Menus from an Orchard Table

This has got to be my favorite recipe in this book so far. I’m sure it’s a combination of preparation and cooking method for this particular recipe, and getting used to the style of the book as a whole, but it came together perfectly.

It’s also one of the few recipes in which the mirepoix (there go those fancy French words again! It just refers to the mixture of onion, carrots and celery that form the base of a dish) is still part of the final dish, as opposed to strained out and tossed away after their flavor has been extracted. Neil especially likes this part, since throwing out food (even when it’s flavoring agents that have done their job and are just soggy shells of their former selves) always irks him.

We planned from the outset to make the ragù preparation of this dish, and the vegetables made an awesome textural addition to the seared, then oven-braised meat.

The finished meat came off the bones and shredded perfectly, and the sauce was absolutely divine. We made a quick batch of pasta while we were waiting for the braise to cook, and our fresh noodles with the rich sauce was a flawless execution of rainy day (which it was) comfort food.

If we know eachother (or if we don’t, and you’d like to meet), bring over a bottle of red and an oxtail any time. I’d make this again in a heartbeat.

---

Naramata Bench Syrah Braised Oxtails – page 200

Just in time for Easter, I figured I’d try out one of the rabbit recipes from this book. I’ve always heard that rabbit works a lot like chicken in terms of cooking function, and the recipe actually states you can use a chicken if you can’t find rabbit where you are.

(Jen’s tip: the book doesn’t mention this, but if you use a chicken, use the breasts as you would the loins, but cut the breast halves in half again lengthwise. Double the amount of pancetta and end up with four rolls instead of two.)

Turns out everything I’d heard was correct, the rabbit meat was very similar in texture and colour to chicken, and the anatomy isn’t entirely unfamiliar. The “wings” attach a little differently, and instead of breasts on the front, there are loins running down the spine to take off.

But the rabbit came with an added bonus: giblets! I haven’t seen a chicken with giblets of any sort for a long time, so to open up the carcass and find those little chef’s treats inside was… well… a treat!

Good thing too. We fried them up with some thyme, LOTS of butter and finished them with lemon juice while everything else was cooking. The sustenance was really welcome, since this recipe took FOREVER.

The gist of the preparation is to sear, then braise the rabbit limbs, and at the same time to make a short stock with the carcass. Near the end of the cooking process, wrap the loins in pancetta and cook those off. Finish everything off by combining the braising liquid with the stock, and reduce the hell out of those. Add the crème and mustard (among other things) and reduce again.

I left about 30 minutes to complete all the reduction steps, because I am clearly not smart enough for this particular recipe. I was left with fully 4 litres of liquid to reduce, none of which could be reduced at a full rolling-boil without breaking it. All told, the entire reduction process took about 2.5 hours. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!

We were actually so hungry that I forgot about taking pictures of the sauce, but I did manage a shot of the final plate, with the rabbit & sauce over some roasted root vegetables.

We didn’t really feel like this recipe was “worth waiting for” considering the colossal cock-up on the timing, but if you leave yourself enough time for all the reducing, the rabbit is a really delicious alternative to chicken. I’ll definitely make rabbit again, though I’ll read the sauce recipe a little more carefully next time.

---

Braised Rabbit with Crème Fraîche, Dijon and Thyme – page 220

Pork Belly is one of those dishes I’m always surprised by. I never think to order it in restaurants, then end up drooling over it on someone else’s plate (and if that someone else is the husband, stealing bites). Thankfully, the husband was flipping through this book as I was looking for the next recipe to make, and with his love of Pork Belly, he zeroed in on this fantastic dish.

This one starts with a great, Asian-inspired spice rub, and sits on a tray in the fridge overnight as the salt draws any excess moisture out of the meat and the spices infuse the pork belly with flavour. Or at least, that’s the ideal scenario. We ended up out late the night before Pork Belly Day, so I did the rub/fridge thing in the morning for about 6 hours worth of absorbing. Were I to do this one again, I’d be keen to let it go overnight – I think the flavour would be a lot more intense.

Not that it was any sort of disappointment in the flavour department. After rendering the fat side of the pork belly until it’s got a good, golden colour on it, it’s then braised in a mix of vegetables that’ve been sauteed in the rendered fat from the initial crisping, white wine, stock and apple juice.

I’d read of the sear/braise/sear technique for making super crispy chicken thighs in a recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated, so was pretty interested in seeing how a practical application would work. Turns out, quite well!

Once they come out of the braise, the pork bellies are browned again to crisp up all the edges. We served them on a bed of braised red cabbage.

Mine turned out a bit darker and crustier than the golden, translucent fat-layer shown in the picture in the book (this book is pretty short on photos of the recipes, for those to whom that kind of thing’s important), but it was damn good nonetheless. Definitely a keeper.

---

Cirspy Pork Belly Braised in Joie’s Orchard Apple Juice – page 214
[ad]

I wanted to try something that seemed not too daunting for my first real foray into cooking recipes from this book. For me, that means working with ingredients I understand. I’m well familiar with pork loin and am in the middle of a serious late-winter love-affair with fennel, so this recipe seemed like a perfect place to start.

The first challenge with this recipe was scaling it down to a serving size that makes sense for the two of us. The recipe is based on making enough for eight, but I figured instead of a 3lb pork loin, I’d go for a smaller tenderloin and stuff that with the recommended mix.

After trussing and searing the pork tenderloin, it went into the oven to finish cooking through. And I got started on the real star of this dish (for me at least), the fennel sauce.

Blanching and blending fennel into a cream sauce and adding it to the roast juices to make up a sauce for over the dish led to gravy the likes of which I’ve never encountered. It was INCREDIBLE. I never think to make a gravy or pan sauce by putting anything other than a flavourless starch-based thickener (a roux or corn starch slurry) into drippings.

This is also the only part of the recipe where I wished I’d used the cut of meat originally called for. Tenderloin is so lean that there weren’t a lot of drippings to go around. We’re total sauce junkies, so any extra drippings to add more flavour would’ve just been, well, gravy. Literally.

All around though, it was an auspicious start to cooking through this book. We served it with the suggested Moorish Rice Pilaf and a simple fennel salad we’ve been making a lot of lately.

---

Spanish Roast Pork Loin in Fennel Sauce – Page 211