Dark Lord Day!

This past weekend we took a short trip down to Munster, Indiana to partake in the world famous "Dark Lord Day" put on by Three Floyds Brewery ( http://www.threefloydspub.com/ ) once every year.

Essentially the "Dark Lord" is a HUGE imperial stout which imparts so many subtle flavors that it boggles the mind...seriously after one sip at the festival we all looked at each other and just said "wow" and agreed that it was difficult to even start describing what was going on with this jet black stout.

The actual event was what I would classify as just "ok", meaning that it was certainly an experience but after waiting in line (which ended up in the thousands of folks from as far as Japan) for 5 hours to get our bottles you were kinda left with the sense of "what now...". Well "what now" ended up being sampling just a few beers (a good cask bitter, and a Russion River brew), listening to a brief amount of heavy metal from a local band in the brewery wharehouse and jumping back on the road to Chicago. Granted the location is in Munster, IN and to be fair..well..there's not much going on down in Munster, but please keep in mind that I'm not faulting the event on the location but rather what was available at the fest....4 bottles of DL-good, 2 food stands and no access (well under a 2 hour wait) to the brewpub-bad.

Anyhow..the DL is a extremely chewy and robust stout and it's going to be very difficult to leave the remaining 2/4 that I have along for a year +

At $15 per bottle (22oz) and a limit of 6 per person you can bet we will be cellaring these bad boys for some time.

...also check ot the metal group that opened up at 11am....if this stuff does not get you drinking a beer called "Dark Lord" nothing will...

Panchetta!

So its been a while since I've put a posting up..which sucks :) But rest assured outside of not having enough time to post on my culinary adventures I have actually reserved my spare time to actually "have" my culinary adventures...and this was one of them.

I'm happy to report that only weeks after picking up my copy of Charcuterie I've already produced 4 different flavors of cured meats and will get some pics/descriptions up very soon...but for

now

lets look at the Panchetta.


Essentially a salt cured (with spices and herbs) pork belly then hang dried for
2+ weeks to develop flavor which is used to flavor other dishes.

So after leaving this guy to hang dry for two weeks (next to my second round of du
ck breast prosciutto) I was finally able to bring it down and use it one a nice breakfast pasta for the wife and myself. After slicing thin and cooking with some shallots I added our panchetta to some pasta, goat cheese, and sun dried tomato for a hearty (to say the least) Sunday morning breakfast (by the way..as I'm writing this Sunday evening I can now tell you that this more than contributed to our Sunday late morning nap :) ).

Personally I loved it, the flavor was very much like bacon (no surprise) but had a nice herbal/floral note to it left by cure (if you have any interest in the cure please let me know).

Cheers!