Catching up on events.

So the last week or so has been an almost exhausting cavalcade of new recipes and experiments, as well as an interesting new development in the form of me actually getting paid for doing this now.

Yup, that's right. The folks at Bend's Source Weekly have seen fit to give me irregular column space. The first piece, a profile of cook/owner Tammy Mills of Cross Creek Cafe, ran a few weeks ago, though due to some confusion had to be cut down considerably. I hope to post the extended profile soon.

Walking back through the menu over the last week, the biggest adventure was the smoke roasted pork tacos, for last weekend's D&D game.

I started with two roughly 6.5 lb boneless pork shoulder roasts, and brined them for two days in a brine seasons with whole dried japonica chiles, peppercorns, mustard and coriander seed, lime juice, and bistek.

This then got thrown on my smoker over hickory chips at about 250-300 for two hours, topping them off with a few slices of fresh pineapple. However, the temperature proved insufficient to get them done in a reasonable amount of time, a fact that was unfortunately largely the fault of the weather.

So I brought them inside and threw them both on a cookie sheet, and popped them in the oven for a bit. Unfortunately, I'd neglected to consider that the pan I'd grabbed had no edges on it, and the running molten fat from the pork wound up starting a bit of a fire in the bottom of the oven.

So the pig got yanked back out, and the oven left alone for a bit, and some rapid brainstorming occurred. One of my fellow players, and also a fellow cook, spotted a crock pot on the counter, and upon pointing it out, it occurred to me that if we were going to finish one of the roasts in that, we should take advantage of all the beer lying about, and cook it off in that with some more of the pineapple slices. The other roast meanwhile, went back on a proper baking sheet this time, and back in the oven at 350 degrees.

The oven roast went in for another hour, before, all of us quite hungry, we decided to pull that one out and carve into it. The thickest portion in the middle was still a bit rare in the center, but a good two thirds of it was quite done at this point, so we went ahead and carved off a healthy portion, and went about making tacos of it, served on corn tortillas with some fresh pico de gallo and a squeeze of lime. The oven pork was absolutely fantastic, moist, salty, rich with fat. The flavor was sort of like a pastrami, crossed with bacon, and the texture was perfect.

The remainder went back in the oven for another hour or so to finish, at which point we returned again to crack into both the oven and crockpot versions, which were both well and cooked by this point. The crockpot version, by contrast to it's oven compatriot, was almost a totally different animal. It was moist and tender, and the flavor of the smoke had mellowed and blended with the bite and the acidity from the beer and pineapple to create a whole different flavor from it's dry roasted counterpart.

It was well more food than any of us actually needed of course, and I wound up still having a third of the oven roast to take home, sadly leaving the crockpot one behind, having only really had the chance to give it a taste.

This wound up finding it's way into many of my recipes the following week. The next morning, we decided to make sandwiches with it, and I discovered that, now that it had chilled, I could slice it and use it rather like bacon, and so made some open faced sandwiches, by placing slices of the pork on a baking sheet under the broiler, before putting that back onto some bread with some healthy slices of pepper jack over the top. I served this with some Campbell's tomato soup, itself seasoned with a bit more of the pork, sliced thin, broiled until crisp, and then tossed back in the soup for flavor.

I also used it, sliced, then chopped into smaller pieces, to add some extra body and flavor to a few other dishes, like chicken and rice with sauce veloute, and a southwestern chicken lime pot pie. The last bit of it wound up coming full circle, and again being turned into tacos, this time diced, tossed with bistek and Tapatio, and then refried in butter on a flattop griddle.

I had considered repeating the experiment on a much smaller scale this weekend, but ultimately wound up taking a bit of a break from cooking over the last few days. However, tonight, my break ends, and I shall be returning to the kitchen to prepare a lovely spaghetti puttanesca with sardines.