the pork barrel.

sausages

It's been a while since I've done any cooking worth blogging about, but I figure a weekend of spit-roasting ducks and making sausages has to count.

I love making sausages, and I'd recommend it to nearly anyone: the equipment is low-tech and not too expensive and, contrary to my expectations, there's no heavy lifting involved. Somehow it turns quite pedestrian recipes into gold; I think it's the close mingling of the ingredients pressed together by the skin: it makes the flavours marry in a way that hardly ever happens during my regular cooking. Also, the ridiculous amounts of fat and salt involved, of course. 

So, we made Spanish chorizos, which were remarkably simple (nothing but pork loin, salted pork belly, garlic and parika) and two kinds of Thai sausages, the latter from recipes by Vatcharin Bhumichitr. I'm not going to pirate Vatch's recipes here, just report that they're good, and if you hold back on the salt a bit, they scale up very well. He's pretty authentically Thai in his approach, but he writes for a Western audience shopping in Western supermarkets. The only problem with his recipes is that they're for tiny quantities: if youre going to clear your kitchen to make sausages, you should do a decent amount - I split the task with a friend (who happens to be a professional chef, and who supplied the sausage stuffer and the meat-grinding attachment for the Kitchen Aid Mixer), and we started with 12lbs of pork loin for the three recipes combined, making sausage to grill and to freeze. All three were exactly as fabulous as home-made sausages should be; wonderful fried, unbelievable on the barbecue. I'll be doing it all again soon.

Natural casings, by the way, are easy to find at many supermarkets (just ask at the meat counter) and not the least bit icky, even though they do look a bit like condoms.

 

...and on the side, we spit-roasted a duck. The whole deal was a bit spur-of-the-moment; we didn't have time to marinade the bird beforehand, so my friend introduced me to another bit of equipment, which I was deeply skeptical about, but which turned out to be a treasure: a flavor injector. To be honest, this gadget still offends me somehow, but like the tyrant king in The Arabian Nights, it amazed me enough that I'm willing to keep it around for one more day. We liquidized a mixture of garlic, sherry, oregano and orange zest, and the result was fresh, bright, juicy and surprisingly complex. Next time I'll do tarragon, garlic and roasted coriander, my recent favourite seasoning for roasted chicken, and we'll see what happens.

Final bonus of the day: having processed 16lbs of sausage I was feeling virtuous and pleasantly tired enough to eat a good amount of everything we'd made without the slightest twinge of guilt.

Meat Shirts III

The ideal belated Mother's Day gift: "We Choke Our Own Chickens."  I'll take an XXL, please -- both on the shirt and on the order of fried chicken. 

"Stove Ownership"

From xkcd.  [Thanks, Eric!]

Mmmm... murder... mmmm....

I can't believe I posted this to the wrong blog: "MEAT IS MURDER.  Tasty, tasty murder" tshirts at Threadless.  Get 'em while they're about, say, medium rare.  :)

Some People Will Review ANYTHING

From our special correspondent, code-named "Head Cheese," comes a review of "Uncle Oinker's Bacon Mints" at A.V. Club.  Warning: they were not kind. 

What to do with all that cilantro

Round our way, herbs and spices are sold in two sizes: McCormick/Schwartz (which seems to be aimed at the one-shot cook, and priced on the assumption that you won't be back) or Indian Grocer (aimed at restaurant chefs, or heads of families with 30 or so hungry mouths to feed). The exception is fresh cilantro, which seems only to come in super-extended family size: while you can get a few sprigs of thyme, or mint, or even parsley, the assumption is that, if you want cilantro, you want it as a table ornament.

I've always been puzzled by this. I cook a lot of Indian and Thai food, I'm hardly a cilantro slouch, and yet I find myself throwing more than half of each bunch away. What's all the rest for?

Now I know. Seco de Res: a purportedly Peruvian beef stew in a sauce of, basically, pureed cilantro. It's simple, fabulous and unique, and doesn't taste remotely like soap, even to people who have a hard time with the raw leaf. The cilantro is not at all over-powering, and the beef comes through nicely. It's also simple enough that you can cook it while thinking about other stuff, which is a must for me these days.

This recipe is probably inauthentic: if anyone has a better (that means tastier) method, please offer corrections in comments.

Onion,
6 cloves of garlic or more,
1 level teaspoon ground cumin,
2 lbs stewing beef, cubed,
some potatoes and carrots, as it suits you,
one whole gigantic bunch of cilantro,
one bottle dark beer, brand unimportant.

Fry up the onion and garlic like you always do. Puree the cilantro in a blender, with just enough water to make it blend. When the onion's transparent, add the cilantro, then add the beef, so it's boiling in the green sludge, then the beer to cover. Simmer for at least one and preferably two hours. Add potatoes and carrots 45 minutes before the end of cooking time.
Of course, there's salt, and optional black pepper. Add at will. I know there must be a way to keep it bright, vivid green and not the olive drab that mine tends toward: I've tried lemon juice to no avail; if you think of something, let me know. Also, because it's green you can pretend it's healthy.

More High-quality, Meat-positive T-shirts

"I'm Made of Meat!" 

It's sexy, it's descended from dinosaurs, meat is mentioned, and web.comics are involved again!  What more could you possibly want?  :)

Spic'n'Span Don't Cut It II

A couple years ago on EAJ!, I posted about an essentially racist policy in Raleigh against Hispanic food vendors.  Now from the West Coast comes word of a similar situation in L.A.: The Bacon-Wrapped Hot Dog: So Good It's Illegal. 

Fuckers.

[Thanks, Kat!]

More Foods, More Feed

Since I have multiple food blogs, I've decided to crosslink them.  I've added a feed in the sidebar for Eat at Joe's!, which is my main food blog.  I'm also going to add feeds for the food blogs from other contributors. Right now that means a feed for cookingeatingdurham as well.  You'll see the subject lines for the last 5 posts for those blogs, which will be links to the posts themselves. 

I also want to make it clear that while the original focus of this blog is pork, I'm not gonna get bent out of shape if guest bloggers want to post about other food matters.  :)

Enjoy. 

Pork-A-Licious

Due to an excess of zeal on my part, I made a pot roast out of a 6-pound boston butt.  I now have 90% of that sitting in my refrigerator.  Any suggestions on what to do with several pounds of fatty roasted (I guess I should say braised) pork?  I need to do something different with it so I don't get sick of it.  Actually, what I should really do is stop cooking like I'm a family of 6 when it's only me, but never mind that right now.  :)