Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder

This, my friends, is about 5 pounds of slow-roasted pork shoulder. Harry did a great job of hand-pulling the meat and now it's ready for a variety of recipes - or just nibbling on it until dinner is ready!

When we find a great deal on a huge piece of meat, we can't pass it up. While we would prefer to smoke it, Harry's cooking hours are severely limited. That doesn't mean I can't have juicy, tender pulled pork that I can use in ways other than sandwiches.

I like to keep slow-roasted pork in the freezer for a quick start to a meal. We use it in a lot of our Asian-inspired dishes such as Hot & Sour Soup or stir-fry. It's super-easy to make a quick Pork Fried Rice when all I have to do is chop the meat. When we roast the pork, I also get a large amount of pork broth that I can use to make pork & noodles or simple open-faced pork sandwiches smothered in gravy.

The prep work for the pork takes about as long as it takes for your oven to preheat to 250 degrees. Low and slow is required to keep the shoulder from drying out. Someday, when I plan far enough ahead, I'd like to experiment with oven-smoking.

The rub for this pork shoulder is simple. We started with close to seven pounds of raw meat (bone-in), so I went a little light with the rub. In a small bowl, combine 1 tablespoon of sage, 1 teaspoon each of Kosher salt, granulated garlic and ground black pepper, and one-half of a teaspoon of paprika.

You can see that I didn't build up a crust on the pork, but rather a nice, light seasoning. You don't want to mask the flavor of the pork by going too heavy with the rub. Add about a half-cup of water or beer, cover the pan with foil, and walk away for about 6 hours. Do the laundry. Clean the bathroom. Sit on the porch with cocktails and watch the clouds pass by.

I never peek before the pork shoulder has been roasting for at least 6 hours - constant checking will allow the moisture to escape. Since we will remove the fat when we pull the pork, I'm not concerned with getting a crispy crust. You want the pork to test at at least 180 degrees Fahrenheit before you remove it. I've gotten distracted and let it go to about 200 degrees without losing any flavor or tenderness.

Once the pork has cooled enough to handle, you can use your clean hands or a pair of forks to pull the meat from the bone. Package the cooled pork and freeze for later use. OR - mix up a batch of it with your favorite barbecue sauce for sandwiches immediately - do NOT forget the dill pickle slices. They are very important.

Harry's Mom's Meatloaf

For some people, meatloaf is boring but for many households, it's a fairly easy go-to dinner when time is tight. We we make meatloaf, it's always two loaves - Harry loves sandwiches and sometimes, we don't even eat it for dinner but make it specifically for meatloaf sammies.

I love my mom's meatloaf - when she makes it. Mine never turned out the same for some reason. I failed HUGE with a meatloaf recipe in 1984 that caused my then-husband to turn green at the slightest mention of meatloaf for dinner. OK, ok, the sausage wasn't quite as thawed as it should have been and that was long before I learned the joys of a digital thermometer. When Harry and I started The Wright Taste, my ex-mother-in-law - more than 20 years after the fact - chirped "You can't even make a meatloaf and you expect people to buy food from you?"

Harry wasn't, in general, a fan of his mother's cooking. We both have memories of the same general meals and these days, I'm not a fan of the way my mom cooked a lot of things when I was a kid. I still loved them - the only place I'll eat Ragu on my spaghetti is when Mom makes it - it's kind of hard to explain. And I STILL can't get my Boiled Dinner (corned beef and cabbage) to come out the same way Mom does, even if we buy the same brand of corned beef at the same time!

But Harry did like his mom's meatloaf and the first time he showed me the recipe, I thought "ICK!" But, this is the best meatloaf recipe I've ever tried. It's never dry and it's the perfect sandwich meatloaf - it doesn't get crumbly when you slice it and it also freezes beautifully.

This is the "normal" recipe - plenty for dinner for six plus leftover for sandwiches. Save yourself a little time and double the recipe. Freeze one loaf whole to heat for another dinner or freeze it in slices for sandwiches later. I don't know where Mrs. W got the recipe but since Harry was eating this as a kid in the late 50's, early 60s, I don't stand a chance of tracking down the original source.

Harry's Mom's Meatloaf

2 pounds ground chuck
1 cup plain bread crumbs
1 can evaporated milk
3 tablespoons ketchup
2 tablespoons dried minced onion
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon granulated garlic
1 teaspoon Frank's Red Hot
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine the evaporated milk, ketchup, dried minced onion, eggs, granulated garlic, Frank's and salt. Mix it well and set aside. In a large bowl, combine the ground chuck with the bread crumbs - take your time to work all the crumbs into the meat.

Now is when it will get really messy: Have Harry pour the liquid mixture into the ground beef mixture. As you squeeze the liquid into the meat, it will originally appear to be very soupy. Mix it with your hands until the liquid and meat are well-combined, then allow to rest for five minutes. The resting time will give the bread crumbs time to absorb the moisture, so it's possible to form it into loaves.

Add the cooled melted butter and mix well. Now it's time to shape your meat loaf. Only shape it into two loaves if you have doubled the recipe.

This is where I deviate from Harry's mom's recipe: I love ketchup baked onto my meatloaf. Harry's mom always covered it with American cheese slices - the choice is yours.

Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees for about an hour. I check the temp and try to keep it between 170 and 180 degrees inside.

Remove from oven and let rest for five minutes. Then, remove to a serving platter (to get it out of the grease), cover with foil and allow to stand for another 10 minutes - this will help the meatloaf "stiffen up" so that it's easier to cut without crumbling.

Spaghetti Sauce by the Gallon!

I love to cook but sometimes we're a little short on time. I love stocking the freezer with the good stuff so we don't fall back on mass-produced crap or think we have to pick up fast food. Double-duty cooking means you take a few extra minutes when preparing one meal to make enough for a second or more.

Hopefully, we'll have luck with growing our tomatoes and maybe score a deal like we did last year. Harry got an amazing price on about 120 pounds of tomatoes from a vendor at the Pataskala Farmers Market in August - $25. I turned most of it into Bloody Mary Mix but also made a couple of quarts of tomato sauce and froze some tomatoes after I peeled and seeded them. They were so good this winter but I'm completely out.

I'm already planning to make this sauce when the tomatoes come in and popping it in the freezer. If you aren't adventurous enough to start from fresh tomatoes, this version of spaghetti sauce uses the canned variety. Quit paying Ragu and Prego and whatever other companies are out there. Homemade spaghetti sauce is a breeze to make. My version makes one gallon for about $5 - how many meals will that make for your family?

Yeah, there's steam coming off of the onions, shallots and garlic. I forgot to take a picture when I used the red wine vinegar to deglaze the pan. Deglazing gets the yummy bits off of the bottom. Be careful to not scorch the garlic.

Here's the spices - seems like such a small amount for so much sauce. Do you know how hard it was for me to actually measure something while I wasn't baking?

After you add the tomatoes and the tomato sauce, throw in the spices. Stir it up, bring to a simmer and leave it on low heat until it's yummy.

I added our homemade meatballs to the mix. You can add browned ground beef or Italian sausage. My friend Trish uses meatballs, Italian sausage links cut into chunks and browned boneless country style pork ribs. Harry was in heaven when I described it to him!

Spaghetti and meatballs with a fresh-tasting sauce - even from canned tomatoes.

Get all the specifics for Double-Duty Cooking: All Purpose Italian Red Sauce by following that link.

Meatballs, meatballs, meatballs - subs & spaghetti!

A good meatball sub is hard to find. Harry loves them but doesn't like how the spheres roll out when you try to bite into it! These little beauties are perfect for spaghetti or subs.

I wrote this recipe and left out the veal for anyone who freaks out about eating baby cows. My preferred blend of meat is 2 parts ground beef, 1 part Italian sausage and 1 part ground veal. But, in the interest of all, no baby moo-moos were harmed in the making of this blog post. The photos you see are beef & sausage.

I prefer making a bunch at once and freezing them. Double-duty cooking is huge around here. Why just cook for one meal when I can put something in the freezer for a night that we might not have 2 or 3 hours to spend in the kitchen.

There it is in a big ol' bowl. Ground beef, sausage, our own homemade bread crumbs, some egg and spices and just a bit of Frank's Hot Sauce. I use granulated garlic for these so I don't have to worry about scorching garlic bits while I'm sauteing the meatballs.

All squished up and ready to be rolled. I wish I could find that picture of the mountain of meatballs in my food porn file. This recipe makes about 40 meatballs.

FOUND IT! YAY! It only took about 10 minutes to roll all these by hand.

 I love my collection of cast iron. The "youngest" I have was one that Mom gave me when I first got married in 1983. I needed it to make corn bread and it honestly took about 5 years before I could say it was truly "seasoned" properly. All of the rest of my collection is at least 70 years old.

Sorry - back to the meatballs. My friend Trish showed me how to make them years ago and how to keep them semi-round. Don't overcrowd the skillet - you need some room so cook them in batches. Roll each meatball into the skillet and shake the pan to keep them moving. You're not trying to cook them all the way through. I have another friend who has gotten the method down to not even brown the meatballs before adding them to her sauce. Must mind-meld with Pam Gaulin.

Isn't that pretty? No, I'm a dork and each time we've had meatballs subs, I keep forgetting to take a picture.

For all the ingredients follow the bouncing ball to Double Duty Cooking: Italian Meatballs

Yes, really. Frank's Original Red Hot DOES come in one gallon jugs! I try to catch it on sale at GFS Marketplace for around $10. If you don't have a GFS around you and you put that sh#t on everything, you can order it here.

Homemade Pizza and YES! It's almost round!

There's a few places I love to get pizza from. Rotolo's in Grandview is worth the trip. They don't have inside seating, so we eat in the parking lot while it's still piping hot! Those perfect little crispy-edged pepperoni, curled up and filled with grease - heaven! Fracasso's in Center Village has a patio and a dining room - oh, and BEER! I'm fond of Pizza Burg in Centerburg even though they use a conveyor oven.

I prefer the old school places that still have a real pizza oven - stone baked at about 500 degrees so the crust pops and crisps quickly. We lined our ovens with unglazed quarry tiles two years ago and never looked back. I leave them in the oven full-time. It doesn't affect the pan baking in any way.

We love pizza night. No, I mean the nights that we make our own. The tiles in our ovens at 500 degrees make a crust we love and the pizzas are done in about 7-8 minutes.

After I originally wrote the recipe for the sauce, I changed my method a little bit. Rather than adding the balsamic vinegar with the tomato sauce, I use it to deglaze the pan after sauteing the onions and garlic. Well, this time I used shallots - because I can.

Isn't this gorgeous sausage? We bought the house grind at Carfagna's. I had to let Harry go a little crazy with the seasonings to give it more of an Italian flavor.

 This is the closest I've ever gotten to making pizzas that were actually round. I've tried everything - and trust me, you don't want to ever see me trying to throw a crust in the air. We used a pressing method this time - Harry squeezed the dough between two round cake pans and that gave me a good start.

Mmmmm....pizza sauce! As I worked, putting on the ingredients, the crust continued to relax a bit and I was able to smooth out the parchment paper.

 We love lots of cheese and put on a thin layer just above the sauce to help everything stick together.

Remember the carnivore? Yes, we must have lots of pepperoni.

I like onion on my pizza. I try not to force Harry to eat too many vegetables with his pizza, so it's a rare occasion that I might throw on some green olives or fresh tomato slices.

And Harry's special-seasoned sausage. There's one pizza joint that we like but we can't order sausage for our pie there. They always put it on top, the cheese is on the bottom and you always lose the sausage.

So - to save our sausage, we always put the cheese on top. Lots of cheese. No, I didn't shred this myself because I was being slightly lazy. 

Now - how good does that look? No we didn't eat three pizzas in one night. The leftovers were breakfast and midnight snacks for Harry for a few days!

This crust recipe really is a breeze. It's important to let it rest for at least an hour to make it easier to work with. When Allison came home for the holidays, I made the crust and sauce and browned the sausage before we headed to the airport and kept it all in the fridge. Works like a dream.

Follow the link for Easy Homemade Pizza Crust and Sauce

For the price, this is a decent stone. Oh, and don't buy one of those fancy-schmancy wooden pizza peels. I have a restaurant-size stainless steel pizza peel that I picked up at Wasserstrom's for about $12.

Vietnamese Egg Rolls...Harry's Way!

Without too many details, let me just say that Harry knows Vietnamese food! Last winter, we finally decided to really test our kitchen chops several times with Asian cuisine and the results were great. As usual, when we get into our "experimental research" phase, we will spend hours making dinner.

The difference is visible on the nights when we are making Vietnamese food - I chop a few veggies and sit back with a glass of wine while Harry takes control! This recipe for Vietnamese Egg Rolls doesn't really take long, we take a long time. We always make a full batch so we can have some in the freezer - even with great effort, we can't come anywhere near eating 30 large Vietnamese Egg Rolls in one night.

Vietnamese Egg Rolls differ a bit from the more common Chinese Egg Roll is the meat - our version contains salad-size shrimp and pork with some veggies and noodles thrown in for depth.

Still didn't have my new kitchen light - in the back are our two dipping sauces. I made a sweet lemongrass sauce and Harry's Nuac Cham is the light-colored sauce.

I chopped all the veggies - some shallot, garlic, sweet pepper, Napa Cabbage and Bean Sprouts.

Ready for the freezer. We freeze them on a pan to keep the Vietnamese Egg Rolls from sticking together. Then, we can just pull out a few at a time to fry when we get a craving.

The expert! Harry puts about two tablespoon of the egg roll filling on the diagonal wrapper...

Then, fold the bottom up, close in the sides and finish rolling. He dips in fingers in the little bowl of water to seal the edges of the finished egg roll.

 You can find the complete recipe for our Vietnamese Egg Rolls right here!

The Weatherman Says It's Soup Season!

I love autumn - fall - whatever you want to call it! The colors, the cool nights and the beckoning of my soup pot.

Harry does most of the cooking in the summer and we don't put away the grill in the winter. When the weather turns cool, it's my time to take over again.

We eat some form of "bowl food" at least three nights a week from October through June! Some soups are more hearty - I love a great bowl of fish chowder and someday when I'm all grown up, I'll be able to make it as good as my cousin Freddie in New Brunswick. Of course, he does have the advantage of living much closer to the ocean and being able to buy better fish.

Through the winter, we make our own stock - vegetable, chicken, turkey and beef. When we find a great price on whole chickens or I can find some meaty beef bones, it's time to fill the freezer! Having our own stock in the freezer makes it easier to whip up a pot of soup for dinner.

Chowder, for me, almost always includes corn and potatoes and some sort of creaminess. Sometimes I thicken it with a little slurry.

For the beginning of soup season, I have two very simple recipes adapted with store-ingredients. Most of these items should be in your pantry; if not: stock up when the prices are good and you'll be able to quickly make a pot of soup no matter how busy you might be. Both are made with ground Italian hot sausage - one of our favorites - but you can use mild sausage.

Sausage & Corn Chowder and Tortellini Soup

It's not the prettiest picture but this sausage and corn chowder is REALLY yummy!

Veggies on the Grill!

It took me a few days to get time to make the Grill-Roasted Stuffed Peppers, take the pictures, get the article written and published - but I did it!

Most of the ingredients for our dinner of Grill-Roasted Stuffed Peppers with a Caprese Salad and corn on the cob can be seen here...

I cut up some yellow and red watermelon and a cucumber for us to snack on while we were cooking. The cheeses on the plate were from the farmers market. The wedge is a Habanero Monterrey Jack from Fulton Creek Jersey Cheese - you can find her at the Main Street Delaware Farmers Market on Wednesday and Saturday. She makes INCREDIBLE cheeses including a Parmesan that is out of this world. The smaller piece is the remains of a grass-fed Roasted Red Pepper cheese I picked up at the Mount Vernon Farmers Market on the Square. I'm drawing a blank on the name of the farm, but their cheese is also sold at the Sunbury Farmers Market.

I've got 2 kinds of tomatoes, Giant Marconi Italian sweet peppers, a Vidalia (really, I bought them before Brian told me about the bounty of Candy Onions and I needed to use them up!), garlic and a leek from the Delaware market and a medium-heat banana pepper.

Not the best picture - the sun was shining through the kitchen window. For my sausage and rice pepper filling, I've diced Vidalia Onion, the other half of the two tomatoes I used to make the Caprese Salad and minced some banana pepper, garlic and half a leek.

These Giant Marconi peppers might look a little funky for stuffing, but they hold their shape and don't fall over on the grill.

 Ready for the grill. I browned the Italian sausage, added the veggies and rice then simmered it until the rice was cooked. Use a spoon and get the filling into the nooks and crannies. Harry heated the grill to a medium heat and took over from there.

And it's supper time! Harry grilled the peppers just until a char started - not blackened, not burned. The peppers still have some "body" to them, not cooked to mush. I added the cheese and closed the lid of the grill for about a minute to melt.

You can find the complete recipe here...

Grill-Roasted Stuffed Peppers

On Cooking from Scratch...

Everyone who knows me is well aware of my passion for cooking from scratch.

Yes, I still buy mayonnaise and butter - I've made them from scratch and I don't have to anymore! There are a few commercial products that I buy, such as cream of mushroom soup, because I haven't yet figured out a way to make it myself.

There are so many advantages to cooking from scratch: You know EXACTLY what is in your food, it's less expensive and it will always taste better.

Cooking from scratch does seem more expensive in the beginning. Stocking your pantry takes time but once the pantry and "magic drawer" are filled, you have a world of options at your fingertips.

Two of my earliest articles were all about cooking from scratch. I hope they give you some hope and help you realize it IS possible to save money AND time by cooking from scratch.

Stock Your Kitchen to Save Money

Save Money With Homemade Convenience Foods

I'm a fan of the cookbook in the Amazon link. All cooking and baking is based on ratios - so much liquid to so much flour to so much fat. Knowing these ratios can take the worry out of adapting a recipe to be more suitable to your tastes.

A Simple Supper, An Early Night

Saturdays wear us out!

For the first time since March, Harry had a Saturday night off work. YAY! No coming home exhausted from the market-short porch break-nap-choking down dinner-another nap-he goes to work kind of day. We had such grand plans for this rare event.

A relaxing, enjoy-being-in-the-kitchen-just-for-us EARLY dinner, watch the sun set behind the extremely tall corn, maybe a snack, some TV and then a good night's sleep.

Somehow, it didn't quite work out that way. Harry had a breast collar to repair and deliver. While he was gone, I chopped the veggies for the salad. Tomatoes, cukes, OUR green onions, someone else's candy onion, half of a medium-hot banana pepper, a green bell and a really awesome tasting chocolate pepper that the organic vendor just threw in with my other peppers.

Usually, I won't even dress this salad but I made the super-easy honey-lemon dressing with honey from the Delaware market that was harvested Thursday - so light and clear! I only buy honey from local producers but I keep my eyes open for special tasting honey for dressings and sauces.

I cleaned the corn, got the green beans ready to fry (yes, FRY) in bacon grease (yes, BACON GREASE) with onions and peppers so the man would eat them with me, par-boiled the country ribs we found on markdown and made a great barbecue sauce!

I sat on the porch while he grilled the ribs, running in to start the corn and beans right before the ribs were ready. We filled our plates, ate dinner...

and went right to bed. It might have been 7:30 or so.

I slept until 4:00 AM - like a rock, missing the storm that I think rolled through here last night. I've read dozens of articles, tweeted, FB and caught up on some of my blog reading.

I think I'll take a nap today.