Just a quickie tonight. I finally managed to get my hands on some of Bill Wood’s (Wood ‘n’ Hart Farm) Lamb Shanks this weekend. So here’s what we did: (Excuse the poor photo quality. iPhones still don’t compare to a proper DSLR).
Kalamata Olive Braised Wood ‘n’ Hart Lamb Shank,
in it’s own jus
Grilled Lemon-Parsley Risotto
Grilled Spanish Onions
Gremolata
Balkan Yogurt
It was pretty well received.</understatement>
Last Saturday, we did something really special. I woke up that morning like it was Christmas morning, and Santa Claus (or in this case, Chris from GetAway Farm) was coming with something good. We had worked up quite a bit of stir in the restaurant for these specials, and had pre-sold 3 of them; one of those without even knowing what it was.
So, to get it out of the way now, here’s the menu we had kicking around in the kitchen as we got things ready.
Big F’n Steak for 2-> ($75)
- PigFish Bite (amuse)
- Tiger’s Milk Salad
- Pan Roasted 28oz. Getaway RIb Steak. Butter Confit Fingerling Potatoes, Bernaise Sauce, St. Amboise Oatmeal Stout Jus, Roasted Brussel Sprouts, Grilled Asparagus and Apple-Horseradish Salad
- Call Paramedics
Be warned, some very graphic images of large pieces of meat follow here.
Now then, we had to go with a three course dinner, since a steak like this takes about an hour to cook. And that’s rushing things.
Here it is. 28oz of the finest cow being raised in Nova Scotia, seasoned up and ready to go into the cast iron. Even before we start making the amuse, this steak has got to get cooking.
Steak. Pan. Browning.
Steak. Pan. Browning. Butter. Basting.
Really this is thing beyond words.
After this, it went into the oven to finish and we started making the rest of it.
First up, the PigFish Bite. A little, two-bite version of the PigFish on our menu. A slice of molé braised pork belly, fried up crispy on the outside, melting tender and fatty on the inside. A seared scallop, and a squirt of squash puree. There’s a lot of umami going on here, getting your taste buds geared up for what’s to come.
I would put a picture of the salad here, but we’ve all seen salad before. It’s green. This was a pretty tasty one though. Mixing the juices from making salt haddock, with a shot of tequila (a traditional way of serving tequila, with a shot of Tiger’s Milk as the chaser, that I learned about from Alfredo back at Ssäm Bar(traditionally, it’s ceviche juice, not salt fish. But when life gives you fish juice, you figure out some way to get drunk)), some garlic, ginger and cilantro, to make the dressing. Topped with some fish sauce roasted nuts. Again, lots of umami, but pleasantly tart to get you ready for what’s coming.
Steak, coming out of the oven. Just a little shy of done right now. Finish it with another dollop of butter and let it rest, while we get everything else together.
So, we start bringing everything together.
.
..
….
Wait for it….
The crowning glory of a plate full of really tasty stuff, cooked perfectly and with passion.
Now I want one.
Sorry I haven’t updated this thing in quite a bit now. After recovering from my injury, there was a lot of work to be done; playing catch up from the time away, and getting some projects restarted.
I’ll have a real humdinger for you all tomorrow; but, for now, I’ve just got a quick little one that I did up last night.
Lemon “Meringue” “Pie”. When I told Leo about it, I used the quotes around lemon as well. And then quickly reneged as it actually does use lemons. The meringue has been replaced by a house-made marshmallow, which is trimmed to size and placed on the lemon bar (replacing the pie), browned up in the salamander, and served up all tart and gooey. Big thumbs up from everyone who tried a bite.
So…New food hitting the menu today. After a more than a few go-arounds to get the broth just right, we finally hit on the dish that scratched the itch for a bowl of ramen that I’ve had since that dinner at Momofuku Noodle Bar back in May. Starting from the recipe in the Momofuku book, we did it up the way we like. Taking a cue from David Chang, who swapped out the bonito for bacon in making his dashi, we went a step further and swapped out the combu for dulse, as well. Thusly with the Oulton’s bacon and dulse “dashi”, we refer to it as a Nova Scotian Ramen broth.
Add to that the noodles, a few pieces of confit pork belly, a couple of shavings of guanciale, pickled carrots and diakon, and a scallop, sliced and placed raw in the bowl, cooked in the hot broth. Garnish with a poached egg and green onions.
This one is rapidly rising as a staff favourite, and I’m hoping will be a big hit with the customers.
So I just had a visit today from one of my old cooks. He moved to Edmonton, about a year ago now, and has been working at one of my favourite restaurants back there. He told me that they have a blog going on there as well, so I thought you might like to check it out as well.
I haven’t had a chance to really dig into it, but there are some nice shots of his recent trip to India. Worth the time to check it out, and, if you’re in Edmonton (or in Nelson, BC), I highly recommend the whole Culina group.
I was tidying some things up on the old Google Docs, and found a few old menus that aren’t up on the Brooklyn Warehouse’s proper blog, so I thought I’d throw them up here, just to see some of the other stuff we’ve had going on in the past.
So first up, we have the Christmas Dinner that we did with Bill Wood (of Wood ‘n’ Hart Farm, who regularly supplies our lamb shoulders and rabbits).
Bacon and Scallops
Braised Lamb Bacon, Seared Scallops, Butternut squash purée, Pine nut relish
Lamb with 4 Garnishes
Grilled Rack of Lamb, White Beans, Mint Jelly, Glazed Parsnips, Fennel Sausage
Roasted Leg of Lamb
Horseradish Mashed Potatoes, Candied Apple Jus, Crispy Carrots
Figgy Pudding
Clotted cream, Brandy flame
This was a pretty amazing dinner, everyone had a bit too much to drink and it was around one in the morning that we all finally left. The PigFish that we served here has turned into the one we currently feature on our menu.
Next up, our New Year’s Eve dinner. This one was a hell of an event. We ran two different menus for two different seatings. First a three course menu for the early seating of people who had to get some where else.
First Seating
First
Choice of
Chilled Apple Soup
Roasted Walnuts
-or-
Spinach Salad
Roasted Beet Chevre, Jost Prost Viniagrette
Second
Choice of
Choucroute Garni
Braised Ham, Sauerkraut, Lunenberg County Montbeliard Pear Wine, Taties `n`Nips-or-
Five Spice Roasted Chicken Breast
Spaghetti Squash, Crispy Potato Pave, Foie Gras Jus
-or-
Halibut Confit
Indian Point Mussels, Sofrito Rice, Saffron Broth
Dessert
Vanilla-Chili Pot de Creme
Blueberry Grunt
Chocolate Chip Cookie Bread Pudding
Hot Toddy
This seating came and went pretty quickly, and left us plenty of time to finalize all the preparations for the second seating. A real show stopper this one. We purchased a full pig from Oulton’s, and (since we don’t have anywhere to put a whole pig) had them break it down into the primals for us. Then each cut got its own special treatment. A full snout-to-tail feast.
Second Seating
First
Crispy Tete de Cochon
Braised Celeriac, Mustard Sauce
Second
Figatelli Stuffed Trotters
Chervil Salad, Grilled Orange Sauce
Third
Smoke Roasted Pork Belly
Roasted Garlic White Beans, Corn Meal Crisp, BBQ Sauce
Fourth
Choucroute Garni
Braised Ham, Sauerkraut, Lunenberg County Montbeliard Pear Wine
Fifth
Apple Roasted Pork Loin
Taties `n` Nips, Candied Walnuts, Apple Sauce
Dessert
Vanilla-Chili Pot de Creme
Blueberry Grunt
Chocolate Chip Cookie Bread Pudding
Hot Toddy
So a little break down for some of these dishes.
The tete de cochon (for those like me who absolutely failed at being bilingual) is the pig’s head. After boiling the whole thing, the skin was removed (we saved the ears for ourselves), shredded all the meat, reduced the cooking water down to essentially just the gelatin, mixed that with the meat, rolled it into a log, chilled it, sliced and fried. The exterior gets a wonderful crunch, while the interior absolutely melts in your mouth. With a real sharp kick from the mustard sauce, this was a hell of a way to start the meal.
The figatelli is a spicy, liver sausage, which you can find either dried or fresh. We didn’t have time to dry our sausage, so we stuffed it into the boned out trotters and slow roasted it for a couple of hours.
The smoke roasted pork belly was a real gem. If we ever get a smoker around here, expect to see more things like that. This was also the first appearance of my own, “kitchen sink” BBQ sauce.
The hams were a pretty impressive dish to prepare. A pot full of cabbage with two whole legs covered in four bottles of a very sweet local wine. Add in all your usual suspects of spices (cinnamon, allspice, cloves and nutmeg) and this was what you want your house to smell of when you cook a big dinner. It would be interesting (and perhaps I’ll get a chance to do this some day) to do a full Choucroute Garni, or perhaps Cassoulette, dinner. All the traditionally garnishes (not just the hams, but pork belly, sausages, veal breast, duck confit (in the case of the cassoulette), whatever else you have on hand), but each served as an individual course.
The pork loin could be considered the fore runner of the roast that I did for the Slow Food Spring Supper. This one was good, but the Pork Saddle Arista, a boned-out saddle (loin and attached belly) rubbed with a blend of salt, pepper, rosemary and fennel, inside and out, and rolled up, with the belly providing a shield and basting the loin with its fatty goodness, was a real hit at that dinner (Craig Flynn commented during the plate up that it certainly seemed to be the chef’s favourite, as we were all greedily sucking back excess or mis-sliced pieces).
I think the desserts went over well, but it was after midnight that they went out, so…I don’t really remember.
So, finally getting back into the swing of things, I dug up a shot that we took while we were making the Hang Over Pasta a while back. It was rather over exposed, so I had Tim do what he could in the old PhotoShop. So here, in all it’s glory:
Be warned: some of the pictures about to be presented can get a bit intense.
(This post is running a little late, so please excuse any sudden changes in verb tense that I missed in editing.)
Three weekends ago, Chris from Getaway Farm (where we are getting those short ribs you saw a few weeks ago from), dropped off a few beef shanks for us last Saturday. Not wanting to go stereotypically Italian with an Osso Buco (and before anyone says it, yes that’s veal), we decided to make a big batch of ragout.
First, I marinated the shanks in some red wine. All right. A lot of red wine. It took about 3L to cover the shanks. And then I forgot about them for a day while I slept the sleep of the just. 
Back in on Monday, I drained them, patted them dry and seasoned them up. A good searing, some onions, garlic and star anise (thanks to Heston Blumenthal for turning me onto the star anise/onion combo). I deglazed the pan with the red wine the shanks had been marinating in, and then topped it up with some of our chicken stock. Covered up and into the oven for 5 hours.
The next day, I pulled the shanks out of the jus, and pulled the meat from the bones. The jus went back onto the stove and reduced by half, and then the meat was added back in. I put it on a low heat at the back of our 
griddle and occasionally stirred it through dinner service.
The next day, reheat the ragout with another splash of stock, cook up some parpadelle, and we were rockin’.
So all told, this took me 5 days to get together, but only really took about 45 minutes of my time.
Sorry I’ve been away for a bit here. I broke my ankle two weeks ago, and have been laying low and resting up. I have however had a chance to get out and eat at some of the competitors joints, and can say that we’re doing pretty well for ourselves up here.
Fortunately, I got a space boot put on Thursday, just in time to do a shoot with East Coast Living for a piece on rabbits coming out this September. We went through and got photos of the whole process, from taking the rabbits apart, cooking them to the plated dish.
It felt pretty good to get back into the kitchen and do some cooking, and it was nice to do it on a Sunday afternoon with nobody else around to comment on how rusty I was. But those knife skills take a while to fade away and I was breaking down those rabbits in record time (except for the slo-mo demo bunnies).
Check back in soon, as I’ve got one post I was just finishing up before the incident. Plus, some new food that’s we rolled out while I was away, and a couple more dishes coming out this week.
So we rolled out our new brunch menu this today, and got some awesome responses to the new dishes. I’ll post some shots of the Three Little Pigs sandwich soon, but for tonight, I’m gonna show you the highlight of the new menu: The Hang Over Pasta.
First step: Brown some julienned Oulton’s ham and then add some cream. Let that come up to a boil and reduce a little bit. Then, we add a healthy shot of Dutchman’s Smoked Gouda and melt that into the cream.
Toss the pasta in the sauce to coat fully (big ups to Tim on the action photo there. It reminds me of Calvin fighting his dinner). Twirl the pasta into a mound in the center of the bowl, then top with a good spoonful of molasses beans (which are also served with the fishcakes, and real good) and sunny-side fried egg.
A couple cracks of black pepper and pinch of micro greens (cause we’re really worried about our vegetables at this point) and there you go. This is a seriously indulgent dish, and should not be consumed too frequently. George had one for breakfast today, and another for dinner. The paramedics are on stand-by.
