Pass Over the Pepper

The most important holiday in my West Coast liberal Jewish/WASP/Buddhist-influenced family of choice is Passover. Our seder, always held on the convenient weekend instead of the official first day, has for years provided a casual, cozy place for my family's circle of vaguely Jewy friends who, in avoiding the stressful family dynamics that such holidays usually provide, have managed to create an intimate group of families and friends who loudly joke, cook, bicker, and drink their way through the proceedings.

Turns out that relatives are relative. 

The menu has, over the years, developed into a routine despite my mother's best efforts. Along with a few of her close friends - all loud, opinionated Jewish(y) women with what you might politely call "strong personalities" - certain recipes have become canon, with people threatening to not attend if my mother doesn't make her lamb recipe or Karen comes without her passover cake and so on. Often the people making the demands of these women are each other. And their children. Because, although I can imagine a seder without these things, it isn't one I can feign much excitement about. 

And so when I moved across the country for graduate school and could no longer afford to come home for my parents' seder, there were a few recipes I took with me.

It took me three years to get Karen's secret family recipe for her Passover cake, and I only got access to it by arguing that I was a legitimate family member, so that remains a secret. And because the cake is out of this world, even for someone like me who isn't much into cake, I apologize for your inferior life experience. You will just have to experiment with nut flour, egg whites, and whipped cream in hopes of creating a vague shadow of the epic deliciousness that is this cake.

I will give you my mother's lamb recipe, which has converted goys, lamb-haters, and vegetarians to this once-a-year, Jewish, lamb-filled, unapologetically pink and juicy meat bonanza. It isn't really hers, so much as it's straight out of the Silver Palate Cookbook, but it has all the nostalgia, taste, and notoriety of a traditional family recipe. It took almost as much badgering to get as the cake recipe, but for different reasons. My mother's original description of the recipe was "Oh, I just put the lamb in the oven and cook it for awhile." Eight hours of marination, over half a dozen ingredients, and a whole lot of phone calls about cooking techniques later, I finally got the whole thing out of her.

I had a (somewhat) irrational fear of running out of food, so for a crowd of fourteen underfed students I bought a 8 lb leg of lamb and a 5 lb shoulder, both bone-in. The best combination of cheap and quality lamb was found at one of my local Italian Market butchers - I visited and called around at some of the local supermarkets and they either had small, sad-looking cuts for a dollar cheaper (Acme, Superfresh type places) or large, prewrapped legs of lamb for several dollars more (Wegman's). The butcher at Cannuli's deboned the lamb (although was slightly confused by my request to keep one of the shank bones whole for the seder plate!) and wrapped it up for me. As you can see from the bag, it isn't exactly a kosher establishment, but I was pretty thrilled with my purchase.

Because this recipe calls for extensive marination, it doesn't have to be the most tender or quality cut. I bought my lamb on the Thursday before my Saturday seder, which meant it had over 24 hours to marinate. The shoulder made for less beautiful slices, but still tasted wonderful, so it's easy to save a few dollars by getting the less quality cut. 

The marinade is a potent mixture of soy sauce, wine, vinegar, dried spices, and fresh mint and rosemary. After cooking, the leftover drippings make a mean gravy.

Rolling the roasts was sort of an experience, as I hadn't ever tied a shoulder together before - it was a little more difficult and less intuitive than the leg. 

There's probably a fast, easy, standard way to do this, but I don't know what it is. I just tried to wrap it evenly, and tied it tightly. It worked out.

It wasn't until several hours after the meal (and quite a few glasses of wine) that I saw the unopened bottle of mustard on the kitchen table and realized that I'd forgotten to cover the lamb in a mustard-peppercorn crust. It adds a lovely, crispy, spicy touch to the lamb and, although my mother used to leave it off when there were a lot of small children at the table who couldn't handle the spicy pepper, it's one of the defining traits to this recipe. Despite that, I didn't realize it was missing until I'd eaten my share of the meat (neither did anyone else), and so it is optional. But it's also better.

Passover Lamb

From The Silver Palate Cookbook by way of my mother

Wash and pat dry:

5 lb leg of lamb

[unrolled and de-boned]

Combine:

1 tb peppercorn

1 tb fresh rosemary [I usually use more]

one bunch mint leaves

5 cloves, crushed

1/2 cup sweet vinegar [the original recipe calls for raspberry, I used balsamic.]

1/4 soy sauce

1/2 cup dry red wine 

Pour marinade over the lamb and refrigerate, turning the meat every so often, for at least 8 hours and up to a couple of days.

Take the lamb out of the fridge a few hours before cooking to bring to room temperature.

Roll the lamb with cooking twine and cover with:

2 tb Dijon

2-5 tb peppercorns

Put lamb on meat rack in a baking dish and pour the marinade around the lamb. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F for about an hour and a half (18 minutes a pound). Let roast stand for 20 minutes before slicing and serving. Retain cooking juices for gravy. 

 

Happy Passover, holiday of your choice, or unattached lamb-filled feast!

Epic Pig Roast: We Don't Know How to Do This. (Aftermath)

To recap: We bought this whole, uncooked pig and roasted it. Which was lovely and difficult and I'm so glad we did it and I'll never do it again, and everyone had a good time and ate lots of pork. And then, and you probably saw this coming, we had all this pig left over.

Or, to be more precise, we had whole pig carcass with all the pork eaten off it.  The bones, the ribs, the head, the liver, the feet...those things we had. 

Well, and I guess there was some actual pork left too.

 

So, after weeks of planning a pig roast, we suddenly found ourselves with about twenty pounds (give or take ten pounds) of pig bits that needed to be dealt with.

First we cut up the pig carcass. After the roast, we'd just put the whole thing in a garbage bag and left it in the fridge, so there was quite a lot of cutting and sorting to do. I don't have any photos of that (lucky you), but it was a huge pain and took the two of us about two hours. As is true of this whole project, had we known what we were doing, it would have been a simple process and taken about twenty minutes.

After our carving ordeal we got hungry and ate liver, onions, and pig cheek for our afternoon tea. And, well, about the liver. It tasted wonderful on the day of the roast, covered in the citrus-y marinade, but most of the delicious seemed to have dissipated in the meantime. Liver is sort of gross, even when you're a grown-up.

With that, we'd gotten rid of the liver and the cheeks, which wasn't really making much of a dent in the huge pile of pig pieces. So we filled up a stock pot with meaty bones and feet, threw in some onions and bay leaves, and boiled the hell out of it.

The resulting stock was so thick (and the refrigerator so cold) that it congealed overnight. Which made bagging it for the freezer extra easy!














The thing about pork stock is that it really isn't a good soup stock. It's thick, it's overwhelmingly flavorful, and it's sort of... intensely porky. Extremely good for cooking beans. Not so good for a nice noodle soup. Luckily one of my favorite, freezable, hearty foodstuffs involves lots of pork and beans.


Feijoada is a Brazilian staple. Like all regional specialties, there's only one way to make it, and everyone in Brazil has their very own, totally authentic way of doing so. Luckily they do usually agree on two things: black beans and pork.

And onions, because everyone loves onions. We kept it real simple: Cook two pounds of black beans with some pork stock. Sauté all the onions left over from the pig roast, add a couple of pounds of chorizo that you picked up at the corner store and about an equivalent pile of pork that you just spend hours chopping off a pig carcass. Everything should be bite-sized pieces. Add it to the beans with some bay leaves. Cook for awhile.

After eating it in your Pre-Modern Europe class, decide it needs a salty/smoky flavor. Buy a package of bacon. Add it to the pot. Cook for awhile.

Now put it in your fridge, next the pot of pork stock, the tupperware of pork fat, and the bowl of pork pieces.

Come back next week for my exciting foray into a rigid kosher diet! This new religious adherence will be a desperate and terribly transparent ploy to avoid all the pork that's invaded my life.

Epic Pig Roast: We Don't Know How to Do This. (Part Two)

Disclaimer: This ought to go without saying, but some of these photographs involve a very dead pig. If you get squeamish about such things, you should skip this post. And probably any post that has the "slaughtering and butchering things" tag.

To recap: My friend Matt and I are hosting a pig roast. The pig is Beatrice, and she'd been soaking overnight in garlic, thyme, and a citrus marinade all night. You can read more about that here. Now it's the morning of the roast, and our beloved friend, Sarah, has zipcar'd a pickup truck to haul Beatrice and the grill to the park at 6am. Then she went back to bed, and we prepared to spend the next fourteen hours at the park, roasting a pig.

This is what I look like after three hours of sleep. I may be attempting to recreate the Pieta, but instead of looking sad and serene, I look annoyed and exhausted. I'm a realist like that.

At 7am, next to a beautiful lake full of resting Canada Geese, Matt and I straddled a raw pig carcass and, grunting, pushing, pulling, jamming, and becoming more and more frantic, tried to attach it to the spit. We decided, as marinade got in our shoes, as pig juices soaked into our clothes, as we took turns supporting and pushing 60 pounds of pig, that, in fact, this is a four person job. Minimum. It took us about 20 minutes and a lot of anxiety to get Beatrice securely on the spit. I would have loved to show you photos of what was probably, to an observer, a hilarious time, but Matt and I were both far too busy mounting Beatrice to take pictures. Use your imagination.

We finally got her up on the grill (we didn't manage to get her on quite straight, as you can see, but she's secure, I promise!). That morning we had been planning on renting a generator for power, but once we got there we discovered an electrical outlet that had gone unnoticed on our reconnaissance trips. Hooray! However, once Beatrice started turning, the chain on the motor began to slip. Ten minutes into the roasting process, our pig had a crispy, bubbling patch on one side, and wasn't able to turn all the way over. Disaster!

Matt discovered that if he held the chain down with a spoon, he could keep it turning. This technique, aside from being tedious and impractical, also seemed like it would burn off quite a bit of arm hair and be extremely uncomfortable. Before calling the party rental place, I decided to take one group photograph before the day turned into a hellish experience.

You can see the spoon, the patch of skin that bubbled from the heat, and our still-visible, slightly delirious, and quickly waning excitement about our pig.

Luckily the party rental folks answered the phone, and were able to direct us to the huge, totally noticeable knob (see it on the left? by the motor?) that would adjust the height of the chain. This fix worked for the next eight hours, and only started slipping again at the very end of the roast, when it hardly mattered anymore.

Crisis averted!

We spent the next few hours groggily watching the pig spin, adding charcoal and hardwood chips every so often, and trying to to homework.

Around noon, a group of folks showed up with a permit for the space. In all our planning, we'd never seen any permit requirements, or any way at all to call or request such a thing, so this was a surprise. Luckily they turned out to be the most awesome group of folks ever, and were pretty impressed with our pig, so we ended up sharing the boathouse with them for a few hours.

They were Philadelphia Black Gay Pride, and had a bumping DJ, a fat sign, and a bunch of really smart, interesting, super friendly, amazing folks. Matt and I were pretty happy to have some nice people to talk to, and we talked cameras and pig roasts with them for awhile.

People from the Pride event and other folks who passed by the boathouse kept coming in to look at the pig and take photos. It was so gratifying to see so many people who were interested, excited, and impressed with our pig ordeal, now in its ninth hour. We'd started in on the beer around 9am (hydrating!) and had been trying to get through some dense books, or in my case, fall asleep in the sun, so it was particularly nice to have our own folks start wandering in around 4pm.

The pig, which we had estimated taking about eight hours, was clearly not yet done, so we spent some time hula-hooping and goofing off.
 




A wedding party was using the boathouse for some photographs, and Matt suggested that I go ask them if they wanted to take some photos with the pig. (Which I did. This sort of friendship, where we willingly carry out each other's ridiculous suggestions is, as my sister pointed out, how we ended up hosting a pig roast in the first place.)

The couple seemed sort of horrified, but a few minutes later came over, followed by their troupe of wedding photographers.

 

Their wedding was probably less work than this pig.

 

Don't worry, Bea, we still love you. 

Eventually Beatrice seemed about done. We decided to try to crisp her up a little more by lowering the spit a few notches, close to the coals. It got a little stuck, but eventually, and with the support of the growing group of onlookers, we got her down. That's about when the chain decided to start acting up again.

We took the chain off, and got ready to move Beatrice off the grill. I like this photograph, because it looks like I'm super hardcore. Which I am, but not because I can lift heavy things. I'm supporting maybe ten pounds here. And that part of the spit wasn't hot at all.

 

 I also like how excited everyone is. Except perhaps Matt and I – we'd been at the park for over eleven hours at this point.

 

 I was starting to lose it. 

Not to take anything away from the euphoric sense of accomplishment we felt slicing into Beatrice!

 

And then we cut her up, very unprofessionally.

It started to get dark as we were cutting, which made things a little difficult, but we'd set out plenty of food for people, and everyone seemed content to hang out, eat, and talk while we butchered Beatrice.  Some particularly fantastic friends had contributed some dishes: pasta salad, hummus, cookies, chips and salsa, I think someone brought bbq sauce, and we'd also brought some corn, potato salad, apple sauce, and bread.

So much delicious. And that pig skin was so wonderfully crunchy, the pork was moist and flavorful, and everyone seemed happy.

I'm glad it all turned out so well – we got unbelievably lucky in lots of ways, considering we really didn't know what we were doing. We also got a lot of help and advice: from family (sister!), friends, and classmates, but also from people we didn't know, who stopped to talk to us on the street, or in the butcher shop, or at events, or parties, or who stopped by to watch our pig rotate on the day of the roast. It's been a wonderful opportunity to connect and learn from pork lovers everywhere.

And it's now three days later and I still haven't recovered. I'm still exhausted, I keep finding charcoal dust under my nails, and I've got a bunch of pig bones in a pot on the stove. Next time I want roast pork, I'm just going to order a precooked one form Cannuli's. Or get a sandwich from John's Roast Pork.

I am glad, however, that we've proved ourselves undeniably awesome.