Pretty good, and not a monstrously complicated prep also.
The pork belly needed an earlier start than the rest, of course. Braising is not a complicated technique, but I think the flavors it produces are both a strength of home cooking and a vulnerability. The vulnerability is the time required, especially if we’re talking something like pork belly, that needs a while to break down. But it’s also the flavor. I remember very much that I did not like the taste of braised and stewed meat until I was in my thirties—the soft mouthfeel, the intrusion of other flavors that I couldn’t identify, and so on. I understand that a lot of folks identify braises and stews as the essence of home but I do think there’s something about the flavor that turns a lot of kids and young people off.
That said, this was pretty great. I really like that Elia’s recipe calls for dropping some bitter greens in the mix in the last 30 minutes along with broccoli—that seems like a smart variation on cooking collards or other big bitter greens down in animal fat and broth. I used dandelion and chard, along with a big handful of Italian parsley. We put the pork belly and greens on some fresh-made pita, and that worked. I don’t know that rice or another soft starch would work so well.
The pickled chicken is 100% a summer recipe so it wasn’t all that fair to make it now. But it was tasty. I dropped a teeny-tiny bit of my fermented chile sauce into it and that seemed to have worked. I’d make it as something to take on a summer picnic—I could see chopping it roughly with cucumber and tomatoes and some fresh oregano. It also yielded a good chicken broth, so there’s that dividend.
I didn’t make all the garnishes for the cauliflower soup, since I just wanted it to be a light appetizer, but with preserved lemon (Mahjoub brand is good), feta and mint, it went down very nicely as a quick, easy starter about an hour before main service.
Essentially, you need a good bread for either of these main dishes, as I said before. Grains aren’t the right thing. The greens with the pork belly are the real deal, though—it makes you feel a bit like the carnivore who is eating a good part of the prey and eating the grass or digestif that you’re going to need in the morning to help metabolize the fat and richness of it.
VERDICT: Sure, book stays on the shelf. I obviously need to pick something I am predisposed to get rid of to create a bit more suspense.