haldean eats.

Cured some salmon with herbes du provence for a couple of days; made for an awesome breakfast!

Damn this was good.

Did my first-ever real canning today! It’s two cara-cara oranges, two grapefruits, the juice of four oranges and a Meyer lemon, boiled forever with tons of sugar and then canned. I’ll see how it set up when it’s cool tomorrow.

The first installment of Adam’s and my crawfish boil series was yesterday, and it was a great success! Stay tuned for announcements of more crawfish events this summer.

Short rib with pressure-cooked onion compote and scrambled egg foam, garnished with daikon sproouts. The short rib was cooked sous vide for 48 hours and can be cut with a fork; the onion compote was just butter and onions in a pressure cooker for half an hour. The egg foam was more complicated; the eggs were blended, then sous vided, then blended, then charged with nitrogen oxide in a cream charger. Served with garlic-rubbed toast.

This is probably going to be served at Haldean Eats Vol. 3, coming up soonish! Volume 3 is going to be Peruvian themed; get excited.

Thanks to wictorwictor and captaincabinets for the dough recipe!

Egg-in-a-basket with pesto

Make an Alfredo sauce, stew some figs in it, take dried figs and saute them with garlic, then throw in Brussels sprouts and pine nuts and put it on pasta. Super easy.

They were good, but note to future self: use fattier pork belly, and maybe throw in some pork back fat. They lacked the sausage-patty crust that I was going for.

Braised lamb shoulder with a mushroom tomato sauce and roasted turnip puree, served over orzo.

The duck was seared then pan-roasted and served with blackened shallots and a sauce made from fresh orange and grapefruit juice, orange peel, rosemary and szechuan pepper corns. The rosemary sprigs were thrown into the pan right before throwing the whole thing into the oven.

The chicken was marinated in buttermilk and soy, then covered in both crushed and powdered instant ramen and deep-fried. It was served on rice with pickled carrots, cucumber and daikon (thanks Hang!) as well as fresh-grated daikon, roasted purple radish and "chicken chicharrones" (deep-fried chicken skin). The sauce was maybe my favorite part; it's a really rich mushroom, bonito, chestnut and miso stock that I let reduce all afternoon, and it's rich and earthy and a bit fishy. Served with a bit of Kewpie and my friend Jacob's Saison; it was a fantastic meal.

Grilled salmon and asparagus with wild rice!

Had meat, cheese and crackers to start, and the gnocchi was served with bread and homemade roasted garlic butter.