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. 

Let's try a book review

Happy New Year, y'all. Hope that you enjoyed or successfully endured the holiday season, depending on your point of view. 

Holiday Dip/Schmear

It’s crunch time at the day job, so I don’t have anything terribly sophisticated or involved today. But then again, that’s probably not a bad thing. The holidays are complex and stressful enough as it is, and given how elaborate and involved the cooking on Thanksgiving, Chanukah, and Christmas tends to be, it’s not a bad idea to have something that you can throw together quickly and without much effort. Assuming you have a food processor, that is. If you don’t, this recipe is probably not in your future, although a blender might suffice in a pinch.

Anyway, this is dip season, as far as I’m concerned. Yes, during other times of the year we all like salsa or guacamole with chips, but this is the time of year when you start to throw together all manner of dairy-based gooey concoctions that you then eat with reckless abandon on chips, crackers, bread rounds, or whatever. This is a favorite dip of mine, although as the title indicates, it can serve as either dip or schmear, depending on context. Hell, if you're a fan of the lesser works of a bygone comedy troupe, you can call it "The Salmon Mousse" in a sepulchral voice. Knock yourself out.

Pepper-Seared Tuna, Limited Illustration Version

Why “Limited Illustration,” you ask?

(I know, I know, you don’t care. Play along.)

Chicken Curry, Improvised Ersatz Version

Authenticity? Never heard of it.

Every time I venture into Asian cooking, I always feel I need to acknowledge that I don’t really know what I’m doing.* But the truth is, so many heinous things have been called “curries” or “stir-fries” or whatever over the years, that I tend to go into preemptive apology mode when I try something like today’s dish.

So for the record, I am not an expert on Thai cooking or on Southeast Asian cuisines in general. I’m just an amateur cook with access to an Asian market. Mind you, I’m not sure whom I think is going to chastise me. I’m reasonably certain that there is no Thai culinary police out there, although if I’m wrong, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t turn me in.

The Problem with Chefs' Cookbooks

I am not a chef. I’m a decent home cook, but I’m not a chef. Never have been, never will be. The word chef gets thrown around far too freely these days, largely due to an influx of “TV chefs” from the Food Network. But a chef is not just a good cook; a chef is a trained professional who runs a restaurant kitchen. This is something I have no experience with—from everything I’ve read, I would be reduced to a gibbering wreck after ten minutes in a restaurant kitchen.

Muffins, Old School

Remember the pre-Starbucks America? The one where coffee was a weak-flavored, brown liquid that cost less than a dollar and came with never-ending free refills?

Thank god those days are over. That shit was vile. If you’re too young to remember those days, grab a cup of drip coffee that’s been sitting all day on a warming burner at a gas station, and you’ll get some idea.

We will return to your regularly scheduled program...

Things have been busier than usual with the day job in the last few weeks, so there has been little cooking of interest going on--or rather, no cooking worth writing about, at least. I'm hoping to get another post up soon. For what it's worth, btw, if anyone has a recipe they would like me to tackle and (amateurishly) photograph, I'm open to suggestions. 

In the meantime, I direct you to this piece written by NPR's Linda Holmes. She blogs about popular culture for NPR, and is the host of a truly delightful podcast called Pop Culture Happy Hour, which I cannot recommend highly enough if you are interested in television, movies, theatre, and/or music. 

In this case, she's written a very funny takedown of contemporary menu speak, which is one of my pet peeves. If, like me, you're old enough to remember when dishes had names, it can be particularly irritating to read of "Unicorn Ranch Free-Range Tofu Braised in Willamette Valley Shallot Confit with Wildebeest Reduction," or whatever. Ms. Holmes seems to understand. 

[Inarticulate Scream of Frustration]

1. Make sauce

2. Boil water


3. Realize I’m out of pasta

I write a food blog.

#sadreally 
#Juliaisspinninginhergrave
#goingto711tobuypizzarolls

Addendum

OK, I still want to emphasize that everyone should give the Chinese Braised Pork Belly a go. It's amazing. Really. It's a recipe from Michelle Humes at Serious Eats. 

But I’m not one to ignore the practicalities of everyday life. And although people seemed to think the preceding recipe looked great, a lot of people complained.

Chinese Braised Pork Belly

OK, this one is a bit of an undertaking. I’m aware of that. It may not be easy to find the necessary ingredients. I’m aware of that, too. And it’s time consuming. But hear me out. Because this one was amazingly good. Seriously, it was. And I don’t say that as a boast—I was just following directions. But damn. If you can get the requisite ingredients, you have to try this.

Vegans, vegetarians, and pescetarians: sorry, but I got nothing for you on this one. Check back next time.