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Weekend double shot bonus (and encore) recipe: Do or die with the ground beef…

06 Friday Apr 2012

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So to debunk my typical Sunday posting routine, I’m rebelling and re-surfacing (re-bumping, is that a word?) one of my favorite slow cooker recipes I posted last fall.  When you’ve got ground beef thawing in the fridge for the second time around after refreezing it, it’s got to move forward or risk losing its flavor… or maybe that’s just me. Thankfully it’s still sealed up like it was in the grocery store.

Polenta with Bolognese Sauce isn’t the traditional way to welcome Spring, but Spring has yet to officially boing and spring around here.  Cold, biting winds, a few snow flurries even into early April, rain (well, that’s typical) and some nasty flu bugs going around are making it tough to break free from the grips of Winter here in the Seattle area. 

So here’s a hearty meal to fight that off – a Bolognese sauce prepared in a slow cooker and later baked with sliced polenta and some parmesan.  This is glorious and well worth the time – trust me on this one.

Bolognese Sauce
Makes about 12 cups (3 quarts)

2 T olive oil
2 oz pancetta, chopped
2 small, finely chopped yellow onions
2 finely chopped carrots
1 stalk finely chopped celery
3 lbs ground beef
2 C beef broth
1 1/2 C dry red wine
1 can (28 oz) crushed or diced plum tomatoes
1/2 C milk
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Fresh Italian leaf parsley, minced for garnish (optional)   

In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, warm the oil.  Add the pancetta and saute until it begins to render its fat, about 1 minute.  Add the onions, carrots and celery and saute until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes.  Add the beef and cook, breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon, until it is no longer red, about 7 minutes.

Transfer to the slow cooker.  Add the broth and wine to the pan and raise the heat to high.  Bring to a boil and deglaze the pan, stirring to scrape up the browned bits on the pan bottom.  Pour the liquid into the slow cooker along with the tomatoes and stir to combine.

Cover and cook the sauce on the high heat setting for 4 hours, or the low heat setting for 8 hours.  Add the milk, stirring to combine.  Cover and continue cooking for 20 minutes longer.  Season with salt and pepper.

…now, how do you use this sauce?  Toss it with some fettucine and sprinkle in fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. 

Or try it with Polenta:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  Butter a gratin baking dish (I actually just use a 9 x 13 glass casserole).  Take a tube of prepared Polenta (18 oz) and slice it crosswise into slices about 1/4″ thick.  Arrange the slices in the bottom of the baking dish, overlapping them.  Spoon the Bolognese sauce around the slices generously and sprinkle a 1/2 cup of fresh-grated Parmesan cheese.  Bake until the sauce is hot and bubbly, about 20 minutes.  Served with minced fresh Italian parsley for garnish.

Fivenineteen’s notes:  I added a small ‘blob’ of minced garlic for a little extra punch when sauteeing the onions, carrots and celery.  Guessing about 2 or 3 teaspoons.  I just spontaneously grabbed a small caviar-type spoon, scooped up some garlic and threw it into the pan. Love that aroma! Most of you who tune in regularly know I prefer minced garlic in a jar as it’s so much more convenient than peeling/pressing fresh garlic.  AND you won’t notice a difference – promise.

I also recommend adding the crushed tomatoes to the slow cooker BEFORE pouring in the broth and red wine mixture.  It will save you a lot of potential stains and splashes on your countertops and on yourself.  You can also reduce the amount of red wine and broth slightly – maybe a quarter cup total.  I boiled the mixture for quite a few minutes to reduce it down before adding to the slow cooker but there still is a fair amount of liquid remaining even after the slow cooking is finished. 

The flavors are incredible…enjoy!

From the Williams-Sonoma Food Made Fast Slow Cooker Recipes book.

Singing the Tom Douglas Praises…again

01 Sunday Apr 2012

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Along with other Seattle treasures like Starbucks, Nordstrom, Microsoft, Amazon, hiking, boating and skiing literally in our back yard, lush green, beautiful mountains and a few decent professional sports teams…we have Chef Tom Douglas.  He and his wife, Jackie, are the owners of five restaurants:  Dahlia Lounge, Etta’s, Palace Kitchen, Lola, and Serious Pie, all in downtown Seattle.  You simply cannot talk about great food in Seattle without mentioning Tom!  Now, I have yet to try Lola and Serious Pie, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the Dahlia Lounge, Etta’s and the Palace Kitchen.  I smile and remember grabbing brunch at Etta’s one morning with friends and walking up a few blocks to catch a matinee performance of the symphony at Benaroya Hall.  A blissful Seattle day!  This was a few years ago, and I remember it was hard finding restaurants downtown that were open for breakfast or brunch.  So a walk down to Etta’s it was.  I hear Lola has an incredible breakfast.  Definitely on the to-try list.

I was suprised to learn that he’s originally from Delaware!  His dishes capture Pacific Northwest flavors to a T; his signature is using fresh, local ingredients to put a fresh twist on a classic dish.  Charred ahi tuna with pasta puttanesca anyone?  This is next on my list to make…I’m curious how the tuna will taste with a pungent puttanesca sauce!

I was definitely craving some food variety this weekend and that’s a good sign.  I’ve been a little run down…not with a flu or cold or anything I could put my finger on.  Just tired.  And not really motivated to cook.  When I get home from work and am exhausted it’s all I can do to whip up some pasta and pesto…my own form of comfort food.  But even that gets boring after awhile.

So this weekend it was off to the grocery store.  I thumbed through Tom’s Seattle Kitchen cookbook, savoring the wonderful ingredients and the stories behind the recipes, looking for inspiration on what to cook.  Sometimes I like to play a game with myself and just randomly pick a page in a cookbook and THAT’S what I’ll be making for dinner that night.  Ooops…not up to making a dish with octopus in it, so I kept flipping the pages.

Then I found it:  a clam linguine recipe with pancetta, jalapenos and garlic.  See what I mean about a fresh twist on a classic?  Never would have thought about pairing up jalapenos with clams.  But it sounded intriguing!  And delicious!  Then I realized I had some shrimp that needed to be used up soon in my fridge and decided to use that instead of clams.  Now, normally when I try something for the first time I follow the recipe pretty much exactly as written and then make my own notes on what to tweak.  But the shrimp won out.  I’m sure Tom won’t mind.

Here’s a confession:  I absolutely adore grocery shopping.  Roaming the aisles, wondering what wonderful dishes are just dying to come out of all these wonderful foods.  Looking at the spices and wondering what else I need to add to my collection.  Cheeses, vegetables, wines…fantastic, glorious food!  Now I’m sure I would feel differently about grocery shopping if I had kids to feed.  Might be more of a chore than a joy.  Sure, we all need to eat, but for me being single with no kids, grocery shopping is an adventure.  Yep, I’m a true Taurus…I LOVE my food and take it damn seriously.  But not so serious to also have a little humor and play around with it.  Try new things!  Take risks!  The food isn’t going to bite you. 

There are a lot of ingredients, but this goes together quickly – serves 4

  • 2 jalapenos, cut in half and seeded
  • 1/4 C olive oil, plus more for brushing
  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 3 ox pancetta, diced (1/2 C)
  • 1 tsp minced garlic
  • 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (or to taste)
  • 2 lbs clams, scrubbed and rinsed
  • 1/4 C dry white wine
  • 1 lb linguine
  • 1/4 C unsalted butter
  • 4 tsp chopped, fresh flat-leaf parsley
  • 3 tsp fresh lemon juice
  • 2 tsp grated lemon zest
  • 1/2 C fresh, flat-leaf parsley
  • 1/4 C shaved parmesan cheese
  • 4 lemon wedges

Preheat oven to 400 F.  Start a pot of salted water boiling to cook the pasta later.  Brush the jalapeno halves with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Place on a baking sheet and roast in the oven for 10 minutes.  When cool enough to handle, dice finely.

Put a large saute pan over medium high heat. Heat 1/4 C olive oil, add the pancetta and cook, stirring, until browned, about 2 minutes.  Add the jalapeno, garlic and pepper flakes and cook, stirring, another minute. Turn the heat to high.  Add the clams and wine and cover. Cook until the clams open, about 3 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in the boiling water until al dente.  Add the butter, chopped parsley, lemon juice and zest to the clams in the pan and toss until the butter melts into the sauce.  Drain the pasta.

In a large serving bowl, toss the pasta with the clam sauce and whole parsley leaves. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

NOTE:  feel free to put Parmesan on this dish, despite the Italian thing about “no cheese with fish.”  Use grated cheese or make Parmesan curls with a potato peeler. Make sure the clams mostly end up on top of the pasta, facing up.  Move them around with tongs if you need to. Discard any unopened clams.  Garnish with lemon wedges.

This is absolutely delicious…even substituting shrimp for the clams!  Now, as I’ve always said (and learned the hard way awhile back), be sure to read a recipe all the way through before you start.  A recipe is not a mystery novel with a surprise ending!  You don’t want to get caught with your pants down getting ingredients prepared only to then read, “Cover and marinate overnight in the fridge.”  Oops…you’ll be ordering pizza for dinner probably instead.   So when I read about roasting the jalapenos in the oven, I laughed a little.  Is it ridiculous to heat up a whole oven to 400 degrees to just roast four small jalapeno halves?  Answer:  YES.  Does it really make a difference?  YES.  Be sure to take the time to roast the peppers…the flavor would be totally different if they had been just thrown into the saute pan uncooked.  So trust me (and Tom) on this.

Buon appetito!

Well hello again, Food Processor

16 Sunday Oct 2011

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…and time to change it up in fivenineteen land in here a little!  How do you like what I’ve done with the place? 🙂

So it’s that still, grippy grey outside again.  So silent this morning it woke me up.  No wind, no rain, no cars on the road.  Damn, did everyone leave town except me?

And I’ve just about finished up the last of that wonderful Bolognese sauce I made last week.  It keeps beautifully in a Tupperware in the fridge.  This batch went quickly so I won’t likely need to freeze any.  

Now, in last week’s post I made some comment about how I don’t mind the chopping and prep work that you could do in a food processor in a fraction of the time. Maybe I stirred the sleeping beast way deep in the back, top shelf of my pantry.

I must have been craving something completely different for this weekend’s cooking adventure.  I have a pretty decent kitchen, but it’s nowhere near the size or with the open feel that more modern kitchens have today.  Nope, it’s 1980 here in our townhouse complex, and while one of my neighbors did a glorious remodel to open up her kitchen area into a nice great-room flow, the rest of us have not yet pulled the trigger.  I’m glad I at least have a good-sized, open bar counter area on one side which looks into the dining room and a nice bay window and slider which plops out onto my back deck.  So no claustrophobia.  It’s just a small-ish kitchen with not a whole lot of spare countertop space.

And part of that countertop space is a mini-showcase of my beloved cookbooks. The rest are in the pantry…and that pantry is a hodgepodge of well, stuff you normally put in a pantry, my spices, and some cooking gadgets I don’t use super often.  And my hand mixer, a wonderful toaster oven with a mini pizza stone, waffle iron, plastic wrap, tin foil…hmmm, I think this baby is due for a major cleanout.

I took a good, hard look at those cookbooks.  How much have I REALLY used them recently?  The slow cooker recipes, raw “cooking,” vegan, Primal, Italian food, American Southwest…time to pull one off the display and try something different, I told myself.

So I reached for Caprial’s Bistro-Style Cuisine, by Caprial Pence.  (That’s “kuh PREEL” on the first name, by the way.)  I have one of her other cookbooks, and way back in the day (late 1990s) she had a cooking show on our local public TV station, which is how I first found out about her, channel surfing on some lazy weekend afternoon.  Caprial’s signature are recipes that are simple but super chock-full of flavor and come together very quickly, with a big nod to the flavors of Pacific Northwest cooking.

Here’s what I whipped up – it’s chicken with a wonderful, spicy peanut sauce which you can also use on grilled prawns or fish.  The sauce has a good kick but not in a blow-your-head-off way.  Head to the Asian foods section of your grocery store!  And when she says to mix ingredients in a food processor, she means it.  I dug out my 11-cup Cuisinart, blew the dust off and took her for a spin. 

Hot-as-Hell Chicken on Noodles with Peanut Sauce
Serves 4

Peanut Sauce
2 tsp peeled, chopped fresh ginger
2 tsp chopped cilantro
2 cloves garlic
2 fresh jalapeno peppers (whole, stems removed)
1/2 C red wine vinegar
1/2 C soy sauce
1 heaping C creamy peanut butter
2 tsp curry powder
1/4 C honey
2 tsp dark sesame oil

Chicken
1 tsp olive oil
4 (6 oz) chicken breast halves
1/2 C dry sherry
1 C sweet hot chile sauce
1/2 lb dried Chinese egg noodles, cooked al dente and tossed with a dash of vegetable oil
1/2 C dry roasted peanuts or cashews (I used cashews)
3-4 green onions, minced

To prepare the peanut sauce, combine the ginger, cilantro, garlic, jalapenos, vinegar, soy sauce and peanut butter in the bowl of a food processor and process until smooth.  Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the curry powder, honey and sesame oil and process until smooth.  Set aside.

In a very large saute pan, heat the olive oil over high heat until smoking hot.  Put the chicken breasts in the pan and brown them well, about 2 minutes on each side.  Decrease the heat to medium and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes.  Add the sherry, increase the heat to high and cook until about half the sherry remains, 2-3 minutes.  Add the chile sauce and turn the breasts to coat them well. Decrease the heat to low and slowly simmer while you prepare the noodles.

Put the noodles in the pasta insert and set in a pot of boiling water or in the stock pot and cook for about 2 minutes to heat them through.  Strain the cooked noodles and place in a large bowl.  Toss them with 1/2 cup of the peanut sauce and place on a serving platter.  Remove the chicken breasts from the sauce and slice.  Place the chicken slices on the noodles and pour some of the remaining sauce over the top.  Sprinkle with the peanuts or cashews and scallions.  Serve hot.

NOTE:  I had some bowtie pasta lying around and used that instead of egg noodles.  I bet this would be great over rice too. 

Late Night Mid-Week Slow Cookin’…

09 Sunday Oct 2011

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Fall is here!  Even on a rare sunny day like yesterday it felt different.  It’s crispy outside (or soggy if it’s raining).  It’s getting darker a little earlier than it used to and the shadows are long even midday.  I met up with a good friend on the top of the hill here yesterday very spontaneously for a 90 minute brisk walk.  Leaves are starting to turn, and the tall sunflowers in that corner yard we always pass by are now top heavy and tired from their own weight.

So while I always mourn summer as she melts away into fall, I DO love this time of year for the clothes and food.  Time to bust out the sweaters, boots, leather jackets…oh yeah.  And cooking!  Soups!  Stews!

Last year I purchased a slow cooker for the first time.  I remember our Crock Pot as a kid – my Mom made wonderful chicken dishes all the time – and they seem to be coming around in style again.  Kinda like fondue.  Anyway, mine was free actually.  Remember the Refrigerator Drama from last year?  I got a $100 Sears gift card, one of the few bright spots in that whole episode.  So I used it toward a slow cooker.  Very nice, stainless steel, 3 1/2 quart size.  And my folks gave me a Williams-Sonoma slow cooker recipe book for Christmas.  Love it!

And it was time to bust a move with it again.  Last weekend I had 3 lbs of ground beef in my fridge, just a couple days away from use it or freeze it.  I really wanted to make a Bolognese sauce – the cookbook recipe is wonderful – but, being a smart cook, re-read the recipe.  Ah yes, now I remember:  once you make the sauce it needs 4 hours in the slow cooker on high heat or 8 hours on low heat.  Hmmm…how do I cram that into my crazy week schedule?  I know one cool thing about a slow cooker is you can put everything in it in the morning, turn it on low and come home that night from work with your meal ready!  But for some reason I’ve been a little reluctant to do that.  What if I get stuck at work late or in traffic?  I know they shut off to a low simmer once the timer goes off, but anyway I guess I’m not comfortable with something “cooking” in my house when I’m not there. 

Last week definitely was burning the candle at both ends.  Sunday night was our first hockey game of the season!  Woo hoo!  With a 10:45pm faceoff!  Not so woohoo.  But that’s winter season for ya.  It was awesome seeing my teammates again, meeting a couple new faces and getting back on the ice.  I had not skated since around June and frankly have been woefully lame getting regular exercise.  But I actually skated and played a lot better than I thought I would.  And we had an 8-4 blowout win!

There’s something surreal about leaving the rink after a late game. That night, it was midnight.  Luckily this game was at the rink that’s just a 5 minute drive from my house, so no excuses.   Once I get to the rink, especially for a late game, time kind of stops mentally for me, except for our game clock.  I force myself not to look at the “real” clock…nope don’t need to be reminded it’s 11:30pm or whatever!  Crazy.

Now, it’s uber hard to immediately wind down and get to sleep after hockey, as much as I want to/need to, especially on a Sunday night (errr, early Monday I guess).  So that means an extra cup of coffee at work.  Those of you reading this who play hockey or other late night sports know what I’m talking about!

So Sunday night was out for making the sauce.  Onward to Monday.  Well, I didn’t get home as early as I’d thought, and so I got a late start getting the ingredients ready.  There’s a bit of chopping and prep time, plus you need to brown 3 lbs of ground beef and make a little extra sauce with some deglazing.  I honestly don’t mind doing a lot of chopping/prep work by hand.  Yeah, there are these really cool things out there called food processors, and I actually do own a couple – one large, one small – but when it comes to chopping, slicing or dicing relatively small amounts of ingredients, I’m good with my cutting board and a sharp knife.  My Mom says I’m my grandmother’s granddaughter…on my Dad’s side.  Right down to our mutual love of flour sack towels to get those last drops off of pots and pans after they air dry.

Getting the meat, veggies and deglazing sauce ready was all I had time for on Monday.  Even on the high heat setting, 4 hours in the slow cooker would mean finishing up at 1am.  And I just couldn’t do it.  So I put the cooked meat and veggies in a huge Pyrex bowl, poured the deglazed sauce in it, covered it with foil and put it in the fridge.

Tuesday?  Well, that was a night out with my Silpada team.  We meet monthly and normally are at our team leader’s house, but this time we changed it up and met at Purple, a wine bar in downtown Bellevue.  I loved seeing everybody and relaxing with some wine and munchies.  Someone even sprung for a round of salted caramels for dessert.  WOW.  We definitely were the most bling’d out table, and given it was a little noisy we just had a ton of chitchat rather than any kind of organized meeting agenda, and passed around eachother’s jewelry for everyone to try on.  

I got home at 10pm that night.  So that’s a no-go on finishing that darn sauce.

Wednesday night, anyone?  This HAD to be the night to finish.  I thought it would be OK, but a teeny part of me was worried that the sauce would turn out different or weird having been in the fridge for two days.  But, it turned out great.  Kinda weird getting steaming hot sauce to cool down and get divided up into Tupperwares…at midnight.  Ahh, blissful sleep.

So I learned that slow cooking is MUCH better done on a weekend.  Thankfully this sauce keeps beautifully in the fridge or freezer. (This sauce stores up to 3 days in airtight containers in the fridge or in the freezer for up to 3 months).  But it’s soooo good I bet you won’t be able to keep it around that long!

Here’s the recipe!

Bolognese Sauce
Makes about 12 cups (3 quarts)

2 T olive oil
2 oz pancetta, chopped
2 small, finely chopped yellow onions
2 finely chopped carrots
1 stalk finely chopped celery
3 lbs ground beef
2 C beef broth
1 1/2 C dry red wine
1 can (28 oz) crushed or diced plum tomatoes
1/2 C milk
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Fresh Italian leaf parsley, minced for garnish (optional)   

In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, warm the oil.  Add the pancetta and saute until it begins to render its fat, about 1 minute.  Add the onions, carrots and celery and saute until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes.  Add the beef and cook, breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon, until it is no longer red, about 7 minutes.

Transfer to the slow cooker.  Add the broth and wine to the pan and raise the heat to high.  Bring to a boil and deglaze the pan, stirring to scrape up the browned bits on the pan bottom.  Pour the liquid into the slow cooker along with the tomatoes and stir to combine.

Cover and cook the sauce on the high heat setting for 4 hours, or the low heat setting for 8 hours.  Add the milk, stirring to combine.  Cover and continue cooking for 20 minutes longer.  Season with salt and pepper.

…now, how do you use this sauce?  Toss it with some fettucine and sprinkle in fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. 

Or try it with Polenta:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  Butter a gratin baking dish (I actually just use a 9 x 13 glass casserole).  Take a tube of prepared Polenta (18 oz) and slice it crosswise into slices about 1/4″ thick.  Arrange the slices in the bottom of the baking dish, overlapping them.  Spoon the Bolognese sauce around the slices generously and sprinkle a 1/2 cup of fresh-grated Parmesan cheese.  Bake until the sauce is hot and bubbly, about 20 minutes.  Served with minced fresh Italian parsley for garnish.

from the Williams-Sonoma Food Made Fast Slow Cooker Recipes book.

Aside

Ketchup…from Scratch!

29 Sunday May 2011

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Yes, this is for real, everyone.  Why not just grab a bottle and squeeze/pour?  Well, this is a quick and easy recipe with a reduced amount of sugar and no emulsifying gums like the commercial versions.

Keep reading and you’ll see why I did this.

You know, it’s funny how when I get in ‘cooking bender’ weekend moods like this I tend to go with a meat dish.  And for the second episode in a row here, it’s pork.  When I say ‘cooking bender’ I mean I go all out and try a recipe I’ve never done before and enjoy the leftovers. (Thank you, Tupperware, and my freezer).  I really do enjoy cooking and I think I’m pretty good at it, but admittedly when I’m not entertaining and it’s just me on a weeknight after work I fall in a pasta, garlic and pesto or other sauce habit with maybe some shrimp mixed in occasionally.  Perhaps I had a subconscious meat craving going on.

So, this ketchup from scratch is part of a BBQ pork recipe.  It’s a pseudo kind of BBQ…I’m no expert or snob in BBQ sauces but from what I read in this recipe it has a vinegar-y flavor which is North Carolina style – ?  OK, OK.  The flavors are wonderful and I was surprised how this sauce (and the ketchup) all came together pretty quickly.

I got introduced to The Primal Blueprint, a book by Mark Sisson, earlier this year. The theory is that our ancestors, back in our hunter/gatherer years prior to the onset of agriculture, were leaner, stronger and healthier than we are today.  Blame it on whole grains, dairy, sugar, breads, rice, pasta, gluten and even beans.  And, blame it on our sedentary lifestyles too I guess. This way of eating flies in the face of the ‘food pyramid’ that shows grains and breads as the recommended foundation of our modern diets.  Mark’s book flips all of that on its head.  The primal diet is full of meats, seafoods, fowl, fruits and vegetables and is intended as a lifestyle, NOT a quick fix diet.  When I first saw the book’s title I had a visual of some caveman eating raw meat right off the bone, like in the first part of the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey, when the apes discover they now can use a bone as a weapon to kill for meat.  Didn’t sound very appetizing.

But it’s not that way at all obviously.  Stay with me on this ramble, everyone.  Here’s the recipe.  Man, I haven’t even had coffee yet today. 

Yes, there is a Primal Blueprint Cookbook and I highly recommend picking it up.  Mark Sisson and Jennifer Meier co-authored.

Primal Ketchup – makes about 1 1/2 Cups
1 can (6 oz.) tomato paste
2/3 C cider vinegar
1/3 C water
3 T raw honey or pure maple syrup
3 T onion, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp sea salt
1/8 tsp ground Allspice
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp black pepper

Mix all ingredients in a food processor or in a bowl with a handheld blender until smooth.  Add a small amount of water if too thick.  Store in a tightly covered jar in the refrigerator.

That’s it!  Takes just 15 minutes, including prep time.  I fudged a bit and used red wine vinegar.  I’d thrown out the cider vinegar in my pantry because it was about a year past the expiration date – yikes – and when I made a trip to the grocery store I forgot to grab a fresh bottle.  And I used ‘regular’ honey, not raw.  I hardly ever use honey and I didn’t feel like buying another bottle because the one I already had was still pretty full. 

I also didn’t completely mince the onion – I took about 1/3 of a white onion and diced it fairly small.  And I love using minced garlic in a jar – 1/2 tsp is about equivalent to one clove and you won’t notice the difference at all.  My garlic mincer stays pretty dormant in the gadget drawer these days.

Ahhh, my handheld stick blender.  My folks gave me one for Christmas over 15 years ago and it’s an amazing tool.  Great for pureeing peeled tomatoes right in the can to start off your homemade pasta sauces.  And it worked wonderfully in a small glass bowl to make this ketchup.

Now, onto the BBQ pork…Grandma’s Easy BBQ Pork
Serves 8 or more
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F

1 T olive oil or high quality lard
8 pork chops or about 4 pounds of pork shoulder roast.  Use bone-in instead of boneless for the richest tasting sauce
1 small onion, finely chopped
1/2 C of the primal ketchup
1 C water
1/3 C vinegar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp celery seed
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 bay leaf

Brown meat on all sides in fat/oil over medium to medium-high heat in a flame-proof casserole or Dutch oven.  While the meat is browning, combine remaining ingredients and stir to mix well. 

When the meat has browned, remove from heat and pour mixture over the meat.

Cover with lid or foil and bake at 325 degrees F for 1 1/2 hours for chops and about 2 1/2 hours for roast.  Check halfway through the baking time and add a small amount of water if necessary.

Remove bay leaf and transfer the chops or roast onto a warm platter and pour sauce in a gravy boat or pitcher.  Spoon or pour some sauce over the meat to moisten.

See how easy that was?  It’s absolutely delicious.  Now, to make it truly Primal, serve with mashed cauliflower, turnips or parsnips rather than potatoes or rice.  Shredded cabbage would work well here too.

I used a 3 1/2 pound boneless pork shoulder roast and the 2 1/2 hour cooking time was perfect.  I also used plain white vinegar and grey sea salt.

When I first lived on my own and realized I needed to get more confident with my cooking, I purchased a few cookbooks and started reading.  And I read in one that you must read the recipe all the way through before you start.  A recipe is not a mystery novel with a surprise ending.  And this is SO TRUE!  You don’t want to get stuck with your pants down with a recipe intended for dinner that evening and then ‘suddenly’ realize you need to marinate something overnight.  Ugh.

So as I read through the BBQ pork recipe, two words jumped out at me: Dutch oven. I have a lot of great cookware but scratched my head…how in the hell do I not have a Dutch oven?  I have some large sauce pans and some large 6 and 8 quart stockpots for pasta or making soup…what would work here?  Aha.

I went upstairs and found my rarely-used, save-the-day 8 1/2 quart pot.  It’s Calphalon and the old school style, so the handles do not stay cool on the stove…and it’s the original hard anodized style (NOT nonstick).  I found it on amazon.com years ago on a total whim – something like $180 marked down to $15.  And while it’s pretty bulky – it’s wider than it is tall and I have to store it somewhere else than my kitchen – it’s well worth it.

This pot was just deep enough to hold the roast.  Now, browning the roast before baking it was a little tricky, especially since I had to use potholders to hold this large, heavy pot.  I heated up the pan on the stove and swirled olive oil 3 times around it once it was hot.  And I found two meat serving forks and grabbed one in each potholder’d hand, stabbed the roast on each side, and gently lowered it into the hot pan.  I’m glad I had the potholders on because the hot oil did spatter a bit.  

After about 3 or 4 minutes I put the potholders back on again, grabbed the meat forks and gently rotated the roast.  Once I got the hang of it it was a pretty easy process.

The pork can sit covered once it’s out of the oven – I used a large trivet and let it sit on my kitchen counter for a half hour before digging in.  The meat won’t overcook – rather, it will become even more tender.

Buon appetito!