Salsa Verde Braised Pork

This recipe is a great alternative to tacos. It’s really flavorful and easy to make. It’s a good recipe to make on a Sunday and have for dinner during the week.  The recipe is from Sunset Magazine with some tweaks by me.

Yield:   6 servings

INGREDIENTS

·        3 1/2  pounds  boneless pork shoulder (aka pork butt)

·        1 bottle (15 oz.) salsa verde (you can add an additional ½ bottle of salsa if desired), I use the Herdez brand

·        ½ to 1  medium onion, finely chopped

·        3-4  cups chicken broth

·        2-3  teaspoons  cumin seeds

·        2-3  teaspoons  coriander seeds

·        1.5  teaspoon  dried oregano

·        4 cloves of minced garlic

·        Salt

 

Serve with: fresh cilantro, lime slices, jack cheese, tortillas, additional salsa and sour cream

1. Trim excess pork fat (or not, it really does not matter). Put meat in a large pot with salsa, onion, broth, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, oregano and garlic. Bring to a boil over high heat; reduce heat, cover, and simmer until meat is very tender when pierced, about 3 hours.

2. Preheat oven to 375°. With 2 wide spatulas, transfer meat to a rimmed baking pan or a baking dish. Bake until richly browned, 30 minutes.

3. Boil juices, stirring, until reduced to 2 3/4 cups, 8 to 10 minutes (may take longer, it’s really important to get it reduced).

 

4. With 2 forks, tear meat into large shreds. Season with salt if desired (I typically don’t do this). Combine meat and juices. 

5. Serve with tortillas, more salsa verde (or any other salsa), tortillas, cilantro, lime slices, grated jack cheese and sour cream.

 

Make ahead tip: I like to make this a day before serving it. If you do that, go through step #2.  Keep the meat and the juices separate and refrigerate. The next day, skim the fat off the sauce and do steps #3 and 4. I added the shredded meat to the reduced sauce and let it heat on the stove for a few minutes before serving.

You may be tempted to make this in a slow cooker. My advice is don’t. I tried it a few times and I can’t get it to taste right.

 

More Signs of Spring in Sonoma County

I do most of my grocery shopping at a small local chain of stores – Oliver’s Markets.  They hire someone to paint the front windows of their stores seasonally. It’s fun, funky and kind of old school. I love it. Enjoy!

Dinner Party Tip - Keep a Hostess Diary

Planning a dinner party is tough enough without worrying about whether you have served your guests a certain dish before.  If you are like me, you have certain go-to dishes for dinner parties.  And that’s fine, but you probably want to avoid serving the same thing to the same people over and over, or accidentally serving someone with a nut allergy something with nuts in it. I solved this by using a hostess diary.  What is a hostess diary? It’s a record of what you served and who was there. You can also add other notes such as was the quantity of food right? What wine did you serve? Did something go over particularly well or not so well? Would you do something differently next time? What décor did you use?

 I use an actual thing called a hostess diary, but in the past I have used a regular old notebook.  It does not have to be fancy as it’s really for your reference.  It takes me all of about five minutes to fill in once the party is over and I have a record that I can refer to later. It makes entertaining and having dinner parties a little bit easier for me, and maybe for you too.

 

Baking Tip - Try Slice and Bake Cookies

When you hear the term “slice and bake cookies”, you probably think of the hermetically sealed rolls of dough that you find in the refrigerator section of the grocery store.  Not the most appetizing image. But, actually, slice and bake is a great thing when it comes to cookies.  Slice and bake cookies are easy to make, can be dolled up to be quite fancy, can be made in any batch size, and the dough can be made ahead and baked as needed. All good things in my book. These sorts of cookies are my go-to if I want to make cookies for book club mid-week. I just make the dough on the weekend and bake the cookies the night before. I get beautiful cookies, practically on-demand with very little work.

So what do you need to make them? First, start off with a good recipe. I am partial to Dorie Greenspan’s sables. They are a little shortbread cookie that takes really well to customizing for various seasons or holidays. Once you make your dough you can store it in the fridge for up to a week. Any longer than that and you should freeze it.

You will want to roll your cookie log in colored sugar prior to baking.  Which brings me to the second thing, you need sugar in fun colors. I buy my sugar at Nancy’s Fancy’s in Santa Rosa.  You can go online too – check out Fancy Flours, they sell 22 colors of decorating sugar! At Christmas I use red and green sugar. I used neon yellow, orange and pink for cookies for a BBQ last summer. The possibilities are endless and you will find that you can easily make very pretty, impressive looking cookies.

Have you ever made slice and bake cookies?

Spring has sprung in Sonoma County!

Green Soup

I was making Dorie Greenspan’s Cheating on Winter Pea Soup the other day and I realized that it’s the soup equivalent of a green smoothie or “green drink.” To make a green drink, you put together a bunch of vegetables and maybe a little fruit along with some liquid, blend it up and voila! green drink.  Same thing with this soup. You sauté an onion and then add some broth along with a bunch of romaine lettuce and frozen peas. It cooks for a bit, then you blend it up and voila! green soup.

These sorts of soups are great for winter/early spring – they are loaded with vegetables, relatively easy to make, can be made with very little fat, freeze well and taste great.  You should also try this asparagus soup from Williams-Sonoma (it’s written for a soup maker of some sort but you can make it on the stove). If you are looking for a soup that uses fruit and vegetables, give Dorie Greenspan’s Double Celery and Apple Soup recipe a try.

Preserved Lemons - Easy to Make and Delicious!

 

I made my first batch of preserved lemons two years ago. At the time, I had never even tasted a preserved lemon. However, my friend Barb had gifted me a bunch of Meyer lemons from her tree (a frost warning had caused her to harvest about 400 lemons all at once) and I figured why not. I used the recipe here and they turned out great. Now I make preserved lemons every year. 

Here a few tips for making this recipe successfully:

·         Start by sorting your lemons.  You need to add some juice to fill up the jars, so separate out the less perfect ones for juice. It takes more lemons than you'd think and I usually end up sacrificing a few of the nicer looking lemons for juice.

·         Cut all of your lemons at once and put them into a bowl.

·         Put the cut lemons and salt in the jars and sort of squish them down. I leave all the jar lids off and then at the end go back and do more squishing and maybe add more lemons and juice to fill up the jars.

·         Wipe the rims with a clean cloth and set on the counter for a few days. Shake the jars periodically. The recipe says to put the jars upside down but I found that one or two would always leak and it makes a big mess so I just shake them periodically.

Using preserved lemons

I use the lemons mainly in spinach (chopped and added while it’s cooking) and chicken piccata (chopped and added to sauce at the end). I made a lot of lemons so I will be looking to use them in lots of other things this year.

Have you ever made preserved lemons? If so, how do you use them?