My Hedonistic Superbowl Recipe: Cola Braised Pulled Pork Shoulder with Whiskey Barbeque Sauce, Green Cabbage Slaw and Pickled Red Onions

Posted on 02/05/2011 by Ariel

Perfect for a winter party, I like to make braised pork shoulder for big game days – Super Bowl Sunday, in particular. Pork shoulders are large, inexpensive, and an oft underutilized cut. It is perfect for feeding large groups of people, on a budget, with little effort. You can begin the marinating one or two days in advance, giving the marinade a chance to thoroughly permeate the meat. And, as is often the case with any stew, roast or braised dish, the pork tastes even better a day or two after you have finished making it.

Recipe

Serves 15- 20

Active prep time: 2 hours

Cook time: 8 hours

Pulled Pork and Marinade:

10 pounds bone-in pork shoulder roast – this can be one or two shoulders

1 head of garlic, cloves peeled and crushed.

2 teaspoons celery seed

1 liter cola

1 cup orange juice

½ cup Worcestershire sauce

½ cup apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoon Tabasco sauce

1 orange

1 lemon

Pinch of whole cloves

Salt and pepper

Place pork in large Dutch oven, or any heavy bottom roasting pan. Rub with crushed garlic and celery seeds and season with salt and pepper. Pour next five ingredients into Dutch oven. Squeeze juice of orange and lemon directly into pot, adding the now juiced peels. Cover pot and let meat marinate in the refrigerator overnight – but up to two- turning meat twice to be sure all parts are well coated, and submerged at one point.

Start cooking early in the morning. Remove pork shoulder from refrigerator. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Let the pork and Dutch oven come to room temperature, or at least loose the initial chill from the refrigerator. Place pork into oven for two hours at this temperature.

After two hours, turn oven down to 250 degrees. This is the temperature you will continue to cook pork.

Remove pork from oven and score the skin in a crosshatch pattern. This is the first of many times you should check-in and baste the pork. Avoiding the skin, pour marinate over any exposed parts of the flesh. Do this approximately every hour.

Ovens vary. The goal for this cut of meat is to reach an internal temperature of 190 degrees. At this point the collagen becomes gelatinized, making for a melt in your mouth final product. If you would like to add some crunch to the skin, increase temperature to 400 degrees for the final half hour (or if traveling, upon reheating.)

I remove my pork shoulders after approximately eight hours. Just in time for six pm game time.

Let pork cool slightly. You can remove some of the fat at this point or place whole shoulder on serving platter and shred it with a fork. It will fall off the bone. I like to serve it with bone and skin intact, on the platter, with a small drizzle of barbeque sauce. I give a head start to the shredding, but allow my guests to see choose their pieces of pork, fat and skin, as well as how much barbeque sauce to apply.

While the pork is cooking, I prepare the other elements of this dish.

Pickled Red Onions

2 large red onions, sliced lengthwise

White wine vinegar to cover

A pinch of peppercorns

A pinch of cloves

3 garlic cloves

1 bay leaf.

Slice onions, cover with vinegar, add peppercorns, garlic cloves, cloves, and bay leaf. Mix and chill.

Green Cabbage Slaw:

1 large green cabbage, shredded

1 cup apple cider vinegar

½ c extra virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper.

Quarter cabbage, removing outer leaves and core.

Separate each quarter as you go into two sections. Press sections flat – this will make it easier for you to shred. Using either a mandolin or a knife, shred cabbage diagonally. The thinner you can slice the cabbage the better. Store the cabbage in a large Ziploc bag with a damp paper towel to cover. Refrigerate until you are ready to serve.

To serve, toss cabbage with one cup of vinegar, oil, and a generous amount of pepper. Salt to taste.

Whiskey Barbeque Sauce

3 cups ketchup

1 1/2 cups of cola

1 cup whiskey of choice

1 cup of coffee

¼-½ cup Louisiana hot sauce

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 teaspoon mustard powder

1 teaspoon chili flakes, or to taste

Salt and pepper

Combine all ingredients in a pot and bring to boil. Reduce to a simmer and let cook until reduced slightly. Barbeque sauce should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Add salt, black pepper, and chili flakes to taste.

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Garbage Goes Gourmet: Offal and Weeds

Posted on 04/27/2010 by Ariel

A collection of foods that have been excluded from the American diet but are finding their way back in with star power. Bits of offal – liver, spleen, and hearts from local butcher Jake Dickson of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats and marrow bones from Grazin Angus Acres, a local Grassfed Angus ranch in Ghent, NY are animal parts we rarely think of as food in the US, but are beloved delicacies included within local diets globally.  The weeds – ramps, nettle and chives – were purchased at the Union Square Greenmarket but can still be found in the wild. They are the first green things to arrive after the long winter which may contribute to their appeal, but I would argue that these local weeds are the most delicious foods of spring.

Restautants featuring some of these items on their menus include:

Minetta Tavern, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Prune, Blue Ribbon, Landmarc, Collichio & Sons, Aquavit, Marea, Tabla

and here is the blog I found in my search for what to do with all the pork hearts I now have in my fridge:

http://www.offalgood.com/blog/recipes/delicious-pig-parts

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Monkshood Nursery and Gardens: Born Charismatic and Organic, now leaning toward a Biodynamic future.

Posted on 03/29/2010 by Ariel


How are you?
I am David, forty thousand onions later.
Tell me the story behind the naming of your farm.
I was going to call it something like the nice herb garden at the end of the pathway, or something like that. On the way to the DBA (doing business as) place, I started to think that name did not sound like a business that would be successful, so I came up with Monkshood Nursery, which sounded more legitimate. We started selling vegetables too and added the garden part. We have been Monkshood Nursery and Gardens since 2001.
How has business changed since you began?
We started out as a nursery growing herbs in a greenhouse. Now we have four greenhouses and we produce herbs in the spring, salad pretty much year round, though in January it is a little sketchy, six acres of vegetables, 12 acres for cover crop. We have chickens for eggs and a milk cow. The list goes on. The longer we do this the easier it gets to do the thing we were doing before, but we are always adding a new things to the business and with that we add new challenges.
What are some your specific vegetable challenges?
All of them are their own challenge. Parsnips take three weeks to germinate. Winter squash grows to be thousands and thousands of pounds. You can go out to harvest salad and get fifty pounds of salad. You go out to harvest winter squash and come back with ten thousand pounds of winter squash.
How do you decide what vegetables to grow?
We learn thru experience what people like to eat. So, we grow more of the popular things, and less of the unpopular things. For example, kohlrabi is not very popular at the farmers market so we only grow some of it. Where as carrots, every body wants to have carrots all the time so we grow lots of them, I mean people love kohlrabi, but there has to be an end to it, just like cabbage, everybody likes cabbage to a point, but then after that its like, I don’t want anymore cabbage.
What is the feedback you get from your customers? Read more »

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New York is Finally Free to Bee

Posted on 03/16/2010 by Ariel

If you think bees are something to avoid, then  you might not understand why Section 161.01 which  bans keeping animals that are ”wild, ferocious, fierce, dangerous or naturally inclined to do harm.” being amended to allow bees to be kept within the city is so exciting. Before today, beekeepers in NYC  could be fined  up to $2,000.

To many bees are a mere menace, but it’s the bees and their business that actually make the world go round.

This movie will tell you all you need to know,

http://www.vanishingbees.com/B/Home.html

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jV5awkL0uc8ZccywaSYGPS7visJgD9EFSNF00

in the meantime, mind your bee’s wax. Really!

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On FoodTV and Me

Posted on 03/04/2010 by Ariel

According to its Wiki, the Food Network was founded in 1993, though food television as a genre had been around far longer and was actually a very memorable part of my TV laden childhood, right alongside Bob Ross’s happy trees.

As a child I had a few cartoons that I liked, maybe the Smurfs and a few others,  but what I remember watching was the Frugal Gourmet, Wok with Yan, and of course Julia and Jacques.  I remember scrambling for a note pad to copy down recipes from Regis and Kathy Lee’s cooking segments while home sick and remember my first cookbook being the result of something I saw on a morning show segment.  How to cook popcorn 100 ways, I remember it was a book I just had to have.

I ended up studying art in undergrad, but while attending school got my first food job at a small pasta shop. I worked the cash register but also learned a little in the kitchen, bringing me one step closer to cooking the food.

I ended up switching schools mid-way through undergrad. The move from small town Santa Barbara to San Francisco came with a desire to make more cash. I interviewed for a position as a cook and sold myself based off the fact that I had been watching the food channel for two years straight! The cook, eight months pregnant and needing someone to help her assistant pick up the slack, bought what I was selling, and I got the job.

The rest is a long and winding road I will save for another post  another day but for now I will say thanks, and give blame to the food channel for getting my tong in the door…  Salon ran this with interview with one of my professors on food TV this week,

http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2010/02/26/food_network_krishnendu_ray/index.html

and I agree with much of his observations.  We don’t know enough to say whether food TV is driving people to cook more or less. Considering that food TV had such a role in my involvement with food today, could it be playing that same role in many other peoples lives?  My mother didn’t cook much but her mother did. I learned to cook a bit from my dad but also from TV. If kids don’t know what vegetables look like anymore, because the food they eat comes prepackaged, and prepackaged food is certainly not running the risk of disappearing, is it then safe to say the more food TV the better? At least real food and cooking does not run the risk of becoming a lost art if it is in our faces every day.

While shows that highlight enormous portions or novelty food items  seem to dominate, Alton Brown is still up in there, and I’m sure there are a few others that at least show people the right way to hold a knife, breakdown an onion, roast a whole chicken, make a fresh sauce. These are important things to learn to do. Maybe it’s not boeuf bourguignon, but maybe that’s ok too.

Personally, I dont watch much Food TV, I find it painful and overly cheery. I find Martha Stewart’s cooking segments enjoyable still, she tends to be informative and technical. Anthony Bourdain is fun to follow around the world but every once in a while I land on some off channel cooking show with chefs from other countries really cooking. They are always a bit more droll than American food shows, which is what I prefer,  and they are cooking, really cooking . I’ve never met a chef with a perma-grin that I liked, andIf I liked them I’d probably doubt their culinary skills.

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Mid-Winter Breakfast…

Posted on 03/04/2010 by Ariel

This is the brunch I made this weekend and described in my last post. Would you like to know how to make baked eggs? If so let me know.

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A Can Opening Kind of Weekend

Posted on 02/28/2010 by Ariel

This year I took advantage of the summer bounty and learned to can.  In case you are not familiar, canning at home means preserving food in jars.  In my opinion its an art and one in which I had never dabbled.

I followed my roommates lead,  she had canned before,  and the sage advice found within a dusty copy of the Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking, published 1951.   A farmer friend gave me fifty pounds of cherry tomatoes,  carrots and cucumbers for days, and a restaurants supply of onions, garlic, sage,  and dill.  It seemed like my chance for an oft thought of canning foray.  I would have to buy a few pieces of equipment first.

It is recommended I have all sorts of canning specific utensils but with my well prepared kitchen I believed I could wing it and just buy the pot. The recommended pot is the ubiquitous large black and white flecked aluminum pot. It is called a canner but for me will always be where lobsters took their last breaths. I got a flat of large mason jars as well and hurried home. Every second wasted was freshness not captured within this glass…. or something like that. Culinary experiments excite me.

First step, process fifty pounds local and organic cherry tomatoes  into the most ridiculously sweet reduction. Figure out other food stuff to make in the meantime…. We settled on curried cucumbers and dilly carrots both stuffed with garlic, herbs and whatever else seemed to fit in.

Boil jars to sanitize, fill, remove bubbles,  cover but don’t touch the food or the rims. Boil again for @ a half an hour. Voila, cans. Er, Jars.

Now that’s the short version, of course, and I would seek the advice of a professional (a book, a blog, your grandma…) but its important to note that it was easy (though maybe I will grab some of the cool gadgets recommended next time) and the pay off is tremendous. On this cold February weekend as local root vegetable stockpiles dwindle down, nothing tastes or feels better than a jar of homemade tomato sauce.

Saturday Brunch Menu:

Baked Eggs with 100 Cherry Tomato Sauce

Homemade Pickled Carrots and Horseradish Goat Cheese from Nettle Meadow

served with a Greenhouse Salad Mix from Sang Lee farms.

(We will have to thank the French for this one too, as the process was invented there in 1795, by Nicholas Appert, a chef  determined to win a prize offered by Napoleon for a way to prevent military food supplies from spoiling.)

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Mushrooms, Medicine, and Culinary Magic with Dan Madura

Posted on 02/22/2010 by Ariel

photo credit: Tom Giebel

Dan Madura is the owner of MycoMedicinals, the premier Mushroom distributer of the New York City Greenmarket system. Upon approaching him for this interview, he wanted to clarify that he is not an entrepreneur, but happy to help you anyway he can. If I know anything about good business it’s an attitude like that, along side an exceptional product,  that keeps the customers coming back. Lets see if what Dan has to say helps you through your day. As for me, a few minutes with this man and a bunch or two of his magical mushrooms, is a fix for any ailment.

Tell us what you do?

I grow different varieties of greens, vegetables, and exotic mushrooms.

Does farming run in the family?

We have been farmers for generations.

Where is the farm and how many acres?

Goshen, Warwick and Minisink. My mother had 726 acres. She died last year and my father died this year. We made it thru, but it was hard. We had to divide the farm up amongst the siblings. All together 200 hundred acres were put aside for a bird sanctuary bordering the Wallkill River.

It must have been beautiful growing up there…

Oh yeah, we went fishing, swimming in lakes, trapping, skiing. We didn’t have snowmobiles then.

Do you enjoy coming south, mingling with city folks, selling us mushrooms?

I only come down on Saturday. It is a nice change of pace. You meet your customers. It reinforces what you are doing and why you are doing it. I go in to the city, and then I get back on the farm. I get the best of both worlds.

Are you working right now?

I am always working. I am used to working 100 hours a week. To this day, I work nearly ninety hours a week, maybe a little less in the winter but I love what I do. It is a passion.

I believe it was Jim Rodgers who called farmers the new rock stars, soon to be driving Lamborghini’s. Is that funny to you?

Well the Amish have rock stars and their Lamborghini’s are a horse and carriage. It is all in the interpretation of the mind. My Toyota 4- runner is my Lamborghini. I believe the more you give the more you get. The Hindus believe that too, they call it karma.

Your family farmed, but you started growing mushrooms on your own?

Yes. In 1977 in New York, we could grow lettuce only in the summer. California could grow all year-round and they would flood the market in the summers, lowering prices drastically, forcing us out of business. That was the game for years. I had to find another product. I knew they grew mushrooms in Pennsylvania and not New York. There was no competition. I started with the Portobello.

Why are mushrooms so good for us?

Because of the medicinal properties each contain. The Shitake contain lentinin. The Japanese were the first to use lentinin as a drug. They extract it and give it to people on chemotherapy or with HIV to help build the immune system. The oyster mushrooms have the statin. Statin is a drug they developed in 1987 from oyster mushrooms. It helps control blood pressure and cholesterol. Maitake is considered most powerful. It has the beta glucan, a polysaccharide that is highly anti-carcinogenic, a stress reducer that promotes a general well being of the body and increased immune system functioning. Yogis use maitake in a tea that helps them meditate.

Are mushrooms more powerful fresh or dried?

The maitake requires heat, which is why its good when you make the tea, the beta glucan is a polysaccharide that requires heat to release its full power. If you dry a mushroom, it looses the water weight. It becomes more intense in power and flavor. That is why many chefs take the mushrooms, dry them, and then add to their sauces. The sauces explode with complex flavor, a definite chef secret. I give one chef fresh garlic leaves, and he dries them in his dehydrator and adds it to his food. Different from garlic powder; he uses it the same way. This flavor is real.

No MSG in the dried garlic leaf powder?

Oh god no. I grow everything organically and there are absolutely no chemicals. You can always add your own chemicals later, but you are not going to get them from me.

Are you certified organic?

No. I do not need to go through the bureaucracy, just to have a label. It’s what you are doing that matters. I juice a lot so it is important to me personally that there are no chemicals in the food. I do not want chemicals on my carrots or yours. I guess the commercial guys feel that they have to do it that way. It is harder work to grow organically, but it is important to people, so we do it.

Do you think of your self as an activist?

I am an activist because I am excited about what I do. I believe food should be fresh. When I sell mushrooms to people, I tell them, do not go home, and leave these in your fridge for five days. Unless you are drying them, eat these now. The older the food the more tired you feel the more work your body does to derive the nutrients. Then you age faster. I do not know if they have done a study on that but they should. Compare people who are eating canned stuff with people who are eating fresh stuff and see who is aging faster, who has more diseases, and who goes to the doctor more.

Do you see a growing interest in small local food production?

Oh definitely, people are into the markets. Even in the poor economy. People know the fresher the food you eat, the better you feel and the better you are going to function. It is going to cut your health care costs. You are not going to be paying so much to doctors. I have markets all over the city and talk to all kinds of people. In the end, with over 250 languages in queens alone, when we get to the farmers market we are all communicating. We are all there for a common purpose.  The people in New York are all very grateful, not self-serving. The people of New York are good people. That’s it.

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Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course; There are so many outcomes that are worse.

Posted on 02/14/2010 by Ariel

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

by Wendell Berry from the September 28, 2009 issue of the New Yorker.

(With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe.)

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;

There are so many outcomes that are worse.

But I must add I’m sorry for getting here

By a sustained explosion through the air,

Burning the world in fact to rise much higher

Than we should go. The world may end in fire

As prophesied—our world! We speak of it

As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit

Of temporary progress, digging up

An antique dark-held luster to corrupt

The present light with smokes and smudges, poison

To outlast time and shatter comprehension.

Burning the world to live in it is wrong,

As wrong as to make war to get along

And be at peace, to falsify the land

By sciences of greed, or by demand

For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify

The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.

But why not play it cool? Why not survive

By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?

Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than the summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

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Cayuga in the Field: Local Grain Rising

Posted on 02/04/2010 by Ariel

Is it even possible to grow grains and beans in New York soil? New to the Greenmarket, Cayuga Pure Organics proves the answer is undoubtedly yes. The first vendor selling locally grown grains, beans and flours in New York, Cayuga’s liaison to the world, Tycho Dan talked with me about the business of beans and flour. While I have always considered making bread an art, when the bread baked is made from local Cayuga flour, the creativity starts from the seed.

Tycho, what does Cayuga Pure Organics sell?

Well, we have three categories of products. There are the dry beans, whole grains, and the milled products – polenta, cracked cereals, all-purpose, buckwheat, rye, and whole-wheat flour.

Everything is grown, milled, bagged, and sold in New York State?

Yes, I can confidently say that 99% of the operation is New York based.

Who is the top dog at Cayuga organics? Who’s the boss?

Erick Smith and let me tell you he is the cutest man in existence. You just want to help him out. He is too nice – not a negotiator.

Is that where you come in?

There is a small bunch of us. Erick and Dan are partners. They describe themselves as two old hayseeds about to retire. Then rather than retire they began this organic farm. They combined their old tractor collections, started tinkering around and getting to work. Now they are heroes.

How did they decide to grow organic beans and grains in NY?

Well, I think it was a process, not one conscious decision. The marketplace played a big factor for sure. A very common story is that farmers growing field crops got into conventional corn. Then the corn market fell apart. The bottom fell out and everybody started losing the farm. Growing conventional crops, they could not compete with the big farms. These large farm commodity crops make up ninety percent of agriculture, everything is mechanized, and your average farm is a million acres. Thankfully, New York is a progressive place and was ready for the organic movement to put down its roots. Cayuga Organics is simply a group of smart people who saw an opportunity. That opportunity has begun to pay off.

So there is a collective of growers represented by Cayuga?

Right. It happened quickly. Cayuga is not a cooperative. I think collective is a better word. Cooperative is not the best model for what is happening here. I really think cooperatives require a lot of direct human contact, not just communication but actual physical proximity. Within Cayuga, there are different projects going on. Grant funded or academic projects through Cornell extension and the USDA. Several of our farmers are participating in programs trying to preserve heritage and organic varieties of grains. They are bringing stuff in from the Middle East and Europe, anywhere they can get old strains of grain to propagate here.

How are your products different then what is commonly available?

Well the first thing most people notice about our product when they usually shop in the supermarket is the price difference. I talk about all the good things, but the reality is that the first thing 99 percent of people notice about our products is price.

Read more »

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