What's cookin'

Eating well is much easier when you cook, but cooking well is difficult given time constraints and work schedules. Seeing Brian stock up at the Essex Street Market this weekend reminded me of how simple a good fast meal can be: quality meat, one or two vegetables, a little olive oil, and the right seasoning.

A great source for quick recipes is The Minimalist column and blog in the NYT food section, written by Mark Bittman. This weekend I tried the following simple recipe for pernil, or Puerto Rican roasted pork shoulder.

1 pork shoulder, 4 to 7 pounds (or use fresh ham)
4 or more cloves garlic, peeled
1 large onion, quartered
2 tablespoons fresh oregano leaves or 1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ancho or other mild chili powder
1 tablespoon salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
Olive oil as needed
1 tablespoon wine or cider vinegar

1. Heat oven to 300 degrees. Score meat’s skin with a sharp knife, making a cross-hatch pattern. Pulse garlic, onion, oregano, cumin, chili, salt and pepper together in a food processor, adding oil in a drizzle and scraping down sides as necessary, until mixture is pasty. (Alternatively, mash ingredients in a mortar and pestle.) Blend in the vinegar.

2. Rub this mixture well into pork, getting it into every nook and cranny. Put pork in a roasting pan and film bottom with water. Roast pork for several hours (a 4-pound shoulder may be done in 3 hours), turning every hour or so and adding more water as necessary, until meat is very tender. Finish roasting with the skin side up until crisp, raising heat at end of cooking if necessary.

3. Let meat rest for 10 to 15 minutes before cutting it up; meat should be so tender that cutting it into uniform slices is almost impossible; rather, whack it up into chunks. Serve with lime.

This recipe uses relatively few ingredients and has only two steps - make the rub and roast the pork; it requires only enough time to slow roast the meat (3-6 hours depending on the size of the roast). Pork shoulder, also called pork butt, is a cheap and easy to cook cut of pork: it is tender enough to be undercooked and safe, and fatty enough to stand up to long cooking times and come out juicy and soft.

Three and a half pounds cooked for a little over 3 hours, served it with mashed yams and roasted brussel sprouts - it was awesome. Fresh lime juice almost requisite. Could be a tiny bit tenderer, next time will turn down the heat a bit and cook longer (or maybe even try a crockpot).