Urban Provincial

Sausage is delicious, and the mantle of the squid isn’t all that different from a sausage casing. So imagine a sausage-stuffed squid. How good would that be, right? So here’s how this went down.

1) Make the stuffing. We bought some pork/pecorino/parsley pork sausages from Martin’s Sausage, and seared them hard on either side, such that the casing was crispy and the guts were raw. We roasted some bell peppers and brussels sprouts in the oven until they looked pretty good, and chopped them up in the food processor along with the sausage, sea salt, fresh basil, and shallots.

2) Stuff the squid. Use the thumbs, is key.

3) Make a tomato sauce. Crushed tomatoes, garlic, onion, balsamic vinegar, pepper, sea salt, and sriracha, into the food processor.

4) Bake. Pour the tomato sauce into a cast iron pan, set the stuffed squid on top of the tomato sauce, cover in foil and bake for maybe 20 minutes.

5) Sear. Remove the squid from the pan and place the sauce back in the oven. Sear the squid to give it some color.

6) Assemble the squid atop a grain/starch-type dish (we made lentils today, carrot-mash yesterday). Pour the tomato sauce on top. The sauce will be insane, because all of the excess sausage stuffing will have fallen in.

A few years ago, we got the chance to tour a Dallis Bros. Coffee Roasting Facility. It was beautiful! Big, shiny industrial roasters (costing upwards of 13,000 dollars) producing the most heavenly smell.

Then, here and there, we started hearing about people roasting their own coffee. It seemed like too much work, possibly too costly. Then we read on Boing Boing about a guy who was roasting his own coffee with an air popper. Neat! Except we didn’t have an air popper, we had a Whirley Pop. 

What’s a Whirley Pop, you ask?

We saw one at a thrift store in Atlantic City, and since one of us is a devoted popcorn-eater, the other one of us very kindly purchased it to enable the other’s popcorn-eating. (Even if you don’t buy it from a thrift store for a few dollars, a new one costs a reasonable 20 dollars or so.) We wondered whether it was possible to use the Whirley Pop instead of an air popper. Turns out, it is!  Not only is it possible, but it works beautifully well. 

Step 1: Buy green beans from Sweet Maria’s (about 6.80/lb).

Step 2: Roast the beans as you would popcorn kernels. It’s important that you don’t stop turning. Our subpar first batch was due to constant peeking to see if it was done, and we learned instead to listen for the cracking of the beans. That’s when it’s about done. 

Step 3: Dump the beans in a colander and let it sit for 24 hours. 

Step 4: Grind the beans fresh daily. We use a French press which grinds a little coarser than drip coffee.

Step 5: Enjoy a truly spectacular cup of coffee. It’s sort of ruined us for anything but this process—which sounds elaborate— but is really quite simple and cost-efficient. 

Beet Blood

Clark Park Farmer’s Market Cucumber

Smoking Habit: chicken we smoked then assembled with mustard + spices sauce on homemade quick-rise hamburger bun.

A morning delight of potato, corn, onion, apple cider vinegar, gochu flakes + two perfectly cooked eggs.

The most adorable pattypan squash gifted by a lovely neighbor—Katie P— stuffed with bacon, squash innards, onion and garlic.

Here is an interesting fact: the best recipe for fried shrimp is easily accessed by typing “long john silvers fish batter” into Google and clicking on the first link. Here is another fact, this one less interesting: you will feel sick if you just fry twenty shrimp and eat them in rapid succession, straight off the oil-saturated paper towel. We’ve done this many times and its always a case of diminishing returns. But what to do? How to complement the world’s best fried shrimp recipe?

Answer: Make a misleadingly named take on shrimp and grits.

First we sautéed corn, basil, and spring onions for a couple of minutes. Next, we brought some beef stock to a simmer and slowly added a little bit of agar, Once the agar dissolved, we dumped in polenta, the sautéed corn, and some grated pecorino, and stirred until the mixture was pretty stiff but still malleable. Once at the proper consistency, the polenta/corn mash was portioned into a bunch of silicone cupcake molds (thanks, mom!), which then went into the freezer to stiffen up.

When the polenta cakes began to hold their shape, they were removed from the molds and pan-seared until golden, at which point they sort of looked like scallops. These were assembled on a plate with the fried shrimp, and the whole finished product - the shrimp and scallops, if you will - was topped with a rich tomato sauce (prepared with chicken stock and pecorino), and then topped with a little more pecorino.

This meal is emblematic of our talent in taking inherently healthy ingredients (shrimp, polenta, corn) and combining them into something less so.

Final observation: Polenta is insane. You put a tiny sprinkling into liquid and it grows and grows, like one of those sponges that fits into a pill casing but explodes into a large-ish shark or dinosaur when exposed to warm bathwater. We have been using the same small bag of polenta for well over a year.

The Clark Park farmer’s market, despite any previous statements to the contrary, is an obnoxious place. It teems with overgrown, overall-wearing liberal arts casualties sipping middling $3 lattes from Green Line Cafe, soldiers deep in the trenches of the tote bag wars, perpetual graduate students. It’s an event that requires rapid ingress and egress, and sadly the apple seller was so mobbed that I had to overhear at least three insipid conversations while waiting to pick up our bounty.

At home: Made a basic tart crust, shoved it into a glass pan with fingertips, baked it for a few minutes until some gold peeked out the top. Peeled the apples, sliced them thin with a mandoline, and stacked them atop the crust, interrupting each layer with a sprinkle of cinnamon, sugar, and butter. Baked for maybe 45 minutes. The result: a pretty good approximation of something the archetypal grandmother might have made, had she made tarts and not the more commonly cited pies.

The construction of the trash can smoker has been something of a game-changer around Urban Provincial HQ. On Saturday, we attempted our longest smoke yet—a 7 lb pork butt purchased at Reading Terminal Market.

On Friday night, we made a rub out of brown sugar, white sugar, korean red pepper flakes, cumin, salt, and pepper. We slathered the pork butt in mustard, and then coated with the rub. In the early morning, we threw it on the smoker, which was burning apple wood. 10 hours later, we pulled the pork butt from the smoker, and proceeded to pull it apart and devour it.

Meet our garden.

On Sunday morning, we watched the Food Network - particularly, a competition involving trash can smokers. This event, which I think took place at the old Airstream diner/outdoor pavilion/vacant lot at Lorimer and Metropolitan in Williamsburg, made frequent use of the term “DIY.”

That afternoon, we pogoed from Home Depot to Lowe’s to Home Depot to Target to Ikea, finding supplies to build a homegrown electric smoker. After we’d put everything together, we smoked pork loin and shark, and the result tasted like a wildfire, and not in a good way, if that’s even possible. Clearly, we would need to recalibrate.

Which brings us to tonight, our second stab at the smoker. We started with trout, brined it, smoked it for an hour and then finished in the oven. (The oven was foolish; we shouldn’t have rushed it. Finishing out the trout in the smoker would led to a more tender result.) Served alongside a killer mango chutney, prepared with onion, mint and basil from our container garden, and homemade hot sauce.

We like the Reading Terminal Market. When we first arrived in Philadelphia, this was not necessarily the case. It seemed loud, crowded, confusing to navigate. Most people walking through were similarly lost. Over time, the market has revealed its charms to us. Today, one of the resident butchers was selling these inordinately thick lamb loins, and a vegetable seller had in-shell English peas. Meanwhile at home, the swiss chard was not going to eat itself.

We marinated the lamb chops in minced basil, garlic, and champagne (not a pro tip so much as a matter of circumstance), and seared them on a smoking cast-iron pan before being placed in a hot oven. At the same time, we sauteed the swiss chard with bacon and onions, then simmered the result in chicken stock. To make the sauce, we softened some onions, added and reduced some red wine, and mixed in some horseradish. Very simple.

At the very end, we threw the peas into the swiss chard. Buying peas in the shell is confusing - you need a massive amount of shells to produce a small amount of peas. Good to know.

All the same, a hearty meal. A Thursday night luxury.