7.14.2009

Cooking

It's late and I have to go to bed soon, but I've found myself cooking a tremendous amount lately. The other night, I made a gallon of spaghetti sauce. It tasted exactly like how Dad makes it. Tomorrow, I'm making beans and oranges - a Latin American dish - with pork and rice along with it. The whole making food from scratch thing, while delicious, is both time consuming and expensive. The ingredients I needed for tonight? Something like $20. I will defray the costs through my housemates and all the others who eat the food, but still, that's like a weeks worth of groceries devoted to a single meal. A single dish even. Sometimes I wonder if I'm being too extravagant. I currently have the beans soaking in beer (a tip I got from Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything (thank you Grandma Anne and Judy)) and the pork is marinading in a spicy sauce. The pork cut is the shoulder, so it is extraordinarily fatty. Apparently the recipe calls for that cut, but still, I wonder if it won't be too chewy and gristly. Esp. since I will be cooking it in a pan instead of roasting it or broiling it. Hmmmmm... The recipe for beans and oranges says it is best to use the fat from the pork to help cook the rest of the dish, including the beans and vegetables added to it. I'll be crossing my fingers, and probably crossing my eyes as well. I've spent soooo much time in the kitchen lately.

What's worse is that my housemates are not especially good cooks, so they wouldn't even dream of attempting the stuff I do. However, I refuse to eat spaghetti sauce out of a jar on principal, and the whole cooking in bulk is good because then you have lots of leftovers. I'm making 2 lbs of beans, on top of 2 lbs of pork, and about six cups of rice. This is to feed between 10 and 20, I think. I'm not completely insane. Y'know how in the Harry Potter books, Molly Weasley just magics her way around the kitchen? Why can't I do that? Or at the very least, get a staff of Ecuadorian prep cooks and dishwashers like Uncle Rick.