The Ballad of Billy the Kid

This week’s topics include the WF as short order cook, a reflection on how spoiled the Things are, Billy the kid (work with me), and I drink 27 year old wine!

What am I working on?  Since returning from vacation, I have been on a cooking tear, even by WF standards.  I’ve made smoked whole chickens, smoked spare ribs, carnitas tacos, homemade salsas, enchiladas (using the smoked chickens and carnitas), black mussels steamed in white wine, butter, garlic and shallots, and pasta made with the leftover mussels and their liquor. 

However, I’m not here to write about all of that fancy food.  I’m here to write about the simple poached egg.

I love poached eggs and I’ve never tried to make them.  Yes.  I know that’s odd.  Recently I decided to correct that and the Things were my test subjects. 

I pulled out a shallow, straight sided pan (a sautoir for you Francophiles).  I know that some purists insist on deep pots that you drop the egg into.  Whatever.   The shallow pot is easier and gives you less opportunity to fail.  I added a little salt and vinegar to the water after it started to boil, and turned down the heat to just under a boil.

The result?  Perfect medium poached eggs.  Check ‘em out.  The Things loved them.  I wonder how many kids have a dad who will get up and make them fresh poached eggs before school.   I suspect not many. 

However, I don’t mind.  I love cooking fancy food, but nothing gives me greater pleasure than playing short order cook for breakfast.  There’s something very fulfilling about making people exactly what they want.  “Over medium.”  Cool.  “Sunny side up.”  Got that.  “Poached runny.”  Nice.  I can do that.  “Scrambled.” Done.  And so on…..

Plus, if you can’t cook eggs really well, can you call yourself a good cook?  Methinks not.

Yo… Billy!  Recently my friend D invited me over to assist him on a culinary ‘project’.  You may recall D from such blogs as.. this blog!  D’s the one who had the pig roast last summer that I wrote about.

D decided that he wanted to upgrade his roasting hardware, so he bought a fancy motorized spit.  Hand cranking a pig in the heat of the day gets old quickly, so he bought a new toy.  He wanted to try it out before the big pig roast.

He researched a whole lamb, but they were ridiculously expensive, so he decided upon… wait for it… a small goat.  Naturally, I jumped at the chance to come help!

We’ll call this small goat Billy and this is the tale of his last days.  Actually, his last day was well before D picked him up, so this is actually the tale of what became of Billy….

We rubbed the cavity of the carcass with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, fresh rosemary and chopped garlic.  We stitched him up and tied him to the spit.  We then inserted bolts to keep Billy from moving while on the spit.  Finally, we cut slits on the outside of the body and shoved them full of garlic and rosemary.  More salt, lemon juice, and olive oil, and we were off to the pit.

Here’s Billy ready to be cooked.  Looks Frankenstein-esque, doesn’t he?

Here’s Billy during the cooking process. 

And here’s Billy after cooking.  Note the goofy looking dude carving Billy up in his sandals. 

The review?  The goat was very well cooked.  Rich flavor from the herb and lemons.  However, I have to admit that goat straight off the spit is not my favorite meat.  It is VERY gamey.  The Red was not a big fan, nor was Thing 1.  I ate a fair amount and enjoyed it.  Thing 2, however, is our resident carnivore.  He had multiple helpings, including going to work on a goat spare rib.  I was so proud!

What’s really exciting, though, is what we can do with the leftover goat.  If you slowly cook it down, it loses its gamey flavor.  D’s wife made a Filipino stew which was absolutely awesome.  She told me what it was, but I can’t remember the name.  Either way, it was awesome!

I took the heart of the carcass (ribs, back, etc.) and some legs and plan to make a traditional goat birria stew.  More on that in a future blog. 

Thank you, Billy!

If I had tons of money, I could drink wine like this every day.  This just in… I have a weakness for great wine.  Actually, great booze of any sort.  I’ve come to embrace this alleged weakness and one of my methods is joining the wine clubs of a few, select wineries.

My favorite wine club is Stags Leap Wine Cellars (not Stags Leap Winery, which is fine, but not the French-beating, world class winery we’re talking about).  As you may recall, a SLWC cabernet was one of the American wines that beat the French in a blind taste testing in the ‘70s.

Why this wine club?  First and foremost, you never have a SLWC bottle which isn’t great.  A lot of wineries charge a lot of money for adequate wine at best.  Not this winery.  All of their wines are great.  Second, once or twice a year, they’ll send an email to their wine club members offering some of their old library wines for sale. 

Recently, they offered a flight of 3 old merlots ('83-'85) for about $140 before shipping and tax.  My response to being offered 27-29 year old wine which has been cellared perfectly for that price?  Hell yes!

The Red and I recently opened the ’85.  I admit that I am not a big Merlot fan, but I also admit that Merlots have gotten a bad rap in the last decade or so.  The fact is that the French have been using Merlot grapes for centuries, including in a lot of their high-end Bordeaux wines. 

How is 27 year old Merlot?  It took a long time open up.  I tasted it straight out of the bottle and it was flat.  Very little flavor.  In my experience, this is normal for old wines.  They have to breathe a lot before their true flavors open up.  However, the aroma was nothing short of intoxicating and it only got better as it opened up.

After it opened up for 1-2 hours, this wine had a depth and complexity I’ve never tasted before in a Merlot.  Awesome wine  Money well spent. 

Happy cooking

WF