My local big box store stocks some good stuff, and I've been eyeing some good looking beef heart for the past few weeks.  Yesterday I took the plunge and bought a pound and change of beef heart.

After trimming the fat and silver skin I sliced it into about a 1/2-1/4 inch thick pieces and placed it in a marinade.

My beef heart pieces sat overnight in olive oil, garlic and chili paste.  The next afternoon I took a few pieces out of the marinade, heated a pan with some oil and seared the heart until just cooked through.  Absolutely delicious.

Beef heart is very lean, and does very well with quick hot cooking.  Grilling beef heat over hot coals or even wood is a very classic South American way of preparing it, and would be a great way of cooking this dish.

The pound-and-change of meat I bought turned out to be quite a bit of food, and I've eaten it two different ways so fat today (yes, yes, I know).  Seared and over a lightly dressed salad, and in a perfect little sandwich made with 7 Grain bread and greens.  Up next for my beef heart - tacos.

Just for good measure I'm going to include the recipe.  I've been doing a bit of recipe writing over at SeriousEats, so I thought I'd try out a real simple one over here at ENT.

Serves 2 (main) or 4 (appetizer)

• 2 large cloves garlic, mashed
• 1 teaspoon chili paste (like sambal, or even sriracha)
  
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 pound beef heart (trimmed of fat and silver skin)
• olive oil (for searing)
  

Combine mashed garlic, garlic & chili paste and olive oil and mix well.  Pour over trimmed beef heart and mix until all the meat is covered with the marinade.  Let sit overnight (or two nights).

Heat a good drizzle of olive oil over high heat, until oil is shimmering.  Place strips of beef heart in heated pan in an even layer.  Do not crowd the pan or you wont get the desired sear.  Cook until beginning to brown, about 2 minutes, then flip and cook until just cooked through, another 2 minutes. 

Serve very hot in a sandwich, on a salad, or in a taco.  Beer would be very good with this as well.

This is my second post for the Sunday Supper column on SeriousEats, and they approved an oxtail recipe!

Comforting, hearty and simple.  Not to mention succulent and delicious.

Head over and take a look!

Thanks to twitter, I was able to get some advice from Jamie Bissonette the Chef at both Coppa, and Toro about how to cook some of the shrimp I got through my CSF. 

His advice - "fry them in their shells until crispy. Toss with nauc chum, mint and cilantro. So simple. Soooo good"

I took his recommendation in spirit (because I had no nauc chum, mint or cilantro in the house) and tossed them in some arrowroot flour seasoned heavily with salt and pepper and deep fried them.

My first step was to soak them in cold water, changing the water every 10-20 minutes.  After five or six changes of water I set the shrimp on a paper towel to dry.

Next I heavily seasoned some arrowroot flour with a lot of salt and cracked black pepper.  Then I heated some vegetable oil over medium high heat and cooked the flour coated shrimp in small batches.

I was finishing a soup for dinner as well, so I held these shrimp in a 375 degree oven until I was ready to serve.

A big dish of shrimp in the center of the table, and a few shrimp on top of each bowl of soup as a garnish.

Pull off the head to suck on (or eat whole!) then pop the whole tail in your mouth.  I've talked about eating shrimp tails before, and these really sealed it for me.  Shrimp tails are absolutely delicious.

Thanks for the great advice Jamie!

Thanks to Kumiko Mitarai at SeriousEats I've had a craving for onigiri.  And my leftover shrimp and rice from dinner will make four perfect little onigiri.  First I had to shell the shrimp -  the shells I saved to throw in the fish stock I've got planned for later.

To make the filling for my onigiri I coarsely chopped the shrimp, then added a spoonfull of mayo and a big squirt of sriracha.

Next I simply filled my onigiri, sprinkled them with toasted sesame seeds and wrapped them with nori.

Wrapped in plastic these keep well in the fridge for a few days, but are much better at room temperature.  These little guys will  not be sitting in the fridge at all.

Through my CSF I ordered one share of northern shrimp, which is way more shrimp than you could possibly imagine when you're standing in a parking lot at 530 on a Monday night.

And yet, when you toss what feels like a little less than half of them in sriracha and mirin then cook them over high heat, licking your lips the entire time, and finally sit down to dinner the truth about these shrimp begins to unfold.  Once you pull off their heads, they are actually very tiny.

The largest ones were the size of my index finger (with their heads still on) and the smallest ones were half the size of my pinky.  The taste was delicate and sweet, and even though it was dinner you had to work for (not unlike artichokes) I would definitely get them again.

This was dinner for two (with a bowl of rice and some wilted spinach) and there were about a cup and a half of whole shrimp leftover.  As well as a bowl of rice.  Thanks to SeriousEats, I've had a real hankering for some onigiri - I'm thinking lunch tomorrow.

Community Supported Agriculture has been around for a few years, it's an excellent way to support small farms as well as eating local.  Those of us who live on the coast also have access to community supported fishing (or CSF).  The community supported fishing that we participate in offers whole fish shares as well as fillets.  And although scaling, and sometimes gutting fish may not be everyone's idea of a great time on a Monday night, the quality of fish is awesome (and way cheaper if you get the whole fish share) and the practice with a knife is worth the time (at least that's what I keep telling myself).

So far I've gotten pollock, haddock and monkfish.  This week it was redfish, along with a special share of Northern shrimp that I ordered a few weeks ago.

These are a smaller variety of fish, so these guys came with guts and all.  The fisherman process the larger fish varieties so they come gutted (and the monkfish came headless), these were the first small fish we've received so it was the first time I've had to gut anything with this share.

The three smallest fish I scaled, gutted and filleted.  Some of the fillet's I put in a marinade for later this week and the heads and bodies I saved for stock.

I sautéed onion, celery, carrot, garlic and ginger in butter until tender then placed some shrimp bodies on top (leftover from last night's dinner) followed by the fish heads.

Followed by the fish bodies.

I covered all of it with a kettle of boiling water and then simmered for one and a half hours with a few peppercorns and a bay leaf.  Be sure to skim often, I ended up straining it twice through two different sized strainers.

Dinner tonight will be some of the fillet's poached in the stock, I haven't decided whether to add tomatoes and some of my whole shrimp for a European fish stew kind of thing, or to simmer some lemongrass in the stock and add soba noodles shrimp, veggies and a few dumplings for a totally different meal.

After  spending the day with a large amount of serrano ham, I really needed something soothing to put in my belly.  There are a lot of things that I find soothing (rice flour rolls, hot toddy's, leftover roast beef, warm bread, all soups) but today it was a bowl of streamed broccoli topped with dried shrimp and sriracha with a simple garlic/ginger congee.

These dried shrimp are far more delicate than the last ones I used in congee, much smaller as well - almost translucent.  Far less toothy and fishy.  It's a little hard to see in the picture, but I love the little black eyes staring out from their pinkish translucent bodies.

Use 1/4 cup of rice and 1 cup of water, with 1 clove or diced garlic and 1 knob of mashed ginger to make a very simple, easy on the stomach congee.  Just bring everything to a simmer, cook until the rice is soft, and season with soy sauce and/or fish sauce . Then simply steam the broccoli and top with dried shrimp and a drizzle of sriracha.  A few shakes of sesame seeds are nice as well.

If anyone has a suggestion of what else to do with dried shrimp I'd love to hear them.

Every year Ross and I go to Madison WI for American Thanksgiving to visit the Tiefenthalers and old friends.  I've gone on about my love of Wisconsin here before so I'll save you - but it's truly a fantastic state.

While we were there we had the opportunity to go the farmers market.  I bought some cheese curds, a ten year old chedder, jalapeno cheese of some sort, a few emu sticks for our bloody mary's and a nice piece of bison braunschweiger. 

The liver is strong, but perfectly seasoned so that it's not overbearing.  The texture is coarser than the liverwurst I'm used to, almost closer to a country pâté.

One of my favorite things about Wisconsin is how feverishly they hold onto their Eastern European roots, while making those traditions undeniably mid-western.  This bison braunschweiger (a smoked liverwurst type sausage) is such a wonderful example of that.  An Eastern European classic, made with bison - it's just so awesomely Wisconsin.

Another one from the master - Fergus Henderson's recipe for deviled kidneys.  I'm using lamb kidneys that I got from my meat CSA, Stillman Farm, they do this wonderful thing where they give away all the off bits and offal for free to members.  My meat CSA is amazing - everyone should join one.

The recipe is very simple.  Remove the sinewy bit from the center of each kidney, roll them in seasoned flour and fry in butter in a very hot pan (2 minutes each side).  Add a large shake of worcestershire sauce and some chicken stock, once everything has 'gotten to know each other' take the kidneys from  the pan and put on a piece of toast to rest.  Continue to reduce the sauce, and when ready pour the reduced sauce over the kidneys on toast.

This weekend we hosted a Cowboy Brunch at our house.  Two of our dear friends came over and were kind enough to cook a bunch of cowboy themed brunch foods.  It was delicious.  One of the guys cooked for the meat-eaters, and the other cooked for our darling vegetarians.  We also had a few vegans so I contributed some vegan baked beans, and because I had a slightly freezer-burnt chunk of tenderloin in the freezer I decided to cure it following Fergus Henderson's recipe from The Whole Beast.

Basically, the tenderloin is cured int he fridge for three days in a combination of sugar and salt, and nestled in rosemary stalks.

After three days remove your tenderloin (making sure that it has taken on a firmer texture) and rub it with cracked black pepper, slice and serve.

This was one of my most successful cures ever, there was a subtle rosemary flavour, along with a salty sweetness.  And because it was not a full cure the meat was very soft.  Fergus Henderson suggests a celeriac salad, but I think it would be excellent on some bitter greens as well.