Category: General

Help! Help! I’m being repressed!

Posted on by John R

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.

Mojo pork with mojo sauce, Instant Pot Cuban black beans, white rice

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

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Mojo sauce

Author: John R Cuisine: Courses:
Difficulty: Beginner Cook Time 10 mins

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Place the minced garlic and the kosher salt in a mortar. Use the pestle to mix and grind the ingredients into a paste.

  2. Add the paste along with all the other ingredients to a bowl. Whisk to combine. Store in a plastic container until needed.

Keywords: Cuban, marinade
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Slow cooker mojo pork

Author: John R Cooking Method: , , Cuisine: Courses: Recipe Keys: P pork
Difficulty: Beginner Cook Time 260 mins

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. 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.

  2. 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. 

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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. 

Keywords: slow cooker, pork, Cuban
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Instant Pot Cuban mojo black beans

Author: John R Cooking Method: Cuisine: Courses: Recipe Keys: B black beans
Difficulty: Beginner Cook Time 80 mins

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. 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. 

  2. 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.

  3. Remove the lid to the Instant Pot. Add in the salt and the dried chipotle powder and stir to incorporate.

Keywords: black beans, Cuban, instant pot

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.

  1. https://asassyspoon.com/mojo-marinade/ ↩︎
  2. https://familystylefood.com/instant-pot-cuban-mojo-black-beans/ ↩︎
  3. This is a complicated recipe, lemme tell ya. ↩︎
  4. 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. ↩︎

What the world needs now…

Posted on by John R

…is another self-indulgent cooking/food blog.

“like I need a hole in my head”1

Too bad.

This post is going up on January 1st 2nd (at least according to WordPress — it’s 11:35pm CST on the 1st). I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine my motivation.

I’ve made a promise to my better half (and, equally importantly, myself) to cook three times a week.

However, I’ve learned quite a bit about myself over my *clears throat* years on this rotating orb.

1) I have a tendency to start grandiose projects…and then never follow through.
2) My latent perfectionism crops up in ways I’ve learned to expect, which gives me a chance to account for them.
3) I have a mental block regarding following a recipe to the letter.

This is my attempt to solve all these challenges at once.

I’m considering this blog (and, by extension, the readers that stumble upon this secluded corner of the Infobahn) my accountability partner in this exercise. I’m hoping that feeling an obligation to keep content coming will keep me cooking and writing.

I’m also well-aware that there are a whole bunch of people out there busier than I am who manage to cook nearly every day. Cooking three times a week is a cake walk compared to that. However, if I commit to something ambitious like cooking every day, the first or second time I fail, I’ll give up on this endeavor. Baby steps.

Since I never follow a recipe to the letter, every single time I go to cook something I’ve made before, I have to try to remember what changes I made. If it’s something I’ve cooked several times, and I’ve cooked it recently, that’s generally not too bad.

Gentle reader, I have cooked maybe half a dozen times since the world ended. Even the stuff I’ve made a bunch is all but foreign to me now. This site is going to wind up being an archive of the things I actually cook in the ways I actually cook them.

What readers should and should not expect from John Cooking (aka the John Manifesto):

1) This is a work in progress. I have design ideas and essentially zero skills to implement them. Aesthetics will change, as will layouts (most likely).
2) The narrator will not change. Every word in a post on this site will be written by me. Readers will get me in my unvarnished state, for good or ill. I’m going to keep things to food and cooking, but my personality and my convictions will come through. I’m laying off the profanity for the duration of this post, but I’m sure there will be too many F-bombs for this blog to get a PG-13 rating.
3) I’m committing to cooking three times a week. This means there should be at least three posts per week.
4) I’m NOT committing to cooking three new recipes a week. What’s the point of documenting recipes you cook in detail if you never use them again?
5) There will be at least three new recipes a week. I own a lot of cookbooks. I’m sure my wife would say I own too many, in fact. When I cook something I’ve previously documented, I’ll note any adjustments I made (if any), and I’ll add at least one recipe from my collection that sounds interesting at the moment. This may be a preview of coming attractions, or it may be a complete McGuffin.
6) I’m not guaranteeing that every subsequent post I make will have one or more recipes. I will be cooking, but even more than cooking I enjoy eating. My wife and I love going out for good meals, so some posts may be about things that we’ve eaten. Some posts may be about food in general, or new equipment I acquire, or rants about the flipper we bought our house from (those will be mostly kitchen-related). Some posts may be cocktail recipes I enjoy – either the recipe as written or how I enjoy it.
7) I’m going to get in WAY over my head with some of these experiments. I’ve got my first week of meals planned, and there’s already one thing on my menu that is highly likely to fail spectacularly. If something bombs, you’re going to hear about it. I’m also going to ask for honest impressions from the people consuming my food — I hope they’ll be honest in their feedback.
8) This isn’t Instagram. There will be food photography, but most of it will likely be me with my phone with little regard for lighting, plating, or general presentation whatsoever. My wife likes taking food photos, and if she takes them, they’ll likely be much better than mine, but I’m not a food stylist, and I don’t even have an Instagram account.
9) I’m cooking my food and my recipes my way. Any reader that is a purist about a particular cuisine or dish will most likely be less than amused with my version. Feel free to rant in the comments (assuming I can figure out how to set those up); I’m sure you’re much more of an expert than I am, and maybe other readers will get some value from your contributions. I’m not apologizing for my take on food, however.
10) I’m not an influencer, nor do I have any expectations of becoming one. I’m not looking to monetize this in any way — I’m sitting here looking at a tool on my screen telling me how well I’m doing at search-engine optimization, and I’m already annoyed. I have no plans of becoming an Amazon affiliate. If some company wants to waste their promotion budget by sending me food or equipment to use2, I’ll disclose it, and it will have no impact on the opinions I have. If I gush over something on this blog, it’s because I truly love it. I’ve got nothing to sell and nothing to promote — I’m taking up cooking again to save money over ordering delivery all the time3, and I’m blogging this because I feel like it.

About me:

I’m John. Nice to meet you4.

My day job is database development. When I’m not eyeballs-deep in SQL, I’m a huge Dallas Mavericks and soccer fan (I’ve been an FC Dallas season ticket holder for years now). I drink good beer (preferably local) and cocktails (usually strong). My wife and I live in Dallas (no, not the suburbs).

Like any geek, I nerd out over completely random things. I know a little bit about a whole lot of things, but I claim mastery in nothing. I collect collections. I write like I speak, which means there will be plenty of thoughts that just end in ellipses. I don’t mean anything by it; I just tend to trail off into my own thoughts.

I’m not a chef, nor do I aspire to be one. My cooking is decidedly amateurish, but it’s almost always edible. I’ve only tried to burn the house down once while making a meal (that story involved a pot of pinto beans on the stove and an untimely trip to the ER).

The things I enjoy cooking are usually eclectic and sometimes patently absurd (I entered a friendly bacon cooking contest once with a great-tasting but poorly-planned pot of wonton soup, for example). One of the people that will be eating my food frequently has a gluten sensitivity, so most of the recipes I make will be gluten-friendly for now. The ones that aren’t will most likely be based around beer5.

My mom was a good cook, and I got my love of random church/civic organization cookbooks from her. When I post a recipe verbatim from a cookbook (usually on occasions where I’m cooking something I’ve already documented here), it will most likely be from one of those types of books. I may be violating someone’s copyright by doing that, but I’d like to think most of the contributors would be tickled to have their recipe shared electronically by a random nerd 30+ years later.

Administrivia:

I’m accessible by email. I’m not going to post my email address here, but I’d like to think anyone who reads my paean to cooking misadventures has enough creativity to guess what it might be. I’ve set the typical email aliases that I can think of to silently send to File 13, so I’m hoping the SEO robots and people wanting to sell me things to build the burgeoning following for my nonexistent business get exactly the response they deserve.

The last time I had anything resembling a blog I wrote it in Notepad. The only business web presence I ever had was creating and maintaining a few pages for my uncle’s numismatic store – I did it in XHTML and it didn’t have a shopping cart, and that uncle died 20 years ago. That’s all to say that I feel like a fish out of water here in WordPress6. I’ve purchased an extension to be able to create recipes and make them searchable, but I’ve never used it. I know that all the cool blogs have comment sections; I presume I have that capability, but gussying up this page is a lower priority than actually getting in the kitchen.

  1. If you started singing along with that in your head, welcome. Get comfortable. I suspect we’re going to get along just fine. ↩︎
  2. I might be willing to sell out my strongly-held principles for good beer. ↩︎
  3. The CFO of our relationship notes that, due to the procurement of new ingredients, spices, and equipment, any savings are highly theoretical. ↩︎
  4. That portion of my readership that nodded along with Footnote 1 will understand why I’m slightly regretting not registering this site as joshuacooking. ↩︎
  5. I’m sure you can figure out my email address, independent microbrewers of the world. Ping me… ↩︎
  6. Amazingly, I did figure out how to do footnotes. Go me! ↩︎