coconut-braised pork shoulder

It’s done. We’re off to San Antonio. I can’t really believe it. I’m…I’m going to be a Texan. An upstate New Yorker, a Massachusettsan, a Coloradan, a Texan. Right now I’m excited about Joe having a really awesome job that will let me work more on my own crap, perpetual summer, a never ending growing season, throwing a quarter of our shit away when we pack, having a house that I can clean every surface of before moving our stuff in. So that leaves the stuff I’m not so excited about: leaving the mountains right when I am just dying to go backpacking, driving with two yowling, frothing-at-the-mouth cats, packing, loading, driving, driving, unpacking, perpetual summer, leaving a really cool burgeoning food and beer scene, leaving my new gym, leaving my wonderful friends. It’s going to be really sad. What kind of people am I going to meet there? What do they like to do?
Before I start sobbing, let’s move our focus to pork. Malaysian pork. Which, I realize is offensive to like 2/3 of that country. They should try it. Come onnnn what’s the big fuss about? Uh, okay anyway, this dish reminds me of a southeast Asian restaurant I used to love in Boston – and makes me realize how little I’ve explored that general area of cuisine here in Denver. Fuck, there’s no time. We’re taking a trip to San Antonio next weekend to try to figure out where the heck to live, then Joe’s leaving the next weekend – a place to live or not. I suppose we should work our way up Federal, eating at some ethnic restaurant every night from here on out. Tall order. I’m at least staying until mid June, so that’s relieving to me. I’ll have lots of nights to go out with friends and lots of weekends to explore parts of Colorado I never got around to. Anyone want to go to the Western slope with me and go to the wineries and go to cherry orchards to try to scavenge up the very first, probably not-yet-ripe sweet cherries?? Anyone want to backpack with me somewhere I don’t even care where?
Is this blog going to turn into a Tex-Mex blog? A neverending exploration of Tex-Mex Slop Combination A, Combination B, Combination C, and so on to infinity? Or will I be able to keep my sanity and continue to make such wonderful dishes as this meltingly soft pork with lemongrass, ginger, galangal, and garlicky coconut milk sauce? Only time will tell, I suppose. In the meantime, you really ought to make this recipe. And it’s worth taking a trip to Whole Foods or an ethnic market to get lemongrass and galangal. It’s not such a pain, I promise! There are two shortcuts I built right in here – ground turmeric if you can’t find turmeric root and jarred galangal if you can’t find galangal root. You could also use jarred lemongrass. As for the bok choy, you can just chop that up and sauté it in coconut oil. Joe took the main picture for me when I was at work. It wasn’t supposed to include the bok choy. That’s what I get.

coconut-braised pork (with bok choy)

2 large shallots, chopped
1 lemongrass stalk, outer leaves peeled, cut into 1/4 inch pieces
6 garlic cloves
6 star anise
2 inches ginger, coarsely chopped
4 small hot chiles, stems and seeds removed
2 teaspoons minced galangal
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
1 tablespoon coconut oil
4 pounds pork shoulder, cut into 1-inch cubes, any bone saved
2 cans coconut milk
1 cup water
5 kaffir lime leaves (or grate some lime zest and squeeze half a lime in the pot)
2 teaspoons sea salt
scallions for garnish

1 bunch of bok choy

1. In a mortar or a food processor, grind the shallots, lemongrass, garlic, star anise, ginger, chiles, and galangal. Mix in the turmeric.

2. Heat coconut oil in a dutch oven or stock pot over medium high heat. Sauté the ground spice mix for several minutes until nice and fragrant. Add the pork chunks and stir around. Let brown for a couple minutes, then stir again and do the same. No need to be perfect about the browning.

3. Add the coconut milk, water, kaffir lime leaves, salt, and the pork bone if you had one in your shoulder cut to the pot. Stir and bring to a boil. Cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 3 – 4+ hours. Season with more salt if you’d like (I did).

Serve with sautéed bok choy and top with chopped scallions. Remove the kaffir lime leaves if they’re not obliterated in the pot.

root vegetable chicken soup

Someone’s got to eat the end of the root vegetables. Or heck, maybe you’ve just gotten some out of the ground that have been growing over the winter. You’re my hero. Here’s your answer, nonetheless, a silky, salty, garlicky chicken soup full of big hunks of soft, starchy root vegetables.
Now that it’s getting warmer out I’m starting to regret my decision to get bangs. The other day was like 62 and they felt like a a sheet of plastic on my face. Sweaty plastic. I’m not sure headbands will work so well for the mid day workouts I like to do during my work days, lest I look like I have a drawbridge on my forehead. And please, I’m not washing my hair in the middle of the day. Who do you think I am?

celery root salad

I’m completely smitten with old cookbooks and reenactment cookbooks…well, historical cookbooks, because they’re often not reenactments so much as modern interpretations on historical recipes. I only wish they were reenactment ones; maybe just explained a little more thoroughly than old ones. I have this one interpreted historical cookbook from the City Tavern, which almost makes me cry because I want all of the recipes so badly to be exactly what olde timey Philadelphians would have eaten at that restaurant so that I can taste something exactly the same. But there are some recipes in the book that aren’t too modernized. It’s refreshing at least to see lard used as the fat of choice in some recipes. This celery root salad is one simple little dish that I’ve been eyeing for a while from that book. There are a fair amount of vegetable recipes in it that are prepared nice and heavily. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good, crisp summer salad, but I’m not going to say I don’t really love fat-laden vegetables. I should have been born in Minnesota, I guess.
Celeriac is one of my absolute favorite roots. To eat. Some how or other, though, I’ve avoided it raw. Mashed, boiled, roasted, but not raw. Come to think of it, I’ve also never had raw beets I don’t think. I asked for a mandoline for Christmas and this was the first time I used it to julienne something. Pretty sweet. I’m sorry if you don’t have one and you have to julienne the root by hand. No, I’m not, because I’ve had to julienne everything by hand before this. You can do it. You’ll be a better person for it. You could also use a box grater, though the result won’t be as elegant, but whatever. I’m not really elegant, either.

cilantro-lime fish cakes

I feel like salt cod is haunting me. I think it started with my blogger friend Mark’s post on salt cod that I mentioned back when I last posted about cod. Then in New York, I ate salt cod croquettes at Casa Mono. Even the Whole Foods we went to had salt cod in a bulk bin. Well, I’m sorry to announce that no, this recipe doesn’t utilize salt cod. It’s like my own recipe is jeering at and taunting me. I’ll just go hang out at allrecipes.com. Start posting there instead. Watch, they probably even wax on about bacalao there, too. User grandma_knitter64 is all about making her own salt cod and making the best salt cod croquettes, ’cause that’s just so here and now, ya know. Well screw you guys, I’m making plain old fish cakes with fresh cod and some mashed taters (and some lime zest and cilantro because, heck, I’m not in New England anymore).
There are about as many types of fish cake recipes out there as there are stupid blogs like mine with posts on them. I’m not sure I’m comfortable saying mine’s definitive in any way – either for me or in the world of fish cakes, but it’s pretty great. It’s crispy on the outside and super soft and fluffy on the inside with flecks of just crunchy enough red onion. Lime zest and cilantro make them kind of addicting and squeezing fresh lime juice on top before you eat them is just what I needed to get through yes, another snow storm. Accompanied by kale and cabbage slaw, it’s all a pretty great antidote.

pork neck bones with sauerkraut

My trip to New York City nearly killed me with a flake of puff pastry. I hadn’t even had puff pastry in so stinking long and then I like breathed in a litte flake and it flapped over my trachea. Like a vacuum seal. It was the worst. I’d like to say my life flashed before my eyes, but instead I just kept thinking how much I just wanted to be able to freaking breathe. My memory is terrible anyway. Well, I probably have that little pastry flake still in my lungs, because I breathed again. Wait, in a month or something I’ll get some sort of lung rot from the putrified puff pastry residing in there. At least I got to have a wonderful time and was able to eat some pretty great food. And Samantha found a glorious wedding dress.
Slow-cooked collagen is glorious in its melting rubber texture. That’s the best description I could come up with. I wish toothsome was the right word. If I could redefine toothsome, it’d be to mean the texture of slow-cooked collagen. It’s kinda like melty halloumi. But without the squeakiness. Kind of. I don’t know. It’s good though. And a spine, just like oxtail, has amble amounts of it.

birthday food

I almost titled this post “Birthday Eats”. I hate “eats”. Not as much as “noms” – nothing can be worse than that – but who am I kidding. A single person should speak of “eats”. Only companies. I still love you Serious Eats.

You know what? I have no recipe because I didn’t want to come up with a recipe to make. I ended up cooking everything for my birthday party and that was enough, thank you. So instead you get to read about things I ate for my birthday (week). You probably should just become friends with me on Yelp, which seems a much more suitable place to hear what I have to say about restaurants, but oh well.

While I really love fancy tacos, I feel like fancy taco places are kind of like the equivalent of how people caught on to how wonderful lobster meat was and instead of being relegated to the lower classes, it all of sudden became $40/lb. Not that I’m all anti-bourgeoisie, I guess it just bothers me that there a lot of people that would never have gotten tacos from that bright yellow-painted, fluorescent-lighted taco place in the sketchy strip mall, and then are all now showing up in their slouchy hats, mustard yellow scarfs, and thick-rimmed glasses and asking about my political affiliation before letting me sit in their soon-to-be-vacant bar seats. Believe me, people, I knew yours from across the room.

Regardless, I enjoy better atmospheres than those strip mall taco places can offer and I enjoy some creativity with traditional food and the (hopefully) better quality meats, like the place I went with friends on Friday, Pinche Tacos. Braised pork belly taco (where the belly wasn’t as succulently fatty as it should be, but more on the spongy side), lengua, asada, and carnitas. Their tongue is cooked really well and oh how novel, the carnitas were crispy! I don’t know why most carnitas I’ve gotten are more stewed than fried.

So Sunday night, for the end of birthday week, we trudged through the snow to the opening night of Old Major, just a few blocks away. Focusing on heritage pork and sustainably-raised seafood, I’ve been excited to see this place finally open. I’m pretty alright with another farm to table kind of restaurant, especially when they even churn their own butter, like I overheard a server saying to another table. Hopefully it’s not just from shitty ultra-pasteurized cream, but perhaps I’ll bring up that snarky question next time I’m there… our waiter didn’t laugh when I tried to make a joke about their mustard seed emulsion. “Oh nice, I always emulsify my mustard seeds.” “Yes, it’s really delicious.” “…”

Despite some cardboard personalities (or perhaps mostly nervous that they’d forget anything and get fired on their first night), the whole experience was great and the food was wonderful. Nothing incredibly novel, but then I’m not really that excited by novelty. This is “elevated farmhouse cuisine” and I’d be pretty okay living in a farmhouse that has food anything like this. They butcher their own hogs, make charcuterie, and yeah apparently churn some butter. There wasn’t much evidence of nose-to-tail eating on their current menu, but maybe they’re using some of the off parts to make broths. Or are stockpiling in the freezer for the next menu iteration. Frozen pork stomach.

We got the pork cheeks, cassoulet, and cioppino. So it was a good birthday week. Tacos, tacos, pork, and fish. And some snowboarding in lots of fresh snow. But I’m so old.

coconut milk kheer

I’ve had some pretty terrible rice puddings. Thin and anemic, the rice somehow devoid of any starch. And something about it being served cold, more often than not, just magnifies how watery and uninspired the “pudding” is. Gross. But I’ve also had some really delicious ones. Spiced just right, not too sweet, and so thick serving it cold might be hazardous. Kinda like this recipe here.
I finally took the plunge and ordered a case of coconut milk online. I’ve of late been refusing to use the guar gummed coconut milk. I’ve been fairly convinvced it makes me feel terrible after an objectionable run-in with some commercial coconut milk ice cream, and while I’ve had some non-ice cream canned stuff in recent past and been alright, I’m still done with it. Enter the unfortunately titled “Natural Value” coconut milk. I’m not entirely sure it’s not an off-brand from Family Dollar. But hey, the placebo effect is a real thing, ya know?
I cut my hair! Bangs! Ugh, what was I thinking. They’re the worst! Now I actually have to style my hair. Now I actually have to wash my hair regularly. I have this big dumb cowlick in the front of my head that makes my hair look real dumb if I don’t comb and brush and curl and blow dry it. Also, I need to stop eating so much dessert. I shouldn’t have made this pudding. I think my chin and neck have come together to meet in unholy matrimony.
Instead of arborio rice as I use here, jasmine rice is also a great rice to use, as is basmati. Jasmine’s flavor makes up for any difference in starch content between it and arborio I think. Golden raisins are also a nice addition, as are other nuts as garnishes – toasted almonds or toasted cashews. The saffron is optional. I have some from a Middle Eastern market and it was really inexpensive, but I know normally it’s not. And please don’t think you can make this with cauliflower rice or some other such nonsense. I mean you could, but I can think of way better things to use cauliflower for. You could use sprouted brown rice if you’re so inclined, but just decrease the amount of coconut milk you use since it’ll cook so quickly. I might try that with some brown Jasmine rice I have. I like sprouting things.
coconut milk kheer
serves about 6 – 8

1/2 cup arborio rice
2 cans coconut milk
6 cardamom pods, lightly crushed
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
generous pinch saffron
4 tablespoons honey
shelled and peeled pistachios

1. Wash and rinse the rice until the water runs clear.

2. In a small saucepan, heat the rice, coconut milk, cardamom, salt, and saffron over medium high heat until it starts to boil, then reduce the heat to medium low. Cook for 20 minutes, stirring frequently, especially toward the end as the mixture gets thicker.

3. Stir in the honey and cook an additional few minutes, stirring frequently.

Serve with chopped pistachios on top. If you can wait until it’s closer to room temperature (aka prime mouth-shoveling temperature) then it’s supreme.