cook: roast pork

For Friendsgiving, I told Helen that if she bought the pork shoulder, then I would roast it. And oh man, I struggled to score that pork rind (I finally resorted to my serrated bread knife) before oiling and salting the pork roast all over and then searing it for 50 minutes in a 500 degree oven and then lowering the temperature to 325 degrees and letting the pig roast for 2 and a half hours. However, it crisped beautifully.

The Sunday before the work week, I denuded a turkey carcass and the pork bone of all the meat and boiled for a few hours.

 

I now have bone broths for boiling beans.

With the turkey broth, I know I want to cook a cottage pie with leftover mashed potatoes and turkey and add mire poix and a flour and butter roux to make a gravy. I've white onion and lime too for garnishing after simmering our Gordo beans. But that pork broth is calling for a pozole. Stay tuned!

cook: menu planning and thanksgiving sides

The day before Thanksgiving, I finished off the Asian meals in my fridge. I ate the Filipino sinigang and the Thai red curry that were still leftover before my weekend working trip to Memphis. And I had hoped to find inspiration to change up my meal rotation. Two of my meals in that Southern city were great: fried chicken, coleslaw, fried okra, and collard greens + grilled red snapper with both Cajun spice and garlic butter, beans and rice, grilled squash. But South in my mouth was too fried and too meat-centric to eat on the regular. So lo and behold, I came home to an issue of 52 meals in Food & Wine.

Like Julie and Julia, maybe 2024 will be a year of new dishes and exploration of other cuisines from around the globe.

And yesterday was Thanksgiving Day, and I'd volunteered two starchy sides: oyster stuffing and garlic noodles. I roused my little girl from bed and got to chopping. I started with the stuffing by sautéing the onions and celery in a stick of butter. I saw chives in my fridge and decided to chop them up and add to the stuffing.

 

I knew I didn't want the fresh oysters to cook down to a rubbery texture, and so I added their liquid to the simmering broth and aromatics and chopped the oysters as well as additional seasoning to add JUST ALONG with the bread mixture.

 

Dried bread mixture added next to the cooking liquid, stir and done.

 

The stuffing tasted divine and started on the mise en place for the garlic noodles by first chopping the scallions. And then the garlic.

 

The garlic I knew was gonna be a lot of work, and it took me all morning to pound it in my mortar and pestle.

  

Once the aromatics were prepped, next was the washing and cutting of the baby bok choy into bite-sized pieces.

Next was the making of the salty umami element of the Vietnamese American noodles: a little soy, seasoning sauce, oyster sauce, and fish sauce.

And then it was time to gather and pack. My enameled cast iron would be both the carrying AND cooking vessels. Ready to hit the road!

I was famished after all that cooking preparation.

The next time I travel to a conference, I know to take with me an avocado for those meals that I just could not abide, like an awful turkey sandwich and mediocre cucumber salad served at the hotel.

clay: soap dishes + butter boxes

In my inbox was this announcement for a makerie retreat for making market baskets and bags. They are so dang lovely, and I particularly love the basket below with the leather handles. However, the market bag below is made in a course for intermediate willow weavers.

The beginning class starts with making a bread basket.

However, this basket weaving workshop happens in October, and I'll likely wait until I'm retired from being a school librarian before I explore this craft. In the meantime, I'm going through a phase of making lots of soap dishes and a couple of butter boxes.

The kiln gods rewarded me with this decorated pumpkin this week.     

I like it a lot! It's going to decorate the Friendsgiving table. And I'm firing up two more pumpkins that were destined for the reclaim bucket. Earlier this week, I glazed some soap dishes: gloss white on the red clay dishes and just underglaze and wax resist on the white clay dishes.               

I received thank you notes from the the grandnieces for their Halloween card and $5 gift cards from Target to buy as much candy as they want.

I was touched and reminded too that I need to get going on the homemade dolly quilts and pillows for the plush dolls I bought them for Christmas. I'm pondering getting crochet kits for the two other older grandnieces, but they're too young yet to make amigurumi as they're not at least 12 years old and probably won't have the dexterity to handle crochet hooks.

I'll be away from my beloved clay because I'm en route to Memphis. Too early for me for breakfast, which is too bad because there's in this airport terminal a Filipino eatery called Mama Go's, serving arroz caldo and a siopao. I have a stopover in O'Hare, one of my favorite airports because of Tortas Frontera. I'm already scanning the menu, and the Crispy Chicken Milanesa with napa cabbage, pickled jalapenos, cotija cheese, avocado-tomatillo salsa, and cilantro crema sounds like the way to go. Ceramics and cooking are my obsession at the present, and so if I can't eat that torta I want in Chicago, I'll re-create it for dinner in California.

cook: more asian comfort

I've been on a spree of making soap dishes and a couple of butter boxes. And hence I've been cooking dishes without having to think--Filipino, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Saturday night, I cooked chicken karaage, steamed brown jasmine rice, kabocha and sweet potato tempura  with dashi and soy dipping sauce, and red leaf lettuce salad dressed in miso & sesame oil.                           

I thought if I'm gonna fry, then I'm gonna fry! I did strain and reserve the cooking oil. And Patrick complimented me on a delicious dinner.

And lunches this week will be leftover Asian meals as well as kale and goat cheese and walnut salads with my usual homemade dressing: minced shallots, walnut and olive oils, Dijon mustard, orange blossom honey, seasoning sauce, soy sauce, lemon juice, salt and pepper.     

I'm trying to eat my Asian leftovers before I leave for a 4-day working weekend, but I cooked a Thai curry last night. I had defrosted chicken thighs. I also pulled out a jar of Thai red curry paste, leftover kabocha and sweet potato and bok choi and herbs as well as red peppers from the garden, a can of coconut milk and both Filipino and Vietnamese fish sauces as well as a Vietnamese caramel sauce (fish sauce boiled with Palm sugar). I liked that I was making do when I cooked and not making additional trips to the grocery store for a missing ingredient.               

I now have a reserve of coconut milk after a trip to the warehouse store. 

 

I sautéed the cut-up chicken, kabocha squash and sweet potato in the red curry paste. I then added one can of coconut milk to the chicken and starches and let it simmer for 15 minutes.

 

I left the rest of the vegetables for the last 5 to 7 minutes of cooking and the herbs for the very last.

The curry was a bit fiery, and so I added some of my caramel sauce to temper it. 

The husband ate the curry too though he didn't compliment the dish.

But the win for me is that my husband ate what I ate and that I got to eat a dish I liked. I also had Cecilia help herself to as much curry and rice as she wanted, and she validated me by declaring the curry as one of the best I've cooked.

cook: charcuterie + comfort

Last Sunday, Cecilia invited neighbors to participate in charcuterie. To balance out all the proteins of cheeses and meats, I made a vegetable dish. Endive encasing hearts of palm drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and black pepper.      

Cecilia thought the palm heart was cheese not a vegetable! The bitterness of the endive was a pleasant counterpoint to all the salty fats in the cambezola, gouda, toscano, salami and cappicolla.

A few nights later, I had invited Cecilia over for family dinner of sinigang. While the pork neck bones and spare ribs were furiously boiling in a Dutch oven, I quartered eggplant from our garden, spliced baby bok choi in half, trimmed long beans, and peeled and cut up taro.                

After a couple hours when the pork was slipping off the bones, I added the vegetables to the soup.

I had Cecilia boil a pot of rice, and we enjoyed a fine meal with condiments of soy sauce, patis and calamansi. 

I craved even more comfort and last night made a sandwich with my favorite cold cut of mortadella. However, instead of the usual, I changed it up with focaccia, pistachio pesto, and burrata. The recipe is very simple, slather bread with pistachio pesto...        

 

...then layer mortadella and burrata and eat!

 

The sandwich wasn't as delicious as I thought it would be. I should have sprinkled a bit of sea salt and black pepper on the cheese. 

And yet I want the sandwich again, and so I will eat it again for lunch but will probably add sundried tomato and broil the cheese and bread before adding the mortadella.

cook: what to bring to a breakfast potluck

I was assigned a turn this month to bring a potluck dish for a staffulty breakfast. Eggs! But in what form? Burritos? Casserole? Only I’d been obsessed with clay this past week. And so I borrowed a deviled eggs dish from Helen, and that meant I only had to boil six eggs to make 12 deviled eggs. And because I ran out of divots, I thought I’d just boil a dozen more, bring hot sauce and call it a day EXCEPT I remembered I had a small breakfast strata in the freezer. And so I popped the savory bread pudding into a hot oven 30 minutes before leaving for work.                    

Pretty easy peasy to transport in one bag too.                       

And my friend, Andrew asked me for my recipe for the savory breakfast casserole I baked. Except there’s really no recipe I told Andrew because my strata are always cobbled together from whatever ingredients are in my refrigerator, which on a particular day was leftover baguette, breakfast sausage and gruyere cheese.