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.

Catherine: Mum's the word

Catherine's mom was here in the vicinity of mother's day, so she made these chrysanthemum cupcakes.

Pretty, aren't they?  Those petals are mini-marshmallow halves.

A happy mother

Kathleen's Food in Greece

A few sensational highlights:



Mmm, yummy. Octopus. Need I say more?




Have you ever seen such a slab of feta cheese? It was enormous! This was my first Greek salad in Greece, and I was like, whoa. That slab there, was at least four inches long. Actually it turns out that's very normal for Greece--Greeks are actually the largest per capita consumers of cheese in Europe--but I was astounded to have such a mass of cheese placed in front of me, to eat with just one salad. It makes me hungry just thinking about it.



I thought I'd give that lemon soup that Xan made over the holidays a try. His version was pretty good! It tasted very similar to this. And in the background is the rest of my dinner: a tomato and pepper stuffed with a yummy rice mixture.

Kathleen's Fruit Salad

While traveling, my ability to prepare food is extremely limited. However, I do have one advantage that most of you do not share: ready access to very fresh tropical fruit. This evening I took advantage to make a fruit salad with mango, banana, and passion fruit. I decided against pineapple, as it has a slightly acidic taste and I wanted something warm, with the tang of passion seeds. Not to mention the difficulty of being tidy about chopping up a pineapple with my limited resources. I am sorry to say that I did not have quite enough passion fruit--but otherwise, it was yummy!

Linden's Thing Xan Can't Eat

People in England have difficulty with the concept of Pizza and America. They also have difficulty with the idea of jocks and cheerleaders in the classroom (and outside of it), but that is easily laid to rest with assurances that yes, they do exist.

Pizza, on the other hand, takes a little more explaining. Yes, we have pizza just like yours. We have flopsy New York pizza. We also have doughier crusts, like Dominos. And then we have deep dish from Chicago. Yes, they count as pizza. No, Italy doesn't hold copyright on pizza.

And then I usually feel obliged to mention that England unapologetically bastardizes every cuisine it gets its hands on, sometimes with delicious results (take Chicken Tikka Masala, for example) and that I don't understand how England even has a high horse to climb on when it comes to food.

But the terrible consequences of all of this are that I am left craving pizza, and not just the kind we can get in this country. The Chicagoan kind! And then I feel the bitter irony that has Xan "NoCheese" Xan living in the heart of deepdish land and me living very far away.

So I set out to make little deepdishes. They are a jumble of compromises, because this country isn't very into things like cast iron or cornmeal. So my deepdishes are made in a springform. This, on the bright side, makes serving easier since you can just despring the form once it's cooked. And I use very finely ground cornmeal, but that's all right. (To make the dough biscuitier, you add a little cornmeal in place of flour. ...and some butter.)

And, this country doesn't have italian sausage, so I have to make my own. (By buying sausage meat, and then adding in chili flakes and fennel. That does just about well enough, since it's going into tomato sauce anyways.)

But they are super delicious! Just look at that cheesy, tomatoey center. With basil sprinkled artistically on top.

Yum yum yum.

Linden's 4th of July Cheesecake

Now before the pictures, I want to offer a general disclaimer that this isn't all my work. We all know I'm not very good at things like patterns and decoration, and that when given a box full of colorful crayons I will draw a panda. And people will think it's a snowman. So before people think I have made great leaps and bounds in this area, this wasn't decorated by me! I did all the baking and slicing of fruit, and then Chris hid the mess I had made of the top of the cheesecake by putting fruit on it.

This cheesecake was taken to a Fourth of July Bash, funded and hosted by the US Military. When planning my dessert contribution, I worried, "what if this isn't patriotic enough, they may not let me in. especially because I am arriving with a Red Coat." I instructed Red Coat Chris to wear the other two Patriotic Colors (having informed him earlier that it is general good practice to wear two of the three colors to a 4th celebration - I myself was wearing blue and red - or all three if you can manage it tastefully), and to hold the cheesecake out in front of him and be very quiet upon arrival, to disguise his accent and help ease his entry.

We made it through to the garden, where the grill and food were set up, and requisitioned ourselves some NonAlcoholic Beverages and barbecue chicken sandwiches (I made sure Red Coat Chris' had some lettuce, because Xan is not the only one who finds themself on vegetable duty)

The US Military reports that my cheesecake was delicious, and eaten in record speed, and that people were fighting each other for the last forkfulls (so it must be true). It disappeared fastest of everything at the barbecue - initially it was attractive and appealing, after one shake of the lamb's tail half of it had been consumed by a small bastion of Africanists who were considering whether they could justify eating the other half, and after two shakes it was all gone (they decided that it was more ethical to give some to those less fortunate). I myself managed to secure a small slice, and I can confirm that it was super delicious. I even managed to requisition two blueberries and strawberries, which were delicious as well (English strawberries taste better, which always puzzles me since it rains so much here).

 However, I think we can all recognize that in spite of the delicious fruits and decorations, the really impressive thing here is me.