Pulled Pork and Szegediner Goulash

Little Red and I started out toward Adam’s Market in Kingston hankering for lamb chops, but once there we soon discovered that the price of lamb chops has risen into the stratosphere. Fortunately, there were some very tasty looking boneless pork butts—perfect for making Pulled Pork, and I reckoned one would do very well for making both Pulled Pork and Szegediner Goulash, which is made with pork, sauerkraut and plenty of Pride of Szeged Hungarian Paprika. The pork butts were only $1.09 a pound, which seemed about 1/18 of the price of the lamb chops we wanted.

It is better to make pulled pork in a slow smoker. Even a Weber Grill (charcoal) will much better results—but Oven Roasted Pulled Pork can be excellent, and it is certainly better than no barbecue at all. If you’re hankering for a smoke flavor you can always dab on a bit of liquid smoke, or roast some hickory chips in the oven for a while.

Remove any twine netting from the pork butt. Sprinkle it all over rather heaviliy with salt and pepper. Insert three or four cloves’ worth of slivered American garlic into slits poked into the fatty parts of the pork butt. Salt and pepper the butt again and sprinkle it all over with Pride of Szeged Sweet Hungarian Paprika — which we also got at Adam’s. Place the butt in a roasting pan fat side up. If necessary prop it with some potato slices. Set the pan in an oven preheated to 450° oven until it is well-browned. If the pan starts smoking add a little water or turn the heat down. Or do both. It may well take half an hour to brown the beast.

Turn the heat down to 325° and roast for an hour. Meanwhile, prepare some Yukon Gold potatoes by removing the eyes, the stems, and any bad spots, then cut them in half. Peel two large onions. Coarsely chop one; cut the other into half rings. Take the meat out of the oven after an hour, and put it on a platter.

If you are planning to make Szegediner Goulash, cut off a third of the pork butt. A pound and a half or two pounds. It will not be cooked done yet. If you are just making pulled pork, skip all the goulash instructions.

Put the halved potatoes in the roasting pan. Strew the onion over everything, then put the pork butt back in the roasting pan fat side up and continue roasting it for half an hour while you put the goulash together:

For Szegediner Goulash, cut the pork butt into eating sized pieces. Tumble the pork pieces into a large stewpot with a goodly amount of the drippings from the pulled pork pann and brown them over medium high heat, stirring occasionally. Don't let them scorch, but a good forthright flame will be essential. Sprinkle on a bit more paprika and also some salt and papper. Add a cup of sliced mushrooms as the pork begins to brown. Add a large onion, diced, and six cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped. Let the vegetables brown. You might like to add a carrot and one stalk of celery, both minced. Sprinkle everything with two tablespoons of Pride of Szeged Hungarian Paprika—preferably one tablespoon of sweet and one tablespoon of hot. Add a bay leaf and a tablespoon of thyme. Add some freshly ground black pepper. Open a package of sauerkraut and drain it in a colander. You will not need to soak the sauerkraut unless it seems extremely sour. Let the sauerkraut join the rest of the goulash ingredients in the stew pot. Add enough water or preferably pork or ham stock (do not use canned broth) to cover by an inch. Bring to the boil, and then reduce the flame to a good simmer and cover the pan. ** The goulash will need to cook at least two hours for the meat to get properly tender. About half an hour before it is done, remove most of the excess liquid to another pan or a skillet and reduce it down until it gets thick. Meanwhile, add a cup of sour crream to the goulash, and stir it in well. Add the reduced cooking liquid, stir well, add a tablespoon of chervil, and adjust the seasonings. Let your goulash simmer a few minutes, then check the seasonings again. Finish the sauce with a tablespoon of red wine and some butter, if you like. Serve over broad egg noodles.

At the ** above, return to the pulled pork: Now cut two sheets of aluminum foil, both long enough to make a tent over the the pulled pork and the entire pan. Crease them several times along one edge to make a tight seal and then spread them out to make double wide foil. Haul the pork out of the oven. Use the double wide foil to cover the pork and make a tight seal around the pan. Put the pan back in the oven and lower the heat to 300°. You can sprinkle the top all over with Tabasco or Cholula hot sauce, if you like. It will need to cook at least two more hours to be fork-tender. Long, slow cooking is essential.

Lift one corner of the foil and use a fork to test for doneness—will it pull? If so, it’s done. When the meat is tender, remove it to a platter and use two dinner forks to pull it apart into shreds. If some chunks won’t separate easily, put them on a cutting board and hash them up. The outside crispy brown pieces are the best. Be sure to eat most of them before choipping them into the rest of the barbecue.

Barbecue sauce is not essential. I recommend you don’t use it. Down south, pulled pork is served on soft buns; probably because they don’t have decent poppy seed hard rolls. I like coleslaw on my barbecue. Some do not.

To make coleslaw: ½ a large head of cabbage, one jar of Marzetti Slaw Dressing. Shred the cabbage on a mandoline or using a chef’s knife, or grate it on the WhizzinArt. Put in a large bowl. Add the Marzetti slaw dressing. Kraft Slaw Dressing will not give good results. Mix well. Let stand an hour in the refrigerator. Serve over—or at least next to—pulled pork barbecue.

While everything finishes cooking, you'll have just enough time to make some pâte à choux for cream puffs. Bake the creampuffs while your pulling the pork. Fill them with vanilla ice cream and top with chocolate ganache made by melting Lindt milk chocolate with some heavy cream.

God bless you all, and please invite me to dinner.

Three Indian Restaurants

Little Red and I been out a few times lately to some Indian restaurants: Kingston Indian Restaurant (downtown, where the Tea Garden used to be), Mountain Gate (in Woodstock), Tanjore (in Rhinebeck) and the Indian Grill (on Broadway in Kingston). We had mixed results.

Kingston Indian Restaurant was the first place we tried. Little Red had never been to an Indian restaurant before, but she claims to like lamb curry, and I wanted a masala dhosa. I rode my bike over from Woodstock, down the Sawkill Road through Zena, and we tried the lunch buffet. It was not bad. Little Red like the lamb curry and the tandoori chicken. It seemed to be the only restaurant in downtwon Kingston that had a good sprinkling of people at the tables -- but that was probably just an illusion. It seemed "a clean, well-lighted place." The wait staff and the owner were friendly. They had only just opened a week or ten days before our first visit. There was no dhosa on the menu. Well -- no matter. Many Indian restaurants do not serve dhosas.

We tried Mountain Gate next. Little Red and I were the only two people in the restaurant when we got there and no one else came in before we left. Possibly Christmas Eve is not the best time to visit an Indian restaurant? The waitress, an American teenager, looked after us fairly well. We liked the creamy chicken and coconut soup. And the papadoms. Mountain Gate does not have a dhosa on the menu. The dining room seemed clean. They charged me what seemed a steep price -- $3.50 -- for a cup of tea made with a Lipton tea bag—not even Brooke Bond Red Label. Little Red and I managed to get enough to eat for around $40.00—tip included. I call this the “Indian restaurant problem”—I think you often pay what seems a lot for what you get at an Indian restaurant. Overall, my opinion is we paid nearly twice as much as the meal might properly have cost — but that's just my opinion. The dining room was a bit chilly.

Mountain Gate made me miss the old Deanie’s. It seemed a well-appointed tablecloth restaurant, clean and well-lighted, and perhaps on a busier night the kitchen might have pleased me so much I'd be willing to overlook the price.

About aten days later we went down to Tanjore early on New Year's Eve. It was a buffet night. The rice was good. The samosas on the buffet, however, were too soggy to eat and the nan had been steamed until it took on an oddly gelatinous texture. Little Red liked the lamb curry; but I thought it was not only a bit dull but also that it had been stewed a bit too long. We both liked the tandoori chicken wings. I liked the vegetable biryani and the palak paneer; the chicken tikka masala was unexceptional -- did you know it's the new "national dish" of Great Britain? -- and seemed to have been made, if that is possible, with a starting base of canned tomato soup. There were many choices on the buffet, but overall most items seemed to be swimming in a lot of gravy. The chai was not bad, though, and it was included in the price of the buffet, as was dessert. I especially liked the honey balls and the white cheese balls in syrup, but by that point in the evening Little Red was too full of curry to think of eating dessert.

If Tanjore was closer, I might go fairly often, but Rhinebeck seems a bit far, though I might go back for a masala dhosa if I’m in the area on other business. This meal also cost nearly $40.00 for two people (including the tip), but at least we got plenty to eat, and it did seem that Little Red was at least warming up to the different types of Indian food. Perhaps we would have fared better later in the evening, or on a non-holiday night.

At Kingston’s Indian Grill, which is on Broadway near but across the street from the mid-town Diesings, we did fairly well, I thought, though Little Red felt we should have gotten more of lamb curry for dinner. It’s true we did not get much of the curry, but at least it was good. The papadoms at the start were freshly crisped. The samosa chat was a relatively crisp samosa in a bowl of chickpeas with yogurt sauce—and there seemed to be a lot of chickpeas. The alu nan was toasted nice and crispy on the exterior. I forgot to order chutney. A large party sitting nearby got some very nice looking tandoori meats on sizzling platters. There were not many seats in the restaurant. The carpet seemed perhaps even older than the carpet at Eng’s. Possibly a new carpet sweeper would help keep it cleaner. Though I found the lamb curry to be spiced just right, and we both agreed that it tasted good, Little Red felt we did not get much of it (the IRP again), and Little Red complained it was slightly to hot for her. So I ordered a mango lassi. We went home relatively happy, because at least we hadn’t spent an arm and a leg, and we both thought the tandoori grill items might be fun to try in the future. The Indian Grill has a lunch buffet, which made Little Red’s ears prick up, but alas they seem to have taken lamb chops off the new menu.

Overall, none of the curries we ate at any of these restaurants was better than the curried potatoes or lamb curry I can easily make at home using Patak’s Mild Curry Paste — which you can find at Hannaford's.

The Hudson Valley seems ready for a few totally vegetarian restaurants like the Udupi Palace, so I can at least hope some udupi cuisine nearby ... before long.

Burro di Parma Italian Butter

Burro di Parma—the best butter I have ever eaten. Highest quality, best flavor. Great Italian Butter. Far superior to the Danish Lurpak and to the organic American cultured butter. Available at Sam’s Club. (Perhaps only at Sam’s Club? From the production of Parmigiano Reggiano, where the true Parmesan—Parmigiana—the King of Cheese! Derives. Evidently it all starts with the cows. Packed in 17.5 (1.1 lb) blocks. The heavy paper paper packaging with its green and red stripe shows a blue line drawing of an Italian milkmaid. No trace of surface discoloration, no off flavor near the surface. Take two blocks of this butter home with you.

Stalle Selezionate, vacche selezionate, panna altamente selezionata. Questo burro, dal sapore fragrante e delicato è e prodotto da creme pastorizzate del latte raccolto nella zona di Parma e Reggio Emilia, dove si produce il miglior formaggio italiano. La qualità è ineguagliable in quanto il latte utilizzato è altamente selezionato secundo severi e rigorossi disciplinari di produzione. Materia grassa 83% butter fat. Packed by Montanari & Gruzza, Via Newton 33 (RE) Italy.

www.delitia.com

The Omnivorous Epicure?

Although I like to think of myself as "primarily a novelist," I started out as The Omnivorous Epicure; I'll eat anything that tastes good. My first effort was a food column that appeared in eight daily newspapers. I started writing it while running a horse farm near Charlottesville, Virginia.

That was long before I published a prize-winning novel and acquired an MFA in Fiction Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University -- I started my career in journalism with a high school diploma from Onteora. I was a sports reporter on the Kingston Daily Freeman ... back in the Linotype era, when Charlie Tiano was the Sports Editor. I miss the buzz of working in a newsroom, though not as much as I have missed writing about food.

After teaching cooking and wine tasting, I reviewed restaurants in Richmond, Virginia for awhile. My favorite red wine is Morgon, though I like Pommard, and also Chinon. I might like California reds more if they didn't seem so over-priced; and since the left coast wine laws have no teeth, you never really know what you might be drinking.. I also love the Rheingaus and Moselles, though Mersault would get the nod if only they could be a bit more reliable; but nothing compares to Sauternes.

My first restaurant was so successful that I never got a chance to do any catering. I have worked in a number of kitchens and also as a restaurant manager. I know the business. Most of all, I know how hard it is.

My first cookbook, The Hundred Glories of American Cuisine, is almost ready for a publisher.

I rarely visit a restaurant alone -- what would be the point? -- but I don't always visit more than once before writing the review. I like to write about the whole performance, not just the food. Buffets usually bore me, but I love church suppers. And bake sales.

My favorite meal is the Thanksgiving feast. However, in the future I'm making grilled lamb, not roast turkey. When you come right down to it, I prefer a spit-roated lamb to a slow-cooked roast pig. I do love the barbecue burrito at the Blue Ribbon in West Newton. It may be impossible to improve on the cheeseburger at The Riverside in Charlottesville. El Parillan serves the best carne asada taco in Los Angeles. Real Texas chili is ambrosia. So is broccoli with Hollandaise, or a good porterhouse with Bearnaise sauce. I like to cook dinner with friends. Why aren't you here?

- The Omnivorous Epicure