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Recipe: carolina-style pulled pork

I wrote about pulled pork earlier this year during my Summer of Barbecue, but I never gave a recipe for it. Barbecue is regional in the US. Heck, my MIL just told me last weekend that barbecue in Memphis differs from barbecue in the rest of Tennessee! The varieties could make your head spin and your colon tremble: sweet, spicy, vinegar-base, tomato-base, thick, thin, beef, pork, ribs, pulled, sliced, smoked, and don’t forget the hot-links. I like them all, really. But in southern Virginia, we get a heavy influence from North Carolina and so tonight I paid homage to Carolina pulled pork for dinner.

One of my favorite acts in cooking is the Magic Act, where you take a cheap cut of meat and cook it forever, whether by dry or moist heat, and render it a tender heap of Culinary Nirvana. Since we’re talking Carolina barbecue, you automatically know it is 1) pork and 2) vinegar-based sauce. And if you didn’t know, it’s about time you learned. An excellent part of the beloved piggy (besides the belly and the leg) is the shoulder, aka butt, Boston butt, Boston roast, shoulder blade roast. It is a favorite for barbecue (and also of Chinese cooking!) for its wonderful flavor, marbling, tenderness, moistness, and low cost. The trick is low and slow heat.

I tend to believe that authentic barbecue is smoked over coals for hours on end. I could do that where I live, but then I might burn down the entire National Forest, so I slow cook in the oven. It’s a more practical approach.

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Recipe: laab

First the admin stuff: I’ve decided to show only 3 posts per page. I’m not sure if this matters or not to anyone other than me, but it makes the traffic on my server easier to handle. The traffic… I thought when we left Southern California we also left traffic behind! Not so. When I made this blog public I was expecting maybe a couple dozen foodies to drop in from time to time to talk food. But now, each time someone links to me on StumbleUpon, it’s as if all of those people are kicking my dear old server in the shins. This blog, my other blogs, and my entire website go dead. So until I can switch out the hardware and optimize caching within the next week or so, I am blocking requests from StumbleUpon. Sorry folks – but you are killing me with your love and I think we need a break… just a short one. It’s not that I don’t enjoy visitors, just that I hadn’t prepared appropriately for the magnitude. So let me be a proper host and get my house in order (i.e. put the old server out to pasture).

On to the topic of the day: larb or larp or laab. It is a wonderful Thai seasoned meat salad of sorts. We were introduced to the dish by our friend, Pailin. She’s Thai and she’s a chef and she’s amazing. We met her hitch-hiking in the Eastern Sierra. Jeremy and I had hiked out of the John Muir Trail a day early because we fell a day behind and were going to miss our scheduled shuttle pick up at Whitney Portal. Instead, we exited via Kearsarge Pass to Onion Valley where we encountered Pailin and Wayne as they finished a day hike. I had never hitched before, but I’m not a very intimidating person (except that I stunk something awful after 6 days of backpacking without a shower), nor did they appear to be serial killers. Gee, I hope my mom isn’t reading this… I asked if we could catch a ride into town. We became fast friends and they stayed with us in Pasadena a couple of times when they came to LA to replenish their pantry with Asian groceries. Wayne and Pailin treated us to dinner at this authentic Thai hole-in-the-wall joint in downtown LA. That’s where we had laab and that’s where the addiction began.

My version of the dish uses ground turkey because it’s healthier, and I probably Chinesified it over the years adding ginger and garlic. When I decided to post this recipe, I realized that perhaps I should check its authenticity against some of my Thai recipe books. Hmmm, no garlic or ginger… Anyway, you can use pork or beef or chicken or tofu. There appears to be enormous flexibility on this dish.

Recipe: coleslaw

I cannot recall when it was that I changed my mind about cabbage, but it has been one of my favorites for a long time now. I initially only ate cabbage in the Chinese cold salad form when I was a kid. It’s salted and then marinated in sweet, sour, and spicy seasonings – served with the traditional cold appetizer plate. I ate it up. Did I mention that I am crazy about pickled vegetables? Don’t get me started on kimchi… I could eat that for days on end.

Coleslaw scared me at first. In the South, it was usually mixed with a lot of mayonnaise. I’m not afraid of mayonnaise per se, well… yes I am. It grosses me out to consume enormous amounts of mayonnaise. When I moved west to California, I discovered the mayonnaiseless coleslaw and I was hooked, however I didn’t consume much of it because I spent my days eating a lot of fantastic ethnic food that I can’t get my hands on now.

So now, in the Rockies, I’ve been driven to making my own favorites because I can’t seem to find them in town. This summer I did a lot of barbecue testing and of course, the natural partner to pulled pork, pork ribs, barbecue chicken, and friends is… coleslaw (among other things like beans, potato salad, and rolls). Coleslaw is unbelievably easy to make. Even easier if you omit the mayo.

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