Cooking My Delicious Meal

When my Eating San Francisco professor, David, told us we had to cook a delicious (the only criterion) meal to be shared with others, my first thought was, ‘No curry, Ali, anything but curry.’ I wanted to challenge myself to cook something I’d never cooked before. I’ve lived 8 years of my life in Florida, and most of the other 13 in California, so an affinity toward Cuban and Mexican foods is inevitable for me (I assure you, unless you’ve been to Cuba, you have not had a Cuban sandwich until you’ve been to The Floridian in Treasure Island, Florida). But in terms of cooking, besides many a fine guacamole batch, I’ve never gone down that road.

I decided to learn to make some carnitas cooked in a salsa verde braise and carne asada and set up a homemade, family style taco bar. My patrons? Ex-neighbors Dave and Unni, plus their new roommate Ken, plus my roommate Anna. Dave used to cook for my roommates and me all the time, being that he is a successful businessman and we were (are) starving college students. I felt I owed him.

You’ll be happy to know, after this self-indulgent rambling, that to document this I want to use mainly photos of the process and a few instructive words. In case any of you care to try to make any part of this meal, I know it is not in our generation’s nature to weed through paragraph after paragraph to finally understand what someone’s trying to tell you in the last 3 sentences. Thus, I shall try my best to go against my own grain and be brief.

I’ll start with how to prep the two meats, since these need to be started about 4 hours prior to eating time. These recipes are both from SimplyRecipes

Salsa Verde Carnitas :: Ingredients
3-3.5 pounds pork shoulder
2 cups salsa verde (I used a bottled brand from Safeway, but you can also make your own)
1 onion, finely chopped
3 cups chicken stock
2 teaspoons cumin seeds (I used already ground cumin)
1 tbsp fresh chopped oregano (you can use dried, but I prefer fresh)
½ cup chopped fresh cilantro
Salt to taste

First, I took the huge pork shoulder out and trimmed off the extra fat (I don’t have good kitchen scissors, but those probably would have worked better), and put it in a 6 quart Dutch oven.

I poured the salsa verde and the chicken stock into the dutch oven with the pork. Then I added the chopped onions, oregano, and cumin as well. I turned my burner on high and turned to the carne asada marinade while waiting for my pork braise to boil…



Carne Asada :: Ingredients
2 pounds of flank or skirt steak (I used skirt, tasted great but a little tough for tacos)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 jalapeno (I left this out...not my bag...)
1 tsp ground cumin seed (again I used already ground cumin)
1 handful fresh cilantro, leaves/stems finely chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
2 limes, juiced
2 tbsp white vinegar
½ tsp sugar
½ cup olive oil
Cloves
Allspice
First, I got out a large metal bowl and my roommate combined all ingredients besides the steak, cilantro and garlic in a bowl. I was doing the chopping so I threw in the cilantro and garlic after. I substituted white wine vinegar for the white distilled vinegar, and added a little more sugar than called for. I also threw in a couple of cloves and some allspice for extra flavor – I like carne asada a bit sweeter.

I put the steaks into the bowl and coated each piece well, wrapped it in saran wrap, and put it in the fridge.

At this point my pork braise was boiling, so I turned down the temperature to low, and covered it to let it simmer until extremely tender – about 3 HOURS.

TIME OUT: it was approximately 3:50 pm, and I had a tech rehearsal at 4:00 for (shameless plug alert) the FREE Music Student Showcase, this Saturday at 7 pm in the School of Ed building! I left the steaks a-marinating and pork a-simmering for about an hour while I was gone.
When I got home at 5, the pork still had a lot of simmering to do, so I did some reading and took a catnap. At 6, I decided to start putting together some of the toppings for the tacos...

First: Marinated cabbage
I chopped up about a third of a head of cabbage (turned out not to be enough for 5 people, I’d do a half or 2/3) very thin. Since I had to move everything to Dave’s, I put it in a Tupperware and sprinkled some olive oil, seasoned rice vinegar, salt, and pepper on top. I tossed the cabbage and closed up the container to let it marinate.

It was time to move to Dave’s so my roommate and I packed everything, pork still in the pot, and steaks still marinating, and hit the road. I called ahead to have him preheat his oven to 400 degrees…

Once there, we moved the pork from the dutch oven (I wouldn’t stop picking at it) to an aluminum roasting pan and I used two forks to shred it into large-ish pieces. We stuck that in the 400-degree oven to brown around the edges for 20 minutes.

The dutch oven full of braise was to be reduced to about 2.5 cups so I could later mix the crispy carnitas back into the salsa verde sauce, so I put it on a burner on high heat (YAY for Dave’s gas stove) and let it boil as long as it needed to. Note: Skim excess fat off the top of the braise and it will go MUCH faster.

While all that was cooking, we placed Dave’s huge griddle over two burners on medium heat to get the steaks going. Once it was hot, I put all three of them on, and cooked them for about 8 minutes (they were pretty rare).

While they cooked, Dave, Anna and I team-worked on the other toppings/sides to get them out at the same time:

Pico de Gallo (amounts very depending on how much you want to make and what ratio of onions:tomatoes you like)
Chopped onion
A few chopped tomatoes
Chopped cilantro
1+ limes, juiced
Salt and pepper

• Grated Monterey Jack cheese (although Cotija Mexican cheese is preferred but not available at Safeway)
• 3 chopped avocados with salt, pepper, and fresh lime juice
• 2 cans black beans heated on the stove top
  

When the steak was cooked and sliced and the braised had reduced and the carnitas was browned, I mixed the pork back into the braise reduction and got ready to serve. I heated up some corn tortillas in the microwave and we set all the bowls of toppings out. Everyone did an assembly line through the kitchen.


And who could forget a little chilled Reisling for the hot night…

The tacos came out like so:

They were very tasty – I was particularly proud of the carnitas, which was insanely flavorful with a little spice. The carne asada tasted wonderful, but the texture just wasn’t right for taco meat. We ended up eating it by itself. That marinade recipe is great. We ate and drank in silence, watching the Laker game with salsa verde dripping down our fingers.

Once we had digested, my roommate Anna had planned a dessert her dad used to give her as a kid. She made a bittersweet chocolate sauce by melting bittersweet cooking chocolate with corn syrup (takes about 2 minutes and tastes so good on sweeter stuff), and we dribbled it over Haagen-dazs vanilla ice cream and topped it with raspberries. It was perfect – not too rich and refreshing in the heat.

I’ve cooked meals I know for friends before, but after putting as much work into this meal as I did, there was something so much more gratifying about watching them struggle to keep their tacos in one piece, and their content, munching faces once they succeeded. Now that I’ve learned that carne asada marinade recipe I am certain I will use it again, just maybe not for tacos. The carnitas was time consuming but so worth it. I’m hoping to make it one of my staples now that I know how to do it.