Hotels at Christmas... it's always interesting.
We never close. While most 'normal' restaurants shut their doors during the holiday of holidays, families cruising around looking for grub can always find a meal in a hotel restaurant which is guaranteed to be open. The menus, as ours was this year, remain pretty straightforward as we structured it to be attractive to the family with kids as well as the younger couple away for Christmas.
For Christmas Eve, one of our entrees surprised us as being pretty popular. That dish was braised pork shanks with red pearl onions and mushrooms. Sounds great to me, but in an area that boasts a huge Jewish population and has kosher deli's on every other block it was nice to see these hocks appear on each ticket rung up in the kitchen. Of course, braised pork just sounds incredible without any further elaboration, but what made this batch even better was the use of the C-Vap. We've dabbled with it for various applications since it was parked in our kitchen... however, I'm constantly amazed at one of its more common uses... long term slow cooking of the highest caliber imaginable.
We started out with raw shanks rubbed with fresh herbs and dry seasonings (cayenne, porcini, onion) and set them in a roasting pan along with some dried wild mushrooms, pearl onion, and just a little chicken glace (you obviously need less liquid for braising in a controlled vapor environment).
These ran for a little over 24 hours at 62º. Afterwards the incredibly 'fall off the bone' tender (yet still nicely medium) meat was removed from the bones and tossed back in with the braising liquid and pearl onion. We removed the dried mushroom and added in freshly roasted shiitake, oyster, and chantrelle mushrooms. Instead of the typical long term over-cooked meat that depends on the surrounding liquid for flavor, the flavor of the meat was the dominant element that depended on the other flavors only for slight balance and support. We had recently cooked some boneless shortribs the same way for 36 hours, and drooled over the realization that they were still medium rare in color yet could be broken apart with a dull spoon.
So incredibly simple, yet I went to sleep last night thinking about them. Seriously, if you don't have a C-Vap in your kitchen, you need to squeeze one into your 2009 capital budget while you still have time.
Other notes:
Through the NY Times, I came across a great link for following our president elect's food policies and general food associated articles, Obama Foodorama. With the wide range of areas that require great focus for anyone who should find themselves sitting in the president's chair during this period in American history, we should hope that changes in our foodways do not drop to the back burner as they are arguably the most important of all.
There are so many wrong food practices in the USA. When visiting our exec. sous chef Mike in the hospital (who is doing great and just returned home after a very successful surgery), I was dumbfounded over one of his designated recovery meals served while we were there... chicken with converted artificially seasoned and colored rice, jello with artificial colors and sweeteners, mixed frozen vegetables, and a diet Pepsi. Does this make any sense at all? Funny that this could easily be on the menu today in your child's school cafeteria. Why should people, when they need the freshest and most nutritious sustenance ever, be prescribed to eating pure garbage simply based on its shallow dietary read-out (I'm sure there was one listed on every can they opened)? Is it the hospital's way of keeping themselves in business by purporting a constant state of ill health in those who have the insurance to keep them in the black (like a dentist giving candy to kids).
Seriously, he should have been fed that pork shank.