I have been hella jonesing for New Orleans lately. What's new? And I got a crock pot for my belated birthday. NOLA Jones + crockpot = red beans. This is my third use of the crock, and the first time I have managed to take a picture, even a picture of my second bowl of leftovers, as, when the food approaches readiness, I become busier with preparation and overexcited to eat so picture taking tends to get forgotten. Only later, looking at the wreckage of dirty dishes and compost slop that I think, "Oh yeah, if I had taken pictures, I coulda blogged about that, and then, well, then there would be a blog about it."
The first outing was a skin on pork shoulder, acquired at the impeccable Bi-Rite Market. It was a pretty expensive iteration of a "cheap" cut of meat, and I stewed it in beer, cilantro, onion, and garlic. It came out pretty good, but it actualized its full potential the next day, when I cubed it and fried it. There was a generous amount of well distributed fat that created a lot of hot grease that sealed the cubes and transformed them into nearly-perfect little golden nuggets. The second outing was adobo pork. Rest assured this will be repeated, so there is strong potential that there will one day be pictures of a crockpot adobo in this very space. More pork shoulder, this time a pretty cheap iteration. Soaked and cooked at length in vinegar and soy sauce and peppercorns, the pork becomes weirdly flaky and almost dry, but infused with flavor, and the sauce was engineered generations ago to make plain, steamed rice into tangy nirvana. Next time, I will include chicken wings, and make enough to make bahn mi with the leftovers.
So, red beans. This meal would have been ridiculously cheap had I not passed by the aforementioned Bi-Rite Market for a bag of coffee and stumbled over a two-pack of house-made andouille links (All the other packages were triples, which would have left me a spare, as I was having a friend over for dinner. I could have used the spare to put into the pot, or with leftovers, but the two-fer made it feel like kismet.) full of heritage pork and smoked paprika. Then, to further run up the tab, there was no line at Tartine, and my feeling about Tartine is that since I refuse to wait in line for their delicious output when it is ridiculously long, no matter how hungry I am for it, when there is no line, I should get in there and buy something whether I am hungry for it or not. So, when I got inside, I got a morning bun, because it represents a kind of platonic perfection that gives me reason to keep breathing in generally meaningless world, and I hadn't had breakfast despite it being nearly 1 o'clock. And, in keeping with the Franco-NOLA theme, I got pear-laden brioche bread pudding which would make my diabetes counselor lunge for my throat and then break down weeping at the futility of her task after she has been restrained. I got a serving size they called a "cup" packed to go, and it easily weighed twice as much as the half pound of sausage. It was the kind of good that necessitates no discussion whatsoever of its goodness, a goodness that can be conveyed completely with glances and small facial gestures. These two late additions to the meal cost about twice as much as the pot of beans and rice.
Pound of rice and pound of beans in bulk (.99 cent a pound!), celery, bell pepper, yellow onion, garlic from the Evergreen Market. The Evergreen is run by a several generations of Chinese family and caters to a Mexi/CentroAmericano clientele. It used to be the neighborhood's infirmary, back when this was a different kind of neighborhood. A guy like me wandering the store for too long would be approached by an old woman and asked if I felt ok or needed anything special and after some short vetting and maybe even a discussion of symptom, be sent out with Mexican pharmaceuticals. I don't think it goes on too much anymore, or if it does it has gotten much more discrete. I tend to cheat up on the garlic and down on the celery in my red beans. I got a pound and a half smoked ham hock at the Mission Meat Market for 2 dollars and change. There was no discussion of the heritage of this particular swine.
I cooked the beans for about 4 hours on high and then another 3+ hours on low. One thing I did differently this time that I have never done before when making red beans was cooking down the onion/peppers/celery /garlic with a little bacon. The flavor (and bacon) were well worth having to wash the extra pan and I will certainly do this in the future, maybe with a link of andouille.
No comments:
Post a Comment