slow cooker pork carnitas braised with dark beer and chipotles

This is an excellent base for many tasty meals, and an easy formula for making tender, pull-apart pork in the slow-cooker. I turned on the slow cooker before leaving the house today, and then came home and made tacos for dinner. Yum.

formula for slow-cooker carnitas

meat + spices  + liquid --> slow cooker = magic

sweet potato and pulled pork hash

This was me finally using up the last of the pork from our taco night. It was still really delicious. I think I want to make a big chunk of pork once a month. :) This would make a great brunch dish, or weekend breakfast. In our case, it was a thrown-together dinner, but hey, that was good, too. I first roasted the sweet potato (1 large, cubed) with some onion (about 1/2 red onion, diced) and olive oil in a hot oven (about 450, with a sprinkle of paprika and cumin, salt and pepper). Roast about 20 minutes, until soft and starting to brown. Then I added it to an oven-proof skillet with the pork (about 1 1/2 cups), heated it up over a medium flame, and finished it off in the oven with some eggs and some cheese (queso fresco). Cook until the eggs are done (about 10 minutes). Season with salt and pepper and serve with hot sauce.

how to host a taco party (with pork carnitas and all the fixings...)

Last night we had a couple of friends over for tacos, our first little party in the new place. It was really good food and good company, plus margaritas. No better way to extend summer. :) Tacos are a really fun group/dinner party food, because you can prep almost everything in advance and it's easy to pass stuff around at the table. I had been craving some more good tacos after having some at the Providence Farmer's Market a few weeks back, and going to Isalita (a new restaurant in Ann Arbor) last week. I knew I wanted to make pork carnitas plus a couple kinds of salsa and toppings. This was a lot of firsts for me: first time making carnitas, making pickled onions, first time using tomatillos... But I had really been wanting to do this. Everything was a hit - especially the pineapple salsa. It was a bit of work to put everything together, but the flavors were really good and we have lots of delicious leftovers for the busy week ahead.



Here's the menu:

for the taco fillings:
pork carnitas (recipe below)

vegetarian/vegan option: spicy sweet potatoes and black beans (recipe here)


salsas:
spicy pineapple salsa
guacamole taquero (with tomatillos)
pico de gallo

toppings: 
sliced radish
pickled onion
queso fresco
cilantro
lime

margaritas: blood-orange margaritas (from Smitten Kitchen)

ginger-garlic meatballs

These are a Nigel Slater - inspired recipe. I am really enjoying discovering his recipes, and I love his writing style. It's so strange when you feel you get to know someone a bit through his or her writing. The best cookbooks are like that. Synne gave me The Kitchen Diaries for Christmas - and he goes through a year, sharing recipes and food notes. You really feel you get to know him. I am also reading through Appetite and really enjoying it. It has gems like this:

"Putting little bits of leftover food on plates is not a good idea. They will only dry up and haunt you every time you open the fridge door. You might as well throw them away in the first place."

"Use your nose. At first you can only tell when something is burning. The smell of smoke will alert you to the fact that your supper is probably past the point of perfection. Pretty soon you will find that the smell a dish gives off as it cooks can be a good clue to its progress. Butter will smell nuttier, garlic will smell sweeter when it has softened..."

"I loathe gadgets. My idea of hell is a drawer full of those miraculous, time-saving devices specialy designed for cutting pizza/portioning a cake/brushing the soil off mushrooms, etc. ...Before you get carried away with one of those gadget catalogues and your credit card, let me warn you that you by the time you have played hide and seek with your little diddy that does this or that, you could have done the job ten times over."

"butter. Glorious stuff."

"mustard. How I love mustard."

Okay I could go on and on but I will stop myself. :)

hearty soups: shredded pork stew with chipotle tomato sauce

 When we're planning what to cook, Michael often tells me he feels like something "hearty." I'm spending a few days in Providence and my goal is to make him some hearty soups, putting all the leftovers in the freezer so he misses me lots when I'm gone. :)  The first one I came across in a book series from Food & Wine: Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes, taking recipes from what they consider the 25 best cookbooks of the year. (This was a find at the Ann Arbor Public Library, which has an amaaazing selection of cookbooks. Except also a long waiting list for new and popular items. I guess it's a community with a lot of good cooking going on!) This particular recipe is from Lourdes Castro, from the cookbook Simply Mexican. It looked so good, I just had to try it. It was a little on the spicy side, so be careful with the adobo sauce and chipotles - but don't leave them out. This gives the soup its spicy, smoky flavor.