Del Campo

We first tasted Victor Albisu's cooking back in the winter when we visited his Taco Bamba pop-up.  Since then, the brick and mortar version has opened, as well as Del Campo, a more upscale eatery that still harkens back to his Latin American roots.

The first thing you'll notice is that everything the restaurant offers touches the grill.  Even components of their cocktails have a nice, smoky char to them.  I opted for the pisco sour, a classic Peruvian cocktail.  It's a refreshing drink on a hot summer night, due to the citrusy tang of the lemon and lime, and light foamy egg white that floats on top.  Justin wanted the Tank 7 farmhouse ale since we were meeting friends for beers afterwords.  About 10 minutes later he was informed they were out of the Tank 7, and it took awhile longer to get another beer. Since we there during the first few weeks of them opening, we weren't too surprised they were working out some kinks in service.

Source

Then we came to the food options.  While perusing the menu we were presented with freshly baked bread, served with smoked olive oil and smoked salt for dipping.  I think I could've drank a cup of the smoked olive oil on it's own, it was that tasty!  The menu is broken down into appetizers & ceviches, asados (essentially all the meat options), house specialties, and del mar (the seafood options).  Your best bet is to share everything so you can try a variety of food.

Source

For appetizers, we chose the roasted beet salad with goat cheese, the chicharones (because we can't resist crispy pork skin!), and the yellowtail ceviche.  The beets and goat cheese was one of my favorites, both in taste and visual appeal.  There were golden beets, striped beets, and the traditional red beets, all with a nice sweetness that was balanced out by the tangy goat cheese.  But we can't forget the chicharones.  You may be envisioning a pile of crispy pork rings on a plate, but this dish was way more than that.  It was more of a pork tasting plate, offering up some crispy skin, a rib, and a slab of pork belly.  The salty, delicious pork was balanced out with a sweet potato puree.

Source

Now, onto the entrees!  Ideally, you'll want to try a variety of meats.  I opted for the lamb shank, which was grilled perfectly and arrived at the table, falling off the bone.  The portion was a bit on the smaller side though.  Justin went with the short ribs.  The most common preparation for short ribs is to braise them for hours on end so they're falling off the bone when you eat them.  But in keeping with the theme of the restaurant, these bad boys were grilled.  If you're a bit hungrier, these are a good option because you're served three strips of short ribs.  Our dining companions chose the hangar steak and teres major steak, both of which were cooked to a perfect medium rare, as well as the grilled salmon.  We also received a complimentary serving of roasted bone marrow.  Now, if you remember back a few paragraphs ago, I mentioned sharing the food.  That's because all of the meats were served on one large wooden board, to really encourage sharing.  They also came with four sauces; two chimichurris (a traditional South American herb-based condiment), a Malbec sauce, and a salsa.  For the amount of meat we ordered, I think we could've used slightly larger quantities of sauce.

Source

The sides are a la carte, as in most steakhouses.  To accompany our meats, we ordered the fried yucca and grilled polenta for some starch.  Like any great french fry, the yucca was perfectly crisp on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside.  They were served with a salsa criolla, and I easily could've eaten an entire basket of these fries.  The sauce was addictingly good, and although we were stuffed, we kept going back for more fries.  The grilled polenta had a nice, charred outer crust, yet was still fluffy in the middle.  But they weren't very memorable.  Next time, I may opt for one of the vegetables.

Overall, it was a great meal, and delivered exactly what it promised; deliciously grilled meats.  It would definitely be worth a trip back to try a few other cuts and the uni ceviche and some desserts (assuming we don't stuff ourselves on delicious meats again!).

Monday Night Mangia!

Tonight, we have a quick, easy chicken piccata with a side of creamy polenta with kale.  It came together rather quickly and was really tasty to boot!  So let's get started...

You'll want to strip the kale off the ribs, and slice up a few cloves of garlic.  Cook up the garlic in a little olive oil, just until it's fragrant, and then add your kale so it cooks down a bit.

While the kale is sauteeing, bring to a boil some water, milk and butter.  Once it starts boiling, whisk in the polenta.  Keep whisking until it thickens.

Once the kale has wilted down a bit, you can coarsely chop it, then add it to the polenta.  Make sure you continue to stir your polenta every once in a while.

 

Let the polenta continue cooking.  Right before you're ready to serve it, stir in the ricotta and let it heat through.  To put our own little spin on the dish, we added a little crushed red pepper flakes for a little heat.

Now, on to the chicken!  The meat tenderizer was at Justin's place, so instead of pounding out our chicken breasts, he cut them into thin cutlets, and simply breaded them in pan searing flour, salt and pepper.

These just got pan fried in some melted butter and olive oil until they were cooked through.  To keep them warm and crispy, we placed them on cooling racks on a baking sheet and put them into a warm oven.  Keeping them elevated on the cooling rack lets the air circulate underneath and keep them crispy on all sides.

For the sauce, we used the same pan we cooked the chicken in, and just added a little more butter, white cooking wine, some water (or you could use chicken stock), and a little lemon juice.  Since we had some dill and thyme on hand, we added that to the pan as well, for a little extra flavor.

Once those flavors had a chance to meld together, we added a little flour to thicken it up, as well as the capers for some saltiness.  And that's it!  Super simple, and only used a couple pans.  What more could you ask for?

Tressed to Kill

Tonight's dinner is brought to you by the letter P, for pork and polenta!

Since we have apples from the CSA, and pork tenderloin was on sale this week, it was a match made in heaven.  We've experimented before with a recipe for pork chops stuffed with apples, hazelnuts and blue cheese, so we made a few tweaks, substituting in walnuts rather than hazelnuts, and rolling it all up into a pork tenderloin.

I got to work chopping up 2 gold rush apples and toasting the walnuts.  We seasoned the pork with salt, pepper, and chopped rosemary.  Then we stuffed it with the apples and walnuts.  Our blue cheese is currently MIA, so we had to forgo the cheese.

 Justin had the pleasure of tressing the pork and making sure all the apples and walnuts stayed up inside the pork.  And since all of the apples didn't fit inside the tenderloin, we just put them in the dish around the pork while it cooked.

For our side dish, we went with a butternut squash polenta gratin.  The bulb of the squash was roasted, while the neck was just peeled and sliced.  While the squash roasted we whipped up the polenta.

The roasted squash was added to the polenta, along with a bunch of parmesan cheese.

I only had a loaf pan, so we made layers of polenta and sliced squash.  This was all topped with more cheese, some black truffle oil, and truffle salt.  Then we popped it into the oven with the pork to cook.  About 30 minutes later, dinner was ready!

The pork was perfectly cooked, the apples added a nice sweetness, and the walnuts had a nice, toasty crunch.  I did miss the tang of the blue cheese though.

With the unseasonably warm weather on the docket for this weekend, we're hoping to fire up the grill, so stay tuned to see what we do with the bison steak and kohlrabi!