Today I’m cooking my favorite dish, so I’m going to make it my way. No cookbooks will be harmed—or used—in the making of this dinner.
What is my favorite dish? Chile verde with cubes of pork. (Well, there are others jostling for first place, but this one is very consistently near the top.)
How did this come to be my favorite? For one, it was one of the dishes I can remember my mother making a few times that stuck with me as a taste memory. (Another that I learned to do pretty early on was flank steak marinated with soy sauce, red wine and garlic. I also used to be amazed by a coffee cake she’d make on weekends sometimes until I realized as a young adult doing my own shopping that it had been Pillsbury biscuits turned on their side in a bundt pan, kept tightly together, and covered with a cinnamon-sugar sauce before baking.)
It’s an easy dish to understand in terms of learning to make it without a recipe. It can be scaled back to being very simple: all you really must have is some cut of pork, some tomatillos (you can even make it work pretty well if all you can get is tomatillo salsa), some chicken broth, and some garlic. It can be scaled up to add a lot of other elements (that’s going to be today’s version). It lasts really well for a week in the fridge. You can repurpose it for burritos, enchiladas or nachos. It freezes well.
It has a great clean taste to it—no matter how simple or complicated I make it, I can taste the components. (Compare here to conventional red chiles, which I also like to make, where there’s really just one dominant taste that comes together.) It comes out different every time but it’s also recognizably the same dish no matter what. It’s good in summer and winter—warming but it doesn’t eat as heavy as stews and braises that have tomatoes as a major component.
So tune in later today and we’ll see how it went. I have everything I might want to work with, so I’ll be making some real choices as I go.
Image credit: Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash
One of my faves, too!
with candles??