Pork for New Year's Day

A long time ago my mom told me that someone told her you can't eat chicken on New Year's Day, you'll scratch and scratch all year. (And you have to say scratch twice. "Scratch and scratch all year" is part of this menu choice.)

For the past couple of New Year's Day, I made happen John, following a Lee Brother's recipe from The New York Times, but I decided to try something new today.

I bought one of those large club-like pieces of pork that are always on the bottom shelf of the meat cooler in my local grocery stores. It's amazing that they are under a dollar a pound. I probably don't want to know why its so cheap.

Last night I made a paste of seeded dried smoked peppers, garlic, oil, cider vinegar, oregano and a pinch of cinnamon, working very loosely from a Pork Adobo recipe in the new Joy of Cooking. I rubbed the paste all over my six pound leg of pork or fresh ham.

This afternoon, I cooked two onions for about five minutes in some oil, added a can of vegetable stock and then the pork and all the paste on top. It cooked for about four hours in my huge dutch oven until it was close to falling apart and easy to pull into strings with a fork.

Then I pulled it out of the pot and let it cool.

Then, while R* and I watched the HGTV Dream House (ugly blue kitchen counters, yuck) I made us some pork sandwiches. They were tasty, delicious. The meat was moist, good texture. I especially liked the edges of the meat where the spice sauce really sunk into the meat. Pulling all the meat off the joint made a big mess and I'm not sure what I'll do with all that pork? More sandwiches maybe?

Anyway, since we had pork (and I had crabcakes and eggs from the diner on the corner), let's hope we won't scratch and scratch all year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR . . . and happy blog-birthday to me. It was a year ago today that I got so pissed at the disgusting Shirley's Tunnel of Fudge Cake that I started this blog.