Category: Recipes

Yesterday we celebrated our third annual Oysterfest. It’s a special thing when the stars align to bring together group of people whose shared love of raw mollusks is so steadfast that they are compelled to purchase 200 oysters and eat them all, sitting on a back porch in the San Francisco sunshine*. To repeat this celebration of the ocean’s bounty on the regular, now that’s how you know you’ve stumbled upon an exceptional group of folks—25+ oysters a person is nothing to scoff at. It’s on days like Oysterfest that I can’t believe my luck. To live in this beautiful city with such wonderful friends and exceptional food, I’m living the dream.

If you happen to have a group of friends similarly dedicated to the celebration of oysters and live in the Bay Area, it is easy (and surprisingly affordable) to secure a few bushels of oysters for your enjoyment at the Alemany Farmer’s Market from Point Reyes Oyster Company. Throw your bushels of oysters in a cooler, pour a few bags of ice on top, and get ready to shuck.

The best way to shuck an oyster (and minimize the amount of shell shrapnel you ingest) is to insert the tip of the oyster knife in the hinge of the oyster, apply firm pressure downwards at a 45 degree angle until the knife tip goes into the oyster and the oyster releases the suction holding it’s shell shut. The two halves of its shell will loosen and you can more easily run your knife around the edges to free the oyster from the shell. Detach the oyster foot from the shell, apply your condiments and enjoy!

Classic Mignonette
1 small shallot, minced
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
salt and pepper, to taste

In a small bowl or jar, mix together the shallot, vinegar and salt and pepper. Let sit for the flavors to combine. Serve a small spoonful over a raw oyster.

Whiskey Smash 
2oz whiskey
1 oz fresh lemon juice
0.75 oz lapsang simple syrup
4 – 5 basil leaves (or mint)
2 strawberries, sliced

For the lapsang simple syrup, make 2 cups strong lapsang tea and mix with 2 cups turbinado sugar. Stir to dissolve and keep refrigerated. In a cocktail shaker, place sliced strawberries, lemon juice, simple syrup and basil leaves (slapped). Muddle. Add whiskey. Fill shaker with ice and shake vigorously for 8 – 10 seconds. Double strain into an old fashioned glass. Garnish with sliced strawberries and a slapped basil leaf.

So make yourself a cocktail, grab an oyster knife and shuck your friend an oyster … or twenty.

*The day usually starts off sunny and 65° F, but come 4 pm, the fog is rolling in thick and it’s time to bust out the jackets and blankets.

Ps. Last year’s Oysterfest and several phenomenal hot sauce recipes to accompany your oysters.

-Emily

This recipe comes by way of my friend Alexa. The other night over drinks, I mentioned that I was in a bit of a cooking funk and she immediately texted her mother for a recipe to pull me out of it. Some friends, I tell ya, they just get it. This cake is one of her mother’s go-to recipes and after making it, I completely understand why. Perfumed with citrus and Grand Marnier, it is just the right amount of sweet. The olive oil starts to take it to a savory place, but you’re brought back into sweet territory just in time. It’s the perfect cake for people who “don’t like dessert”—not that you should be friends with those people anyway…

After reading through the recipe, I noticed that it called for Grand Marnier. For those who don’t know, Grand Marnier is an orange-flavored cognac liquor that while tasty, is also very expensive. Usually, I’d just skip the Grand Marnier and call it a day. But, I figured that I ought to embrace my duty as a food blogger and actually determine 1) if 1/4 cup of Grand Marnier makes a difference in taste and 2) if that extra cost actually makes the cake better. Testing ensued!

The Method: Firstly, you can purchase tiny, tiny bottles of Grand Marnier at BevMo for $5 (still spendy, but not terrible for the wealth of information it would provide). In the interest of scientific integrity, I made the batter as if I was making just one cake up until the very end and then separated it out into two bowls. To one bowl I added 1/8 cup Grand Marnier and to the other I added 1/8 cup citrus juice, taking care to stir them equally. I then poured them into the prepared baking dishes and baked them side by side for the same amount of time.

The Findings: In a blind taste test, Jordan was able to correctly identify the cakes, but he also found both equally delicious. The Grand Marnier does indeed add a deeper, spicier, slightly boozy flavor, but the cake with just citrus juice was still really damn good. Strangely, the cake with the Grand Marnier also rose a bit more—the jury is still out on why.  I slightly preferred the cake with Grand Marnier because it was a bit more complex with a more subtle citrus flavor, but honestly, don’t drop the cash on Grand Marnier if you don’t already have it lying around. If you do, by all means, throw it in. And bring me a cup in a mason jar.

-Emily

I’m not sure I have much to say other than this is a damn good cocktail, and sometimes you just want a good cocktail. It’s a take on a whiskey sour, swapping the simple syrup of the sour for more complex maple syrup. Trust us, it’s a better match.

Bourbon and maple syrup compliment each other oh so well. A bit of lemon juice brightens it up and the egg white gives you that glorious foam. You can skip the egg white, but I wouldn’t. I’m no scientist, but something tells me the alcohol must kill salmonella.

-Emily

Writing a blog is a pretty handy way to make life look pretty perfect. You get to immortalize the best moments and hide the ugly bits… usually by virtue of not mentioning them at all. In the case of a food blog, hiding ugly bits usually means it looks like you eat like a king. Today on The Answer is Always Pork we’re here to debunk that myth and show you how the sausage is made.*

*At least our sausage. Who knows, maybe all those other bloggers do have perfect lives/eat like kings and we got the short end of the stick?

Sometimes this food blogging thing is easy. The dish tastes great, I’m able to get a decent photo, the words flow freely. But most of the time, at least one of the following things happens: a dish turns out weird/bad/boring, it’s dark outside by the time we eat and my overhead tungsten lights make even tasty food look like death on a plate, in the rush of getting dinner on the table I forget to take a photo of the final dish all together, I stare at my computer screen failing to come up with something that will convince you that this is a recipe worth trying.

A lot of dishes are left on the cutting room floor. To call them failures seems a bit harsh, mostly they’re just pretty meh. But, meh isn’t something I really want to write about or subject you to. There are plenty of recipes on the Internet that have meh on lockdown, and my SEO could never compete.

And so for your reading pleasure, some of my most recent mehventures:

• Salmon wrapped in phyllo that was delicious, but it’s essentially impossible to know when the salmon is actually cooked, which is rather terrifying for most home cooks, especially when you’ve got 5 guests sitting at your kitchen table.
• Granola bars that were supposed to be studded with chocolate chunks but instead I prematurely added chocolate to the dry ingredients, added the warm wet ingredients to the dry and melted the chocolate completely. Somehow I also thought it was a good idea to add a banana to the mix. It wasn’t, it was weird.
• Hot wings that were heaven, but the photos are terrible, and who eats hot wings when it isn’t the Super Bowl anyway. Maybe next year?
• A mushroom pasta that sounded good, turned out ok, but a bit on the dry side. Dry casseroles are such a disappointment. Mostly it was pretty dull, and I’m not sure I can summon the will to finesse it.
• Soft baked eggs in phyllo cups that absolutely tickled me with their adorableness in person, but I couldn’t get a good photo to save my life. Tragedy.
• About 7 different smoothie recipes, none of which turned out better than this one that I’ve already shared with you all. We still drink that one every morning.
• An omelette filled with mustardy bread crumbs that gave me a panic attack each time I made it because all that cooking happened so quickly. Plus, what is more impossible to photograph than omelettes? Except for maybe cassseroles? Lord help me.

Some good, some bad, most need work. We eat a few misses, and a lot of in-progresses. Pretty much every recipe that makes it to the blog I’ve made at least twice, usually more like three or four times, until the stars align and it goes from just dinner on the table to something you people deserve to hear about. Oh the pain of the creative process…

Now to keep things real honest, there are many nights where I combine a few Trader Joe’s ingredients with some random CSA veggies and call it a day. And because if some other food blogger was divulging her cooking reality, I’d want the nitty gritty details, here’s what that looks like. Wrap whatever you’ve got in a tortilla (chicken, cheese, beans, rice, veggies—any combination will do ya), pour some enchilada sauce on it, bake it 30 minutes and boom: dinner. Steam a few TJ’s pork gyoza, sauté up whatever veggies you’ve got lying around with an onion, throw some soy sauce on it at the very end and ta-da: dinner—just try and remember to put on the rice. Bake some TJ’s falafels, spread some hummus and tzatziki on a pita, top it all with some random veggies, hallelujah, you’re fed. These aren’t masterpieces (and I’ve got Mexican, Chinese and Persian grandmas rolling in their graves), but they’re healthier and cheaper than take out. We’re real people fighting the good fight, just like you are, and that fight is fueled by Trader Joe’s.

Today is Sunday, which is usually my cooking day (or it least it was when I wrote this). I’ve got a few projects in the works and I’m hoping I’ll break out of this funk and come up with something good—some signs point to yes? Fingers crossed, no guarantees. I might have a recipe for faux-enchiladas for you next week.

Xo,
Emily

My mom used to make red beans and rice for us as kids. It was the only holdover from the time she and my dad spent living in New Orleans while he was in medical school. And we were obsessed. It’s probably still my favorite dish that she makes. Now, whenever the kids are coming home, she’ll throw a batch in the crockpot and we’ll feast when we arrive. That drive from San Francisco to Sacramento, whew, you can really work up an appetite.

I wasn’t planning to to make my mom’s red beans and rice this time around. I’d actually found a recipe in David Tanis’ beautiful book The Heart of the Artichoke for an Italian-ish black eyed pea stew and that was more or less what I was working towards. But one taste of those beans after they’d been simmering with a pork neck bone for a few hours and I knew a New Orleans infusion was in order.

It was a good call, it’s probably always a good call. Maybe beans just shouldn’t exist outside of red beans and rice … or cassoulet … or burritos … or baked beans … hummm. Anyway, if you want a taste of my childhood, here it is.

Calypso Beans and Rice, in the style of my mom’s red beans and rice
1 lb dried beans, I used Calypso beans because they were cute, but kidney beans are the traditional choice
1 onion, diced
4 cloves of garlic, sliced
2 slices of bacon, cut into lardon
1 smoked ham hock or smoked pork neck bones
1 bay leaf
2 teaspoons worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon cayenne, or more if you like it hot
1 teaspoon dried thyme
salt, pepper
2 teaspoons hot sauce (we like Crystal, but Tabasco was my dad’s hot sauce of choice growing up)
White rice, andouille sausage (if you’d like, we didn’t have any), and more hot sauce for serving

Soak the beans in a large bowl of water for 8 hours or overnight.

In a large, heavy bottomed pan or dutch oven over medium-low heat, sauté the bacon pieces until they render their fat and begin to brown. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and set aside. If your bacon is fatty, you should have enough oil to sauté the onion in, but it it isn’t add a bit of olive oil or duck fat (when you live in this house you have a jar of duck fat in the fridge so why not make good use of it?) to the pan.

Add  the onion to the pan. Sauté for 5 – 10 minutes, until the onions are translucent. Likely they’ll pick up some of the more browned bacony bits left behind in the pot. That’s good news. Add the garlic and sauté another minute more.

Add the beans, bay leaf and 6 cups of water. Be sure to throw in your ham hock at this point also. We had some delicious smoked pork neck bones from a pig my mom bought over the summer from a customer of hers, and so I threw those in instead. You could skip the smokey meat bit, but I wouldn’t recommend it—it adds a tremendous depth of flavor to what’s an otherwise pretty bland food.

Turn the heat to low and let your beans simmer away, until they are tender. Mine took about 2 – 2.5 hours. After your beans are sufficiently tender, add the worcestershire sauce, cayenne, and thyme. Season with salt and pepper. Add the hot sauce to taste.

About half of my beans were falling apart into a beany puree as I stirred. Depending on the texture of your beans, you might want to puree about a third of the mixture and add it back in if they don’t seem to be falling apart into mush on their own. It’s best to have some beans that are more whole and some that become more of a bean sauce.

If you’re using a ham hock, you’ll probably want to pull that out and pick off the meat and throw the meat back in. This might happen on it’s own, but discovering a little hammy nublet when you’re thinking it’s just beans, that’s good stuff.

Serve on a bed of rice with more hot sauce on the side. My mom will usually sauté up a few andouille sausages, slice them and top the beans and rice with them. You could do so too if you felt inclined. Bon appetit!

PS. I’ve never been to New Orleans so I can’t honestly say how authentic my mom’s red beans and rice are, but I can guarantee that they are delicious. Her recipe is probably some California-Louisiana fusion that real purists couldn’t possibly endorse, but for me it will always taste like home.