quick carrot or daikon pickle- this one would be nice here too.

And now... the bowl.
First the rice, then the peppers and onions. Lay a few slices of the brisket over that. Then the egg on top of the brisket. Pour a bit of the spicy fatty sauce from the brisket over the whole lot of it. Then the pickle gets tucked in where the bowl needs a bit of color.

butcher

 

Like any other tourist destination, New Orleans has a neighborhood where the tourists hang out.  

The French Quarter is amazing in its own right--people stay there because it is beautiful and creepy and filled with gas street lamps and little restaurants. But it is also a party all of the time, and walking down Bourbon Street at two in the morning, pushing past teenagers holding their bong-shaped plastic cups made especially for some New Orleans specialty drink with the especially classy name of "the hand grenade," carefully stepping over the running brook of vomit through the street, one can't help but feel stuck in a perpetual college spring break.

It's no wonder that every time we talked to someone from New Orleans on the street (which was a lot, as people actually talk to each other on the street there), they would inevitably take our shoulders and turn us around as if we were blindfolded and headed towards the pinata, and they would point us in the right direction, and with a loving shove, say "go there- out of the quarter.  Keep walking until you find this."  We had a few recommendations too, a few emails from friends suggesting that we "try the drinks here!" or find this place.  We never did our homework, we never mapped out the city to find these mysterious locations, and we rarely employed the gps on my phone.  We just wandered.

We met a woman on our last night in New Orleans, an artist named Bobby who had lived in the city on and off for 30 years.  We had seen her earlier when she was volunteering at the Tennessee Williams Festival, and she had steered us off the street into a theater so that we could witness the drunken finally of the festival, the annual "Stell-ahhh!" competition where anyone can enter with their best channeling of Stanley Kowalski.  We saw her later outside of a lovely bar called d.b.a. (best music I've heard in a while, everyone dressed in their best to dance) in the Marigny neighborhood, and we thanked her for pushing us into the Stella competition.  We got to talking, and we told her about how we had found Butcher the previous day, and about how we kept running into the places that people had told us to find even though we never actually stopped to figure out where there were.  This happened over and over, that we'd be walking for an hour and end up in some new neighborhood, and then we would look up and see that restaurant that our friend Luke had told us that we should find.  It all had a bit of a fairy country feeling, like we just had to wander enough, and as soon as the heat really started to get to us, the place that we needed would appear.

 

Bobby said that New Orleans had always been like that, that it just made sense in the strangest way, and that you couldn't walk five feet without experiencing some sort of magical coincidence.  She said that after the storm, nothing made sense.  The city lost that quality, you couldn't actually find anything, and nothing really matched up.  She said that the city was just starting to make sense again, and that our experience enforced that.  She said that even though there are still neighborhoods entirely without power and running water, even though some of the streets are nearly impassable by car, even though there are hospitals and hotels that remain empty and over half the population of the city has left for good, the fact that the city had shown us that old quality of magical coincidence was a sign that it was coming back to life.

There are two adjoining restaurants in the Warehouse district that occupy one corner.  The first is Couchon, a lovely sit down restaurant with an exciting menu crafted by its owner and rising star of a chef, Donald Link.  Next door, he has opened Butcher, a cafe that is mostly a meat counter, but it has tables so that you don't have to wait until you get home to tear into your little package of sopressata or chorizo.  Butcher has a small menu so beautiful that it is necessary to order one of everything and a beer list that fits on a chalk board comprised mostly of Louisiana beers. We sat down at one of the high bar tables, and before we even ordered we had made friends on either side of our table.  To our right was a couple that included a woman who was born and raised in Berkshire County about 30 minutes from our house, and to our left sat an older couple, two teachers from Memphis who got into a passionate conversation with Joey about Memphis bbq.

We sat at Butcher for hours, talking to people, eating, and admiring the assortment of meat hanging behind the counter.  I had a charcuterie plate of fennel sausage, chorizo, and sopressata.  It was simple- sliced thick with a side of grainy mustard and house-made bread and butter pickles. A scoop of pork rilletes in the center without any ceremony, and a pile of crunchy, seeded flat bread crackers.

 

It blew my mind, and I don't say that lightly.  I begged the waitress for more pickles.  Joey admitted that he had just consumed the best hot dog of his life.  We finished our beers and wandered home, hoping that it would appear to us in the same way that the restaurant itself had.

And of course, after a few more adventures of the night, we found our way back and there was our hotel in front of us again.  I said, "maybe we should go back? across the expanse of city just for one more taste?" Our dreams were filled with perfectly smoked meats and sweet and sour pickles, and I must admit that those dreams are still with me.

stuffed cabbage a la chatelaine

Do you ever find yourself in the kitchen, confused and full of questions? What is this that I'm making? Why did I start so late? How will I possibly finish making it before I have to go pick up the kids? Do I even want to? Shouldn't there be some liquid in here? 2 hours in the oven? Maybe we should just eat hummus for dinner? Who wrote this recipe? Why didn't they give me a picture? Am I lame to want a picture? If I were fabulous and French would I understand it? Should this cabbage be cooked all the way through? Maybe I should have cut it before I blanched it? Will my children touch this? Will Joey grumble about cabbage week all through dinner? Will I have to skip a day of cabbage week and keep this one to myself?

And then, even though I have about ten minutes to pull this together, I have to stop and take a picture. It turns out this whole cabbage week might just be an excuse to take a lot of pictures of cabbage, perhaps, I'm beginning to think, the most photogenic vegetable there is. Tell me this, have you ever seen anything more lovely than a whole blanched cabbage? I swear, I would make a dress out of the leaves if people wouldn't complain about my perfume. Look at that color, would you?

Like life itself, that color. Just gorgeous.

I wanted to make something new for you today, something I've never tried. I wanted something fancy and interesting involving whole cabbage leaves and meat and cognac. Today is stuffed cabbage.

I'm finding that to say you are making stuffed cabbage is as specific as saying that you are making a pasta dish. Sometimes the actual whole cabbage is stuffed. Sometimes the leaves are rolled around the stuffing and you have cabbage rolls. Or every so often, as in this confusing dish, the leaves are layered with the stuffing. Sometimes the stuffing is meat. Sometimes there is rice. Sometimes there are vegetables. I had to narrow down the category.

For stuffed cabbage inspiration, I kept wanting to come back to my new and satisfyingly hip book, I Know How to Cook. I've talked about this book a few times since my friend Alice sent it to me for my birthday, and it continues to make me feel fancy just by holding it in my hands. It's a new version of an old book of generally simple and classic French cooking, and it's one of those books that is a mix of useful and timeless recipes along with weird old recipes that you would never want to try but love to look at.
I know there are these two categories, because I heard it on NPR, but because everything usually sounds like a good idea to me, I can't really seem to tell the difference. I'm just as likely to attempt the "gayettes" (if only I could find the requisite pig's liver, lungs, kidneys, and caul) as I am to make the timeless "coq au vin".

As I layered cognac soaked meat onto whole cabbage leaves, I started to think that I might have made a mistake. But in my thirty-one years I have yet to abandon a recipe, so I soldiered on.

In the end, I'm really not sure if I made this the way it was intended. People must have been more intelligent in 1932 when the book was first published. They must have just inherently known whether one would cut a cabbage before blanching or not. My confusion continued to lead me through the whole process, and in the end, it seemed outstandingly simple. Cabbage, meat, breadcrumbs. I was instructed to top it off with tomato sauce, and I whipped up a batch of this, which would be good on absolutely anything. I know it's cabbage week and all, but make this tomato sauce, even if it's only to pour over your cabbage.

All was well in the end. I thought it was quite tasty, and enjoyed my small square of stuffed cabbage from the corner of the baking dish. Joey however, ate the entire rest of the contents of the pan, save for the few bites that Sadie sampled. He was quiet, and sighed a lot, and he closed his eyes for the greater part of the dinner. This is amazing, he said. And with that, Joey embraced cabbage week.


Stuffed Cabbage a la Chatelaine
loosely adapted (or perhaps we should just say inspired) from Ginette Mathiot, I Know How to Cook

serves 4

1 green cabbage (about 3 lbs)
12 ounces ground pork sausage
1 tablespoon cognac
1/2 cup roughly chopped fresh parsley
3 tablespoons butter
1 cup fresh breadcrumbs (stale bread toasted and chopped finely by hand or in the food processor)
salt and pepper
1/4 cup water or stock

about 3-4 cups tomato sauce

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Remove any of the damaged outer leaves from the cabbage and trim the bottom stem, removing as much as possible while keeping the cabbage together. (If you know a better way to prepare cabbage for blanching the whole leaves, by all means do it, and teach me how too). Submerge the cabbage in boiling water. It will float, so hold it down with a serving spoon. Cook it for about 5 minutes, and then submerge in ice water. Separate the leaves of the cabbage from the stem and set aside.
In a medium bowl, combine the ground sausage, cognac, parsley, salt and pepper. In an ovenproof casserole dish, lay out a layer of cabbage leaves. Then a layer of stuffing. Repeat until you have run out of stuffing. End with a layer of stuffing, and then all of the breadcrumbs. Pour the 1/4 cup water or stock over the whole thing. Cover with tin foil and put in the oven. Bake for one hour, then remove the tin foil and bake one hour more. Serve topped with tomato sauce.

meat

Vegetarians, this post is not for you. Go elsewhere in your daily ritual web wanderings, and come back here tomorrow.

Today we're going to talk about meat.

We eat a fair amount of meat around here.
Hard as it may be to believe, I was a vegetarian from the ages of nine to seventeen. I sported a PETA button on my "too cool for school" vintage jean jacket that kept me exiled in junior high. I think the button said "Meat is dead". (I was never one for subtlety) When I was seventeen, my confronting and rebellious aunt (not to be confused with my gentle and vegetarian aunt) put a steak in front of me at the Clement Street Grill in San Francisco and my vegetarianism was quickly forgotten.

What can I say? I'm the granddaughter of a woman who was a vegetarian for the majority of her adulthood except for when she had the chance to eat ribs. And when she had the chance, man did she take it.
Meat makes Joey happy, and that's pretty worth it to me too. A lamb shank will remedy any amount of bad day for him. But it's not just Joey who finds contentment in a meaty braise. Lately, meat nights are the only nights that Rosie will come off her "I'm not eating dinner" couch that I have installed in the new kitchen. She will eat as much meat as I can give her. She calls everything "pork chops." I let her, as labels hold a lot of meaning for that girl.

Way back when, I made a decision about meat. Because the majority of meat production and processing is grosser, more disrespectful to life, and more dangerous than we could ever imagine, we stopped buying meat at the store. Lucky for me, there are a whole lot of farmers in these environs raising animals on grass, giving them a good life and a humane death. Buying meat from these farmers is such a good idea, but before we go any further, I need to admit something to you.

I have a really, really big freezer. It is in my basement. I share it with my farmer friends, Jen and Pete, who fill their half with frozen corn and spinach. They are vegetarians, and they are very nice about the fact that there are several animals chopped up in my side of the freezer. It is a chest freezer, and no, it does not require a lot of electricity to run, and yes, if you have the space and you are interested in changing the source of your meat I suggest you get one if at all possible.

Logistically, there are pretty much two different ways to buy meat from small farms. The first is on a piece by piece basis, like you would buy at the supermarket. You can buy meat this way at farmers markets, sometimes in a farm stand freezer at a farm, and occasionally at a good health food store or coop market. This is a good way to buy local meat if you don't have a large freezer, or if you are very clear about the cuts that you are interested in. The downside of this is that it is often fairly expensive, as the farmer is offering the choicest cuts and packaging them for individual sale.
The second way is to purchase an entire animal, or at least part of one. In the case of chickens or smaller animals, you might purchase a certain quantity. Depending on the set up, this can be similar to hiring the farmer to raise an animal that you have purchased. Often you will commit to buying the animal while it is still alive, and this way the farmer knows that they won't lose money on the animal. This is how I purchase my meat, and the good things that come of it are numerous enough for a good old fashioned list. Here we go.

Why purchase an animal or part of an animal from a local farmer?

1. Usually, when you purchase an animal or part of an animal, you pay a flat fee per pound. For example, you might purchase half of a cow for five dollars a pound. You are paying five dollars a pound for ground beef, but you are also paying five dollars a pound for some pretty amazing steaks and roasts. It saves you a lot of money.

2. You are supporting local farmers, as well as your own local economy.

3. You can go visit the animals at the farm where you buy your meat. You can see exactly what conditions the animals live in before they are processed. Most farmers really love visits from their customers.

4. I have never had a piece of locally raised meat that did not taste exponentially better than its store bought equivalent. Especially in the case of pork- some of this meat will amaze you.

5. In the commercial meat system, animals are being bred for meat production. Chickens with oversized breasts are just one example. Usually farmers are raising breeds of animals that are just gone from the commercial meat system, and by supporting their work, we keep certain breeds around.

6. For any of you who have belonged to an agricultural csa, you know how great it can be to be forced to welcome a new vegetable into your home. Maybe you've never had a rutabaga, but you got two in this week's share and you better figure out what to do with them. The same is true for the purchase of an animal. You will get all sorts of cuts that you have never thought to be at the store, many that are not even available. I would never buy a boston butt pork roast at the store, but this has become one of my favorite cuts of pork. I feel like I have begun to learn where cuts come from, and this deepens my appreciation of the meat in general. When I bought a half of a pig this fall, the boxes included pork chops, shoulder roasts, butt roasts, ribs, sausage, bacon for breakfast, bacon for soups, ham steaks, a larger ham, sausage, and pork loin. You the idea, right? Endless meal opportunities.

There are also a few challenges to buying meat this way, and in the interest of fairness, let's talk about those too.

1. Although it is often less expensive in the long run to purchase meat in this way, it requires that you have a bunch of money all at once. You might buy a half of a pig which lasts you all year. It could cost 400 dollars, which stretched out on a meal by meal basis is pretty great. But when you go to pick up your pig, you need 400 dollars, and this certainly requires some planning.

2. Space is certainly an issue. But you've been wanting to buy that chest freezer for a while now, right?

3. Having a freezer full of meat requires meal planning, as it takes time for meat to thaw. But I think that this is also a plus. When I get it together to plan my meals at the start of the week, I buy less groceries, and I feel less panicky about what we're going to eat all week.

4. Sometimes, it can be hard to find a farmer. Farmers who are putting their lives into their small farms are often so busy that they don't put their energy into advertising, so you often have to go looking for them. Around here, the information of who is selling good meat is traded around like a guarded secret. It may feel like some people have the in, but there are easy ways for everyone to join the club. More about this in a minute.

I know, even the cons make you want to buy meat from small farms! So how do you start?

Start at the Farmers Market! There are probably farmers there selling meat. Talk to them about their farm, what they are raising, and whether they offer the option of purchasing sections of animals. Also, you can try their meat at the market and see if you are interested in more.

If you don't have a farmers market or you're not sure where to start, there are several websites that can set you in the right direction.

Local Harvest can direct you to farms, csa's, and grocery stores where you can purchase good produce and meat. There are even some meat csa's, and you can find them through this site.

The Eat Well Guide is a similar site that I really love. Their search feature is very graceful, and they have a great blog on their site as well.

For those of you over in my neck of the woods, Berkshire Grown is the best place to start. Our local Co-op market also carries meat from a lot of local farms.

I know, it's all so exciting. What are you waiting for? Go!