A quiet weekend on the cooking. I had been preparing to do something interesting with some chicken and pasta last Friday and in the end I got home too late and just made chicken sandwiches. Then Saturday we went to see “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” with a live score played by students from the School of Rock on the Main Line, who I have to say knocked it out of the park—the score was fantastic and their quality of play was very high. We had a late lunch out that made us all very full and I didn’t bother to cook that night.
(Much I loved the music program at my child’s public high school, I’ve never understood why many high schools only offer orchestra and band programs, never rock or pop music.)
On Sunday, all I knew for sure is that I wanted to carve some pumpkins (we hadn’t done that for a few years), pick all my remaining chiles from my garden before a hard frost, and do something with some cubed pork shoulder I had in the fridge.
It turns out there were a lot of chiles.
I’m not entirely sure why I grow this many. The Carolina Reapers on the left are nearly unusable at this volume—that’s five or six months worth if you used them judiciously. If I put them in a fermented chile sauce, two of them are enough to vault the entire thing to intense heat even if there are no other chiles in a full gallon of other components. The little peppers dry out pretty well on their own, and even better if I put them in the dehydrator.
I think it’s mostly that no animals try to eat them, even the sweeter pepper varieties like the Jimmy Nardellos. I’m going to need to do something to amend the soil in my fabric pots, I think—the only other good outcomes this year were the herbs. Or maybe it’s just not going to work because most of my yard is in part shade, sometimes almost full shade. Not a lot of edible garden plants that flourish under those conditions.
Anyway, I also decided to make a satay marinade and dipping sauce for some roasted pork, along with a Napa cabbage salad and some rice. I think pork shoulder cubes can’t really stand up to a longer roast without drying out, but they can’t cook well enough at shorter times—the satay might be something to make only with tenderloin. Still, it ate pretty well.
An unambitious weekend, and in the end, somewhat uncomfortably so, in that the Saturday meal out made us all feel kind of overfull and tired. I keep meaning to find the energy to do some deep cleaning and decluttering in our place, so some weekend or other I’m going to just have to give up cooking for a day and switch to that instead.
Cooking is more fun, on the other hand.