Hopefully everyone had a nice weekend. The Wooden Table spent it waist deep in some of the craziest powder that Squaw Valley has ever seen, noshing on goods that warmed body and soul (although we missed out on those delicious alpine waffles this time around).

Now it’s time to get back to work. Below you’ll find some shots from our most recent dinner, Heavy on the Hog.

Yet again, soba makes an appearance on our menu (we love buckwheat!). This time ice cold soba gets a hot bacon dashi bath, topped with a crispy soy pork belly and garnished with a fresh lotus root.

We sourced the meat for this salad from La Villa, a local deli (who also happen to have really delicious raviolis). The first pass at this dish was a regular lardon salad, but it just didn’t have enough pork in it for a hog meal. So I decided to up the hog ante (with some pan fried mortadella, pancetta and speck) and paired it with leaves that had some serious structural integrity (to hold up to the yolk) and some sharpness to cut the eggy and piggy richness.

The concept for this dish was “pulled pork in the Philippines”. I used only ingredients that would be readily found out there (even in making the bbq sauce). It sat atop pan de leche (an eggy sweet bread) from Valerio’s and was paired with a fried plantain to complement the flavors of the sauce and presented on banana leaves with a side of spicy (and I do mean SPICY) atchara to serve as a slaw of sorts.

My mama makes THE BEST callos con garbanzo. So I knew that I wouldn’t even be attempting my mom’s recipe (which calls for stewing tripe for hours until buttery and aromatic). But I also knew that I wanted to expose our diners to a flavor profile that I loved and might be unfamiliar to them. So I broke down the elements of the dish (some might say deconstructed) and reinterpreted them, allowing each to take up a different role on the plate. Roasted chick peas gave the dish crunch. Fried hock polenta cakes, crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside with bits of hock throughout took the textural place of the unctuous tripe in the traditional dish. Confit olives (olives poached in olive oil) gave the dish it’s traditional briny zing.

The entire meal was paired with a soundtrack of funky drums (to accompany the many funky crunches of the menu) assembled by J-Squared