Tag: Food

I love popcorn.

Love it.

Popcorn is one of my favorite foods, and I’m simply incapable of seeing a movie at the theater without popcorn. If I’ve just come from a big dinner, as part of a “dinner and a movie” type thing, I’ll still buy a small popcorn. I consumed popcorn whilst watching Schindler’s List, which is as un-popcorn a movie as has ever been made.

At home, I love popcorn a lot too. For years we’ve used microwave popcorn exclusively — usually a “light” version of a “Movie Theater Butter” flavor. Not the healthiest alternative, obviously, but we don’t indulge in popcorn all that frequently; once a week, at most. But the trouble with the microwave stuff is that it’s full of chemicals and that butter flavor is pretty fake. (Yeah, so’s the “buttery topping” they put on the stuff at the theater.)

Part of our general approach toward food in 2010 is to rely less on processed, chemical-laden food products. This, we quickly realized, could also include popcorn. So, we bought ourselves a popcorn popper.

It’s a StirCrazy, which we chose because that’s what we had when I was a kid. That old version worked wonders, and I realized that I missed that old, clean flavor of popcorn a great deal. The ingredients no longer include whatever chemicals and artificial flavorings go into the microwave stuff; now the ingredients are merely these: popcorn, oil, butter, and salt.

With the StirCrazy, you pour a few tablespoons of oil into the base, and then measure out your corn:

Measuring is very important. Must always measure!

Then you pour that onto the hot plate as well and put the dome cover on top. The cover doubles as a serving bowl later on, but for now, it’s a cover and a butter-melter. Here it is:

There’s an armature (basically a steel rod) that rotates at the bottom of the heat plate, constantly stirring the popcorn and oil. At the top of the dome cover is a well with holes in it; that’s where you put your butter. As the heat rise, it melts the butter, which then drips through the holes onto the corn. This arrangement works surprisingly well at getting butter all over the popcorn. (We use unsalted butter exclusively.)

Of course, one can attempt to help the process along by using heat vision, but success will be hard to come by:

In time the corn starts popping, slowly at first, but quickly filling up the entire dome cover:

A minute later:

Once the popping slows, you unplug the popper, grab the handles, invert it, remove the hot plate, and voila! A beautiful bowl of popcorn. Salt, stir, and consume.

We’ll still keep microwave stuff around, because sometimes it’s just plain convenient to be able to nuke a bag as opposed to dragging the popper out. But generally, this stuff tastes so much better, with just good old unsalted butter, Kosher salt, and peanut oil. (I may try doing it with coconut oil sometime, just to see if coconut oil’s effect on popcorn is as pronounced as I’ve heard over the years.) The flavor was not only wonderfully clean and “unprocessed”, it took me back to my youth when we’d have a bowl of popcorn prepared just this way (using an earlier model of the same popper) during Family Teevee Night.

I can’t recommend this highly enough. If you have any love of popcorn at all, get a good popper. (And not an air popper, either. Those things result in crappy popcorn!)

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I decided, kinda-sorta on a whim, to make some pulled pork the other day.

Now, in the past when I’ve had the taste for pulled pork, I’ve bought it already-made at The Store, either our own make of it or a brand like Lloyd’s, which comes in a tub and just needs to be heated up. But while I used to love Lloyd’s products, over time I’ve come to find them too saucy and too sweet, and I’ve further learned that pulled pork is basically a very cheap hunk of meat, cooked until it shreds, and then simmered a bit in sauce. More or less.

So I bought two items the other day. I bought a small roasting pan, with rack; this is to supplement our larger roasting pan, which is big enough to roast a nice-sized turkey, but is a bit cumbersome when one wants to roast a six-to-eight pound cut of meat or a chicken or a game hen or…you get the picture.

The other item I bought was, obviously, the meat. I bought an eight-pound shoulder butt pork roast, which I laid out on the rack of my new roasting pan and seasoned on both sides with a rub:

Then I covered the roast with foil and put it into the oven at 375 degrees, where it remained for the next four hours. It was about an hour into this process that I discovered a flaw in the Homemade Pulled Pork Plan: even though the cooking time is six hours, your home smells like wonderful pulled pork after just one. Talk about hunger being the best sauce, and smells stoking the hunger….

After four hours, I removed the foil and popped the roast right back into the oven, for another ninety minutes or so. At this point I was checking the roast’s temperature every twenty minutes or so, aiming for about 175 degrees; when I finally reached that point, I took the roast out of the oven and let it “rest” on top of the stove for ten or fifteen minutes. (Believe me, folks, allowing cooked meat to “rest” before doing anything else is so essential to good cooking that, well, it’s almost a deal-breaker; cutting meat just after removing from the heat will pretty much destroy any effect you have from your careful preparation. Trust me on this.)

Then it was time to shred and simmer a bit in sauce. I grabbed a couple of forks and shredded away, dropping the hunks of meat into my trusty crockpot. This took a lot longer than I had originally thought it would; even as tender as the meat was after that long in the oven, it still takes a while to physically shred eight pounds of the stuff by hand. Once I had it all shredded (except for a couple of large hunks of fat, which I removed), I poured in most of a bottle of barbecue sauce (a “Kansas City” style recipe sauce, although not the stuff that my good friend Mark likes to recommend because he knows the people who make it, but next time, that’s what I’m using because trust me folks, it’s good sauce), and then ran the crockpot on high for about half an hour, just to bring everything to a nice piping-hot temperature.

The final result? Utter sandwich heaven:

Of course, being that our household is just the three of us, this process yielded an enormous amount of pulled pork for us. We each ate two sandwiches that night; The Wife and The Daughter had some more for lunch the next day; I had it for lunch yesterday and will have more today; and yet, as of this writing, there is still a huge container of it in our fridge. So far we’ve got seven meals’ worth of meat out of that roast, and we’re not close to done yet. Total cost will be under a buck a meal for each serving we end up getting out of it. That rocks.

My process here wasn’t any kind of “official” method for making pulled pork, but I put it together from reading some recipes online and looking at the shredded pork recipe in Emeril Lagasse’s cookbook devoted to pot-luck dishes. It’s as easy a cooking process as I’ve encountered. If you’ve never made your own pulled pork, give it a shot. It’s easy!

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Straw and Hay, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I made this dish for dinner a couple of nights ago, using a recipe from a Christmas-themed cookbook by the Frugal Gourmet. I’d always wanted to make it, but I always forgot about the recipe when not in the Holiday season, because that’s the only time I tend to peruse this particular cookbook. (He gives the Straw and Hay recipe in honor of the donkey ridden by Mary to Bethlehem.) It’s called “Straw and Hay” (Paglia e Fieno in Italian) by virtue of the two colors of pasta involved. I served it with a crusty garlic bread from The Store, and we loved it, although The Wife and I agree that next time, I should add shrimp.

Since I’m sure this cookbook is long out print, here’s the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1/4 cup olive oil
4 cloves minced garlic (or more, to taste — I used more)
1/2 pound spinach linguine
1/2 pound regular linguine
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Salt, Pepper, and additional cheese to taste, when served

Cook the pasta according to directions. Drain (but do not rinse) and pour into large bowl.

While the pasta cooks: In a small frying pan, melt the butter, and then add in the olive oil. In this mixture saute the garlic for just a minute or so, until it’s barely browned and the mixture becomes deeply fragrant. Pour the garlic mixture over the pasta in the serving bowl and add the 1/3 cup grated Parmesan. Toss to combine, and serve hot.

I added a small pinch of kosher salt to my own serving, plus quite a lot of black pepper. Next time, I’ll add shrimp; what I suppose I’ll do is throw in some cooked shrimp to saute when I add the garlic, which should just bring the shrimp up to a serving temperature. Diced Italian sausage might also be a good addition to this.

What I loved most about the dish was how simple and easy it is. I usually take my time cooking recipes that are new to me, and even so, from the time I put the pot of water on the stove to boil to the time we sat down to eat, about twenty minutes elapsed. That rocks!

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