I served this cured duck hors d’oeuvre at my recent dinner party. Everything on my menu that night had some type of relevance to me. This dish represents the beginning of my professional career here in New York City. The duck pastrami was one of the things I learned to do at the first serious restaurant I worked at, a Mediterranean spot called Trigo. I used the same curing mixture to cure my duck breast at home, as I did back there at Trigo. I made my own dish from it though, by serving slices of the duck on endive leaves, with a garnish of minced apples. Endive leaves are a cool vehicle for hors d’oeuvres. I learned that trick at Aquavit. When I worked there we served tuna tartare on endive leaves as an hors d’oeuvre for private parties.

Duck, like pork, goes very well with fruit and other sweet ingredients. In this dish, duck breast is sautéed and served with an apple juice-flavored brown sauce and a garnish of butter-sautéed apple slices. The sautéed apples are also an excellent garnish for pork.

Duck breast has quite a lot of fat, which is rendered off during its slow cooking. Duck fat is a delicious substitute to butter or oil and prized in many cuisines. You may want to save the fat that renders off (strain it and refrigerate it), and cook with it later.

This monkfish dish, from Charlie Trotter, is very characteristic of the New American cuisine. Although the dish is very light, many complex flavors are at work, and there is a great freshness and brightness to it.

It’s a colorful dish, and has a lot of texture contrasts – smooth puree, crisp fish, and soft, sweated vegetables. Watercress appears in two forms – the puree spread across the plate, and wilted in the salad.

The salad of bitter endive and watercress is balanced nicely by sweet, julienned apple, and zesty red onion.

A delicious, unique dish that highlights a great, inexpensive fish – the poor man’s lobster.

Big, juicy pork chop with thick, apple-flavored gravy

A bone-in loin of pork rubbed with sage and roasted with mirepoix and apples, which caramelize beautifully and make for a flavorful gravy.

This was a fun dish to make. The pork roasts slowly at 325, giving the cook some extra time to bust out a couple nice side dishes. After one hour, you add the mirepoix and diced apples to the roasting pan. When the pork is up to temp, you remove it and place the pan on the stovetop to cook away excess moisture, and deglaze the pan with stock. Then, the liquid is thickened with a blond roux, and simmered for 15 minutes to incorporate. I had made a quick stock the day before, using parts from a couple whole chickens, a few pounds of pork bones from a Latino grocery store, and a couple pieces of a calf’s foot to add some nice gelatin.

Add mirepoix and apples after one hour

Sorry vegans, but ain't nothing bad about something sooo good

You burn the roux I'm a throw you outta my kitchen

Evaporate the water, then drain the fat

Cabbage goes well with apples and pork, so this cabbage braised in apple cider was a natural to go with the roast pork with sage & apples. The recipe is from Best American Side Dishes, a great source of recipes for vegetables that don’t taste bland and boring.

I used red cabbage rather than green this time and found it works just as well. It’s a simple recipe, but the cider, diced Granny Smith apple, thyme, and caraway seeds add a wonderful mix of flavor to the leafy vegetable. I doubled the recipe (cooked the whole head of cabbage rather than half) as I was cooking for a bunch of hungry people who like to get their nutrients and stuff. If you do cook the whole head, just add it in bunches to the pan so it can wilt and make room for the rest. Unless of course you have a huge sauté pan that I don’t know about.

Sautéeing the Granny Smith

We all know how bad cabbage can taste if not prepared well. So show the poor thing a bit of love.

Shingle the slices for a nice presentation

Because pork is so lean these days, it has the danger of being a bit dry and flavorless. However, with both a marinade and a thick, reddish, complex pan sauce, this recipe will ensure a flavorful roast and a worthy presentation.

Marinating in Oil, Soy Sauce, and Ginger

I got this dish from a culinary arts textbook, Professional Cooking by Wayne Gisslen, which I’m reading through while I wait to attend school. The sweet-sour apple glaze is based on a gastrique, a mixture of caramelized sugar dissolved in vinegar, which according to the book is “A classic technique to add a balanced sweet-sour accent to a sauce.” The pork is removed from the roasting pan and the sauce is made by adding a bit of tomato paste to the mirepoix and pan drippings and deglazing with chicken stock, and then combining with a mixture of honey and cider vinegar, which has been heated in a saucepan until lightly caramelized.

Presentation: overlap a few pork slices on the plate in a semi-circle, like shingles, and glaze with a couple ounces of the sauce. Goes great with some apple slices sautéed in butter, or braised cabbage. You can also shingle the slices around a mound of mashed potatoes.

Here’s my version of the recipe, which is a bit of an approximation as it’s scaled down from the original, restaurant-quantity version, and changes bone-in pork loin to boneless pork loin. You can mess around with the amounts; I actually used a very small pork loin, about 1 ¾ pounds, so scaled it down further.

3 or 4 pounds boneless pork loin
2 ounces oil
2 ounces soy sauce
About an inch of fresh ginger, finely diced
Salt and pepper to taste
Large onion, diced
Large carrot, diced
5-6 garlic cloves, peeled, left whole
½ tablespoon tomato paste
2 cups chicken stock
2 ounces honey (preferably acacia honey)
4 ounces cider vinegar

Mix together the oil, soy sauce, and seasonings. Marinate the pork for at least 1 hour.

Remove the pork from the marinade, leaving any pieces of ginger adhering to the meat. Place in an oiled roasting pan and place in an oven preheated to 350°F.

After 10 minutes of roasting, add the onion, carrot, and garlic cloves, and continue roasting until the pork is done, about 1 hour 20 minutes to 1 hour 50 minutes in all.

Remove the roast from the pan and hold in a warm place.

Place the roasting pan on the stovetop. Add the tomato paste and cook for a few minutes, then add the chicken stock. Cook for 15 minutes.

Strain. Reserve the garlic cloves. Skim off any fat.

Combine the honey with the vinegar in a saucepan and cook until lightly caramelized.

Add the strained cooking liquid and cook for a few minutes, then add the garlic cloves. Reduce until the sauce is thickened enough to lightly coat the back of a spoon. Strain, pressing the garlic cloves well. Season to taste.

Serve the pork sliced with the sauce around.