Apple Tart at Home

For breakfast (and lunch...), I noshed on a homemade apple tart, with some jasmine green tea to drink.

I baked it yesterday, just for fun. The recipe's super-easy, even though I'd never made pâte brisée before. I like that the tart doesn't contain anything else (looking at you, cinnamon) to distract from the simple apple flavor and rich, not-too-sweet crust.

The recipe calls for individual "tartelettes", and peeled apples, which I modified for prettiness. Also, remember all that lard? Perfect for adding a little extra depth to the apples. I replaced a bit of the butter with lard in cooking the apples; if you know it's there, you'll taste it, but it didn't scream PORK!

Finally, an equipment suggestion: I do not own a pizza peel, and always mourn this fact. But I don't have the space for an adequately-sized one, and it's sort of a ridiculous purchase, unless you have a wood-fired oven or something. If I'm making pizza, I heat up the pizza stone in the oven, then pull it out and build the pizza on the warm stone. With fragile tarts, I can't do that, and transferring them can be fraught with disaster. I solved this by sprinkling a wooden cutting board with cornmeal, building the tart there, and slipping it onto the pizza stone as if it were a peel.

Odd Ingredient du Jour: Lard

So, for someone who likes food a whole lot, I'm not really into the Cult of Pig that's hit the food world in the last few years. I like my jamón, I like proscuitto di San Daniele, I madly love these people. But I maybe cook bacon once a year. It's ok, but I could take it or leave it. Especially since lamb bacon is way tastier.

In any case, Jon decided to cook traditional Hungarian goulash last night. The recipe called for the meat to be browned in a few tablespoons of lard or shortening, and we had neither. The sensible thing would've been to buy that scary shelf-stabilized lard, or to buy a can of Crisco, or just use butter or oil. Or maybe even to head to the Dupont Farmers' Market and hope Red Apron Butcher had some posh lard on hand. Me being me, however, this went in a different direction.

That's two or three pounds of fat, skin, and god-knows-what the local Whole Foods nicely scraped up for me from their butchering remnants.

I knew my kindred spirit Chichi Wang over at Serious Eats had done a tutorial on rendering lard a few years back, so I figured it was manageable enough. Of course, I wasn't starting with a nice, pretty chunk of leaf lard, so I just loosely followed her procedure and hoped for the best.

First, I chopped that pile of pig into approximately 1" chunks. Next time, I'd dice them to get a faster render and maybe even some useful cracklins. The fat was still pretty cold from the butcher's cooler, but if I were dicing, I'd probably pop them in the freezer for awhile to make the process easier and less messy.

Then I tossed them in my large (4 quart?) dutch oven, and added 1/4 cup of water. The water's just there to help the fat evenly heat, and to prevent scorching at the beginning.

The tutorial says to start it over very low heat, covered, for the first ten minutes. Presumably this is to help it heat up quickly and evenly, but mine was over such low heat (stupid new apartment burners) that nothing really happened. I removed the lid and kept heating, stirring regularly.

10 minutes.

15 minutes.

20 minutes.

75 minutes.

105 minutes.

The whole process seemed to take forever. Especially between the 20 and 75 minute photos, change was very incremental and slow, to the degree I wondered if it was working at all. The important thing to remember is very low heat, at least until it has mostly melted. This yields a nice golden fat, without browning or developing off-flavors.

I quit at about two hours, though I could've gone longer and maybe yielded some cracklins. At that point, I (precariously) tipped everything through a mesh strainer into a measuring cup, then into jars for storage.

It's unfortunately a messy business.

It cooled to a nice creamy white, and made Jon's goulash extra-delicious. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the rest of it...

Muy Sabroso: Restaurante La Mexicana

For dinner, I had chicken enchiladas in mole sauce with refried beans and limeade. And then some ice cream.

Dinner was at La Mexicana in Montrose.

The mole sauce was nice, probably homemade. Moles vary a lot from one restaurant or recipe to the next, so it's always interesting to try them. In general, it's a thick brown sauce made of several kinds of chili peppers, ground nuts or seeds, and unsweetened chocolate. Theirs was a little chunkier than most, with deep savory flavors- I want to say "musty", but I mean that in a good, forest-y sort of way- and a nutty undertone that may have come from peanut oil or ground walnuts. The sauce overshadowed the shredded chicken inside the tortillas, but mole is usually about the sauce rather than the carrier protein anyway. Their beans were creamy and probably full of lard- delicious.

After dinner, we headed to Amy's Ice Cream for dessert. I had some incredibly good lavender-honey ice cream earlier this week somewhere else, so was interested in their more unusual flavors. I sampled their avocado ice cream, but it was utterly strange. It had an off-putting bitter aftertaste. I'd try it again, but it might be better mixed with another flavor. I ended up getting half rose, half Shiner ice cream. The rose was as flowery and over-the-top as you'd expect, but it was very creamy, almost custardy, and worked really well. Amy's uses real beer to make the Shiner ice cream, so the interaction between frozen alcohol crystals and frozen milkfat gave the whole thing a grainy, sandy, sorbet-like texture. The Shiner flavor didn't come through very well, so it ended up tasting like slightly caramel-flavored frozen milk. I enjoy interesting textures in my food, and the flavor wasn't bad, so I liked it anyway.

Greasy Breakfast Tacos- yum.

For breakfast, I had a barbacoa taco and a potato and cheese taco. They were very good. The accompanying coffee, however, was awful.

We went to Villa Arcos, a little red shack of a restaurant on the other side of the tracks close to downtown. It is in the same neighborhood as the original Ninfa's, Houston's most famous homegrown Mexican-American food. Ninfa's has strayed into Tex-Mex yuckiness as it has franchised out, which is why I hesitate to call it Mexican food. The above pic is of Ninfa's, but it gives you a vague idea of the atmosphere. Villa Arcos is known for the best breakfast tacos in Houston. Having visited, I know their secret- lard. So much lard that their flour tortillas are almost translucent. I love my tortillas de maiz, but these were, by far, the best flour tortillas I've ever had. The barbacoa was heavily seasoned, kind of greasy, and very delicious. The accompanying salsa verde was painfully spicy but full-flavored, and complemented the greasiness nicely. My only complaint was the cheese on the second taco- it was a yellow cheese that failed to melt well, and remained rubbery and flavorless. The potatoes were smushy rather than crispy, but it turned out to be an asset to the overall texture.

The other great thing about our journey to the other side of town is that we discovered a strange, completely out of place beer garden down the street. I didn't get enough of a look to determine if it's really a beer garden or just a creatively named Mexican bar with a little side yard, but it's definitely worth looking into.