Supper Punch!!! (Week 8)

You can’t go wrong with meat and potatoes, ladies and gentlemen. Last week, Jennifer Carnam brought home her third victory in this epic battle of culinary greatness. Let’s see if she can do it again…

October 13, 2010; 6:00 AM • by RVANews staff

Voting for week 8 of Supper Punch!!! is now closed. Jennifer Carnam has done it again. She is unstoppable! Tune in tomorrow for the final battle.

Our competitors:
Sarah Bonkovsky, a gluten-free mother of three who loves to eat food from her own and nearby gardens. She also describes herself as “slightly lazy, distracted, and messy in the kitchen.” Don’t let her self-deprecating tone fool you — she can BRING IT.

Jennifer Carnam, Vice President of Marketing for the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau (RMCVB) with 30+ years of experience. She’s a California native, a Boston Red Sox fan (by marriage), wife to Allyn, mother to Lex, and step-mother to Lincoln and Todd. She is also the most fun.

Ross Catrow, co-founder of local web design firm PharrOut, lover of beer, butter, and his family. He’s perhaps best-known as the master and commander of the good ship RVANews. Occasionally he takes a picture or two (you can see documentation of his Supper Punch candidates here).

Nick Dawson who recalls early memories of watching PBS cooking shows while home sick from school. By day he works in hospital administration, focusing on improving on the patient experience; by night he is a fan of all things porcine, a curer of meats, a producer of pickles, and a lover of simple foods done very well. He describes himself as “passionate about local, sustainable foods and their producers.”

Our current standings are:
Bonkovsky: 1 (winning week 5)
Carnam: 3 (winning weeks 2 and 3, 7)
Catrow: 1 (winning week 6)
Dawson: 2 (winning weeks 1 and 4)

Let us begin!

Bonkovsky: Veal Saltimbocca

I took a week off from Supper Punch and let my husband do the cooking this time. DQ me if you’d like, but not before you read about how to make this meal so you can recreate the yumminess at home. The dish my husband made was veal saltimbocca, which literally translated means “jumps into one’s mouth”. I can’t think of a more accurate description of how I ate. Here’s how to make it: take some veal, pound it out, dredge in cornmeal (for the GF among us), lay some fontina cheese and sage leaves on top, wrap some prosciutto around it and saute in olive oil and garlic. After the veal is done cooking, take it out and add some wine to de-glaze the pan, then pour it on top. We had ours with a side of asparagus (not really in season, I know, but delicious just the same).

Time spent
The whole process took less than half an hour. I was seriously shocked at how quickly this meal came together. Now that I know how to make it, I’ll be sure to do so sometime in the near future.

Carnam: Pineapple Chicken Skewers with Baked Stuffed Graffiti Eggplant and Blood Orange, Kiwi & Pomegranate Fruit Salad

All day Sunday I was flashing back to what I was doing 24 years ago to the day – anxiously awaiting the arrival of my baby girl. It was a long, arduous process, but a mere 23 and ½ hours after I arrived at the hospital early on the morning of Oct. 10, 1986 Lex was born. Even though her birthday is Oct. 11, we celebrated on Sunday, complete with Barboursville Brut sparkling wine.

I practically ran over another shopper in the produce section when I spotted these gorgeous graffiti eggplants. I grabbed two of the prettiest and thought they’d be especially festive stuffed with a tri-color rice blend, some Kalamata olives, feta, olive oil and fresh oregano (from my deck).

I’ve been anxious to skewer something ever since the Red Sox didn’t make it to the playoffs and the Yankees did, and this weekend’s weather certainly cooperated for outdoor grilling, so I settled on boneless, skinless chicken thighs and fresh pineapple. I cut the chicken in chunks and marinated them in a mixture of low sodium soy sauce, white wine vinegar, fresh ginger, a little brown sugar and some almond oil for about 3 hours. I reserved the pineapple halves to use as “boats” for a simple fruit salad with blood oranges, pomegranate seeds, kiwi and banana.

This all came together for a nice, casual family dinner. Of course, we had to keep peeling my 87-old Mom away from the TV during the Braves vs. Giants game (she wore her Braves hat, t-shirt and chopped her foam tomahawk dutifully). Sadly, her team lost, but the birthday dinner was a win all around for all three generations.

Time spent
1 hour and 10 minutes

Catrow: Chocolate Chip Cookies

So. I am sure I made dinner a couple of times this week, but you know what? None of it was very appealing to look at. I mean it was tasty, don’t get me wrong. But things like sausage gravy with homemade biscuits, sausage stromboli, and roasted vegetable mash — while delicious — are not very photogenic. My mom was like, “All your food is brown.” WELL SO WHAT, SOMETIMES VEGETABLES ARE BROWN. The above picture is proof that at times things were edible.

You know what is uncontroverted truth? Chocolate chip cookies are delicious — especially chewy ones. Well here is the best doggone chocolate chip cookie recipe that exists. Just ask PharrOut and RVANews.

2c flour

.5t baking soda

.5t salt

.75c butter, melted

1c brown sugar

.5c white sugar

1tblspn vanilla extract

1 egg

1 egg yolk

2c semisweet chocolate chips

Combine the dry in one bowl and the wet in another. Then mix the two together, adding the chocolate chips at the end. Here is the important part: each cookie should be ONE QUARTER CUP — which is massive, but key. Also key: bake at 325 for ~15 minutes. The cookies will look raw and mushy, THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT. Transfer them to a cooling rack and eat them all before the sun rises again.

Time spent
About 10 minutes to prep, 15 minutes to cook

Dawson: Fried Chicken, Black Garlic Mashed Potatoes, & Green Beans

My doctor doesn’t read Supper Punch right? Fried goodness two weeks in a row! It all started when we ran into Ryan Smartt at the South of the James Market. As I recall it went something like: “Nick, two words… fried chicken!” Well, who am I to disappoint? Much like the pork chop last week, the chicken when into a 50% brine solution (50g of kosher salt to 1l of water) for 24 hours. While it came to room temperature and dried, I mixed up the coating. Flour, Panko bread crumbs, paprika, cayenne pepper and onion powder went into a bowl, got mixed with vigor and then divided into two bowls.

It should be stated that everything I now know about frying chicken, I learned from Brad at Edo’s Squid in relation to frying sweetbreads. Brad’s method is pretty simple: forcibly press the coating onto every inch of the quartered bird. Place each piece into the first bowl of the coating and, using the back of your hand, literally squash the coating into the meat and skin. The idea is to really pack it on. Then the chicken went through a quick dip of buttermilk and then into the second bowl of coating, repeating the packing process. Shake off the excess and get ready to fry! The cooking is easier with two pans. A high sided dutch oven works well for the thighs and drumsticks. Drop them into 340F oil and let them get a 3 minute head start before lowering the breasts into a cast iron pan with oil at the same temperature.

For the potatoes, we stared with some great local tubers that were boiled until soft. When making mash potatoes, its important to have warm milk or you get lumps — or so my grandmother tells me, and you don’t want to argue with her. Trust me. I used the warming milk as a chance to infuse some flavor, specifically black garlic. Black garlic is garlic that has been fermented while raw in a controlled environment over two weeks. It has the texture and sweetness of roasted garlic and admittedly it was a challenge not to eat most of it raw on some bread. It is also loaded with umami, that sometimes debated fifth taste that represents a fatty mouth feel often associated with things like oysters and soy sauce. Once the potatoes were cooked, we mashed ’em up with the garlic, milk and some…well… lots of butter.

The beans got a simple coating of olive oil and kosher salt and went into a 500f oven for 12 minutes. We served some homemade hot sauce and some home pickled radishes alongside the golden brown and delicious bird.