Cooking Revival Meats Pork Chops

I like to eat meat. I know that Michael Pollen says that we should "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too much" but I love the mouth feel of a cook piece of pork with fat slippery and oozing down my chin. I also love animals. I agree with Peter Singer that we should try to minimize the amount of suffering in the world.

Which is why I was excited when I found out about Revival Meats (see previous post) and the fact that they were coming to Houston to sell some pork.

I bought bacon and pork chops:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

and I wanted to honor the pig by making him delicious.

I decided that I would grill the Chops, and accompany them with grill corn on the cob

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

and grilled peaches:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

But before we get to cooking, I wanted to brine the pork. I send Morgan a text just to make sure it still made sense to bring pork of this quality, and he said that it was fine. So I made a simple brine of kosher salt (about 1/2 c) and sugar (about 3T) in about a quart of water:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

I let the chops brine for about an hour, and then let them sit at room temperature for another hour or so. Aren't they beautiful?

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

I then started the grill,

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

Peppered the pork,

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

and started grilling

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

Look at these beautiful peaches!

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

I wanted to make sure that the pork didn't overcook, so I got out my trusty thermo-pen:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

but the battery was dead.

So we grilled the pork and corn

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

Until they were done. (Pork to about 135 degrees F, corn until it was blackened)

This is what it looks like plated:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

The pork was great:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

(it was a little pinker than that photo shows)

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

Man, it was good!

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

This is the wine we had with it:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

and THAT was a winner! I love those Burgundy Wines.

Finally, the roasted peaches with ice cream and caramel sauce, sprinkled with malt:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

It was a delicious meal.

Revival Meats

I have been reading about Revival Meats since I first stumbled across them from someone's twitter feed. So last week Friday, when I read that they (read that as Morgan Weber, the owner of Revival) would be at the Dairy Maid's warehouse from 3:00 to 6:30, I was thrilled. I figured this would be a great time to get some real pork, and also to support a local farm about which I had heard such great things.

I had a meeting at the Empire Cafe late that afternoon, so I was not too far away from the warehouse. I got up there about 4:00, but Morgan had not yet arrived.

I was worried that he may have sold out of all his pork, but the truth was a little more prosaic. He had a meeting with Brennan's restaurant that went long. (Coincidentally, we ate at Brennan's Saturday evening - the first time since they reopened. It was great) We are good with that, as we want good pork at Brennan's and we want Revival meat to become famous.

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

DairyMaid's Warehouse

Morgan got to the warehouse about 4:30 or so, and had two big coolers with some nice looking pieces of meat.

I was second in line (to @FoodPrincess. Nice meeting you, by the way!) and picked out some nice looking bacon:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

and a couple of pork chops:

From Revival Meats and other backyard pleasures

They were all frozen, so I took them home to thaw.

Oh, and of course I bought some Cheese from the DairyMaid's stash. We had the cheese that evening for supper (very healthy!) and prepared the Pork Chops Sunday night.

I will write more about that later.

Travel as Collecting

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More Paris

I won't write anymore about this trip, as we have been home now for close to a week. But if you want to see some food pics, go to my Picasa site and check them out.


As you could see from my previous post, we weren't too far from Notre Dame.

Here is a photo of the flying buttresses. You have to love flying buttresses:


And what trip to Paris would be complete without a photo of the Eiffel Tower?


Finally a couple of pictures of us at the Louvre:



What a life!

Paris

Since we arrived in Paris about an hour late, we missed our lunch reservation at the Bistro Paul Bert. But luckily there was a great little cafe just a block away from our place called the Bistro Petit Celestin:


The owner, a woman I would guess around 65, looked just like Ruth from Northern Exposure. And she was just delightful. We told her we did not speak much French, and she embraced it, miming out the food, and in one case, even bringing us a plate with the main course (Pork ribs. We ordered it). When I ordered the wine, I her her tel Patrick (her son, I assume) "Deux verres" of wine. I said, "No, no! un carafe!" she then brought the two sizes of carafes to the table so we could pick the right one. (We picked the bigger one)

Doreen had boiled eggs with home made mayonnaise as her appetizer, I had fresh melon. Both were great - then we had the pork ribs as the entree, and coffee for dessert. A great meal.
Then we took some time to unwind in our apartment. It was on the 2nd French floor of this building:

We had the lowest level of balconies you can see. It was a great place!

We felt like nobility:


The place we had in Avignon was not very nice (Maybe I will write about it later. But suffice it to say it was not what we expected based on the website.)

But this place exceeded our expectations:


It was a little farther east than we usually stay - in the Marais, but when you have Metro tickets, who cares?

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TGV from Avignon to Paris

The train from Avignon to Paris left from this really cool station:


But the train was late. The good news was that this station had a new stand, so that Doreen bought a newspaper.


We we able to stay up near the track, and then when the train came we jumped on.




It was an interesting ride. We saw a nuclear power plant (no smokestacks)


but as we got closer to Paris, the terrain got less interesting.

It was a nice, easy trip, and we ended up in the Gare de Lyon - just blocks away from our apartment!

Pope's Palace, Avignon

Like many medieval buildings, the Pope's Palace grew organically. But it was built in only something like 20 years, which seems fast for something build in the 14th century.

Here we are in front of the palace.


It had some great courtyards inside the building. Here is a very nice one we found:



See if you can find Doreen in this photo:


They had a crypt, but we don't know who is buried there:


They took the "Exit through the Gift Shop" meme to a new level at this place. They took you through a wine store! Selling the "Wines of the Rhone" (In English)

Worth a visit.

Sur le Pont d'Avignon

After we got back from our trip to Gordes, we dropped the car off in its garage and wandered back to the apartment.

We had a great meal at a place called Thierry Piedoie that Doreen had seen listed as one of the New York Time's top five restaurants in Avignon. Look at the photos, the food was as good as it looked. The odd thing about that place is that they had no pink wine! I always thought that was a mainstay of Provence. They also eat their lamb very rare. Good for us, off putting for others.

After lunch we ambled on down to the Pont (made famous in song). It is only half a bridge anymore, having fallen down in a flood in 1668. (!). That is one old bridge.

It was so darned windy while we were there, you felt as if you might be blown off the bridge. We were told that this is the Mistral wind - a strong wind from the North. IT certainly made the skies blue!



Doreen dancing:


You cans sort of see how windy it was. Look at our hair! Neither of us could wear our hats in Avignon as it was so windy.


There was a chapel on the bridge to hold the bones of St Bénezet. He was the one whom God told to build a bridge across the Mighty Rhone there. The town elders laughed at him until he picked up a huge stone nobody else could move and laid the foundation.


As I am sure everyone knows, the Papacy was based in Avignon from 1305 to 1378. (From 1378 to 1415 the anti-Popes were there)

More later on the Pope's Palace.

Gordes

On our last day in Avignon, we knew we needed to fill the car up with gas (well, with Diesel, actually) before we could turn it in the following morning at the TVG station. So we drove over to a previously identified Shell station, filled up, and I was ready to head back into the city and spend a nice day relaxing around Avignon.

Doreen, though, thought it would be nice to drive to Gordes, a mountain village east of Avignon. Needless to say, we didn't have a great map, but we soldiered on.

This is our first view of Gordes:


It was a real medieval village, a walled town, that had given itself over to the tourist trade. The drive was sort of harrowing, and the road was very narrow. You don't get a good feel for how steep it was from this photo:


But it did feel like you were on top of the world.


There was an old castle in town:

that had been turned into the Hotel de Ville (city hall)


On the way out, we saw more grapevines, as above.