Smoked Pork

I was thinking of smoking pork last week at our pre-reunion gathering, but I was nervous about trying it for the first time when serving thirteen dinner guests, not because thirteen at dinner is unlucky--and anyway there were fourteen including me--but because I'd hate to serve a failure to that many people. When I tried pizza, it was so easy I went with that instead, but just as good dress rehearsals reputedly make for bad performances, pizza was not easy on the night.

So perhaps it is foolish of me to decide, based on how easy (if time-consuming) it was to smoke this pork, that it is the perfect choice if everyone comes again next year, but I am refusing to learn from my mistakes.

This year, along with the disappointingly slow and difficult pizza: blackberry-lime gin fizzes, zucchini with lemon and mint, lentil salad with carrots, and lemon berry tarts.


Though the pizza was difficult the company was delightful:

  

Blueberries

After a hot morning at the charmingly-named Peasley Poor Farm, we came home with about twenty pounds of outstandingly delicious berries. With my share (about a quarter of the total) I made Individual Berry Crisps with the help of Betsy, Hedy, and Joe.

They were tart and wholesome.








Then, in addition to eating plenty raw, I made a blueberry pie with multigrain butter crust from the King Arthur Flour Cookbook (delicious but not very pie-like and a bit crunchy from the stoneground cornmeal) and Blueberry Snack Cake (not too sweet and very easy: one for the permanent collection).

This Picture Makes Me Sad

I took this just a little over a month ago (February 3rd), undoubtedly to preserve in my memory what must have been a delicious meal, but already I cannot remember how I sauced the pasta. I can see there are toasted slivered almonds, and I'm assuming there was garlic and olive oil, but I can't identify the larger-than-the-almonds pieces-of-something also tossed in there.

I'm glad I didn't forget the roasted asparagus: I've been eating it regularly and it's my current favorite vegetable, possibly my current favorite food.

So it occurs to me, instead of thinking of this blog primarily as a way to share recipe experiments, I need to do a better job keeping up with it for my own sake. In the past I forgot recipes and ideas and didn't regret them, but now that I have this darn picture-taking habit, I see the pictures and am frustrated by the imperfection of memory.

At least I can remember what I cooked last night:

At Marc's shopping for ingredients for next soup-and-bread-Tuesday, I saw beautiful green bunches labelled "broccoli rappini." The odd name looked like a mash-up of broccoli rabe and rapini, and that's what it looked like, so I treated it as such. Vegetable Love gave a simple method for braising it with garlic, olive oil, red and black pepper, and what looked like far too much salt. I used less than half the salt the recipe called for and enjoyed the result with a glass of red wine and felt so good and so healthy. Then I ruined it by eating too much crackers and cheese immediately afterwards.