Chestnut and Pancetta Soup

¾ lb chestnuts, or 7 oz. dried, soaked overnight in cold water
half stick butter
3 oz pancetta, diced
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 celery, finely chopped
1 tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped
1 bay leaf
2 garlic cloves, halved lengthwise

The first thing to do is peel the chestnuts. There are several ways to go about this – the cookbook we were using suggested that you slit the shell along the rounded side, and then either cover in cold water, bring to a boil and simmer for 15-20 minutes, or roast in a preheated oven at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. I did not notice that it said to slit them beforehand, consequently several of them exploded in the oven. Ooops. Peeling them wasn’t as big of a pain as I expected, though it was slightly tedious.

Next, you’re probably gonna wanna chop your pancetta and vegetables (or you can do that while your chestnuts roast). Once everything is ready: melt the butter in a large saucepan and add the pancetta. Fry over medium heat until the fat runs. Add the onions, carrot, and celery and cook for 5-10 minutes, until they’ve softened. Add the chestnuts, rosemary, bay leaf and garlic and cover with water. Bring to a boil, half cover, and simmer for 30-45 minutes, until the chestnuts disintegrate. Season with salt and pepper (we also grated a little parmesan in there).

This was a very tasty soup, and surprisingly flavorful, given that it was cooked with water, not stock. The rosemary really came through powerfully, it was great. Better Half loved it, but personally, I had some reservations. One, I thought it was a hair too salty. This may be because Better Half over-salted it at the end, or it may be the pancetta. Secondly, I thought it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi – I think maybe a touch of white wine could make the flavor a little more complex? Finally, I’d also wanna add some texture to it – I think it would be fantastic if there was some crunch in there, maybe with some croutons. Still, it was very tasty. We don’t make soup much, but now that it’s getting colder, they’re much more appealing.

Porcini Gnocchi with Prosciutto and Parmesan Cream Sauce

I'm not gonna lie to you - this one is pretty labor intensive, and somewhat expensive, what with the prosciutto and mushrooms. But it's so unbelievably incredible that it's absolutely worth it. We ate it as a side dish (because we were having a pretty insanely extravagant dinner), but it could definitely be a main course.

Gnocchi:

1 medium Idaho potato, peeled

3 oz grated parmesan

1 egg

1/2 tsp kosher salt

freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup flour, or more as needed

1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms

Sauce:

1/2 cup liquid from rehydrating the porcini (see above)

2 tbsp butter

1 small red onion, sliced

1 tbsp minced garlic

2 oz shiitake mushrooms (can be dried and rehydrated) - separate caps from stems and slice the caps (but keep both)

handful of parsley stems

1 tbsp chopped parsley

1/2 cup dry white wine

1 cup heavy cream

1 oz prosciutto - doesn't have to be top quality, as it will be cooked

1/2 cup greens (we used arugula, but spinach or swiss chard might be more appropriate)

2 tbsp grated parmesan

First, make the gnocchi. Pour boiling water over the porcini and let them rehydrate for 15 minutes. Cook the potato in boiling salted water until tender. Mash it (or put it through a ricer, I just don't have one). Put in the refrigerator to cool, about 15 minutes. Drain your porcini, being careful to reserve 1/2 cup broth, stick on a food processor and blend until smooth.

Remove your potato from the fridge, dump it onto a clean work surface, form into a little volcano shape. Sacrifice the porcini paste, parmesan, egg, salt and pepper to Cthulu by throwing them into your volcano. Then destroy your volcano with your hands and mix it all up. Then add the flour and knead into a dough, using more flour if needed (I think I ended up using almost double the original amount). Divide the dough into quarters, wrap each in saran wrap. Clean the work surface. Take one of the quarters, roll it into a tube about as thick into your finger, and then cut into gnocchi side pieces. Indent each piece with a fork if you're feeling fancy; I quickly tired of this process and just made them into pillow shapes. Lay them out on a cookie sheet and set aside.

Start boiling water for your gnocchi. It is helpful to have two people at work here - in this case, I was on gnocchi duty, and Better Half made sauce. If you're doing it yourself, I guess you should probably do gnocchi first, because they'll re-heat in the sauce). When your salted water is boiling, add the gnocchi in batches. When they float to the surface, remove them with some kind of implement and drain.

Now, the sauce.

Melt 1 tbsp butter in a large pan and saute onions, mushrooms, garlic, parsley stems and shiitake stems. Cook until soft but not brown, approx 4 minutes. Add wine and porcini liquid. Bring to a boil then simmer until reduced to about 1/3. Add cream, reduce again "until the sauce coats the back of a spoon". This part, we had a hard time with, because it didn't seem to reduce. The recipe says you then strain it into a bowl and set aside. I dunno that you need to strain it, because everything in it is delicious.

Anyhow, in your newly empty saucepan, heat remaining butter (1 tbsp) until it begins to brown and add the chopped shiitake mushrooms caps. Saute 2-3 minutes. Return cream sauce to pan, along with prosciutto, greens, and half the parmesan. Cook 3-4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add gnocchi to your cream sauce. Add remaining parmesan and parsley.

Fantastico!

Bacon blogging

Cheryl emailed and told me about her bacon blog, Bacon Glory. Check it out. She seems to actually post stuff, unlike me.

Related to that... I am sorry I'm so inactive, I really am. One thing is that I'm really busy - my other blogs have fallen idle as well - the other problem is that honestly, I'm pretty sick of the whole bacon craze. And I feel like a poser, because I actually don't eat all that much bacon. But I do cook a fair amount, and enjoy cooking. I'm tempted to just turn this into a cooking blog, a la my friend Gemma's wonderful Pro-Bono Baker, so I could tell you about things like the awesome sammich I just had made from home-made Maple Walnut bread (I baked bread!), apples, cheddar and argula (awesome!), but honestly, I don't really update that much as is. So instead, I'm sticking with the general idea, and only posting stuff related to pork. I've basically made that shift anyways, posting about things that involve, say, chorizo, or prosciutto, but now it's official. So there ya have it. Sorry to the die-hard bacon fans out there who may be frustrated.

Fun facts about bacon

Via Ariel (who by the by has an etsy shop and makes some neato things): some interesting things about bacon.

Chicago Bacon Takedown

Via Gemma, who should practically be getting co-author credits on this blog at this point: the Chicago Bacon Takedown. September 11th, 1:30 pm at Lincoln Hall. Anyone can enter - you get 15 lbs of bacon and your quest is to make it tasty. For prizes.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can buy tickets to the event here. Curiously enough, they're only $15, even though you apparently get to sample all the recipes. I might actually go, I'm kind of curious.

National Bacon Day

So it turns out that the Saturday before Labor Day (ie, September 4th this year) - EDIT: wow, missing sentence anyone? It turns out that it is National Bacon Day. Kinda. Vicki, who works for the Edwards Virginia Ham company, sent me an email recommending their products as suitable fare for the occasion and describing the different varieties of bacon they have. I have no idea if it's good or not. All I know is that they had the initiative to send me an email. Most of the people who email me because of this blog are resourceful media people for various companies. Sigh.

Anyways. Come to think of it, I may have posted about Bacon Day last year, because I think someone sent me a link to a Bacon Day blog. I note with amusement that it has not been updated since 2009. I note with concern that the last post mentions illness, and I express my hopes that the author is still amongst the living. I put on my cloak and wizard hat...

So, I wanted to give this post some substance, and started looking around on the internet for the history of this alleged national day of bacon. From what I can see, wasn't nobody celebrating it before last year. Curiously enough, however, the internet does seem to have come to a kind of consensus on the date, though there are some competitors out there. More broadly speaking, it seems like the whole "National Day" thing gets started when someone in a specific place (like a city) sets aside a day for something (as with National Pig Day in Lubbock, Texas) and then it spreads and ends up being national. Bacon Day, I'm guessing, was started in a little place called the internet, hence it doesn't have any groundings in a specific geographic location (oh, this postmodern world we live in!) or any specific observances attached to it.

Personally, I think it's kind of dumb. The holiday I mean.

Some recent failures, and my other blog

I know, I know, I haven't been posting much. The thing is - the bacon related things I've tried to make lately have not been very good. And if you're already feeling lazy about updating your blog, it's kind of hard to motivate yourself to tell the world about your failures.

So, right quick:

Bacon Hush Puppies.

These could potentially be good, and I will revisit them. The bacon wasn't the issue here, it was the hush puppies themselves, which were awfully dry and kind of tasted like a mouthful of dust.

Bacon vodka.

I've mentioned, I think, several times that I was working on infusing my own bacon vodka. So, I did do it, but for whatever reason, I didn't feel like actually trying it. By the time I did, it had been sitting in the freezer for over a year. Which may explain why it tasted so ungodly awful. Another potential reason is that while I did skim the fact off the top, there was clearly some still in there. Next time, I'll try to strain it through a coffee filter before I dump it down the sink.

BUT I will say this: it DID taste like bacon. Intensely so, in fact. In a very pleasing way. So I really ought to give this another try. All I did to make it was fry a few pieces of bacon and stick them in a jar with some vodka, which I then stuck in a dark corner of the pantry for a few weeks.

Accordioned baked potatoes with bacon:

This too could have been ok, but for some reason wasn't. I suspect the problem was that I was using small red potatoes, which have a kind of sweetness to them that was really not good for some reason. Those, though, were fairly easy to make. Take a potato, wash it, then take a sharp knife and slice almost down to the botton, every centimeter or so. It fans out as it bakes, and it does look kind of cute. You can do just that (you probably wanna rub yr tater with some olive oil and salt), or you can squish a bit of bacon in between the slices, and that's very nice too. You can do the same thing with an onion, though the slicing gets a little more complicated there. You bake it for about 15 minutes at around 350 if it's a wee potato, maybe longer for bigger ones. When you pull it out, before it cools, you can get some cheese involved too, that's nice.

So those are three things I could've posted about and didn't. I think the real clincher is that I feel like I should upload pictures, but man, that takes more effort.

Anyways, one other piece of news:

I have yet another blog, which I've also been lazy about updating but vow to be better about. It's called Leave Room for Delight, and it's about restaurants. Check it out. Mostly Chicago based, as that's where I live, but who knows.