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Cornflake Crusted Smoked Salmon Croquettes (Fancy Fishsticks)

When life hands you two pounds of salmon scraps, a box of cornflakes, and leftover ramp bulb pickling liquid there’s only one answer, fish sticks!  

Well, that or a some sort of weird sweet and savory cereal, but that’s a (strange) talk for another time.

Where was I? Oh yeah, fish sticks, and the sauce they need, ranch.

But not hidden valley or anything that easy or reasonable, but one built on the brine from leftover pickled ramps

Pickled Ramp Ranch

1/2 Tablespoon dijon mustard

3 Egg yolks

1/2 Cup buttermilk

1/2 Cup ramp pickling liquid

1/2 Tablespoon honey

1/2 Tablespoon sriracha

2 Tablespoons fresh dill, minced

2 Cloves confit garlic

Salt to taste

Olive and Canola oil blend

Place all ingredients other than the oil and dill in a blender or food processor.

Turn your chosen device on, and begin slowly streaming in the oil, as if making an aioli or emulsified vinaigrette.

When the ranch (read rampch) reaches your desired consistency, fold in the dill and season to taste.

Stored in the fridge for up to three days.

Smoked Salmon Croquettes

Two Cups smoked salmon, lightly flaked

Four russet potatoes, peeled.

1 Teaspoon smoked paprika

1/2 Teaspoon ground cumin seed

1/2 Teaspoon ground coriander seed

1.2 Teaspoon granulated garlic

1 Tablespoon sliced chives

Salt to taste

Four Eggs, well whisked, plus two more

Cornstarch as needed

Cornflakes, roughly crushed

Place the potatoes in a pot of water, season well, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook until tender.

Pass the potatoes through a food mill or ricer, let cool completely

When the potatoes are fully cooled, combine them, the salmon, paprika, cumin, coriander, granulated garlic, two of the eggs and mix well.

Taste this mixture, seasoning as needed with salt.

Form the resulting potato mix into rough cylinders about two inches long, and half an inch wide.

Next, take five containers, place the cornstarch in the first one, half the beaten eggs in the second, half the cornflakes in the third, the remaining eggs in the fourth, and the rest of the cornflakes in the fifth.

Run all the potato tubes through breading procedure in order, gently form them back into tubes at the end if they get wonky during breading.

Heat a deep fryer to 350.

Working in batches, fry the croquettes until golden brown and crunchy, season well with salt.

Serve with that delicious Rampch dressing.

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Matcha based seasoning blend

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Cherrywood smoked matcha rubbed ribs

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Back from the dead

Been a bit of radio silence lately, but that’s all in the past, we’re good now, I swear.

Enough about that, how about some food?

It’s fall now, leaves aren’t falling but the sun is setting at inconvenient times, it’s getting chilly enough that I have to wear long pants all the time and the cicadas have stopped singing.

Luckily apples and squash are doing their thing and it’s socially acceptable to eat carbs again.

With that in mind, have some sausage, veggies (with spices!) and bread, also apples and stuff.

Italian sausage, ras el hanout spiced cauliflower, spiced apple and citrus relish

This one has a bit of prep time, mainly chopping up everything for the relish, the actual cooking is grade school level stuff.

You will need the following

Two links hot Italian sausage, home made or store bought

One head cauliflower chopped into bite sized pieces

One head broccoli chopped into bite sized pieces

Two yellow onions, one finely sliced, one diced very fine

Six cloves garlic, two minced, and four smashed

One quarter cup roughly chopped parsley

One twelve ounce beer, not too hoppy

One honey crisp apple, peeled and finely minced

One and a half ounces honey

One Tablespoon Ras El Hanout, homemade or store bought

Olive oil as needed

One Grapefruit, peeled and cut into small segments

One Lemon, peeled and cut into small segments

Salt as needed

One Tablespoon sambal oleck

This recipe is best tackled in three steps, the relish, poaching the sausage, and roasting the vegetables.

The most efficient way is get the veggies in the oven, and use the time while they’re roasting to poach the sausage and make the relish.  So here we go.

Preheat and oven to 425, meanwhile set one small, and one medium pot over medium heat.

Take the cauliflower, broccoli, three of the smashed garlic cloves, and half the sliced onion.  Toss this mixture with salt, a bit of olive oil, and the ras el hanout.  Lay it on a sheet tray lined with foil or parchment, and place it in the oven, set a timer for fifteen minutes, it’ll take longer than that to cook, but this is a “hey look at me!” timer.

In the medium sized pot, saute the remaining sliced onions, add the rest of the smashed garlic and cook until slightly colored.

Gently sweat the diced onion in the second pot  until soft, do your best to avoid any caramelization. When the onions are nearly cooked, add the minced garlic and stir a few times, transfer to a mixing bowl and allow to cool.

Add the beer to the pot with the sauteed onions and bring to a boil, season well with salt.

Let the minced onion mixture has slightly cool, then add the apples, grapefruit, lemon, sambal, honey, two ounces of olive oil and parsley.

Once the beer mixture has reached a boil, lower the heat until it reaches a slight simmer, add the sausage and poach until just cooked through.

Check your veggies in the oven, stir them around and rotate the tray, the goal is to have them nicely colored, but still retain a bit of snap, once you’re happy with them remove them from the oven and check the seasoning.

Remove the sausages from the pot, and set a saute pan over high heat.

Sear the sausage, get some nice crispy bits, meanwhile set out a plate and toast some bread.

Dress the roast vegetables with the finished apple and citrus mixture, slice the sausage and combine everything with the toasted bread.

Eat that stuff!

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Beef Neck Ragout

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Before and after.

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Liquid Center...biscuits?

If a biscuit is tasty, and a biscuit with sausage on it is tasty, and a biscuit with caramelized onion cream cheese is tasty, then all three together are probably delicious, right?

Hey, what do you know, it is, in other news, water is still wet.

Of course, a delicious porky, creamcheesy biscuit is fun and all, but what would be really cool is if we wrapped the cream cheese in the sausage, and somehow inserted that inside of the biscuit.  

This actually isn't hard, it just requires a bit of planning and a few days to put together, and it's a hell of a party trick.

You'll need

Raw garlic sausage

Caramelized onion cream cheese (recipe to follow)

Biscuit dough.  (Important! This should be a cake like biscuit dough, one where the fat is creamed into it instead of cut)

Caramelized Onion Cream Cheese

I love this stuff, it's great on bagels, or anywhere else you'd use cream cheese or a ricotta spread.

3 Pounds cream cheese

4 Spanish onions sliced thinly

1/2 Cup brown sugar

1/4 Cup apple cider vinegar

1/4 Cup sliced chives

Salt to taste

Vegetable oil as needed

Heat a large, heavy bottomed pot over medium heat, add the onions and enough oil to lubricate, cook them gently until very well caramelized, but not quite burnt.  Meanwhile, set the cream cheese out to temper.

Combine the onions, cream cheese, sugar and vinegar in a food processor or large bowl, mix well, season to taste with salt as needed.

Adjust with vinegar or sugar as needed, fold in the chives.

Chill and store in the fridge for up to five days.

OK! Ready to make fancy stuffed biscuits?  You'll need the following

Some sort of small mold to freeze the cream cheese in, silicon baking molds, or tiny ice trays will work

Plastic wrap

Muffin tins

A rolling pin

Grated cheddar cheese 

Eye of newt

Here we go

Two days before you want to cook your biscuits, freeze the caramelized onion cream cheese, and make your sausage.

The next day, lay a sheet of plastic wrap on a flat surface, deposit two ounces of sausage in the middle of it, and pull another sheet of plastic wrap over it.

Gently press the now completely covered sausage into a flat patty, take the rolling pin and spread it out a bit, you're looking for something roughly three inches in diameter and of a uniform thickness.

Remove the top sheet of plastic, and place a frozen cream cheese cube in the middle of the sausage patty.

Gather the corners of the plastic wrap, and pull them together, this will also pull the sausage around the frozen cream cheese, use your fingers to spread the sausage over any parts that are exposed.  It's very important the cream cheese be completely covered with sausage, otherwise the finished biscuits are gonna look like they were baked by Dr. Seuss.

Remove the plastic from your sausage ball and place it in the freezer.

The next day, make the biscuit dough and preheat an oven to 350 degrees.

Grease a muffin tin and lay four ounces of the biscuit dough in it, take your frozen sausage ball and press it into the middle of the dough.

Take three more ounces of biscuit dough and place it on top of the sausage, spread it down the sides and make sure that the sausage is fully covered by the biscuit dough.

Sprinkle the top of the biscuits with a bit of grated cheddar cheese and place in the preheated oven for thirty minutes, rotating halfway through.

Once they're cooked, remove from their molds, let rest five minutes, and then eat.  

Here, have photos, everybody loves photos!

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Despite all of the pleasures of instant noodles—the salty, MSG-packed broth, the little freeze-dried nubs of vegetables, the slippery, way-too-soft noodles—wouldn't it be great if you could get all of that same convenience and pleasure—the portability, the just-add-water cooking, the lunch-sized portions—but pack it full of fresh vegetables and real, honest-to-goodness flavor?\n\nHere's a secret: you can, and it's easier than you think.

One of the coolest things I've seen all week.

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Crostini.  Pluot mascarpone, cucumber, mint, chilie, olive oil, tomatoes.  Summertime snacking.

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A cake made of neither cheese, nor fruit.

You could call it a fruit cake, since it's cake with fruit on it,  or you could call it a cheese cake, since it's cake with cheese on it.

But you'd be wrong, it's spice bread.

So what the hell is spice bread?  

Well, there's Pain d'épices which is traditionally made with rye flour, honey and spices, and these days leavened with baking powder.  You can also look at gingerbread which is quite similar, but more of a broad class of pastries. For lack of a better definition, let's say spice bread is a dense cake, usually containing honey and brown sugar, and heavily spiced.

I love spice bread, it's versatile, you can use it as the base of a dessert, toast thin slices to garnish a salad, or use it flavor a sauce for a short rib dish.

It's something nice to have in your back pocket. The fact that a broom with a knife tied to it could probably manage to make it doesn't hurt.

The only issue with spice bread is that it's really dense, and kind of dry, but it's so flavorful that I'm willing to look at these as challenges, not problems.

In this application we melted brie onto thin slices of the bread to add some richness to it. Next a sweet and slightly tart puree of cinnamon scented pluots helped to brighten the dish, and played well with the spice in the cake. Blackberries stewed with gin and turbinado sugar gave it a bit of texture as well, and finally some local honey drizzled over the top tied everything together.

It's a dish that eats lighter than you'd expect, while the cheese and bread are fairly substantial, the fruit elements are quite light, a tasty summer treat.

Spice Bread

This isn't hard to put together, and it keeps well.

⅔ cup packed brown sugar

⅓ cup Almond milk

2 cups AP flour

1 ½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon allspice

zest of 1 lemon

2 eggs

½ cup honey

⅓ cup olive oil

Combine the spices, almond milk, brown sugar, lemon zest, and vanilla extract, put in a pot over low heat and stir until the sugar has melted, remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature.

Meanwhile, preheat an oven to 325 degrees.

While the milk syrup is cooling mix together the eggs, honey and olive oil. Set aside.

Sift the salt, baking powder and flour together, reserve for later use.

Add the milk mixture to the honey eggs and olive oil, stir until homogeneous.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet, a third at a time, mix as you would a cake batter.

Pour the batter into a well greased loaf pan, tap against the counter a few times to remove any air bubble.

Slide the batter into the oven and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center removes cleanly.  Rotate every fifteen minutes.

Unmold the cake from the pan while still hot, place on a wire rack to cool, once cooled it'll keep for a few days if wrapped at room temperature.

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Corn, cabbage and pork in four easy steps (and three tricky ones)

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A sweet treat

Or coconut milk panna cotta, with tasty bits and pieces.  Specifically, a black berry, red wine and black pepper compote, hazelnut brittle, and minty lime granita.  Summer in a bowl,  a delicious, type two diabetes endangering bowl.

Panna Cotta is easy, really, really easy.  At it's simplest it's just milk, sugar and gelatin.  Gelatin that you can buy in sheets! or powdered, you don't even have to boil fish bones to extract isinglass.  Just make a sweet broth, activate your gelatin and wait a few hours. In fact, it doesn't even need to be milk based, (though some traditionalists might raise a fit over the name, but honestly, screw them) coconut milk as we use here makes a great substitution. But before we set that coconut milk with gelatin, we're going to sweeten it with sugar, and infuse it with the flavor of fruit loops (coriander, lemongrass, lime zest.)

Ok, so now we've got a sweet, flavorful, coconut jello, pretty cool, but honestly boring on it's own. So how do we keep it from being monotonous?

 Well, first we'll give it a few different textures, a crunchy hazelnut brittle is a good start, a granita (basically a temperamental slushy) is another nice foil both in texture and temperature.  Finally a quick compote of stewed blackberries with red wine and black pepper helps to tie the other three elements together.

So, outside of texture and temperature, how do these different pieces work together?

The panna cotta itself is rather sweet, but also quite rich and fatty, on it's own it's far too much, but as a base it's perfect. 

The brittle is crunchy, so crunchy when it's freshly made that the sound will make you think you're chewing on glass. A darker, roasted flavor, which lingers on the palate, and ties well to the finish of the coconut with and its spicing.

The compote is silky, sticky, and melts on the tongue, the black pepper ties into the hazelnut in the brittle, and the lemongrass in the panna cotta.  The blackberries and red wine play well with the mint in the granita, as well as provide a shot of acid to deal with the heavier components

The granita is super light, the mint, lime, and cold temperature combine to provide a bracing, palate cleansing, balance to the rest of the dish.  Then, as it it warms and melts it mellows and forms a second sauce around the panna cotta itself.

Simple, right?

Ok, here's a recipe. Hazelnut Brittle

This is pretty straightforward, you can make it all with one pot and a sheet tray.  However, it doesn't hold at all, especially if it's humid, this stuff is pretty worthless the next day, so make it fresh.

It's awesome on any dish that needs a bit of crunchy sweet, not just panna cottas, but ice cream, soft cakes, or even with something like a beet or carrot salad.

1 1/3 cups granulated sugar

4 ounces water

2 ounces unsalted butter

1/2 teaspoon salt

Juice of one half lemon

3 ounces hazelnuts, toasted and finely chopped

1 Teaspoon of baking soda

Combine the butter, sugar and water, cover with a lid and bring to a boil.

Once it boils, remove the cover and continue to cook, meanwhile place a silpat or parchment paper on a sheet tray.

Continue cooking the sugar mixture until it reaches 296 F (hard crack stage), quickly kill the heat and immediately add the hazelnuts, salt, lemon juice, and baking soda.  

Be careful, this mixture will foam up, gently stir it until everything comes together, and then pour it on the lined sheet tray.

At this point you've got a couple choices as far as spreading the brittle, you can take a couple forks and gently pull it, but this is stick and gives you a couple forks that are impossible to clean.  The other option is to gently tilt the tray and let gravity spread it for you.  Just remember this liquid is basically napalm, and if it gets on your skin, the skin is coming off.  Also it's going to make that tray super hot, so remember that.

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If you like supper clubs, you'll love this.

It's a supper club.  

The theme changes weekly, but recent ones have included soy and honey glazed duck, market mezze, and smoked pork shoulder ssam.

If you're interested, in Chicago, and have (small) amounts of disposable income, let me know!

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Sweet and Sour Pork

We wanted to keep all of those elements but the regret.  Also, it needed to taste good, make sense, and be true to the idea of sweet and sour pork, sort of it's platonic ideal.

So let's break it down

Pork, instead of taking slices of loin or shoulder, tossing them in a cornstarch breading and deep frying them.  We cured and confited pork belly, pressed it into flat rectangles, portioned those into slabs, and then pan roasted them for an end result which was crispy on the outside, meltingly tender on the inside, and very flavorful.

We didn't want the vegetables to be an afterthought, so instead of depressed onion and bell pepper slices, we charred sugar snap peas and glazed them soy sauce, chili flakes and rice vinegar, for a tart, spicy and umami rich foil to the pork.

Fried rice became crispy jasmine rice balls.  We steamed the jasmine rice with tons of garlic and ginger, formed it into small cakes, and then pan roast those on the pickup, they kind of ended up looking like potatoes.  They also had a really cool texture, crispy fried rice on the outside, and delicious fluffy jasmine on the inside.

We wanted to keep the sauce pink, but we didn't want any food coloring.  Rhubarb was in season and it's wonderfully tart, so we made a red wine and rhubarb compote, added a bit of sambal to it, and balanced it with sugar and soy.  Not only was it delicious, but we really nailed that  red number 5 look.

After tasting all of that together we felt the dish still leaned heavy, so we added some pickled green strawberries from last year.  They made a lot of sense with the rhubarb (after all, what's a more classic pairing than strawberry rhubarb?) and kind of tasted like fruit roll ups.

Where does this leave us?  We've taken a dish normally consumed out of a styrofoam container, put it in a suit and tie and given it a shave.  Now it's something you'd totally feel fine eating off of a nice plate with a cocktail pairing. 

We've also stayed true to the thought behind each of the original elements while rooting it physically in the Midwest, and seasonally in mid spring.  Also, it's like, delicious and stuff.

But enough of that, here's a recipe.

Rhubarb sweet and sour sauce

I get a real kick out of this, it's basically just a slightly more savory rhubarb compote, the sambal gives it a bit of heat, but doesn't turn it into an inferno.  

It's great with just about any roast meat you can think of, as an accompaniment to cheese, or rubbed into your hair for a glossy coat.

4 Pounds of rhubarb, rinsed well and cut into half in pieces

2 Cups of dry red wine

2 Cups of granulated sugar

1 Tablespoon Sambal

2 Cups of water

2 Ounces of soy sauce

Salt to taste

Toss the rhubarb with half the sugar and a light pinch of salt, let sit thirty minutes.

Combine the rhubarb, any liquid it's released, the wine, sugar, water, and sambal in a large sauce pot and bring to a boil.

Reduce the heat until just simmering, stir often and skim off any scum that rises to the top, let reduce by one third.

Once the sauce has reduced add the soy sauce sauce, remove from the heat and let it cool slightly.

Set up a food processor and working in batches (carefully, this stuff is basically napalm) lightly pulse the sauce, you don't want a completely homogeneous liquid, just make sure that there are no large chunks remaining.

Taste the sauce, season with salt, if it's running too tart add more sugar, if it's too sweet balance it with red wine vinegar.

Chill and set aside until ready for use.

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Mussels, Charred Spring Onions, Spiced Coconut Broth

The second course in the pop up dinner we did recently was our attempt to make a seasonal and more refined green curry.

They were a genius, and to most people in the states that's authentic Thai food, and why not? It's delicious, simple, universal, and will be at your door in thirty minutes.

My favorite dish from that lexicon is green curry, so it's what we played with.

This first thing we wanted to do was to make the flavor profile of the curry more focused, so we got rid of the curry paste.  Instead we infused the coconut milk with spices, garlic, shallots and ginger to replace that depth.

Since we'd just lost all the herbs that had previously colored our curry, we had to replace them with something or change the name.  Since it was spring we made a spring onion puree and used that to color and flavor our broth. Also, it like, tasted good and stuff. Because I'm a huge nerd and like to show the same ingredient in more than one form, we took more spring onions, charred the hell out of them on the grill and worked those into the dish as well. Also, this gave the dish another texture to go with the mussels and broth. The mussels were prepared simply, steamed with white wine, ginger and garlic.  Aromatics that tied back into the broth and were complimentary to the grilled onions. Almost like we knew what we were doing or something. Finally we added some toasted bread, because while that makes no fucking sense in the context of green coconut curry, it makes a ton of sense with steamed mussels in any sort of broth.

We made it seem extra fancy pouring the broth into the bowl tableside and giving people those fancy little shellfish forks. Green Curry with Mussels and Charred Spring Onions

2 Pounds Prince Edward Island Mussels, bearded, purged and scrubbed

2 Quarts Coconut milk

1 Teaspoon toasted coriander seeds

2 Whole cloves, toasted

3 Toasted allspice berries

3 Pods of green cardamom

1/2 Teaspoon toasted black peppercorns

1/2 of a star anise toasted

6 Cloves of Garlic

2 Shallots, peeled and sliced

A pair of two inch thumbs of ginger

2 Bunches of scallions

1 Baguette, sliced on a slight bias

Dry white wine

Salt to taste

Juice of two limes

Combine the coconut milk, cloves, coriander seed, cardamom, black peppercorns, star anise, shallots, two of the garlic cloves and half the ginger, bring to a boil and reduce to a bare simmer.  Let simmer thirty minutes.  Meanwhile light a grill and bring a large pot of water to a boil

Divide the scallions in half, remove the greens from one half and set aside, take the other half and the bottoms, toss in oil and salt, and char well on the grill.

When the water comes to a boil, season well with salt and plunge the reserved scallion greens into the water and boil until tender, plunge into ice water immediately.

Squeeze all the water out of the scallion greens, and puree with salt and ice water until smooth. Chill until needed.

Strain and chill the coconut milk, slice the charred scallions and set aside.

To Serve

Bring the coconut milk to just shy of a boil, add the scallion puree to it, season with salt and lime juice until it tastes awesome. While this is going on, toast the sliced bread.

Meanwhile place a large saute pan over high heat and add the remaining garlic and ginger, toss in a bit of oil and then the mussels, sprinkle with salt.

Place the charred scallions in a small pot and heat gently

Add the wine to the mussels and cover, steam until they've all opened, discard any that haven't along with the garlic and ginger.

Double check your seasoning, arrange the mussels and charred scallions in a giant bowl, or six normal sized ones, place a couple slices of toast on the side and split the seasoned broth between them.  

Enjoy!

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Wrap it up

Recently some friends and I got it into our heads to do a pop up.  We wanted to have fun and focus on the kind of food we like to eat, so we decided to take common take out tropes from "Asian" restaurants and clean them up a bit.  While approaching them in fairly seasonal fashion, and staying true to their roots.

We got the incomparable Greg Buterra of Weatherby's Bitters to do cocktail pairings, found our twenty closest friends with disposable income and did the damn thing.

We wanted all our dishes to read fairly familiar, and ideally our diners had encountered them in some form before, bonus points if they were from some crappy Americanized chain restaurant.  So clearly our first course would use PF Chang's lettuce wrap as inspiration.

Lots of food cultures use greens as a delivery vessel, Korean Ssam and Polish stuffed cabbage come to mind. It's clean, filling, not too fussy and usually provides additional aromatic punch.

But enough about that authentic food, we're dealing with chain stuff here. Once we broke it down to the basic components we found these almost always had

Lettuce leaves (duh) usually romaine

Herbs, cilantro, basil, mint, fresh stuff

Rice Vermicelli

A dipping sauce, usually very sweet

A protein of some sort, shrimp, pork, beef, tofu, chicken, etc

Obviously we were going to wrap it in lettuce, but instead of romaine we went with Boston bibb, it's got a bit more going on, seems to make a nicer cup, and has good crunch.

The herbs we liked, we ended going with a combination of mint and basil, this helped keep the dish very clean, and quite refreshing.

For the dipping sauce we took Vietnamese nuoc cham as inspiration, but used a combination of pickled ramps, banana peppers, and their brines as the base.  Sweet, sour, funky, and spicy.  Bonus points for seasonality.

Roasted crushed peanuts for a bit more texture, and "darker" caramel aromatics

We 86'd the rice noodles, after all this was merely course one of four, and we didn't want people to get too full.  Those are pretty much just there as caloric filler, and no one was going to be hungry after working their way through this menu.

For the filling we used flank steak from a local farm that we marinated in a bath of fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, garlic and ginger for five days, before grilling to "mediumish" and slicing.

The whole thing was served as seen above on the plate, for the guest to assemble themselves.

It didn't suck.

Chili-Ramp Nuoc Cham

If for some crazy reason you've actually been making all of these recipes, you'll have pickled banana peppers and ramps on hand, if you're a normal person with a life, you haven't been.  You can sub pickled shallots for the ramps, but the banana peppers you should be able to find pickled in any grocery store.

1/2 Cup minced pickled ramps

1/2 Cup minced pickled banana peppers

1 Cup pickled ramp brine

1 Cup pickled banana pepper brine

4 ounces sugar

2 ounces fish sauce

1 Teaspoon micro planed ginger

There really isn't too much to this one, combine everything and mix well.  Let sit in the cooler for two days.  Note that this is made with the level of sweetness and acidity in my pickles, which tend to be fairly sweet on the whole, so you'll need to tinker if you're using store bought ones.   

Marinated Flank Steak

This is pretty alright, the beef gets very tender after a few days in the marinade and extremely flavorful.  Don't limit it these wraps, this stuff'll be awesome in tacos, stir fries, sandwiches, or with some roast potatoes.

5 pounds flank steak, silver skin removed and cut into 1 pound portions

3 Quarts of water

4 Cloves of garlic crushed

1 Three inch piece of ginger, rinsed and cut into coins

1/2 Cup of caster sugar

2 Cups of soy sauce

1 Cup Fish sauce.

Combine all ingredients but the beef, and heat until the sugar dissolves, remove from the heat and chill. (If you want to fancy, use ice for half the volume of the water. Keep the ice to the side and then pour the boiling brine onto that, it'll cut the time it takes to chill the brine considerably.  It's how the pro's do it.)

When fully chilled, add the beef and weight down with a plate or something.  Place in the cooler for three to five days

When you're ready to cook, light and heat a grill.  Meanwhile remove the beef from the marinade, season well with salt, and place on a rack to temper.  Let it sit a couple hours, we want the marinade on the outside to pellicle a bit.

Once fully tempered, grill the beef to your desired temp, I find medium works the best for this, let rest and slice thinly against the grain.

To Assemble

3 Heads of Boston bibb lettuce, separated into individual leaves, cleaned and dried

The sliced steak (still hot!)

1 Cup of Chili-Ramp Nuoc Cham

1/4 Cup toasted and crushed peanuts

Plenty of picked and rinsed basil and mint, say a cup of each

Place everything on platters and have your friends tear into it, half the fun here is building your own wrap.

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Eat the whole thing!

Fish and chips are almost always a disappointment. You go into them with high expectations and dreams of a light, crispy pile heart disease inducing deliciousness...and end up with a soggy bowling ball of heart disease inducing bullshit.

It doesn't have to be that way, they can be good, you just need to believe!  In case your faith is lacking I'll give you some directions.

First and most importantly, the fish.  I like to use rainbow trout, with the pin bones, and major fins removed, but the head and tail attached. But honestly, anything that flakes well and can stand up to being cooked through will work.  

Next the batter, all purpose flour as the base, some light spicing from cayenne powder and baking powder as a strong leavener all help, but the real force of flavor comes from the beer.  Nothing too hoppy, that'll make it bitter, but something dark is just what you want. Me? I like Lion Stout.

Finally, you need something to dip that fried fish in, we're going to use one based on Paul Prudhomme's remoulade, after all, if you're gonna steal, steal from the best.

Lion Stout Batter Rainbow Trout

4 Cleaned rainbow trout, around 8 ounces in size, cleaned with the pin bones and all fins but the tail removed.  

1 Cup all purpose flour

1 Cup cornstarch

1 Teaspoon Salt, plus more to taste

For the batter

2 Cups all purpose flour

1 Tablespoon baking powder

1 Teaspoon kosher salt

1 Teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 Can Lion Stout beer

Mix the cup of cornstarch and flour with the salt and sift together. Lightly season the trout all over and then dip in the dredge, shake off any excess. Heat the oil in your fryer to 375 (alternatively, use a very deep pot and be careful!)

Meanwhile, mix the remaining two cups of flour with the baking powder, salt, cayenne, sift.  

Add the beer, one third at a time to the dry mix, whisk until smooth, you're looking for a consistency a bit thinner than cake batter.

Coat the dredged fish in the butter then carefully slide into the hot oil.  Fry until a light amber color, flipping halfway through.

Remove the cooked fish from the oil, drain on a rack or towels and season well with salt.

Prudhomme Remoulade (kind of)

This is delicious, bright with lemon, herbaceous and spicy, it makes almost everything better.

4 egg yolks

1/2 C chopped celery

1/2 Sliced green onion

1/4 cup minced parsley

1 EA lemon, seeds removed and sliced

2 Tablespoons brown mustard

2 Tablespoons ketchup

2 Tablespoons worcestershire sauce

1 Tablespoon dijon mustard

1 Tablespoon white wine vinegar

1 Tablespoon confit garlic

2 tablespoons paprika

Salt to taste

1 Pint vegetable oil

In a food processor combine all the ingredients but the salt, egg yolks and oil, process until homogeneous.

Add the egg yolks, one at a time and process until smooth

Slowly stream in the oil, as if making an aioli. Adjust seasoning with salt, tobasco and lemon juice as needed.

To Assemble

4 Freshly fried rainbow trout 

Prudhomme remoulade

Several lemons cut into eighths

Lots of napkins, this is messy business

Arrange the fish on a large platter, squeeze some lemon on and dip it in the sauce, attack it with you're hands, it's the right thing to do.