A recipe for my sister: Pork and Walnut Pasta

Dinner the other night was an experiment spawned from the recesses of someone else’s blog post. It’s the way these things happen sometimes. If you’re allergic to walnuts like a certain legal theory comrade of mine, then I suppose you could try substituting almonds or cashews for the walnuts. Parmesan cheese is crucial to this recipe as it adds vitality and depth to the sauce, an aged parmesan like parmigiano reggiano is well worth the extra expense if you can afford it. The porcini powder is a flourish the helps the tang of the dish without directly introducing salt and supports the mid-to-back palette flavour of the humble button mushrooms. I’ve chosen to use shallots in this recipe for their domina grassy sweetness and faintly sour flavour compared to french shallots, brown onions, or red onions. This flavour profile of the shallot incorporates itself into the protein of the walnut that reinforces the ‘nice side’ of pork rather than the uric edge it can get if cooked in other ways.

Serves 4

Ingredients

  • Pasta, preferably something that holds the sauce like a contoured fettuccine
  • Pork fillet cut to 8mm dice
  • 150g of fresh walnuts (shelled)
  • x3 shallots, chopped, greenery reserved for finishing
  • x1 stick of celery, finely chopped
  • x1 fennel bulb, finely chopped
  • x5 medium button mushrooms, peeled and roughly chopped
  • 1/2 medium zucchini/courgette, finely chopped
  • x2 garlic cloves
  • x2 tbl of tomato paste
  • x1 tbl of yellow mustard
  • x1 heaped tbl of flour (all purpose or 00 if you’re feeling fancy)
  • 3/4 cup of sage leaves, chopped
  • 1/2 tsp of porcini mushroom powder (optional)
  • olive oil
  • white stock such as chicken or pork (and dry white wine if you want)
  • parmigiano reggiano

Method

Generally I find cooking the pasta as I’m reducing the sauce to be the most efficient method. You’ll be adding the pasta to the sauce at the end anyway so it is able to stand after draining if necessary.

  1. Preheat the oven to 150C
  2. In a large hi rimmed pan or deep saucepan warm a little olive oil
  3. Add your pork to the pan in batches so that it doesn’t become too crowded and cook until sealed all over.
  4. Add the flour to the pan and stir through, covering the pork and absorbing the juices.
  5. Remove and reserve the pork. Repeat previous steps for the pork if doing it in batches, distribute the flour accordingly (too much flour leaves the sauce tasting a bit odd).
  6. Spread the walnuts over baking paper on a baking tray and put in the oven for 10-12 minutes. When they come out they should crumble under the pressure of your fingers.
  7. Add the fennel, celery, and shallots to the pan at a medium heat and sautée while stirring up any residue from the pork.
  8. Once fennel is soft add the zucchini, mushrooms and pork and occasionally stir for five minutes.
  9. Remove the walnuts from the oven and add 3/4 of them to the sauce by loosely crushing them over the sauce. Reserve the remaining walnuts for serving.
  10. Check the pasta, it should be done. Remove and drain.
  11. While the combination in the pan cooks, combine the tomato paste and mustard in a bowl with 1 cup of stock (or dry white wine). Crush the garlic into the bowl and stir through.
  12. Add the contents of the bowl to the saucepan after the zucchini and mushroom have softened. Stir through.
  13. Top up the saucepan with stock until almost covering. Bring to a low simmer and cover, leaving on a low heat for 20 minutes.
  14. Bring water to boil for the pasta and cook the pasta until just before or on al dente (al dente is important because it’s going to be cooked slightly further in the sauce).
  15. Uncover the sauce after 20 minutes and check the level of the liquid, you want no more than a cup and a half to be present — reduce accordingly, this may take 10 minutes but don’t continue for more than 12 as it will dry out the pork.
  16. On a low heat add the sage and porcini powder, cover the sauce in a layer of finely grated parmigiano reggiano and stir.
  17. Once the cheese dissolves the sauce will become a creamy red hue, add the green shallot trimmings and fold the pasta into the sauce, covering with all those lovely juices.
  18. Serve topped with grated parmigiano reggiano and a scattering of walnuts.

2 notes

beyondthegoblincity: How about an apple, dearie? source: my scan These days that sounds like a demonisation of Apple Inc. My how times have changed.

beyondthegoblincity:

How about an apple, dearie?

source: my scan

These days that sounds like a demonisation of Apple Inc. My how times have changed.

6 notes

vlynx: Benson Island

vlynx:

Benson Island

10,134 notes

craigknowles: Quick doodle of a slightly camp Nosferatu. This stretched, emasculated, caricature of Nosferatu is a good way in to seeing how the ridiculous sublime functions in the modern aesthetic sensibility. The figure’s cartoonishness offsets its genre: horror. The gnarled, sharp fingers and slightly blunt fangs gesture to a lifetime of stalking and consuming prey that is now no more than an ironic glimmer. The maudlin palette with a mild air of toxicity forces shadows to be blistering white. It is curious how the index for these shadows is the white collar and the eyes. Taken in their semiotic unfolding, they seem to suggest a fixated gaze, locked around the throat of something from the shadows. And then the white that surrounds the figure strikes one as odd; as though the ‘white shadow’ has parted to reveal this sublime undead figure of too much life, its predatory nature ridiculed by its representation. The ridiculous sublime thus has less to do with the object in the frame than with the framing of the object per se. The inversion of shadow from black to white parallels the inversion of effective predator to a less dauntingly, camp figuration. This inversion is the key to the ridiculous sublime: unlike the traditional sublime that overpowers one’s finite body or mind, the ridiculous sublime makes the smallest trace disable the gaze, incapacitate the ear, numb the touch, banish all scent and aroma. I only theorise what I like, as a sign of respect. Better things be thought through than hastily forgotten.

craigknowles:

Quick doodle of a slightly camp Nosferatu.

This stretched, emasculated, caricature of Nosferatu is a good way in to seeing how the ridiculous sublime functions in the modern aesthetic sensibility. The figure’s cartoonishness offsets its genre: horror. The gnarled, sharp fingers and slightly blunt fangs gesture to a lifetime of stalking and consuming prey that is now no more than an ironic glimmer. The maudlin palette with a mild air of toxicity forces shadows to be blistering white. It is curious how the index for these shadows is the white collar and the eyes. Taken in their semiotic unfolding, they seem to suggest a fixated gaze, locked around the throat of something from the shadows. And then the white that surrounds the figure strikes one as odd; as though the ‘white shadow’ has parted to reveal this sublime undead figure of too much life, its predatory nature ridiculed by its representation. The ridiculous sublime thus has less to do with the object in the frame than with the framing of the object per se. The inversion of shadow from black to white parallels the inversion of effective predator to a less dauntingly, camp figuration. This inversion is the key to the ridiculous sublime: unlike the traditional sublime that overpowers one’s finite body or mind, the ridiculous sublime makes the smallest trace disable the gaze, incapacitate the ear, numb the touch, banish all scent and aroma.

I only theorise what I like, as a sign of respect. Better things be thought through than hastily forgotten.

15,323 notes

French Toast

I don’t share recipes very often.

Ingredients

  • 4 Eggs
  • 2/3 Cup of Milk
  • 2 tsp of cinnamon
  • 8 thick slices of bread (best to buy unsliced loaf and slice your own)
  • butter or vegetable oil
  • maple syrup
  • zest of 1/2 an orange
  • 1/2 tbl of triple sec or cointreau

Directions

  1. Mix eggs, milk and cinnamon together in a bowl. Add the orange zest and triple sec. Whisk until well blended. Pour the blended mixture into a shallow bowl.
  2. Dip each slice of bread into the egg mixture. Allow the bread to soak up some of the egg mixture. Melt some butter (or heat some vegetable oil) in a large skillet on a medium-high heat. Place the dipped bread into the large skillet. Cook until brown on both sides; turn the bread when necessary (don’t let it burn!).
  3. Serve hot with butter and maple syrup and seasonal berries, or cool caramelised orange segments if you’re feeling fancy. 

2 notes

“The Ballet of The Red Shoes” is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of Red Shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she get’s tired and wants to go home, but the Red Shoes are not tired. In fact, the Red Shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes dance on. In the end, she dies.

And, as Slavoj Zizek has noted:

In Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won’t stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion. These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being. This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’: although the subject cannot ever ‘subjectivize’ it, assume it as ‘her own’ by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this!’ it nonetheless operates in her very kernel. 6 As Fink’s book reminds us, Lacan’s wager is that it is possible to sublimate this dull satisfaction. This is what, ultimately, art and religion are about. 
6 One should mention here Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, a suicidal variation of the same motif. At the end of the film, the shoes the young ballerina is wearing also take on a life of their own. However, since there is no one there to cut her legs off the shoes carry the ballerina out onto a high balcony from which she is forced to leap onto the railroad tracks where she is hit by a train. The crucial thing this cinematic version adds to Andersen’s fairy tale is the opposition between the ‘partial drive’ embodied in the shoes and the normal sexual desire, i.e., the girl’s sexual interest in her partner.

(Source: freecocaine)

2,716 notes

yangwong: St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

yangwong:

St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

5 notes

yangwong: St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

yangwong:

St. Vincent @ The Hi-Fi Brisbane

5 notes

pleatedjeans:

misunderstood shark

111,038 notes

Wine Tip

Wine Tips - by Andrew Corrigan Master of Wine

“Air Force” – breathing and decanting - Part 1

Most wine consumers have heard of decanting and “breathing”. The image is strong of beautiful glass decanters, candles and waiters with starched white aprons. A decade or so ago, in the era of fine dining and silver service, restaurants used to decant wines! Decanting was part of the “table theatre” that could entertain diners, but could also intimidate those who were unsure about wine. In modern casual bistro style eateries, decanters don’t exist. Anyway, most wines are available by the glass and the need to handle bottles in front of a customer is rare.

Air (more correctly the oxygen present in the air) has a big effect on wine. When air first comes into contact with wine, the wine starts to evaporate – and wine aromas lift off the wine. After a period of time (a few hours for delicate wines, a day or so for big densely flavoured wines) the wine aroma is gone and the wine starts to turn stale – at this point it becomes faulty and the problem is known as “oxidised wine”. When you are ready to drink a wine, the lifting up of the aroma is a very desirable effect. Unless the wine is about to be consumed, aeration (which is usually accidental and caused by such problems as a leaking cork) is a bad thing. Hence, air is normally considered an enemy of wine.

Why decant?

Some wines develop sediment in the bottle and skilful decanting leaves the sediment behind in the bottles. Few wines have sediment. Vintage port certainly does but it is not a common wine. Old reds may have sediment because as wines age, the tiny molecules in the liquid gradually join together creating a tiny solid particle. The procedure for an old red requires the standing vertical of the bottle some hours beforehand. Most wine bottles will be lying down on their side during storage and the sediment that may have formed will lie along the side of the bottle. After standing up, the sediment will fall to the bottom and if the wine is decanted carefully, the sediment will be left behind.