Tasso - Cajun Smoked Ham

So lately I have been trying to pick up larger cuts of meat and do various things with them.  I use the excuse of economy but the underlying truth is that I enjoy amateur butchery.  In addition to that, it is definitely convenient to buy a 3 lb chuck roast, have it sitting in the freezer, and be able to fit many whims with it.  Beef stew?  Ground beef?  Shaved beef for cheesesteaks?   I have a wide variety of bases covered.  Keeping it locked in vacuum bags extends the freezer life so I have the luxury of using one large cut over a couple months.  The downside to this (if you could call it a downside) is that occasionally I find myself wanting to get rid of things so that I can pick up something else, or feeling the need to make something with a certain cut before freezer burn, the inevitable asshole, sets in.

Last weekend I found myself wanting to get rid of the last of a pork shoulder.  I had about 1½ lb of shoulder that I wanted to use.  I had a hankering to break out the smoker and do something cured/smoked, because I didn't intend on using the shoulder immediately.  The first thing that came to mind was to make tasso - the ubiquitous ham used all throughout Cajun cooking.  

I think tasso often gets a comparison to bacon.  They are used in similar ways, primarily as a seasoning ingredient for bigger meals like jambalaya.  They are both cured, but tasso is a very quick cure compared to bacon, which can take up to a week.  Tasso cures for a matter of hours on much smaller cuts of meat.  Tasso uses shoulder, whereas bacon uses belly, and tasso uses a strong spice rub, lending a complex flavor profile after smoking.

Traditionally, tasso is smoked using pecan wood.  I had to settle for a mix of alder and hickory (1:2 ratio), I wanted a smoked flavor but not too strong.  Alder is a nice mild wood often used for smoking fish, so I relied mostly on that with a little bit of hickory to give it a little backbone.

 

Tasso - Cajun Smoked Ham

(recipe adapted from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman)

Cure:

1.5-2 lb pork shoulder, cut into roughly 1" thick slabs

8 oz kosher salt

4 oz sugar

Rub:

1½ tbsp ground white pepper

3/4 tbsp cayenne pepper

1½ tbsp dried marjoram

1½ tbsp ground allspice

Start by combining the salt and sugar for your cure.  Dredge your shoulder cuts in the cure, shake off excess, and set them in a container to cure for 4 hours.  You could add pink salt to the cure, I opted not to.  In this cure you would use 1 oz of pink salt.

Combine the rub ingredients.  I had to use the old fashioned mortar and pestle to grind my white pepper so it is extra chunky.  I got tired and my mortar and pestle are small and kind of hard to use.

Rinse the shoulder slabs and pat them dry with a paper towel.  Use your hands to work in the rub on all sides of the shoulder.

Get your smoker preheated to 180º.  Soak the wood chips for at least 30 minutes, add them to the smoker and watch for first whisps of smoke to come out.  Add the tasso and smoke to a temperature of 155º.  Add woodchips as necessary.  Let cool and use as needed or freeze for future use.

Brazilian Chicken and Okra Stew

Has it really been three months since my last post?  I wish I could say that I had a reasonable excuse, but I really don't.  Life has gotten so crazy since moving to Boston.  Crazy in a good way, but crazy nonetheless.  My days are long and my job is keeping me busy at all times.  My routine from my life in Raleigh is a distant memory, which is obviously affecting the regularity of my posts here.  Before moving to Boston, I often found myself creating cooking projects for myself to blog about.  Living in Boston has been more of an exercise in practicality.  Instead of spending 20-30 minutes commuting each day, I spend 2 hours commuting.  The time to come home and pull together an extravagant dinner is no longer there.  Instead of stopping at Whole Foods on the way home for a spur of the moment meal, my wife and I have begun planning our meals in advance, and spending most of the weekend prepping for a busy week.  For a while, I felt that there was nothing really worth blogging about in that situation, but now I'm realizing that it's not really true.  I hope to get back in the groove with regular blog posts, even if the subject matter is not as epic as I wish it could be.

One of the great things about moving to a new city (or even a new neighborhood) is experiencing a cultural change in your new setting.  I had no idea that Boston had a strong Brazilian population, but nearby neighborhoods like Union Square in Somerville show a strong Brazilian population.  I have to say that Brazilian food is something that I don't know a lot about, but it has been great to learn about and see the style of food that is in local Brazilian restaurants.  I was looking for something to make for lunch for the week, and my wife suggested recreating one of her favorite dishes from the Brazilian restaurant at the end of our street - stewed chicken and okra.  A one-pot dish served over rice, travels well and easy to heat up for lunch, I was all in.  I can't vouch for the authenticity of this recipe and I decided to compile parts that I liked from several recipes that I found, so it's kind of a menagerie of ideas but I was really happy with the result.

Brazilian Chicken and Okra Stew (Frango con Quiabo)

1 lb boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into cubes
1 medium onion
1 green pepper
1 small handful (1/4 c?) flat leaf parsley
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 lime
3 tbsp white vinegar
3 tbsp vegetable oil
6 cloves garlic
Long grain white rice
1 lb okra (fresh or frozen)
2c chicken stock

Start by making a marinade for the chicken.  Juice the lime, combine with the vinegar and oil, crush 4 of the garlic cloves and add a fair amount of salt and pepper.  Whisk to dissolve the salt and marinate the chicken for at least 30 minutes, or as long as overnight.

After cutting the okra, rinse and salt it and let it sit for 15 minutes or so.  This will leech out some of the stickiness.

While the chicken is marinating and the okra is macerating, roughly chop your onion and green pepper.  Add to a food processor with the parsley and the last 2 cloves of garlic.  Process until you have a smooth paste.

Put a saute pan on med-hi heat and add enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Fry the okra for approximately 10 minutes.  Let them sit long enough to brown up a bit and then remove them and set aside.  Add a little more oil if necessary, and add your chicken.  Saute until brown on all sides, then remove and reserve.

Add the onion/green pepper mixture and the tomato paste and saute for approximately 10 minutes.  It took a while for me to get this cooked down, it took longer than I expected for it to not have that sort of raw onion and pepper smell.  You will notice that the mixture will start to dry up, then you know it's getting close.

Add your chicken back to the mixture as well as the chicken stock.  Bring to a simmer, turn the heat down to low, and partially cover.  Stew the mixture for 45 minutes or so, until the chicken is nice and tender.  If your mixture dries out, add more chicken stock or some water to keep it from burning.

The vinegar on the chicken should bring some brightness to the stew and really make it pop.  I love the consistency of okra, and the seed bring a really nice texture to this stew.  Cheers to trying new stuff and learning something new along the way!

Homemade Butter

I guess it's kind of funny that after attending a Thanksgiving dinner with 11 new friends, the thing that I left most excited about was trying to make homemade butter.  My wife and I had the pleasure of going to Thanksgiving in Providence, where we met a lot of great new people.  There was a ton of food - too much to fit on the dinner table alone - so it spilled over to side tables.  Dotted among the dinner plates and platters on the table were small ramekins filled with butter, which I found out was homemade butter from our new friend Cobi - a pastry chef who works in Cambridge.  I was immediately intrigued and had to know more about homemade butter.  I've heard of people making butter before but I was never quite sure how difficult it was or anything.  Cobi's succinct answer convinced me that I needed to try it asap:  "you take a bunch of cream and you shake it."  It couldn't actually be that easy could it?  She gave me a few more instructional points, mostly related to when to salt and how to rinse it, but aside from that, it really is that easy.  I hurried to the store today to pick up some heavy cream and see what I could come up with.  I didn't even bother to look up a recipe - let's do it live.  The resulting butter was really smooth and tasted incredibly rich with a texture better than store bought butter.  It was also a relatively quick process, 30 minutes start to finish, including breaks for photos.  

Butter is a natural product of milk and has been a core component of cooking in cultures centered around herding for centuries.  Milk is comprised mostly of water, as well as proteins, fat globules, sugar in the form of lactose, and vitamins.  The fat globules are contained by a membrane that keeps them separate from the proteins, and when we make butter, we are basically just agitating the fat globules so much that the membranes rupture and the fats can stick to each other, resulting in 2 end products:  butter and buttermilk.  We use a high fat concentration of milk (cream) to make butter, which has its own interesting production process.  Fresh milk  (unpasteurized / non-homogenized) separates naturally when sitting at room temperature.  Fat rises to the top and can be skimmed off to create higher fat concentrations of milk, like half & half and cream.  

Homemade butter:

Yields ~6.5 oz butter

16 oz cold heavy cream

1/8 tsp salt (optional)

Pour your cream into a large container with a tight fitting lid (I used a quart mason jar).  Shake the shit out of it.

That's really it.  I'll spend the rest of this post talking about the breakdown of the "shaking the shit out of" process.

Before you really get going, chill a large amount of water - maybe a couple quarts worth.  You will use it to rinse your butter, and it has to be cold to keep the butter from melting.  Put it in the freezer to get it nice and cold while you shake and get your cardio in.

Total time to end up with butter:  30 minutes

At 17 minutes of shaking, I took a quick peek.  I found a very thick cream, it looked like overwhipped whipped cream.  You can start to see the  cream looking kind of granular - I think that is the separation of the fat from the proteins and water.

It got to the point where I was shaking but felt like nothing was happening - I could no longer hear sloshing or anything inside of the jar but I just kept going.  At 22 minutes, the globules broke and the separation began in full force.

Four minutes later at minute mark 26, I could clearly see butter formed surrounded by the buttermilk.  I continued shaking this for a few minutes.

I poured off the buttermilk through a fine mesh sieve into a separate jar.  I did this a few times to make sure that the cream had fully separated and I was no longer getting buttermilk.

At this point, I added some table salt and continued shaking for a minute or two to make sure that the salt was evenly distributed.  If you don't want salted butter you can just leave it out.  Pour in enough cold water to cover the butter and shake more.  Pour off the water and continue rinsing until the water runs clear.  We are removing all of the buttermilk still clinging to the butter.  After the water runs clear, go ahead and package your butter.  It will keep for a week in the fridge but you are better off freezing unused portions.


My final yields were 8½ oz buttermilk and 6.4 oz butter.

Coincidentally (or not), 6.4 (oz butter) /16 (starting oz of cream) = .4 and the concentration of heavy cream is defined as 36-44% fat.  So the logical side of me says that if you are targeting a specific yield of butter, multiplying the number of ounces that you are buying by .4 will give you a nice average estimate of how much butter you will end up with.  Part of me was hoping that I would find that homemade butter was somehow way cheaper than store-bought mass produced butter.  Trying to recall from my last visit to the store, I think that the average organic butter goes for about $4.50 lb.  6.4 oz of organic butter cost me about $3.50, so it is more expensive to make homemade butter, but you do get a better product and a bunch of buttermilk.  I'm not one to argue with more reasons to make homemade pancakes or waffles or even buttermilk fried chicken... so I'll take it.

Homemade Dashi

One of the things that I love about Japanese cooking is the simplicity that pervades every facet of it.  Most dishes, at their essence, start with a mix and match of just a handful of ingredients and are built from there.  Soy sauce, mirin, sake, dashi.  You will find a variation on this theme in most Japanese recipes.  I find it fascinating that an entire culture's food history is built on the shoulders of such simple ingredients.  The difference between peasant food and fine dining isn't so much in the ingredients but in the pursuit of perfection - honoring the ingredients in a flawless fashion.

This recipe is part one of two of a Japanese soup called Tonjiru - a hearty cold weather soup with pork and vegetables.  It's easy to make and it's perfect for cold nights in the fall.  I made the stock but didn't plan on using it immediately, so I froze it until I was ready to use it.

Dashi is a core ingredient in so many Japanese recipes, and it's a simple stock created from just three ingredients:  water, bonito flakes, and konbu seaweed.  The stock never boiled, it is treated more like a tea - you steep the ingredients in hot water for a period of time and then strain the stock when most of the flavor has been extracted from the ingredients (prolonged steeping will result in off-flavors).

To me, the most fascinating thing about this stock is the bonito.  Shredded bonito (katsuobushi) goes through a really interesting preservation process.  It starts with skipjack tuna, which is boiled in salt water and then smoked every day for a 2 week or longer period.  It is then inoculated with a strain of mold and left to ferment for another 2 week period, then sun-dried before mold removal.  This fermentation step is performed three or four times, over a several month long period, resulting in meat that is hard and dense and supposedly sounds like wood when struck.  When complete, the fish is shredded and bagged and ready for whatever application - be it soup stock or as a topping for okonomiyaki or anything else.  Maybe if I can find myself a whole skipjack tuna I'll try the preservation process, but until then I'll probably continue buying nicely packaged bonito flakes.  The package that I have pictured here actually is a mix of bonito and mackerel - it was a suggestion of the nice girl helping me at the Japanese market, who said that she preferred the mix to just straight bonito.  I'll be honest, I don't know if I would be able to tell the difference in the final stock either way, but I decided to take her advice.

Homemade Dashi

1 3x6" piece of konbu
2 handfuls katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes)
8 c water

Start with cold water, and do yourself a favor and start with purified water.  With such a simple stock, the quality of the water has significant effect on the final results.  I have read that you can score the konbu with a knife prior to placing in the water in order to more quickly penetrate the flavors of the seaweed but I'm not sure how I feel about that - you're basically trying to score something that is as tough as a piece of hardwood and the threshold between pressing hard enough to score and breaking the seaweed is small.

Place the konbu in the cold water and heat the water over medium heat until it just begins to simmer.

Turn off the heat and allow the konbu to steep for 12 minutes.  Bring the water back to a simmer and turn the heat off again, adding 2 handfuls of the katsuobushi this time.  Cover the pot and let the ingredients steep for another 7 minutes.

Strain your stock and you are done!  I portioned mine into plastic containers to be frozen for when I make tonjiru.

Corned Beef Tongue

Finally we are back into what feels like a normal routine.  We are mostly unpacked and things feel like they are settling down after what felt like forever in limbo as we transitioned from Raleigh to Boston.  In reality, it has only been a month and 2 weeks since we decided to accept the job offer that would move us from the southeast to New England.  First post in a new place and I have to say I am excited about it.  First, I'd like to tell you a little story about this beef tongue.

Sometime maybe a couple of months ago, I was at the Raleigh State Farmer's Market, and I saw that one of the farmers who sell meat had whole beef tongues for sale.  I love beef tongue.  If I see it on a menu, I have a hard time not ordering it.  It was first introduced to me by a Guadalajara-born friend in Los Angeles.  "You gotta try the lengua man, it melts in your mouth" he would say when we brought up mexican food, but I was timid and didn't work up the guts to try it until I lived in Chicago.  For as much as I have come to love it, I had yet to cook it at home, so when I saw it at the farmer's market, my heartrate went up and I felt like I couldn't pass it by.  I brought it home and immediately stashed it in the freezer until I could find something to do with it.  For one reason or another, I just never got around to cooking it in Raleigh.  I was able to get rid of all of my other freezer meat before we moved - either by grinding it or just finding a way to make use of it.  Everything except this tongue.  So when we started planning our move and what would go with us in the car, I thought I'd make a brilliant suggestion to throw the tongue in the cooler that was going in the car with us.  Since it was like 3 pounds and frozen, it almost single handedly kept everything in the cooler cold for the 14+ hour drive from Raleigh to Boston.  When we got to Boston, it went straight back into the freezer until I could come up with something to do with it.  My first obvious inclination was to make tacos de lengua - my favorite style of taco.  But after looking at recipes, I just wasn't all that inspired.  I continued to peruse my blogs until I found a posting by 4505 Meats founder Ryan Farr.  I first became interested in 4505 as a blog because of the in-depth postings that Ryan would make related to butchery.  He offers classes in whole animal butchery, which I would love to take some day.  Some of the processes are documented in photo blog format, and Ryan also recently released a book about butchery.  I haven't picked the book up, but it looks to be a must have.  Largely illustrative, it looks to demystify some of my questions about butchery and how the process works.  Ryan's corned beef tongue didn't come with a recipe, so I manufactured my own, but I think that it is largely in the spirit of his corned beef tongue, and it was absolutely amazing.

Corned Beef Tongue

(inspired by Ryan Farr, 4505 Meats)

1 beef tongue

1 head of garlic

1 large chunk of ginger (3-4 oz), peeled

10 sprigs thyme

2 tbsp Sriracha chili sauce

1 whole onion, peeled and halved

1 c soy sauce

1 32 oz box chicken stock (optional)

1 box kosher salt

Pink salt (aka Instacure #1 , DQ curing salt) (optional)

Tongue ready to cure

I just wanted to show the fatty end.  Look at that lovely marbling.

Start by rinsing your tongue and patting it dry.  Place it in a container and cover it with salt.  If you would like to use pink salt, feel free.  I used it because I wanted the reddish color that pink salt imparts as it cures, but it is certainly not necessary.  If you do use it, mix the kosher salt and the pink salt in a separate container before covering the tongue.  Cover the tongue in salt and cover the container.  Refrigerate for a week.  I flipped the tongue every other day to ensure that it cured evenly, and I added more salt halfway through to keep the tongue well salted.  

Remove the tongue from the salt and rinse well.  Prep the rest of the ingredients by cutting the garlic head in half, having the onion and removing the outer layer, and peeling and cutting the ginger into large 2" chunks.  Place the tongue in a stockpot and add the soy sauce, ginger, garlic, onion, thyme, and Sriracha.  

Cover the tongue with either water or chicken stock.  I had some chicken stock in the fridge, so I used about 16 oz of chicken stock and water for the rest of it.  Fill the pot until the tongue is covered and then bring to a simmer on the stove.  Cover the pot and simmer the tongue for 3-4 hours.

When the tongue is cooked through, take the lid off and cool the stock.  I wanted to speed up this process because I was hungry, so I set the tongue aside, strained the broth, and set up an ice bath.  I cooled the stock rapidly by putting it in a mixing bowl in the ice bath for about 5 minutes.  I then put the stock back into the stock pot and put the tongue back into the strained broth.  Otherwise you could just let the stock sit on the stove until it cools.   

Braised and ready to clean

After the tongue has cooled, you have to remove the outer layer.  This is maybe a little gross.  Make a clean very shallow cut down the center of the tongue.  Use your fingers to pull the outer layer of the tongue away from the meat.  Do this for the entire outer layer.

Better idea of how thick the outer layer is

 Slice the tongue into ¼-½" slices.  If you do not plan on using the tongue immediately, place it back in the stock in a storage container and refrigerate it until you are ready.

When you are ready to eat the tongue, simply heat up a frying pan, add a little oil, and sear the tongue until brown on both sides.

To serve, I made a quick sauce of mayo, sriracha, salt, pepper, worchestershire sauce, and horseradish and made a sandwich of the mayo, corned beef, and greens on italian bread.   To be honest, I feel like I maybe wimped out on the sandwich because I had swiss chard in the fridge that I wanted to blanch and dress in a lemon vinaigrette, but when it came down to it, I was hungry and it was time for football so I settled for the mixed greens.  It doesn't take anything away from the awesomeness of the tongue though.

To Boston

Another month, another lack of posts from me.  Again I have to apologize but once again real life got in the way of blogging.  This time it's a big change - I recently accepted a new job and will be moving to Boston!  My wife and I have been frantically throwing our lives into boxes, saying goodbye to friends made in North Carolina, and preparing to move to a city that we know next to nothing about.  It's exciting and scary all at once, and as with any big life change, it doesn't come without sacrifices.  Of course, the good will hopefully outweigh the bad in time, and the prospect of exploring a new city (and its food) is very exciting.

In Boston, we will be living in the Medford area - our immediate neighborhood seems very Italian, something that I am excited about after living in the Bloomfield area of Pittsburgh for a couple of years.  I'm looking forward to the little markets and all the possibilities that lie within.  I'm also looking forward to the fall and trips to Maine involving lobster rolls and beer at Allagash brewery.

I need to keep this short because the computer is the last thing to be packed... so, another city, another exploration, another opportunity for me to learn more about cooking... let's see where this takes us...

Vacation to Southwest VA: Town House / Riverstead

As a personal rule, I have avoided being a restaurant blogger here.  I love seeing what restaurants do but I find some more satisfaction in writing about things that I have some control over rather than just consumption. It's a nice rule and all, and I plan to adhere mostly to it for the rest of the life of this blog, but rules are meant to be broken and today is the day that I break that rule.  My wife and I celebrated our first anniversary this past weekend and decided to take the opportunity to go to one of the best restaurants in the southeast:  Town House, in Chilhowie, Virginia.  Started by ex-Alinea and Charlie Trotter's chef John B. Shields and his wife, Karen Urie Shields, Town House took fine dining from Chicago to rural southwest Virginia and turned Chilhowie into a dining destination.  In addition to having the restaurant, they have also renovated a two-bedroom house, given the namesake "Riverstead," within 5 miles of the restaurant where diners can stay for the night and enjoy some peace and quiet in the mountains after dinner.  My wife and I decided to go for the whole package - we did a 10 course tasting, wine pairings from sommelier Charlie Berg, and stayed at Riverstead for the night, followed up by hiking in the nearby Appalachian Trail thoroughfare park Grayson Highlands State Park.  All in all it was an amazing weekend:  the food was fantastic, the wine paired perfectly, the staff was friendly, the house was amazing, and the scenery was incredible.

One quick note:  I'm going to mention the pairings but the truth is that I am not too knowledgable about wine so forgive me for my ignorance there.

The exterior of Riverstead - a 2 bedroom guest house owned by Town House

Upon arrival at Riverstead, we were greeted by homemade snacks:  local cheeses (front cheese was a soft cow's milk cheese and the back was a harder veined kinda blue cheese), homemade crackers, and a slightly spicy candied nut mix

Exterior of the restaurant.  When staying at Riverstead, they provide car service in the BMW.  High Rollerzzzz!

Menu for the evening:  we opted for the 10 course.  Go big or go home.

Amuse bouche:  Oyster leaves dipped in clam juice

Paired with a prosecco to wake things up.

Flowers:  I took less than desirable notes but I believe that the sauce was an artichoke puree

This course and the next course were paired with a flower infused sake that was truly amazing and a Chardonnay from Lebanon.

"Gazpacho" of summers foliage:  green tomato on the bottom with pickled coriander seeds, shiso leaves, green bean leaves, zucchini

Barbequed Eggplant:  smoked mussel "ash", black garlic, mussels, lemon, and basil.  The ash was frozen and then shaved to make almost like mussel 'snow' or something.  The sweetness of the black garlic with the smokyness of the mussel ash and the eggplant balanced perfectly.

Sweet Corn, Chicken, Lovage:  corn silk on top, chicken liver on the bottom, crispy chicken skin, sweet corn, lovage puree, and chicken reduction around the edges.

Paired with a sweet Sauterne

I mentioned that I don't do this restaurant blog thing often right?  Well this is my first major fuckup and I'm really upset about it.  This WAS Dungeness Crab in Brown Butter and Butter Whey.  The picture is awful and I almost didn't want to post it but I want to acknowledge the existence of this awesome dish.  Charred onions, shellfish cream, lime, seared bay scallops, and reduced pork stock.

Paired with a really dry Sherry.  I'm going to fuck this up but it was marked with a crosshatch, denoting (I think) a naturally occuring process in the fermentation which results in an incredibly dry Sherry.

Turbot cooked in its own juice and cream:  I loved this dish.  Potentially my favorite.  Crispy turbot skin on top, crispy pork, shaved bonito, turbot broth infused with geranium.

Beef Cheek and Tongue... Pastoral:  "essence" of hay and grass broth, beef tongue, milk "skin", horseradish, grasses.  This was probably the most interesting dish - the grass broth was notably grassy but not overpowering and it went well with the beef.  Interestingly, there was no acid in the dish - the balance came from the milk skin, which had a tangy kind of buttermilk taste to it.  This one made me wonder how the hell they came up with it - really amazing.

Lamb Shoulder and Wild Blueberries:  licorice glaze, barbecued beets, black malt powder.  Served on a black plate and with the patent leather shine on the glaze, this was one of the more visually arresting dishes.  Also delicious.

Paired with a nice Syrah

Canteloupe and Toasted Farro:  Shaved carrots, sassafras ice cream, turmeric root (I think in the broth), tonka beans.  This was definitely the most polarizing dish at our table.  My wife didn't care for it.  I didn't know what to think of it at first, then I hit the canteloupe - which was actually under the ice cream.  The farro was very al dente, it provided a lot of crunch.  The ice cream was not very sweet, and all the sweetness in the dish came from the ripe canteloupe underneath.  At first I didn't think I liked it but once I hit the canteloupe, I became a believer.

Broken Marshmallows, Whipped Cream, Green Strawberries, Flowers, Cucumber:  this dish was also interesting.  The green strawberries almost had a salty note to them in their unripeness.  The cucumbers were made into a sorbet which balanced pretty well with the marshmallows. 

Closing with some frozen macaroons with kefir lime zest on top.  These were pretty amazing.  I am pretty sure the macaroons involved sesame in some way, and they were crispy and frozen (presumably with liquid nitrogen).  It was fun to eat them and then blow smoke.

Breakfast the following morning:  coffee, fresh orange juice, granola, a soft boiled egg (holy fuck I need to get into soft boiled eggs), blueberry corn muffins, fresh fruit and yogurt.  It was simple but it really was delicious.