Tag: pork

Well, as Tele has previously posted, the other night we went to Kobe. I think its a fine little sushi bar, and I must say that while I was there I fell in love with Red Snapper. That's some awesome fish, I tell you what.

The problem, however, is as much as I love sushi, I can almost never eat enough of it. I can eat .. well.. quite a bit more than I logically should be able to eat, and I fear that it's my voracious appetite that will condemn me to a) not eat enough at a sushi bar, b) eat so much at a sushi bar that the itamae and I have to battle in hand to hand combat because they have nothing left in the restaurant to eat, or c) I've eaten so much sushi that the Pacific ocean is declared devoid of life. A good example, is what I had to eat today. I had the following to eat:

• 4 cups of coffee
• 1 cup of tea
• 5 bottles of water (16 oz)
• 4 sandwiches
• 1 cup cheese popcorn
• 2 truffles
• 1 pear
• 1 stuffed pork chop
• 1 baked potato
• 1 bowl of cinnamon apples
• 1 bowl of coffee icecream

At the sushi place, if I recall correctly, I had:

• 5 pc cucumber roll
• 5 pc philadelphia roll
• 4 hamachi (yellow tail)
• 2 red snapper
• 2 crab roll
• 3 cups green tea
• 1 16oz sake

and we went out for frozen yogurt afterwards, in which I had a 16oz plain with pomegranate seeds.

I think I have a tapeworm. He and I understand each other.

There was a recipe in the Kraft Food & Family magazine for pulled pork sandwiches. That gave us the idea for making our own, except by doing it without going to the store at all.

Barbecue sauce was the first part of the equation, and it's so easy to make that I make it every other weekend or so. I do cheat a little by using ketchup, but only because the tomato paste and vinegar and seasonings I'd be using would essentially be making ketchup in the first place.

Steps to make barbecue sauce:

1. Pour some ketchup into a saucepan. The ketchup will be about a third the mass of the entire finished result.
2. Pour half that volume of brown sugar in.
3. Add a few shots of worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, and if you have it, liquid smoke.
4. Pour in enough apple cider vinegar to make the whole thing liquid.

By cooking this over medium and tasting it frequently, you can adjust the taste with those ingredients until you get your base sauce at the perfect level between savory and acidic. (I usually do my red pepper at this point too, so I can also adjust for heat).

There are tons of things you can add to this to make your own special barbecue sauce. For our pulled pork, I used Newcastle Brown Ale, cayenne, and onion powder. Because that's how I roll.

The barbecue sauce in this instance went with some pork ribs into a slow cooker for 4 hours, got pulled, and got stirred back in. Tart-head made the hamburger buns, and excellent they were- but you'll have to wait for her update, because I have no idea how she made them.

So it all began something like this via instant message...
June 26th

• Tele: So Savory wants to do Asian night
• me: Asian night? What would we be eating on Asian night?
• Tele: I don't know. He just wanted Asian food.
• me: I don't know any Asian dishes though.
• Tele: Stickybuns!
• me: Stickybuns are Asian? (Thinking to myself-"A stickybun is something warm and gooey with cinnamon and sometimes covered in a thick frosting and nuts. You get that at a bakery. This is so not Asian. What is my husband speaking of?")
• Tele:Char Siu Bao
• me: Stickybuns & porkbuns are so not the same thing.
• Tele: sticky pork buns
  

June 27th

• Savory: Has Tele talked you into making Cha Siu Bao for Sunday yet?
• me: He sent me a recipe link yesterday. I didn't realize that was his way of asking me to make. Then he came home and said that you were both thinking of asking me to make the pork buns.
• Savory: lol

And so be began my journey. I have never eaten a pork bun. I have never seen a pork bun. I have never been to Dim Sum. So I had to do research. No time to go eat this Asain food so the research must all be done on the internet and via further chats with Tele and Savory. I found that Savory prefered his steamed with a little honey baked in. Tele prefered his baked. Well alright, we are off to a start. Baked, I can do baked (I worked at a pretzel shop for 3 years). Steamed, I do not know a thing about steaming. (Tele apparantly did. Whew, one less thing I have to worry about. He can teach me on cooking day.)

I ended up combining 3 seperate recipes to make my one dish. I found a food blog with a recipe that I felt would work well, but I needed a dough that could be seamed and baked. I was not sure that her dough recipe would work well both ways however she had other elements that I would definately use. Her site was extremely detailed and that was a bonus (remember I do not know what this item is that I am making). I do believe that she made her life a little more complicated than necessary by cutting out individual little wax paper squares to set the buns on, I chose to just set mine on one large wax paper sheet. I used her site for the details and the filling as well as how to bake the Pork Buns. She didn't have a recipe for how to roast the meat either as she bought hers pre-roasted. The next order of business was to find a versatile dough recipe that would work well both steamed and baked. I found just such a dough recipe. This recipe ended up being an extreamly simple recipe to make. The dough did work well both steamed and baked. The dough was sweet to the smell, but not to the taste. I then found the Chinese barbeque pork recipe on the same site as the dough.

This dish came out very well. Tele and Savory seemed to enjoy them very much. I absolutely loved them. Both the steamed ones and the baked ones were excellent. My 1 year old baby loved the roasted meat and was eating as I was shredding it! There were a lot of seperate steps to get the dish done, but over all it was actually all very simple to do. You must think ahead however as the meat needs to marinate over night first, then get roasted, cool, shredded and then heated on the stove with the rest of the filling ingredients. I felt like the dish was well worth the work put into it and am glad that these two silly guys talked me into making it.

Because this was all a bit confusing, here is a list of the links I used for the different parts.

• Roasted Meat I did not use any variations, just the Basic Steps 1-5 replacing 6 with shredding the meat rather than cutting into bite sized pieces. I did end up using Pork Tenderloin because it was all my Sam's Club had available 30 minutes before closing.
• Dough and How to Steam Buns
• Meat Filling and How to Bake Buns

You already know that Tele owned up to cheating by making Egg Drop Soup (Thank you, it was excellent!). But what you didn't know is that Savory made Stir Fry (Also, thank you. It was tasty). So now what I want to know is how did I end up cooking for 2 days while they ended up cooking for 15 minutes! I think I shall be much more suspicious next time they "assign" me a dish to cook.

I loves my spicy foods. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of my four year old son, so there have to be compromises made.

Or do there? Southeast Asian cooking styles have been around for a long time, balancing capsaicin-induced heat with sweetness.

First, I chopped up a couple of center-cut pork chops into long strips, and seasoned them with black pepper and red pepper. While those sauteed in butter, I put approximately two cups of cranberry juice and one cup of white wine in a saucepan to reduce. Finally, I pulled out the frozen california mix (broccoli, cauliflower, and carrot) and steamed it.

Once the pork got going, I poured some sirracha on it, browned it, and set it off to the side. Then, I cooked the steamed vegetables (with a little more pepper and sirracha) in the same skillet. Finally, I reintroduced the pork, and poured the cranberry reduction (now about 2/3 its original volume) back over the top.

It was like a Taiwanese Thanksgiving. I wholeheartedly endorse this type of cooking- just make sure not to go over the top with either sweet or spicy.

Hi all,

Usually, we here at EU are pretty religion agnostic when it comes to our articles. Mainly I think because we don't want to offend anyone or misrepresent anyones holidays. However, I figure I'd touch a bit on Slava, since it has so much to do with food.

Basically, Slava is a feast that's held for the patron saint of the family in Orthodox Christian homes.

When I say feast, I mean FEAST.

The wife and I went the other day to some of our Serbian friends' Slava. With the exception of eating until I thought I was going to die, it was pretty cool.

First, there's soup. Then, stuffed cabbage. Then, sliced Pork loin, Chicken, Lamb, country ham, and salami. And cheese. and then there's dessert. Baklava, cakes, cookies, something I can't remember.

Did I mention there was drinking? Oh probably not.

At the hosts request, we drank. alot. I drank 5 heinekens, and 2 glasses of cognac, along with 3 shots of plum brandy. I was smashed.

Plum brandy is good.

I digress. There should be plenty more holidays where you eat until gluttony no longer applies and it turns into some new word that hasn't been made up yet.

This one starts off as a bit of a disaster.

I had four great tastes that I figured would taste great together- spinach, salt pork, artichoke hearts, and mushrooms. Unfortunately, my quantites were a bit off, and the cumin I added really didn't help the dish much; in addition, the artichokes were marinated in a bit saltier liquid than I'd hoped for.

Were I to do it again, my next recipe would look more like this:

• 1 lb bacon, cooked on low until all the fat is gone
• 2 cups chopped mushrooms, cooked in the bacon grease
• 1 lb sauteed spinach, seasoned with garlic and onion powder
• 1 can of artichoke hearts

After cooking all these and putting them in the food processor, I believe this simpler pate would fix the saltiness of the original recipe, where the entire dish was dominated by the 2 cans of artichoke hearts I added. I'll let you know how this revised recipe turns out.

While I'm still at the point where every bechamel has a fifty percent chance of turning into gruel, I can admit with some well-deserved selling-out shame that I can do French Toast just as well as anyone else.

With indeterminate origins shrouded in the mists of time, French Toast (known colloquially in some American regions as 'Fried Eggy Bread', to the sounds of every dead Frenchman spinning violently in his grave) is known by several names throughout the world, including Bombay Toast, arme riddere ('poor knights'), and the term en francais, pain perdu.

Regardless of its origin, I got up this morning determined to eat something other than cereal or pork chops in hot sauce, so I started poking through the pantry looking for things that I might have, at one point in time, heard of as a potential ingredient in french toast. Unfortunately, her Tartiness immediately sensed the twinging of directionless fumbling resonating from deep within my Y chromosome, and hauled out her favorite french toast recipe.

As I reluctantly set down the Clabber Girl (we might have had an interesting breakfast indeed) and perused the recipe, my inherent fiddliness blossomed into full-on transmogrification mode. I mean, the recipe she gave me had six ingredients. Six! I believe in simplicity for simplicity's sake as much as the next man, but this morning I was feeling much more Da Vinci than Kazimir Malevich, and ornery besides. I glanced longingly at the Clabber Girl. Her disturbingly large Victorian eyes seemed to be pleading with me to ignore the pragmatic whims of my wife and instead follow her down a psychedelic yellow brick road of chaos, pestilence, and creative breads.

Unfortunately, looking at the bread and thinking 'yellow brick' inspired in me an unsettling urge to return to simplicity.

In a Pyrex baking dish, I added the two eggs, mixed in brown sugar (take that, recipe), and mixed in the rest of the ingredients in old-school eyeballing fashion. Since it was French toast that I was making, I used half a stick of butter and made sure to scorch each piece slightly.

The result was delicious- but heavy. Brown sugar and butter with a particularly absorbent bread do indeed yellow bricks make. Though they were pleasantly crunchy in a waffle-like fashion, they weren't too sweet, and didn't mind being dusted with confectioner's sugar (I think it was confectioners sugar, but where did little miss Clabber go?), nor did they mind a little pure maple in the tradition of the great French Toast Eating Lumberjacks that used their mighty axes to pave the way to our modern landscape of McDonalds and california rolls. I only managed to eat one piece, but the other slices quickly disappeared due to guerilla action from the other family members. Let freedom ring.

Maybe it's my genes; maybe it's because I'm not Jewish; or maybe it's just because I'm working my way up to cannibalism. Either way, nothing goes with pork chops like hot sauce.

Now, this doesn't mean your dish HAS to be spicy (unless it's meant for my consumption). Hot sauce comes in two basic varieties- the thick kind you either brush onto food or add in small dabs, and the watery Louisiana style hot sauce which is less about heat and more about flavor. Obviously, I stock both and use the latter for most of my cooking.

Tonight, I took some pork chops (hooray for sales!) and treated both sides with a small amount of hot sauce, cayenne, garlic pepper, and salt. (Other potential additions are: minced garlic, crushed red pepper, chili powder, small amounts of ginger, cumin, or paprika). After melting down a small amount of shortening, I cooked it for about seven minutes per side (until the center was white); had I not been so hungry, I'd have given it the sear treatment before the cooking on medium.

Seeing as how I used about a teaspoon of each ingredient, the taste wasn't as hot as previous variations; instead, the hot sauce imparted its own fresh-vegetables taste that took it out of standard weak-chops fare and placed it somewhere in the upper troposphere.

Not my best shot at this one, by far; but certainly quick, easy, and worth eating on a budget. Viva le hobo!

Burgundy makes you think of silly things; Bordeaux makes you talk about them, and Champagne makes you do them. - Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Born in the region of France from whence it gets its name, the Pinot Noir wine known as Burgundy is a rich cooking experience. Perfect as a sauce base for dishes of beef, chicken, or pork, it is a principal ingredient in preparations of escargot and coq au vin. Despite its international heritage, however, a cheap Burgundy can still make an excellent aromatic and flavor addition to a stock-based dish. Broth Reductions

One of the simplest ways to use Burgundy is as a reduction with broth. After flouring and browning the meat of choice, you can add a quart of broth and about 2/3 bottle of wine, along with your herbs for seasoning (bay leaves, in particular, seem to sing in these preparations). Be prepared for at least half an hour (preferably more) of occasional stirring over medium heat; your patience will be rewarded when the liquid reduces to about 1/2 to 1/3rd its original volume and becomes reddish-brown and thick (think beef bourguignon).

Almost any traditional stew ingredient can be incorporated into this dish. For a more gourmet dish, sauteed mushrooms and pearl onions can be added; chives, oregano, garlic, basil, sage, and/or pepper in different combinations are great. (Since I’m a spicy food lover, I also add in about half a teaspoon of cayenne and go rather heavy on the black pepper). Served over noodles (slightly al dente, buttered, peppered, and lightly seasoned with basil), you’ll turn burgundy into a regular part of your pantry.