When my DH was still working – this has been more than 10+ years ago now – Fay was one of the women who worked in the office (DH sold computer chips for Intel). She lived on the outskirts of our county on a small ranch. Her children were young teens then, and the family was active in 4-H. The H’s stand for Head, Heart, Hand, and Health. It’s a youth organization, centered mostly around farming or ranching families, along the lines of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, except the kids learn skills for raising livestock (like cows, sheep, chickens, etc.). They do service projects just like scouting does, but still the day to day work is all about farm projects.

Fay had a son who wanted to raise a pig. And usually, the deal is that the kids raise the animals, knowing from the beginning that they’ll be sold at the County Fair. Or at a livestock auction. So Fay offhandedly mentioned to DH that her boys were going to be selling a pig – their pig – at the Fair that summer. She also told us that we’d be paying a fairly premium price for the pig, but would we be interested in buying a half or a whole pig? She explained that the pig was mostly hand raised, and that part of the price is tax deductible somehow. Her son would be caring for it from day one on their ranch, the best feed, exercised well, pens cleaned out, etc. We talked it over, and Cherrie and I agreed to buy a half a pig. Fay would buy the other half. We signed up to buy it in the Fall when the pig was a little piglet. Months and months went by, and I’d forgotten all about this until one day Fay phoned to tell us that the pig was going to the Fair the next day. Oops. And that we would need to pay up in full right away. That’s when we learned how BIG the pig was. Something like 400+ pounds. Somehow I’d pictured a sweet little, demure thing, maybe 100 pounds or so. Ah well. Live and learn. Pigs are not hogs, but they’re gosh darned BIG.

The next day Fay phoned with the price and Cherrie and I mailed our checks immediately. Meanwhile, we needed to decide how we’d like to have the pig butchered – well, not how exactly, but what kind of cuts. We were faxed a page from the butchering firm, and we looked it over carefully to decide on chops, ribs, roasts, breakfast sausage, Italian seasoned sausage, plain ground pork, even hams smoked or raw, and bacon. We needed to specify how much of each. Of course, some things we didn’t know – like how many pounds of baby backs there are in a half a pig. It was quite perplexing figuring that out. We faxed back the page, and they told us to come pick it up a few days hence, depending on the smoke house schedule. The 4-H group used a company almost in Northwest Riverside (that’s about 50 miles away), out in the boonies, to do the butchering.

THEN, we got a note from Fay’s son, including the tax deduction information, and he thanked us for buying PETUNIA. Oh my. Petunia. When we heard her name was Petunia, we wanted to back out. To say no, you can’t have butchered Petunia! How could we possible buy a slaughtered pig with the name of Petunia? Sounds inhuman. Like you’re destroying a famous cartoon character. But we had to – after all, we’d agreed to do this and we’d already paid for it. It was too late, of course.

For several years we bought an animal from Fay’s son and one of us had to drive out to this butcher, with the car filled with ice chests. It was always summertime, so we needed to keep the stuff cold. They did freeze all the meat for us – that is a nice service – and it was all labeled well. Cherrie and I figured out which was which – hers and mine – and we began enjoying the pig. PETUNIA. <very big, sad faces here> I think Petunia was the very best tasting pig we had. For a couple more years we shared another pig. Cherrie bought a half by herself one year. His name was Tootsie Roll. Fay’s sons also raised lambs a couple of times too. Generally, with whatever kind of meat, we used the nice cuts first, seemed like. The chops, the roasts. Even the Italian sausage. Unless we used the ham prior, for a special occasion, it usually waited until Easter to be served. Some years it was too salty for me, so in subsequent years I asked for less smoking, less salt, which the butcher was kind enough to accommodate.

So all of this story is leading up to how this recipe came to be. Cherrie had somehow, one year, ordered a LOT of ground pork. I mean a lot. We learned over the years what we preferred – the chops, roasts, even the ribs, not so much the hams or the numerous packages of seasoned sausage. We could order the ground pork in whatever sized package we wanted – I always ordered in one-pound ones. But they often got rolled to the back of the shelves (the freezer) and began to accumulate. There are only so many recipes you can use with pounds and pounds of ground pork. Unseasoned, fairly lean, but still, it’s ground pork. The only constant was meatloaf. But usually that’s a mixture of beef, veal and pork, or some semblance of such. Veal is not very accessible these days and way too pricey anyway, so basically you’re down to ground beef and ground pork (or you could add ground turkey or chicken too). So, really, how much pork can you use up in ONE meatloaf. Two pounds maybe. When you have perhaps 25 pounds of ground pork in the freezer, that’s a heck of a lot of meatloaf.

So, Cherrie raved about this recipe for Chinese Meatloaf, and she was delighted because the single recipe used a full pound of ground pork. She’d found the recipe in the Los Angeles Times (this has been years and years ago, now, and it’s not available online). She’s changed it just a bit, but mostly it’s the original recipe: ground beef, pork, a lot of Napa cabbage, cilantro, fresh ginger, Asian seasonings, and some Hoisin sauce on top. I’d gone online to see if I could find the recipe, and did, but mostly found recipes for a meatloaf using lots of cream soup cans and bean sprouts. Yuck. This version is ever so much more authentic and tasty.

Cook’s Notes: Cherrie has added another cup of Napa cabbage to her version (the one below), and she likes to put a bit of Hoisin on the top of the meatloaf when it first goes in the oven. Not much, but about 2 tablespoons. You’ll want to use a large baking dish, like an oval or round Pyrex. Mold the meatloaf into the dish so it has space around the sides to exude the juice. The meatloaf generates a lot of liquid, so make sure it’s high enough sided that it doesn’t spill over. Halfway through the baking, you’ll want to pour off the fat. I suspect a lot of the liquid is juice from all the cabbage, but still, you’d like it removed since the fat is swimming in that water anyway. Then when the meatloaf is done, smear the top with a bunch more Hoisin sauce, because that’s the part you crave (like the ketchup part on a traditional American meatloaf). The meatloaf makes a somewhat soft texture (from all the cabbage), so let it cool for a bit before slicing and serving. She serves it with basmati or jasmine rice in which she’s shaved some carrots, and a green salad to which she adds some kind of citrus, like Mandarin oranges from the can, or some wedges of fresh orange or tangerine. Thanks Cherrie, for sharing your great recipe.
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My friends sometimes ask me, “how do you possibly come up with all the stories?” Or, “how can you write about every recipe?” Well, it seems that every recipe has its own story to tell. That’s what makes cooking unique to each of us. It’s how recipes are born. It’s how a recipe from a website, or a cookbook, your friend Linda, or your Grandmother, with a slight change here and there, becomes your own. A creation from your intuition (well, sometimes it’s just that you didn’t have any carrots, so you used butternut squash instead, and it totally changed the dish). That’s the start of a story.”You must spend hours and hours at your computer?” they quiz. Well, yes and no. I do spend many hours a day at my computer, but I’m not always writing my blog. The blog though – it doesn’t take that much time really, since I like to write.

Writing comes easily to me. I wrote for 20+ years in my career. Writing was a big part of the job – I wrote mostly newspaper and magazine ads for companies wanting to hire people. Those small, medium to huge ads you see in the help wanted section week after week. There are ad agencies out there that do just that. Not product marketing type advertising, but people hunters. Not head hunters, but ads to encourage and entice people to apply for jobs. A client, the advertiser, would give us, the ad agency, some sketchy phrases about the job requirements, and about what this person would do. It was our job to fashion those phrases into cohesive sentences and paragraphs. Make the words logical. And their sequence make sense. Sometimes we’d use some fancy graphics to make the ad stand out. Other times it was a simple 2-inch ad with very small type. There were times when the ads were very hard to compose, I’ll admit. Perhaps the client didn’t give us much to work with. But usually there was enough.

So, you see, writing doesn’t seem like drudgery to me. I always thought, years ago, that I’d find my inner voice – maybe a voice that would write a novel. But the reality is that my mind doesn’t dream fiction stories. My head writes food stories. When I began putting all of my recipes into the MasterCook software, in one of the text cells I find that it invites me to explain the recipe. No, it doesn’t ask that, but it seemed that with every recipe I entered, I had no difficulty at all writing up something about it. About when I’d served it. How I’d altered the recipe to suit a particular occasion. Or used the leftovers. Many of my recipes have long, evolved stories about their origin. Or who they came from. Like the Cold Green Pea Soup from our friend Pamela in England. Or the Bishop’s Bread I just posted early last month from my mother’s friend Mary. Or my mother’s Apple Crisp.

Spending hours at the computer isn’t hard work for me. (Hmmm. Just ask my DH how many hours a day I spend at the keyboard. Oh. No. Scratch that.) When I’m cooking, there are stages in most recipes when it needs to cook. So I flit over to my laptop that resides here in the kitchen and start a new story. Or finish one that’s in progress. Or input a new recipe. Or insert a photo. Or even take a photo. I usually have 3-4 stories in progress at any one time. It seems that there is a kind of a schedule we bloggers keep. Gotta write a story. Gotta write a story every day. Almost anyway. I do my best. Perhaps there will come a day when I will look at this screen and tilt my head a bit and say, I have nothing to write about. But so far, that hasn’t happened. I still have lots and lots of my own tried and true recipes to post here. It’s just that I haven’t made them recently, and I don’t like posting a recipe and a story without a photo. You know that adage, a picture speaks a thousand words. So true with cooking.

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So, now that I’ve waxed on for 500 words, it’s time to talk about this recipe. This one started when I read a new cookbook I received for Christmas. I think I’ve mentioned that I constantly update my Amazon wish list with everything from cookbooks to kitchen appliances, etc. So our son and his wife gave me a book I’d requested, Cooking with Cafe Pasqual’s, by Katherine Kagel, the owner and mind behind the fairly famous restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is Kagel’s second book, and it’s a nice addition to my library. I read it from cover to cover and put little flags on the pages I wanted to return to. One recipe that intrigued me was her version of Pork & Green Chile Stew.

Saturday, DH offered to go grocery shopping for me (he loves it, aren’t I lucky?), so my mind immediately flipped to the stew. I put together a list. Now, in order to make sense of this whole story, you have to know that her recipe calls for 2 pounds of pork butt, corn, potatoes and nothing less than 16 fresh New Mexican or Anaheim chiles. I wanted to double the recipe, so that’s 32 chiles. I thought – whew, that’s a whole lotta chiles. But oh well. So, off my DH went. At his second stop, 20 minutes later he phoned. They didn’t have pork butt. What would I like to do? Also, they had not one single Anaheim (California) chile pepper. He didn’t have time to go to yet another store, so I said forget it, I’ll make something else tomorrow.

Next chapter: that same afternoon I was doing some catching up on blog reading (I read a LOT of food blogs, which you can see if you look at the list down my right column). And when I’ve been away for 11 days, the catching up took me a long time. So, I was reading over at CooknKate, one of my favorites, and lo and behold, she was cookin’ a Green Chile. Wow. Really? I studied the recipe. It was completely different than the one from Katherine Kagel. She had found the recipe over at Homesick Texan, another blog I read. I printed it out and decided to try THIS recipe instead of the other one. This one calls for 4 pounds of pork butt, poblano peppers (aka pasilla), jalapenos, tomatillos and beer! So today my darling hubby went out on another shopping expedition for me. He’s so wonderful. This time he found pork shoulder, poblanos, jalapenos, tomatillos, cilantro and a fresh bag of masa harina. I was off and running (in the kitchen, that is).

The prep on this recipe did take more time than I’d thought. I mean – this is just a STEW for heaven’s sake. The chiles had to be roasted, the tomatillos shucked, onion diced, garlic chopped, jalapenos minced, meat cut up in chunks. But the browning of all the meat was the most time consuming, and you wouldn’t believe the state of my wood floors when I was done. My rubber-soled shoes slid along. Time out to wipe paper towels all over the floor. Reminder to have that carpet cleaned.

And when Kate mentioned about the heat from this stew making her eyebrows sweat, she was right. She cut down on the chiles from Homesick Texan’s version, I decided to do the same. I used all five poblanos, but I used just two very large jalapenos. I shudder to think what this would taste like with more, or with the serranos. Five alarm for sure. More like ten alarm. I like spicy and moderately hot food, but this was too hot still. I’ve altered my version accordingly, and have upped the masa to thicken the gravy a bit more. We liked putting the mixture IN a flour tortilla, and the stew needs to be thicker for that. And I had a larger bottle of beer, so used all of it (probably 2 cups worth).

So you see, recipes evolve and morph. What’s right for Kate, or Homesick Texan, becomes right for you when you make your own additions (or subtractions as the case may be). In either case, this pork green chile stew is a winner in my book. I’m looking forward to the leftovers. We each had just one cup in our bowls (ample) with a hot flour tortilla. Delish.
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This is about chiles. You want a bit of chile heat in your meatballs? This is your recipe, then. Usually I make these during cool weather, not in the summer, as the spicy heat seems to taste better when the rain is falling or the wind is blowing. But, there’s no reason why this couldn’t be eaten any time of year. We’d been on a hiatus from eating beef when I made this some years ago. The recipe was in Bon Appetit, and just hit a taste button with me and I promptly went out to buy the ingredients. I made a moderate batch of them and froze the remaining in dinner-sized portions. I freeze the rice in a separate quart-sized Ziploc bag but put it with the meatballs in the gallon sized bags. Then my meal is all together.

This could be made with ground turkey or chicken, or a mixture. It’s the little bit of capers in the middle that make the meatballs unusual. And the chipotle chiles. Then the fresh tomato sauce is also different. Fresh Tomato Sauce merely means you use fresh tomatoes and you don’t cook it very long. So the sauce retains some semblance of a “fresh” taste. It’s easy and delicious. Summertime is a good season to use up your abundance of home grown tomatoes.As I mentioned, the recipe called for rice (I use brown basmati), but it could also go over mashed potatoes just as easily. Or pasta for that matter. But you might want some kind of carb to soak up the good sauce. Generally I make more sauce than the recipe says, but it’s truly not necessary unless you like sauce like we do.

Chipotle chiles are an ancient condiment, I’m sure, with all the Mexican or South American cuisines that include hot chiles. They’re merely jalapeno chiles that have been smoked and canned or bottled in an adobo tomato sauce. They’re spicy. Very spicy. I’d open a can and use a mere teaspoon or two, put it in the refrigerator and months later would discover this moldy messy gunk in there. So I was overjoyed when at one of the cooking classes I attended, the instructor suggested piling the chipotles into a plastic bag and freezing the leftovers. Then when you need some, you just use a spoon and scrape out whatever you need. Very easy, and certainly a better use for the contents of the can. I don’t cook Mexican food very often – we have such wonderful restaurants here in our part of the world that I don’t need to make it. But I use lots and lots of Mexican food products in my cooking. And this meatball dish certainly isn’t Mexican particularly.

Are any of you enjoying Rick Bayless’ cooking program on public television? I’ve been Tivo it for awhile, and have enjoyed it immensely. Rick is a famous American chef from Oklahoma, although he lives in Chicago now, where he has two very popular Mexican restaurants. He’s a very unassuming kind of guy – I don’t detect a bit of ego in his style. He just adores Mexican cuisine, particularly from the Yucatan. He uses copious amounts of chipotle and other chiles in nearly everything he makes. Some I’d never heard of. Rick has published six cookbooks. (Just an aside here for those of you who follow my cookbook obsession, I own not one single Rick Bayless cookbook . . . aren’t you proud of me?) This series, with the recipes from the PBS series is from his book called Mexican Everyday, although the series is called Mexico One Plate at a Time.My hands are particularly sensitive to chiles. No matter how careful I am with cutting up a chile, I always manage to feel some heat from it – usually underneath my fingernails. Not everybody has this problem, so this is just a friendly warning. I use plastic gloves. The staff in my dentist’s office has been kind enough (thanks Joan and others) to give me a box of their gloves every couple of years. They’re a must for me. Particularly with the chipotles. Getting a little bit of that spicy chipotle sauce under my fingernails can be so painful for hours and hours.So, if you’re looking for something a bit different, give this a try. Use gloves.
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We may be one of the few cultures to make baked meatloaf. Lots of other cuisines include a ground meat stuffed something (pastry, cabbage, etc.) or small orbs of some kind of chopped meat, but we Americans appear to have invented meatloaf (really, we did), meaning we started with finely chopped raw meat. Mostly I learned, earlier cooks used cooked meat to make any kind of chopped meat dish. I wanted to know more about the history of the dish, and found this:

• The raw, ground meat commonly used to make today’s American meat loaf has a humble heritage. In the 19th century, we know the Industrial Revolution made it possible for ground meat to be manufactured and sold to the public at a very low cost. At first, many Americans were slow to purchase raw ground meat products and generally regarded them with suspicion. Cooks continued to mince their meat (often already cooked, as was the practice for centuries) by hand. Companies selling meat grinders to home consumers at the turn of the century endeavored to change this practice by providing recipe

Regarded as the ultimate comfort food, there are certainly lots of types of meatloaf. Some with fillers and additions (bread crumbs, cracker crumbs, carrots, onions, eggs, red bell pepper) and many variations of toppings (savory tomato, catsup type, even teriyaki style). But the most common is with a tomato-based sauce on top. I’m no different than the crowd, so this may not be one of the recipes you’re going to try since you may already have a favorite sauce. But for me it’s simply the sweet and sour sauce that is a must here. The recipe came from one of my old 1960’s era military officer’s wives cookbooks, and since I first made it, this has been the standard by which any and all meatloaves are measured. In our family, this is THE recipe, and mashed potatoes on the side are an absolute must. No rice. No pasta. It must be mashed potatoes.

And generally I increase the sauce because everybody loves to put more sauce on the potatoes. So early on I began doubling it. No problem. It’s easy enough to make. I’ve made this with partly ground turkey, and it’s also very good. I think my daughter Sara makes it with all turkey and her family loves it that way. When I make it now I use 50/50 beef and ground turkey. That gives the meatloaf a little firmer texture, which is what we (and most people, I surmise) miss about eating ground turkey. It just doesn’t have the “tooth” to it that beef does. I’ve made this using Splenda (it’s fine) and with Brown Sugar Twin (also fine). So we can still have this but with less carbs.

Back when our children were teenagers we asked each of the kids to choose a weeknight and be responsible for preparing dinner for the family. (We’re a blended family, so between DH and I we have 3 children, two daughters and a son, all in their late 30’s now and for most of their teenage years we all lived together.) We had to plan ahead so the ingredients were on hand, and mostly the kids were pretty good about it. They got to fix one of their favorite meals, and we were all appreciative (at least I think we were). I will tell you that this item was a real “regular” on the menu. Everyone in our family loves this meatloaf and they all learned how to make it because they had to do it.
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I’d never even heard about paella until about 1967. Wow, that’s 40 years ago. At the time I was living in Denver, Colorado, and friends had returned from serving 3 years U.S. Navy duty in Rota, Spain. We got acquainted with them and began having dinner at one another’s homes on a regular basis. Joan was a good cook, and was happy to share her knowledge about Spanish food she’d learned about and prepared. They had lived “on the economy,” meaning they’d lived off the base, in a regular house, not on the U.S. Navy base, so had made friends with a few locals. One particular neighbor shared food with them and showed her how to make some of the Spanish dishes.

So one night Joan and Roger prepared their version of Spanish paella. They also served us her version of Sangria, which I’ll share another day. Joan explained that after trying many different kinds of paella in Spain, the only one they really liked was this one which combines chicken, Italian-style sausage and shellfish all together in the one dish. She explained that the flavoring of the sausage added a big boost to the flavor. She also said she varied the kind and amount of fish/shellfish included in it, but it always had to have the chicken drumsticks and sausage added as well.

Happily I began making it and have done so about 15 times over the years. It needs to be made for a crowd as it will feed about 12 people. And I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that this is an expensive dish to make – the more shellfish, the more those dollars add up. Eventually I acquired a paella pan, an inexpensive model from Williams-Sonoma (not available per their website). It was less than $15. And I’d be remiss again if I didn’t tell you that this dish does take a moderate amount of prep time. There’s a bunch of mincing, chopping and sauteing in several pans, to be done. So leave ample time to complete all those tasks.

Here’s a photo of the drumsticks with the onions, yellow bell pepper and garlic. I will admit that over these 40 years I’ve had some difficulty with the paella – sometimes the rice didn’t get cooked. Sometimes the chicken didn’t quite get done, and sometimes the shellfish was undercooked. Maybe if this was made out in the open, in the huge paella pans used by the original sheepherders, you’d know it’s done because it was stirred more often. Here in the U.S. anyway, the presentation is half the pleasure of serving it – with all of the shrimp tails standing up, the drumsticks arranged artfully in a spoke pattern and the rice buried underneath. I’ve used scallops and langostinos, squid, fresh clams and fresh mussels too. Just don’t use all of those as there’s no way you can get them all on top of the rice.

Here’s my advice when making paella:

• cook the rice until it’s just a hair’s breadth from being done (I do this in a separate pan now);
• brown and cook the drumsticks until they, too, are just barely done;
• if using frozen shellfish, defrost it fully first;
• if covering with foil, leave it tented with a space for steam, as that helps to cook all e fish nestled into the top layer; in other words, form it into a kind of dome;
• and lastly, cook the Italian sausage until it’s lost all of it’s pink color, and mince it up into small bite-sized pieces.

Here’s a photo of the rice – you must brown the rice before finally finishing the preparation of the paella. It has a really rich color and the steamy flavor from it is SO good. Until I visited Hungary some years ago I didn’t know there were so many types of paprika, so I now have the traditional, half sharp and smoked. I used some of the half sharp and the smoked paprika in the paella this time and liked it. I order most of my spices now from Penzey’s, and you do know, don’t you, that paprika must be kept refrigerated. Little critters love to get into that herb and it loses its flavor left at room temperature. The addition of saffron is essential – it’s so very Spanish, and leaves a nice underlying character to the rice.

Finally, you begin pulling it all together. You add the canned clams and sausage to the rice, then all that is poured into the bottom of the paella pan, then the drumsticks are placed in a spoke. Shellfish is strategically placed in and around the drumsticks, tails pointing up. If you add mussels or langostinos, those need to be nestled into the mixture as well. By this time the pan is FULL, let me tell you. Lastly, you throw in a bit of fresh tomato, cover with foil and put into the oven. If the fish is cold, just remember that it takes a bit of time for the entire mixture to heat up enough to cook the fish, so make sure it’s done before serving. It always seems to take longer than I think. Take a peek and be certain the shrimp is cooked through. Whisk off the foil and garnish with the reserved minced red bell pepper and peas and serve.
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It seems that I’m on a Hugh Carpenter roll. Maybe I’d better buy his cookbook, Hot Barbecue, since I’ve prepared several recipes from that cookbook and like them all. Yesterday was a beautiful Southern California day, perfect for a backyard grilled dinner. Since Dave is a diabetic, I tend to not prepare sweet barbecue sauces except on rare occasions. And that’s probably why I was attracted to this recipe because it has a limited amount of sugar in it. (And, in fact, I forgot to add the honey to the recipe at all, but next time I will.) I remember when I attended the grill class and these ribs were prepared for everyone – I enjoyed them then, and we enjoyed them yesterday. The ribs came from Niman Ranch, and they’ve been in my freezer for several months from an order I placed with them back then. If you’ve never had any Niman Ranch meats, you’re in for a treat. Only available by mail order or phone, they raise very healthy animals, no antibiotics, no hormones. Although, their bacon (which is excellent and contains no nitrates or nitrites) is available at some Trader Joe’s, and occasionally you can find their pork chops there also. If you get on the Niman Ranch email list, they’ll tell you when meats are on special. Find a friend who will order as well and the shipping will be less that way. These ribs were exceedingly lean. Maybe not healthy-lean, but certainly better than any ribs I buy locally.

First you make a sauce/marinade: peanut butter, soy sauce, Hoisin, ginger, garlic, sherry and some Vietnamese chili sauce, among other things. You marinate the ribs in the sauce for an hour or two. Or three, or up to 8 hours. The sauce isn’t hard to make – whizzed up in the blender – then you pile the ribs into plastic bags with the sauce and just let them stew in the refrigerator. Really very easy.

Carpenter has developed his own method for using the grill. He likes high heat at first, then you lower the temperature to let meat settle in for some long, slow cooking. This method is very similar to the Ribeye Steaks with Amazing Glaze that we made several weeks ago. Click HERE to refer to that recipe.

We sat outside overlooking our beautiful view of the California coast, under our new pergola, in the shade, sipping on a magnificent bottle of 2002 Iron Horse Alexander Valley T Bar Vineyard Merlot. We watched blue jays swoop down to our small table and grab little pieces of corn chips, while the ribs were slowly baking. The birds seem almost tame, as they would come within about 6 inches of my hand to pick up crispy pieces I’d toss their way. We’ve seen these birds before. They may even have a nest somewhere on our slope as they’d dive just over and down behind the foreground palm tree in the photo. Very entertaining. And very peaceful and relaxing. Off in the distance in the photo is the Pacific Ocean, looking toward Long Beach and Palos Verdes. It’s about 10 miles to the ocean, although it’s kind of hazy out in the distance. What a lovely end to a nice weekend.
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Deciding what to serve guests? For me, making decisions about a company meal usually starts out with the decision about the entrée. So, is it beef, fish, chicken, pork or lamb? I’ll flip through my big personal cookbook (three large 3-ring binders containing all 500+ of my recipes, divided up by categories), and start making a list of the options. I may pull out those recipes (each is in a plastic sleeve) before I decide. Here’s what I do:

• make a list of a couple of the meat dishes that sound good to me. Then I’ll think about what should go with it;

• vegetables (depends on the season, maybe two vegies and no carb), add to the list;

• another side/carb (does this dinner need a carb, would my guests prefer not to have a carb, is it too many calories already? think about the color on the plate since we like to have some variety); add to the list;

• a salad (green type? or another? special additions like pecans or walnuts, a new dressing? an old favorite?), add to the list;

• dessert (look over the menu so far, think about my timetable, what I can manage with all the other dishes, does it need to be lower calorie? a splurge? chocolate or no?); add to the list;

• and lastly appetizers (do I need to make something homemade? can I make do with chips and salsa? if we’re not having carbs with the dinner, maybe hummus would be fine with crackers and vegies?).

So, for this particular dinner I wanted a pork roast using a recipe I’ve had for some years, after taking a class with Tarla Fallgatter, a local cooking instructor. But, I wanted a simple, but JUICY pork roast. The last few times I’ve baked a pork roast I’ve been disappointed and had concluded it was the pork, not the cook (moi, how could it be moi?). I was convinced it’s this new, leaner pork, the other white meat, that was just too lean, with not enough fat in the grain to provide any juiciness. So I consulted my local independent butcher. He told me that the pork I bought at Costco was probably the same pork I bought from him, or at least they were from the same or similar pork producers in Iowa as Costco uses (okay, no help there.) But, he did tell me that if I wanted a bit more marbling of fat, I should buy a roast from the rib end (more toward the country ribs part). He just happened to have one (oh good). BUT, he told me, the most important thing I should remember was to not overcook the meat (uh oh, maybe I am the culprit after all?). I asked him (always good to get a second opinion) at what temperature I should remove the pork. He didn’t know (hmm, not good, a butcher doesn’t know this?). Okay, back to my recipe, which said 145°.

So, once I’d decided on having pork, chosen the recipe (below) I rounded out the meal with the zucchini gratin (my posting on Saturday), a nice green salad, chips and salsa, and I made some strawberry mascarpone ice cream from over at Culinary Concoctions by Peabody. It was a very nice meal with a couple of bottles of red wine. We were all very mellow by 10:00 pm.

As for the pork, I was careful to use my meat thermometer. But, I found out
that the part of the sensor that reveals the oven temperature isn’t working, so think I’ll have to buy a new one – I dropped it a month or so ago and bent the connector that goes into the little digital box – most likely that’s the problem. I’m glad it wasn’t the interior meat temp that wasn’t working! I removed the roast at exactly 145°, let it sit for about 10 minutes while I prepped the rest of the meal. The pork was perfectly cooked. And JUICY! I have no qualms about spending the money to buy a new meat thermometer. It convinced me once again what an invaluable instrument it is in the kitchen!

The apricot compote is a bit different than some. The addition of a whole vanilla bean – well not the bean itself, but the contents – makes it unusual. Whole vanilla beans have such a fragrance – a perfume, if you will – that could easily overpower. You carefully slit the bean open, to butterfly it (it’s a little like microsurgery – attacking this tiny, narrow little thing – do use a small knife with a very thin and sharp point) and scrape the miniature grains out of the bean. You’ll get about 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon total. And you can see the grains in the finished sauce – you may want to tell your guests so they don’t think it’s sand!

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As mentioned in the previous recipe, my friend Cherrie and I attended a cooking class recently, which was a Cinco de Mayo celebration of recipes by Phillis Carey. This is different than any carnitas I’ve ever had, and it’s really tasty. It doesn’t take long to simmer the meat, and the steps to make this are relatively simple. With a green salad, this could be dinner if you put out condiments like the salsa and guacamole. Shredded lettuce would probably be a nice addition too. In this version, instead of serving shredded (cold) cheese as a condiment, Monterey jack cheese is melted and baked with the meat and you merely scoop some of this combination into a hot flour tortilla and serve.
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