Oomame Chile Crisp Ice Cream

Moroccan Oomame on Oatmeal with feta

One of my favorite products discovered at the 2021 Fancy Food Show was Oomame's line of globally-influenced chile crisps. Originally from China, chile crisp has become a popular condiment among chile-heads and others who enjoy a flavorful bit of spice plus crunchy texture. It's great on dumplings, but also pizza, pasta, and just about everything else. What I like about Oomame's product is that it comes in four varieties - a classic Sichuan style, plus others borrowing flavor profiles from Mexico, Morocco, and India. While I still like to use the Sichuan version on typically savory dishes, I have found that the dried fruits in the other varieties (fig in Moroccan, papaya in Indian, mango in Mexican) add a subtle sweetness that makes them also work well with foods that are traditionally sweeter. Try a drizzle of Moroccan Oomame with a sprinkle of feta cheese on your next bowl of oatmeal--rather than the usual brown sugar or maple syrup and fruit--for something totally unexpected and totally delicious. But let's push that proverbial envelope a bit, shall we?

Some ice cream shops in Sichuan province have taken to drizzling chile oil on vanilla soft serve. And while a chile crisp sundae seems like a fine idea, I took it even further by putting chile crisp in ice cream. Yes, I did! The Mexican-inspired version of Oomame Global Chile Crisp, in particular, seemed ripe for taking a savory condiment fully into dessert territory. But rather than using vanilla in my frozen confection, I borrowed some elements from the chile crisp itself to flavor the creamy base. I started with Jeni's ice cream recipe, which uses corn starch and cream cheese in place of eggs as a thickener, and infused it with mango and orange peel, adding peanuts as a substitute for the pepitas in the Mexican Oomame. (While they're great for crunch, I didn't think they'd add all that much flavor.) 

The result exceeded my wildest expectations. Mr Minx wasn't all that thrilled with the flavor of dried onion in his ice cream but it didn't bother me. Nor did the occasional hit of cumin. The predominant flavor was orange peel, even more so than chile, which I thought was enough to keep my creation well within the realm of dessert. If you're an adventurous eater, give it a try. 

I have no regrets.

Oomame Chile Crisp Ice Cream

1 clementine or half a small orange

2 cups milk

1 1⁄4 cups heavy cream

1 ounce dried mango strips

Small handful of roasted unsalted peanuts

4 t cornstarch

2⁄3 cup sugar

2 T light corn syrup

1⁄4 t kosher salt

3 T cream cheese, softened

2 T Oomame Mexican Chile Crisp

Additional roasted unsalted peanuts

Chocolate chips (optional - I used a Seattle Chocolates Mexican Chocolate bar, cut into slivers)

Peel the clementine or orange in large strips, saving the fruit segments for another use. Carefully scrape the white pith from the inside of the peel with a small knife. 

Reserve 1/4 cup of milk and put the remaining 1 3/4 cups plus the cream into a 4-quart saucepan. Add the mango, peanuts, and clementine or orange peel. Over medium-high heat, bring the milk to almost a boil. Turn off the heat, cover the pan, and allow the flavorings to steep for about 20 minutes. 

Stir the cornstarch into the reserved 1/4 cup of milk and set aside. 

Strain the steeped milk into another 4-quart saucepan, reserving the fruit and nuts. Add the sugar, corn syrup, and salt to the pan and bring the milk to a boil over medium-high heat. Cook for 4 minutes, then stir in the slurry. Bring back to a boil and cook until thickened, 2 minutes.

Put the cream cheese in a large bowl and pour in 1/4 of the hot milk, whisking until smooth. Carefully whisk in the rest of the hot milk. Stir in the chile crisp. Pour the milk into a storage container. Add a layer of ice cubes to the bottom of a baking pan large enough to fit the storage container and put the container on top of the ice in order to cool the milk mixture down quickly. After about 15 minutes, put the container in the fridge to chill completely, 4 hours or overnight.

Cut the steeped mango and orange peel into small pieces and reserve along with the peanuts.

Put the chilled ice cream base into the bowl of an ice cream maker and process according to manufacturer's directions. After the ice cream has started to thicken and is almost done, add the mango, orange, peanuts, and chocolate, if using. Scoop ice cream into a freezer-safe storage container (I just used the same one I used for the hot milk) and smooth with the back of a spoon. Cover and freeze until firm, at least 4 hours.

Serve with additional chile crisp, or over your favorite brownies. Or eat straight out of the container.

* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Blood Orange Manhattan

Fabrizia's blood orange limoncello is as delicious as its lemon version, only, you know, orange-flavored. It's a great post-dinner sipper, and can also be used in recipes, like the one for limoncello balls posted here the other week. Of course, it also works well as an addition to a cocktail, as in this simple blood orange Manhattan. It's light and orange-y, not too sweet, and perfect for warm weather.

Blood Orange Manhattan

2 parts Bourbon
1 part Fabrizia Blood Orange Limoncello
a few dashes blood orange bitters
Fancy cherry (or a regular Maraschino) and blood orange slice for garnish

Stir together the bourbon and limoncello and add a few dashes of bitters. Pour into two lowball glasses with ice. Garnish with the cherry and blood orange slice.

Easy peasy, light, and delicious.

* Fabrizia Spirits sent us product and compensated us for this post. However, the opinions within are our own.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Flashback Friday - Tangerine Beef

This post originally appeared on Minxeats.com on February 13, 2013.

I wanted to whip up a little something festive and lucky to celebrate the Chinese Year of the Snake, but I didn't want to go to a whole lot of effort. Yes, I'm lazy, but also tired from planning and dealing with book signings and all that good stuff. Traditionally, Chinese New Year festivities involve labor-intensive dumplings or spring rolls, which symbolize luck and prosperity. That seemed like too much work for me, plus spring rolls need to be deep fried, and I have a long-standing fear of frying.

Then I found a recipe for tangerine beef that sounded entirely do-able, especially since we had everything on hand except the beef and the tangerine. Tangerines are considered a lucky fruit, as the word for tangerine sounds similar to the word for luck. Oranges, too, have a place at New Years feasts because "orange" and "gold" sound alike as well. And as luck would have it (heh) I stumbled upon this recipe for Tangerine Beef in a book already on my bookshelf, Feeding the Dragon, written by brother and sister team Nate and Mary Kate Tate.

The recipe calls for flank steak, which was hella expensive at the local Safeway, so we substituted a piece of London broil, instead. The dish was very different from what we normally think of as "orange beef," which usually has crisp meat and a sugar-laden sauce. Instead, the beef in this dish is tender, the sauce not sweet at all, and with the combination of chili bean sauce, dried chiles, and Sichuan peppercorns, full of ma-la, or the spicy and numbing sensation popular in Sichuan food.

Tangerine Beef (adapted from Feeding the Dragon)

1 tangerine

Meat:
1 teaspoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1 lb London broil, sliced thinly against the grain into 2" long strips

Sauce:
1 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
2 teaspoons hoisin sauce
1 teaspoon chili bean sauce
1 teaspoon sugar

To Cook:
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorns
small handful dried Sichuan chiles
3 scallions, chopped, white and green parts separated

Peel the tangerine, taking care to leave the peel in large pieces. Using a spoon, scrape out as much of the pith as possible (this is easier to do if the peel is in large pieces). Boil the peel for six minutes to remove bitterness, then slice into slivers. Set aside. Eat the tangerine innards.

In a large bowl, dissolve the cornstarch with the soy sauce and rice wine. Stir in the ginger and add the beef strips. Toss well, cover the bowl, and set aside to marinate for at least 20 minutes.

Stir together the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the vegetable oil in a wok or large saute pan over high heat. Add the beef and stir fry for about 1 minute, until browned but still a bit pink. Remove beef and any liquid from the wok and set aside.

Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil and when it's hot, add the Sichuan peppercorns, chiles, the reserved tangerine peel, and the white parts of the scallions. Stir fry for about 45 seconds, then add the sauce. Toss in the beef and the green parts of the scallions and stir until the onions start to wilt and all is covered with sauce.

Serve hot with plenty of steamed rice to ease the heat.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Flashback Friday - Avocado Soup and Crab Salad

This post originally appeared on Minxeats.com on June 21, 2013.

I do most of the cooking on the weekends, except when we go out to eat (of course). If I'm thinking ahead, I plan my meals by Tuesday, our usual grocery shopping day. Most of the time though, I don't give it a thought until Thursday or Friday and then I have to decide whether I should just use what we have in the house, or schlep down to the grocery store to pick up special ingredients.

One recent weekend, we had steamed crabs on Saturday and ended up with a nice container of leftover meat. Rather than default to making crab cakes, I decided to make a crab salad and serve it with a soup made from the two ripe avocados we had picked up earlier in the week. The soup was thick and lusciously creamy, and the citrussy salad added the perfect touch of acid.

I used black garlic to season the soup because I had it. You can use one clove of regular garlic, but chop it and add it to the scallion while it's cooking to cut some of the strong garlic taste. Of course, if you like the flavor of raw garlic, don't let me get in your way!

Avocado Soup

4 scallions, white and green parts, chopped
olive oil
2 ripe Haas avocados
3 tablespoons lime juice
1 cup chicken or vegetable stock
1/4 cup plain yogurt or sour cream
3 cloves black garlic
couple shakes of hot sauce (I used green Tabasco)
salt and pepper to taste

Cook scallions in a bit of olive oil and a pinch of salt until wilted. Add them, along with the rest of the ingredients, to the bowl of a food processor or blender and purée. If the mixture is too thick for your taste, add a bit more stock or yogurt. Season to taste, adding more lime juice, if desired. Serve chilled, topped with a handful of crab salad.

Makes 4 appetizer or 2 main dish servings.

Crab Salad

2 tablespoons orange or grapefruit juice or a combination of the two
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon champagne vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon honey or agave syrup
1 lb blue crab meat (body and claw), picked over for shell
1 tomato, seeded and finely chopped
fresh basil and mint leaves

Combine the first six ingredients in a small bowl, beating well with a fork until the dressing emulsifies. Season with salt and pepper.

Put the crab and tomato in a medium bowl. Pour over the dressing and toss lightly to coat. Taste for seasoning and add additional salt and pepper, if necessary. Cut basil and mint into a chiffonade and stir in before serving.

Makes more than you'll need for the soup, so grab a fork and dig in.



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Brunch at Wit and Wisdom

Mr Minx and I were recently invited to try Wit & Wisdom's revamped brunch buffet. Despite our usual lazy weekend mornings that involve eating breakfast in the vicinity of noon, we don't consider ourselves to be brunch people. Our experience at Wit & Wisdom might just change that.

The brunch buffet there is serious. Executive chef Zack Mills' offerings include everything from soup to nuts. (Almost literally--we didn't see any nuts.) There are plenty of familiar breakfast options like scrambled eggs, potatoes, Belgian waffles, buttermilk pancakes, biscuits and gravy, and omelettes. But there are also salads and soups, raw oysters, smoked salmon, poached shrimp, and more substantial items like pulled pork, roasted salmon, and teres major.

Raw oysters with mignonette, tuna tartare, lamb chop, pita, labne

Near the front of the line was a chef's choice table featuring flavors of the Middle East, including some lovely lamb chops that, despite resting under a heat lamp, were perfectly pink and juicy inside and nicely crusty on the outside. There was also hummus and labne with pitas, a spiced rice pilaf, and a pot of ful medames, an Egyptian fava bean stew.

Smoked salmon, shrimp, rice pilaf, scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, bacon, tuna tartare

There's also a section of items for the kids--thoughtfully arranged on lower, child-height tables--with chicken fingers and fries, mac and cheese, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Bacon, eggs, potatoes, macaroni and cheese, roasted root vegetables, biscuit with sausage gravy

We had to try a little of everything. Well, almost everything, because two people couldn't do the expansive buffet justice. Everything we tried was quite good and served at the proper temperature. My favorites were the lamb chops (I was so tempted to make a pig of myself and eat two) and the roasted root vegetables.

Rice pudding and assorted Viennoiserie

The dessert table was hard to resist. Pastry chef Dyan Ng's tiny croissants and other sweet morsels are a perfect ending to the meal. Even if you pig out on savories, there's always room for a tiny cream puff or a couple of spoonfuls of rich rice pudding. Or both.

In addition to all of the various eats, Wit & Wisdom's brunch also features a build-your-own Bloody Mary bar and bottomless Mimosas. A full array of cocktails crafted by lead bartender Aaron Joseph are also available. (We chose to stick to more traditional breakfast beverages: coffee and freshly-squeezed orange juice.)

Wit & Wisdom's brunch is served on Sundays from 9am - 2pm. The cost is $49 for adults and $19 for children 12 and under. Yes, the price is steep, but you probably won't need to eat for the rest of the day....


* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats.

Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!



Posted on Minxeats.com.

Avocado Soup and Crab Salad

I do most of the cooking on the weekends, except when we go out to eat (of course). If I'm thinking ahead, I plan my meals by Tuesday, our usual grocery shopping day. Most of the time though, I don't give it a thought until Thursday or Friday and then I have to decide whether I should just use what we have in the house, or schlep down to the grocery store to pick up special ingredients.

One recent weekend, we had steamed crabs on Saturday and ended up with a nice container of leftover meat. Rather than default to making crab cakes, I decided to make a crab salad and serve it with a soup made from the two ripe avocados we had picked up earlier in the week. The soup was thick and lusciously creamy, and the citrussy salad added the perfect touch of acid.

I used black garlic to season the soup because I had it. You can use one clove of regular garlic, but chop it and add it to the scallion while it's cooking to cut some of the strong garlic taste. Of course, if you like the flavor of raw garlic, don't let me get in your way!

Avocado Soup

4 scallions, white and green parts, chopped
olive oil
2 ripe Haas avocados
3 tablespoons lime juice
1 cup chicken or vegetable stock
1/4 cup plain yogurt or sour cream
3 cloves black garlic
couple shakes of hot sauce (I used green Tabasco)
salt and pepper to taste

Cook scallions in a bit of olive oil and a pinch of salt until wilted. Add them, along with the rest of the ingredients, to the bowl of a food processor or blender and purée. If the mixture is too thick for your taste, add a bit more stock or yogurt. Season to taste, adding more lime juice, if desired. Serve chilled, topped with a handful of crab salad.

Makes 4 appetizer or 2 main dish servings.

Crab Salad

2 tablespoons orange or grapefruit juice or a combination of the two
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon champagne vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon honey or agave syrup
1 lb blue crab meat (body and claw), picked over for shell
1 tomato, seeded and finely chopped
fresh basil and mint leaves

Combine the first six ingredients in a small bowl, beating well with a fork until the dressing emulsifies. Season with salt and pepper.

Put the crab and tomato in a medium bowl. Pour over the dressing and toss lightly to coat. Taste for seasoning and add additional salt and pepper, if necessary. Cut basil and mint into a chiffonade and stir in before serving.

Makes more than you'll need for the soup, so grab a fork and dig in.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Tangerine Beef

I wanted to whip up a little something festive and lucky to celebrate the Chinese Year of the Snake, but I didn't want to go to a whole lot of effort. Yes, I'm lazy, but also tired from planning and dealing with book signings and all that good stuff. Traditionally, Chinese New Year festivities involve labor-intensive dumplings or spring rolls, which symbolize luck and prosperity. That seemed like too much work for me, plus spring rolls need to be deep fried, and I have a long-standing fear of frying.

Then I found a recipe for tangerine beef that sounded entirely do-able, especially since we had everything on hand except the beef and the tangerine. Tangerines are considered a lucky fruit, as the word for tangerine sounds similar to the word for luck. Oranges, too, have a place at New Years feasts because "orange" and "gold" sound alike as well. And as luck would have it (heh) I stumbled upon this recipe for Tangerine Beef in a book already on my bookshelf, Feeding the Dragon, written by brother and sister team Nate and Mary Kate Tate.

The recipe calls for flank steak, which was hella expensive at the local Safeway, so we substituted a piece of London broil, instead. The dish was very different from what we normally think of as "orange beef," which usually has crisp meat and a sugar-laden sauce. Instead, the beef in this dish is tender, the sauce not sweet at all, and with the combination of chili bean sauce, dried chiles, and Sichuan peppercorns, full of ma-la, or the spicy and numbing sensation popular in Sichuan food.

Tangerine Beef (adapted from Feeding the Dragon)

1 tangerine

Meat:
1 teaspoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1 lb London broil, sliced thinly against the grain into 2" long strips

Sauce:
1 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
2 teaspoons hoisin sauce
1 teaspoon chili bean sauce
1 teaspoon sugar

To Cook:
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorns
small handful dried Sichuan chiles
3 scallions, chopped, white and green parts separated

Peel the tangerine, taking care to leave the peel in large pieces. Using a spoon, scrape out as much of the pith as possible (this is easier to do if the peel is in large pieces). Boil the peel for six minutes to remove bitterness, then slice into slivers. Set aside. Eat the tangerine innards.

In a large bowl, dissolve the cornstarch with the soy sauce and rice wine. Stir in the ginger and add the beef strips. Toss well, cover the bowl, and set aside to marinate for at least 20 minutes.

Stir together the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the vegetable oil in a wok or large saute pan over high heat. Add the beef and stir fry for about 1 minute, until browned but still a bit pink. Remove beef and any liquid from the wok and set aside.

Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil and when it's hot, add the Sichuan peppercorns, chiles, the reserved tangerine peel, and the white parts of the scallions. Stir fry for about 45 seconds, then add the sauce. Toss in the beef and the green parts of the scallions and stir until the onions start to wilt and all is covered with sauce.

Serve hot with plenty of steamed rice to ease the heat.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Post-Christmas Cookies

We had our annual cookie-fest at Casa Minx in the week before Christmas, making the usual chocolate chippers and snickerdoodles, plus a batch of white chocolate/dried cherry cookies from a recipe I had obtained from a friend. (You can find that recipe in the December Minxeats Newsletter. Don't get the newsletter? Then click here to subscribe!) After giving many of them to my brother and eating still more of them for Christmas dessert, by mid-January, we were in a sad state of affairs as far as our cookie inventory was concerned. Since I recently had a nice long weekend thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr., I thought it might be nice to put one of those days aside for baking.

A while back, I had bookmarked a recipe for Red Velvet cookies because: 1) Mr Minx likes Red Velvet cake; 2) they seemed so easy. Honestly, I should know better than to use boxed cake mix, especially cake mix that contains a quantity of red food dye. The cookies came out looking like a sunburnt version of Thing and tasted like, I dunno...propylene glycol, polyglycerol esters of fatty acids, and monocalcium phosphate.

Fail.

The bar cookies I'm going to call Reconstructed Florentines came out much better. I figured Florentines were a tasty way of using up candied orange peel left over from making fruitcakes, but I didn't want to deal with the potentially messy chocolate-coated classic version of the cookie. The bar cookie version was nearly perfect, except that I think they would be better with a crisper crust (mine was more like cake). I also varied the recipe by omitting the cherries and using almond flour in place of the chopped almonds (because that's what I had on hand).  

Finally, because Mr Minx is not a big fan of candied orange peel, we baked a third cookie, this time a variation of Milk Bar's Christina Tosi's cornflake chocolate chip marshmallow cookies. We didn't have marshmallows, nor was I about to whip up a batch of "cornflake crunch," so we omitted the former and just used handfuls of plain cornflakes for the latter.

Despite chilling the dough for the required one hour before baking, we had some issues with the resulting cookie. They weren't quite the same flat puddles as the last time I tried a Milk Bar cookie recipe - they were super crispy, somewhat brittle this time - but they were still too flat. Tasted fine though, with a sort of brown-butter-ish note.

I think the problem is that the sugar/butter-to-flour ratios on these cookies are way off from proportions that usually work for me. Compare Tosi's recipe to the classic Nestlé Toll House recipe: both require one cup of butter, but Tosi's calls for a bit more sugar and 3/4 cup less flour. Next time, I need to remember to use more flour to get a crunchier, heartier cookie.

I see cookie experimentation in my future.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Fancy Schmancy

Sometimes I'm too ambitious for my own good. The other day, I decided to make some mahi mahi for dinner. Because we had a couple of oranges and ripe avocados, my original idea was to make a pretty orange-and-green salsa-like topping for the fish. And then I noticed that we had a handful of cloves of black garlic and mmm...wouldn't that taste good?

Unfortunately, black garlic + citrus + avocado = ugly.

I cut the orange into supremes, something that always gives me trouble. I can usually get three or four slices cut before the whole fruit collapses in my hand, making the remaining slices impossible to remove whole. The avocado was a bit too soft, so rather than nice cubes, I had ones that were a bit smooshy on the edges. And unfortunately, the black garlic lent its blackness to the mix, almost like a jolt of squid ink. Oops! Rather than a broken orange/pasty avocado/black stuff salsa, I mashed it all into a guacamole...which was a more uniform army-green color.

Very ugly, but also very delicious. I'd eat this slop again in a heartbeat!

The guac in this pic has been color-enhanced for your protection.

Citrus Guacamole

2 navel oranges
5 cloves black garlic
2 ripe Haas avocados
juice of half a lime
1 scallion, green and white parts, chopped
salt and pepper

Slice bottom end off orange. Hold it, cut side down, on a cutting board and with a very sharp knife, slice off the skin and pith, leaving only the flesh. Pick up the orange and cut out slices between the membranes, placing orange "meat" in a bowl. After removing all of the "meat" of the orange, squeeze out the remaining juice from the leftover pulp into the bowl over the segments. Repeat with second orange.

Mince the black garlic as well as you can (the stuff is super-sticky) and add to oranges and juice in bowl

Cut avocados in half, twist out pit, and scoop out the flesh with a spoon into the bowl with the orange and garlic. Mash well. Add lime juice, scallions, and salt and pepper to taste.

It's not pretty, but it tastes damn good.
-----------------------------------------------
If you're curious about the other elements in the photo, the mahi (broiled simply with salt and pepper and a dash of olive oil) is atop a bed of Trader Joe's brown fried rice with mushrooms, with the addition of a bit of napa cabbage and turkey bacon. Drizzled on the plate is a bit of cilantro oil made by whizzing cilantro in a blender with canola oil and straining out the solids. More turkey bacon was used as garnish, as were fresh chives from the garden.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.

Pork Roast with Orange Apricot Lemongrass Gastrique

While I was relaxing on the sofa with a cup of tea and a pile of magazines, a recipe for blood orange gastrique jumped out at me from the pages of Bon Appetit. Sometimes, when a recipe gets my attention, I have to make it immediately, if not sooner. I had defrosted a small four-chop pork roast for dinner and had no clear idea of how I would serve it. At the time, it was in the fridge luxuriating in a bath of soy sauce, garlic, mirin, and lemongrass paste. Would not a blood orange gastrique go nicely with an Asian-marinated piece of meat?

We didn't have blood oranges, but we had orange juice, so I followed the recipe except for that substitution. After the sauce had reduced to about half a cup, I added a pinch of powdered ginger, a tablespoon of apricot preserves, and a teaspoon of lemongrass paste.

As for the meat, I decided to follow the cooking instructions for a slow-roasted pork loin in the Joy of Cooking. The recipe states that a 3-lb boneless roast should take about 1 1/2 hours. I figured that my 2-lb bone-in roast would take about as much time. Wrong. After reaching an internal temperature of only 118F at the 90-minute mark, I cranked the oven temperature up to 350F. About 45 minutes later, it was finally done. Crazy!

Along with the gastrique, I served the pork with an arugula, butter lettuce, and pear salad, and some Trader Joe's Thai-style Lime Rice. It all worked quite nicely together.