Coppa



The Houston restaurant & bar scene seems to ebb & flow, especially along the Washington Avenue corridor, so it peaked our interest when a local hit restaurant, Catalan, closed and in its space opened a new Italian restaurant named Coppa.

As you can see in the above picture, the outside space at Coppa is quite enticing to sit outside and sip wine; however, despite 80 some odds days without rain and being in the middle of a drought, Houston is currently under siege by swarms of Flood Water Mosquitoes, which have the capability to bite through fabric, thus rendering patios off-limits. 

The dining room of Coppa is an interesting cross between an ancient Italian villa, full of stone walls & chandlers, and a "Euro-Club," full of obnoxious pastel colors and eccentric music. 

Dining room asthetics aside, the service and food at Coppa was simply outstanding!  Giving credit where credit is due, Chef Brandi Key is the culinary rockstar behind the recent success of Coppa!

Brandi came to Coppa after a stint as the Head of Reserach & Development for the Pappas Restaurant Group, which owns a variety of ethnic-themed restaurants that each include Pappa in the name (Pappadeaux, Pappas BBQ, Pappacitos).  According to an article in the local paper, Brandi won the job based on her Pasta Carbonara, a peppery pasta with pork & egg.

We kicked off our meal with a pair of glasses of Pinot Noir & an order of crispy chick peas, and were pleasantly surprised with generous pours, a nice touch by a new restaurant trying to build a clientele!

The chick peas came out dusted with a heavy coating of a good quality paprika & were mixed with fried sage leaves.  The dish was only ok.  However, our other appetizer, the octopus carpaccio (yes, you read that right) more than made up for the chick peas.!

I personally really like the flavors of octopus, and typically only see it a Mexican seafood cocktail, so octopus carpaccio caught us both by surprise & left us wondering what it would look like.  We were presented with a razor thin piece of octopus covered with argula, chopped green olives & roasted red peppers, fingerling potatoes (that were almost as amazing as the octopus), and lightly dressed in a lemon-olive oil dressing. 

The dish was a home run, tender and balanced well with just a enough acid and salt.  I could have made a meal out of a bowl of argula topped with the octopus and dressing!



Liz went with the Capellini, angel hair pasta dressed with garlic olive oil, crushed tomato, & basil.  On the menu I'm betting the dish gets overlooked due to it's simplicity, but it was far and away the best dish of the night!  I've never had tomatoes, cooked tomatoes for that matter, at a restaurant, that tasted like they came out of a garden hours before they ended up in the dish! 

Hearing that the Head Chef won her spot based on her Pasta Carbonara, I had to try it.  I was served a dish of pasta topped with minced salami, black pepper, shredded Parmesan cheese, and egg yolk on top; on the side was a saucer of cream sauce.  The dish was a decedent delight!  Contrary to it's name, the dish was pretty mild, and the egg yolk really helped to emulsify all the flavors together, and somehow, unbeknown to me, the dish, complete with such rich ingredients, was not heavy!

The beauty about pasta is there almost always some to take home!  And with a to go bag in hand, we departed a restaruant that we'll be sure to head back to in the near future!

Pumpkin Seeds

I noted in my previous post on pumpkin soup that the Cinderella pumpkin was really a disappointment in terms of being a cooking pumpkin; however, I still thought it would be worth a shot at making roasted pumpkin seeds.  The taste of the seeds was sub-par due to the type of seed, but thought I would share the process of roasting pumpkin seeds anyways!

We started by separating the seeds from the pumpkin innards by submersing the seeds and guts in a mixing bowl of water and sorting by hand.  We then placed the seeds between paper towels to dry for 30 minutes.  This method gets the job done, but it's a bit of a pain to pick the seeds off the paper towels.

Once the seeds were dried and clean, we transferred them to a sil-pad on top of a sheet pan and roasted them in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

After the seeds were done roasting, we tossed them with ground pepper, kosher salt, and smoked paprika.  Again, the flavor and roasting of the seeds came out great, but the actual taste and chew of the seed, being from a lackluster cooking pumpkin, was not great.  So when you're ready to roast pumpkin seeds, make sure you pick up a jack-o-latern pumpkin!

 



Pumpkin Soup

My wife will attest that while my mechnical apltitude is relatively limited, like most red-blooded American men, I love a task that involves using different tools & thinking outside of the box; admittingly, this typically ends in a good final product, but a larger clean-up!

When we were home in Illinois a couple of weeks ago, I was thumbing through a Bon Appetit magazine and came across a recipe for pumpkin soup created by roasting a whole pumpkin in the oven. Now, I like pumpkin/squash soups, but the idea of putting a pumpkin in the oven put me over the edge!  And, as luck should have it, Central Market, our favorite Houston grocery store, happened to have Cinderella pumpkins (the type of cooking pumpkin the recipe called for) available.

All pumpkins are not created equally; some pumpkins, especially field pumpkins, aka jack-o-laterns, are best for carving & roasting their seeds.  Other pumpkins, such as sugar or pie pumpkins, are great for cooking.  Cinderella pumpkins are listed in the Bon Appetit recipe and noted as a suitable cooking pumpkin; however, we found out at the conclusion of our cooking process, the Cinderella pumpkin is not all that tasty of a cooking pumpkin.  Low and behold, the Chicago Tribune published an article 24 hours after we finished cooking noting how Cinderella pumpkins were rather bland & watery.

Chicago Tribune Pumpkin Article

Watery & bland pumpkin aside, we did pick out a nice pumpkin to work with....

The first step of the pumpkin soup process is just like carving a pumpkin-cut a lid into the pumpkin and remove the seeds and membrane.

With the seeds and goop out of the pumpkin, I put on my Paula Deen mask & armed myself with half a stick of unsalted "butta" and rubbed the inner the flesh with the stick of butter until the stick was no more.

The next steps in the pumpkin prep process include seasoning the inside of the pumpkin with salt, pepper, and sweet Hungarian paprika.  The recipe calls for a spice by the name of piment d'Espelette, a French chili powder, but we keep it simple and practical in our kitchen!

After the spices, 1 cup of bread crumbs and 1 cup of grated Gruyère cheese (1 cup less than called for) went into the pumpkin.  When it comes to bread crumbs, I think the store bought kind is garbage, and it's so easy to make your own, so we did just that!  We toasted 2 slices of good sourdough bread in the oven at 350 degrees until it was crispy & dried out and then pureed it in our food processor.  Admittingly, I think I should have made the bread crumbs finer, but they tasted and worked well!

Before the pumpkin went into a 300 degree oven, we filled it with 7 cups of chicken broth, leaving 3 inches between the top and the "water line" and capped the pumpkin with its top.  The pumpkin baked with its lid on for 1 hour before baking for another hour with the lid off.

After the pumpkin was done roasting, our process took an Ad Hoc spin from the recipe.  The recipe calls for the broth to be laddled into a serving bowl and served with a dollop of pumpkin flesh in the middle.  While it may look posh in a magazine, it didn't seem practical nor appetizing to us, so we drained the broth from the pumpkin, and cut the pumpkin into sections and scrapped the flesh from the walls before we combined the two in a sauce pan.

I began this post talking about my tool box being pretty empty, but one tool in my kitchen tool box that I greatly value is our immersion (or stick) blender.  We combined the scraped pumpkin &maybe a 1/2 cup of pumpkin broth at most and over low heat, hit it with the immersion blender until we achieved a smooth consistency, about 40 seconds.

Now that we had the consistency down, addressing the taste was the next step!  Wanting to add depth to the soup, we added 1/2 teaspoon of cayene pepper and an 1/8 cup of brown sugar for a sweet start and a spicy finish. 

Served with a piece of good sourdough bread, the soup proved to be a quality Fall meal, despite the outside temperature hovering at 85 degrees.



Drew's Taste of Central Illinois

If you can't tell by now, I love food, especially fresh food from the garden, small farm, and the home kitchen.  But like most people, I have a dark side, and when home I'm home in Central Illinois, I cross over to it.   My family shakes their heads at me, but I love two fast food dishes semi-specific to the Central IL area.  By no means are these dishes made with the freshest ingredients by the hands of an accomplished chef, but it's a taste of home to me!

My main guilty pleasure is Steak-N-Shake chili.  While most people would argue it looks and tastes like a cappuccino brown roux, to me it's a heaven in a bowl!  Little known fact, there's actually no tomatoes in the chili!  Paired with a vanilla Diet Coke, there's no better pseudo-meal in town.

The above treasure is a Gondola sandwich from Avanti's restaurant, nestled on the Illinois State University campus in Normal, IL.  If you look closely at the cross section, you'll see this sandwich consists of processed American cheese, limp iceberg lettuce, ham, and salami-far from a gourmet meal, right?  WRONG!  The "Go You Red Bird" Nation will agree with me, it's just the opposite.  What makes the sandwich is the bread, soft and sweet.  My second favorite Avanti's meal is a loaf of bread and their meat sauce.  

Want to make my day?  Send me a sandwich and a bowl of chili!  Or a puppy!

P is for Pork (Loin & Shoulder)

No Fall season in Central Illinois is complete without a visit to Curtis Orchard, but no visit home to Champaign is complete without a visit to the University of Illinois Meat Science Laboratory.  Period.

On our last visit home E-Meree & J-Meree went on my behalf and came home with a 4 pound center cut pork loin and a 5 pound pork shoulder.  Buying this at a chain grocery store would cost approx. $25 and the meat would come from a factory farm, thus yielding a lower quality of meat.  At the meat store:  $16 for a much higher quality product!

With a day off before the Illinois-Ohio State game, Friday was cooking day!  We started with a boneless Boston Butt pork shoulder in preparation for pulled pork sandwiches for our tailgate on Saturday.  

The shoulder got a quick rinse and pat down while resting 30 minutes to come to room temperature.  As the meat sat, I started making a spice rub with equal parts kosher salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, thyme, oregano, and cumin.  When the meat went into the pan, it got drenched with a 1/4 cup of Curtis Orchard's apple cider.

Speaking of spices, I wanted to highlight an alternative to the spice cabinet.  As opposed to the traditional spice cabinet, I thought Judith's idea of putting spices in a drawer to be a pretty novel idea (read:  Martha Stewart inspired), but in reality, it makes spice selection quicker and easier.

The pork shoulder went into a 200 degree oven for a little over six hours in a covered roasting pan; the meat is done when it falls apart with a fork.

When the pork cooled, I reserved the pan juices before I chopped into fine shreds.  Using a gravy separator, we were able to separate the fat from the meat juice.  

Using a gravy separator is pretty easy.  One simply pours pan juices straight into the separator over the vessel's mesh top.  When the liquid cools, gently pour off the yellow fat at the tip of the spout.   At this point the fat will have separated from the juice and floated to the top of the vessel.  Finally, just pour the juice into the your desired location, stopping before the fat gets to the bottom.

With the arrival of our iPhone4Ses just 4 hours before, Ad Hoc has now has video capability.  Here's our first attempt at a video of how to separate fat from juice using a gravy separator.  Just click the link below!

YouTube Video

After the meat was shredded, I poured the juice over meat and and wrapped the pan in foil.  The next day we topped it with Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce and stirred it all up!  The pork shoulder was moist & tender and as always, a hit at the tailgate!

While the pork shoulder occupied the oven (no, the pork was not protesting Corporate America in an ironic set of knock-off Ray-Bans), it was time to start the pork loin for dinner.  Since the spice worked so well on the pork shoulder, we used it again on the pork loin, first letting it rest until coming to room temperature before covering it with spices.

With the oven tied up & such a nice Central IL night, the pork loin found its way to the grill.  We pre-heated the grill with all 4 burners on high and before the pork went on, we hit the grates with Pam cooking spray and turned the heat down to medium high.  

We seared the pork on all four sides before turning off one of the burners and sliding the pork half way over that area. 

The pork cooked for about 30 minutes more until it reached an internal temperature of 125 degrees.  We pulled the pork (pun intended) and let it rest under a loose foil tent for ten minutes until the juices settled internally and the thermometer read 135 degrees.

The pork came out great and paired nicely with rainbow chard from the garden and homemade mashed potatoes, and with that, the prep for a wonderful Central IL dinner came to a close!

Curtis Orchard

Answer:  This is a quintessential activity key to having a complete Fall season in Champaign.

Question:  What is a visit to Curtis Orchard?

You don't have to be a Jeopardy contestant to know that a visit to the Curtis Orchard apple & pumpkin farm is a key piece of a successful Fall season in Central Illinois.  

Nestled in the Southwest corner of Champaign County where Champaign meets Savoy, Curtis Orchard is an 80 acre working farm complete with 4,500 apple trees, a 20 acre pumpkin patch, a 6,000 square foot country store & bakery, and a petting zoo that houses goats who like to re-enact the childhood tale Billy Goat's Gruff by climbing up a goat bridge all day long (it's the little things in life that make it great, right ;) ).  

In my humble opinion, there are multiple reason to go to Curtis Orchard, but only 3 really matter:

• Crisp, juicy honey crisp apples
• The world's greatest unfermented apple cider
• Pillowy-soft apple donuts

Our relatively quick visit to Curtis Orchard yielded the best apples I have ever had in my life-you could hear the crunch as you bit into a slice & the flesh was equal parts sweet and tart.

SO, if you're out & about in Champaign County on a clear, sunny day, find your way out to Curtis Orchard and have an apple for me!

Jambalaya

After 15 months of flying back & forth between Houston & New Orleans, I sometimes find myself craving cajun/creole food on the weekends, so when the craving hit last Saturday, just 3 days after my return from a business trip to NOLA, I was one step ahead of the game with a pound a of andouille sausage and primed to make Jambalaya!

Our jambalaya started with us slicing our 1 pound link of sausage into 2 equal halves, as we only need 1/2 pound for our recipe.  The other half of the link got thrown into a vacuum bag and sealed using our Food Saver machine-a great investment and waste-avoider!  We have sealed and frozen everything from meat to bread to peaches.

Our 1/2 pound of sausage and 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts cooked earlier in the week, were the recipients of a dice that resulted in 1/2 inch pieces of meat.

While on the topic of chopping, allow me to introduce you to the Cajun Holy Trinity & the Pope!

All over Louisiana restaurants, home kitchens, and billboards advertising Louisiana grocery stores, the combination of diced green pepper, diced celery, and diced white onion is used as the base of virtually every dish.  The French call diced celery, diced white onion, and diced carrots a mirepoix, and since so much of Cajun/Creole cooking is rooted in French technique, it makes sense that the Holy Trinity mirrors the mirepoix, but making it regional, the addition of green bell pepper and the subtraction of carrots takes place.  Another local addition is garlic, and since there's a religious theme already going, the locals call garlic "The Pope" because a shelled clove of garlic mirrors the hat worn by the Pope.


After smashing & mincing our garlic, we heated 4 T. of EVOO in our Le Creuset dutch oven and sauteed our veggies for approx. 7 minutes over medium high heat, stirring pretty regularly.  While the veggies cooked, we mixed our chopped meat with 2 T. of thyme, 2 T. of onion powder, 2 T. of oregano, 2 T. of garlic powder, 2 T. of black pepper, 1 T. of cayenne powder, and 2 T. of paprika.

At the 7 minute mark, we added to the pot a can of diced tomatoes, 4 bay leaves, and a teaspoon each of hot sauce and worcestershire sauce and stirred the mixture of over medium heat for a couple of minutes.

Once the new ingredients were well mixed in, we dumped in 3/4 cup of brown, non-instant rice and slowly added in 3 cups of chicken broth, stirring constantly.  Once the all the broth was in, let the mixture cook over medium heat for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, but covered the pot after 10 minutes in an effort to thicken the mix.

At this point the rice was tender, and we added the meat to the pot and cooked it over medium low heat for 10 minutes.

The final dish was warm and flavorful, but not at all overly spicy given all of the spices that went into the dish.  The jambalaya also kept well in the refrigerator and made for a couple of easy week night suppers!


While I'll never claim to be K-Paul or Emeril, who's recipe served as the base for our dish, it's nice to know that we can always bring a taste of Louisiana to our kitchen!