Mealtime: Simple Pork Stew

After my trip to the market on Saturday - I backed it up with a run to Meijer of course - I felt like making something simple for dinner.

Oh, and I had a second motivation too. I wanted to try out the french oven I picked up the weekend before. What could I make? How about a real basic stew?

Pork stew it was.

Ideally I would have cubed some of the pork I picked up at the market, but it was frozen and I didn't feel like trying to rush the defrost process (I'll be eating those tomorrow), so I used a package of supermarket chop suey meat. Other ingredients: One medium organic onion, a little olive oil and two cans of Ro*Tel.

I like Ro*Tel. If you ever want an easy meal, find your self a chunk of meat that can be slow cooked, throw it in the crock pot with some Ro*Tel and in eight hours you'll have dinner.

Back to the stew.

Isn't that a good looking pot?

Oops, I digress.

Keeping it basic, I diced the onion and sauted it in a little olive oil, then browned the pork - I skipped flouring it. Added the onions back in, the Ro*Tel and a pinch of salt. Simmered for about 20 minutes.

The end result? Tasty. I think it would have been better with a longer simmer, the pork had just a bit more chew that I would prefer, but it was still quite good. Served with a side of organic potatoes, mashed. Simple comfort food for a late winter evening.



Let's go to the scoreboard:

Taste Rating: B. Would make and eat again, but would probably tinker with cooking time.

I Done Good Rating: D+. Didn't use the local pork. Ro*Tel is neither local nor organic afaik - tastes good though. The organic onion and potatoes were trucked in from who knows where. I'm not giving this a failing grade because I did intentionally select the (industrial) organic produce and at least I went through the effort of making it. Oh, and I just ate the leftovers, so no waste.

Simple Weekend Breakfast

I've been slacking.

I had great intentions this week but got slammed on the work front and so I ate more takeout than I would like.

The good news is the food I bought last weekend will wait for me. I did use up the ground beef making spaghetti sauce - which went into the freezer so no review of that yet.

Every time I've opened the fridge the thick cut applewood smoked bacon from Creswick Farms has been taunting me. If bacon could talk it would say "cook me, I'm delicious".

So I did. (Finally)

I was hungry so I didn't go for anything fancy. I pan fried four strips of the bacon, fried two of the farm fresh eggs in butter with a splash of the bacon grease, and briefly toasted - also in the bacon grease, isn't it wonderful stuff - a buttered slice of some bread that I made mid-week.

That's how breakfast is done.

And how it should be done more often.

It wasn't perfect - I overcooked the bacon slightly - but it was still very tasty.

If you wanted to assign some kind of score for being local, sustainable and otherwise "good" this meal would rate pretty high. The eggs and bacon are local. I haven't found a local source for butter yet and the same for the flour in the bread - it's just King Arthur organic all purpose. I don't expect to find truly local sources for oil, yeast or pepper (duh) but only small amounts of each are involved.

What's up for this week? Well, I have lots of ingredients left from what I bought last weekend. Time permitting, I think I'm going to try oven baking most of the rest of the bacon - I'll probably freeze a few slices. I'm thinking I might make scrambled eggs with salsa tomorrow. I need to bake another loaf of bread - stupid easy when you have a bread machine - and hmm, maybe I'll have a grilled cheese with some of that local cheddar for dinner tonight.

Downside to posting this stuff: It makes me hungry!