Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday, period.

Who can’t warm-up to a holiday where we stuff food inside of food and celebrate? Even the bird gets fat before you consume it. This year we decided to put pig inside of pig as a light appetizer and drop a 13 pound bird into 4 gallons of peanut oil (for a crispy outside and tender loving goodness inside) as our main course accompanied by the usual suspects, mashers, sour-apple stuffing, cranberry sauce, and lots of friends. Big shout to all those who joined, we love having you at the Mesa (and Al you are always welcome to crash on the couch).

Inspired by some great American BBQ’ers over at BBQ addicts, I had to build my own Bacon Explosion. Besides, how does one top the BFTE? Last year’s pulled pork followed by a Turducken by Dominic and Joao was a two-day event complete with Dr. Furia’s from scratch Sweet Potato (“This must be where pies go when they die”) Pie, Dr. Hofheinz’s supra-dense sour dough bread, and an engagement announcement from our favorite expatriates Markus and Katya (now helping McKinsey take over the world and educating all those Germans on American Real Estate).

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At the farmers market on tuesday I found $5/lbs head-on gigantor-prawns and Erin, a college friend of mine.  I got two pounds from the former, an RSVP from the latter, a few heads of garlic, and headed straight home!

My mom used to make this spectacularly showy and delicious dish as an appetizer for parties and such.  With sufficiently many, it made a great light (ha!) dinner along with some tabbouleh we made for lunches during the week.

This meal has an interesting mathematical property, there have to be more heads of garlic than heads to feed, or else there’s just not enough to go around.  I actually got comments the next day that I smelled like garlic…  We joke about this around the house, but apparently it actually happens.

The recipe couldn’t be simpler, fry some (1.5 heads per head) garlic (don’t burn it, please…) in peanut oil, coat the shrimp in corn starch and fry them.  Toss it all together with some salt, and enjoy the whole damn animal.  Yes, you eat the eyeballs, and the juicy, creamy gutsies.

Make sure you don’t get shot in the eye with the peanut oil!

We loved having Erin’s company, and it was cool to have someone dive into a big crunchy sea-creature with as little hesitation and as much enjoyment as Erik and I.  She also helped out with the final plate-up and photography.  Here’s her rendition:

The tabbouleh & hummus are something special as well, and we’ll get a full writeup of that later.

As far as quantities, we did the following:

• 3 heads garlic, chopped finely
• 1/3 cup peanut oil for frying
• 1 lb head-on shrimp with the pokey nose cut off
• A lot of corn starch
• 1 tablespoon salt

Fry garlic slowly separately, fry prawns coated in corn starch pretty hard in more oil, toss together with salt and garlic, EAT!

Alex first made this meal for me on a rough night in my love life, and it blew my mind.  It’s one of those non-guilty pleasures (I don’t believe in guilt) that I really want to make a few times a month.  I’ve made it myself just twice, and every time it gets better.  The flavor is so complex, intense, and round that I have no choice but to experience it fully in the moment.  It was a great choice on Alex’s part to clear my head. The key is having the mix of meat, still steaming, with chocolatey-spicy-sweet molé, and mellow beans.  Ideally, I’d love to make everything myself from scratch, but hey, I don’t really want to start growing corn and raising cattle!

I’ve made it with a variety of different molé bases, but the most recent one took the cake.  It’s a paste sold (exclusively?) at Santa Cruz market in Santa Barbara, but you can probably find it most anywhere.  What you’re looking for is a consistent, thick, black paste that reeks of chocolate and chili.  If it’s covered in oil, or has a chalky, chunky texture, you’re headed for mixing and flavor disaster.  Eventually, I’ll make my own.  Until then, I’ll stick to it.

The sauce is super simple, start with (1 or 2) caramelized onions (duh), and add the molé paste (1 cup).  Slowly add RFCS and water until it’s a good consistency (probably 2-3 cups or more).  Throw in a few handfuls of sultanas and let the whole thing simmer for a while.  At the very end, slice up some corn tortillas, and throw those in.  I made my own, and they were absolutely wonderful, but that’s another story.  Sprinkle some cilantro on top for garnish and a friendly fresh flavor.

Marinate the meat in 1 part lime/lemon juice, 2 parts hard alcohol (I used bacardi rum), and 4 cloves crushed garlic for every lemon.  Let it sit for at least an hour in the fridge.  Grill it nice and hot, so it’s still rare, but has a smokey, good-natured grill texture to it.

The beans are, well, cooked pintos.  Do ‘em from a can, or do ‘em for real.  I un-canned them, this time!  I like to throw in some caramelized celery for good measure.

This one I can barely stop eating…

3-day Beef Stroganoff (Adapted from ad hoc)

With Dan out Adventure Racing the world in “NorCal”, and me plowing through my Green Chile Stock pile at home I was on a mission for some culinary inspiration… I tried tapping my sister, Sheila, Executive chef at Jax Fish House. Unfortunately, the chef was busy so I ventured into cookbook land. I remembered reading an LA times article reviewing Thomas Keller’s new cookbook, so I cruised on over to Chaucer’s Bookstore (my local stand-in for the Tattered Cover) and threw down. The book is super dope, and in pretty plain language serves up serious doses of humble-pie. It took me 3 days to execute the Braised Beef Stroganoff. A day convincing my butcher to cut me some boneless beef chuck (as recommended by T. Keller) and in the end I bought the bone-in short ribs, another day braising my beef and forgetting to start culturing my Creme Fraiche, and another day cutting parchment paper lids and cheesecloth sachets. A sense of satisfaction flowed over me as we enjoyed this meal, but I still feel like I have a lot to learn.

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Ingredients:

• lb of ground Buff
• blue cheese
• bacon
• bacon grease
• yellow onion
• crimini mushrooms
• Red wine (Dolcetto)
• Heirloom tomato
• Arugula
• Fresh Figs
• Walnut Oil
• Guacomole + chips  while you cook

Fry up bacon, keep grease. Fry onions in bacon grease. Crumble blue cheese in raw buff meat. Pour fried onions into buff meat. Make patties. Grill. Toast buns.

For the salad: Arugula + Figs + Walnut Oil +Olive Oil + yellow onions + S&P