Sarah's Pork Roast

Last Friday, I was heading home after a long week in court for a jury trial. I was feeling pretty exhausted, and I wasn't looking forward to eating another take-out dinner, which is what we primarily subsist on when I am at trial. The worst part about it was that I knew that I had a pork shoulder sitting in the fridge. I really wanted some pork slathered in barbecue sauce. But I knew that making it would take several hours. And I was starving.

In my mind's eye, as I was sitting on the bus home, I opened the fridge and stared at that raw pork shoulder, longingly. Then, as I got off the bus, took the elevator to get to my floor, and walked down the hallway towards our apartment, I could smell the aroma of meat - wonderful, wonderful meat. I opened the door and was reminded in yet another way of why I love my wife. She made the pork.

Jury Duty

This week, I started a jury trial. For various reasons, the work has been even more time consuming than a jury trial would otherwise be. I haven't cooked in about a week, which is unfortunate, as cooking, or more precisely, chopping things, has become a way for me to de-stress. Since there isn't much time for cooking, I've reverted back to my normal trial time ritual of seeing if I can finish a bottle of whiskey before the trial ends. One would think that, as sleep-depriving as trial work can be, how is there enough time for whiskey? The answer is that, because trials tend to make you have to drink coffee far into the evening, having a nip at the end of the day helps you get to sleep.

A friend just started a food blog, and reading her first post has made me particularly hungry for well-prepared food. But, as I write this post from the bus, I know that, because I have a couple hours of work still ahead of me and an early Saturday morning meeting tomorrow, Sarah and I will likely have to suffer through something that comes in a styrofoam delivery container.

home fries

The last time I made breakfast, I tried to make hashbrowns. Hashbrowns are one of my favorite things to eat. Last Thanksgiving, I went Black Friday shopping with Sarah and her sisters. At some point in the morning, I went to McDonald's to pick up some breakfast for everyone. I bought like five breakfast meals, but the girls only wanted to eat the sandwiches. That left me with five hash browns to eat. I felt like the chubby kid in Billy Madison who was eating everyone's lunches.

For whatever reason, hash browns have eluded me. This has been the case, even though I have been trying to make them for the last two decades. Granted, two decades ago, I was 11. My idea of cooking was to get eggs, ham, and frozen tater tots, and throw it in the biggest frying pan I could find. It would invariably end up as a big, breakfasty mush. It never turned out how I hoped, but I would cover it in ketchup and watch the timed VCR recording of the previous night's saturday night live.

I still can't make hash browns. But I have gotten really good at home fries.

Pizza Sausage

Last time we were back in Iowa, I really wanted to make a variety of pizzas that day so that everyone could have their favorite. One of my nephew's favorite toppings is sausage, and I just didn't know how to make that. Fortunately, he also really likes cheese, so the absence of sausage pizza went unnoticed. But it made me start thinking about pizza sausage incessantly. Some people get songs stuck in their head. I get food.

pot roast

Because I only used part of the chuck for last night's dinner, I had two pounds of chuck that I needed something to do with. I decided to make pot roast in a crock pot. Things were getting pretty busy with work, so it was nice to make a meal that pretty much just takes care of itself. Plus, I had a shelf full of barbecue sauces that I had bought while in Iowa. Pot roast makes for a good palette to compare.

beef and mushroom ragu

Every time I see a recipe with pappardelle, I instantly want to try it. This pappardelle with beef and mushroom ragu recipe from Real Simple was no exception. The problem was, and the problem with pappardelle recipes always is, I could not find pappardelle in the store. Come to think of it, I don't think I have seen pappardelle sold at the grocery store. Ever. Fortunately, the recipe says you can substitute with fettucini, so I got the fattest fettucini I could find.

Buffalo Dip

To go with the brisket I made for my Bears Game Day spread, I made Buffalo Dip. This is a recipe that Sarah got from a friend. From the moment I tried it, I knew I had to have the recipe. At the time, I was going through a year-and-a-half-long, insatiable craving for wing sauce. And this just hit the spot.

taco pie!

I wanted to get back to some recipes from the Western Dubuque Marching Band Cook Book. So I started flipping through the pages to find something to cook. And while I thought it might be fun to randomly pick things, like bubble pizza (which calls for 2 canisters of instant biscuits) or Barbecued Ham Balls (which calls for graham and/or Ritz crackers), I decided to ask some of Sarah's siblings to provide suggestions. I got this from Sarah's sister:

Mike,

I like Chicken Breasts Supreme recipe on page 219. I have also made the Taco Pie recipe on page 241. The kids and I like it, but Ben does not. I also make the Broccoli salad on page 277 quite a bit.

I decided on the Taco Pie, because it sounded the most ridiculous and because Ben doesn't like it. But also, since I do like Iowan Taco Pizza quite a bit, I thought this would probably be good. After all, the recipe calls for crushed Doritos. 

game day brisket

In the days before the Bears playoff game against the Seahawks, I decided that I wanted to make some really special food. Normally, I would make a boatload of wings. But since it was the playoffs and all, I figured I needed to do something special. When I was in the grocery store, I saw some brisket. I have never tried to cook one before. In fact, I had never even seen a whole brisket, other than on TV. It seemed unnecessarily large. I didn't even think I had a vessel large enough to cook it in. But none of this deterred me. I put it in my cart and went to the checkout.

I don't think they sell a lot of the briskets at my grocery store. When I went to pay for it, the checker asked me how I was expecting on cooking it.

Cooking Redemption: Iron Chicken

As unpleasant as dinner was the night before, I didn't want to leave things with Sarah not-liking dark meat chicken. I wanted to give the chicken another try, but I really had to make sure that she would like it or she might have made me cook vegetarian for the next week. Plus, I had like two pounds of raw chicken sitting in my fridge that I wanted to get rid of, so I had to do something.

For most of the day, I figured I would slow cook it for a couple of hours. That way, all the parts of the chicken that Sarah considered gooey or nasty from the night before would melt away into a slow cooked chicken that would be nice and tasty. But that would be a cop out, I thought. I decided that I would not let the iron skillet chicken defeat me. I wanted to try it again.

Hash Browns and Pancakes

Even though it was a Saturday, I woke up early and got started on breakfast. Last night's chicken fail left me pretty hungry. And I wanted to make it up to Sarah with a nice breakfast. This, I thought, would be a good opportunity to use a Christmas gift I got from my mother-in-law, a double burner skillet pan. To best utilize the extra real estate that this skillet pan would provide, I decided that I would make some pancakes and some hash browns.

Cooking Fail: Iron Chicken

They can't all be winners. This recipe started out with the best of intentions, but it was not so successful. I wanted to create my own recipe by picking and choosing things I liked from various other recipes. I was hoping for a rustic chicken roast with mushrooms in a rich balsamic sauce. But what I ended up with was undercooked chicken and oily mushrooms drowned in hot vinegar. The only plus side is that, when we went to get quesadillas afterwards, we also stopped by CVS where they had these doritos sold in old school packaging.

Metafood

I am proud to announce that this blog now has 10 followers. I am going to celebrate this milestone with a bag of cool ranch doritos I found in my office.

Super Tacos

 Just before Sarah and I left Chicago to go visit her family, we spent a couple of days trying to eat everything in the fridge. We were going to be gone long enough that anything that wasn't eaten would probably go bad, and I didn't want to throw anything away.

By the final night of fridge cleaning, we were down to one chicken breast, the remnants of several bags of shredded cheese, and several corn tortillas. I combined these things into a hybrid taco/quesadilla. I liked this so much, I decided to do it again. This time, with pork.

Pommes Chef Anne

The problem with making your wife watch three hours of cooking shows per day is that your wife will soon begin thinking that you can actually make anything that is on tv. This is where we started on this fancy yet easy potato side dish adventure.

But, as usual, I modified the recipe.

Meatballs!

Kay's Meatloaf, as delicious as it was, was not enough to sate my craving for ground meat. If you recall from my facebook earlier this year, I was consumed with the desire for a meatball sandwich for a good several days. Then, after watching a Good Eats episode about meatballs, I decided that I try to make them on my own.

Roast Duck

I was watching a No Reservations episode where Anthony Bourdain went to a market in Paris. He remarked how seasonal the market was, as there were deer, geese, and ducks, which presumably were in coming in season. I like eating seasonal things.

I have eaten duck many times, but I have never made it myself. I love the taste, and after watching a Good Eats episode on cooking duck, I decided to give it a try. The week prior, I had seen some at the grocery store. The next time I went, I bought two.

Soju Tasting

Soju is a Korean drink usually referred to as a rice wine. But I am not sure why they use the word, wine. It's about 40 proof and always tastes like watered down whiskey.

I had remembered going to some club in St. Louis back when I lived there. On Thursday nights or something, they would have a soju drink special that featured like eight different kinds of fruit flavored sojus. The weirdest part was that this place was not a Korean club. Nor do I remember it even particularly Asian at all. They just had fruity soju. And club music.

I couldn't find flavored sojus at the liquor store near my parents' house. These are what I found instead.

Pork Roast Slow Cooker

This is a recipe for my brother-in-law. We were talking about pork loin the other day, so I thought I'd post a super simple crock pot recipe. It requires minimal effort and minimal touching of raw meat, not that he is averse to either.

This recipe should serve a family of six, if four of them are kids, as is the case in my brother-in-law's family. But, that is just a guess. I rarely cook for more than Sarah and me.

I usually put this together in the mornings in the winter. If you think the smell of cooked pork is nice, I would say that cooking this makes your house smell nice. And although it probably only negligibly raises the ambient temperature inside, it does make the house feel all warm.

Happy New Year!

For the New Year, it is traditional for Koreans to eat a dish called, Duk Gook, which roughly translates to rice dumpling soup. There have been multiple times where Sarah and I have eaten the proper version of this; there are also times where I have simply added some duk (rice dumpling) to instant udon. This year, we got the real stuff.

New Year's Eve Dinner

We had travelled home on New Year's Eve, so our first dinner back was even more special of a home coming meal. On top of that, dinner was going to be for 6 people, which is unusual at my parent's house. I don't come home all that often, and the fact that my sister, her fiance, and my wife were also there made this dinner all the more rare.

We had decided to stay at home for dinner because we thought it might be either too difficult or too hectic to try and find a last-minute dinner reservation for 6 on new year's eve. This was more than fine by me. Many of my favorite foods to eat in New Jersey are the foods that my mom makes.

Homecoming Lunch

Sarah and I had made relatively last minute plans to return to my parents' house in New Jersey for the New Year. That meant, we were going to eat. A lot.

The morning of our flight back home, I had called my dad to let him know that our flight was going to be delayed. He asked me where I wanted to eat lunch.

Later, I learned from my father, this is a frequent way that Koreans used to greet each other after the Korean War. 'Have you eaten yet?' 'Did you have something good to eat?' Such questions towards travelers or guests were gestures of food generosity, a highly regarded social value in the tumultuous post-war times, my dad told me.

Sometimes, I think my dad just makes things up.