The first of many, many pork-filled posts.
My beloved photographer, Yung Gary (YG), does not eat pork. Sadly, a huge amount of recipes in the SCCB are pork based or, unsurprisingly, use bacon fat in their preparations. Instead of forcing YG to spend hours taking pictures of and smelling food that he cannot eat, I cooked a few pork dishes on a day I knew he would not be available to assist me. Thus, Bound Kitchen had its first Pig Day! And this will not be its last.
This week I marked all of the recipes that involve pork or pork products in some manner - they're marked in the picture above with yellow sticky notes. That’s at least… 10 more pig days. Rejoice!
For today’s edition, I chose one standard recipe and one seemingly vile recipe: sausage spaghetti sauce and ham in sour cream. You guess which one is the gross recipe.
Ham in Sour Cream
Beef stroganoff is a classic Russian dish comprised of cooked beef in a sour cream sauce, often served with rice. This dish comes in many variations, some with mustard, some with lightly floured beef, some with and without mushrooms and onions, all of which are outrageously incorrect remixes to the original recipe (as deemed by Wikipedia). The essential ingredient that truly makes these dishes a stroganoff is the smetana, the sour cream.
I chose Ham in Sour Cream for today because I knew it was going to be wonky. Scanning the ingredient list evoked visions of a strange portobello stroganoff recipe I made in the dead of winter. It wasn’t great, but it was warm and edible. This recipe has very similar ingredients and as another spin on stroganoff, I was hoping that it, too, would be warm and edible.
The recipe didn't call for many ingredients, but tracking them down was tough. I was trying to do everything I could not to have to buy ham in a can. What’s worse than canned ham? I figured the hot food section would be a good option, but no such luck. I went to three different grocery stores and just when I had lost all hope I turned around and a refrigerator display full of plastic containers with strips of cooked ham inside appeared! Its like they knew that's what I was looking for, though, I’m not really sure why anyone else would need bulk cooked ham strips...
I also ran over to the ethnic food aisle and found a can of delightfully small and uniform mushrooms. The cartoon they were plucked from must have been adorable.
Once home, I re-cooked the pre-cooked ham in butter with onions. When slowly adding the sour cream and mushrooms I realized all of my “worst case scenario” thoughts about this dish were coming true. Something was wrong.
Was sour cream in the 1960’s thinner than it is now? I was told to let the dish cook down until thick, but if I had been loyal to the recipe, I would’ve ended up with something that was the consistency of cement after sitting in the sun to dry for two hours. You’ll notice that the pictures show a slightly more liquid form that I’m describing. This is not only because I didn’t cook down the goop, but also because I added milk to it at the end as a last ditch effort to not glue the contents of my stomach together with the first bite. I’m glad that I didn’t ask any of my loved ones to join me for dinner.
You guessed it, Ham and Sour Cream was the gross recipe. It tasted just like salty, sour cream. Lumpy, gray, salty sour cream. This I will blame on the fact that Emilie Carpenter decided not to include any other seasoning in this dish. In the 21st century we know about the magic of taste layering.
A note about waste:
While this recipe was warm and edible, it was not something I wanted to eat beyond my two tasting bites: one for an initial reaction, one for confirmation. I put it the dish into a tupperware to eat for later, but as soon as I opened the lid and saw the cold, congealed version of this mess, I knew I would never taste it again so, I threw it out.
As soon as the rice and ham and sour cream slopped into the bin I remembered that my office had a compost system. In the future, and I know there will be a future of inedible dishes at Bound Kitchen, I will compost any gross dishes there. As for excess, Gary and I will eat as much of these dishes for lunches and dinners. From there, I will pawn off extras on our roommates.
Sausage Spaghetti Sauce
This is a classic dish. There’s eight ingredients listed for the recipe and half of them are seasonings. The rest are simply the makings of meat sauce. The magic of the recipe comes from stepping your meat up from ground beef to sausage and time. For a typical Salem family, this dish would’ve only a few more dollars than a ground beef sauce and it’s worlds better.
To start, I added the sausage to a hot pan. For this I chose to use my dutch oven because it's gorgeous (and also because it’s large). I had to remove the skins from the sausages first, and because of this the meat was still sausage shaped even post-de-casing. I had more work to do. I had to mush them up so they wouldn't remain in their sausage shapes and could easily disperse throughout the sauce. This step could’ve easily been avoided if I remembered that you can buy sausage in log form rather than link form. Lesson learned. Thankfully, I have a dual-bladed kitchen shears that I got as a present from my mother though she envisioned me chopping a salad with them, not raw pork.
From there it was just dump and wait: kitchen edition. (This is not to be confused with the act you perform when, as a guest, you stink up a friends bathroom and have to worry around looking for room spray, not find any, then resign yourself to just try and wait out the smell as long as possible so that no one knows you pooed, but also not too long so people start to wonder if you’re pooing. Dump + Wait™ is a delicate task, for sure, but not the one I’m concerned with today. This dump and wait was less nerve-wracking.) I dumped the rest of the ingredients into the dutch oven and waited for it to cook down to the perfect sauce consistency. About halfway through what I determined to be the perfect simmering time for this sauce, I noticed the sauce was thicker than I liked so I added some homemade stock to thin and add flavor. Emilie Carpenter, take note of this flavor layering!
The final sauce, which I ate for almost a week since I made enough for a hungry family of four, was delightful. It's simple heartiness left nothing to be desired other than a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese on top. I can imagine my father as a kid wolfing down a plate of this over spaghetti after playing frosty evening ice hockey on the pond. I will be eating this again as soon as the bitter winter rolls through Boston again. For now, I don’t think my body can handle another week of consuming pasta and sausage at every meal.
A note about meat:
I don’t eat a lot of meat, but I am not a vegetarian. I just make sure that my meat consumption is very intentional. When I catch myself saying something like, “I NEED a cheeseburger” more than a few times, I’ll get myself a cheeseburger. That “few times” point is crucial. Most of my meat cravings pass by before I can pull up Yelp and search “chicken wings near me.” Because of the selective meat eating I’ve adopted, I have very little meat cooking practice.
Two things about Pig Day really tested my quasi-vegetarian nature. One, I bought sausage in casing like a dummy and had to really focus on not puking when removing the casings from the links. Even after I removed them, I would open the trash can to toss something else out, catch a glimpse of what looked like someone got nervous and wrung the first layers of their hand skin off, and gag. Second, I was proud and astonished that I succeeded in finding cooked ham so I decided to take a picture of it in my hand, to prove to you, dear reader, that I am a success story. As soon as I took it, I noticed that the ham and my hand were the same color, and had to put the container down and push it far out of my mind.
I don’t think I’m too sensitive about it, but sometimes I catch a tendon in my teeth when eating chicken wings and ruin a meal. These sound a lot like the musings of an almost-vegetarian. I’m sure I will look back on this with whatever en-vogue vegan identity I have acquired many years down the line and laugh.