Administrivia with the devastating combo to leave me facing a standing eight-count.
I did actually cook tonight. That is officially twice this week, so I’m on track.
Proof of cook, Dallas, TX, 2024-01-04. Furnished by John R (photographer). All rights reserved.
There’s a lot of stuff going on there:
Mojo sauce1 (inspired by the A Sassy Spoon blog)
Slow cooker mojo pork
Instant pot Cuban black beans2 (inspired by the FamilyStyleFood blog)
Calrose rice from the rice cooker3
Mojo sauce
Ingredients
Instructions
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Place the minced garlic and the kosher salt in a mortar. Use the pestle to mix and grind the ingredients into a paste.
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Add the paste along with all the other ingredients to a bowl. Whisk to combine. Store in a plastic container until needed.
Slow cooker mojo pork
Ingredients
Instructions
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Score the pork leg. Add it to a large plastic zip-top bag with 14 ounces of the mojo, sealing it and making sure the pork is coated thoroughly. Place in refrigerator overnight.
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Pour the pork leg and marinade into the crock of your slow cooker. Cook on High until the thickest part of the leg registers 195-200 degrees Fahrenheit on an instant-read thermometer. Using two forks, shred the meat into bite-sized pieces. If not ready to finish the dish, set the slow cooker to warm and let the pork stay in the crock.
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Move a rack to the top cooking position in your oven, then preheat the broiler. Turn a burner on your stovetop on to medium-high heat. Place the vegetable oil into a skillet on that burner. Once the oil is shimmering, add the onions and cook, moving them around occasionally, until the onions are softened and browning slightly, approximately 5-7 minutes.
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Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. Mix the shredded pork leg from the slow cooker with the onions from the skillet, then scatter them on the lined baking sheet. Place in oven for 2-3 minutes until caramelization occurs, then pull the baking sheet out and flip the pork and onion mixture, making sure to get fresh pork and onions to the top of the sheet. Repeat this process 2-3 times, until most of the pork and onions are caramelized.
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Mojo sauce
Pour the remaining 10 ounces of mojo from the plastic container into a small saucepan. Add an equivalent amount of drippings from the slow cooker. Turn a burner on the stove to medium-high heat and cook, whisking frequently at first, until the sauce begins to boil. Lower the heat to medium-low and let sauce simmer until reduced slightly, whisking occasionally.
Instant Pot Cuban mojo black beans
Ingredients
Instructions
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Turn the Instant Pot to the sauté function. Add the olive oil. Once the oil is shimmering, add the diced onion and poblano pepper, cooking until softened and slightly browned, 4-6 minutes. Add the garlic, paprika, ground cumin seeds, and oregano to the pot and cook until fragrant, 30-60 seconds.
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Add the black beans, mojo, and water to the pot and stir thoroughly. Secure the lid on the Instant Pot and change the cook setting to high pressure for 45 minutes. After the 45 minutes is complete, let the pot depressurize naturally.
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Remove the lid to the Instant Pot. Add in the salt and the dried chipotle powder and stir to incorporate.
I will post the recipes I made as well as source links…but not tonight.
(I finally got around to creating recipes for this meal — just not nearly as soon as I had intended.)
Thoughts:
1) I was planning on making this with boneless Boston butt. However, the Mexican grocery I shopped at apparently does not know the definition of “boneless”. I could feel bones in about every single package of boneless pork shoulder I checked.
2) I am a big fan of using the mojo I mixed up three different times in this meal.
3) The black beans were simultaneously spicier than I would have wanted them to be and crunchier than I would have liked. It helps if you follow the source recipe and not forget ingredients.
4) It shouldn’t be that hard to cook rice in a rice cooker, but the browning/scorching I found on the rice at the bottom of the cooker leads me to believe that I didn’t use enough water.
5) The jury of my peers agreed with my assessment that the beans were spicy, but didn’t notice any perceived crunchiness in the beans or burned bits in the rice.
Verdict:
Taste: 7/10. I’ll definitely make this again at some point if I have the ingredients and a hankering for it, but I’m not planning to build this into any sort of standard recipe.
Availability: 9/10. Assuming I have the meat in place, the only difficult part about cooking this is having the naranja agria juice on hand. I got 2 20oz. bottles of it from Amazon for less than $5, so having it around seems like a pretty safe ask.
Story: 6/10. The good news is that nothing blew up. The bad news is that there’s not much of a story because nothing blew up.
Lessons Learned? Read the fucking recipe. Refer to the fucking recipe. I’d probably give this another half-point if I had used the chipotle in adobo that was recommended instead of adding chipotle powder after the cooking was complete. Making sure the salt was added before cooking would have been very nice as well.
Administrivia:
I reported the problem I was facing with the dynamic recipe card to technical support. They work on Nepalese time, so when I woke up this morning I had a message.
The good news: Support was able to duplicate my problem in their development environment. There is a bug fix ticket to get this corrected in an upcoming update.
The interesting news: This is not how they recommend creating recipes. There’s another process where I click three links and it gives me what I should be using.
The bad news: I don’t have those three links in that order in my WordPress environment.
The ugly news: They linked to a reference to tell me exactly what needs to be done to create a recipe the correct way.
1) It’s a YouTube video4.
2) The YouTube video is 25 minutes long.
3) The YouTube video is the fifth in a series, and the narrator makes it sound like each video builds upon the steps in previous videos.
Eff.
Em.
Ell!!!
In other news, I did decide on a theme to use. There goes even more money sunk into this venture.
It is a theme that is recommended because it works well with the recipe plugin I’ve purchased. It also looks like it’s highly customizable, which I appreciate. Of course, none of the customizations I’ve made actually show up anywhere as far as I can tell…
The theme was offered with a setup service. (You want something to work in WordPress? Open PayPal and authorize another payment.) I didn’t buy the service…not that I can foresee ever wanting to set up another WordPress site, but if I do, I’d like to have a solid clue on how to do it myself.
Besides, too many more expenditures and I’ll have to conveniently forget ever mentioning not doing affiliate junk and sponcon. It won’t be about making money; it will be about not letting this continual aggravation disguised as a hobby bankrupt me.
I have the source recipes saved. I remember what glorious mistakes I made in trying to follow said recipes. I know my impression of the overall meal (spoiler alert: pretty solid), and I have feedback from the other tasters. Once I figure out how to insert recipes correctly, I’ll make a proper recipe post.
Let’s just hope this happens before SMOD 2024 provides us the sweet, sweet relief of not having to worry about Presidential elections ever again.
- https://asassyspoon.com/mojo-marinade/ ↩︎
- https://familystylefood.com/instant-pot-cuban-mojo-black-beans/ ↩︎
- This is a complicated recipe, lemme tell ya. ↩︎
- Readers may not know that I read faster than the average beara. My learning style is also reading-based. Having to spend time figuring out how to do something from a recording of any sort drives me nuts.
a) Or average human, for that matter. ↩︎