Sum Yum Yum-White Truffle Fluff

Winter Veggies

Beef Short Rib and white truffle fluff

These two photos are two of the nicest looking plates I have at my current underground dinners.  Well the first one is.  The second one is probably the most improved presentation from the beginning.  It's all a process for me.  This menu is the first time I've really felt like I've gotten most of the recipes down for each dish, now it is about me arranging the plates.  Most of the time I make everything then wing it the day of when it comes to composition and it usually makes everyone very happy but I never feel like I get it quite right.  The past week I've been really sitting down and sketching out each dish.  I've had several repeat diners but none repeating this particular menu, therefore, I will have this menu for a while which gives me time to work on style.  I'm obsessed with it.  Spending lots of time reinventing the fabrication of each meat, vegetable, fruit etc.  But I wanted to share with you a delicious treat to add to a entree or dessert at home if you have the time and ingredients to make it.
145g water
300g glucose
200g sugar
1/2t white truffle oil
11/2 sheet gelatin, bloomed
Heat glucose and sugar and 75 g water together until sugar is hot and melted.  Add 70g water and gelatin to stand mixer attached with whisk, pour in glucose sugar water mixture slowly and gradually increase speed to highest setting.  When marshmallow begins to fluff, add truffle oil.  And that's it, white truffle fluff.

Valentine's Day at One Sister Underground! Tables for Two.

This is good stuff.  

Koval Distillery

The first boutique distillery in Chicago since prohibition...!  That's so sexy right?  Well anyways they are right around the corner from me.  I loved walking past in the fall and beneath the garage door I could see boxes of organic pears for miles.  I use a Koval liquor on each menu of my underground dinners.  Currently I'm using Lion's Pride Whiskey, turning it into a butterscotch.  It's probably one of the tastiest things I've every made and will have to run some down to them.  I'm putting it over bacon ice cream in a black pepper cone.  Here's the recipe:
1/2 cup plus 1 T sugar
1/2 cup koval lion's pride
1 t apple cider vin
1 1/2 t vanilla extract
1/2 stick butter

ice cream cones

this is the stuff

Caramelize the sugar over medium heat.  Remove from heat and whisk in liquids.  It will bubble, sizzle and become hard, return to heat to allow sugar to melt back into mixture.  Once incorporated, remove from heat and whisk in cold butter, one cube at a time.  Refrigerate.  This should keep for about two weeks.  I use it for ice cream but you can use it for pancakes, pork chops, whateva it's so freakin' good.

Conch Republic

I love ceviche.  On the fall menu of One Sister Underground I had a scallop "ceviche."  It was ceviche in the sense that table side I poured an acid component consisting of tomato water and lime juice over the scallop which was already steamed rare, served with heirloom beets sliced paper thin, marinated shallots, cilantro puree and herbs.  Nice and light.  I was recently in Key West.  My first time ever.  I loved it.  But instead of a hunt for Cuban food like I do when in Florida I was in search of conch salad- a dish from the Bahamas is what I've gathered.  Johnsons, a small grocer seeming mostly like a convenient store, was where I was told to go by a local.  It was on the corner of something and something not far off Duval St.  Behind the counter, next to the cigarettes, a young girl spooned heaps of conch ceviche into a Styrofoam bowl for me.  I paid twelve dollars for about a pound and a half and walked out to a corner bench and dug in.  It was fantastic.  I had conch ceviche at three other places, Johnsons was the best.  It was simple too.
1 pound conch, diced.  Don't get tenderized.
2 tomatoes, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
1/2 onion, diced
3 seeded cucumbers, diced
1/2 cup lime juice
2 T Louisiana hot sauce
Kosher salt and pepper to taste
Mix and allow to sit for couple hours to overnight, dish up and love it.

Provenance Food and Wine!

Carmelina tomatoes, make a sauce, make a sorbet!

The fingers-crossed... if things go just right... hopefully-future in-laws coming into town?  You want to hit Provenance Food and Wine beforehand.  Get a few things, it's in the bag, you'll impress them, I swear.  I just love all of our local shops in Chicago that are so wonderful about supporting locals.  Provenance food and wine has wonderful purveyors as well as really cool boutique wines, excellent cheeses-local and distant and yummy sausages.  I can't even buy the truffle sausage anymore because I just eat it in one day.  I have no respect for it it's so good, does that make sense?  It does to me.  The thing I love best about Provenance is if you have an imagination you can go there, just there and create a 15 course meal.  I think they know this, they just want you to figure it out for yourself.  But with all the combinations of honeys, breads, cheeses, local meat, eggs, pastas, spreads, you really can!  I love this store.  I love the owners, both extremely knowledgeable and helpful when it comes to food and wine.

Elotes!

Elotes are possibly the best way to have corn.  In the later months of summer, when corn is sweet and fragrant, I make elotes stuffed pierogi.  I've had them traditionally-on the cob, my favorite way-esquites, done up all fancy-as a soup at Schwa and my own version at One Sister Underground with chili mayo, lime gel, dehydrated cojita cheese and sweet corn sorbet.  It seems that when it's served right from the cart on the streets of Chicago, it's the best.  I've got a hunch it's that lovely squeezable butter that does the trick. Last place I had them, the corner of Ainsle and Clark I was wondering where the lovely citrus flavor came from considering there was not a fresh lime in sight.  I had a hunch considering I couldn't say with absolute certainty that it was lime, that perhaps there was some citric acid hiding in the chili/cayenne mixture sprinkled on the top.  I can't say for sure.  Maybe the lime was added to the butter squeezed on top.  Who knows but I know this is all you need to make them delicious from home.
Corn-grilled, cut from cob or on, you can also boil
mayo
cojita anejo cheese
lime juice
touch of chili powder
touch of cayenne powder
salt

yummy yummy yummy

Mix these ingredients together, adding more or less of what you like and serve.  You'll make anyone happy.

Yorkshire Pudding

From Chrysler's with shark fin tails to an entire restaurant's equipment up in the attic that old pole barn on the little farm where I grew up had some of the freakin' coolest things!  I remember the smells so distinctly... It went something like this-horse manure wrapped around dust wrapped around time wrapped around pig manure.  Can that happen?  Yeah.  Throw a little leather in there too from a pile of old saddles, but when we had something good in there like skinned animals hanging upside down from the rafters it meant that shortly all those smells would be hollowed out and filled with the smell of hardwood.  To this day I can think of nothing better than the smell of smoked meat, especially when it is so bitter cold out and the smoked meat is in my own kitchen.  Of course, anyone smoking in his or her house needs to make sure there is appropriate ventilation.  In that barn there was plenty of ventilation.  I remember the smoker.  It was huge!  Maybe even industrial size.  If my father hadn't been a steel worker and had to make ends meet for his family I'm sure he would have been exactly like me: someone who dilly dallies in the garden, dreams up businesses in the pantry, meanders through the woods for dinners and practices being a damn good cook.  Or maybe I'm just exactly like him without the steel working.  Anyways, I'll get to the pictures cause people like pictures...

Polyscience smoking gun.

The meat. 

The smoke.

Rendered meat fat.

The Yorkshire pudding.

The end result.

The end of the end.

This is what I did!  I cleaned the skirt steak, trimming off all the fat.  I saved the fat and added it to a large skillet and on medium cooked it until a nice amount of fat rendered out.  I strained it, pressing on the fat to extract all the liquid. The result was about a 1/2 cup.  This is the necessary component for the pudding.  Here is the recipe...

1/2 cup beef fat

3 eggs

3/4 cup of milk

3/4 cup of flour

1/2 t kosher salt

1/2 apple sliced paper thin, tossed in squeeze of lemon and pinch of salt

Heat oven to 450 and place beef fat in 9 inch pie pan or divide into muffin pan made for six or small cast iron skillets.  Heat fat until smoking hot.  It will be smoking hot by the time you are done mixing your batter.  Mix eggs and milk until frothy.  Sift flour and salt together.  Add dry mixture to wet mixture.  Carefully remove pan from oven and pour in your batter, either all together into pan or separate if making in muffin tins.  Add sliced apple to top.  Cook twenty minutes.  You can start checking at about minute fifteen.  It will be nice and golden brown around the edges and the fat should be all incorporated and the tins fairly dry.  A little residual fat is fine.  Remove from pan or muffin pan and sit on wire rack to cool.  Serve with anything really...Steak for dinner, eggs for breakfast, eat with salad for lunch, add sugar and cinnamon for dessert with ice cream.  I had mine with the applewood smoked steak which I grilled and a bearnaise which is simply a hollandaise with tarragon.  Although I added a squeeze of clementine juice to mine...Classic!

French Onion Soup!

When I was young I never thought I would like this soup.  Finally at lunch one day my mother convinced me to have a bowl at this little French country cooking bistro called, Bon Femme in Merrillville, Indiana.  I was hesitant taking my first bite but the waitress couldn't believe it when I had 3 bowls after that.  You'd think I was fat right, but I'm not.  Well anyways about ten years later I started working in the kitchen at that same restaurant.  They had interesting salads, soups, quiche, crepes and desserts which changed daily.  After I felt comfortable I asked the owner to teach me how he made the onion soup.  This is it.  I still think it's the best French onion soup I've ever had.
4 onions, Frenched
1/4 bottle red wine
2 quarts beef stock
4 sprigs thyme
2 bay leaves
2 oz Parmesan rind
salt and pepper to taste
2 T butter
French the onions and place them in a large pot with 2 tablespoons of butter, stir and cook until soft, do not allow to burn or caramelize.  Add red wine to cover onions about 1/4 to 1/2 inch.  Allow to cook for about twenty to thirty minutes, until onions are translucent and red wine reduces, add a touch of salt here to bring out the liquids in the onions so that it cooks down with the wine and butter.  Add the beef stock, bay, thyme, Parmesan rind (umami), and pepper to taste.  Cook on low for two to three hours.  When done onions should melt in your mouth, check here for salt.  Add if needed.  It'll depend on your stock and how the flavors develop when reduced.  I finish mine with a nice crusty bread that I've left out over night and gruyere or provolone cheese.

Very thin onions, Frenched

Add red wine.

Beef stock.

Parmesan rind.

Thyme, bay.

Yum.