Recipe

Try this Bacon-Wrapped, Chorizo-Stuffed Dates recipe from the new cookbook, Cooking for Good Times.

I first had these dates when my wife Mary’s dad, Bob, brought them to one of the epic Christmas parties that we used to throw every year for the restaurants’ staffs (until we were going through about fourteen kegs of beer and staying up all night smoking and pulling twelve pork shoulders — then we called it quits). I knew from the moment I tasted one that there was a place on our menu for them. I kept bugging avec’s original chef, Koren Grieveson, during our first week, saying, “We gotta put these on, gotta put these on,” and her answer, every time, was “no.” Actually, it was expletive expletive… but she finally agreed and — with the addition of the piquillo-tomato sauce — the dates have been on offer at avec ever since. The recipe hasn’t changed at all in fifteen years. We’ve had the same guy makin’ ’em, too— Jorge Ruiz. From the very beginning he’s been cranking out more than three hundred a day, five days a week; that’s almost two million to date. He’s made nearly every stuffed date at the restaurant — no kidding. When he goes on vacation, he fills up the freezer with them because when someone covered for him once, people complained that the dates weren’t the same. He’s even developed his own chorizo blend that’s spicy enough to offset the sweetness of the dates. He throws in beef scraps, pork scraps, prosciutto scraps — whatever we have around. You get more bang for your buck that way and they taste better. I get the bug from time to time and say let’s just take them off — I’m tired of them — but there are some things you just can’t touch. People would riot.