Real Food Has Curves

Here it is: our first-ever contest on REAL FOOD HAS CURVES, all in celebration of our new book, HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. We've got some pretty serious prizes.

Let me tell you about the person behind the first-place prize: Nancy Newsom. That's her behind the counter of her general store in Princeton, Kentucky, a store that's something out of a time past.

Nancy cures and smokes some of America's best artisanal hams: American country hams, sometimes mistakenly called Virginia hams or Smithfield hams, dry-cured wonders that hang in open barns for months, slowing curing like prosciutto crudo from Italy, but distinctly American, bold and full-flavored.

By the time the hams are ready to ship, they've dried out almost completely--but oh, what's left. Flavor compounds you wouldn't believe. Deep, complex flavors have developed in the meat--like the same molds in roquefort cheese. Some of the proteins have also bloomed, the same ones that make the milky, white spots in Parmigiano-Reggiano. You have to soak a country ham in water to reconstitute it and to get the salt out of the meat--all before you roast it. But holy cow! (Or pig!) Nancy's hams are a wonder indeed. So much so that she was the first American ever invited to speak at the international ham conference in Spain. (Yes, there is one.) And one of her hams is the only American ham ever invited to hang in Spain's ham museum. (Yes, there is one. If you know anything about Spain, you know they're serious about ham.)

Our first-place prize is a $75 online gift certificate for a Nancy Newsom ham--or for anything else you might want to order from her store. You might want to try her ridiculously good, two-year-aged prosciutto. You can have your selection drop-shipped right to your house. If you want to know more about her, check out her website here.

OK, with Nancy's country hams and her ridiculously quaint store in mind, here's the contest: names will be draw from a hat, raffle-style. How do you you get your name in the hat? Simple, like this:

You get your name in the hat ONE TIME if you take a picture of the book, HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER, and post it anywhere online (other than on this blog)--that is, facebook, twitter, your blog, etc.

You get your name in the hat TWO TIMES if you take a picture of YOURSELF with the book and post it anywhere else online: facebook, twitter, your blog, etc.

You get your name in the hat FOUR TIMES if you write a review of the book (be nice!) and post it to amazon, bn-dot-com, facebook, your blog, another blog, culinate-dot-com, seriouseats-dot-com, tumblr, etc.

At the maximum, your name can be in the hat SEVEN TIMES.

After you post your bit, send me a message via this blog. (The message box is just to the right in this column, down the page a bit. This way I'll have your email to contact you, but your email won't be in a public space, like on the comments thread to this post.) Make sure I know where your post is so I can find it.

The contest ends Sunday, 4/28. Bruce and I will draw the names and announce the winner on Monday morning, 4/29. Each person can only win one of the prizes.

And what can you win?

FIRST PLACE: a $75 (US) online gift certificate to Newsom's country hams. (That'll get you a 15-pound ham!)

SECOND PLACE: two of our ultimate, single-subject books, signed however you want them. I'll send you a list--Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book, Ultimate Potato Book, Ultimate Peanut Butter Book, etc.--and you'll tell me which two you want.

THIRD PLACE: a jar of Bruce's homemade strawberry preserves. 

So get obsessed. You could win the best of American artisanal products: a Nancy Newsom ham.

It's the last of the weeks of our ham tour on this blog. All to celebrate the publication of the new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER--which is now officially out and, as they say, available at fine stores everywhere. Or skip the stores and go online. Get yours here. While it's hot!

Today, we've got a pizza with prosciutto, one of a couple pies in the book--but one of about 25 recipes in a larger chapter that deals with all the European dry-cured hams, from jamón ibérico to sunca, from presunto to jambon d'ardennes, speck to jambon de vendée.

In some ways, these hams represent the very origins of pig curing. They are undoubtedly the ancestors of American country hams, like Virginia hams (and the Kentucky ones I found in the trip narrated in the book). And for many foodies, they're the sine qua non, the (as Aquinas called such a thing) first and final element.

Ha! A reference to Aquinas on a food blog. And a direct tie between medieval scholasticism and ham. My work is done here. Except for the recipe for today.

Click to read more ...

For the third week of our pre-tour of Bruce's and my new book, HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER, published in only two weeks, we're gonna do a real comfort-food classic, made with crazy-good, down-home, wet-cured ham (aka, deli ham--the stuff you get on sandwiches). You're in for a real scoop on the book with this post, because this luscious bit of comfort food is a great meal with a vinegary salad on the side--or as I had it this morning, a plate of "leftover" casserole, nuked in the microwave until hot. Which fortified me to go out and get rid of the seven (frickin') inches of snow we got yesterday.

So without much more ado, here's how to do the magic:

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Another week, another ham, all in celebration of our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER, right there on the right. It's published March 1st--and it's a stunner: beautiful design, lots of photographs, and (well) a bit of snark from yours truly. Let's just say at one point there's a bad case of maggots in a French charcuterie. (If that doesn't make you want to buy a cookbook, what will?)

But of course, it's not all gorgeousness. Recipe-testing is a mess. Our kitchen gets the industrial treatment on a daily basis. I can't tell you how many bottles of counter cleaner I go through in a month. Amazing. All this food, at a constant pace, with more books to come. Whew. No wonder I need a vacation. But not from ham.

This week, I'm writing about the second of the four types of ham: a fresh ham. Last week, we did the wet cure. But now we're taking on the most elemental way to make a ham: a big pork roast, not smoked, not cured in any way.

In the book, there are lots of recipes for leftovers, for smaller portions, but I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite dishes Bruce created: the ham cacciatore.

Click to read more ...

Welcome to ham month on the blog. Don't worry: it won't be ham all the time. But all month, I'm going to be featuring snippets from our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. Up top on this page sits the ham for today: a cured, braised one. And there to the right on the page sits the book itself. It's already available on amazon--and will be published in just a few weeks.

I can't wait until you see it! It's the first time I've written a book in first-person. All our other books are written as "we." This one's "I." It's my fractured, at-times hilarious take on how Bruce developed those 100 recipes, plus the story of how we raised our own pig, took it to slaughter, tried to cure one leg, failed, tried again, and learned more about ham than you can imagine, including tres chic European hams and down-home American country hams.

To quote from the introduction:

From that first fateful day when we started this project [you'll have to read about it--let's just say it involves the lethal combo of Eudora Welty and porn], Bruce and I have endured refrigerators full of ham leftovers, with hunks of pork being delivered by UPS every afternoon; I've been to northern Kentucky in the dead of freeze-butt winter; both of us have been to a ramshackle slaughterhouse in rural Massachusetts; and we have borne witness to an enormous toe-on pig leg in our back refrigerator, a swarm of maggots in a French charcuterie, and a group of chic, black-bedecked New Yorkers eating a quivering pile of ham in aspic.

So let's get our first sneak-peak recipe from the book: the way to make your own wet-cured ham.

Click to read more ...

Sometimes, life moves too fast. Like lately. We've had photo shoots aplenty at the house, as well as scouting runs for a coming series of cooking technique videos for weightwatchers.com--and have been in and out of New York City so many times in the past two weeks, I feel as if I live there. Dreydl's sick of the kennel. I'm sick of the car.

Slow-cookers are made for times like these. Dump stuff in, set the thing going, come back later, eat dinner. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

So I have no clue why these lovely appliances get such a bad rep. Once, we pitched a fancy magazine on a passel of slow-cooker recipes, and the uber-chic editor said, "Oh, sure, American housewives love that crap." (Well, she actually used another word for "crap." I'll leave it to your imagination.)

Well, Ms. Fancypants, call me an American housewife. I've always been partial to the slow cooker (aka, the crock pot).

Because of my years in Wisconsin for graduate school? No.

Because of my Baptist pot-luck supper roots? No. (By the way, we didn't believe in luck, so we called them "pot-providence suppers." We were nothing if not exacting.)

I love the slow cooker because it's really just a braising tool. And you know how I feel about braising.

The other day, amid a zillion things, Bruce made chili in ours. OK, ham chili. From leftovers from the shoot for the ham book. He used a fresh ham chunk (not smoked), but you could also use a pork loin. And he used fresh oregano. (Mr. Fancypants.) Dried would work just as well.

Here's the shtick:

Dump 2 chopped medium yellow onions, 2 pounds diced fresh ham (or pork loin), one 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes, 1 cup fat-free chicken broth, 2 tablespoons ancho chile powder, 2 tablespoons pasilla powder, 2 tablespoons New Mexican red chile powder, 2 tablespoons minced oregano leaves (or 1 tablespoon dried oregano), 1 tablespoon ground cumin, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 3 minced garlic cloves into 5- or 6-quart slow cooker. Stir it all together, put the lid in place, and cook on low for 4 hours.

What if you don't have all those chile powders? You can find ancho chile powder in almost all supermarkets. Then you can substitute other chile powders, even just the standard stuff--but if you do, cut out the ground cumin since the standard chile powder has cumin already in the mix.

And you know the secret to slow-cooker success, right? Don't open the thing. Every time you open the lid, you need to add about 30 minutes to the cooking time. Slow-cookers work because of the combination of ambient humidity and low heat. That is, a braise. So just leave it be.

After 4 hours, stir in two 15-ounce cans drained and rinsed pink beans. My Texas kin will now sit up in consternation because "if you know beans about chili, you know chili doesn't have beans." OK, not traditionally. But beans add a little heft and tooth to a slow-cooker version. So go ahead and taunt me with your disapproval. As an American housewife, I'm pretty tough.

And that's dinner. No-brainer, right? And so good. We like to serve it with pickled jalapeño rings and sweet pickle relish atop. Oh, yeah, and beer. Lots of cold beer. Especially when life is moving too fast.