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smoked squash, herb marinated feta, garlic dressing

I don’t do a lot of smoking. I won a smoker a few years back for a photo of some meat, and guess what – I never used it. It stayed in garage, unopened in the box. Well, honestly, that was mainly because it was one of those that used these dicey pellets of reformed wood and with me being the hippy that I am I didn’t want to smoke my food with a bunch of unknown substances that hold that reformed wood together. I imagined it to be kinda like smoking food using MDF. Nah, not for me.

One book, which shall remain nameless because honestly it isn’t all as bad as this, recommends smoking in a wok using sugar as the fuel if you want to smoke food indoors. Since it is winter and raining here in Seattle, that seems like a good idea. Guess what – it tastes like burnt sugar, and that is being polite.

Instead I decided to try my hand at using the wok smoking technique but with proper wood chips – apple wood chips to be precise – I thought that might be a rather nice way to cook delicata squash. Turns out it is, especially if you smoke for 10 minutes and then finish in a very hot oven or under a broiler to caramelize.

A favorite restaurant of mine here in Seattle, Sitka & Spruce (which unfortunately seems to have doubled their lunch prices and halved the portions of their oh so lovely food) does some great stuff with marinaded feta, and frankly I want some of that action too. I have been pairing feta with a lot of stuff recently and I really enjoy the sharpness of it with this smokey rich squash. Pair that with a lovely spice and herb tang from the marinade and I reckon this whole thing is a bit of a winner.

Smoked Squash with marinaded feta recipe

1 delicata squash

handful of wood chips of choice

1 packet of decent feta cheese

olive oil

a few sprigs of rosemary

2 tablespoons fennel seed

2 tablespoons coriander seed

sherry vinegar – about 1 tablespoon

1 clove of garlic, peeled

small bunch of chives

salt and pepper to taste

24 hours ahead of time break the block of feta up into 1″ squares. Toast the fennel and coriander seeds briefly in a hot pan until fragrant. Yank the leaves off the rosemary stalks. Put the feta in a bowl with the coriander and fennel seeds and throw in the rosemary. Cover liberally with olive oil, and a few grinds of black pepper. Let this sit covered, in the fridge for a day or so.

Cut the squash in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Cut these two halves across in to half-rounds about 1/2″ thick.

Toss with a little salt and pepper.

Soak your wood chips of choice in cold water for about 20 minutes. Line a good sized wok with a double layer of foil. Drain the wood chips and place in the bottom of the wok. Torch the wood chips with a blow torch (plumbers blow torches are the best for this, and lighting charcoal barbeques!) until they are smoking. Turn the heat up under the wok to keep the smoke going constantly. Put a small rack in the wok – making sure it sits an inch or so above the smoking chips. Carefully put the squash on to this rack in a single layer. Cover the wok and smoke the squash for about 8 minutes. Turn the squash over and smoke for 7 or so more minutes.

As the squash is smoking make the dressing. Smash the clove of garlic up with a little salt until it is paste-like. You can use garlic confit here, which will give a far superior taste (just gently simmer garlic cloves in olive oil for 20 minutes to confit them). In a small bowl whisk together 1 tablespoon of sherry vinegar with 3 tablespoons (roughly) of good olive oil. Whisk the garlic in to this. Season with salt and pepper.

Finely chop the chives.

Once the squash seem to have taken on a mellow smoke aroma, remove them from the smoker. Finish them under either a very hot broiler, or a hot oven – 450F or so until nicely browned – say 5 minutes for the broiler, 15 minutes for the oven.

NOTE: I have a very hot ceramic salamander style broiler that does a brilliant job of very even browning on food – it does in a few minutes what it takes an oven 20 minutes to do. I do a lot of root veg under it these days, cutting down my cooking time. If you broiler isn’t so even, I suggest sucking up the extra time and roasting them in an oven.

Take the feta out of the olive oil marinade. Worry not if some of the spices stay on the feta. Arrange the feta and squash in a bowl, and toss with the chopped chives. Pour over the garlic dressing, and finish with some good sea salt. You know, the British stuff.

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Spenser magazine

Many months ago I got en email from a bloke at a new online magazine startup called Spenser. He was looking for a story. Apparently he likes the stuff I do on my blog here and wanted an article about how I got started in charcuterie, the stories of the successes and failures, and just how you go about curing meat at home.

“sure!” I said “that sounds like fun”. Turns out it was. Even better than that it turns out that this online magazine is absolutely fantastic. Stocked full of great stories and photography. My kind of publication. In future editions I will be delving more in to different aspects of charcuterie, but to start with this article is about how I got started doing what I love.

So, go read. The whole magazine. It is awesome, and you can view it for free. That makes it doubly awesome. Oh, and they have a really nifty viewer to read it in too. Yep, you guessed it – now triple awesome. Here is the link: Spenser Magazine

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beets with creme fraiche and other stuff..

Beets are my favorite root vegetable. My favorite to grow in our back yard, and my favorite to chow down on come the cooler months. They have, I have to say, been one of our great successes in the yard. We aren’t experienced gardeners, especially when it comes to vegetables. Many things have died from either our neglect or over attention, but beets have never been one of them. The seeds we sowed this year even survived a ridiculously wet spring and early summer that left most of our other crops bait for slugs. Each year we grow a couple of different varieties, some golden, some of the standard red ones and my personal favorite the chioggia beet. The chioggia is hands down the prettiest beet in the patch. I love how they look simple and beetish in the ground. You pick them and the slightly more red/orange root still looks like a standard beet, albeit a slightly odd colored one. But once you cut in to one raw and see the magnificent strips of brightly colored flesh you are sold. Unfortunately they loose some of that when cooked, however – which just means they should be eaten raw more often. For some reason it always reminds me of cutting in to a watermelon radish, a similar spectacular display of colors and patterns.

get more beets after the jump

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roasted peppers, millet with apricots, raisins, hazelnuts and toasted spices

It is about this time of year that I start doing quite a lot with locally grown peppers. They crop up at the farmers markets everywhere and it is pretty much impossible to walk through without picking up at least one bag. Over the years I have started to stray away from the usual red bell peppers, in search of more interesting shapes and colors. I actively hunt out the odd looking ones. Those deformed ones seem to have more character and I think they taste better to boot – or maybe just photograph with more charm..

Click to read more of this roasted pepper recipe

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a simple pot of beans

As I start getting old in my years, I am starting to realize there are two things that you shouldn’t mess with. The first is your mother-in-law, and the second is a pot beans. I am not even going to go there with the first – I happen to have a great MIL, so no worries there. The pot of beans is a far more complex issue anyhow (not calling the MIL “simple” you understand) because it needs subtly, which as we all know mother-in-laws can never have (hi Nell!)…

Beans are a favorite of mine, not just because they go so darn well with pork. Oh, and lamb to that point too. Beans have the ability to soak up so much flavor from whatever they are cooked in, yet remain delicate and individually nuanced if you want them to be.

get more beans after the jump

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Food and Light 2011

This blog has been a little quiet of late, and I apologize for that. Things have been busy, really busy. Here is one of the reasons why – Food and Light 2011.

Jen Yu of UseRealButter fame emailed me a while ago and asked if I wanted to be an instructor along with her and Todd and Diane of WhiteOnRiceCouple for this two day photography and styling workshop in Boulder, CO that she was setting up.

Click to read more about this workshop

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gluten free flatbreads – hot pepper lonzino and mizuna

It has taken us nearly a year to perfect this gluten free flatbread dough. The “we” part is my wife and I. For the last couple of years she has had to be gluten-free and that might well never change, so we decided to try and develop a fantastic pizza and flatbread gluten free dough. A regular weekly staple for us was making pizza from the basic “wheat, no knead” recipe that seems to be on every blog these days. We changed it a bit to use a mix of white and whole grain flours, but it was essentially the same. The only problem with it was gluten.

So when Danika first had to go gluten free, this was the one thing we had to make. We started with a recipe from a gluten free baking book. Our hopes were high. We bought the 4000 different flours required, the 20 different bizzare gums that I had never heard of before, and started to mix. We let it rise, then baked it. We wanted to like it. “hey this isn’t bad” I seem to remember muttering. But we knew different. It was bloody lousy. It was also a sodding pain in arse to work with.

Click to read more about this gluten free flatbreads

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the USDA approved basement..

It was about a year ago that I met David Pearlstein. He had a charcuterie blog back then, and was making some very decent looking (and tasting) product in his basement. He came over, we shared some of our cured meat (he makes the best duck proscuitto I have ever tasted) and chatted for a while about salty pig bits. Back then there was no mention of his great plans afoot.

About 6 months ago I checked his blog and saw a post on how he was converting his small home garage into a fully inspected, USDA approved meat processing facility, with the view to make awesome fresh sausage from local sustainable meats. Frankly, this didn’t surprise me much. David has spent more than a decade making fresh sausage, so it only seemed natural for him to make a business out of it. What did surprise me however was that he was going to do it legally from his garage. At the time I remember thinking that it will never work. That he would never get USDA approval for something like this. I mean, everything you hear about the USDA is that they are there to support big (BIG) business and giggle with a non-approving look at small artisan businesses.

click to read more about this meaty garage

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breakfast

“You need to eat more protein” said my naturopath, “preferably at breakfast” she added. Being honest, I wasn’t totally surprised. My breakfasts recently had been cereal mixed with nuts and apples, covered in yogurt (Grace Harbor Farms for the world!). Looks like there is less protein in yogurt than I figured.

To some readers of this blog, that might be a shock. Given that my world the last couple of years has revolved around cured meat, pig and fish. This might be a tall order to expect you to believe this, but I honestly don’t eat much meat. In fact, a lot of the stuff I cure I give away. So, with all this in mind I set about coming up with a few fast breakfasts that revolved around my number 1 favorite food.

Eggs.

Click to read more about my favorite breakfast

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homemade port and fennel pollen salami

If I was to get all swanky on ya, I would call this salami “finocchiona salami”, however whenever I use some authentic name I seem to get emails from twerps telling me that it isn’t in fact XYZ because of this this and this. So I am not going to.

To be a true finocchiona it should have both fennel pollen and fennel seed in. I doubt the port should be in there either. No doubt it also has to be made by a certain old man named Giovanni who lives in a hut in the back of Tuscany somewhere. You can only contact him by a secret bird call, and he will only make finocchiona salami when he has the exact breed of pig required and at the right time of year so that the one certain kind of natural mold will settle on said salami, which of course gives it is characteristic taste.

I am guessing only part of that is true..

Click to read more about making salami at home

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wrightfood photography manual – digital version!

OK folks, gonna make this one short and sweet. Lots and lots of people have asked for a digital version of the Wrightfood Food Photography manual that I have started selling last week to raise money for Japan.

The original hardback book is available through blurb for $44.44. With the profit that Blurb takes, this leaves $10 for Japan. I make nothing on this sale.

The digital version of this book is available through Tradebit, in both PDF and ePUB formats for $20 I know Tradebit might look a bit hokey, but it is a great German company that do secure digital content downloads and offer the most competitive pricing. Both the PDF format and ePUB format will give $14/sale to Japan – again I make nothing.

I personally would choose the PDF version. The formatting is much nicer, and the images are larger. ePUB has a lot of formatting restrictions, and image size restrictions that does hamper a book like this a bit. The content is still the same – I just think the PDF version is prettier to look at.

So, go buy it! Here is the info on the book again, if you cannot be arsed to look back at the last post:

I wrote a short book on food photography. It covers everything you need to know to get yourself taking great food photos in your house. Examples of how to use scrims, bounce cards, natural light, artificial light. Everything to get you going.

I wanted it to be more than that though. So, what I did was include a bunch of examples. On one full page you see the food photo I took and on the page next to it you get a detailed description of the setup, along with an illustration I did showing exactly how the scene was setup. Where the light was coming from. Where the bounces are. Where the camera is – AND WHY.

There are examples for both natural and artificial light. I talk about lenses, cameras, tripods all that good stuff. I even give advice on composition, scene setup and all that stuff.

By the time you finish this short book, I want you to be able to take really great shots of your awesome food at home. No studio stuff, just a camera and some light, and a few doodads that you can buy at an art supply store.

Sales update: so far the hardback book has sold 75 copies. That means $750 has been raised for Japan. That is awesome. You guys are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I am hoping the digital versions of this book will help push this number much higher!

And one final thing.. I know that with this digital version it is easy to pirate and copy it for your friends. Since this book is entirely for charity, you frankly are a total scum bag if you think this is acceptable. It has nothing to do with how much work I put in to the thing, it has everything to do about raising money for people who desperately need our help.

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wrightfood photography manual – help japan!

About three months ago Danika turned to me and suggested we do more for charity. That is something that you can never just say “meh..” to. So we got thinking. She is a very accomplished artist so we are planning on selling some of her works for charity. We also thought about setting up a large community vegetable garden to supply vegetables and fruits to lower income families, however that is a wee bit adventurous for both our time and wallets right now.

She then said “why don’t you make a book about food photography and sell it”. That was that. For the last two months in the evenings after work you would find me typing away, making illustrations and designing page layouts.

The book is done. It took longer than expected. Apparently that is how it goes with these things.

Read the rest of this entry »

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celery root remoulade

Some things are so classic, so perfectly right as they are that it seems like a total disgrace to “reinvent” them. There is a reason some dishes have been around for a long time, on and off restaurant menu’s, but always there. There is a tricky knife edge here though. You can fall one way in to classic stardom of a recipe – something so good, so simple that it should never be changed. A quick shake on the edge however and things can fall drastically apart. The dish can be flat, boring, dated.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Meat curing safety

Some of you might know that I am one of the judges for the rather large, rather viral #charcutpalooza challenge. I am in great company there I have to say, and the challenges are shaping up to be very interesting. Michael Ruhlman does a great job in his Charcuterie book to go in to some detail about the safety side of things when curing meat, but I figured I would add my thoughts on the whole safety side of things too.

When I started meat curing at home many years ago I promised my wife two things – If I thought it might dicey, I wouldn’t eat it. I would read up as much as possible on the safety of curing meats, the process and so on, so that I can guarantee my work is safe.

If done properly, with good technique, attention to detail, and the right environment curing meat is safe. Very safe. It has been done for centuries. People in the past have died from it so we don’t have to. Sounds harsh, but it is true. No need to make the mistakes that others less fortunate have. With that in mind, here is a list of safety facts that I have gathered along the way, to make sure what I do doesn’t make myself, or even worse other people sick.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Food and Light Workshop 2011

Well folks, this is quite an honor to announce this. Every year there is a very special food photography workshop in Boulder Colorado setup by the lovely Jen Yu and Todd Porter and Diane Cu. You might know them better by their blogs – Jen Yu is UseRealButter and Todd and Diane from WhiteonRiceCouple. I am sure they need no introductions from me.

These three are easily some of my favorite food photographers of this time. Each of them a well honed professional in food photography, having shot for publications, cookbooks, websites, restaurants, and I whole lot more. Just when you wanted to hate them for being so bloody talented – there is more. They are some of the most genuine, warmhearted people you will ever come across. Perhaps the greatest thing of all (especially for everyone else) is that they LOVE to teach, and they do it really darn well.

Click to read more about this fantastic food photography workshop

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