From simple picnics of bread and cheese on park benches to Michelin-lauded establishments of the culinary elite, my mother and I ate our way across both the city and the countryside. Through well-laid plans as well as happy coincidences, our meals were shared with old friends from all over the world either living in Paris or happening to travel through the region at the same time.

One of the amazing things about Paris is how easy it is to find incredible food on every corner, from boulangeries to patisseries to shops teeming with foie gras or artisan chocolates.  We started one day at Sainte-Chappelle on Ile de la Cite, a popular tourist destination that was completely worth the wait…

and then proceeded to visit another the spectacular sight of Paris – the fromagerie.

This shop, on Ile-St-Louis, featured a front window display teeming with chevre of all shapes and sizes.  Some looked like moldy grey logs, others like newly hatched dinosaur eggs, others like petrified stones or lumpy balls of grout scraped off your shower tiles.  But the inside…smooth and creamy and bursting with earthy, grassy flavour.

That’s some French chevre, up close and personal. Best to be eaten in a small park behind Notre Dame with some paté from the bucherie, a fresh baguette from the boulangerie, and rhubarb nectar from the gourmet shop round the corner.

Our massive picnic on the Seine unfortunately left us too full to sample the wares of the street market behind the Hotel de Ville. But next time I’m definitely going back for these potatoes, which are probably fried in goose fat or sausage lard or something equally naughty and French.

To contrast with the steaming hot, oil-splattering grease bombs above were gorgeously speckled beans…

…thick stalks of white asparagus and tiny bitty shoots of what I think is wild baby asparagus on the right, like something you’d find in a field and mistake for a weed rather than a perfect little bite of springtime.

I was curious as to how it would taste, and was lucky enough to get a chance to eat some later that evening, at one of the best meals of my life…

More France to come!

It might just be the best bread in the world.  A warm, soft, tantalizingly nutty sesame loaf, fresh from the ovens just after 5pm…

…or one of THREE enormous olive loaves purchased in one go later that weekend.  I want to go olive spelunking in caverns and crevasses of doughiness.

Phenomenal with a large splosh of fresh ricotta cheese, liberally doused with several large gloops of good olive oil, a spritz of freshly ground pepper and a HIYAAAA of kosher salt.

Spectacular with an assortment of cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery…a punchy, saucy blue, the ever-orgasmic ash-striped Humboldt Fog, and a half moon of triple cream.  Because double cream isn’t good enough and single cream is just preposterous.

I can think of fewer recipes for happiness than Tartine bread + Cowgirl Creamery cheese + good friends + bottles of wine.

Just don’t expect to eat any of your delicious dinner afterwards.  Way to go on the triple olive bread and the triple cream, Steph and Lex. The Lawrence sisters, like the Li sisters, most definitely how to eat.

We promised pig photos, and pig photos you’re going to get. Be forewarned though; spit roasting a 50 lb pig in the backyard is not exactly a pretty process, although it ends in lots of happy deliciousness. If you’re squeamish about meat, weird animal parts, nose-to-tail eating, or happen to be (gasp!) vegetarian…you probably shouldn’t click the button below. But if you’re curious about how to roast your own whole pig on a bed of charcoal in your backyard, then choose the blue pill and take the plunge into our carnivorous world…

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

7am: Above we have big brother Andy, hero of the day for sourcing the pig from his restaurant, Harvest.  Andy also hooked up the motorized spit rental, essential for a day’s worth of slow roasting.  Andy made it all happen, but the center of attention all day was assuredly Antonio the pig.

Over the course of the day, we got better and better acquainted with Antonio.

8am: We prepare Antonio for salt, pepper, and olive oil.

Antonio manages to be a little bit cute and grotesque at the same time, stirring up within us twinges of sadness, appreciation, squeamishness, maybe even guilt. But we know that Antonio lived a good life, and we know he will be extremely tasty after hours of slow-roasting, and so we begin scoring the skin in 1/2 inch lines with a pocket knife for crackling.

Daniel graciously removes the eyeballs, because really, they’re too gross, even for us.

They are not, however, too gross to take creepy photos with.

We remove various things from Antonio’s cavity.

We replace them with apples, red onions, and butter.

We rub Antonio down with aforementioned ingredients, plus some wine, cider, and and more butter. Because everyone likes butter, even Antonio.

9am: We put Antonio on the roasting apparatus.

He starts to brown and crackle juuuust the tiniest bit. Our stomachs start to howl.

10am-2pm: Antonio gets progressively browner, but is still rather undercooked on the inside. Daniel loyally applies love and butter sauce to the roasting process.

Our guests, once arrived, congregate around Antonio. He’s a conversation piece. He’s better than TV.

3pm-ish: It’s about time to eat, but Antonio still isn’t quite done, so we cut off some crackling to pass around. It’s insanely good.

4pm: We declare Antonio thoroughly roasted, and begin dismantle him in the middle of the party.

His tongue/face region are particularly creepy. Sorry.

People tell Irene that she shouldn’t be working so hard at her own birthday party – it seems they don’t understand that this is the kind of thing she does for fun.

Finally, the roast is served: we honor Antonio with sandwich rolls, hoisin sauce, spicy mustard, and homemade pickles.

We spent the next few hours cleaning up, and making preparations for pork shi fan, pork soup, beer braised pork, red wine stewed pork with fresh linguine, pork and collard green stuffed ravioli, and even more pork sandwiches. Antonio’s head is still in the fridge.

Thanks to all for joining us on this epic journey of pork and delight! What will we roast at the next party? Suggestions so far include goat, lamb, four and twenty blackbirds, and a baker’s dozen of ducks. Honestly though, we’d be happy to just eat Antonio all over again.

It was a grand occasion in the Li family household on Sunday for an epic once-in-a-lifetime event: the 150th birthday party! Once-in-three-lifetimes, to be exact – it was a springtime celebration of our mom’s 60th birthday, Irene’s upcoming 20th birthday, and our dad’s upcoming 70th. Obviously, 60+20+70 = BADASS PARTY TIME. And no badass party would be complete without roasting a 50 lb pig in the backyard.  Or grilling a 30 lb fish. Or baking 10 desserts, including 4 crack pies. Or making 3 kinds of homemade pickles. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of beef brisket, pulled chicken, barbecued ribs, sweet potatoes, mac & cheese, three bean salad, collard greens, and sandwich rolls from Lester’s Barbecue and three sheet trays of cornbread from Andy’s restaurant Harvest.  And an accompanying approximately 20 cubic feet of alcohol. How else would you celebrate such a once-in-three-lifetimes occasion?

By the way, the top photo and a few others below were taken by our awesome cousin Justin who rolled up from New York for the party. You can see some of his other party and guest photos here. Thanks Justin!

Now back to the food. Let’s start with the reason that big brother Andy rolled up at 7am with a rented mechanical spit roaster: Antonio the simultaneously adorable and grotesque but ultimately super delicious pig.  We’re doing a separate post covering all the pig roasting action complete with some oh-that’s-amazing photos and some oh-god-that’s-creepy -and-disgusting photos, so we’ll keep it low-key for this party overview.  Although no party utlilizing over 16 sticks of butter can really be called low key. Here’s Andy, Daniel, cousins Tyler and Josh, and friends David and Joyce admiring Antonio as he slowly rotates over a bed of charcoal.

By the way, we’re not entirely sure this setup was legal. Don’t tell, or you won’t get invited over for delicious pork sandwiches topped with spicy mustard, hoisin sauce, and homemade carrot, red onion, and cucumber pickles.

For a lusciously closeup view of the pickles, look no further. We’ll post the incredibly easy recipe soon. You’ll be spearing these refreshingly zesty pickled bits of goodness onto everything you eat in no time.

However, despite being the center of attention at the party, Antonio was only a tiny percentage of the available food bounty at the party. He only barely outweighed Tyrone, the enormous striped bass that Irene and I could barely hold up ourselves.

We stuffed Tyrone’s gaping pink belly with soy sauce-soaked smashed garlic, scallions, and ginger. I would like to be stuffed and marinated like so when I go.

Then we wrapped him up in a cozy burrito of banana leaves and took silly photos.

Then we rolled him in tin foil and tossed him onto the grill. He came out looking like this.

And eventually like this.

Tyrone was simply enormous. Which is what we’re going to look like after we finish the leftovers. There weren’t too many dessert leftovers though, which is what happens when you make red velvet birthday cake with cream cheese frosting (cream cheese+ butter+powdered sugar+ vanilla+ heavy cream = OH HOT DAMN) and Christina Tosi from Momofuku’s crack pies. Let’s just take a few looks at these insanely addictive, ridiculously rich, burnished golden pecan-pie-without-the-pecan circles of beauty. Let’s ogle from the top…

…and from the side, with berries…

…and surrounded by luscious pale yellow sponges of light and moist grapefruit yogurt cake.

Here are Irene and Daniel with cousin Tyler taking a quick break from the dessert table. But only a quick one.

We made sure to stay well hydrated too. Best way to do that is by sticking close to the large crystal bowl of sangria.

Or by this lovely pot of tea.

All in all, it was an absolutely wonderful day of friends, family, and food food food. We had loved ones come from as close as next door and as far away as New York, Chicago, and Hawaii. The final attendee list probably totaled around 70 people or so, but the house is still filled with enough leftovers to feed an army. Of  T-rexes.  Who haven’t eaten since the Pleistocene Era.

Luckily we’ve got plans for the leftovers. Once we’ve recovered from the food coma….

…which just might take another 150 years.

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you know quite well that Irene and I have a bit of a thing for David Chang and his small East Village Momofuku restaurant empire.  The cookbook has been bedtime reading for both of us as well as the source of three or four or maybe eight dishes over the past few weeks. I’m almost glad I left the book back in Boston with Andy (it was ostensibly his Christmas gift anyway) because things were getting a bit out of hand.

I first ate at Momofuku Noodle Bar in its initial tiny incarnation about four years ago and felt a pressing and insistent desire to return after finishing the cookbook.  Luckily I was leaving for New York the next day, so less than 24 hours later I found myself alongside devoted noodle fans Lexi and Rachel, hunkered down over steamed buns glistening with fatty pork belly, pungent and slippery ginger and scallion noodles, and a steaming hot porky bowl of classic Momofuku ramen that I could now recreate if I had a ridiculous amount of time and an even more ridiculous amount of pork.

(An aside: I’ll be honest, we actually tried to go to Ippudo first, but 90-105 minutes is too long to wait on an empty stomach, even for what some consider to be the best ramen in New York.  Frank Bruni’s NYT review on their ramen includes some of my favorite food writing ever, particularly the first four paragraphs which are so descriptive and poetic and so perfectly true: ‘The taste of ramen isn’t just layered and complex; it’s almost murky, but a good murky, an enthralling murky, the kind of murky in which greedy eaters contentedly lose their way.’ Rarely has any food writing made me quite so insistently crave anything so viscerally and immediately as Bruni on ramen. Which reminds me that I’m really hungry for ramen, right now).

But I was only the tiniest bit sad to walk away from Ippudo because it meant I could taste more of Momofuku with a deeper understanding of the dishes and the impetus/inspiration/happy accidents behind their creation.  Speaking of inspiration and happy accidents, the supposed topic of this post  – a last-minute-invention dish of miso butter scallops – owes its existence to both. Momofuku gets props for the inspiration and the lack of clams at Whole Foods deserves credit for the resulting purchase of local Gloucester wild-caught scallops instead.  Chang’s recipe for scallops in kohlrabi puree using an entire stick of butter got transformed into this recipe using slightly less miso butter which adds a rich warmth to the fresh scallops.

Miso Butter Scallops

This recipe’s pretty simple.

What You Need:

A bunch of good quality, fresh, ideally diver caught scallops (less destructive to the ocean environment)

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp white miso paste

A splash of vegetable or grapeseed oil – something neutral tasting

What You Do:

1. Combine the butter and miso and mix thoroughly to get miso butter.  You should probably make extra because you’re going to want to slather it on everything you can possibly think of. Like your face.

2. Heat a neutral oil in a frying pan and once the oil is hot, place the scallops in the pan and press down to ensure full contact with the pan.

3. After two minutes, the bottoms of the scallops should be lightly browning, at which point you pour the miso butter into the pan and let it melt. Tip the pan towards you to collect the melted butter in a spoon and then pour it over the scallops to baste.

4. Let the scallops cook until you have a nice browned bottom, at which point they still may have a hint of translucence but the scallops should be warmed through. I like scallops barely cooked, but you can also flip them and cook for a minute or two on the other side if you want. Overcooked scallops are like rubbery

5. Serve over roasted brussels sprouts – wack ‘em in the oven with olive oil, salt and pepper until they brown and crisp up.

Thanks Momofuku. I’ll see you soon, even if I have to fly around the world to do it.

One of the best things about being home at my parent’s house is the likelihood that any given moment – approximately 89.75% of the time – the Bean and I can walk into the kitchen and there will be delicious Chinese food cooking.  Yep. It’s pretty sweet.  There’s a lovely Chinese couple, Jenny and Don,  living there who help our Dad around the house and also cook tummy filling and seemingly effortless and homestyle Chinese food.

Quite often these dishes are aesthetically pleasing and easily replicable, like the black tea and spice glazed eggs above.

Other times, these dishes are neither easy to prepare nor particularly attractive…

Unless you have a thing for chicken heads.  Don’t let the head or feet scare you off though…soy sauce chicken is seriously delicious.

Another time I walked into the kitchen and encountered this disturbingly phallic item. Not quite as tasty,  but certainly an excellent source of gleefully immature amusement.

Who knew marinated and simmered pig’s tails could inspire so many Lorena Bobbitt jokes? But enough of this edible exotic titillation. Back to the black tea and spice eggs.  We’ll stick with the less intense preparations for now. Tea eggs are incredibly simple to make and beautifully glazed like old pottery.  I love the cracked glass spiderweb of tea and spice flavor threads patterned against the organic form of the smooth and shining egg white.

There are a few more complicated versions of this recipe out there, but this one is nice and easy.  We could claim it’s because we value simplicity and the beauty of uncomplicated recipes, but it’s really because Irene’s Chinese skills   skills were limited to comprehending the major components as explained by Jenny. Which is not to say that Mei’s are any better. In fact, if Mei’s level of Chinese language skill corresponded to this tea egg recipe, Irene’s abilities would be a ten-course Imperial Banquet. So here’s our best explanation, but don’t worry. It’s pretty hard to screw up.

The Simplest Chinese Tea-Glazed Eggs

What You Need:

A bunch of eggs

A few tablespoons of Chinese black tea leaves ideally, or a few black tea bags.

A few whole star anise flowers

About a 1/2 cup of soy sauce

What You Do:

1.  Boil the eggs in just enough water to cover the eggs for 2-3 minutes, just enough to set the eggs.

2. Remove the eggs from the water and run under cold water or place in a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking and cool them enough to not burn your hands off.

3. Use the back of a large spoon to crack the shell all over the eggs.

4.  Once the shells are cracked, place the eggs back in the water and add the rest of the ingredients and boil for about 3 hours. The longer you leave the eggs, the darker the glazed lines and the saltier the taste.

You can slice and put the eggs on top of noodles or salad, make into an interesting egg sandwich, or just eat straight.  We wouldn’t blame you.

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/01/11/the-family-styles-holiday-eating-escapades-part-three-chinese-home-cooking-and-tea-glazed-eggs/feed/ 0 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/01/10/the-family-styles-holiday-eating-escapades-part-two-the-wake-and-bake/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/01/10/the-family-styles-holiday-eating-escapades-part-two-the-wake-and-bake/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 05:24:54 +0000 mei http://familystyles.wordpress.com/?p=2594

I am a gloriously productive person every time I return to the States. Blessed with a five-hour time difference from London, I arise at the I-do-lots-of-useful-and-important-things hour of 7am (a time of day I am generally unacquainted with, especially on vacation) and…I do lots of useful and important things.  Like bake lots of focaccia.

Okay, so obviously this is a relative usage of the words ‘useful’ and important’.'  But I do consider baking to be a valuable activity, particularly so over the holidays when the day’s activities consist primarily of getting together with family and eating, meeting up with friends and eating, catching up with old family friends and eating…you get the picture.  In such a gastronomically focused time, baking and other food production techniques grow to paramount importance.

Thus, I present to you the newest addition to my useful brunch party repertoire: The Wake and Bake Eggs. Simple, cheap, non-labor intensive, adaptable, and basically idiotproof.

At the beginning, with all this  unexpected morning time at my disposal, I enjoyed baking complicated dessert productions like the Orange Almond Coriander Polenta Cake from the most recent Rambling Restaurant dinner and the Carrot and Walnut Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting from the glossy and gorgeous Ottolenghi cookbook.

But other times, especially when you’ve got a whole group of people coming over and have multiple other dishes to prepare, it’s great to have a dish you can put together with little effort and little time. Hence, the baked eggs, which I know sounds gross to a lot of people – yes, I’ve seen your faces when I mention it – but it’s oh so easy and delicious and perfect for when you start adjusting to a new time zone and are no longer quite so gloriously productive before noon.

It’s also excellent for when you’ve got 10 people coming over for brunch and you don’t want to have to worry about the timing of scrambled or the production of poaching or the mess of frying for every single person. Also, baked eggs means one pan for extreme ease of dishwashing. Unless you happen to own an attractive selection of individually portioned ramekins, in  which case I am one-quarter disdainful of your arsenal of random and rarely used kitchen items and three-quarters seriously jealous.

Wakey Wakey Eggs and Bakey aka Baked Eggs In Tomato Sauce With Cheese

What You Need:

8 eggs or however many you plan to eat. At least 1 per person.

1 large can crushed tomatoes, 1 large can whole tomatoes (I like to chop a can of whole tomatoes to get more texture, but you can use all crushed if you’re lazy. If you’ve got fresh tomatoes, toss those in too).

1/2 cup shredded cheese – parmesan is great, I used a really tasty Parmesan/Asiago/Fontina blend

Chopped herbs – I used chives, thyme, chervil and tarragon, but only because they were already in the fridge.

What You Do:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 while you dice the canned or fresh whole tomatoes and pour them into a roasting pan with

the crushed tomatoes.

2. Crack the eggs into the pan like so:

3. Sprinkle the top with herbs and cheese.

4. Stick it into the oven and wait. Depending on whether you like your eggs soft and runny or hard and firm, could be anywhere from 10-15 minutes or so. Poke a fork into the yolks to test every so often until the eggs have reached your happy level of doneness.  I like runny oozy yolks for prime egg and tomato mixing on just-baked bread.

5. Scoop out an egg for everyone. Dip bread into the hot cheesy tomato sauce. Gloat that you don’t have to stand in front of the stove doing individual eggs for all 10 of your friends.  Well done you.

I highly recommend serving alongside the reverse color spotted Cherry Tomato and Roasted Garlic Focaccia.

Nothing like a good wake and bake to celebrate the holidays…

1. Obsessive playing of video games (this year it’s Dr. Mario).

2. Multiple rounds of board games (Settlers of Catan, Bananagrams, what have you).

3. Repeated watching of cute things involving babies on the Interwebs (seriously, go watch this).

and, obviously,

4.  A sick amount of cooking. And not just regular cooking. Wake-up-at-7am-and-start-baking-style of cooking.  Make-a-new-kind-of-cake-every-day-style of cooking. Take-24-hours-to-make-fried-chicken-style of cooking. In short, Family Styles cooking.

Hey, it’s the holidays. What else do we have to do?

So here’s what we did. Let’s start off with the chicken. Biggest props go to the Bean for the most laborious, complicated preparation of  Brined-Steamed-Dessicated-and-Deep-Fried-then-Rolled In Special Sauce Chicken from the Momofuku cookbook. Talk about an insanely delicious masterpiece of crispiness. She found the recipe online and spent the first day brining several chickens in multiple plastic bags in the fridge and then steaming them in multiple batches.

Yeah, I know it looks kinda gross, but just wait till it gets deep fried. She then cooled them overnight to dessicate the skin so when the chicken hits the oil, it doesn’t take as long to crisp up the dried skin.  Once deep frying time came around (always an eventful moment in our kitchen), the Bean rigged a Macgyver-style candy thermometer setup using a bobby pin to monitor the boiling oil. I kid you not. It is not pictured though. Sorry.

Then it’s time for a quick dip in the boiling oil. The genius of this extremely labor-intensive process is that the pre-cooked chicken and carefully dessicated skin makes for super short frying time and no danger of overcooking the outside in order to make sure you don’t get raw chicken on the inside.  Plus the skin is thin and incredibly crispy without a thick layer of gross breading and flabby skin. Amazing.

Yup. Tasty time. The chicken by itself was already an amazing bite of oily, crunchy, golden perfection. But to keep things exciting (and add another level of complication to the whole business), Irene meticulously sliced and diced up an Asian vinaigrette with about a dozen ingredients. Jalapeno, garlic, ginger, hot sauce, soy sauce, corn oil, sesame oil, black vinegar, rice vinegar, etc etc = OH HOLLER YOU ARE A WALLOP OF SPICY TANGY NUTTY SALTY YUM.

Stop, drop, and roll. Then fall to your feet in appreciation. This fried chicken is that good, people. Thank you to the inspired brilliance of David Chang and the culinary dedication of my sister. I love you both.

P.S.  If you want to recreate this madness, the recipe is here (in PDF) from TimeOut via the awesome Inuyaki blog.  Or in the Momofuku cookbook. Which I don’t own, but hopefully will someday.

P.P.S. I am still accepting Christmas presents.

This beauty right here is a kahlua pumpkin pie with a latte-art-esque design in heavy cream, courtesy mostly of one Daniel Bartholomew. We made sure to use real pumpkin (boiled it ourselves and all) and plenty of cream. Just to be safe.

Mei and I put together our classic cranberry orange relish. Behold the food-processed twin delights of pithy, zesty orange and tart, bright cranberry.

Ridiculously delicious and moist cheddar scallion scones that we baked in a toaster oven. A toaster oven, people!

Here’s our beautiful turkey from McDonald Farm in the New York Finger Lakes region, where Peter McDonald and the family practice restorative agriculture to produce clean food. Daniel and I picked it up on our way home to Boston; Peter was kind enough to leave his family dinner to take us out back to a refrigerated shipping container and bequeath 22 lb. Samson the Turkey upon us.

Samson rested in the sink in a bag full of oranges, shallots, garlic, salt and sugar, while we clear out a couple square feet of refrigerator space for the brining process.

Our mother Elaine used a good sharp knife and some protective wintersport goggles to slice onions. That slightly crazed look in her eyes and smile on her face simply demonstrates that zeal for food and cooking runs in the family.

I learned a few months ago how to properly slice onions, so as you may imagine I and my bedhead had lots of fun with cubing this lovely loaf of bread.

Roasted brussels sprouts and creamed chard.

A full plate of roasted turkey, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, bacon leek and mushroom stuffing, creamed chard, roasted brussels sprouts, candied yams, cheddar and scallion scone, and cranberry orange relish.

Stayed tuned for photodocumentation of me and the gang completing my other resolutions: roasting a whole pig, making venison jerky, opening up our Ithacan dinner party club… you get the idea.

Since the mere reading of the recipe made my stomach grumble with longing, we decided to make the pork shoulder for three consecutive Rambling Restaurant suppers. After a day’s worth of roasting, you pry apart the brittle outer shell of crackling and dig through a shuddering layer of burning hot pork fat to find the most perfect, tender, juicy, falls-apart-with-the-tug-of-a-fork meat. Shredded with two dueling forks and bathed in an impromptu soy-hoisin-chili-garlic-leftover spring roll dipping sauce mixture, we had guests raving that it was the best pulled pork they’d ever tasted.  And so I recreated it for my family back home in Boston, introducing them to the joy that is garlic and spice-rubbed, high heat-blasted pig skin.  Here’s the recipe so you can do it yourself, very very slightly adapted from Hugh F-W’s recipe in ingredients and time, should you decide at lunch that pork shoulder is essential for dinner, without quite enough time to ‘fuhgeddaboutit.’

Ridiculously Delicious Roast Pork Shoulder With Crackling

What You Need:

A large hunk of pork shoulder with skin – mine was about 8 pounds and fed 8 people
Five cloves of smashed garlic
A thumbsize piece of peeled ginger, if you had impressively large thumbs
1 tbsp chili flakes
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tbsp Chinese five-spice
4 tbsp salt
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tsp white pepper
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp soy sauce

Also helpful if you want gravy:

Stock (in a perfect and happy world,  freshly homemade from the carcass of the ever-giving Samson the Turkey of the previous day’s Thanksgiving extravaganza)
A few shakes of flour
Soy sauce
Red Wine
Chili Sauce

What You Do:

1. Take a very sharp knife and score the pork skin into parallel lines about a centimeter apart, which means attempting the slightly awkward process of cutting into the skin deep enough to reach the fat but not so deep to cut into the meat. It feels sort of wrong,  but it will make you happy in about six hours when you have crackling in hand.

2. Dice the garlic and ginger and mix with the spices and liquids to form a chunky paste. I did this by hand, but even better if you’ve got a mortar and pestle.

3. Give the skin side of the pork a nice deep tissue massage with half of the tasty paste, then place it skin-side up on a rack in a roasting tray. Then you can make tasty gravy with the meat juices below.  Blast the meat for half an hour at 450º.

4. After what Hugh F-W calls the ‘half-hour sizzle’, grab a pair of oven mitts and flip over the shoulder. If you have the ability, it is particularly amusing to make your little sister stand by the oven holding the scorchingly hot hunk of heavy meat while you do something, I can’t remember what. Once you allow her to put the meat back in the tray upside down, rub the other side with the rest of the, um, rub.  In case you have no common sense, I will remind you not to do this with your bare hands and to use a wooden spoon instead.

5.   Pour a glass of water into the roasting tray, bring the temperature down to 300º and leave the meat to slowly increase in tastiness for about six hours. Adjust temperature accordingly depending on how much time you have – Hugh F-W does 16-24 hours at 110º, I increased the heat because I only had 6 hours instead of overnight. If you’re not sure, just make sure the internal temp is at least 165º before pulling the shoulder from the oven. Regardless of cooking time, flip and baste the meat halfway through.

6. About 45 minutes before you’re ready to eat, turn  the heat back up to 450º to get your crackling all crispety crunchety.

7.  When the meat is done and cooling, you can make a quick and meaty gravy by heating some of the pork fat from the roasting tray and whisking with a few shakes of flour to make a roux. Then pour in the rest of the pan drippings, stock, some soy sauce, a bit of chili sauce, some red wine, whatever you’ve got around that tastes good.  The sauce will thicken and become awesome.

8. Eat pork, audaciously bathed in prodigious amounts of spicy, meaty sauce. Allow to melt into mouth. Crunch into a few happy little strips of crackling. Serve, if at all possible, with leftover stuffing/mashed potatoes/cheddar and scallion scones/homemade bread and finish off with leftover pie. Feed (and impress) your whole family with pork and happiness. Oh, how I love the holidays…