Upside-Down Heirloom

Planning ahead for the many vacation days I would need to use for the wedding this year, I never took a summer vacation. Planning for the expense of Ireland, I never even took a weekend shore trip or a few days in the Poconos. And so I baked in my air condition-less apartment, sipping rum drinks Will concocted and reading the New York Times food section as it went on and on about how lovely it was to take a jaunt down to "The Cape" and cook sea food and walk on the beach. One article in particular caught my eye, talking about the limited kitchen resources in a rental, but how one place she had stayed at had big cast iron pans hanging on the wall. She went on and on about how the pans were so very useful, handling everything from fried potatoes to a baked peach crisp. I was enchanted, and decided it was absolutely necessary to add a cast iron pan to my arsenal.

Conventional wisdom holds that the ideal cast iron pan is handed down from your grandmother, has cooked 800 meals, and has never seen a drip of soap. By cleaning only with hot water and a stiff brush the flavor and essence of those 800 meals clings to the metal and infuses itself into every new dish. In serious culinary families severe divides have been created amongst siblings gunning to inherit such a pan. My family has no such pan, as far as I know (insert suspicious glares at my cousins here). This being New York City, lineage can be purchased if the price is right. I know for a fact that The Brooklyn Kitchen--where I took my knife skills class--sells refurbished antique cast irons, but they were a bit out of my price range. Onto my registry went a 9" cast iron pan, and every few weeks I would peek at it, dreaming of the family heirloom I was about to start. Well big thank you to childhood friend Lucy (spoiler alert: she's a soon to be mommy! yay!), cause this week it arrived, heavy, black and ready to go.

I have heard that if you aren't a cast iron heiress then the first order of business for the new pan is to cook up a big batch of bacon to get the flavor absorption started. Bacon, it seems, is wonderful and has many uses. Every now and again, I catch Will trying to pour bacon grease on his cereal instead of milk--an eerily attractive concept. Unfortunately, I had no bacon on hand, but I did have the leftover panchetta from last week's stuffing. Into the pan it went, fried up beautifully and an heirloom was born. Carefully studying the care instructions I cleaned with hot water and a brush, sprayed with vegetable oil while still warm, and put in a cool dry place.

Now that I had started the seasoning, I needed the first real recipe to break in the new pan. The article that had first piqued my interest was all beach focused, and the snow swirling past my window Saturday night did not put me in the mood for such fare. I needed something built for cold weather, something with a winter comfort food feel. Searching a bit more on the NY Times website turned up an article I had seen last month from Mark Bittman about a Pear Upside-Down Cake. That's right, not only was I going to bake, I was going to invert it. Fuck you Isaac Newton.

The video included in his blog told me that I had found a kindred baking spirit. He gets frustrated at having to complete two steps at once, and really doesn't feel that making things pretty when baking is an absolute necessity. Also hysterical is when he decides that if a little egg shell gets in, well that just adds "crunch." Brilliant. He doesn't actually use a cast iron when he makes it, but it turned up in the search because someone in the comments suggests it. Searching the website of Lodge Cast Iron, the company that made my pan, turned up a recipe for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, and a confirmation that upside cake is really meant for a cast iron. That was all the prodding I needed, so I plunged in.

Maple Pear Upside-Down Cake

Adapted from the NY Times

Ingredients:

11 tablespoons butter

3/4 cup maple syrup

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

3 to 4 pears, peeled, cored and thinly sliced

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 large eggs

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup milk.

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a 9" cast iron pan over medium heat; add maple syrup and brown sugar and cook, stirring, until sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil and cook for another 2 minutes; remove from heat and set aside. When mixture has cooled a bit, arrange pear slices in an overlapping circle on top.

2. With a handheld or standing mixer, beat remaining 8 tablespoons butter and the sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and eggs, one egg at a time, continuing to mix until smooth. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt.

3. Add flour mixture to butter mixture in three batches, alternating with milk; do not overmix. Carefully spread batter over pears, using a spatula to make sure it is evenly distributed. Bake until top of cake is golden brown and edges begin to pull away from sides of pan, about 45 to 50 minutes; a toothpick inserted into center should come out clean. Let cake cool for 5 minutes.

4. Run a knife around edge of pan; put a plate on top of cake and carefully flip it so plate is on bottom and pan is on top. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Pork Chops in a Maple Brine with Roasted Pear Chutney

Trying to find a good recipe for Pork Chops, which happened to be on sale last week, I ran across a recipe for Maple Syrup Brine with a Roasted Pear Chutney. It's been a few years since I've brined, I did it once or twice with success before I absolutely ruined a few chops with an overly salty brine and have shied away ever since. I do not take well to serving a pork chop that tastes suspiciously like a salt lick. This recipe did have a few things that intrigued me though, including the maple syrup ingredient. While in PA last weekend my mother had given me some farmers market syrup she had picked up. Because it's just Will and I in the apartment and I rarely cook breakfast (before coffee my culinary skills involve toasting and that's about it) I had been concerned about my ability to find uses for such a tasty syrup. A rich brine seemed like the perfect "solution." That's right, it's a righteous pun. Deal with it.

There were other advantages to brining. Since both the brine and the Pear Chutney need to be created the night before, I could cook it in the later hours of the evening, when the sun had gone down and my apartment cooled off a few degrees. It was an elaborate and time consuming bit of cooking which I don't usually tackle on a weeknight. Before moving to NY when I lived at home I usually only cooked on the weekends and would make complex meals. When I moved, these were the recipes I knew best and didn't calculate in the full time job when attempting them. According to the people I love I get a tiny bit cranky when my blood sugar plummets, and I nearly risked my relationship and my cookware making mozzarella stuffed meatballs at 8:30 on a Tuesday night with Will hiding in the bedroom and ground meat all over the table before I finally figured out that not every meal could be created on a weeknight. The brilliant part of the brining plan was I had already eaten a simple sausage sandwich and none of the food was for the same night, making the weeknight cooking a much lower pressure and higher blood sugar situation.

So that's how it came to be that at 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday I was standing over my "non reactive" pot. Who are these people buying the "reactive" pots recipes feel the need to warn you about? The nice thing about brine is that it's generally a "Throw things in pot, stir, boil, cool" kind of directions. There was a lot of chopping and measuring involved, but no sauteing or roasting or extra work to speak of. As per the comments on Epicurious, I halved the salt, didn't concern myself with the Juniper Berries (which I don't happen to keep on hand), and added a bit of Bourbon. As I had nearly killed the bottle, I threw the remaining shot in a glass, added an ice cube and a mint leaf and enjoyed a nice southern summer treat as I cooked. Cooking is better when you have a drink in your hand, which is one of the reasons I keep Will around and let him eat my food.

Once the brine was all set and cooling on the table, I turned my attention to the Roasted Pear Chutney. This involved, unsurprisingly, roasting the pear. In 87 degree humid weather. Dammit. The kitchen already felt downright gross so instead of turning on the oven to roast a single pear, I flicked on my brand new toaster oven, a wedding shower gift from my childhood friends the Jacobsons. I peeled the pear, cut in half, and tossed with lemon, sugar, ground cinnamon and ground cloves. I was a bit weary of the recipe as my kitchen now smelled like a Christmas cookie in the middle of a heat wave in August...but I plowed ahead. The onion mixture was simple enough, though it called for

golden raisins and currants, neither of which I had thought to buy, so I skipped them and crossed my fingers. Thank god I had lined the roasting tray of the toaster oven with foil. The extra sugar sauce that dripped off the pear became a black smoking goo within 15 minutes, and while the pear was fine, it would have been a hell of a thing to subject my brand new cookware to.

At 10:30 p.m. everything was covered and in the fridge, and I was drenched in sweat and exhausted. Of course, exhaustion doesn't necessarily mean sleep. Insomnia racked me and I got out of bed and surfed the internet until three in the morning, which left me a bit cranky when I rose the next morning and set about the task of actually plunking the pork chops into the brine. I really, really hate dealing with raw meat before coffee. I'm perfectly fine with smooshing ground meat with my bare hands or butterflying

a chicken after, say, one in the afternoon. Let's just say handling a giant raw pork chop at 8 a.m. isn't my favorite way to start the day. I plunked the chops into the brine and, after the damn things started to float on me, weighed them down with a butter knife.

Sticking it back in the fridge I muttered something about how I swear to god I'm going to turn Kosher, and then settled in with toast and coffee.

At 6 p.m. that evening I stumbled into my apartment and collapsed on the bed, four hours of sleep did not make for the most invigorating day. Thank god I had done 90% of the work on dinner the night before or I would be calling my friends at Dominos. Will and I were getting worried we called them too much when we started receiving "Valued Customer" coupons in the mail... but then some friend of ours told us that their delivery guy recognized them on the street and knew them by name. I'm sure the people who deliver for Dominos are solid upstanding citizens of high moral character, but that's far from the point. I just don't want to feel like a fatty. That hasn't happened to us yet, so I guess we're still okay.

I proceeded to nap until Will got home around seven and then I decided I had better start cooking the massive pork products. Well, first I had Will make me his patented Raspberry Lemon Cosmo. Then I got some laundry together. Then I had a piece of baguette with cheese and read a magazine while Will tackled some of the sink of dishes I had created the night before. Okay fine, so maybe it was close to 8 p.m. before I actually chopped potatoes and got them cooking, and another half hour before I got the grill pan going. I was tired! The directions, which were of course written for an out door grill and not my teensy Queens kitchen, instructed the chef to have one part of the grill on high heat, and another part on medium. The chef is to sear both sides of the chops on high heat, and then transfer to the medium heat part and cover the grill. I regarded my singular grill pan with trepidation. I solved this problem by

searing, and then removing the chops entirely to a plate, turning down the flame, and then holding the grill pan in midair for a minute while it cooled the hell down. Grill experts could probably tell you ten things wrong with this system, but luckily I haven't talked to them. Once the chops were back in the pan I covered them with a lid from an old cheap pasta pot that is ventilated. I threw out the pot a long time ago when the bottom rusted (ew), but I discovered this method while grilling Turkey Burgers, so I've held onto the lid. I'm so handy. I'm also very attractive and funny, but that's off topic.

So, after all that, at nearly 9 p.m. (which, I suppose, makes this a 26 hour meal for those keeping track) we sat down to Grilled Maple Brined Pork Chops, Roasted Pear Chutney, and Roasted Red Potatoes. The Pork Chops, thank god, were delicious. They were juicy, they had a deep oaky salty flavor without being overly salty, and I didn't even burn the outside, which I've been known to do on a grill pan. The potatoes are fool proof, so they were tasty as always. The Roasted Pear Chutney, well... it was very very vinegary. The white wine vinegar completely dominates the dish. If you tried the pork with a bite of pear you could still get some of the pear's sweetness, but none of the spice I worked so hard to put on. The onions were completely overpowered, which might have to do with the fact that I was supposed to use a red onion, which has a stronger flavor, but since I really don't like red onions that much I'm not sure that would have made it taste "better" to me. Maybe those raisins and currants would have saved the dish, but I don't see how they would have made an impressive dent in that vinegar. I might try it again someday but the chops were perfectly wonderful without it, and even the recipe refers to it as optional.

After all the work and patience and waiting, I reconciled my relationship with brining and had a (mostly) satisfying meal on the table. Now if I can just get over my fight with blanching, my coldness towards basting, and the outright silent treatment I've been giving deep frying, there may be harmony in my kitchen.