Xan: Kerr Lake 2015!

We have just returned from VongsaCamping 2015 at Kerr Lake. This year's group: Mom, Dad, Kathleen, myself, Catherine, Chris VA, and also a cameo from Monica and Devin. Linden was notably absent, and yet somehow constantly present by phone, despite limited reception and significant timezone differences.

Regardless, good times were had by all. And, as this is technically a food blog, it must be said that we ate particularly well this year. Mom used to say that after a week of camping, regular food tastes amazing. However, I think this has slowly become disingenuous. The food gets better every year and at some point we just started eating better than we typically would at home.

What happened to us and when did we get so spoiled? It's hard to pinpoint a single cause, but if I had to describe the evolution of our camping menu, it would go something like this:

1. In the beginning, we were like everyone else. Beans and franks, you know? And grill food -- burgers, I suppose, and more franks? Not sure. I'm too young to actually remember the beginning, frankly, but I think it was a very frankly time.
2. Over the years, we picked up some great camping recipes from other campers. Chicken Chili and so forth. Things that are easy to prepare in quantity with limited tools. 
3. However, we came to realize that it's so hard to cook anything in the wilderness that we ought to prepare as much as possible in advance. Dad would bring ribs that just needed reheating. Mom would precook onions and sausage and I would premix a dozen spices and then a Moroccan ragout involved nothing more than heating up a can of diced tomatoes together with precooked onions/sausage/spices, ready in 10 minutes.
4. As more and more partial and complete meals were prepared in advance, planning took on a life of its own. Meals were either planned or panned. And it turns out that if you do 10 times as much planning, you can eat twice as well.
5. From here, we continued to optimize, optimize, optimize, until we had so many great recipes that it became impossible to even cut the menu down to an amount we could eat in a week. This time, we had to have a two-dinner day to make room for it all. I even stopped catching catfish, which I'm told is an "improvement" in the menu, even though I don't necessarily agree.

What do you think, Vongsas? Is that what happened, or did I just make it all up?

I will now recap the food highlights of the trip, at least from my perspective.

Chapter 1: A cake with True Grit.

A few years ago, we discovered you can make cake in a Dutch oven over coals. Unfortunately, we had a little trouble with the orientation of our Pineapple Upside Down cake, which a certain person extracted from the oven only to drop it right into the sand. It was a very confusing experience. One minute we were looking forward to cake, the next moment we were looking down. We dusted it off as best we could, but it was certainly a cake with True Grit. It could have been much worse, actually, if it had fallen upside-down...or is that right-side-up? Whereas cats always land on their feet and toast always lands butter-side-down, Pineapple Upside Down Cake is guaranteed to land ambiguously.

In any case, this year we took no chances. We did a Texas Sheet Cake instead, which is always the right way up, and I was in charge of removing it from the pot, and there were no accidents, and it was glorious. You don't mess with Texas Sheet Cake.

Chapter 2: The Fires of Mount Doom.
Perhaps you don't know it yet, but there is really only one question you should be asking right now. You should be saying, "Xan, I get that you guys baked the cake in the Dutch oven, but what about the icing?"

You should be asking this because the answer is that we melted the icing on the fiery slopes of the goddamn Volcano we built with our bare hands. 

One tries to minimize the cursing on a family food blog, but in this case we have found that sanitizing only makes the Volcano angry. 

Specifically, what you see here is Chris wielding his trusty 40-oz bottle of 63% ethyl alcohol Germ-X hand sanitizer. The Volcano clearly does not appreciate attempts to clean up its act.

How this happened: Me and Chris are, of course, always looking for new ways to control fire. So I pitched him the idea to build a camping oven from scratch and see how good we could get it going. We quickly put together a small test oven with a few rocks and wet sand:

We were impressed with how well it worked and decided we needed Something Bigger. So we collected a bunch of rocks and dredged the lake bed for mud to act as mortar, which was baked pretty hard by the heat of the oven. Here is the oven in progress:

We found some mystery bricks and an old grate left behind by another camper. The fuel would go on the grate, and ashes would fall below like in a grill.

Some nice flat rocks would make for the roof of the oven and double as a stone cooktop.

We also added a smoking chamber which in retrospect was a mistake, as we did not actually have access to any woods that would be nice for smoking foods. It's mostly pine and sweetgum in the nutrient-poor soil around the lake.

Of course, at some point Chris decided that the chimney should be a volcano, and it was all downhill from there, in a Run-For-Your-Lives, Kill-a-Man-Jaro sort of sense.

To be perfectly honest, after hours of building this behemoth, we were not at all sure it would, you know, work when we lit it up. But as soon as we set it ablaze, smoke just shot out of the volcano.

Of course, we had to name it Mt. Doom.

One fire ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness BLIND THEM!

Anyway, you get the idea. It was pretty awesome. The next day, Chris built up the volcano even more.

Lake mud, cast into the fiery chasm whence it flame!

Sadly, I do not have any pictures of it on fire. Nevertheless, the stone cooktop got hot enough to toast our garlic bread.

Chapter 3: Chop chop! Pull pull! Pork pork!

While Chris was building out the Volcano, I was also engaged in another ambitious project: spit-roasting an 8 lb pork shoulder roast over the open fire. I wanted to make a spit from scratch. This turned out to be difficult. In fact I was fortunate to have access to a couple of particularly helpful tools.

First of all, this year finally saw the arrival of a proper felling axe. We retired our beloved hatchet, affectionately named Old Faithful by Chris, for its longstanding habit of faithfully flying off the handle in mid-swing. I will shed no tears for the departure of Old Faithful, and no fingers either.

Wielding the mighty felling axe, I was able to effortlessly hew the necessary lumber from a downed pine. I fashioned a pair of tripods to hold the spit, and used one of Dad's woodworking tools to remove bark and sharpen the spit itself:

Make no mistake -- that spear would have skewered a wild boar! But I had only purchased an NC fishing permit, not a hunting permit, and so I was forced to rely on the domesticated variety. (For now). We coated it in Memphis Dust and went right through the center.

The idea here is to have a main fire blazing off to the side, which generates embers, which are moved near the pork to cook it under moderate heat in a controlled fashion. The fire itself might contain perhaps a whole tree..

I always do like to include a whole tree in a fire like this, because you can just keep pushing it in as it combusts. This one was long dead and dried, but still quite heavy and Chris helped me to drag it over.

In the absence of a battery-operated rotisserie, draft animals, or fellow campers willing to do my bidding, I simply turned the spit every 20-30 minutes. After 7 hours on the spit, the pork looked like this:

Can you smell that? It smells GUUD!

Not done yet, though, as we were going for pulled pork.

Chapter 3.5: Lightning Strikes!

Pulled pork is an all-day affair. Unfortunately, all the day was not fair. Before the pork could finish, we were beset by a Most Epic Thunderstorm and had to resort to Backup Contingency Rain Plan #1, which was to throw the pork into the Dutch Oven, surround it with coals, cover it with foil, and wait out the storm.

Two hours and two inches of rain later, the storm finished. An hour after that, so did the pork. We pulled it, and dug in!

Pretty good, under the circumstances! And I will say that despite the fall of rain and night, we never once dropped the pork.

Epilog

Of course this is but a small sampling of the Kerr Lake 2015 menu. I wish I had pictures of all the food, but it's hard when your phone is mostly off. Maybe next time we can try to put together a more comprehensive review. In any case, I hope you have enjoyed this recap of our caper, jumbled as it may be. Yeah, think about it.

An epilog, charred. From the Greek epi- meaning "upon." A log on a log is an epilog. A frog on a log is an epifrog. 

A pig on a spit on a log, to wit: epihog. 

Xan: Sous-vide pork tenderloin

All things considered, pork tenderloin is not my favorite cut.  I'm just not on board with the emphasis on tenderness over flavor.  If I have to choose between them, I will take flavor any day.

Technically, now that I have my immersion circulator, I don't have to choose between them.  I can take tough, flavorful cuts and make them tender, with a longer cook.  Even so, I'm not going to completely stop eating the naturally tender cuts.

Cooking sous-vide for a short time (1-4 hours) has its own advantages.  Over this short time, the meat truly loses almost no moisture, ending up noticeably juicier than meat cooked either the conventional way or over an extended stay in the water bath.

Here is pork tenderloin cooked at 138 F for 3 hours:

Pink and juicy.

And if anyone is wondering about the safety of cooking pork to 138 degrees: The idea is that bacteria die much quicker at higher temperatures, but by holding the meat at 138 for long enough, the same number of bacteria are killed. This pork has been completely pasteurized, which sous-vide allows me to do at a lower temperature than other cooking methods allow.

So not only is the meat cooked evenly from edge to edge, but it can also be safely cooked to a lower temperature throughout, if desired.  We could go down even further from here, although at this point the binding constraint has nothing to do with science.  I must always ask myself: Will Catherine eat it?

Anyway, this is easily the best pork tenderloin I've made.

Unless it was this one a few days before:

Yo dawg, I herd you like two-packs, so I put a two-pack in your two-pack so you can eat while you eat...

I'm not sure, but I had two chances to experiment because Costco sells pork tenderloin in two packs.  I gave half of my two-pack to Ryan, but it turns out each half of the two pack is also a two-pack, because Costco is the eternal trailblazer of embiggening.

I served one of these with squash soup:

Really excellent, but that's for another post. (Forthcoming!)

Xan and Grandma: Pork!

Grandma says it has been raining a lot in Thailand, but the water will be gone by the time we get there.  She also sends along some pictures of her pork ribs!  Sadly, they will also be gone by the time we get there.

  

Made with Dad's BBQ sauce.

Source: Makro!

And here is her Kanglian:

A healthier option!  This cancels out pork, right?

I mean, look at all those vegetables!

As it happens, we have been eating up some delicious pork ourselves.  Pork shoulder, specifically.  Mark Bittman's Roast Pork Shoulder, Puerto Rican Style, from How to Cook Everything.

This turned out to be a very yellow and brown meal. Or as we say in the crossword business, ochre!  We have pork, bread, corn with pan drippings, and microwaved honeycrisp apples of deliciousness!

Mmm...

Three little pigs!

That's plate #1.  It was so delicious that I pigged out (!) and ate a double meal.

*

Mark Bittman's Roast Pork Shoulder, Puerto Rican Style
(paraphrased and modified by Xan)

Ingredients

• One 4-7 lb pork shoulder, trimmed of excess but not all fat

Marinade:

• 4 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 medium onion, quartered
• 1 TBS dried oregano
• 1 TBS table salt
• 2 tsp black pepper
• 2 TBS peanut or other oil
• 2 TBS white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, or other vinegar

Steps

1. If you have a food processor or hand blender, blend together all the marinade ingredients.  Otherwise, just finely chop the onion and garlic, and mix everything together.
2. Place the pork and marinade in a gallon ziploc bag or other container.  Coat the pork all over with the marinade and place in the fridge for 1-24 hours.
3. Preheat the oven to 350 F.  Remove pork from the marinade and roast for 2-3 hours until done.  The internal temperature should be 150-160, and the meat should be fairly tender.
4. Rest for at least 15 minutes, slice and serve.

Notes:

• This is not pulled pork.  We are not cooking it for hours and hours so it won't get to that falling-apart level.  When I do a 4 lb shoulder, it takes about 2.5 hours to get to 155, and it's still sliceable, as you can see from the pictures.
• I crisped the roast up in a skillet right before serving, which is why it is so browned.  Alternatively, if it is not browned to your liking, you could always let the meat rest for a bit, crank the oven up to 450, and put the roast back in for a few minutes.
• In any case, what you should really take from this recipe is the delicious marinade.  You can apply it to the pork and cook it any way you like.  
• I actually poured the entire contents of the marinade over the pork before sticking it in the oven.  The marinade has a paste-like consistency (at least if you use a food processor or hand blender), so it will stay on top.  This obviously hinders browning so if you have troubles with that, don't do it -- maybe pat your roast dry with paper towels instead!  But since I was going to use the skillet afterwards, it wasn't a problem.  The marinade paste forms a really nice, substantive crust.

Oink oink!

Linden's Really Good Pork Ragu

To continue the recent pattern of big, meaty dinners, here's what we ate last Sunday. (Now that I work a proper job, I don't have time to do long meals on weeknights, so all the delicious slow cooking happens on the weekends.)

Last weekend, we wanted something delicious and meaty, and I've had this in my to-cook folder for months. (I have a long list of meals that require a dutch oven, and since I don't have one of those, and don't actually know what it is, and whether England carries them, they mostly stay there. Now, I have a casserole dish, and I'm making do with that for some of the cheatable ones.)

Personally, I think this is something Xan should cook, because he will like it. It is super, super delicious! Not all that much work, but a long cooking time that makes the whole house smell really, really good. After browning a big hunk of pork in a pan, you stick it in a dish and add some tomatoes, red wine, herbs, and put it in the oven for hours and hours.

It comes out looking like this, and then you shred it, and put it on some delicious pasta.

 Yum yum. Really though, Xan should make this and report back. The original recipe here

Xan: Pulled Pork Pizza?

Lin is going to hate me for posting all the things she missed at the beach this year, but I also made a bunch of pizza dough to bring down to the beach.  I made an assortment of mini pizzas: cheese, pepperoni, Hawaiian, and pulled pork pizza:

It turns out that barbecue sauce and pulled pork make a really good pizza!  People loved it so much that I made a bigger one another day:

Maybe next year, Lin.  I'm sure you'll agree this whole England thing is not worth it. Give it up already!

Xan and Paul: Pulled Pork!

Oink.

Oink?

Oink! Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink!

That's ten pounds worth of oinkers, which is actually the smallest amount you can get at Costco in the form of pork shoulder.  Ah pork shoulder, the intersection of two most delicious things.  Oink!  Read on for the Saga of the Most Delicious Way of cooking the intersection of two Most Delicious Things...

A detour for those who want to learn more about meat science.  You know, there was a time when I didn't understand meat cuts.  I thought it was just a bunch of random pieces to learn the characteristics of.  But actually there's a simple logic to meat properties. (Oh, speaking of meat properties, please take a detour from the detour and watch this excellent short film.  Or perhaps this visual guide to Mr. Oink is more up your alley, brought to you by The Onion, America's finest news source. ). Anyway, let me lay it out for you:

• Plants don't move much, so they can store their energy reserves in tough, relatively inert starches.  But animals must react quickly to their surroundings, which means they are made up of more volatile, reactive (read: detectable to our tastebuds!) chemicals...and in particular, fat packs more energy per pound than starch, so that's how they store fuel.  In making energy more readily available to themselves, animals thus make themselves more flavorful to us.  Eat that, vegetarians!

• In particular, the parts of the animal that do a lot of work need to have a stand-by energy store in those places, i.e. fat.  On the other hand, they also need a denser support structure of connective tissue to hold everything together.

• Thus, you can loosely reason from "part of the animal" to "properties of the meat."  In particular, animals use their shoulders a lot, which means they're very fatty (delicious) but also full of connective tissue (not so delicious).

The main connective tissue protein of interest, collagen, you really don't want to eat.  Fortunately it has the nice property that at high temperatures it dissolves into gelatin, yum!  But if the temperature is too high (i.e. in the vicinity of 212) too much of the water in the meat will up and leave.  So typically we cook shoulder at something like 200 degrees for a long while, to give the collagen time to get up to temperature and melt away.
Because shoulder is so delicious (and cheap!), I make a lot of stews and braises with pork and beef shoulder; these cook for maybe a couple hours.  But pulled pork is cooked a lot longer -- like all day -- and it ends up much more falling-apart-y.  Which is good, since you have to pull it afterwards.

Anyway, so moving along with the Saga, I decided to make a big lot of pulled pork to take down to the beach with the family back in June.  The first step was to find an awesome recipe.  Accomplished!  The next step was to find the meat; the recipe calls for a 4-7lb shoulder.  7 pounds is a lot of meat, in case you aren't clear on this, but I figured we need to feed a lot of people at the beach.  And I figured, Costco will sell pork shoulders on the big end, because it's Costco, right?

But when I got to Costco, I realized they had outsmarted me.  Costco's goal isn't to sell big, it's to embiggen.  And because pork shoulder is already sold in large sizes at regular supermarkets, the only way Costco could embiggen it was to pack two shoulders together.  So I ended up with two 5-pound cuts, which was absolutely the smallest they had.  Ah well, like I said, we had a lot of people to feed.

Next, the cooking.  The recipe called for cooking it in the oven, but of course dad wouldn't hear of it.  So he fired up his grills (not a typo) and off we went.  We started the pork on the old Weber.  And this is where things started to go wrong.  

A grill is not a plant, okay? So will someone please explain to me why the sprinkler system came on and watered it liberally when I wasn't looking?  

You know, that's exactly what you would do if you wanted to cool off a hot piece of metal as fast as possible.  Like, if there was an overheating reactor core in there somewhere, SOLUTION=WATER IT!  But like I said, a grill is not a plant.

In any case, that wasn't fatal because it was only supposed to be on there for a couple hours of initial cooking.  Next we put it on the gas grill for the main cooking.  The gas grill is nice because you can hold it at a controlled temperature for the hours and hours needed to cook the pork.  

Unless of course the gas runs out at some unspecified point in the evening.  I'm actually getting really tired of this story so let me just say that the pork wasn't done until we were getting really tired early the next morning.  And then we had to get in a car and drive to the beach. And then it was time to pull it.  Here's before:

And after:

Finally, to go with, I made some Eastern NC-style vinegary bbq sauce and dad also made some delicious Kansas City bbq sauce.  And then it was time to eat it!  And boy was it good.

So there you have it.  I keep a spreadsheet of all the food I've made, and to date this is the first and only food I awarded a full 5 stars.  For those of you who loved this, which is everyone who ate it, you guys should be able to replicate this pork exactly with the right equipment, now that I've given you such detailed instructions.  You will have to ask mom about the proper schedule and positioning for a sprinkler system though.

Xan: Cocoa Cherry Pork Tenderloin

My relationship with cooking is definitely still in the "novelty stage," where everything is new and full of surprises.  I have never cooked most things, and I am still coming across totally mainstream vegetables or cuts of meat that I just haven't gotten around to trying out yet.

So with pork tenderloin!  Tonight I cooked one for the first time, and it was the right combination of delicious, inexpensive and easy.  Furthermore, pork tenderloin is especially good if you are eternally tasked with feeding someone who is both cutlery challenged (hey, no bones or fat!) and inexplicably likes her meat medium instead of medium-rare (the tenderloin tapers to one end, so there's a gray-dient).

I followed this video recipe from foodwishes.  The pork is rubbed with cocoa powder and chili powder, and served over a cherry-vinegar sauce.  It was delicious:

Yes, it came out perfect on the first time, just like every other meat I have ever roasted, thanks to my innate ability to own a meat thermometer.  Here's mine.  I guess this is just one of those have-it-or-you-don't cooking skills; if you find yourself unable to own a meat thermometer, I'm afraid you will just have to compensate with actual cooking experience and skill.  FYI this pork was taken out when it hit 145 F.

To go with, zucchini and sweet potatoes.  After an initial sear on the stovetop, the pork is transferred to the oven to finish cooking, so I sauteed the zucchini in the pork pan, with a little olive oil, some salt, pepper, and oregano...really delicious.  In other news, I have been cutting my sweet potatoes a bit thicker lately so they will have a nonempty interior of squishy goodness.

Question: What would you serve with pork tenderloin?  To me, a "standard" meal is meat+vegetable+starch.  In the starch category, rice and pasta are my most frequent choices.  Bread is also a good choice but it takes more work and actual planning.  I don't cook potatoes enough but that's on the rise...would roast potatoes be welcome here?  I would say yes automatically except I can't remember ever eating roast potatoes with pork.  Maybe I should just forget my starch and go with apples...

In my accounting, sweet potatoes are somewhere in between a vegetable and a starch; I picked them because rice and pasta obviously don't belong here, and I didn't have bread, and I didn't think of roast potatoes.