Pulled Pork, Cheddar Cheese Cornbread and Buttermilk Coleslaw

 

Whenever I see someone cook Southern Food on TV I usually think two things: “Omg! All that fat, sugar and butter! and it’s all deep fried!”, followed by “that looks really good. Deep frying does make everything better!”. To bring out my latent Southern girl I made one of my favourite meals: pulled barbeque pork accompanied by cornbread and coleslaw.

Cornbread is one of the easiest things to make. You can put it together in five minutes and after half an hour in the oven you look like a genius. In the bowl above there is cornmeal, flour, salt and baking powder.

Since cheese makes everything better I grated a generous amount of marbled cheddar.

One of the nicest things about cornbread is that there is no butter to cut into the dry ingredients, you just melt it and mix it in a bowl with milk and eggs.

Everything getting mixed together. I decided to add in some ground pepper at this point.

And of course, one must never miss an opportunity to add more cheese to one’s life so at The Husband’s request I added some more cheddar on top.

When I took it out of the oven the smell was amazing.

I cut a little piece for “quality control purposes”, as I call it. Yum. There is nothing better than warm cornbread from the oven. It is very comforting food. At this point I had to stop myself from just sitting down and having cornbread for dinner and went to finish preparing the rest of my meal.

Ok. This is quite possibly the most unappetizing picture that I have ever posted on my blog. This is my way making a faster and less greasy pulled pork. Most pulled pork recipes involve taking a really fatty piece of meat like pork shoulder or pork butt, cooking it for hours and then separating the meat from the fat. While the meat tastes great with this method it is also a pile of grease. To avoid the mess and to make life easier I simmer pork tenderloins in broth for 30-40 minutes until they are cooked then take them out and let them cool.

Once the pork loins have cooled enough to handle I take the meat and shred it. You can literally just pull it apart with your fingers into long strands. Voila! The texture of pulled pork without the incredible mess.

Next up I add the pork to the pan with onions that I had sautéed beforehand along with several very generous glugs of my favourite barbeque sauce as well as some onion powder, garlic powder, chili powder, a bit of paprika and salt and pepper. I let this cook on low heat as I prepared the coleslaw. This actually tastes better the longer that leave it on the stove but I was in a hurry that day so it didn’t sit there for that long.

Coleslaw is one of the easiest things to make especially since they sell shredded cabbage mix in the supermarket. Some people like to blanch their cabbage but I like it raw. I always use mayo, Dijon mustard (this time I happened to have jalapeno mustard in the fridge so I used that), apple cider vinegar and some buttermilk. I also add in lots of celery pepper to taste. Super easy and really good although it is best on the day that it is made if you’re like me and like the slight crunch of raw cabbage.

This is one of my favourite meal combos ever. I love the spicy, saucy pork, the crunch of the tangy coleslaw and the warm cheesy cornbread. I have to watch myself around cornbread because I could easily inhale several pieces because it is that good. Eventually I want to buy a cast iron skillet to make more authentic cornbread.

Red Beans and Rice

After all the gluttony of the last few meals I decided to make what counts for as "health food" in the South, red beans and rice. Being a good Latin, I grew up eating beans so I like them more than the average person.

Now for the ingredients:

-Onions
-Celery
-A green peppers
-A jalapeno that looked lonely in my vegetable crisper and decided to join the party
-Carrots
-A bay leaf
-Smoked Polish sausages
-Olive oil

Why smoked Polish sausages you might ask? Because I don't think they have any smoked Southern sausages north of the Mason-Dixon line or at least north of the Canadian border. These were the next best thing, or more accurately the only smoked sausages that they had in the supermarket. Alas, such are the limitations which I am faced with.

After all of the ingredients had time to get nice and brown I added in:

-Two cans of red beans
-A ham bone
-Enough water to cover up the whole thing

If I were a *very* good Latina I would have soaked dried red beans overnight but since I am perennially short on time I usually sell out and use the stuff in the cans. Please don't tell my Salvadorean great grandmother, she wouldn't approve.

As for the ham bone, I was quite lucky to be able to get one. Apparently the butcher rarely ever has them and when they do, they save them for preferred customers. He's also a foodie and we talk about the Food Network when I go grocery shopping. I told him about my red beans and rice predicament and how I couldn't find a ham bone and he went to the back to get his last ham bone from the freezer for me. A foodie can understand the pain of another foodie when they just can't find the right ingredient.

Here is my pot right before I left it to simmer for half an hour to let all the flavours come together. Usually I prefer adding chicken broth instead of water to recipes but sometime the chicken flavour can overwhelm everything. In this case I wanted to taste of the beans and the smoked sausages to really come through.

The final result, served with rice. I deliberately did not leave everything terribly soupy although I'm not really sure how liquid the authentic version is.

This was comforting and filling. I'm a carbaholic and this meal made me happy. I poured liberal amounts of mexican hot sauce over the whole thing to top it off and it was tasty and homey.

Country Fried Steak

Recently I bought a southern cooking cookbook and now I feel like channeling Paula Deen and frying all of my food. There was recipe for country fried steak and while I am not a big red meat eater, breaded fried steak topped with gravy sounded just gluttonous enough to be good.

So here are the cast of characters for the breading:

-Flour
-Salt
-Pepper
-Cayenne pepper


I mixed this up in a plate and dipped sirloin steaks in flour, then egg, then flour again. I'm always trying to remember to use one hand for wet dipping and one hand for dry but I end up forgetting and by the end of the breading process I need to scrape the floury goop off my fingers.


I then heated up a pan (sadly for authenticity's sake not cast iron because I don't have one), with olive oil until it was sizzling and fried my steaks in two batches.


Ah, lovely, golden and crispy. Can't you just feel the circumference of your thighs increasing looking at this? Here's another picture:

Now for the gravy. Once again very basic ingredients:

-The olive oil that was left in the pan
-Flour
-Salt
-Pepper
-Milk
-Beef broth

I added the flour to the oil first and let it get a bit toasted and golden. Then the rest of the ingredients followed and I cranked up the whole thing to a boil.

Oh, I had also made some oven roasted potatoes.

The Husband and I call them "crack" potatoes because they're that addictive. They crunchy and golden and go with pretty much anything.

I was so good. I wanted to lick the plate afterwards and make sure that I had not missed a morsel of this calorie defying meal. I'm a huge fan of texture contrasts and the meaty steak covered with crispy breading, bathed in creamy savoury gravy and accompanied by crunchy golden potatoes was beyond awesome. Supposedly the South is one of the fattest parts of the U.S. and with recipes like this I don't blame them. This is a definite repeat, but not too soon or otherwise my pants won't fit.