Pork Shoulder Braised in Cider

 

I'm back, continuing my long-standing tradition of posting recipes at wildly irregular intervals. You're welcome. 

This one has no specific “original recipe” to draw upon. My initial impulse was to make the Italian Beef recipe from last year, but with pork shoulder instead of beef. However, as I was going along, I ended up heading in a different direction. So while this was somewhat improvised, there were two recipes that I used as inspiration. One was J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Braised Oxtail Sandwiches, which was my starting point for the Italian Beef dish. The second was another Serious Eats recipe, by Jennifer Olvera: Cider-Braised Country-Style Pork Ribs. I first sampled these succulent braised ribs at the home of my friend Kelly, whom I first cooked with decades ago, when we were in grad school together. We once considered pitching a TV cooking show entitled “Don’t Try This at Home,” but that’s a story for another time.

Polenta for the Lazy

This one’s a nice dish to have in your repertoire when it’s winter and you’re bored with the stuff you’ve been cooking lately. I won’t say it’s life changing, but it is bloody useful. I’ve taken/stolen/adapted this one from Sara Moulton’s Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals. We’ve done one of her recipes before, as you might recall; like Jacques Pépin, she is one of the few classically trained chefs who actually understand the constraints and limitations of cooking at home, which makes her books quite useful.

Holiday Dip/Schmear, Revisited

Hi. I’m back. Excited?

Didn’t think so.

I’m the guy who used to write a food blog. You may remember me from such blog posts as “My go-to Risotto,” or “Chicken Thighs au Pépin,” or “Pasta alla Norcina,” which was my last post, almost six months ago.

Where did I go? (I know, I know, just pretend you give a damn.)

Pasta alla Norcina

Hey, it’s July. Picnics, cookouts, pool parties, all of which are ways of coping with the 100-degree F (38-degree C) heat of mid-summer. So what better time to talk about pasta with sausage and heavy cream?

Bear with me.

Kofta Metamorphosis

I have returned. Perhaps I was missed. Probably not. Best not to inquire, I suspect. Sorry for the pun in the title. It's not really relevant, but it was quite literally the only semi-clever thing I could think of in connection with the word "kofta." 

For some reason, I’ve not been culinarily inspired of late, so there hasn’t been much in the way of novel, unusual, or even particularly interesting cooking in my household lately. So while I’ve been absent, it’s not as if I’ve been cooking faisan truffée au sous vide without telling you.

My Go-To Risotto

As I’ve written before, risotto is one of those dishes that most Americans were unaware of until relatively recently and thus tend to find intimidating. This one, as the title indicates, is my go-to risotto; when I’m in the mood for a risotto, this is the one I usually make. Except for the dried porcini mushrooms, none of the ingredients are particularly difficult to come by. If you can do a bit of multitasking, this is a one-pot meal* that can be cranked out in an hour or less. This amount serves two to three, but you could easily double the quantities for more people. There’s no formal recipe on this one, but I’ll list all of the ingredients at the end.

Almond Cake

I’ve been putting off writing this entry for some time. Not because of any concern regarding the recipe, which is perfectly straightforward and worked really well.

Netherlandish Children

As I write this, tomorrow is Mardi Gras, alias Carnival, alias, Shrove Tuesday, alias Pancake Day—we’ve discussed this before. So a pancake recipe seemed apropos. This is an oven-baked pancake called a Dutch Baby. I don't know why. Feel free to google it if you're curious. Odds are the original name of it was "Deutsch," rather than "Dutch," and it appears to be a regional American dish. It’s a sweet breakfast dish where I come from. That said, there are all kinds of sweet and savory variations on this, most notably the Popover and the Yorkshire Pudding. 

The Mediterranean, as seen by the Midwest

Let’s get this out of the way: although this dish is called Italian beef, it isn’t Italian, in that it does not hark from the nation-state known as Italy. It does come from the Italian-American immigrant community, and is typically associated with Chicago. But it’s not Italian in the Tuscany/Parma/Liguria/Emilia-Romagna sense of the word. It is, as my grandfather would have put it, “Eyetalian.”

Wherein I Suffer for My Art

Gumbo, as I mentioned in my last post, was served for dinner on Christmas Day in the Moss household, but it’s a very nice dish to have in your repertoire for entertaining people on non-feast days as well. First, it’s pretty much a one-pot meal. It’s traditionally served with rice, and you can add a salad if you’re feeling some post-holiday-indulgence guilt or something, but that’s optional, really. You can also make it a couple of days in advance and just park it in your refrigerator until you need it; if anything, this improves the flavors. It’s a little time consuming, but none of the steps involved is difficult, and since it actually benefits from being made in advance, you can prepare it whenever you have time. You can even spread the prep over several days if you wish. You can make it with meat, with seafood, or with just vegetables, or all of the above.