Thit Heo Nuong Xa

That would be lemongrass-marinated pork in English.

From the picture it looks pretty complicated, but it's really very simple and easy to make.

It's just a couple thick pork chops or a hunk of pork loin (not too lean!) marinated overnight in a paste of:
2 Tablespoons light brown sugar
1 Tablespoon garlic, chopped
1 Tablespoon shallot, chopped
3 Tablespoons lemongrass, white bits finely grated
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoon black soy sauce
1 1/2 Tablespoon fish sauce
1 Tablespoon neutral oil. Grill or fry them up and slice it it thin against the grain.

Add grilled green vegetables. I had pak choy on hand. Also sliced tomato and cucumber and a poached egg are nice additions.

Put those over a big bowl of coconut rice:
6 oz rice
1 1/3 cups coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 bay leaf
cooked on a standard rice cooker cycle.

Plain white rice is OK, but the coconut rice does add a nice little something.

and top with drizzles of:
Nuoc Cham
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
3 Tablespoons rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons sugar
125 milliliters water
heated until just about to boil and then mixed with
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 hot pepper, thinly sliced
2 tbsp lime juice
1 small carrot, shredded
and cooled

and
Scallion and garlic chive oil
250 milliliters neutral oil
4 scallions, finely sliced
1 handful garlic chives, finely sliced
1 pinch salt
1 pinch sugar,
simmered briefly and cooled,

and sambal hot sauce
from a bottle and better suited here than over-hyped Sriracha to my mind.

OK, maybe it is a little complicated, but you don't have to do it all at once. You can make a big batch of the pork and keep it in the freezer, make the sauces a day or two before and cook whatever vegetables you've got to hand.

It's as tasty as it looks. More tasty if you don't think it looks so good.

CSA week 12 - A couple of yukina savoy recipes

One stir-fry and one cream soup. Normally, I'd just give them a passing mention in the weekly round-up, as they're simple stuff, but there are so few yukina recipes on the web that I wanted to put these out there for bewildered folks to find so they know a couple more options.

I separated the leaves and stems for these because I had two heads of yukina, both large enough for a full dish, and I wanted the variety. If you've got just one head, either one would work using the whole thing.

Let's start with the leaves.

Yukina savoy and pork stir fry

1/4 pound pork, sliced thin [I only had a center cut pork chop on hand which isn't the right cut for stir frying. Use something more tender, like loin.]
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon rice wine
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 bunch yukina savoy or leaves from 2, about a pound, cleaned
a few cloves garlic, minced
an equal amount ginger, minced
2 Tablespoons black bean sauce [I used black bean chili sauce since I like it hot]
1 Tablespoon peanut oil

1. Mix the pork with a bit of soy sauce, a bit of rice wine, a little sugar and some cornstarch. Maybe some sesame oil. No need to measure precisely. Let marinate around 20 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, stack the yukina leaves and slice them crosswise into ribbons about half an inch wide. If you're using the stems too, slice them into pieces a half inch wide too.

3. Get your garlic, ginger and black bean sauce ready.

4. Heat a wok really really hot. Add the oil. Add the garlic, ginger and black bean sauce. Cook briefly until aromatic. Add the pork (along with the marinade) and stir fry until it loses its pinkness. Remove to a plate.

5. Add a little more oil to the wok, swirl it around then add the yukina. If you're using the stems, add them first, stir fry until mostly cooked, then add the leaves. Toss the leaves around a bit so they all gets somewhat wilted. When there's enough room, return the pork. The yukina will be releasing some moisture (plus there will be some water still clinging to the leaves from when you washed them) so a sauce will start forming. As the cornstarch on the pork dissolves, it will start to thicken. It's pretty variable so add a little water if necessary or add a little more cornstarch (dissolved in an equal amount of water first) until the sauce is thick enough to cling to the leaves but not goopy. When you've gone from stir frying to simmering, turn down the heat to medium and cook until the leaves are tender.

Serve with white rice.


Yukina works pretty well here as it's sturdier than spinach, but doesn't need to cook nearly as long as, say, collards. Plus it's got enough flavor to stand up black bean sauce.

And now for the stems.

Cream of yukina savoy soup

1 bunch yukina savoy or stems from 2, about a pound, cleaned
whatever other green vegetables you've got lying around [I used a spring onion and a couple handfuls of parsley leaves], chopped
1 large or 2 small potatoes [white or russet would likely be best], diced
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon olive oil
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup cream [or sour cream or yogurt if you'd like it tangy]
salt and pepper and possible some other spices or herbs

1. Break the yukina stems into pieces no more than 5 inches or so long.

2. Add the butter and olive oil to a dutch oven over medium-high heat. When the butter has finished foaming, add whatever vegetables you'd like to get a little color on, in my case the spring onion. After a bit I added the parsley. [Maybe parsley leaves taste good browned. Who knows?] If you're using the yukina leaves, you should probably wilt them down now.

2. When the vegetables a softened and browned to your liking, add the potato and cook 2 minutes more. Add the yukina stems and the chicken stock. The vegetables should be just about submerged. If not, add more stock to cover. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to medium low and simmer until everything is tender, around 10 minutes.

3. Remove everything to a large bowl and cool until you can get it into a blender without burning yourself, around another 10 minutes.

4. Blend well in batches, straining the blended soup back into the dutch oven. Yukina stems tend to be stringy, so even with serious blending, I had to strain out a good wad of gunk.

5. Add the cream and season to taste. Now's the time to add any additional flavors that you think might go well with what you've got so far. I added some pimenton which I though went nicely with the celery notes in the soup.

6. Put the pot back on the heat and bring back up to serving temperature.

You probably ought to garnish it because otherwise it looks like this:


I should have saved a little spring onion to sprinkle on top.

My soup ended up tasting somewhere between cream of cabbage and cream of broccoli. Not what I expected, but pretty good. And, like both those soups, tasty served cold too.

Like I said up top, nothing groundbreaking here, but both successful applications of yukina. If you're not sure what to do with yours, I can recommend either strategy.

Broccoli almond soup

Broccoli almond soup is interestingly ambiguous. A little push in one direction and it's Chinese, in another and it's Mediterranean. The basic recipe I worked from, from the Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread cookbook, had it both ways. It used both sesame oil and sour cream for a fusiony effect. For me, the Chinese association was too strong. I could bring myself to finish it off with the sour cream and instead piled on garnishes with Chinese flavor elements. Maybe I missed out; I'll try sour cream with some of the leftovers.

Ingredients:
1 large head of broccoli, chopped into florets, thick stems peeled
6 cups chicken stock [I only had two cups of fairly condensed stock left so I just used water for the rest. I figured I'd get a purer broccoli flavor that way so maybe an improvement.]
2 Tablespoons butter
1 large onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/2 cup toasted almonds
3 Tablespoons sesame seeds
2 teaspoons sesame oil
salt and pepper to taste
sour cream, maybe

1. Bring stock to a boil in a dutch oven. Add the broccoli, turn down the heat to medium low and simmer for 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a medium pan over medium heat. Add onion and sauté 5 minutes to soften and lightly brown. Add garlic and cook 1 minute more.

3. Move broccoli and onion mixture to a food processor. Add the almonds and sesame seeds. Process until smooth, adding broth to help the process along as necessary. [Sliced almonds will process better than the whole ones I had, but I liked the little chunks of almond that were left.] Return to the broth.

4. Bring back to a boil and simmer 1 minute to blend the flavors. Adjust texture with extra broth and seasoning with salt and pepper. [My low sodium, low chicken broth meant that I needed a whole lot of salt.] Mix in sesame oil.

As I mentioned up top, the original recipe just topped it with sour cream and called it a day, but I wanted to bring out more of the Asian flavors. You can't see it under there but there's a heap of brown rice in the bowl. On top are slices of Guilin-chili-sauce-and-soy-marinated pork chop and some cilantro.

Sans garnishes, the soup is intensely flavorful, with a bright freshness from the broccoli (despite the long cooking time) and a toasty nuttiness. It's fairly creamy considering the lack of dairy, and the imperfectly blended almonds add a bit of crunch. It's tasty but, personally, I find it hard to eat a whole bowl of soup where every spoonful tastes exactly the same.

The nuttiness of the brown rice blends right in with the other nutty elements in the soup. The combination of broccoli and rice is a cheap Chinese take-out for good reason so no complaints there.

The pork is a little problematic, though. I did an unexpectedly good job of marinating and cooking it to the right level of doneness so I really wanted to eat it on its own. It's still pairs well with the flavors in the soup, but it's a shame not to let it go solo when it's so good. What I should have done was marinate some beef in oyster sauce. That's the classic pairing with broccoli. While I'm making substitutions, some scallions instead of the cilantro would have been a better choice.

Well, I've got two containers of leftovers packed away and two plans of what to do with them. Good.

CSA week 16 - Two sides brown noodles

A traditional chow mein seemed like a good way to use up the rest of the bok choy and at least some of the celery. Two sides brown is a name I've seen associated with the version that has the vegetables topping a crispy noodle cake. Because I looking under a different name, I only just now noticed that La Diva posted her recipe for a crisp noodle cake and stir fry not long ago. You shoudl probably read that too.

Mine uses a somewhat different technique and I think I've got a few interesting things to say. Still, it's marginally post-worthy. I'll try to make something you've never heard of when I get back from Passover.

The first step is choosing the right noodle for the job. From my research I found that fresh egg noodles were the way to go. I was going to make them myself, but I saw one recipe that called for wonton noodles and I thought I recalled seeing such a thing down at Lucky Oriental Mart. And indeed I had. I think this is wonton wrapper dough sliced long and thin.

Once it was cooked al dente, I drained but didn't rinse it and patted it down into a pan to cool and starch-weld itself together into a solid mass. This preparation is really helpful for later. It means that instead of trying to fry the noodles in a pan they barely fit in, I can use the wok and instead of having to use the tricky Spanish tortilla two-plates method of flipping after the first side is browned, I can just flick it up high and over. (I did take the wok outside to give myself plenty of room to maneuver and to keep the splattering oil from going all over the kitchen. Shame I didn't have anyone to video it; I'll bet it looked pretty cool.)

The stir fry is pretty standard chow mein mix. I used the rest of the bok choy, a stalk and a half of celery, a carrot, water chestnuts, onion, mushrooms and bean sprouts. The sauce is mostly soy and oyster sauce with good hits of sriracha and sesame oil. I made more and thinned it out with more chicken stock than I would usually use to make sure there was plenty for the noodles too. The umami-heavy oyster sauce makes for a heartier gravy-ier sauce than a lot of chow mein recipes use, but it goes well with the egg noodles.

Ideally, I'd serve this by presenting the stir fry over top of the noodles, but I've got a bunch of servings here and I'm just one man. I'm carving off a wedge of noodles and serving the stir fry alongside.



The noodle cake is crisp outside, soft inside. That's a style not a mistake, but it's a style that would work better with the thicker round noodles I was hoping to find at Lucky. (The wonton noodles were a second choice.) That would have given a crisp/chewy contrast instead of the crisp/soft I'm getting here. For flat noodles, a thinner cake and/or a looser weave so the oil can penetrate and crisp everything up would be a better choice.

Oh, I nearly forgot, I bought some La Choy chow mein noodles too for the authentically midwestern approach to the dish. Let's see how they work...Hmmm, they're pretty wheaty since there's no egg in there, but they're not a bad match for the sauce and bring out the celery flavor for some reason. Keep their crunch too. Nah, still like the noodle cake better.

The stir fry itself turned out great with the vegetables fresh, colorful, crisp but not undercooked and meat tender and tasty, but since I wasn't paying close attention to what I was doing, I can't tell you just why. And you know how to make a stir fry, right? If you don't, post something in the comments and I, and readers who feel like jumping in, can try to troubleshoot whatever problems you're having.

CSA week 14 - A mizuna pesto variation

As Caroline wrote on her blog earlier today, pesto's an easy way to use up an overload of CSA greens and it works just fine with mizuna. I've been having trouble finding a good use for the mizuna so I decided to punt with a pesto, but I didn't want to make it too easy on myself. As long as I was switching out the basil, I might as well throw in a few more switch-ups and see where I ended up.

I had a vague idea of making a Southwestern-style pesto so to the mizuna I added a handful of cilantro. And to the garlic I added a modestly hot pepper. The olive oil I kept the same. For the parmesan, I substituted an aged queso blanco and for the pine nuts I substituted corn nuts.

And, in a last minute decision, for the pasta, I substituted pulled pork.



The results left something to be desired, but, surprisingly, it wasn't my substitutions that caused the problem. It was the bitterness of the mizuna. Once I added a couple pinches of sugar and a drizzle of vinegar to balance against the bitterness, it was much improved. Now it tastes like a proper pesto with a bright fresh grassiness and slight tanginess. Without the bitterness prominent, a lot of the distinctive character beyond a generic green comes from the cheese and the corn nuts which give subtle hints of funk and toastiness respectively. And a lot of salt from both. All of this plays surprisingly well against the savoriness of the pork. This was just a lark, but I've stumbled upon something really quite tasty. I wonder why there isn't a tradition of pesto-based barbecue sauces. Maybe the smokiness of proper barbecue (as opposed to my crockpot pulled pork) throws the balance off? Or does such a thing exist; have any of you heard of it?

CSA week eight - Hirino me selino sto sáltsa avgolemono

a.k.a. Pork with celery in egg and lemon sauce

This is a Cretan dish that I read is typically served around the holidays. Traditionally it uses pascal celery which, judging from the pictures, is a small parsley-like herb rather like the Chinese celery we sometimes receive in the CSA shares. A pound of that is rather hard to come by around here so using regular parsley is a small compromise. The recipe I'm making, originally from The Food of Greece by Vilma Liacouras Chantiles, using the standard Greek methods of light seasoning and long boiling, but has a few more changes from most of the other versions I saw. I assume, because these additions build additional flavor elements, they're taking it away from the traditional Greek version. Is that being unfair? I'm probably being unfair. I don't really know much about Greek cuisine.

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons butter
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1 pound lean pork, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
salt and pepper
approximately 2 cups hot water
1 bunch celery, cut into 1 1/2-inch lengths
1/2 carrot, peeled and small diced
1 Tablespoon flour
1 egg
juice from 1 lemon
parsley to garnish

1. Melt 1 Tablespoon butter in a dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until soft and translucent. Add the pork and cook until it loses its pinkness. Don't brown it. Season with salt and pepper. Add hot water to cover, bring to a boil then cover and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, prepare the celery and carrot. If your celery is particularly leafy save some for the garnish. Take the egg and lemon out of the refrigerator too.

3. When the pork is not quite tender, add the celery and carrot. Bring back to a boil, re-cover and simmer gently for 30 more minutes or until both meat and vegetables are on the verge of falling apart.

4. When you're ready, remove the solids from the pot into a bowl. Pour the liquid into a measuring cup. If you have less than 1 1/2 cups add some water. If you have more, pour some out.

5. Add the other Tablespoon butter to the newly emptied pot. When it is melted and sizzling add the flour. Stir and cook for 1-2 minutes until the floury clumps melt down. Add the 1 1/2 cups of pork stock and stir until it comes to a boil.

6. Meanwhile, in a small bowl beat the egg. Slowly drizzle in the lemon juice while beating. When the liquid in the pot has come to a boil beat a little into the egg-lemon mixture to temper. Then pour the mixture into the pot, mix well, turn the heat to low and stir until it thickens. Pour the sauce over the pork and celery. Garnish with parsley and any reserved celery leaves.



I'm rather surprised how much I like this. Boiling the heck out of celery really mellows it out. It's still celery, but it's not CELERY any more so it plays well with the lemon and the pork.

Pork, on the other hand, is better as PORK so boiling the heck out of it doesn't serve it so well. But the flavor lost is in the sauce so it's still in the dish and I can't complain over much.

The sauce is, foremost, tart, but also rich and with some depth of flavor from the use of the pork stock.

Overall, quite tasty and a fine way to use a whole head of celery which is a very small class of recipes indeed.

CSA week seven - Not quite banh pho xao he

This is a pretty straightforward vietnamese noodle dish modified from using a pound of garlic chives to using everything leafy and green within reach. The recipe I modified was from Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen cookbook.

I cut the recipe down by about a quarter to adjust for the amount of noodles I had on hand. I'm going to use the original amounts to avoid weird numbers.

Ingredients:
1 pound banh pho flat rice noodles
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar, divided
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
3 Tablespoons water
2 Tablespoons cooking oil
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and cleaned
1/3 pound ground pork, broken up into bits
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 pound assorted leafy green vegetables [I used 1 bunch each of garlic chives, mizuna, swiss chard and cilantro], chopped or torn into 3- to 4-inch-wide pieces.
1 lime

1. Put the noodles in a large bowl and cover with hot tap water. Let them soak until pliable and opaque, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain. Cut into short lengths. The original recipe called for 3 to 4 inches, but I liked them a little longer.

2. Coarsely grind the shrimp into pea-sized pieces. Break up the pork into similarly sized pieces and mix with the shrimp.

3. Mix the fish sauce, water and 1 1/4 teaspoon of the sugar in a small bowl.

4. Heat oil in a wok over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and fry until fragrant, about 15 seconds. If it took less time and/or the garlic started to brown, turn the heat down; this isn't real stir-frying. Add the shrimp and pork. Break up the meat and add the salt and remaining sugar. Cook, stirring and breaking up clumps, until shrimp and pork have turned opaque, about 2 minutes.

5. Add the greens. Stir and fold to mix in the shrimp and pork and get different bits of the greens on the bottom. When the greens have wilted down by a third, add there's room in the wok, add the noodles. Mix well and add the fish sauce mixture. Turn the heat up until the sauce starts to sizzle and continue stirring 2 to 3 minutes longer, until the noodles and greens are soft and the noodles have absorbed a bit of sauce and darkened in color.

6. Remove from heat and squeeze in the juice from the lime. Mix once again and serve.


Hmm. Not bad. The shrimp and pork are, of course, great together and enhanced by the fish sauce. [When genetically modified lab-grown meat improves (right now they can just do a meat paste suitable for hot dogs and not much else and they have to use cells from animals that actually exist), they really ought to work on shrimp-pig.]

The chard goes pretty well with the other flavors and adds a substantially different flavor and texture than the garlic chives which I think is an improvement in the dish. The mizuna and cilantro seem to have wilted away to nothing, though, which is a shame.

I used the milder Vietnamese fish sauce so it's a low key dish that could do with some nuoc cham (or at least a little more fish sauce and lime juice) and sriracha to perk it up and maybe some fried garlic or shallots for crunch. Most Vietnamese recipes, I think, assume you've got your condiments and garnishes on hand to finish the seasoning of the dish. I added ground peanuts to my first serving, but the flavor isn't quite right. Fried garlic is a much better choice.

CSA week two - potsticker redux

When I set out looking for recipes, I wanted to find a pork and garlic chive recipe distinct from all the other sorts of Chinese dumplings. Not only didn't I find one, I can't even find a name for them distinct from the rest. Pork and chive seems to be the basic default from which those variations stem.

Given that discovery, there wasn't anything stopping me from winging it. Not that there ever really is, but if there is a traditional recipe for what I'm making, I feel obliged to at least try it. Since there is only a continuum of options, I just looked at what I had around and tossed some ingredients together.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup pork
1/4 cup beef
1 bunch garlic chives, finely chopped (~1/2 cup)
1 inch ginger finely grated (with a microplane is ideal)
6 small dried shiitake mushrooms, rehydrated
2-3 ounces firm tofu
1 Tablespoon rice wine
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 drizzle sesame oil
salt and white pepper to taste
no garlic
no scallion
no cabbage (so the chives are really the star of the show)

1. Grind beef and pork, until it doesn't quite form a paste.

2. Grind together mushrooms and tofu. The broken down tofu had an unexpectly sticky texture which let me do without the egg I was going to add as a binder.

3. Add everything else and mix well together. Chill for a whle to make it easier to work with.

I had a little trouble filling my wrappers. They've been in and out of the freezer a few times now and the edges are getting dried out and difficult to make stick together. I ended up bundling some of the dumplings up in burrito-style wraps just to get them to hold together. I had more trouble just with my lack of facility with the dumpling filling-process. I underfilled the dumplings and didn't get all the air out, so these aren't very elegant.



But, pretty or otherwise, the cooked up just fine. Surprisingly, despite the wrapping problem, the batch I made were all sealed air tight so they blew up like balloons during cooking and then collapsed back down.

The filling's a little dry, so maybe the egg would have been a good idea after all. Or maybe a little more of the rice wine and soy sauce as a boost in those flavors wouldn't hurt. Then again, I'm not using a dipping sauce which solve both those problems.

The beef isn't bad, but the combination of beef and chives brings thoughts of beef stew topped with chive dumplings or steak and baked potato--neither of which are helping me enjoy these dumplings. But that's my brain's fault, not the dumplings'. I tried something different and something different is what I got. There are some plusses here even if beef may not have been the best choice. The tofu binder is pretty interesting and the chive flavor is coming through nicely.

P.I.G. - Pork is Good

[Edit: Most of you are coming here looking for chicharones. I have some tips a few paragraphs down by the picture of Chef Jeremiah's creations, but my recipe for making them at home is here. Also, chicharrones is spelled with two r's. You only found this page because both of us mis-spelled it with one. Search for it with two and you'll find a lot more info.]

That there is the advertisement for last afternoon's PIG event. The event was a not-quite-underground dinner organized by Frodnesor of the Food for Thought blog (a first time CSA subscriber this year and good luck to him) as part of his Cobaya gourmet guinea pig project.

The Chef Jeremiah mentioned is Jeremiah Bullfrog, late of Bullfrog Eatz in Wynwood and soon to be of a retro-fitted kitchen in a 1962 Airstream trailer, and currently caterer at large. (You can read a recent interview with him here if you want to know more.) The menu is all pork with a bit of experimentation with new recipes.

Harvey's on the Bay is not just inside Legion Park, it's a back porch attached to the Legion Hall. Kind of musty and creepy until you get through the hall and come out to this view:


I sprung for a VIP pass so I got in early and got my serving of all of the dishes. Chef Jeremiah kindly explain each dish, answered question and put up with nearly half of the twenty-some-strong crowd that rushed him with cameras each time he brought out something new. With all that documentation, I'd better not be the only person writing this up.

He started us off with chicharones and a fizzy cocktail of black cherry syrup and store-bought moonshine. Who knew you could buy such a thing? The cocktail went down dangerously smoothly and the chicharones were mighty tasty and a substantial improvement over my recipe. Three reasons for that: 1. a rather thinner layer of fat for a more skin-centric experience, 2. an overnight brine before simmering and 3. dehydrating at 150 degrees instead of roasting at 250. Those first two steps, at least, are easy improvements to make so I'll definitely be making better pork rinds next time around.

After the appetizer, it was time to get the pig roasting. It was a 50 pound baby pig from West Hialeah the chef picked up earlier in the week. He entirely deboned it, made a stock from the bones and head-cheese from the head and wrapped it up into a giant roulade. Here it is brining in sour orange, lime, oregano, garlic, a little sugar and lots of salt: traditional Cuban flavors.

And here it is going into the caja china box. There's surprisingly little charcoal under there putting out enormous amounts of heat. And it took very little fussing with, I was told.


Then back inside for the first dish, the chef's take on char chui bao--steamed pork buns. Instead of the standard Chinese roast pork filling, he used a barbecued pork butt coated with a traditional Southern-style spice blend, smoked then roasted at 350 degrees. The soft, milky and slightly sweet dough compliments the tender flavorful pork, but the pairing is a little dry. To compensate, we got little syringes filled with soy sauce to inject into the buns which tied the flavors together nicely. Also, a couple hot sauces to put on top. I chose the Malaysian crispy prawn chili sauce that added some texture and just a little funkiness that I though rounded out the flavors nicely.

The non-VIP crowd started filtering in at this point. Good to get the bloggers down under 25%.

Next up were banh mi tacos--all the rage in Los Angeles; unheard of in Miami. Hard enough to get a decent standard taco or banh mi here. I'm not sure if the meat in there is the head cheese or trotters. Either way, its flavored with fish sauce and cilantro and topped with pickled carrot and daikon and a drizzle of sriracha. A pretty presentation, but difficult to eat so I stuffed the salad inside. That muted the bright sweet flavors though, letting the corn tortilla dominate. There was just a hint of fish sauce in the lovely flavor of the pork, but the meltingly soft fat had the texture of refried beans and reinforced the Mexican aspect of the dish for me. Very successful as a cabeza (or possibly pie) de puerco taco; less so as a banh mi.

Around this time the guitar guy started playing. Poor guitar guy sitting all alone and strumming his heart out with everyone ignoring him and wishing he'd stop. So sad.

But back to the food. Next were simplified Cuban sandwiches, anyway. He left out the ham and cheese--which I can't say I really missed--so it was just mustard, homemade pickles and thick slices of pork belly. The flavors were good--maybe a bit heavy on the mustard--but I had a little problem with the texture. The pork belly was chewy which is undercooked to the Western palate, but about right for most Asian applications. And that's fine on its own, but I don't think the pairing with the texture of the Cuban bread was great. But then I think Cuban bread is lousy with just about anything so I'm not the best judge.

One more dish before the main event--homemade hot dogs. The dogs were simply seasoned, cured and not lightly smoked, as hot dogs should be. A nice snap when bit, also good. But they were outshined by the very tasty pickled onions.

Finally, the roast pig! Quite good indeed. Well done, but not dry due to the brining which also subtly enhanced the porky flavor. The real star, though, is the skin--fatty, crispy and oh so tasty. The sweet potato flan isn't half bad either. Light, smooth and creamy and a flavor that was just right with the pork.

I had to run off to get to work at this point. The room was getting crowded and the band had just finished setting up so I presume I missed the real party. Thank god. Anyone who stayed please continue the story in the comments. Actually, even if you didn't stay, if you could talk about how the event went as an event with actual humans socializing, I'd be obliged. Although I did make a little conversation, overall I wasn't really paying much attention to that part. I'll just leave it with thanks to Chef Jeremiah and to Frodnesor for making this event happen and to go so smoothly. Folks seemed to be having a good time so far as I could tell. I certaintly did. And I'm looking forward to the next event.