morsels & sauces

Growing up, we would eat dinner at my paternal grandmother's house at least once a month.  My grandmother was, as most grandmothers are, a character.  Her name was Gertrude.  Legend has it that she wanted to be called Trudy, but people called her only Gert.  And she was most certainly a Gert, not a Trudy.  Further legend has it that she even changed her name from Ruby to Gertrude when she was young because her last name was Stone, and she didn't want to be know as Ruby Stone any longer.  Both legends may be apocryphal.  The truth may be that she was Gert Stone from the start, but I like the idea of this young woman wanting to reinvent herself. When I knew her, Gert was in her 70s and 80s.  She wore the most beautiful shades of red lipstick and had fabulous ceramic chicken dishes loaded with butterscotch candies.  She would cook pedestrian pot roasts when we came to visit, and after dinner my brother and I would wash and dry the dishe...

Mostly, I just felt like using the slow cooker.  That, and I needed to spend the day away from the house in order to get these papers graded.  It's amazing the number of things that can distract me from grading papers. Let's talk pulled pork though, shall we?  Pulled pork has as many advantages as there are recipes to make it.  Advantages to pulled pork are that it's great food for a crowd (just double your recipe.  Triple it, even.  Or you could literally go whole hog).  It takes all day to cook, but it's one you can walk away from if you have a slow cooker but it's more traditional if you smoke the meat outdoors.  And it is oh so tasty. Recipes for pulled pork are just as various.  People get rather emotional about this subject.  Now some people swear by dry rubs.  Others swear by brining the pig.  However, I married a former-Kansan, and that means BBQ is almost always wet.  What's the difference?  W...

Adapted from Cookbook #25:  Williams Sonoma Essentials of Slow Cooking Recipe: Meatballs in Tomato Sauce It's summer solstice. The longest day of the year.  The shortest night. Symbolically speaking, I could use these long days and some short nights. The days: a dear high school friend came to visit from North Carolina, school let out for summer, World Cup soccer launched into full force. But also the nights:  a memorial service and an unrelated but surprisingly tearful goodbye to a friend who is moving to Ohio. In other words, give me more days than nights right now. So to cook at the midpoint of 2010, I quite simply made the homey, satisfying goodness of meatballs. These particular meatballs are a wonderful blend of three meats (beef, pork, and veal (yes, I realize that's still cow, but work with me here)), and they braise (rather than brown) in a tomato and chipotle sauce.  And all of this from Williams Sonoma Essentials of Slow Cooking .  We n...