Hot pastrami – one of the best sandwiches in the world. Fragrant, spicy, thin cut hot meat heaped onto rye bread, slathered with mustard, melting in your mouth. That and a kosher half-sour pickle is all you need. In the book Save the Deli (which you are advised not to read on an empty stomach), David Sax details how some of the best delis in the world make their pastrami. A recent New York Times article claims that an artisan approach to deli food can produce the best possible results. So is it possible to make your own pastrami at home?

Yes, but apparently only if you know what you’re doing. Inspired by a small shop in Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh and various blogs, I decided to give pastrami a try. I have been brining my own corned beef for some time now (both literally and figurative). Pastrami is just smoked spiced corned beef, right? So I took my corned beef out of its brine, covered it with pastrami spices, and smoked it in my smoker. The result: smoked corned beef. It wasn’t exactly awful, but it definitely was not pastrami. It tasted like roasted sauerbraten and had the texture of corned beef. My family wouldn’t touch the stuff – especially not after they were expecting the taste of pastrami.

Back to the drawing board. More research. It seems like most pastrami is dry cured and that we have come to associate the taste of nitrates with pastrami. How does a home cook dry cure brisket? With something called Morton’s Tender Cure. Trim all the fat off a brisket (or whatever cut of beef you are trying to turn into pastrami). A few tablespoons of Tender Cure , a few spices and 3 weeks in the fridge yield a beautiful dry cured piece of meat.

What next? Cover the brisket with pastrami spices (paprika, salt, ground black and white pepper, ground yellow mustard seeds, ground coriander seeds, garlic, a little brown sugar) and put it in a smoker over water to cold smoke for 4 hours. Then into a slow oven over boiling water to steam for maybe 2 hours.

The result: delicious! Hot pastrami, better than anything you can get in the grocery store. Hot through and through, fine textured, no collagen, with a peppery bite and a fragrance that’s out of this world. Is homemade better than the pastrami in a great deli like Katz’s? Dunno … we’d have to do a blind taste test. But then again, who cares unless you live in NYC or Squirrel Hill and have ready access to fine hot pastrami. What came out of my oven was better pastrami by far than anything I can buy here in Northern Virginia. David Sax was right (of course).

3 or 4 thick cut natural pork chops, rib cut, on the bone
1 onion
whatever fresh herbs you have on hand (rosemary, thyme, sage)
3 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon sugar
water
2 tablespoons oil
ground black pepper
2 ounces port wine
¼ cup of your favorite bbq sauce

In a zip-top bag, combine the sugar, salt and about a cup of warm water. Mix to dissolve. Cut the onion into quarters or eighths, removing the papery skin. Add the pork chops and the fresh herbs. Zip the bag mostly closed and remove as much air as possible before closing it completely. Toss it around a little, then put in a shallow pan and let sit in the fridge, turning it after 4 hours. After 8 hours, remove the chops from the brine, and refrigerate until ready to cook.

Preheat oven to 350°. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a frying pan. Dry the pork chops of excess surface moisture, pepper each side, then fry in the hot pan, 5 minutes per side. Pour off excess fat, and replace with port wine. Put on the lid, and put it in the oven for 30 minutes. Remove lid, and baste with bbq sauce, return to oven for 10 more minutes. Remove from oven, and let rest for 10 more minutes.

So it seems pretty straight-forward, but I never actually tried it until last week. A better way to roast a chicken. I’ve often lamented the fact that the thighs and drumsticks are rarely ever completely cooked to my liking, or if they are, the breast meat is completely overdone. Taking a cue from recipes for roasted turkey, I decided to try twirling the bird.

First, salt and pepper the bird, inside and out. If you want to get fancy, put a couple spoonfuls of compound butter underneath the skin of the breast. Then put the 3 to 3½ pound chicken on a roasting pan that’s preheated in a hot oven (425°), but put it in on its side, and let it cook for 15 minutes. Then turn it on its other side for another 15 minutes. Finally, roast it breast side up for 25 to 35 minutes more, basting the bird every 10 minutes. You should hear the chicken sizzling the whole time while it’s in the oven. (You know it’s done when the joints move easily.) Then let it rest outside of the oven for 15 minutes more, covered with foil.

The result is an very moist and completely cooked chicken. What’s more, as with other roast chicken recipes, it’s just as easy to cook two chickens at the same time, either to feed a crowd or for copious leftovers. And though it’s a little more work, and I can’t wander far from the kitchen, it’s definitely going to be my go-to way to roast a chicken from now on — or, at least until some novel method presents itself.

2 or 3 lamb shanks
salt
1 onion, chopped fine (or substitute the same quantity of leeks)
3 or 4 carrots, peeled and cut into 1 inch pieces
3 or 4 parsnips, ditto
2 or 3 turnips, ditto
1 can of tomato paste
6 whole cloves of garlic
16 oz. good english or trappist beer (or substitute cider, stock, or water)
misc herbs (thyme, rosemary), chopped, to taste
2 or 3 bay leaves
4 or 5 crushed juniper berries (optional)
ground black pepper and salt to taste
1 cup pearl barley, rinsed
1 teaspoon salt
2½ cups chicken stock (or water)

Preheat the oven to 300°F.

Season the shanks with salt and brown on all sides in a hot cast iron pan — 3-5 minutes per side.

In a good sized dutch oven, brown the onions and vegetables in a little butter or oil until the onions have gone translucent. Add the tomato paste, and stir, cooking the tomato paste for a couple of minutes. Add the herbage, the spices, and the garlic, as well as the shanks. Pour over the beer and bring to a boil, stirring. Cover, and cook in the oven for 2-4 hours, checking occasionally, turning the shanks. Keep cooking until the meat pulls from the bone easily.

45 minutes, before serving, bring the chicken stock and the salt to a boil in a lidded saucepan. Add the barley and resume boil, then simmer, covered for 45 minutes, until liquid is gone, and barley is soft but still chewy.

Remove the shanks from the pot, and take the meat off the bone, cutting it into bitesized chunks and removing the fatty bits and any gristle. Remove the bay leaves and optionally, the juniper berries that you can find. Return the meat as well as the barley to the pot and stir.

Now that Gourmet Magazine is no more, I’m getting emails from their successor, Bon Appetit. The other day, they sent me an email that described a stew that sounded great, although their recipe was fully vegetarian and relied on mushrooms for the umami. Mushrooms just don’t cut it in my house, since my wife seems to have some sort of allergy to them, so I made the recipe but replaced the mushrooms with small diced pieces of chuck. The results were quite delicious. A fine dinner for a autumn or winter night.

Preheat oven to 375º.

Score the fatty side of a pork loin roast, just to penetrate the fat layer. Generously season with salt, pepper, and herbs de Provence. On the stovetop, brown all sides of the roast, 3-5 minutes per side.

Core and slice golden delicious apples (3) and stalks of rhubarb (2), and place under the roast. Put the whole thing in the oven, and cook uncovered for 45 – 60 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 165º.

Remove the roast and let rest 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, saute the apple mixture, adding a little butter and agave or maple syrup if desired. Slice the pork into ¼” slices and serve the apple mixture on the side.