Some days, everything goes right: the sun is shining, you can ride your bike around town carefree after a winter full of slow ice-patch vigilance, you’ve just eaten a fine lunch and there’s nothing in particular to do that afternoon. You roll into your favorite butcher shop – just to say hello – and suddenly your day gets even better because staring out from behind the butcher’s glass is a shining, garnet mound of fresh blood sausage.

Last Saturday was just such a day for Martha and me; our ride to Clancey’s Meat and Fish was rewarded with several links of blood sausage. Kristin and crew make it fresh a few times a year but it only stays in the display case briefly before it is frozen – blood sausage is not especially shelf stable. The good news is even if you missed it fresh last weekend, Clancey’s probably has all the frozen blood sausage your heart desires.

Desires, but for what? I certainly couldn’t reach back into my personal culinary heritage; my parents never cooked the stuff – in fact I’m quite sure that my dad will read this post with a mixture of horror and disgust. The Spanish, on the other hand, are great lovers of morcilla; it is a mainstay of at least a couple of hearty stews (fabada asturiana and cocido madrileño) and also finds its way into various tapas and pintxos.

I took the inspiration for this dish from the latter of the stews, the venerable cocido. (I was actually leaning toward fabada, but can you believe the Wedge doesn’t carry fabes asturianas?) Inspiration is all I took, though – I wasn’t interested in buying the many required meats or serving each pot ingredient as a separate course. So before any Madrileños arrive decrying my affront to their cultural patrimony, let me be clear: this not an authentic cocido madrileño. It is, however, a great way to highlight the flavor of blood sausage and a nice stew for a cold winter night, of which I am sure there are only a few left this year.

Cocido

• 1# dried chickpeas
• 1 ham hock
• 2 bay leaves
• Chicken stock
• 1 T olive oil
• ½ onion plus 2 chopped medium onions
• 1 celery stalk, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• ½# blood sausage
• ¼ cup parsley, minced
• Salt and pepper

Soak the chickpeas overnight, or quick soak by placing in a pot with heavily salted water, bringing to a boil and then turning off the heat, covering, and allowing to sit for one hour.

After the beans are soaked, drain and rinse them. Place in a stockpot and add the ham hock, bay leaves and half onion. Add chicken stock and water to cover generously – you will want plenty of broth. Bring to a boil and then simmer until beans are almost completely soft. Drain chickpeas, reserving cooking liquid, and remove ham hock. Discard the bay leaves and onion.

When ham hock is cool enough to handle, remove meat from  bones, fat and gristle. Shred the meat and reserve; discard the rest.

In a large pot or dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onions and celery and cook, stirring now and then, until the vegetables soften and start to brown. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add cooked chickpeas, reserved ham, and enough reserved cooking liquid to just cover the beans. If you don’t have enough cooking liquid, add water or chicken stock. Bring to a simmer. Lightly – lovingly – nestle the sausages on top of the stew and simmer gently, partially covered, until the sausage is warmed through and the beans are as soft as you like – maybe 20 minutes.

To serve, remove the sausage links from the pot and slice. Return the sausage slices to the stew along with the parsley and stir to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve in shallow bowls with plenty of crusty bread on the side to soak up the broth.

Conventional wisdom – among burger bloggers at least – is that it’s not worth it to make your own buns. This matches my experience: chalky, crumbly, too chewy, too rich, the list of sins goes on and on. So many broken promises, so many tears.

These bitter bun experiences have taught me better than to take some blogger’s promises about the homemade bun that’s finally – really! – worth it, and so I might have skipped over my good friend Brett’s (of Trout Caviar) Bun recipe with that same cynicism if I hadn’t tried them before, and loved them. It was a hot summer afternoon picnic on Brett’s rolling Wisconsin property, Bide-a-Wee, and we were camped under a farmers market tent, trying to stay in the shade. My bun was full of wood smoked pulled pork, and while the pork was as delicious as pork usually is, the bun stole the show for me. Knowing Brett the buns would have to be homemade – I don’t think he’s ever served me bread he hadn’t baked himself – but I asked nonetheless if he had made the buns, incredulous. He had. I’m too discreet to ask a baker for his recipes, and with Brett’s Real Bread no longer for sale at the farmers market, I figured my only chances to savor these buns would be on the odd invitation out to Bide-a-Wee.

And then Brett asked the world check out his buns.

After that lunch in Wisconsin I didn’t need any more convincing to try the recipe. I followed it as Brett printed, although I may not have kneaded it quite as long as I should have because the dough was quite sticky and difficult for me to work with. In any case, I was planning an overnight fermentation in the fridge, which can cover over a lot of under-kneading sins. The buns came out of the oven the next day and were as good as I remembered.

What makes these buns so special? It’s the texture. They hit a perfect middle road: chewy enough to feel like something and absorb juices without disintegrating, yet light enough not to distract from the main event, located between them. These buns are suitable for a thick and juicy steakhouse burger but won’t diminish a diner-style slider, either. They even work with my favorite veggie burgers which, while delicious, are infamous for squishing out the back-side of lesser buns.

If inferior buns – from the store or your oven – have left you jaded and cynical, I am writing this post to tell you there is hope. There is truth. There is Le Bun.

Tilapia has a lot to recommend it: it’s cheap, grows fast, can be sustainably farmed, and is low in mercury. Probably the only thing not to love about tilapia is its flavor. Not that it’s actively offensive, just that even in terms of white-fleshed fish tilapia is pretty bland.

That blandness can be remedied with ingredients with serious flavor: fish sauce, ginger, chiles, lime juice and herbs. All these are found in larb, the Laotian meat salad that also happens to be the perfect antidote to a long and dreary winter.

My recipe, from Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America by Sami Scripter and Sheng Yang, lists a number of herbs you can choose from: mint, cilantro, Vietnamese coriander, culantro, rice paddy herb, Thai basil, Chinese boxthorn. Tragically our co-op doesn’t carry most of those, so I limited my larb to mint, cilantro, and Thai basil – in spite of the authors’ insistence that authentic larb must contain culantro – but it was still delicious.

The word larb for me is associated with raw meat, particularly raw beef. That’s not necessarily the case – larb can be made with cooked or raw meat – but if the idea of raw beef gives you pause, making the salad with raw fish might be a little easier. Just think of it as a south-Asian ceviche.

Tilapia Larb

Adapted from Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America

• ¾# Tilapia filets
• Juice of two limes
• 2 T minced ginger
• 1 stalk lemon grass, tough parts removed, minced
• 1 hot chili pepper, minced
• 1/3 cup chopped mint
• 1/3 cup chopped cilantro
• 1/3 cup Thai basil
• ½ bunch green onions, chopped
• 1 T fish sauce
• 1 t salt
• 1/4 c toasted rice flour

Chop the tilapia into fine pieces. Toss with lime juice and leave to sit until fish turns opaque. Squeeze off excess lime juice and place tilapia in a large bowl.

Add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl and toss. Serve with lettuce leaves for scooping.

A note on toasted rice flour: I made this by toasting some rice in a skillet until it was tan and then grinding it in my spice grinder. Unfortunately, I didn’t grind it fine enough, and the rice left unsettling crunchy granules throughout the salad. If you’re going to include it, make sure you grind the rice fully to the consistency of flour. You could also leave it out – the salad wouldn’t be authentic, but I think it would taste fine.

As a relative newbie in the world of cocktails, I find them totally mysterious. How is it that pouring apparently random amounts of ingredients that are often quite challenging to drink on their own transform in the shaker into a magical elixir? When I am cooking, at least, I have some confidence in my ability to play with ratios and substitute ingredients to manipulate flavor; mixing a cocktail, on the other hand, is an exercise in total blind recipe faith for me. Measure, mix, pour, pray. Unhappy with my cocktail impotence, I added “understanding cocktail anatomy” to my long-term life and blog to-do list.

As it turns out Esquire magazine has beaten me to the punch. Their reductionist cocktail recipe allows anyone to mix up a reliably drinkable invention using a simple ratio: 3 parts liquor, 1 part liqueur, 1 part Aperol and 1 part citrus juice.

Any time someone claims to have discovered a foolproof recipe, it is my duty to attempt to break it, so for my first Esquire cocktail I broke out the most shameful contents of our liquor cabinet: 1½ oz Sauza Gold tequila, ½ oz Southern Comfort, ½ oz Aperol and ½ oz lime juice. Between the SoCo and the tequila, I wasn’t expecting much from this. But I was pleasantly surprised. While the cheap tequila’s familiar sting was present, it only lingered ethereally over the cocktail, rather than entirely defining it like the cheap tequila cocktails I invented in college. The drink was more or less as promised: smooth and not too sweet. Kind of boring, but not offensive.

Another iteration using 100 Proof Wild Turkey, Benedictine and lemon juice mixed with Aperol turned out the same way: not terribly interesting, but pretty good. Definitely drinkable.

This is not my favorite cocktail recipe. I’ve had way more fun and discovered far more interesting flavors and drinks in Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, which I’ve only scratched the surface of. But when it’s just too much to run out for that obscure new ingredient – or if it’s Sunday in this backwards state – it’s nice to know there’s a cocktail I can mix up with what I’ve got on hand, even if it’s SoCo.

It’s safe to say that unless I hit the internet blogging jackpot and finally get to cash in on marthaandtom.com, I’m never going to own the recently-published Modernist Cuisine. $600 for a cookbook is just a little beyond this blogger’s budget. It’s a shame, because everything I’ve seen about the book (eGullet has some of the best coverage including a Q&A with the authors) indicates that it will be an immensely useful – not to mention beautiful – reference, even if you don’t go in for the immersion circulators, centrifuges, c-vaps and other gadgets favored by the Modernist Cuisine laboratory.

Fortunately for me and anybody else that doesn’t have $600 burning a hole in their apron pocket, this book is generating enough buzz and discussion online that some of the key findings are becoming available to the rest of us. In another post on eGullet, Chris Amirault introduced the modernist pasta, and was kind enough to post the full recipe:

• 100 g ’00’ flour (100%)
• 1 g xanthan gum
• 2.5 g salt
• 9 g water
• 56.7 g egg yolk
• 10.7 g oil

Xanthan gum is something I more expect to see printed somewhere near the bottom of a package-side ingredient list than a pasta recipe. The Modernists claim that xanthan gives fresh pasta a chewier texture closer to that of dried pasta. As it turns out Xanthan gum is a popular ingredient among people with gluten intolerances – it adds structure and enhances texture in gluten-less baked goods – so obtaining a small baggy of the magic white powder was no problem – they sell it in bulk at the co-op.

While xanthan gum stands out in the recipe as a weird ingredient, far crazier was the amount of eggs called for. I tripled the base recipe to produce about a pound of pasta (539.7 g or 1.2#), which meant I needed 170.1 grams of egg yolks. Not really knowing how much an egg yolk weighs, I set a bowl on my scale and got cracking. Ten eggs later and the scale was at 168 g. Ten eggs! With the egg I mixed into the ravioli filling, this dinner took a full banker’s dozen. Anybody have a good recipe that calls for ten egg whites?

I mixed the dough in my food processor; it came together extremely dry and crumbly. Ordinarily I would have added a little more water, but the Modernist measurements being so precise – down to the tenth of a gram – I stuck with them.

The dryness was even more apparent as I tried to work the dough through my pasta machine. Even after resting it was extremely difficult to get the dough to pass through the widest setting on my hand-cranked machine. As I worked it through the progressively thinner settings, the dough became jagged on the edges and appeared brittle.

In spite of these difficulties, once the pasta was rolled the advantages of the xanthan gum started to become apparent. Normally, after rolling and cutting pasta I go into paranoid mode, spreading copious amounts of flour to try to keep all the strands separated. I usually break out the pasta tree. But with the Modernist pasta, no tree was necessary: this pasta will not stick together. I was cutting circles out of the dough to form ravioli, but rather than carefully single-layering them on a sheet pan with cornstarch on either side as I might do with regular pasta, I unceremoniously dumped them in a pile. No sticking! To tempt fate I stacked the discs into an orderly stack – still no sticking. I started to become concerned that it wouldn’t be possible to make two pieces of pasta to stick together around a ravioli filling, but water applied directly to the surface finally caused the dough to adhere.

Due to it’s non-stickiness, this dough recipe seems ideal for long shapes – provided I can address the ragged edges.

The real point of the xanthan gum, though, is not that it makes the dough easy or difficult to work with, but that it improves the texture of the finished pasta. The fair way to do this would of course have been a double-blind tasting, with ravioli made with my standard Cook’s Illustrated recipe (2 cups flour, 3 eggs, a tablespoon or so of water) put up against the new competitor. But after the several hours and many eggs already expended in this effort, I didn’t have it in me. Given those many hours I of course really wanted this experiment to have been worth it, so take my observations with a grain of salt, but the texture of this pasta really did seem better than what I am used to. After cooking in just-less-than-boiling for three and a half minutes it was a silky, smooth al dente, with none of the eggy springiness I often get from fresh pasta.

The question that will be raised with all these Modernist Cuisine innovations is, is it worth it? Is the sometimes very marginal gain in quality worth the sometimes extra effort and expense, the high price tag of the book itself not least among these? Who would make this burger? Or in the case of this pasta, is it worth the sore arms and the egg-spenditure? After one attempt at this recipe, I’m not ready to decide, but I am at least intrigued enough to try it again.

Meyer Lemon & Artichoke Ravioli

Filling:

• 1 cup minced artichoke hearts (I used a 14oz can, drained)
• 1 cup whole milk ricotta
• ¾ cup finely grated parmesan cheese
• Zest and juice from one meyer lemon
• 1 egg
• 1 clove of garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 1 T minced chives
• Salt and pepper to taste

1 # of your favorite fresh pasta

Sauce:

• 3 T butter
• Juice and zest of one meyer lemon
• 1 c cream

Mix all the filling ingredients in a small bowl until evenly distributed and set aside. Roll out the pasta into thin sheets and cut out as many 2″ circles as you can (I used a drinking glass). Keep cut pasta covered to prevent it from drying out. Divide the cut rounds into two even groups (tops and bottoms) and lay the bottoms out across a work surface. Place a teaspoon of filling in the center of each round. Working with a few ravioli at a time, wet the edges of the bottom circle with water and cover the filling with a top. Pinch the edges of the two rounds together to seal.

For the sauce, melt the butter in a skillet and add the cream and lemon juice. Simmer for a few minutes to reduce slightly, then cover while preparing the pasta.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the pasta. Adjust heat so the water does not return to a rolling boil. Cook until pasta is al dente, about 3 minutes with the Modernist pasta recipe outlined above.

Carefully drain ravioli and toss with sauce and lemon zest. Serve hot, preferably in warmed bowls.