Kimchi Soup (Kimchi chigae)

Spicy Korean kimchi soup is just the thing for a hot, hot day.

Recently, I’m really into this spicy Korean soup of pork, tofu, and kimchi called kimchijigae, or kimchi chigae. I started ordering it from a Korean restaurant in Northampton, SooRa, and then I had it at Gohyang, the Korean restaurant in Hadley, the next town over, for comparison. I liked the SooRa experience more, possibly for sentimental reasons, because they were nice about how weird Kevin and I were the first time we went in there, on one of our post-bicycling food adventures, famished and just mowing through the banchan, pickles that accompany a traditional Korean meal, to the point of needing a whole round of seconds.

Kimchi chigae is principally flavored by kimchi and another traditional fermented ingredient, a savory fermented paste of soybeans, rice, chili peppers, and salt called kochujang. This is a flavor that was not familiar to me before I started eating more traditional East Asian foods, and one I would describe as almost yeasty. An ingredient that is commonly used instead of kochujang, doenjang, is another fermented bean paste with that same earthy, yeasty essence. On my second visit to SooRa, the restaurant that introduced me to kimchi chigae, I ordered a different soup, the doenjang chigae, which the waitress described as quintessential Korean dish, and it was sour and savory, without the brightness of kimchi.

Kimchi chigae is made very sour and spicy from the kimchi and a finely ground red pepper. The bulk of the soup is usually made with fresh cabbage as well as large amounts of fermented cabbage in the form of kimchi, and small amounts of pork and tofu. It’s eaten with rice and some sides of pickled vegetables. Each time Kevin and I made our way to a Korean restaurant, I sweated and slurped through my bowls of kimchi chigae and swore to learn how to make it myself.

I like to have food security, and one way I feel food secure is being able to make the foods that I really love to eat. I don’t like having to rely on someone else to provide a food I want. For a little while, I love the thrill of having favorite dishes that I can only get in certain restaurants, but pretty soon, I need to be able to replicate it at home. This is how my repertoire becomes peppered with recipes. For a while, I had access to a good Indian grocery and cookbooks, and learned to make several dishes, starting with what I loved to eat at my favorite Indian restaurant and then expanding into other dishes that used ingredients I wanted to cook. Now I can also make a handful of East Asian dishes, mostly what qualifies as “junk” or snack food, and so is familiar from restaurants: Pad Thai, phô. A copy of The Take-Out Menu Cookbook has made its way into my home, and while it does not include Korean, it is of an ambitious breadth, including such items as bagels from scratch and your own Thai curry pastes.

To learn how to make this new soup I was crazy about, I looked for recipes for kimchi chigae online, letting Google lead me to the proper name for “korean pork and tofu stew,” which I’d forgotten, finding several and amalgamating them to come to an idea of what a typical kimchi chigae consists of. When I wanted to learn to make phô, I did the same thing, studying different recipes until I had a platonic ideal of it in my head to riff off of. There’s no point in precision when it comes to dishes like this: every household will make it differently, and it’s made from living ingredients and leftovers, so it resists exact duplication. That’s the art part of cooking, separate from the science.

The one ingredient that has proven difficult to find is the kochujang. I’ve been scouring every store in bicycling range for this ingredient, and come up nearly empty-handed. Even Tran’s International Market, which seemingly has a whole aisle dedicated to bean pastes, did not have exactly what I was looking for. A national brand, Annie Chun’s, did not inspire, either, because like the only variety of kochujang that I did find at Tran’s, it contained wheat flour, making it unsuitable for my gluten-free husband. Also, because they were all shelf stable, I can only assume they were not living.

What I should have found was something like what I ended up substituting, which was miso. Every place I’ve shopped, looking for kochujang or doenjang and kimchi, have all had selections of misos in their refrigerated cases. We’ve been using some red miso plus a healthy shot of Sriracha sauce to get the kochujang effect in both the kimchi chigae I’ve been making about once a week for dinner, and in Kevin’s breakfast soup.

The other main flavoring in the soup is the kimchi, preferably kimchi that’s been sitting around in your fridge for a while, because it has more beneficial bacteria in it and a stronger flavor. Real kimchi is cultured, as are all traditionally made pickles. When shopping for kimchi, sauerkraut, or any kind of pickle, look for it in the refrigerated case. The ingredients should include only vegetables, salt, and water. There’s no vinegar in a real pickle.

A local company called Real Pickles in Greenfield, MA describes their traditional pickling processes on their website. They make an “Asian style cabbage” pickle available at River Valley Market. (The prices from their online store are comparatively high; it’s expensive to ship glass. Another reason to buy local.) It’s a more refined version of the kimchi I have eaten elsewhere, make of very coarsely chopped cabbage and streaky red with chili peppers. The Real Pickles variety of kimchi is fairly mild, light in color, contains leeks, ginger, and garlic as well as cabbage and peppers, and the pieces are more finely minced than other varieties of kimchi I’ve sampled. I prefer its flavor to several other varieties I've tried, though because it varies so much from the standard I've come to accept, it somehow doesn't seem as authentic. It's at least as authentic as last summer's moussaka: the real thing is always subject to change, including relocation.

Gohyang has an attached grocery store where they make their own kimchi. I’ve missed them being open before---I’ve stopped there a couple of times during the day, only to be reminded by their posted hours that they only do a dinner business. But there is another local flavor to add to my cooking pot when I get the chance.

Read more about living foods on my other food blog, Tin Foil Toque.

Photo credit: charlie applebottom/Flickr

Braised pork foreleg and belly

We are eating the last bits of the half a pig we bought late last year. This week, I braised two forelegs and the last two pieces of pork belly that were in the freezer.

There are two challenges to working with this pig, both challenges that I relish. One is to use as much of the pig as possible, while minimizing the overwhelming porkiness. I put whole pig’s feet from this farmer into a pot of split peas, once, and ruined them, because these are not my father’s pig’s feet. I wrote a micro essay for Meatpaper in which I described the way my father would eat the pig’s feet that my mother would braise in tomato sauce. Even as a child, trying to eat one of those fatty trotters was a disappointment. There’s no meat on them, just bone and connective tissue, which are great for making silky, rich sauces, but on a pastured pig, there is also nothing porkier. The scent and flavor are strongly musky, almost human. And there lies the second challenge in working with this pig: being pasture raised, it ate a rich diet that makes it taste more like a pig than grain-fed pork raised in commercial operations, like what you buy in the supermarket and what my mother bought to put in her sauce.

My farmer tells me there are several factors that make a pig porkier tasting, including breed, diet, and exercise. This pig foraged in woods, ate bugs and roots, and had room to run around. The color of the animal’s skin is supposed to speak to the depth of flavor, too, with red pigs having redder, stronger-tasting flesh. Our pig has white skin, which I removed this time before cooking. I’ve braised some belly before with the skin on, and decided I could do with a milder flavor. Besides, I was also going to braise the forelegs, which I was sure would be stinky.


Previous experiments with this pig have proven that the best approach to the tough and flavorful bony cuts, like the ribs, has been to marinate the meat in a mojo criollo type of mixture (OJ, oil, and garlic is the barest-bones version of this), then rub it with dry spices, sear the ribs, then braise, finishing it with a barbecue sauce in the last hour or so of cooking. I’ve also had excellent results braising pork belly with strong spices and aromatics. The cooking is the same for the ribs as for the belly: sear, then braise. I decided to bring my simpler belly process to the forelegs, and braise everything together until the forelegs fell apart.

 

I worked from a recipe for Chinese Braised Pork Belly, made a couple substitutions (brown sugar for rock candy, jarred minced ginger for fresh), left out the eggs, and added water as necessary to braise. I have a giant, extremely heavy cast iron roasting pan that deserves some of the credit for the excellent results I get using it to roast vegetables and meat. The steady heat that it holds, and how hot the surfaces get, all do an amazing job. One of the disadvantages of cooking in a typical home kitchen like mine, compared to the kitchens in restaurants and on cooking shows, is that their stovetops and ovens can get much hotter than mine. Iron helps even the score.


To take the skin off, you want a very sharp knife. I sharpened my knife twice during this process, because taking off skin requires sharpness, and cutting through tendon and hitting bone will dull the blade considerably. After taking the skin and foot off one foreleg, I needed to sharpen up again for the next.

Taking the skins off the squares of belly is not unlike skinning a fish fillet or taking a chicken breast off the bone. I hacked the shit out of these bellies, like I did the first few times I filleted salmon. Not that anyone cared after it was cooked.

I cut a long incision in the skin, worked the knife under it, and kept the tension on the skin as I worked, in order to remove as little fat as possible, and no meat. 

To take the feet off, I cut through the skin around the foot at the "wrist," just above the thumb-looking toes. There are strong connective tissues on the front, rear, and sides of the joint, and running through the middle of the bones. After cutting through the outer connections with a knife and clearing the way between the bones, I used a pair of kitchen shears to cut the ligament in the middle.

After searing the meat in the roasting pan, I added the other ingredients from the recipe, including water, and began to braise at 250 for several hours, turning the pieces over every hour or so, to allow for browning above the liquid.

Each of these forelegs was good for more than one generous serving of meat. We ate the braised foreleg and belly together, which was a good combination because the fat content averaged out nicely between the fairly lean forelegs, which are a lot like turkey legs in the amount of connective tissue and the leanness of the meat, and the extremely fatty belly.

In the picture above, the sliced belly is between three and five o'clock, most of one foreleg is from five to nine, and along the top is the remnants of another foreleg after we'd already savaged it.


We ate from these for a few meals, eating bits of the foreleg and belly over lentils and rice. This morning we finished it off for breakfast with pancakes. It was so good that Kevin started singing “Pork and Pancakes” to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus in Handel’s Messiah.

Recipe: Roman hash

The types of greens or potatoes you use in Roman Hash are up to you; you can even choose to fry the potatoes in bacon fat, or skip the cheese at the end. If you use both very hearty greens (such as collards) and very delicate greens (such as arugula), chop them into separate bowls, and add the heartier greens to the pan first.


Serves 4 as a light meal or a substantial side dish.

Ingredients
⅓ cup olive oil
4 medium potatoes, boiled
3 medium tomatoes, or comparable quantity of canned whole tomatoes, diced (not canned diced tomatoes): about a pound
6+ cloves of garlic, pressed or finely minced
7+ cups of washed, loosely packed, chopped cooking greens (e.g. collards, kale, mustard greens, dandelion greens, arugula, chard)
½ tsp salt, or to taste
¼ tsp freshly ground pepper, to taste
Pecorino Romano or your favorite hard grating cheese, to taste (optional)

Equipment Needed
Large (14-inch or larger) nonstick skillet (an iron skillet is preferable)
Large pot with a lid
Colander
Cutting board and knife
Garlic press (preferable but not required)
Fine grater for cheese (if using)

Slice the boiled potatoes into half-inch thick rounds. Put the skillet on a medium-high flame and add the olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the potato slices in a single layer. Allow the potatoes to cook, undisturbed, for several minutes until they are lightly browned. Salt and pepper, and turn and redistribute the potatoes as needed to brown and heat the slices.

Add the tomatoes and garlic and stir, allowing the potato slices to break up. Cook for a few minutes, salt and pepper some more, then add the greens, stirring in a large handful at a time and allowing them to wilt slightly to make room for more. Continue to cook and stir until the greens are completely wilted and the dish is not too soupy. Taste for salt and pepper. Serve with a grating of hard cheese, if desired.

Quick braised hearty greens

How to shop for, prepare, and love kale and collards.

Our winter vegetable share has ended, and our summer share has not yet begun to produce. The winter farmer's market, where I was getting some early salad and braising greens, is over and the summer market will not start until next month. I find myself more often at the supermarket and the co-op, choosing from among the imports. Even my potatoes and cabbage are being shipped from California.

Butter paneer masala over rice with a side of kale

There are spring foods, and I'm glad to add them back into my diet: raw milk returns, including the locally made cheese that I make into butter paneer masala.

When the asparagus comes in, I make it every other meal. But mainly, spring is still about living on reserves of starchy vegetables, meat, and grain put by the year before. I think a green vegetable is necessary, too. In winter, we eat more cabbage in the rotation, and in summer, there's more green salad and a lot less cooked greens. In spring, when I run out or asparagus for a minute, it's back to the leafy greens.

I like kale and collards because I can prepare them simply, and use them interchangeably in other dishes or as a simple side. They're the foundation of a breakfast of lightly fried eggs over greens, and go into stew or beside a chop for lunch or dinner. While it's traditional to boil the hell out of them, they don't need to be cooked long to be thoroughly cooked, and they're also good just barely steamed. You can even eat them raw as salad, if you shred them or they're young and tender enough. Some foods we eat year round, and leafy greens are among them.

The dark leafy greens, along with other coles and green vegetables, are deserving of their own food group. The coles include cabbage, kale, and collards, as well as broccoli and Brussels sprouts, and other, non-cole  leafy greens include mustard, calaloo, and dandelion, though these are by no means exhaustive lists.

Oven-baked suet fries and buttered,
grilled asparagus pair with
mustard-brown sugar glazed salmon.

I fall back on a few ways that I will prepare dark green leafy vegetables. This is a practice for braising simple and flavorful greens that go with anything and everything.

How to prepare dark leafy greens:

1. When you're purchasing collards, especially, make sure the leaves are crisp and fresh, not wilted and sagging. Avoid collards that have many tears or marks on them from insects.
2. To wash them, fill your sink halfway with cold water and gently swish and rub the leaves in the water. Rub both sides of collards leaves lightly under the water to remove residue: even organically grown greens have soap and dirt on them. (If this seems like too much trouble, consider that organic, ready-to-eat, pre-washed greens are washed with a chlorine bleach solution, and are sometimes recalled for spreading infection instead of destroying them.) Shake them dry.
3. Inspect the leaves for bad parts to remove: any place that is wilted, brown or black, or otherwise shows evidence of insects having eaten it. Look for the eggs of insects that are sometimes found on the underside (the matte, light green side) of the leaves, and tear out these parts of the leaf.
4. Cut or tear the thick parts of the stems from the leaves of collards and kale.
Tip: If you're feeling really thrifty, you can chop all but the woodiest stems and start them in a braising liquid, then add the chopped leaves near the end.

5. Gather the leaves into a roll or pile and slice them. A very thin slice looks elegant and is a nice texture under something delicate like a fried egg. A big, thick slice goes well with something like sausage or potatoes.
6. Start some fat over medium-high heat in an iron skillet: at least a tablespoon or so or olive oil, butter, or bacon grease. Add a little thinly sliced onion, some red pepper flake. When the onion is lightly browned, add minced garlic or ginger if you like.
7. Add the greens in large handfuls that nearly fill the pan. Move the greens around, cover if necessary to get the greens to wilt down. Salt what's in the pan, then add more greens. When all of the greens are in, add a liquid: just water is okay, but wine can be nice, and stock is my favorite. You only need enough to steam the greens: about a quarter of a cup will do. Cover and turn the heat down very low. They'll be ready to eat in ten minutes or less.

If you're in a hurry, skip the aromatics and just wilt the greens in some hot fat.

If you're really in a hurry, just steam the greens in stock.

Rendering beef fat for perfect French fried potatoes

How to transform a lump of animal fat and some dirty tubers into that crisp divinity, the perfect French fry.

Rendering beef fat is a smelly business. It looks and feels like stinky candles. It takes hours to render any quantity of raw cubed fat, and the odor is unpleasant and weird. But it’s worth it. Once you’ve rendered a bunch of suet, you’ve got a very hard, creamy cooking fat that’s good for all kinds of uses.

When you cook down balsamic vinegar into a syrup, the harsh part aromatizes. It’s in the air. I went to my girlfriend’s house when she was making a reduction, last week, and the wave of vinegar hit me in right the nose as I walked in. But then I ate the balsamic reduction---a little scoop of the gooey stuff on a pear slice had me agog with wonder---and realized that the harsh part was gone. Same with rendering fat. Like the last time I made a big batch of fish stock, I get some criticism for stinking up the joint making these preparations, but zero complaints about the food that results. 

Rendering removes the impurities. The nasty smells cook off, and there will be some chunky stuff left over that you’ll throw away. What you keep is smooth, hard, and a whole lot better for you than shortening or vegetable oil. It’s prized for making flaky pie crusts, crispy batter-fried fish, and the kind of French fries that built a fast food empire. 

I wrote this week on my other food blog, Tin Foil Toque, about how McDonald’s used to use a mostly-beef fat solution for their famous fries. They still use some kind of animal product to flavor their potatoes, even after switching to vegetable oil for frying, because that is what their fries are supposed to smell and taste like. If you’ve fried fresh potatoes in oil at home, perhaps you were disappointed that the result was not as mouth-watering as what you could get at the drive-through. However, if you make your own fries at home using tallow, you can get the ur-experience that McDonald’s used to deliver, and which has become nearly unknown in its original form: French fried potatoes fried in beef fat. You can still get the modern, industrial version: genetically modified Russet Burbanks coated with “natural flavors” and fried in the oil of genetically modified grass seeds.

Or, if you prefer your food to nourish you instead of kill you, if you are sufficiently motivated, and you have access to high quality fat from pastured cattle, you can make the most perfect fries ever: crisp, not greasy, with lots of umami, and best of all, good for you. 

How to render beef fat:

Start with the best quality fat you can get. Trimmings from roasts and steaks can be saved in the freezer until you have enough to work with, though I usually get it in large lumps of 1-2 lbs, frozen, from the slaughterhouse with my beef order from local farmers. Pastured cattle makes the healthiest fat.

Raw beef fat is thick and waxy.

Use a very sharp knife for handling fat, as it’s slippery and contains tougher tissues within it that offer more resistance.

1. Trim any visible meat or other tissue and throw it away or save it for stock. Cube the fat into roughly one-inch cubes or, for faster results, mince the fat. 
2. Roast the fat in a casserole dish, roasting pan, or Dutch oven at 250° F. Open or closed both work, but a closed dish stinks a lot less. 
3. Stir or shake the pan a few times during the day. If you don’t chop the fat finely, this can take several hours. Even if you do, it can take a couple of hours. 
4. When you’re no longer making any progress (the stuff that won’t dissolve isn’t getting any smaller), call it quits. 
5. Strain the fat through cheesecloth into a glass jar. Throw away the solid parts. The rendered fat will keep in your fridge for at least a month. You can also firm it up in any sort of mold, like in ice cube trays or muffin pans, then freeze the molded chunks so you can grab a bit of tallow any time you need a bit of tasty cooking fat. 

Pigging out on ribs and fries

The first thing I did with my freshly rendered tallow was to deep-fry French fries. I admit that I wasn’t entirely sure that tallow would give good results, because I hadn’t cooked with it before. Would my potatoes taste like my house smelled on rendering day? Would they be soggy?

Friends, they were perfect. The reason the potatoes get so crisp is because the fat has so little moisture. Compare the texture of refrigerated beef tallow to butter, and you start to understand what makes that delicious, suet-flavored crispness in fries, but also in other foods I’ve eaten: empanadas are best made with suet, now that I recognize the effect.

I made ribs with the fries, and some cole slaw, and we ate such a pig-out meal, I felt like I was completing a religious rite, it was all so carefully sourced and prepared. This is what I mean when I say that I make comfort food. French fries and pork ribs are supremely familiar, comfortable, and delicious, and yet also a little special. My mother didn’t make these foods; we got them from Chinese take-out and from the fast food drive-through, and later, when I was older, from cheap barbecue joint holes in the wall I found with my friends, and expensive hipster dives in cities, where they fried the potatoes in duck fat.

This is food that I’ve enjoyed most of my life, and for most of that time, it was both mysterious and dirty: bad for me, irreproducible. Now I know how to make pork ribs (I’ll share that recipe with you another time), and how to make fries. I know how to transform a lump of fat and some dirty tubers into the food that has become more American than apple pie. Not only do I know how to make the food, but I know how to make it so that it doesn’t make me feel sick or guilty, or wonder what was in it. I know what distinguishes the pig in my freezer from the one at the closest supermarket, my fries from McD’s. I know which parts are miracle, and which are cheap tricks.

Now, it is medicine food.

Real, good food is better than magic.

How to make French fries:

The secret to crispy fries is twice-frying. Slice your potatoes as thin or thick as you like them. I favor a steak-cut thickness, and keep the skins on. Get your heavy pot of fat nice and hot, and fry a small quantity of potatoes at a time to keep the temperature steady. Fry them once for five minutes, then scoop them out and let them drain on paper towels. Let them sit until you’re almost ready to eat. Then fry the potatoes again in batches, one minute per batch, and drain again on paper towels. Salt them right after they come out of the fat the second time. Serve immediately.

After frying, strain the fat while it’s still fairly warm. Let it cool and put it back in the fridge. Unless you’re frying fish or something else really smelly, you can generally strain and re-use the fat for frying. I use masking tape and a Sharpie to label anything I put in the refrigerator, and in the case of rendered beef fat, I will also note what I’ve fried in it.

Oven fries

Frying takes a lot of fat. And frankly, my husband and I both prefer the taste and texture of roasted root vegetables. Fries can be a fun treat, and sometimes they’re just what I’m craving. But for the most part, I’m much more likely to roast up a pan of sliced potatoes with a hearty dollop of beef fat (which I take right out of the fry-fat jar). It takes longer to bake---about an hour on 350°, turning them every ten minutes---but is less trouble, doesn’t tie up a quart of fat, and tastes just as suet-y and crispy as the deep-fried kind.

What's for dinner

I will sometimes take a picture of my dinner, especially if I'm thinking of this blog and want to document what we're eating. I like the idea of doing this often enough to get a seasonal portrait of our food. I can come back around next year in late winter, before the fresh spring food appears, and see what I came up with to eat. Last year around this time, I discovered crunchy, spicy salads. In the past year, we've learned to eat gluten-free, and have been eating even more whole animals.

Turkey legs from Thanksgiving, out of the freezer and stewed with tomatoes, cumin, and jalapeño, served with roasted root vegetables

Roasted vegetables are one of those dishes I like to make a lot of, and from whatever's in season. Through the winter, I like to make pans of roasted root vegetables and big pots of steamed kale, then eat them til they're almost gone and then do it again. I learned long ago there's no shame in warming up something left over, and even less if you make something else fresh to serve alongside.

Chicken curry sausage from the co-op, roasted root vegetables, and steamed kale

Pan-fried pork loin chop, roasted root vegetables, and steamed kale

This pork chop came from the half pig in our freezer. Usually I rub it with salt, pepper, and coriander, then pan fry it to medium doneness.

Locally grown and frozen green beans from the co-op (sweeter than any other kind you can get this time of year), salt-roasted sweet and white potatoes, and roast leg of lamb

Salt-roasted potatoes are a delicious alternative to roasting them with oil. After washing your potatoes, throw them into a casserole dish or roasting pan, salt them generously, and roast them in a medium-hot oven, 350-400 degrees F, for about an hour for small potatoes, shaking them every 20 minutes or so until they're done. The insides get fluffy, and the skins get chewy.

Fresh ham steak marinated with marjoram, broccoli roasted with garlic, and summer roasted vegetables from the freezer

Broccoli is also surprisingly tasty, roasted. Kevin doesn't usually like broccoli, but we're both crazy about roasted Brussels sprouts. Roasted broccoli comes close in flavor and bite.

I do most of the cooking, but Kevin's gotten into the kitchen more often, especially on weekends and to do a bit of gluten-free baking. A friend turned us on to Pamela's baking mix, and it's everything I could ask for in a gluten-free mix. The blend of rice and almond flours is perfect for biscuits, pancakes, and cornbread, and her baking mix has leavening in it, so it's ready for use in any kind of quick bread. These drop biscuits with currants Kevin made for St. Patrick's Day in lieu of Irish soda bread were buttery and flaky. I haven't been eating gluten-free---most days, I still eat a grilled egg and cheese sandwich---but I don't miss wheat flour at all when I eat these biscuits.

St. Patrick's Day dinner of beef bangers, gluten-free Irish soda bread biscuits, and cabbage braised with onion and apple

Chicken roasted with aloo gobi and its spices, and plain steamed kale

When I made my usual aloo gobi recipe recently, I made a double batch of the spices, rubbed a chicken under its skin with one batch, and seasoned some cauliflower and potatoes with the other. Instead of making the aloo gobi on the stove top, I oven roasted everything together.

Red snapper fillet baked with butter, mushroom risotto, and roasted broccoli with garlic

I haven't posted my usual risotto recipe, which uses mushrooms and a sharp grating cheese, but there's this one for fiddlehead and asparagus risotto that I am really looking forward to making again. Spring is so close.

Collards omelet and aloo gobi

This isn't dinner, but it was pretty and I was sitting down to eat this for brunch with Kevin on a weekend not long ago, so I took a picture. The aloo gobi is equally good for breakfast as it is for dinner.

Kale and Pork

Cassoulet over steamed kale

Two fine foods that go great together, especially in winter.


I treat kale and collards as interchangeable, being sturdy, leafy green vegetables with relatively unassertive flavors. They take less time to cook, but longer to wash and chop than cabbage, another brassica I will sometimes substitute for either kale or collards. They can all be steamed, rolled, and stuffed, as in galumpkes (what the locals call cabbage rolls). They’re all good in braises, soups, and stews. I eat greens at breakfast. They’re great under a stew. 

Pork belly, cornbread, collards with garlic, fresh ham steak with marjoram, and roasted root vegetables

And while all year round, I try to eat something either leafy green or some other vegetable that is botanically vegetable and not fruit (think broccoli, not tomato), in the summer that is often salad, and in the winter it is far more often kale or collards. I picked this idea up from reading Laurel’s Kitchen, where she suggests eating a “super vegetable” every day: a pod or leafy green.

Roast pork, roasted mixed root vegetables, and steamed collards

Greens go with everything. These are dishes I ate in the past couple weeks. Can you see how rare that pork is? No, we're not worried about it. Getting to eat pork as rare as we would eat beef is extraordinary. It's more like lamb. We eat it like this sometimes, when I manage not to overcook it. It's one of the culinary advantages of really knowing where your pork comes from.


The other thing about pastured pork, though, is that it is porky. You know that smell you get off of pig's feet? It's like that, only more so. In fact, the more I eat local, pastured meat, the more I am convinced I can taste their feed, and that industrially raised meat tastes more like corn than it does like chicken, beef, or pork. 

Kielbasa, braised cabbage, and homemade baked beans

Switching to pastured meat could mean finding out you don't like meat as much as you thought you did. I like strong meat (my personal blog is called Strong Meat) but I still cast around for some solutions for mitigating the extremely porky smell. Even the sausages we got from the slaughterhouse, as highly spiced as they were, smelled like this. The taste is a little less noticeable, but still there: a barnyard essence that reminds you this was an animal, a particular one that lived in a place and ate what it liked to forage. Eggy eggs are tremendously rich. Chicken-y chickens are the ur-chicken of chicken-ness. Lamb can be more or less sheep-y. Grass-fed beef is distinctly beefy. Pork was our most recent transition, and not only took a little time to get to appreciate, but to learn to cook with. 

Eggs over medium, potato latkes, a pork sausage, and braised cabbage

I learned that pastured pork goes well with vinegar, or smoke. Some traditional preparations have you soak the pork in vinegar before cooking it, while others use it as a flavoring in stew. Other acids, like tomato, also pair well with strong pork. My Sicilian family has always put pig's feet in tomato sauce. Last night, you could find me exclaiming over a pork and tofu stew at our local Korean restaurant. The stew, which included lots of kimchi, suggested another traditional pairing for pork that's popular around here: sauerkraut.