A few months ago, after teaching a cheese class, I was approached by one of the students — it turns out she’s one of the organizers of the Bucktown Apple Pie Festival, and she wanted me to enter and write about the contest. She pressed her card into my hand and whispered conspiratorially, “Winning’s all about the crust. You’ve got to get that proportion of lard to butter just right, you know?”

“Oh, I know,” I said knowingly, even though I had no idea what I, or she, was talking about. I’d never used lard before, never even seen it; it seemed both antiquated and totally British, and I was pretty sure I’d never be able to find it for sale. Plus it’d been years since I’d bothered to make a pie crust, placing it, at some point, squarely into the too-much-trouble-to-bother-making-from-scratch category. (Other items in that category include potstickers, croissants, and tamales. [Lobster and crab, incidentally, I place in the too-much-trouble-to-eat category. The work-to-food ratio's all wrong.])

But then I went up to Harvestime in Lincoln Square, where I like to stare curiously and fearfully at the offal in the meat department cases (cow tongues are really gigantic), and I saw it: a bunch of blocks of lard stacked on top of the stainless steel meat counter. (It was Armour Brand, which I looked up online because I was pretty sure Armour also made hot dogs and I thought making the hot-dog-and-lard connection was kind of genius, and would make a good bit of blog trivia. It turns out that Armour has a pretty fascinating and strange history that I won’t go into here. But suffice it to say that the lard I bought is connected to Chicago, the origins of labor unions, Breck girls, Dial soap, Greyhound busses, and military food poisoning.)

With the words of the apple pie contest lady whispering through my head, I bought the lard; I had to; I had to win the contest, even though I hadn’t made a pie crust since I was 16. (The Last Crust was for an apple-cranberry pie that I baked for my dad’s birthday. When I unveiled it, he wrinkled his nose — the slightly more polite adult equivalent of that finger-pointing-down-the-throat gesture — then said: “Cranberries? Nothing worse in the world than cranberries.” I took the pie to school, where the science teachers I TA’ed for fell on it like jackals. One told me, after hearing that my dad had rejected a homemade pie, “Boy, I wish you were my daughter.” I swear I’m not making this up.)

So the lard came home with me, and because as soon as I got home I lost interest in making pie and winning pie-making contests, it sat in my freezer for a couple months. But it nagged at me and fell on my foot every time I went in there searching for popsicles, so I did what I usually do when I don’t know how to make something: I scheduled a pie-making class. Nothing like the prospect of public humiliation to make you want to learn to do something really, really well.

But before I get to the lattice crust pie I made, which surrounded a bunch of apples liberally dosed in Chinese five-spice powder and merits a blog entry of its own, let’s explore lard a bit:

Made from rendered pork fat, lard fell out of favor about the same time it was decided that eggs were bad for your cholesterol, olive oil was superior to butter, and animal fats were what’s killing everyone. It’s been regarded as an unhealthy, unsexy cousin of butter, and the words “rendered pork fat” tend to be off-putting in the marketplace vernacular, so when a flaky pie crust is what’s at stake, most people reach for Crisco or other vegetable shortenings — but those shelf-stable butter substitutes are hydrogenated, meaning that they’ve got loads of trans-fats and will kill you with irony if not elevated cholesterol.

But lard’s actually not all that bad for you — inasmuch as something that derives 100 percent of its calories from fat can be “not all that bad for you.” It’s got more unsaturated fat than saturated fat, meaning it’s not as bad for your heart as you might think, and because it’s got a higher smoke point than lots of other fats, foods fried in lard actually absorb less oil.

(Understand that I’m not positing lard as a health food here. I’m just dropping science.)

With the increased interest in “real foods” — and by real,  what’s meant is minimally or unprocessed ingredients that were around long before hydrogenation, Red Dye No. 5 or high fructose corn syrup — and traditional cooking methods and recipes, lard’s actually enjoying kind of a renaissance these days. A few years ago, Britain actually experienced a lard crisis, which has to be one of the best descriptions ever for a nationwide ingredient shortage.

The British Lard Marketing Board, which warns that its website is ‘NOT suitable for weirdy vegetarians,’ is doing its best to keep lard visible. Literally. You can get t-shirts, coffee mugs (“Even Jesus Ate Lard!”), tote bags, mousepads and thong underwear from the Lardstore, their online gift shop. The BLMB website’s chockful of useful lard-centric trivia, songs, and scientific facts such as: Chips cooked in lard taste over a thousand times better than those cooked in namby-pamby oil.

Few recipes call outright for lard these days, with the notable exceptions of chocolard, which I hope to God is a joke, and lardy cake, a traditional British dessert that kind of seems like a croissant-pannettone-fruitcake mashup. It’s yeasted, studded with raisins and citrus peel, heavily spiced, and can be made in loaf form or shaped into swirls like cinnamon rolls.

Even most pie crust recipes don’t call outright for lard, which is a shame: using it in combination with, or instead of, butter in a pie crust recipe will, as my Bucktown Apple Pie contest co-conspirator said, produce an outstanding pie crust — one that’s super-flaky and crispy, and that audibly shatters when you cut into it with your fork. And making a killer pie crust’s much, much easier than I’d remembered — as in, it takes about all of five minutes. Visual, though not audible, proof to follow next week(ish).

It still amazes me that, aside from the term ‘Smart Cabbage,’ the two queries that most often lead Googlers to my site are: are pork belly and side pork the same thing? (yes), and can I eat a Cuban sandwich if I’m pregnant? (yes, yes, a thousand times yes). I was wildly excited to see that someone searched for ‘def leppard hysteria listeria’ — word of my awesome anti-anti-raw-milk-cheese-paranoia song must’ve spread — and pleased that so many of the ingredients that puzzled me are stumpers for other people, too. The number of hits I get for ways to deal with pork belly, black currants, guanabana, palm sugar and salt roasting are encouraging — could Smart Cabbage actually be helpful? Because that would be rad.

I have to say, some of these search terms would make much, much better blog names than Smart Cabbage, like:

• Teaching Cabbages to Talk
• A Girl Who Hates Canning
• Haters Town
• How to Make Alien Clothes for Kids
• A Meat Sliced Like Bacon
• Tamarillo is Not Tomato
• I Put Some Chili Powder On My Bum; It Was a Bad Idea

Some queries, as ever, fall into the terrifying/perplexing/bewildering category:

• scaring pregnant women
• stew maker Mexico acid
• eating pregnant smart babies
• girl funnel up ass with sugar
• which compound can disintegrate bones: lye or lime

A couple speak eloquently and clearly for themselves:

• anchovies are gross
• my husband’s canning my ass

Don’t believe me about the pregnant food confusion thing?

• pregnant cuban sandwich
• can I eat a cuban sandwich while pregnant
• can you eat a cuban sandwich while pregnant
• can pregnant women eat cuban sandwiches
• pregnant women cannot eat cuban sandwiches
• can pregnant women eat deer summer sausage
• garlic shoots for pregnant women
• can pregnant women eat tamarillo
• why are radishes bad when you’re pregnant
• gruyere and pregnancy and listeria
• can you eat cold leftovers the next day when pregnant
• hosting out of town guests while pregnant
• can pregnant women eat cabbage
• where do pregnant women put cabbage

Some of these, I have no idea what the searcher was searching for, or how, exactly, they were directed to my site:

• white jersey taste taste
• gastronomic pedernales
• headache from one nostril
• cartoon kids sitting in diner cakes
• fed ladybug black currant jam
• smart and final avocado sauce
• guanabana shirt
• spoon stupid prop skin
• sentence that smarts use nosebleed

Some people have questions I cannot answer:

• how does butter with weed smell like
• what is the nutritional value of corn nuts
• how to cabbage with pork hogs
• what does the hiatus from Japan eat
• why is cabbage goopy
• is canning procrastination
• where to buy a police grade bullhorn

Here’s hoping 2011 Smart Cabbage is as entertaining for you as it’s always been — in front of and behind the scenes — for me.

I made this:

and these:

and a bunch of these:

and this:

(Before anyone asks, no, I didn’t make the crib. I made the sheet. And the third picture’s of burp cloths made from old t-shirts, which came from cleaning out our drawers to make room for baby stuff.)

The Burger (so named because she’d kick like crazy in utero whenever I ate The Husband’s secret-recipe hamburgers) was born in early January, and I’ve been spending a lot of time on the couch, nursing and reading food magazines and cookbooks. The single best thing I’ve read about child nutrition came not from a website or a medical journal or a parenting guide, but from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat:

Good eating starts in the cradle. … The moment baby is put to the breast, he or she learns that eating is one of the foremost pleasures of life; seeking that pleasure is also how he or she stays alive and keeps growing. … [An obstetrician] told me that one of the reasons breast milk was better than formula was that its taste changed all the time. Whatever a woman’s been eating informs the flavor of her milk, and so a breast-fed child has a varied diet from the very beginning. That’s to say, the baby learns that unpredictability is in the very nature of food, of life — that change and difference, within a secure context, are not frightening but desirable and to be savored.

Now that The Burger’s almost two months old [cripes!], and I’m finding time to shower and eat lunch and even sometimes cook a little bit, I think it’s time to return to Smart Cabbage and its purpose: to eat, or cook, a new food every week. I imagine the recipes and preparation will be markedly simpler than before — I don’t exactly foresee having the time to make a two-day pork bun, or to spend a whole day making a batch of tamales — but the goal of expanding my (and now my daughter’s) culinary horizons is an important one. I may not get to it every single week, particularly since not working outside of the house has me totally clueless as to the day and date, but hey: getting out of pajamas is a major coup these days, so blogging practically deserves a Medal of Honor.

Since I haven’t been working [hooray for maternity leave! boo for no second income!], we’ve been making a concerted effort to be better with our food dollars: cooking at home every night, packing lunch for The Husband every day, eating leftovers, planning menus and writing detailed grocery lists. The underlying theme to all of this is being organized — I take time to plan, keep the fridge (relatively) clean, find coupons online (I saved $28 at Whole Foods, suckas!). And (perhaps most importantly) I did a thorough inventory of our freezers and our pantry, making a list of contents of each and taping it to the outside so I can see at a glance what I’ve got. The challenge is to find ways to use up all of the ingredients we’ve (okay, I’ve) amassed over the past while. Tons of meat from our amazing meat CSA. Bulk grains and legumes that I’m sure I had a plan for when I bought them, but instead wound up languishing in pretty glass jars in the cupboard.

So what’s on tap in the near future? Fideos! Celeriac! Curry leaves! Ethiopian red pepper simmer sauce! Rack of lamb! Stay tuned!

No secret, really. It’s been five weeks since my last post, so those of you who like to take things (like my tagline, “a new food every week”) literally have  probably figured it out. I’ve been, well, busy: working, commuting on the CTA (what is the deal with the transition between the Red and Purple lines at Howard? I mean, seriously.), teaching cooking classes (four in the next nine days!), writing for Gapers Block, hosting out-of-town guests, and — oh yeah — being eight months pregnant. That kind of stuff takes up time. And being busy makes me fall back on my arsenal of well-rehearsed recipes and familiar ingredients — you know, the non-glamorous, easy-going, comfortable things you’ve made so many times before that you’ve got them on auto-pilot. Not exactly the kind of stuff of which this blog is made.

Really, I’m not sure what’s harder: not being able to do everything, or admitting that I’m not able to do everything. Which I guess is why I haven’t written this, the obvious, sooner.

I’ll still post once in a while, and will still teach classes around the city, but I’m going to back off on the “every week” thing. I’ll post when I’ve got the energy to experiment with a new ingredient and the time to write about it, and eventually, I hope, to get back onto a regular weekly schedule of cooking and writing. But don’t hold your breath. I hear newborns tend to throw wrenches into the works (also, up).

You’re probably sick of hearing me talk about my slow cooker. I’m sick of hearing me talk about my slow cooker. But I talk about it because it’s awesome. I use it in the summer, when it’s too hot to cook; I use it in the winter when I want to come home to a gigantic bowl of something hot and stewy. I use it when I’m being foresightful and know that I’m not going to want to spend an hour or more on my feet after work putzing around the kitchen. I use it to stock my freezer with precooked beans, which is one of the biggest time- and money-savers you can imagine.* I’ll use it to make chicken stock after we’ve had a roast chicken dinner; I’ll just toss the carcass, an onion, a carrot, a bit of celery and some parsley into the pot, cover everything with water, turn it on, and walk away.

Hey, I’m not the only one who loves slow cookers. Mark Bittman is a fan, and that guy knows pretty much everything there is to know about food. How to Cook Everything was the first cookbook I bought for my first post-college apartment, and I still use it for reference at least once a week. (I’m kind of hoping Mark Bittman’s got a Google news alert out for his name, like Michael Ruhlman must, and that he’ll comment on my blog, like Michael Ruhlman did, and we can totally become best friends and have cross-country dinner parties and stuff, like Michael Ruhlman and I don’t.)

I even bought a slow-cooker-themed cookbook (not written by Mark Bittman, alas) that I’ve name-checked on here a couple times, The Gourmet Slow Cooker. Each chapter has a different regional theme — Greece, Mexico, France, Italy — and it offers recipes for everything from soups to cakes. Though I haven’t tried any of the “baking” recipes yet, I’ve  made a couple stew- and soup-like things and they’ve turned out pretty well. So when we invited a couple of friends over to help us polish off a gigantic lamb shoulder from our meat CSA, I turned both to the slow cooker and its book. The Indian section had a recipe for Lamb Stew with Spinach that sounded pretty good, though I wound up omitting the spinach because our guests brought an awesome pile of sauteed spinach with golden raisins and toasted almonds that still makes my mouth water whenever I think about it. Plus this can of ghee, which I bought at Patel Brothers exclusively because it looked cool, had been sitting in our pantry for months and I figured this’d be as good a time as any to crack it open.

Ghee’s a clarified butter that’s used in South Asian and North African cooking; it’s made by boiling unsalted butter until all of the water evaporates, the milk protein solids settle to the bottom of the pan, and a scum’s floating on top. Strain the melted butter through cheesecloth (or carefully skim off the scum and pour off the butter from the milk solids), and you’ve got ghee. You can use it anywhere you’d use butter; it’s got a higher smoking point than butter and most oils, so it won’t burn over high heat.

Ghee’s also believed to have medicinal properties, and is used in all kinds of ceremonies and rituals. In Ayurvedic medicine, it’s believed to be an effective remedy for bedsores, burns, bruises and broken bones, and is used to treat ulcers, constipation, eye irritation, memory and attention problems, reproductive issues, nosebleeds and headaches. (Aged ghee, which can be up to 100 years old, is a folkloric remedy for epilepsy, fever, alcoholism and vaginal pain.) Some people gargle with ghee; some use it as a facial moisturizer or to soothe chapped lips and hands.

But I was just going to eat it. (Although to me, the dessert recipe which called for mixing ghee with carob powder and agave nectar to spread on rice cakes was just about as unappealing as using it for gargling.) I’ve had clarified butter before — anyone who’s ever had lobster’s familiar with it, and I lived in Maine for four years, so yeah — but with all of the folklore and hoopla around ghee, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I opened the can. But you know what? It looked and smelled exactly like a can of melted butter, which is one of the most comforting familiar smells I know (and instantly makes me want fried onions):

I dipped a piece of naan into it; it didn’t taste like much, really, probably because it’s unsalted. But generally, that’s a good thing in cooking (and baking), because you can control the amount of salt in the finished product. So I hauled out the slow cooker and the Indian lamb stew recipe and decided to forge ahead.

But something about the recipe bugged me; the steps felt out of order to me, some of the ingredient amounts seemed off, and I had a weird nagging feeling that if I followed it to the letter, I wouldn’t like the final result. Which is what happened: I followed the instructions when I should’ve listened to my instincts, and I didn’t like how it turned out. So you can look up the original recipe on your own; here’s how I’d do it next time.

Toss 1/4 cup flour and 1 teaspoon salt in a zip-top bag; add 2 pounds cubed lamb stew meat, seal the bag, and toss the lamb to coat; set aside.

In a large pan, heat 1/4 cup vegetable oil (or ghee, if you’ve got a pretty can calling your name) and add 2 finely chopped yellow onions to the pan. Stirring frequently, cook for 10 to 15 minutes until browned. Add 2 cloves minced garlic and 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger, and cook until aromatic, about 2 minutes longer. Add a bit more ghee to the pan, then add the cubed lamb and cook, turning occasionally, until browned on all sides. (You may need to do this in batches to avoid steaming, rather than searing, the lamb.)

Once the beef is browned, add 3 tablespoons ground coriander, 2 tablespoons ground cumin, 1 tablespoon paprika and 1/2 teaspoon cayenne, and stir for a couple of minutes. Add 1 14-ounce can crushed tomatoes (or a 28-ounce can, if you’d like it to be a little more soupy) and cook for five minutes, then scrape everything into the slow cooker. Add 1/2 cup plain yogurt, and give it a stir. Cover, and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours, until the lamb is tender. Just before serving, stir in a few generous handsful of fresh spinach, stir til wilted, season to taste with salt, and serve over jasmine rice, with a few handsful of torn fresh cilantro on top.

It was pretty good; I’ll spare you all of the criticisms of the finished product as it actually turned out, since the recipe’s modified to avoid the issues I ran into (though note that no one else at the table, as usual, seemed bothered by the things that bothered me). I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, and by “forgot” I mean “felt weird taking pictures of food in the kitchen while our dinner guests were sitting patiently at the dining room table waiting for me to sit my ass down.”

Oh, and you can also omit all of the pre-cooking steps and chuck everything directly into the slow cooker. I’ve made stews both ways, and I wouldn’t say that one is substantially better than the other. The pre-cooking way yields a product that tastes a little more nuanced (or at least that’s what pre-cooking advocates want you to think).

Next up on the docket: apple fritters and smoked fish (think travelogue rather than kitchen experiment), gnocchi, adventures with lard, lattice top pie crusts, and more.  Again, sorry this entry took so long to materialize. It’s not my finest work, but sometimes — with writing as with dinner — it’s just important to get it on the table.

*Just dump a bag of dried beans in the slow cooker, cover it with about four inches of water, turn it on low, and let it go overnight (or all day, whatever) until the beans are tender. Drain and cool the beans, then divvy ‘em up into zip-top bags in roughly can-sized amounts, and stash them in your freezer. One bag yields three to four cans’ worth of beans, and costs about the same amount as a single can. Do the math, man.

Lots of things transpired to make this week a long one. And by “week” I mean “seventeen day-gap between posts.” First, I’ve been working a lot of scattered shifts in long stretches — eight days in a row, nine days in a row. Which I can’t really complain about, because it’s allowed me to take three- and four-day weekends for special occasions and out-of-town visitors, and also because I write the schedule. But the irregularity of the schedule and the action-packed-ness of the days I’m not working have made it difficult to post.

Secondly, in the little free time I do have, I’ve been writing for Gapers Block, a Chicago-centric website about news, events, culture, city life and more. (Database searchable by author coming soon!) Which is a lot of fun, in an unpaid way. But even those short little posts take a lot more time and research than you’d think. So if you want to read more of my stuff more often, check DriveThru, the GB food section, or Merge, the main news page.

But I think the biggest reason I’ve had problems getting this post up is that what I made — an Indian lamb stew — didn’t turn out exactly as I’d hoped/expected. I read this recipe, thought it looked weird, considered doing things differently, then didn’t. And it turns out I was right — I didn’t like how it turned out, and I should’ve listened to my instincts. My hesitation to post about the less-than-stellar final product, though, doesn’t stem from crippling perfectionism (at least, not this time). It’s more that I’m not exactly sure how to write about what happened. Should I give you the recipe I followed, then tell you what turned out to be flawed about it, then state what I would’ve done differently, and how I think that would’ve made the recipe turn out better? Or should I pretend everything went perfectly and give you a (secretly modified) recipe that I’m pretty sure will be better than the recipe I used? I’m sure this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s enough to make something that should take seven days take seventeen.

Anyway, stay tuned. I’ve resolved to post about this ghee thing, in one form or another, soon. Like, really soon. Thanks for being patient.

It being football season and all, and me being slightly infatuated with my slow cooker, and having found a gigantic angus beef chuck roast from Mint Creek Farm in our freezer, I decided to make chili. More specifically, Lady Bird Johnson’s Pedernales River Chili, which is ridiculously simple and deceptively delicious. She had cards printed up with the recipe, and gave it out freely, calling it “almost as popular as the government pamphlet on the care and feeding of children.” (More, probably. Those things aren’t exactly page-turners.)

In addition to being a hell of a chili maker, Lady Bird was also the first First Lady to actively advocate for legislation. Her pet cause was the Highway Beautification Act, which limited roadside and billboard advertising, and encouraged median and roadside landscaping, prompting The Husband, whenever we drive past a particularly pretty highway median planting, to say solemnly: “Thank you, Lady Bird.”

Lady Bird, by the way, is not her real name. Her first name’s Claudia, but as a child, her nurse apparently commented that she was “purty as a ladybird,” and the nickname stuck. Given that a ladybird is a kind of beetle — i.e., not a bird – the compliment seems, well, dubious. To be fair, ‘ladybird’ is the British term for ‘ladybug,’ but still: some might justifiably take exception to an insect-related nickname.

Like I said, I’m currently obsessed with using my slow cooker,but I’ll give you stove-top instructions since I don’t want to presume anyone else is as crockpot-infatuated as I am. (Though have you tried using slow cooker liners? I don’t usually advocate buying extra packaging-type stuff, but oh man: these’ll become your new best clean-up friend. Please don’t tell me if they have phthalates.)

Dice a large white onion and mince two cloves of garlic, and saute the aromatics in a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Add four pounds chili meat (beef chuck that’s either been coarsely ground or cut into quarter-inch dice), and brown the meat. Add 1 tablespoon dried oregano, 2 tablespoons ground cumin, 3 tablespoons chili powder, a pinch of cayenne, generous salt, a 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes, and 2 teaspoons (or tablespoons) of liquid hot sauce. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer until the meat is tender — it should take about an hour, but it certainly won’t suffer if you let it go longer. (Purists, note that I’ve roughly tripled the amount of oregano, cumin and hot sauce, doubled the amount of chili powder and tomatoes, inserted cayenne, and omitted the two cups of hot water LadyBJ’s original recipe called for.)

I did this in my slow cooker, though, so I skipped the oil and the browning steps, and just chucked all of the raw ingredients into the crockpot, turned it on high, and went to lie down on the couch and do absolutely nothing for three hours while the chili cooked. The whole prep process took exactly 12 minutes, which included: wrestling with a particularly unyielding onion skin; having a hell of a time separating individual cloves from a head of garlic; trying to find the jar of cumin (which, naturally, was on the back of the sink next to the hand soap); dealing with a can opener that wouldn’t finish opening the can of tomatoes; swearing loudly at said can opener; and dicing a five-pound blob of angus chuck roast. (Though to be honest, I did not break the chuck down into minute, exacting, quarter-inch dice. It was more like a sloppy rough one-inch chop. I mean no disrespect to either the Former First Lady or the Pedernales River Basin.)

I’ll usually add some kidney or pinto beans to my chili, though not frozen corn, because my dad always added frozen corn to his chili, and I loved it, but eventually I learned the hard way that most other people in the world hate corn in their chili and/or think you’re crazy for putting it in there in the first place. So the hominy was a bean substitute, a nod to my dad’s chili, and a subtle nose-thumb to everyone who thinks corn in chili is whack.

But I wasn’t exactly sure when to add the hominy to the chili. Nor was I exactly sure what hominy was, so I spent some of my inert three hours doing some half-hearted gastronomic research. Hominy’s basically corn that’s been dried, then soaked in an alkali mixture to remove the bran and the husk. The soaking process increases the nutritional value of the corn, unlocking the lysine and tryptophan amino acids as well the niacin and B vitamins, and also doubles the size of the kernel. If you re-dry the soaked hominy, you can grind it, and then you’ve got grits. (In New Orleans, they call the whole hominy kernels ‘big hominy,’ and the ground grits ‘little hominy.’)

But this alkali thing had me confused. Most of what I read online listed lye as the principal soaking agent, but the can of hominy in my pantry said the corn had been processed with lime. Not being super-familiar with the distinction between “lye” and “lime,” I searched the internet, and was mildly disturbed to see the title of the third result: what works best to disintegrate a human body, lye or lime? Even more disturbing was the one-sentence content preview, which read, in part, “hey dude a 44 gallon drum half full of acid will do the trick, 58hrs37 min and all gone.”

I did not click on this particular search result, which seemed 1) entirely unrelated to my hominy quest and 2) pretty much guaranteed to give me nightmares.

I decided that maybe I already knew everything there was to know about hominy, and I added it to the chili after about two hours, which I figured would be enough time for it to absorb some flavor and heat through, but not enough time for it to disintegrate or anything. (I don’t know if hominy disintegrates, but the aforementioned web search had indelibly planted the word ‘disintegration’ in my mind.)

After three-ish hours, we were too hungry to wait any longer, so we ate. Which is too bad, because the chili really could’ve benefited from a longer stint in the slow cooker. The meat was almost-but-not-quite-fall-apart-tender; the texture seemed a little thin (which is the curse of the slow cooker); and I really should’ve stirred the pot once or twice during cooking. Plus I think it would’ve benefited from the beans after all, texture-wise, since the hominy didn’t seem to add much, and I probably could’ve added more of it, along with salt and hot sauce. But like I said: hunger called.

As usual, I was super-critical of what I’d making, poking derisively through the bowl with my spoon and offering a steady stream of the-many-ways-in-which-this-could-be-better commentary, while The Husband plowed through a bowl like nothing was wrong. When I asked him if he thought it needed beans, he looked at me blankly and said, “No. Yes?”

We ate it topped with a healthy dose of sour cream, more hot sauce, chopped raw onions, and shredded colby jack.

CoJack might seem like a weird choice for a girl who works around fancy cheese all day, but all of the orange cheddars at the store today tasted bitter and poisony (to me, anyway), and I have some weird, atavistic Midwestern aversion to white cheddar on top of my chili. We left the slow cooker on low overnight, and in the morning, the chili was perfect. The flavors had deepened, the meat was falling apart, and the hominy had plumped up a bit, making it both more noticeable and more toothsome. Chili’s always better the next day, anyway, and apparently so is my mood.

Salt roasting — where you whip egg whites until they’re stiff, fold in a bunch of salt, pack an entire fish in in the salt-egg mixture then bake it, creating a hard crust/shell kind of thing in which the fish steams– has always intrigued me. One, because how can the fish possibly not be ridiculously salty? And two, what a waste of perfectly good salt.

But this week a bunch of things transpired to make salt-roasted fish an imminent reality.

First, whole branzino went on sale at the store. If you haven’t had branzino, you really should. Run, don’t walk. It’s a silver-skinned Mediterranean bass, a white fish, but really meaty-yet-delicate and flavorful and a little oily. It’s common in French, Spanish, Greek and Italian cooking, and in France it’s called loup de mer, or wolf of the sea, which is infinitely cooler than branzino.

Then, I was idly poking through the pantry, trying to take an inventory of heretofore unused ingredients I bought with the best of blogging intentions. (Ghee, steel-cut oats, Chinese sugar rock candy, and some weird kelly green spicy Bombay sandwich spread are all still kicking it on the shelves.) And I found a gigantic unopened three-pound box of kosher salt that I think was left over from our last apartment, which we lived in four years ago in an entirely different time zone.

And then while I was digging through the freezer looking for a package of bacon that I knew had to be in there somewhere, I found a tupperware full of egg whites from my Obsessive Ice Cream Making Era. (Never found the bacon, by the way. Or if I did, I couldn’t tell. Let this be a lesson to all of us: label whatever you put into your freezer, because I promise: you won’t recognize or remember it three weeks later.)

So the stage was set for salt-roasted branzino to rear its scaly head.

Mixed metaphors aside, I let the egg whites — I’m guessing there were about four in there — defrost overnight, then beat them with a whisk until they were foamy. Soft-stiff peaks would’ve been better, but I didn’t have the patience or the energy to do that by hand, and I couldn’t remember where the whisk attachment to my hand blender was living these days. Then I added the salt. The recipes I’d looked at called for one pound of salt per pound of fish, but here’s the thing about that: I’d already thrown away the wrapper with the scale tag on it, and couldn’t remember how much the fish weighed. So I just added enough salt until the egg-salt mixture looked like something that would hold together if I tried packing a fish into it. You’re sort of going for a sand-castle-buildability texture here.

I spread out a bit of the salt mixture onto a parchment-paper-lined roasting pan, then laid the whole (cleaned, gutted, scaled) fish on top of it:

Then I dumped the rest of the salt mess onto the fish, and patted it into a crust-type thing that covered pretty much the whole fish, though I will admit that I left a tiny airhole around the fish’s mouth and where I imagined its nostrils to be, because I felt weird suffocating it, even though I understand 1) the whole concept of breathing through one’s gills and 2) that the fish was already dead:

Then I wrapped the whole roasting pan in cling film, shoved it in the fridge, and headed out to work. The whole process took about four minutes. When I got home, some of the egg white had separated from the salt and leaked out onto the parchment paper. I didn’t sweat it too much; I just heated the oven to 400, shoved the fish in, roasted it for 20 minutes, then let it stand on the counter for 10 more. The stray weepy egg whites lent a cool kind of meringue halo effect to the whole dish:

I do think you’d probably get slightly better results if you prepared this right before roasting — that’d give the egg whites less time to weep and/or deflate — but I don’t think doing it in advance compromised the final dish too much. To gussy it up a bit more, you could shove some lemon or orange slices, crushed garlic cloves, or whole herb sprigs into the fish’s cavity.

To serve, you’ve got to whack the salt crust pretty hard with the back of a wooden spoon. The crust’ll shatter, and while this’d look pretty cool at a dinner party table, I’d worry about getting some flying salt fragments in your guests’ eyes. (Then again, maybe you don’t have to hit it quite as hard or as gleefully as I did.)

The skin’ll peel off easily, and you can lift the top fillet off the bones, flip the fish, peel again, and lift off the rest of the flesh. We served it with some chard that The Husband sauteed with ginger and garlic, plus some awesome Indian spiced tomato rice that I picked up at Patel Brothers and refuse to be embarrassed about using, even if it does come in one of those ridiculous boil-in-the-bag pouches.

The branzino was perfect — exactly done, tender and moist, and not overly salty at all. It did pick up a few of the salt crust crumbs while we were peeling off the skin and transferring the flesh to our dinner plates, but it turned out to be just the right amount of saltiness. We did wind up tossing the salt crust into the trash, though if we do this again in the winter, I’ll throw the salt onto our back steps, because why not?

If you haven’t heard of cemitas, don’t sweat it. That means one of three things: you don’t live in Chicago, you live in Chicago but don’t get to Humboldt Park very often, or you don’t watch Diners, Drive-Ins and Drives on the Food Network. (It’s entirely possible, for thee as with me, for more than one of those things to be true at the same time. Guess which two.)

A cemita is a Mexican sandwich, one that originated in Puebla and that’s distinguished from the more common torta by its base — a fluffy, crispy-on-the-outside, soft-and-chewy-on-the-inside, sesame seed bun. It’s also the signature dish of Cemitas Puebla, a tiny father-and-son-owned Mexican restaurant in West Humboldt that can be only described, in the nicest and most accurate possible way, as a hole-in-the-wall.

Cemitas Puebla has maybe ten tables, with those steel-and-vinyl hotel wedding banquet chairs. The ceiling tiles are covered with water stains and crazy posters of Bruce Lee, soccer teams, Mexican Bugs Bunny cartoons and Oscar de la Hoya; the walls are covered with pictures of the elder Cemitas Puebla owner posing with customers, Chicago dignitaries, and athletes from around the world. You order at the counter, from the younger owner himself, and minutes — maybe even seconds — later, the food’s at your table. We ordered two cemitas, a chicarrones quesadilla, and a chorizo-and-carne asada taco called the Gov. Precioso.

The Precioso was delicious, with gobs of avocado, cilantro and white onion on not one but two corn tortillas. There are three bottles of house-made salsa on each table — red, green and brick. The red’s a pretty basic, if tasty, tomato salsa; the brick is made from chipotle chiles of a quality that the owner insists you just can’t get in the States. (So he travels back to Puebla every six weeks to pick up a bundle of the real deal.) And the green is simply stunning: The Husband asked about its ingredients, and it’s just tomatillos, avocado, cilantro, garlic, salt and lime juice, but it’s totally ethereal and I kind of wish I could take a bath in it.

Like I said, the Gov. Precioso was good — but tacos are old news. The chicarrones quesadilla and the cemitas, on the other hand: earth-shatteringly good novelty.

Chicarrones are cracklings; cracklings are pork rinds; pork rinds are chunks of deep-fried, cured pork skin*. If you don’t think that sounds delicioso, you’re loco. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The quesadilla was loaded with melty, stretchy Oaxaca cheese, and crispy/greasy/crunchy-chewy/just-salty-enough chicharrones. Despite being too hot to handle or safely eat, we wolfed the whole thing down in about twenty seconds — it was that kind of good, especially with the green salsa. Now that I’ve had fresh-from-the-fryer chicharrones, I can’t believe 1) I’ve gone this many years without having them before, and 2) that they share a name (and only a name) with those monstrous puffed bagged pork rind snack things.

Appetizers packed away, we moved on to the sandwiches. I had a carne asada cemita, with some of the most perfectly tender steak I’ve ever eaten. The Husband, of course, ordered the signature dish: The Atomica, a three-meat monster that combines three sandwiches’ worth of ingredients. The Milanese consists of a breaded, deep-fried butterflied pork chop; the Carne Enchilada sports a guajillo chile-marinated butterflied pork chop; and the Jamon is, simply, thick-cut ham. The Atomica’s all three:

plus a good slathering of ripe avocado and so much finely shredded Oaxaca cheese that at first glance I thought it was a cabbage coleslaw:

Cemitas Puebla is BYOB, which is rad. They also have a huge selection of Jarritos, those crazy super-sweet Mexican fruit sodas. The Husband ordered pina, the pineapple flavor, which was good in a liquified Jolly Rancher kind of way. I tried ordering hibiscus water, but they’d just changed the menu due to seasonality, and were serving canteloupe water instead. I took a pass on that — canteloupe being quite possibly my most (in fact, only) hated fruit — and ordered a horchata instead. Another thing I’d never tried before, horchata is a sweetened, cinnamon-spiked rice-based drink of which, as it turns out, I am not at all a fan. I felt sort of guilty wasting it, since they served me approximately a gallon for $1, but good lord is it sweet. (Mental note: maybe a good candidate for sherbet making?)

Despite its status as a Guy Fieri-endorsed restaurant, Cemitas Puebla is awesome. (We got home and ten minutes later, The Husband asked if we could go back.) And it’s stupifyingly cheap: we got two sandwiches, a quesadilla, a taco and two drinks — all of which were gigantic, and some of which we wound up taking home and eating the next day — for $23 including tax. Don’t miss the coupon for free chalupas on their website. Though if you do, it’s just another reason to go back again soon.

*Other fun global terms for deep-fried pork skin, lest you think it’s a solely a south of the border or trashy Texarkana convenience store kind of thing, include scrunchions (Newfoundland), oreilles de Christ, or Christ’s ears (Quebec), scratchings (United Kingdom), knabbelspek (The Netherlands), grattons (France), jumari (Romania), and пръжки (Bulgaria).

Hit me up with comments and suggestions. And remember, I can (and will) do private in-home classes, at my place or yours.