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There’s a new web series,  Peter Arthur Stories, launching May 14th as part of a Pennsylvania tourism initiative.   From the trailer, it looks like it’s going to follow a young man on a romantic and food-filled (Shoo-Fly pie!) adventure through Pennsylvania, and it got me thinking about some of the great Pennsylvania foods.  So, of course, I made this Scrapple Hoagie.  If you’re not familiar with Scrapple, think of it as the meatatarian’s tofu, and it makes a damn fine sandwich, if I do say so myself:

Pretty standard chocolate cake recipe except that I discovered that if you whip all the ingredients enough, you don’t really have to pay any attention to sifting all the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately.  Under the gun, you can throw everything in a bowl at once and go to town with your burly hand mixer (thanks Santa!).  The icing/drizzle was coconut milk and a lot of powdered sugar finished with some flake coconut.  A little butter probably would have made it stand up but would have added to my arterial constriction.  Alas.

I know, I know.  Week-old bagels don’t sound like anything you’d want to go near unless you’re looking for a paperweight or a christmas ornament.  (?!)  But hear me out, and consider how much store-bought croutons cost, and more importantly, how much they suck, before you dismiss this idea out of hand.  

When fresh, bagels typically cost at least 50 cents each, but my local grocer sells day-old bagels by the bag-ful at the end of the day for just 99 cents.  As it turns out, you can still get a few more days out of these rejects if you keep them bagged, refrigerate them, and don’t mind toasting them when you’re ready to eat.  But I almost always end up with 6 or 8 bagels that are too stale even for my accommodating standards.  These I convert to croutons.

Cut it as you would if you were going to eat in the usual manner.
 

Cut in half vertically, and then cut in a radius to create small wedge-shaped pieces.  Note that I am carving up a cinnamon raisin bagel here.  I find that the sweet bagels add a nice variety to the croutons.  To some, of course, the non-savory bagel is best left to a temporary flirtation, and I’m not about to get all partisan about it. 

 

Once you’ve reduced the bagel to wedges, douse them with pretty much whatever you’ve got for herbs and spices.  Salt and pepper are key, but garlic powder, terragon, and rosemary usually make an appearance.  And if it’s good for nothing else, powdered parmesan cheese–the cheaper the better I’d say–goes very nicely on these croutons.

Next, oil them up with anything edible.  Olive oil is nicest if you can afford it, but I’ve made them with canola, vegetable, even peanut oil, to delicious effect.  Make sure you toss them thoroughly in a large bowl so each wedge gets a taste of the oil and spices.  Spread them out on a tray or cookie sheet and toast the hell out of them.  No precise numbers here.  I usually drop them for 30 minutes in the middle of a 375 degree oven and if needed finish them for a couple of minutes under a high broil, as I did here: 
 

Once they’ve cooled, you can seal them in plastic bags or tupperware and they’ll pretty much keep for ever.  I eat them on salads, for late night snacks, and, on very special occasions treat my dog to one or two.  They’re also a great addition to a hasty panzanella salad should you happen to stumble across a little fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and basil.

So there: Week-old Bagel Croutons.

I used my Philadelphia Collard Greens and a heapin’ helpin’ of bacon for these savory scones.  I judge them a success, though I don’t think I could reconstruct the recipe exactly, and it involved a great deal of finger-in-the-wind on-the-fly estimates, if I may mix those metaphors.  As almost always, the Joy of Cooking is a good place to start.

Video proof that you can bake and talk on the phone at the same time.  ”Oh really? Awesome!”

The beats are by Aeon, about whom you can read and hear more at Aggregate Dope.

The pig is pretty damn good in almost all its edible forms, or at least all the edible forms I’ve tried.  Sure, there might be a tail fritter or hoof souffle that I’d find disagreeable, but until I make that mistake, I’m sticking with pig.  This summer I found a pork picnic at my grocery store in the 10 pound range for less than $8.  I promptly froze it, and this weekend–some six months later–I turned it loose for pulled-pork.  

The prep for a chunk of meat this large is non-trivial.  There’s a half-inch think slab of fat and skin along the bottom of the piece of meat that you’re likely to want to cut off.  I didn’t want to waste it, so I decided to try my hand at making crackling.  I went here first but then just figured I could fake it.  I cut the slab of fat into thin strips and just set to cooking. 

Pork fat splatters a lot, so I upended another frying pan over top of this one to contain some of the mess.  Here’s how it looked about half an hour later: 

In the meantime, I seared the chunk of meat in a heavy-bottom pot.  After browning it all the way around, I added a couple of spoonfulls of rendered fat (from the crackling) and sauteed three onions until softened.  Then I deglazed the pan with a mixture of red wine vinegar and water and added the meat back in along with some dried lemon grass, some salt, and a hearty squirt of Vietnamese hot sauce.  

And while I was dishing out rendered fat, I figured I’d make up a little cornbread using a variation on the recipe in the Joy of Cooking  (or “Rombauer” as it’s known around here).  Here’s how that looked going in: 

And coming out: 

The pulled pork is still cooking, but a preliminary taste indicates I have about a week’s worth of delicious pulled pork sandwiches in my future.

What the hell is this?  Does this look appetizing to anyone as a cake?

This is a wheat loaf froma Trinidadian bakery on 52nd Street in West Philadelphia (Brown Sugar Bakery).  It has a fairly dense crumb.  I forgot to ask exactly what it’s called.  It’s not quite large enough to make a decent sandwich, but it’s delicious and makes a great toast.  

Here’s a tasty Sorrel Tea I picked up somewhere. I’d never even heard of Sorrel, let alone tasted it. Evidently it’s a perennial herb that’s popular as a drink mixer and alone in Trinidad. I should have tried it with the Doubles! As a tea it’s fairly mild, maybe with a vaguely cranberry taste to it. I’ve got to admit I’m a little puzzled by the copy on the packaging though:

“Life is a search for one’s self and its innocence lost and violated while you were growing up.” Whoa! It goes on from there to suggest, quite radically I think, for a product like tea, that rather than taking a moment to let your cares drift away or to indulge a fantasy–to enjoy a “hypnotical trance”–you ought to…well, do something else, I guess. It’s not clear.

Angel Brand is a tea and spice importer located in Media, PA, some of whose products appear to be popular with folks who might, for one reason or another, be worried about passing a drug test.

Doubles are a traditional Trinidadian street food.  

These came from Brown Sugar Bakery at 52nd and Chancellor Streets in West Philadelphia.