Bacon, marmalade and pumpernickel. Seriously.

Today’s post actually contains two recipes. Well, not so much recipes as ways to celebrate bacon. Bacon is the über meat in my book. I mean, I love a good steak, a juicy seared chop, a nice pot roast… [okay, so I guess I'm saying I love meat], but there’s just something about bacon. If the aroma of a chicken roasting in the oven is intoxicating [and it is], the smell of frying bacon is crack.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. I dated a vegetarian for a while who, when she fell off the wagon every few months or so, did not do it for a skinless chicken breast or a salmon fillet. It was almost always for bacon. Apparently, bacon is the transgression of choice among vegetarians. I’ve happened upon a number of posts on various blogs in which vegetarians admit as much.

There are entire blogs devoted to bacon, in fact. Most notably The Bacon Show, which posts a new bacon-using recipe every day “forever” [as its masthead promises].

And I totally understand. More birthdays than not, the birthday dinner I request from my wife Marion is her heavenly take on Pasta Carbonara. She dispenses with the heavy cream in her version, but in every other regard, it is a heart attack on a plate. You start by frying a pound of bacon. Then you cook zucchini in the bacon grease—you toss the pasta in it too. And you drizzle in raw egg. It is deadly but delicious. We used to eat it regularly, but have reluctantly come to our senses and now only eat it once or twice a year. When my birthday rolls around, I may have her do a post on it. With a surgeon general’s warning, of course.

Meanwhile back at bacon and marmalade on, uh, pumpernickel? I first heard about this about this concoction indirectly through Linda over at The Village Vegetable. She and a friend had eaten at Prune, chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s Manhattan bistro serving up what New York magazine describes as “the sort of unpretentious home cooking at which she excels, a grab bag of eccentric, multicultural influences that is, at heart, American.” Sounded like my kind of food, and it’s right around the corner from my favorite New York French bistro, Lucien. So I looked at Prune’s menu online, and this lunch item jumped out at me: Bacon and Marmalade Sandwich on Pumpernickel Toast—$9.

At first blush, it sounded like an Elvisworthy trainwreck of a meal, not unlike his beloved fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. But then the ultimate Britishness of it hit me. Not sure why, but probably it was the marmalade. I grew up in a grape jelly-eating household; when I first discovered marmalade as a college student, it was Dundee. Then it was sold in a stoneware crock. Now it comes in white, opaque glass jars, a cheaper way to suggest its crockery heritage, but it’s still made in the UK by James Keiller & Son, as it has been since 1797.

Googling “bacon and marmalade sandwich” bore out my suspicions. There was no recipe to be had, unfortunately, but there were wistful mentions of these sandwiches from Brit school days long past. And Melinda Schwakhofer, an American fiber artist now living in the UK, weaved it into one of her posts on her blog Inspiraculum thus: “I started off my creative day with elevenses, a snack that is similar to afternoon tea, but eaten in the morning. The name refers to the time of day that it is taken: around 11 am. I had a cup of English Breakfast tea with milk and one sugar, brewed in my favourite mug, and a bacon and marmalade sandwich on toast.” [Note the "ou" in favourite---she hasn't gone too native, has she?]

The closest I came to an actual recipe was another mention of Prune in New York magazine, more of a description, really, when it named the Prune version a sandwich of the week: “The key to making a good bacon-and-marmalade sandwich, it can now be revealed, is to spread the top piece of the grilled bread lavishly with butter and orange marmalade so that it trickles down, effectively coating and glazing the hot bacon as if it had been dragged through a car wash equipped with a marmalade spray gun.”

Close enough—and intriguing enough to try. Time to go shopping.

The last salsa cruda of summer

A quick note before I get started: Check out Kitchen Notes at the bottom to see how Marion adapted her delicious Plum Cake with pears as the prune plums disappeared from store shelves for the season. But read this post first—no dessert ’til you’ve finished.

 

We didn’t have a garden this year. What with our move and everything, it just didn’t happen. So for the first time in years, we didn’t have tomatoes and basil and rosemary and a host of other goodies straight from our yard.

But at the farmers markets, the produce stands, even the grocery stores, you can see the season changing. Some summer staples are disappearing, and those that remain just don’t seem the same. The peaches that I reveled in for the first time in years are now sometimes being a little more iffy. And tomatoes, though still plentiful, aren’t the deep, robust red found just a week or so ago.

If you’re lucky enough to be harvesting your own tomatoes and basil—or if, like us, you do all your harvesting retail—here’s a quick, delicious way to make use of some of summer’s remaining bounty.

Both Italian and Mexican cooks lay claim to the term salsa cruda, with very different meanings. For both, salsa cruda means uncooked sauce. But Mexican salsa cruda is, well, an uncooked salsa—salsa verde is one example. [Oh, and by the way: Show of hands, who doesn't know that salsa has replaced ketchup as the number one condiment in America? That says something cool about the American palate, I think!]

For Italians, salsa cruda is truly an uncooked sauce, most often to be served over pasta. The only thing you cook is the pasta itself. When you toss it with the salsa, the pasta cools down a little and the salsa heats up a little, creating a light late summer/early autumn meal. A month or so ago, I posted one of my favorite Italian salsa crudas, Pasta Shells with Italian Tuna and Artichokes. This one is even simpler.

Tomatoes are the star of this dish, and straight from the garden is best, of course. I didn’t even think of tomatoes as more than an ingredient in sauces or ketchup until I tasted one Marion had grown in our backyard in St. Louis. Suddenly, I understood what the big deal was.

Store-bought tomatoes are getting better, though. More varieties, better quality—I even saw heirloom tomatoes on a recent Whole Foods visit. Our go to tomatoes at the store these days [not counting grape or cherry tomatoes] are tomatoes on the vine—sold, as the name implies, still attached to the vine. I have to admit, the first time I saw this, I assumed it was just another marketing ploy to separate foodies from their money: Tomatoes sold on the vine command a considerably higher price than their plucked brethren.

But it turns out the vine really does make a difference. It continues to supply nutrients to the fruit, even after harvesting, naturally ripening them and producing firmer, juicier, better tasting, more nutritious tomatoes. How much the actual stem adds to the party isn’t fully understood, but that’s only part of the story. They tend to be better varieties to begin with, and receive gentler handling in harvesting and shipping to keep them attached.

Handle with care. Here are a couple of quick tips on keeping tomatoes and getting the most flavor out of them. First, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never refrigerate tomatoes. As in never. That is the quickest way known to man to rob them of flavor. Also never, never, etcetera place them upside down, resting on their “shoulders”—the raised, well, shoulders around where the stem attaches. All that pressure concentrated on those small points is a perfect way to bruise them and promote rotting. Place them right side up, on their bottoms.

Whatever tomatoes you use—homegrown or store-bought of any variety, including plum tomatoes—this simple, flavorful treatment makes for a light meal on its own or a fabulous side that will vie for attention with a seared chop or other main course.

A few simple ingredients take center stage

Two weeks ago, I wrote about soup. Last week, beans. So this week, naturally enough, it’s bean soup.

This particular soup came out of a failed attempt at a promising sounding recipe that just didn’t deliver. I’ve talked in the past about my overflowing, unkempt binders of recipes. As often happens, I was flipping through them looking for one recipe when I found another, for Tomato Bean Soup with Pasta. I love cannellini beans and I thought they would have more of a starring role in this soup. But the recipe turned out to be too busy, with too many ingredients all vying for attention—the white beans that caught my interest originally and tomatoes and pasta and either swiss chard or kale. In the end, the results were only okay, with no one flavor asserting itself.

Still, the idea of a soup like this one should have been was intriguing enough that it started me searching for others. As usual, I found a couple/few recipes that all gave me ideas for what I ended up creating.

The original recipe called for either Swiss chard or kale. Both are cruciferous vegetables, meaning they contain cancer-fighting antioxidants. They also contain healthy doses of of vitamins A and C as well as iron. Chard is a member of the beet family. Its flavor has been described as spinachlike—mild and earthy.

Kale is a mild-tasting member of the cabbage family. It has been called the archetypal winter green because it prefers cold climates—it will survive even if left in the ground all winter—and its flavor is actually enhanced by a winter frost. Both chard and kale have a slightly bitter undertone that adds depth to their flavors.

Marion has also used escarole in soups for that same slightly bitter touch. Any of these greens—as well as spinach—would work well in this soup, I think.

Lightening up, speeding up a New Orleans classic

Last week I talked about cold soup. This week I do a 180, with hearty, spicy red beans and rice. A couple of weeks ago, we had a cold, gray spell in Chicago that gave me a hankering for some. I started with two recipes—one way too simple, the other a little too busy sounding—and created my own. But you don’t have to wait for cold weather to make it—anyone from Louisiana will tell you that any day is a good day for red beans and rice.

A traditional dish throughout southern Louisiana—and particularly linked to New Orleans—red beans and rice was actually born out of two traditions. Many families couldn’t afford to buy meat for their meals every day, but a ham dinner was a Sunday tradition. And that meant there would be a ham bone left over for Monday.

Mondays were also the traditional day for doing laundry—this was back before automatic washing machines and two-income families. So as load after load of wash was done, either by hand or in old-fashioned wringer washers [my grandmother actually still used one of the later models when I was a kid and hung her wash out to dry in the backyard], it was easy to have a big pot of beans with that ham bone simmering on the stove for hours, with just an occasional stir as you passed through the kitchen. And that made red beans and rice the perfect traditional Monday night dinner all across southern Louisiana.

Besides being amazingly flavorful with all those Cajun or Creole seasonings, this dish was practical. Beans served with rice was a great source of protein when people couldn’t afford to eat a lot of meat. And a big pot of beans could feed a big family cheaply. It was reasonably low in fat too, depending on how much actual meat had survived the Sunday dinner.

The way this dish has evolved, though, it’s anything but low in fat. Some recipes still call for a ham bone—or more often, ham hocks [which epicurious.com describes as “the lower portion of a hog's hind leg, made up of meat, fat, bone, gristle and connective tissue,” usually cured or smoked or both]. But now it also almost invariably includes some kind of smoked sausage—classically, andouille or else kielbasa or some other smoked sausage. Read “fat bomb.”

I’ve lightened up this New Orleans classic considerably, without sacrificing flavor or stick-to-your-ribs heartiness. First, I use a lighter sausage with less fat. It’s still not exactly Weight Watchers, though—if you check the nutrition chart, you’ll see even the light versions contain an impressive amount of fat. And for that reason, I use half the amount of sausage a similar recipe calls for and substitute chicken breast or turkey cutlets.

I’ve sped it up too, with the help of canned beans. It still takes a little over an hour to pull together, but most of that time is just letting it simmer to blend all the flavors together. In other words, maybe time to cycle through one load of laundry if you’re feeling in a traditional mood.