Roasted Pork shoulder

Good Day everyone. I’m sorry I teased everyone about this post but my week had turned out a lot busier than I planned. Let’s jump straight into it. Last week was a family member’s seventieth birthday and I was asked to cook something for it. Sat down and thought about what to make, I figured a Lamb leg would be fun but when I found out that it was for 25 people I instantly knew that I would need two legs. We all know that lamb isn’t the cheapest meat around so I just went with a pork shoulder.

I decided to go a little Italian/Spanish with this. The day of the party I woke up early to get started, I felt like my dad. He would wake up early and do that while having a cup of coffee. So I cranked the oven at 275⁰F, got my foil paper, grabbed two head of garlic and carefully cut off the root, then seasoned it with black pepper and drizzled some oil, wrapped it up twice then out them in the oven to roast. After about two and a half hours the house smelled amazing. With the garlic finished it was now time to get busy. You thought I would tell you more of the story behind the prep? Sorry I have to give you the recipe first.

Pork Shoulder

1 Pork Shoulder (boneless)*

2 Spicy/Honey garlic Sausage (raw)

1 Lemon zest

½ tsp of Olivaca Catalana D’Arbequina **

2 heads/bulbs of Roasted Garlic

1 Cup Parsley (chopped)

1 Bunch scallions (chopped)

3 Bay Leaf

½ bunch Rosemary (chopped)

Salt + Pepper

Equipment

Blender/ Food Processor

Boning Knife

Cutting Board

Baking Pans

Butcher's Twine

That lovely piece of pork that you have in your fridge along with all of your ingredients, take them out. If you’re like me and you have the skill to debone a pork shoulder then kudos to you. For everyone else, you can buy your shoulder bone out. After I deboned the pork I poked it all over with a paring knife so that the seasoning got absorbed a little easier throughout the meat. I heavily seasoned it with salt and pepper and just let the pork sit while I started to get my other ingredients together.

Chop your parsley, Scallions, Rosemary, Lemon zest, and keep it in a small bowl. Take your roasted garlic, the cloves will fall apart don’t worry. What you do is take a spoon and press it from the tip to the end and just watch the garlic come out of the skin, add it to your blender. Take your sausage and remove them out of the casings and drop them into the blender/processor with your garlic, add a tiny amount of olive oil so the blender/processor doesn’t seize up and overheat.

Puree, once it’s a smooth consistency add it to your bowl of chopped herbs. Add the Olivaca to the mix with a little bit of cracked pepper.

Now that you have your paste we are going to spread it all over the inside of the pork, making sure we get it in every section.

We’ve got our spread all over the pork, now we have to roll it. This may or may not go down very well, you with either be able to tie this pork shoulder or just get frustrated with me and bake it flat. I mean, either way works fine. But having this skill is always a plus. I think I might have to make a tying video now. 

Anyways! If you know how to tie the shoulder do it and sprinkle the skin with salt pepper and a little sugar for caramelizing.I baked mine for 2 ½ hours at 350⁰F, the pork spent the first hour and a half covered then I took the foil off for the rest of the time to allow the fat to render a bit. You should constantly baste the pork. Now if you have more time like maybe four or five hours then I suggest baking it at a lower temperature like 275⁰ or 300⁰F, this will allow more fat to render.

*Okay, so the people that can’t debone a shoulder of pork what you do is peel the layer of skin off three quarters of the way and keep it peeled back, now stab the pork constantly to allow seasonings and rub to get absorbed. Maybe even make and incision through the front so it’s even more inside the pork, so it looks stuffed. 

Once you’ve rubbed/stuff the meat, place the skin back on and take your string/twine and just run it under the pork and make a knot over the skin to secure it from moving.

** I know not everyone will have a glass jar of Olivaca, so what you can do is fine an olive tapenade. This is just a puree of olives, garlic, sardines and seasonings.

I am very sorry everyone but I totally forgot to take a picture of the end product, we were rushing to leave the house to go the party.

Have you ever tried Plantain Jam?

Good day everyone, hope all is well. Today we will be making something sweet and yummy from an ingredient that I am almost pretty sure not everyone likes. Everyone loves the banana correct? But what about its cousin the Plantain? I feel like in the Caribbean you only see Plantains used one way and that’s sliced and fried. It’s almost as if people don’t want to explore. The Spanish are the only other ones I know of that do something a little different and that’s just smashing the plantain when it’s fried (Tostones). So here is how the story goes.

I had these two Plantains on my kitchen table just changing color almost every day until I decided to do something with them before they went bad. I picked them up, looked at them, felt how soft or hard it was, brainstormed and decided I am going to make Plantain jam. Huh? Plantain Jam? Yes, Plantain Jam. It would make perfect sense as its sweet as it is already. Now I went ahead and made this jam, it took about an hour but it was fine because I was in no rush. Plantains are nice but I find they lack a little kick, I find that it’s a subtle flavor that’s almost overpowered by sweetness. I’m not sure if you understand where I am coming from but hear me out. I added lemon to it because usually when u make a jam u add an acid to balance the sweetness. I chose a lemon because I felt it was the right ingredient that would have given the Plantain that “oh!” taste to it.

My Plantains had a lot of black spots on it. It was so ripe that when I cut it the skin was almost paper thin on the inside which made it a pain to peel but it was worth the little extra labor. I found that if you cut the Plantains in half horizontally (please, don’t go slicing down the Plantain vertically) helped and then instead of peeling it like a banana. If you run four slices down the side and peel sides left to right instead of peeling down it should be a little easier.\

This is the recipe, now everyone please remember that not all fruits yield the same product. Your Plantain may not be as sweet as mine, always taste and adjust.

1 Cup White sugar

2 Large Ripe Plantain

½ lemon juice

1 lemon zest

3 tbsp Water

2 Lime Leaves

Peel your Plantains and give them a rough chop and put them in your pot along with your white sugar and all other ingredients. Now put the heat on low and just let it cook. Also, please stir your jam occasionally. This isn’t a fast process, it’s something that has to take time. If you rush this, the sugars will caramelize and probably burn. Taste it, can you taste the lemon? Is it subtle? Can you taste the Plantains? Do you understand what I mean with the kick now? I hope everyone enjoyed the recipe. Please try it and let me know how it taste.

Spiced Carrot & Chickpea Soup

5-6 Qt stock

10 -12 Carrots

1 Whole onion

4 Clove garlic

2 White potato/sweet potato

3 Cups chickpeas (canned or fresh)*

2 Tsp ground coriander

4 Tsp ground cumin

½ Tsp ground chili

Olive oil

Salt & Pepper

Hey everyone, so over the weekend me and my girlfriend went shopping and saw ten pounds of carrots for $1.87, you know we got them right? We weren’t going to let this deal get away from us. Naturally the first things that came to mind was to make a massive batch of orange goodness soup. I decided to make a spiced chick pea and carrot soup, I did look up a recipe online so I could get a spice ratio for the soup just because I wanted the ratio to be good and it’s not something that I have totally perfected. Once I had an idea I fixed the measurements to my liking.

So get all your stuff, your containers, your stock heating up, your spoons, measuring spoons and cutting boards. Have everything ready and organized.

Get your stock heating up on the stove while we start getting ready to make our soup.

First we are going to knock off the tedious stuff, the peeling of more than a pound of carrots and two potatoes. Once you’ve got them all peeled just dice them. They don’t need to be equal sizes because it’s a soup and you’re going to puree it in the end. Normally I would tell you to keep the potatoes in water but they shouldn’t be out long enough to change in color or make a difference at the end.

Next we can peel the onions and garlic. We are going to give them a rough chop and save them in a container. Please don’t cry, the onions are sorry for what they have done to you. I’ll give you a moment to stop tearing up. Right! Back to it then. We have out carrots, we have our onions & garlic. Next is our spice, please don’t measure this with your tea spoon that you use for stirring your coffee and tea in the morning. Go grab a real measuring spoon and measure those spices.

Grab your stock pot, I own an 8 Qt pot. Pour your olive, just enough to line the bottom of it.  Once your pot is warm (You can tell by the waves in the pot or u can just drop a pieces of salt in to see a reaction or one of the pieces of onion) add the rest of your onions and garlic to the pan. Season them with salt and pepper. We want to cook the aromatics slowly, so keep your pot on a fairly medium heat until you can’t smell those onions anymore. You can then drop the spices and crank the heat up a little higher. We are trying to toast the spices with the aromatics and release those oils and scents from the spices. You’ll be surprised the different flavors that come out once you toast spices. 

The spices are toasted, the aromatics are all cooked out, now it’s time to drop in the carrots and potatoes. Season them again with some more salt and just leave them there to cook a bit. It shouldn’t burn, if it’s catching on the bottom it because your flame is too high. The chickpeas can go in after the carrots ,then get the stock in there. 

Once you’ve got it all in just taste the liquid, is it super bland? Can you taste a little bit of salt? Does it want more? These are questions for you to ask yourself. Add more salt if you think it needs it but don’t forget that the soup will reduce so don’t put too much salt. It’s better to have too little than too much. Now just watch that pot of wonderfulness just bubble away. You will have to take that foamy gunk off the top of the soup. We call those impurities.

Once your soup is done you can take all the solids out and put them in a blender and just add some of the liquid from the soup in and blend it until smooth. I left my own with some texture. Adjust the seasoning and there you have it. Yummy soup. Enjoy!

*If you have fresh chickpeas, please be sure to soak them over night or else they will be extremely hard and grainy in your soup.

A book a week: Around the world in 120 Recipes

Hey everyone, as I sit down here getting ready to type and talk about this book all I can do is smile and sip my coffee. I had to read the book over this week, just to refresh me with what I really liked about it.

Around the world in 120 Recipes is pretty awesome. Allegra McEvedy is an English female chef and is brilliant. She gives you a long introduction about herself, her childhood and her journeys and her obsessions with knives (which every chef should be). After reading her introduction it’s almost as if she sat down across the table with you giving you her story in person. Based off of the title of the book you can assume what she has done. She traveled and ate across the world and pretty much scribbled and saved her food thoughts, ideas and got the recipes from the cooks/ restaurants.


These stories and recipes aren’t about Michelin star restaurants. A lot of them are simple recipes that you can cook at home yourself. Everything looks rustic, and fun to eat; keep in mind eating is the best part of it.

I think the best part of the book would be the Caribbean section. We are such a small region yet I am sure everyone reading this knows very little about other Caribbean cuisine. I was very pleased to see Buljao in this book.  I had no idea that it was a Grenadian thing because my Trinidadian family always made it. Which left me wondering, is it really from there? or is that the Amerindians from one country that were taught it migrated and just continued cooking food their way. It’s funny how so many cultures and cuisines are so similar or even the exact same with different names.

There is a recipe I did try one time and it was pretty yummy. The Rabbit Lasagna, it was a long a recipe and took some time. One main reason is you have to brown the meat; if you have a smoke detector that goes off a couple of times (I eventually just pulled mine out of the ceiling when I was in NYC) you'll understand. Once you had cooked the rabbit in the broth you have to strip it of all its meat. You have to be very careful because Rabbits have fine bones and if you’re not careful and miss a few I can guarantee that swallowing or choking on them can leave a bit of a scare. In the end it was totally worth it.

If you want a bit of knowledge of some local food from countries around the globe, this is the book to get. Allegra does a really good job at making you smile and enjoy her book.

My mother has been one of the many supporters in my dream and firmly believes that if you want something bad enough it will happen. Whether it was pushing you because you lost sight of the end goal or just giving you some wisdom and guidance. I thank her for this book and continuously supporting me