Cooking With Friends

Cold Sandwiches of Pork Loin Sous-Vide, Onion-Cranberry Marmalade, and Pt Reyes Original Blue

Cooking for friends and cooking with friends can both be immensely rewarding, but they require different rules, different ways of thinking about food, different ways of physically traversing the kitchen floor, of juggling burners, pots, and knives, because - no matter how social the event and how much enthusiasm (and aptitude) for minor prep, plating and service the guests show up with - cooking for company remains an inherently solitary undertaking, while cooking with company is as much about social interaction as it is about food. Partly, this is a function of logistics (unless you're talking about a pot luck or whatever, but a pot luck is not cooking with anybody), but not principally. True collaboration, my home turf, with another cook whom, in all likelihood, I've never shared a kitchen, requires humility, compromise, and adaptability - three words that, truth be told, I very nearly had to spell-check, as rarely as they enter my lexicon. I am not, as a rule, much beholden to the way other people things should be done, and I tend to cook that way. Of course, I also drive that way, talk about politics that way, and do math that way, so this is hardly a unique pattern. And, really, it's a reasonably effective pattern, so long as I have room to maneuver and I more or less know what I'm doing; the downside is that the converse - in which I'm boxed in, confused, and resolve turns to obstinance - isn't pretty, but that's a story for another post.

The thing to remember, if you invite a friend to come over and help you cook, is that it's a good bet that they aren't expecting to show up for the express purpose of prepping your mise or doing your dishes; no, they'll want to contribute, in some way related to the application of heat and knife-force to starch and protein, to the final product. Indeed, they're likely already to have a dish, or at least a central component of one, in mind, if not par-cooked and in-transit. And, of course, they may well fail to appreciate that you know the right way to do something, all of which necessitates a degree of flexibility I generally lack: Seasoning to taste, presentation, and the menu itself all become a product of more than one person's labor. But that needn't be a bad thing, and that is the point of this post: To the contrary, it means less work for me, a chance to check out someone else's chops and maybe even learn something, and - this is the key, really - the opportunity to come up with something, working together, that neither would have come up with alone. Courtesy of my friend B, his love affair with thermal circulators (the technical gastro-toy used to cook sous-vide), and an escalating afternoon party at our casita, I recently had just such an opportunity, and received the commensurate payoff: A near-perfect little sandwich, constructed on a foundation of B's perfectly prepared homage to swine, accompanied by some of my favorite local goodies from the previous day's famer's market, and all tied together with a recent experiment of my design, an Onion-Cranberry Marmalade that I adapted from Tom Colicchio and a staple of many years' worth of Gramercy Tavern menus.

Despite my undying enthusiasm for the popularity of sous-vide cooking, the technique (to say nothing of the required infrastructure) remain outside my culinary bandwidth. My inadequate bandwidth is hardly restricted to gently warmed, tightly monitored water baths - there are all sorts of interesting ways to cook that are either beyond my ken, my natural abilities, or simply strike me as an upside down cost/benefit analysis given my limited resources of time, money, and storage space - but offers up a perfect example of how and why collaboration can work effectively: I simple would not have made this dish (the dish in question being, as I understand it, a pork loin, dressed in bacon fat, and then cooked in the usual sous-vide fashion, cooled, and sliced), and yet it played perfectly off things that I would, and in fact did, cook (grilled cranberry-semolina bread from the Full Circle Baking Company, Pt Reyes Original Blue, and a home-made onion-cranberry marmalade, the recipe to which follows). The sweet spiciness of the onions, the salty tang of the cheese, and the melt-in-your-mouth richness of the pork, all contrasting with the hard crust of grilled semolina sourdough, combined to make, I have to say, one of the better sarnies I've had in quite some time.

So I let B do his thing (he absolutely killed it), let his cooking taking the driver's seat, and played off of that bass line: Add some thin slices of the cranberry-semolina bread to a grill pan for texture and color, layer with medallion-like slices of the pork loin, and topped each medallion with a dollop of the onion marmalade and a small chunk of blue cheese (the cheese and onions can easily overwhelm the delicate pork - a little goes a long way). Garnish with fresh thyme flowers or, as pictured here, lavender blossoms. Damn good finger sandwich.

And I never would have had it, had I not let someone else screw around in my kitchen.

Onion-Cranberry Marmalade (Adapted from T Colicchio, "Think Like a Cook")

1. Heat a large pan over medium-low heat and slice 4 medium onions, preferably Vidalia or Walla Walla. 
2. Put a small amount of neutral fat in the pan - canola, peanut, or similar oil - and add the onions, along with few pinches of salt and a tablespoon of mixed spices (I used roughly equal proportions of cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and white pepper - the key is to incorporate some of those "baking spice" flavors without letting them become overpowering).
3. Sautee gently until the onions are all soft and begin to give up their water and shrink down in the pan. Do not let them caramelize or develop texture - they must remain soft and translucent. 
4. Add about a half-cup of good balsamic vinegar, a quarter-cup of sugar, and a 1/2-1 cup (depending on what you want to serve it with) of dried cranberries. Turn the heat down to low, and cover the pan (it needn't be air tight, aluminum foil is fine). Continue to cook, checking and stirring occasionally, for at least an hour - probably close to 90 minutes. If the onions begin to dry out, taste them, and more balsamic vinegar or water, depending (they onions should take on a deep reddish brown color and should have a pronounced acidity, balanced by sweet spice).
5. Adjust the seasonings and cool. This is quite a lot of the stuff, but it should keep for weeks in the fridge.

Serve cold on pork or turkey sandwiches, in a stinky cheese tart, or warm over steak or game.