Recipe Thursday

This will not have the full effect without some sort of pictures, but as I may have discussed, the digital camera is down.

The recipe this Thursday will be a bourbon honey roasted pork roast wrap. This is a good recipe for any kind of occasion and it is easily prepared with tools you already own. Most of the ingredients are easily available all year.

The ingredients:

One big pork picnic roast, boneless

One onion

One orange

One lemon

Two cloves of garlic

1/2 cup of rice vinegar

About two tablespoons of honey (i just dumped it out of the bottle and guessed)

Stiff shot of cheap bourbon

Rosemary, salt, pepper

Sugar peas

Lettuce wrapping material and some sort of full grain starch (I used a bulgar wheat and flax pilaf)

Step One

Drink some bourbon.

Rub roast with two cloves of minced garlic, rosemary, salt, and pepper. I prefer going heavy on black pepper with pork. Place in freezer bag, juice lemon and lime, pouring juice in the bag. Place roast in bag. Marinade should touch the roast on all sides. I was using a small roast and still had to add a touch of rice wine vinegar to top it off. It doesn’t need to be drowned, just wet enough. Let it marinate a while. Give it a few hours, if you got it. Leave it over night if you can, but I don’t think a marinade this acidic needs that treatment. Take the roast out and retain the marinade.

Step Two

Drink some bourbon.

This is where you prepare your eventual deglazer. Dump the bourbon, rice wine vinegar, marinade, and the juice of the orange in a bowl and make a half ass attempt to mix (I was getting a little tipsy).

In a high sided and already medium hot roasting pan or dutch oven (feel free to improvise), sear all six sides in a mix of butter and olive oil (if I had sesame oil, I would have used it) with about half of the onion chopped. Once you have it good and brown, pull roast out. Deglaze the pan with your mixture. Keep in you drunk mind that this shit will catch the FUCK ON FIRE. I had a couple casualties in the eyelash department.

Once you got it rubbed down pretty good, dump in the honey and let it mix in. The mix should be a little sweet if you put enough honey in. Keep in mind, you’ll be adding more honey later.

Strain out, again half-assed drunkenly, the fluid and retain. Let the pan cool down. Put the roast in the pan with the last half of onion, sliced, and pour in some of the fluid. Maybe around half or so.

Dump the remaining fluid in a small sauce pan. Cover and simmer. Add more honey.  This will be a glaze, so it needs sugar.  Drink bourbon, adding some to glaze.  Feel free to add more citrus, also.  At this point, you should be drunkenly slinging ingredients about.

Cover the pork roast with tinfoil or a lid. Place in a 300 degree oven. Leave that shit for about three hours or so.

Not Sure What Step We’re On

Drink more.

Pull stuff out of oven and skim fat off the pan sauce. Tear into the roast.  It should easily fork apart.  If it does not, you are dumb.  Once you have it broke up into bite size strips, mix the pan juice and pork around good.  Fire up the broiler and place rack where the food will be about five inches from it, alternately, you could just heat up the oven to 425 and leave the rack in middle if your broiler doesn’t allow that kind of room.  Let the pork sit a little bit so the top layer dries out a little.  Then brush it with the glaze.  Place under broiler for about ten minutes.  Sample glaze.  Then bourbon.

Step 452

Steam (very briefly) sugar peas or snap peas or whatever the hell they are.  Dust them with some salt when they’re done.  Put them on a bowl of ice.  You want them slightly cooked, but chilled.

Remove roast pan from the broiler, flip the meat over, again letting it sit until it starts to dry a little.  You’re only doing this so the glaze sticks.  So, don’t let it sit out too long.  Brush it with glaze and put it back in the broiler.

At this point, you should be thinking about the starch.  I usually keep the bulgar and pilaf stuff around and in the fridge.  It helps to have the stuff about room temp.  If it’s hot, the lettuce will wilt too fast, but if it’s cold, it would be kind of nasty, too.  so fuck it.  Just cook it and set it out. By the time you figure this out, the pork should come out.

Step Q

At this point, you basically have a Pacific Rim modified carnitas going on.  So, make the wrap out of the sugar peas, meat, and rice or whatever, using whatever glaze is left over as a sauce.  I would make sure to squeeze some the juice out of the pork, first.  This dish goes well with bourbon.