Pork Loin Ribs

Are not baby back ribs, but they are delicious.

Take a rack of ribs. Mix together in a jar equal parts paprika, black pepper (cracked, easiest to do in large quantities in a mortar), and salt. Rub that over your ribs while your grill is getting hot, so that it's sitting, and ribs are coming to room temperature, 30-60 minutes.

Over medium grill heat (we did some hamburgers first, then threw the ribs on) grill concave (inside) side first for 13 minutes, then flip and do another 13 minutes, with the lid on. Test with meat thermometer to 165-175 F internal temp (in the meaty part, not too close to a rib). Remove from grill, let rest a couple minutes, then slice and serve.

Cochon Philadelphia

Joshua took me to a porky restaurant in Philly called Cochon. I'm sure they stole their name and idea from Steven Stryjewski, but whatevs, the Philadelphia and New Orleans markets are far apart and there is definitely room for both. Also, porky restaurants are never a bad idea.

It is BYOB and rather small; it got noisier as it filled up. We got the charcuterie plate and a nice bibb lettuce salad to start; the salad had lardons because if you're running this type of place DUH everything must have some pork in it somewhere. The spring peas were very nice and the lettuce was soft and submissive, not unlike eating Kima, were Kima a lettuce. The charcuterie plate was possibly - no, truly - the best thing we had, particularly the chicken liver mousse. I could have eaten 5 lbs of mousse on toasts and my parents will tell you I am no huge fan of chicken liver (except in pate form). I'm sure this had truffles and spices and other sorts of pork fat mixed in there but hot damn it was tasty. The saucisson sec was nice, but dry, what are you going to do, the truffle sausage was all right, but not as good as the other more fatty salami. Oh yes and the duck prosciutto was perfectly fine.

Along came the main courses; special braised pork cheeks (crusty on the outside, soft and tender and salty on the inside - a little too salty, in fact), with some apple-celeryroot-goatcheese ravioli, which were better than I expected - mostly goatcheesy, with some crunch and cheesiness-mitigation from the apple. Plus some sort of tomato-fava bean ragout. Joshua had the baby pig, roasted, with a pea shoot salad and some delicious lentils and a truffle aioli somewhere in there, all with a poached egg on top, why, who knows, because I'm sure there wasn't enough protein and umami on that plate already. The baby pig was of course delicious - it being rather hard to mess up roast piglet, thank goodness.

Then we were stuffed but what the hell, dessert! Pecan bourban banana bread pudding. Too much. With some ice cream that had chocolate discs in it, I found somewhat distracting. Probably we should have had coffee to cut the sweetness, as advised by our very nice waitress at Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore the last time we had an overzealous meal, but she wasn't there to rein us in.

Please look forward to the next installment of porky-restaurant reviews in a couple weeks, when we hit Clementine, and possibly next week, from the smoked butt capital of North Carolina.

And - congrats to Nick and Johanna on their NEW FLOORS!

Alfredo for One, proposal week

When trying to figure out how to solve all of Angola's malaria problem as part of donor hoop-jumping, spaghetti alfredo for one can be a nice fatty interlude between budgeting and writing.

Angola fun fact: in 2006, Angola was second only to Kuwait in having the most expensive office rents outside of Europe. If I need say, office space for 3, it will cost me about 20,000/month.

Alfredo for One:
less than 1/4 c cream (about 3/4 of a 1/4 cup)
4 oz grated parm/romano
1 large tbl butter
salt, pepper, nutmeg

heat that all together for a couple minutes and throw it on some pasta.