Saturday, February 6, 2010

Day 37: The Pork Picnic – episode one

Once again, it was the preponderance of celery that started it all after my first Farmers market trip this morning. After getting home with the spoils and sorting the fresh from the not so fresh celery, I tossed the later in a tall pot with carrots, cilantro and a white onion. If you have followed my last several posts you might know where this is going and you’re not far off if you think it means something wonderful is about to happen. The stock was on.

Clearly the next step was more coffee so I headed down to Blue Bottle. If you haven’t ever been there, just go. http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/ Answering to a friends need of coffee, I got an extra cup and headed to deliver it, picking up an order of pork spare ribs for the friend on the way, if you haven’t been to Avedanos Meats, just go. www.avedanos.com

Then the strangest thing, I ordered ribs for my friend, then I THOUGHT what came out of my mouth was “do you have any pork shoulder?” but it must have been “do you have a pork’s shoulder” because my GOD the thing was HUGE! The butcher climbed back out of the meat locker with a pigs leg and shoulder still attached and about the size of my left side waste down. It had to weigh at least 50 lbs.

“About here is right for the cut, or you can just have the picnic, which is about here”. Waving his hand around the top most portion of the slab he just smacked on the wooden table. At this point a couple walked through the door and asked the owner if she had any pork shoulder while my butcher waited for my confirmation on his cut. I nodded decisively at my butcher. The owner who witnessed this said “I’m sorry but this guy just got the last one.” I watched the customer’s eyes widen as he looked to the wooden table where my butcher had begun sawing the leg from the shoulder with a 24 inch hack saw. The guy was clearly about to make the same mistake (a pork shoulder verses some pork shoulder) and seemed a bit confused “do you have anything smaller?” he said to the owner while his lady friend turned to me; “are you going to use all of that… how are you going to cook it?” At this point I was committed but really had no idea so I lied and explained I was part of a very exclusive pork shoulder cook-off competition where there were no losers because everyone got to eat pork. She smiled nervously. Eventually my butcher with the owner’s help wrapped and taped my pork picnic (*see section 5 in diagram below) and was on my way, walking out the door with +20 lbs of pork.

I delivered the coffee and ribs and told my friends the story. “I’ll take half of it from you” said Dan and we attempted to make the cut. But no hack saw so, no luck. “I’m just going to have to cook all of it” I said and I left. They promised to come by for leftovers this week. I arrived home to the smell of wonderfully clean and soul warming vegetable broth at a simmer and the rest came naturally. The pork went fat-side down in a huge cast iron Dutch oven, with bay leaves, dried chili peppers, Mexican oregano, and cyan pepper to brown (both sides) for 5 minutes, then I added my beautiful stock and shoveled it in the oven at 280 for 5 hours. Then I prepared a totally separate dinner for the evening which I’ll elaborate on later as it was also pretty darn good.

To be continued…

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