More vacation week cooking

Okay, this is the last of the catchup posts for now.

Adam come over for cocktails under the guise of dropping off his betta fish. I certainly had too many cocktails. After the first two rounds and the resulting round of manhattans, we warned Adam that he needed to stay for a while. So I made this banana bread!

Josh bought a bunch of bananas at Dekalb FM. But the first one he ate he said sucked. So he left them to brown on their own. I always put bananas and apples far from other fruit so they don't spoil the other fruit so they are usually in my way. I had four bananas. Two are still on the counter. So, I made a drunken banana bread (it was I who was drunk, not the bread, thankfully).

It still turned out rather beautiful. I gave half to Adam to bring with him and we ate some for breakfast the next day. I might have to make another one. What else will i do with those damned bananas on the counter?

I also made a queso fundido. It's not that I don't like vegetarians, but I just never really know what to make. But we had bought stuff for a queso fundido earlier this week, with the intent of making it with chorizo. But we had also seen that Rick Bayless had a recipe for a wild mushroom queso fundido.

I started off by soaking some dried porcinis and Flat Creek Lodge oyster mushrooms in just boiled water. I charred a poblano and left it to steam. I chopped up some onion and grated a mixture of asadero and oaxacan cheeses. It was around this time that I broke my medium grind microplane. I can't believe it!

When everything was ready, I sauteed it all together and added the cheese for a gooey mess of tastiness. Josh baked some flour tortillas (though he didn't wrap them in foil so they were a bit crunchy) and we ate it all up. Yum. And I don't think that was just the alcohol talking.

I had some leftover ricotta. I planned to make some ravioli for lunch. But when I took everything out, I had far less ricotta than I thought. So I decided to make some linguine instead.

I usually use Biba Caggiano's pasta dough recipe which calls for 2 cups of flour to 3 extra large eggs. I went with 1 cup of flour to 2 large eggs. It's almost the same thing. I mixed it up (after one mis-start in which I stopped being able to do math) and kneaded for eight minutes. Then I rolled it out to the 7 setting on my pasta machine and cut it into linguine size. I actually had enough pasta for two meals. I froze what we didn't cook.

Meanwhile, I heated up some of the nonna sauce and right before mixing, I added the ricotta to warm it up. I added the pasta and mixed it all together, then topped it off with grated pecorino. A very divine and silky lunch.

Well. I took the remaining pound of my pork belly and roasted it per the recipe in the Momofuku cookbook. Sadly, I forgot to alter the recipe based on the changed pork belly size (1 lb instead of 3) and it got a bit ... charred. I let it cool and then tried it though. It's charred flavor is actually not so bad, like you would have on some spare ribs. I think it is salvageable for the pork belly buns.

More pictures on that later.

Here
is a picture of that chimichurri that I made for last night's sirloin flap. As you can see, it's pretty damn garlicky. But good.