Pork Shoulder Ragù with Pappardelle
I made this from my Dinner: A Love Story cookbook, but Jenny features this recipe on her blog, too - linked here!
One of many bragging points when it comes to this recipe is the fact that "it's nearly impossible to get wrong." I have to confirm that it was pretty close to perfect just the way it happened, but next time I'll use more tomatoes and less wine - it's just that I added the wine first, and there wasn't enough room in the dutch oven for all the tomatoes.
I doubled the recipe because that's how big my package of pork was, and then froze half of it as a favor to my future self. Served alongside some leftover Layered Arugula Salad from earlier in the week, I was proud to pair the pork as recommended with "a little sweetness" from the pears and pomegranate. Love when a plan comes together.
What really made this sauce shine was the fresh pappardelle - and besides, this was the perfect recipe for the undertaking since it braised in the oven for hours and didn't need supervision, so I could focus on the pasta which does not come easily to me quite yet. In the end I thought the noodles were a little too thick, but the boys liked them as-is. Too bad I call the shots, so they will be thinner next time.
The DALS blog post about this dish says "If you come over to our house for dinner any time between now and the first day of spring, there’s about a 90% chance we’re going to cook this for you." Most assuredly, this is going to be 2023's Chicken Parm - a 'friends are coming over' mainstay.
(The discussion at the dinner table quickly descended into chaos when our friend Ryan discovered that this dish was made with pork butt, leading him to begin calling it "Booty Ragù." I don't condone this and cannot believe they would dishonor Jenny Rosenstrach in this deplorable manner.)
This fueled us through two hours of watching The Bachelor, which I was confident I would be abandoning before this season began, but I've succumbed to the fact that it's just a fairly brainless conversation piece - and not a bad one. We screeched over Tahzjuan wanting to join the cast and the producer telling her that "bad (expletive) cry too."
+ Cookbooks, Bought and Borrowed
The Blue Zones American Kitchen by Dan Buettner - I saw this cookbook featured in a recent issue of Time magazine about living longer, a concept that has my attention right now. In the new year, my aim was to continue cooking creatively, but maybe with a few more vegetables. There's no part of me that has any issue with veggies, aside from the fact that they often take as much time and effort as the protein, and I am only one person that becomes easily irritated around dinnertime if I'm juggling too much in the kitchen as a result of overly-ambitious meal planning. I'm hoping to find and incorporate more veggie-centric dishes into our lives and can't wait to sit down to look through this one.