Pork Fajitas?

Last week, my partner decided she wanted pork. Then she discovered that avocados were on sale, so she decided we should make pork fajitas.

The more common meats for fajitas are, of course, beef, chicken, and shrimp, but there's no reason pork couldn't work, so I was game. Of course, we were out of lettuce and sour cream, but we don't let little things like that stop us.

Pork Fajitas

1 large pork steak
1/2 large onion
1 red pepper
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon tumeric
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
dash of cayenne pepper
2 tablespoon canola oil

Slice onion and pepper into narrow slices and place in separate bowls. Sprinkle 1/4 teaspoon salt into each bowl and mix.

Mix all the spices together.

Cut the pork into strips. Sprinkle half of the spice mixture on the top and let sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Flip the pork and sprinkle remaining spices. Let sit again for 5 to 10 minutes.

Heat canola oil in a medium-hot pan. Saut&233; the onions until they are translucent and start browning, then add the peppers. Once the peppers soften, remove from pan.

Place the pork strips in the pan and brown on each side. Add the onions and peppers and saut&233; until pork is done. Remove from heat and serve over tortillas with your favorite toppings.

I wasn't confident how well the pork was likely to turn out, but it was really, really good. I was concerned that the pork would dry out, but adding the vegetables to the pan while I was finishing the pork kept the pork tender and moist.

Green peppers would work in this recipe, but I think the red is better. The sweetness of the red pepper brings out the sweetness and savoriness of the pork in a way green peppers can't. Green peppers are a little too bitter to do so.

Normally, I prefer corn tortillas over flour, but getting fresh corn tortillas can be a real challenge. With the pork fajitas, I think flour would work better as they are milder in flavor and really let the pork shine.

So now I know that the meat I use in fajitas is only limited by my imagination!

Mushroom Pork Chops

Several weeks ago, I bought a family pack of pork chops. I divvied them up and froze what I didn't immediately use. Some of the chops were HUGE - like twice the size of a normal pork chop. Easily six inches or more long.

This last weekend I decided to make pork. Of course, I pull out the packaging, thinking it was a roast that I wanted to smother in mushrooms. Oops! I decided I would smother them in mushrooms anyway.

Mushroom-smothered Pork Chops

1 375ml bottle of rose wine
2 cinnamon sticks, broken into small pieces
1/2 teaspoon bruised grains of paradise (if you don't have them, use 1/4 teaspoon cracked black pepper)
3 very, very large pork chops
1 lb mushrooms, sliced thinly
2 teaspoons or so oil (I used my Chardonnay Fumé grapeseed oil.)
1 tablespoon or so sea salt

Marinade pork in wine, cinnamon, and grains of paradise for two hours.

Preheat oven to 325°F (163°C).

Spread some oil on the bottom of the roasting pan. Lay first pork chop in pan. Sprinkle with salt. Spread a little oil on pork chop. Cover with a layer of mushrooms.

Place second pork chop, salt, oil, and cover with mushrooms.

Place third pork chop, salt, and oil. Cover top and sides with remaining mushrooms.

Roast for 2 to 2-1/2 hours.

The mushrooms keep the pork very moist and add tons of flavor. The long, slow roast gelatinizes the connective tissue, giving a really, really rich, unctuous savor to the meat.

This dish is really easy to make but tastes like you had to really work for it. But let's keep how easy it is to ourselves.

Cabernet Sauvignon Pork Tenderloin

This week's experiment involved pork and red wine. Washington state is really fortunate to have six hundred (yes, that's right, six hundred) wineries across the state, most of them east of the Cascades. So I get to sample some really excellent wines.

Columbia Crest puts out several lines of wine: Columbia Crest, Columbia Crest Grand Estates, Columbia Crest Reserve, Two Vines, and Horse Heaven Hills (3H). My favorite so far is the Two Vines wines; I haven't sampled the 3H wines yet. Wine Enthusiast, if I recall correctly, has stated that Two Vines have given several wines in the line 90+ points and says they are undervalued. I agree.

Disclaimer: I am not being recompensed for my evaluation of this vineyard. I also may not be remembering the correct magazine; it may be Wine Spectator.

To get on with the experiment, I had gotten some lovely pork tenderloin last week at the grocery store (has a lovely butcher in house). Today I took off work after a weekend trip to rest and recover, but felt well enough to cook a nice dinner. While I was piddling around the kitchen, I had the inspiration to inject the pork with wine infused with cinnamon and clove. Yummy!

Cabernet Sauvignon Pork Tenderloin

1 pork tenderloin, about 1 pound
2 sticks cinnamon
8 or so cloves
1 to 2 cups of wine
1 teaspoon coarse kosher salt
1 tablespoon olive oil

Put the salt in a small, heatproof bowl. Add a few drops of wine to the salt and mix. Add wine until the salt begins to turn purple (do not dissolve salt). Set salt aside to dry.

Break up cinnamon sticks into smallish pieces. Place remaining wine, cloves, and cinnamon in small saucepan or saucier. Simmer, do not boil, for 15 minutes to half an hour. Let cool.

Strain the spices from the wine. Inject the wine into the pork tenderloin from each end. After injecting the first end, stand tenderloin on uninjected end and gently massage until wine is absorbed. Then inject the other end.

Coat bottom of baking dish with oil. Smear wine salt onto the top and sides of the tenderloin. Let rest for an hour or so.

Place the soaked cinnamon and clove in the baking dish. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until tenderloin reaches 170°F (77°C). Let rest for at least 15 minutes.

Slice thinly and serve either hot or cold.

The pork tenderloin turned out quite moist, tender, and flavorful. The cinnamon and clove did not overwhelm the inherent sweetness and flavor of the meat, but rather enhanced it. I served it cold as I didn't know when my partner would be home from work (meeting ran over).

Some observations:

• I could have used more cinnamon and clove without doing too much harm to the pork. I certainly would use more for beef.


• I need to work on my injecting technique. The meat had dark bands through it -- either I didn't use enough wine, didn't massage enough, or didn't let it sit long enough before cooking. This will require more experimentation


• I'm glad I didn't use a merlot or zinfandel with the pork. I think I would have overwhelmed the flavor of the meat. Next time I will consider using a lighter pinot noir just to see how well it would work.

Ribs, succulent ribs!

One of my local grocers frequently has pork ribs on sale: spare ribs, baby back ribs, or country ribs. So I've become quite fond of trying to barbecue them.

I don't mean drenching them in sauce and grilling them at a high heat until they are done and dry. I mean long, slow cooking at relatively low temperatures for hours until they are tender and juicy and just everything ribs should be.

Most grills produce temperatures that are too high to do this, even at the lowest settings that still produce flame. But my oven at home works beautifully -- I can set it as low as 170°F (77°C) if I want. I can cook as low and slow as I want. If I remember to give the meat enough time to cook.

Pork Ribs

1 rack of pork spare ribs
1 tablespoon salt
Dry Rub
3 tablespoons powdered garlic
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1-1/2 teaspoons ground mustard
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon ground tumeric
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Sauce
1 cup barbeque sauce -- I use Jim Bean No 7
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup Worchestershire sauce
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 teaspoons tomato paste
1 cup of water (1/2 cup of whiskey can be substituted for 1/2 cup of the water)

Rub the spare ribs with the salt on both sides. Let sit while you mix the dry rub. Once the dry rub is done, rub both sides of the ribs with 1/2 of the dry rub mixture. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let sit in the refrigerator for at least two hours.

Heat the oven to 250°F (121°C). You can set the oven as low as 200°F but it will take much, much longer to cook. Remove the plastic wrap from the ribs and place in the oven on a baking sheet. You may want to set the ribs on a rack on the baking sheet to let the meat drain more effectively.

Flip over every two hours.

Mix the ingredients for the sauce with the remaining dry rub. After the ribs have been flipped for the second time, spoon about 1/4 of the sauce over the top of the ribs. Each time the ribs are flipped, spoon about 1/4 of the sauce over the new top surface.

Continue cooking until done, between 7 and 8 hours.

I cook the ribs for at least a half hour after I've put the last of the sauce on so the newest basting has time to thicken.

I will admit that I cheat using the commercial barbecue sauce as a base for my sauce. Mostly that's because I don't want to be chained to the stove cooking down the sauce for myself. I want to be able to focus on doing other things: sewing, painting, writing this blog...

The results of this slow roasting are wonderful. The sauce is nice and thick and not overly messy. It is also incredibly rich with a wonderful balance of tangy, sweet, and spicy. I don't like overly tomato-y barbecue sauces; I only want to use it as a jumping off point for my other flavors. Thinning the barbecue sauce with the soy sauce and Worchestershire sauce (and the whiskey) adds more savoriness to the sauce while the garlic, ginger, and cayenne tantalize the nose and tongue.

Pork Tart

Meat pies are something that is not done enough in the U.S. That's a shame because meat pies are amazing -- rich and filling. And they are really, really easy to make.

I found a really good recipe for pork filling in a book called Curye on Inglysch. The book is a collection of fourteenth century recipes. The pie dough is from Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books. However, these cook books provide two big challenges:

1. These recipes are written in Middle English. If you read the text aloud, sounding it out exactly as it is spelled, you will understand most of it. You do need a Middle English translation dictionary (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ is pretty good).


2. Like most of the recipes, some key information is missing -- most notably quantities. With a little experimentation, most of the recipes can be worked out.

I got lucky on this one; I got it in the first try!

Pork Filling

Original Recipe
Curye on Inglysch, Page 136, Recipe 172

Tartee. Take pork ysode; hewe it and bray it. Do Þerto ayren, raisouns courauns, sugur and powdour of ginger, powdour douce and smale brides Þeramong, & white grece. Take prunes, safroun, & salt; and make a crust in a trap, & do Þe fars Þerin; & bake it wel & serue it forth.

Explanation in Modern Terms

Tarte. Take boiled pork, chop it and grind it. Add egg, currants, sugar, and ginger powder, powder douce and small birds there-among, and lard. Take prunes, saffron, and salt and make a crust in a trap and put the meat and bake well and serve forth.

I used the Medieval English Dictionary found at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/, and the translations provided in the index of Curye on Inglysch to translate what the following terms meant.

• Ysode – to seethe, to boil


• Bray – to grind or to pound. In this context, to grind the meat made sense.


• Ayren – eggs


• Brides – birds


• Trap – a dish to lay the crust in.

Note that no instructions for the dough that this should be served in is given. I looked at several other recipes of the same time period to find one that would be appropriate.

Pork Filling Recreation

2 lbs Pork
3 Eggs, large
½ cup Currants
1 tbsp Sugar
1 tsp Ginger
Powder Douce: (I hand ground these as that is how they were treated in medieval times)
1 stick cinnamon
1/8 nut of nutmeg
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp Salt
1 Cornish Hen
¼ tsp Saffron
1 tbp Bacon fat
Pie Dough (enough for a top and a bottom crust)

Roll pie dough and lay in a dish ~1 inch deep.

Chop the pork into small bits. Debone and chop Cornish hen in small pieces. Mix meats and salt and let sit for 10 minutes. Add egg, currants, spices, and fat and mix.

Put mixture in the pie shell and bake at 350° until done (170° or until the egg has set, approximately 45 minutes to an hour).

Deviations from Original Recipe

I didn’t boil the pork. Often boiling meat leads to a loss of moisture and fat. Since modern pigs are being bred for leanness, I decided not to boil the pork.

Braying in Middle English means to pound or to grind. I decided to chop the pork into small pieces that would provide a firmer texture than a grind might. I thought this would appeal to a more modern sense an appropriate texture of meat.

The recipe only specifies “powder douce” or sweet powder. Some recipes I’ve seen for powder douce (and for powder forte) use upwards of 15 ingredients, including ginger and sugar. Since both are included in the recipe on their own right, I decided to go with a simpler powder douce that would complement the flavor of the pork.

I removed the prunes. I don’t particularly care for their flavor on their own and didn’t think they would complement the meat and spices as well as I would like. In addition, while the medieval palate is for a sweeter, more fruity mix (in part to stretch the number of servings of meat), I prefer less fruit with my meat.

Pie Dough

Original Recipe
Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, Page 74, sn. Pety Pernantes

Pety Pernantes. Take fair floure, Sugur, Saffron, and salt, and make paast Þer-of; then make small coffins then cast in eche a coffin iij or iiij raw yolkes of egges hole, and ij gobbets or iij of Mary couche Þerin; Þen take powder of ginger, Sugur, Reysons of Corans, and cast above; Þen cover the coffin with a lyd of Þe same paste; then bake hem in a oven, or elles fry hen in fair grece fresh, And then serve hit forthe.

Explanation in Modern Terms

As this recipe is for an egg and meat pie, it is appropriate for the pork pie filling as well. I am only using the pie dough (or paste) from this recipe:

Take fair flour, sugar, saffron, and salt and make paste there of. Then make small coffins…then cover the coffin with a lid of the same paste, then bake them in an oven or else fry them in fresh grease. And then serve it forth.

Note this recipe does not instruct the cook to use water or any other fluid to make the paste. However, fluid must be added to the dry ingredients to get a paste.

Pie Dough Recreation

20 oz Flour
¼ lb Butter (room temperature)
¼ tsp Salt
¼ tsp Saffron
1 tsp Sugar
1 cup Water (plus/minus 2 tsp, depending on the dryness of the flour and the humidity of the air)

Mix the flour and butter together by rubbing it between the hands until the mixture becomes mealy. Mix the remaining dry ingredients together and add to the flour/butter mixture. Add water, starting with ¾ cup and adding in teaspoon increments until the dough forms a ball that is slightly tacky to the touch (like a baby’s bottom).

Roll out the dough to fit the pan. Fill pie with filling and cover with second crust.

Deviations from the Original Recipe

As I stated above, the recipe does not call for any fluids to be added to the dry ingredients; however, you can not make paste from those ingredients without fluid. Therefore I added water.

In addition, the recipe doesn’t call for any fats. However, later period recipes (Markham, 1986, p. 96; Dawson, 1596, p. 11) call for fat (and sometimes eggs) in pie doughs.

Pork Chops in Garlic Wine Sauce

When I was growing up, I thought I didn’t like pork. My mother regularly made it, always the same way. She would mix a little salt, ground pepper, and garlic powder in a couple of cups of flour. Then she would dredge the thin pork chops. Finally, she would brown the pork chops in oil, add water, and simmer for half an hour or more. The end product was invariably dry pork chops with a bland brown gravy. So I thought I only liked pork when it was cured.

My partner, on the other hand, is a southerner. Or as her sister-in-law calls it: “The People of the Pig.” It was tough on her not eating pork much – either when I wasn’t home for dinner or when she could convince me to cook her pork and myself beef. That ended one night when I got tired of making two dinners and decided to surprise her. I realized that I could deal with the meat’s dryness if I moist-cooked it. So I quickly seared the meat, added water, and added salt and garlic. Something was missing, so I threw in some peppercorns (which I hate, but my nose said it needed). Something was still missing, so I dribbled in some rum. And I loved every bite of it!

So I went on a crusade to figure out how to make yummy pork. And I've been succeeding!

Pork Chops in Garlic Wine Sauce

3 tablespoons of chopped garlic

1 cup of Chardonnay

2 cups of water

1 large pinch of coarse-ground kosher salt

Several grinds of black pepper

1 teaspoon of orange zest

2 tablespoons canola oil

2 large pork steaks (I used pork sirloin steaks)

Pulse the garlic to turn it into a paste. Add wine, salt, pepper, and garlic. Add pork steaks and marinade for an hour.

Heat oil in skillet on high. Remove pork steaks from marinade (reserve marinade) and pat dry. Sear steaks until brown on both sides. Add 1 cup of marinade and simmer for 30 minutes.

The pork was really tender. The pork is well-flavored with the marinade and very, very moist. The orange zest really brings out the native sweetness of the pork and brightens the flavor wonderfully. This goes really well with rice pilaf and freshly steamed broccoli.