Jack & Ginger

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Chelsea

As by now cannot have escaped your notice, the recipes I post and post about here are not old standards. They are not tried and true, they are not perfected, sometimes they do not even include measurements. They are my fun and foibles in the kitchen and my reports about how they turn out. Thus, when I get excited about a recipe or an experiment; excited enough that I take photos of the ingredients and careful note of the process, and the end result peters out a bit under my wild expectations, I am often struck with perturbation. To post or not to post? Usually I decide to share rather than not to share, but there is that lingering question.

The most recent dilemma rests with Thursday night’s dinner. I was jazzed about this one. My husband is a chicken and beef (and sometimes salmon) man, and yet he loves pulled pork. More specifically, he loves Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen’s pulled pork. With a side of mac and cheese and yams, most often. But he seriously digs that stuff. Naturally, then, I was excited to run across a recipe for pulled pork made in the crock pot, and decided to add some of my own alterations and give it a try. We picked up a beautiful two pound pork butt from Long’s Meat Market, and on Thursday morning I chopped, dropped, plopped, and poured ingredients together in the slow cooker, and left. Five hours later the house smelled like a BBQ restaurant. Eight hours later I swear the dog had left drool marks all over the hardwood floors.

It came apart like butter. It collapsed over itself in the crock pot as I tried to pull it out. It dripped moisture and smelled like heaven and looked soft and fragrant and luscious. My salivary glands went into overdrive.

And then we ate it. And it was… good. It wasn’t fabulous. It certainly didn’t rival Papa’s platter. It was a little watery, a little porky, and it didn’t have that saturation of BBQ sauce that pulled pork ought to have. So I wondered, after spending all day (well, sort of) on a meal, after arranging the ingredients just so for a foodie fashion shot and thinking of a clever name and even taking mental notes about how much of each component went into that yawning, welcoming whiteness of my slow cooker, and then having it not be stellar, should I still post?

Clearly, the answer is yes.

Here’s how it went down, with thoughts on reparations for next time:

2 lb. Hunk ‘o pork butt

1 big red onion, frenched (cut in half end to end, then sliced into thin angled wedges)

5-6 roughly chopped cloves of garlic

2-inch hunk of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

1 cup ginger ale

1-2 shots Jack Daniels or other whiskey

1-2 cups BBQ sauce (any type you like)

Put the onion slices, garlic, and ginger in the bottom of your slow cooker. Plop the pork butt on top and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Pour the whiskey, ginger ale, and sauce over the top of the pork. Cover and cook on low for 8 hours.

At this point, I took the pork out of the slow cooker and used two forks to pull it into loose meaty strands. Then, because there were potatoes that needed buttermilk, butter, and a good deal of mashing, I plunged my pulled pork back into the liquid that had collected in the bottom of the slow cooker. This was a mistake. Instead, I should have emptied the vessel, added an inch or two of BBQ sauce, and mixed in the pork. It would have stayed drier, it would have collected the flavor of the sauce, and it would have been better prepared to hold together when we slopped it onto burger buns to transport to our eager mouths.

Tasting, we got the rich soupy porkiness of the meat, spice from the sauce, and maybe the barest hint of garlic and ginger. I don’t know what the whiskey contributed, besides perhaps help in breaking down the muscles of the pork, but it was fun to be able to add it. Maybe a slight tartness made its way into the meat, but that was all I sensed.

The other thing I missed, which can’t be helped because I used a crock pot, was the crusty crunchy hard edges of the pork that result from barbecue treatment. The texture of the pulled pork is so lovely, but it is nice to have a bit now and then that puts up some resistance. I have always thought searing the outsides of a piece of meat before putting it in the slow cooker defeated the purpose of a one-pot, easy meal, but I wonder whether that would help here as well.

So, certainly not a failure, but not the most resounding of success stories either. Still, I do have that old family BBQ sauce recipe kicking around that I’ve never tried, and homemade sauce draped over luscious piggy goodness couldn’t be anything but an improvement…

Do you have a favorite BBQ sauce recipe? What makes it special?

Gourmet

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Chelsea

On a warm, July day, when a person (and her husband) is unjustly required to spend the shining hours of the afternoon working, teaching, holding office hours, what better treat could there be than to come home and indulge in a little gourmet dinner?

As I’ve divulged previously, I like cannibalizing from restaurant menus. Usually it’s not the dish I order, but another that was second or third on the list… or just barely missed the final, nervous, rushed decision as the server hovers above me… and I jot down the description on a slip of paper somewhere and try not to lose it in the subsequent weeks.

This time it was that Americanized, fancified Italian food-of-the-common-man: pizza.

Several weeks ago N. and I celebrated Friday by meeting some friends to drinks and dinner. We’d already eaten, so we swore to each other we would only drink one pint (for him), and one glass of wine (for me). Then we went to Agate Alley with our friends and ordered a huge, gluttonously greasy, spicy, salty, decadent basket of onion rings. I ate so many…

While we patted our fingertips on napkins to try and assuage our greasy shame, our friend S. ordered a personal size pizza topped with prosciutto, gorgonzola cheese, brandied figs, and a bright salad of fresh raw arugula, piled high right in the middle. I had never thought of putting figs on a pizza before, but it seemed so inspired. Though S. ate hers without the porky delights of prosciutto (one of those vegetarian types, you know), the idea of wafer-thin slices of cured pork-belly lingered in my mind when I recalled the recipe.

So I, so often operating as Dr. Frankenstein in the kitchen, decided a recreation was required. This pizza would be a hybrid – a loving, daring combination of Agate Alley’s delectable pie and the prosciutto and caramelized onion darling Ree of The Pioneer Woman has developed. With a hunk of gorgonzola languishing in my cheese drawer, it was just the right thing to do.

Ingredients (mostly approximated):

1 lump pizza dough (I shamelessly bought mine, pre-made, from Trader Joe’s fridge section)

1 medium to large sweet onion

2 TB brown sugar

4-6 oz. prosciutto

5-8 dried figs, sliced

1-2 oz. gorgonzola cheese, crumbled

1 cup (at least!) shredded mozzarella cheese

Big handful of arugula or basil

While my pizza stone heated in the oven, I caramelized my onions per the Pioneer Woman’s directions. Then, while I prepped all my other ingredients (grating cheese, slicing figs, playing with the dough), I forgot about the onions for a little bit too long and the brown sugar started to burn. But I decided to just call that “extra-caramelized” and be happy with it.

With the dough stretched, plunked onto the hot, cornmeal sprinkled stone and already starting to shrink back in on itself (it never wants to stay in a 12-inch circle; why not?), I quickly piled on the toppings: a drizzle of olive oil, evenly spread mounds of mozzarella, trailing slices of salty hammy goodness, cheese crumbles, figs, and dark, dark mahogany clumps of onion.

Into the oven at 450F it went, and about 12 minutes later, gasping, I edged it out and clunked it down on my stovetop. Lacking arugula, I sprinkled baby leaves of basil atop the whole thing.

It looked glorious. The crust was crunchy on the bottom, the cheese was golden and bubbling, the prosciutto had crinkled and crisped, and the figs were these dark, seeded pockets of mystery.

We ate. We ate more. The combination of salty and sweet has been hyped for years now, but that’s because it works. The sweet onions and tangy, sugary figs balanced the rich creamy funk of the gorgonzola and the perfect saltiness of the prosciutto. I would have preferred arugula to basil, because the licorice overtones of basil weren’t the perfect match, but the fresh greenness was definitely welcome.

I would never have thought of figs on pizza, but I would urge you to try them in this combination (or just figs and prosciutto, I won’t tell). Sliced thin, they warmed in the oven and just started to create their own glassy brulée atop their honeyed interiors. With chewy dough, creamy bubbling cheese, crisp-chewy ham, soft sweet onions, the crunch of the little seeds inside each slice of fig, popping between the teeth and tickling the taste buds, was the perfect final flavor of each bite.

This would be perfect enjoyed with a crisp, semi-dry white wine, though the beer we drank with it was just fine. It is supposed to be simple fare, after all.

Summer comfort food

Posted on August 27, 2008 by Chelsea

The woman at right is my Aunt Nancy.

Just below her is one of the many, many reasons I love her.

My slow-cooker and I have a Machiavellian relationship. I want desperately to love it, but I fear it. My reasoning for this is, like many of my food fears, mostly irrational. Shortly after acquiring said slow-cooker, I created a disappointingly leathery pot roast. From that day forth until two or three nights ago, I’ve been wary of the beast, and it has sat in a cabinet. However, a few days ago I embarked on Nancy’s slow-cooker baked beans recipe that I’ve adored and coveted for a number of years now, and I can say with surety that I’m no longer afraid (I think), as it came out perfectly.

The mixture of beans is great, and despite the 6 hours of cooking time, they keep their texture very well. Imagine the little bowl of frijoles de la olla that you get as a side at some TexMex places. Though our baked beans do not remotely resemble those frijoles in taste, the final texture is fairly similar. The beans hold their shape, but the liquid ingredients create a kind of mix between a sauce and a glaze, and somehow hold the beans in a kind of suspended animation of glory.

Nancy’s Crockpot Baked Beans:

1 can baked beans (all cans between 14-16oz).

1 can lima beans

1 can butter beans

1 can kidney beans, rinsed

½ lb. bacon, cut up and fried

1 large onion, sautéed in bacon grease

1 c ketchup

1½ – 2 c brown sugar

2 tsp vinegar

Drain and rinse lima, butter, and kidney beans only (baked bean liquid is necessary for the sauce). Mix all ingredients together. Either cook in a slow cooker for about 6 hours (add a ladle of water if they seem dry), or bake in the oven in a 2 qt casserole at 350^ofor 1 hour.

I’ve thought about ways you might amend this recipe to be vegetarian, and I think it just wouldn’t be as good. The bacon adds necessary elements of flavor. The sauce becomes quite sweet from the ketchup and brown sugar, and though bacon can also be somewhat sweet, the meaty flavor does contribute something to the finished product, cutting through the starchy beans and the syrupy sauce. Maybe it’s a smokiness that the beans can’t quite develop sans pork product. In any case, the closest I’ve come so far to developing a theoretical veggie version is maybe experimenting with flavored vinegars, rather than the standard white.

In any case, the final result according to the recipe is a bubbling mass of sweet, protein-packed goodness. It’s like edible magma that warms you up from inside. In a way, the flavor reminds me a little bit of that sweet red bean paste that sometimes comes in steamed buns. I served this with sautéed cabbage and peppercorn crusted pork loin. Drool.