Last night, I showed y’all the two big pork roasts I was going to cook up for Sunday dinner.  After a good rub and a night under tin foil in the refrigerator, I put them on the smoker for about 5 hours.

Before Skin and fat side up

After

The meaty side went down on the grill, while the skin and fat side went up.  I put charcoal on either side in the grill, and put damp cherry and maple twigs on top of the charcoal.  I was going to use apple too, but couldn’t find the bag of apple wood I put back last fall.

The smoke ring was about half an inch deep in the meat, and the skin and fat has a very nice smoky smell to it.  I saved all that, and I see a big pot of beans and rice sometime in my future.

Irish Woman didn’t have time to make barbecue sauce from scratch, so we took a couple bottles of our favorite store-bought, juiced it up with half a cup of Woodford Reserve and some chili powder, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.   It had a very nice smoky flavor and a bit of a bite from the chili powder.  I have some of that left, so the leftover pork is probably going to go into a crockpot on low with it for a few hours tomorrow and be served up on buns.

Our sides were au gratin potatoes, some of the last of our corn from last summer, and country style green beans with bacon and onions.

A good feed was had by all, and since several of the families we’d asked over couldn’t make it, we had a huge load of leftovers.  Look for my cholesterol to skyrocket over the next few days.

We’re going to get the smoker out for the first time tomorrow, and I’m preparing the roast beast to be sacrificed to the gods of hickory and apple wood.

Last time I rubbed this much boston butt, a female Navy seaman (seaperson?) from Southie gave me a black eye.

The Food Network UK has published results from a survey that finds that a majority of British men prefer their mothers cooking to that of their wives.

I could not disagree more. 

I love to cook, and I love to eat good food.  If you’ve met me in the real world, you know that I’m not exactly anorexic.  My wife is an excellent cook.  Granted, most of what she cooks is going to put me into an early grave, but I’ll go happy.  Everything from soup to dessert is outstanding. I can think of only one or two things she makes that aren’t absolutely delicious, and even those are pretty good.

My mother, on the other hand, was one of the worst cooks I ever met.  On the infrequent times she would mistakenly wander into the kitchen, the food she produced was bland and textureless.  Luckily for me and the rest of the family, her lack of interest in cooking after my siblings and I got old enough to do the cooking kept us from having to choke down shoe-leather pork roasts, spaghetti in tomato sauce with no spices save salt and pepper, and hamburgers cooked until they were uniformly gray and tasteless.  Ketchup was considered spicy, herbs were what she smoked, and baked goods were usually dense enough to bend light.  Ethnic food was Doritos or a once-a-year trip to the local ‘Chinese’ restaurant, run by a nice Norwegian couple who didn’t seem to have a source for ginger or garlic.

I wasn’t much of a cook when I left to go into the world, I’ll admit it.  I learned to cook by making what my mother wanted to eat, so my meals were pretty much the same as hers.  I did, however, like the food other kids’ moms cooked, so I at least knew something better was out there just waiting for me.  I realized how bad a cook my mother was, and how bad a cook I had become, when I couldn’t get over how good the food at Basic Training was.  At the same time, the guys in my unit were having to gag down the food because to them, it was horrible.  To me, it was manna from heaven.  Since then, I have tried to learn to eat and cook as many different things as I can.

I honestly can’t understand where she got it.  My Nana, her mother, was an outstanding cook in the 1950’s casserole vein. Honestly, I would have crawled over broken glass for her baked beans and black bread*, which was the recipe she learned from her Nana in Boston during the Great Depression.  My Grandma, her mother-in-law, cooked straight out of Scandinavia and Germany, and every meal at Grandma’s was a feast no matter how simple the fare. It’s not like my mother couldn’t have learned to cook from at least two excellent examples.

So guys, if your mom can cook, give her a hug and say thanks.  And if your wife needs to learn some things, learn them yourself and cook for her.  She’ll learn by seeing what you like to cook and eat.  Just don’t be stupid and do the “Well, mom used to do this…” thing.  I have a standing reservation at the doghouse, and there won’t be any room at the inn for you.

*To this day, my favorite breakfast is baked beans, black bread, sausages, and fried eggs, served with a side of cholesterol and blood pressure medicine.  Nana used to make that with the leftovers.

We went out to Gallrein Farms this weekend, and picked up a bushel of Peaches and Cream corn and half a bushel of tomatoes, along with onions, peppers, and zucchini.  The corn got blanched and cut off the cob, the tomatoes, onions, and peppers went into making spaghetti sauce from scratch.  The zucchini is going into dinner tomorrow night as a saute.

From the bushel of corn, we got 10 freezer bags with 4 cups of corn apiece.  We were really impressed with the quality of the corn this year.  There were no bugs in any of the ears and all of the ears were full of very juicy kernels.

Here’s what the spaghetti sauce looked like:

 Before:  Half a bushel of tomatoes, four bell peppers, and 5 onions

After:  7 quarts of spaghetti sauce made from the above, along with garlic, a little salt and sugar, and my own special recipe of 11 herbs and spices.  When I put all of the ingredients in the 16 quart roaster, it was within an inch of the top.  By the time it finished cooking, I got seven quarts plus a scant pint out of it.  And it is very yummy.  We made a meatless base for a couple of reasons.  First, if you put meat in it, you have to use a pressure canner instead of a water bath, and I’m not ready to mess with one of those yet.  Second, this will give us flexibility on what meat, if any, we pair this up with.

We probably didn’t save much money by canning our own pasta sauce because we had to buy our tomatoes.  With me being down and Irish Woman having to carry the load for almost the entire month of July, the garden was pretty much left to its own devices.  Apparently this meant being taken over by milkweed.  Our neighbor grows tomatoes, but can’t stand them (OK, I don’t get it either), and has been bringing over bags of tomatoes every few days.  We’re eating them fresh as much as we can, but I plan on either making some chili base and canning it or maybe just canning diced tomatoes or tomato sauce.  We’re also making sure that the neighbor gets a portion of every meal we make with the produce he brings over.  

If we get time this weekend, we’re going back out to get more corn and putting it up.  If we get through two or three bushels of corn, we can have enough fresh corn in the freezer to last us all winter for about 1/4 the cost of buying it at Kroger.  We also plan on buying a couple bushels of apples when they come into season and canning applesauce and apple butter.

Our goal is to have as much produce canned and frozen as possible.  Something tells me that prices have nowhere to go but up, and we’ll be able to save a lot of money by already having our own supply of fruits and vegetables when the trucked-in fresh and frozen stuff goes through the roof.

Here I sit, drinking a low-fat protein shake because it’s easy to swallow, and I read this article.  Why do I do this to myself?

I know I can’t eat anything on that list more than a couple of times  a year, but it all sounds wonderful. 

My loving wife is one of the best cooks I’ve ever met.  I didn’t get fat because she can’t cook.  She loves cooking with pork fat, bourbon, and spices.  One of her favorite breakfasts to make is biscuits and gravy made with a local sausage that tastes more like bacon or ham than sausage served with a fruit salad to cut the cholesterol. The other night she made beef stroganoff from scratch and I played through the pain just so I could have a little of it.  The smell of her cuisine over the past few weeks has been driving me mad.  It should tell you something that in the two weeks since I’ve stopped eating her cooking, I’ve lost between 10 and 20 pounds.

As I’ve recovered, I’ve tried eating a few normal things with varying degrees of fail.  After two weeks of eating soft foods like jello, pudding, protein shakes, and soft noodles, the thought of a Fried Cheese Melt or a Farmhouse Burger is almost sinful.  When this is over, I’m going to lunch at a Chinese buffet and I’m not leaving until I’ve tried a little of everything.