Well, it's going to be unpalatably hot this week.

[conuly]

Thanks, Climate Change!

With that in mind, what should I be cooking for dinner? Also: Dinner is on a budget, so cheap and heatproof! And on a related note, does anybody have any good recipes for this pork shoulder that's been hiding in our basement freezer? (And it's cool to cut it in half before cooking, make two things, right?)

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Comments

[hudebnik]

Pork shoulder wants to be cooked "low & slow", like in a 250°F oven for four hours or more (e.g. if it's still frozen in the middle). The goal is for the fat and connective tissue to melt and leave the meat juicy and falling-apart-tender. Whether you want to have the oven on all day in a hot week is up to you :-)

Cutting it in half is difficult, since the anatomy of a pork shoulder is complicated. Especially if it's frozen. And a good fraction of it is probably bone or cartilage, so it's not as huge an amount of meat as it looks like.

Our favorite cheap, hot-weather meals tend to involve pasta with "light", less-meaty sauces, e.g. yogurt-and-garlic or yogurt-and-lemon. Or red lentils (which cook quickly into a mush). Or this one-pot pasta-with-broccoli, in which the pasta water forms the sauce by magic:

6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1½ pounds broccoli, cut into 1/2-inch pieces, separating florets from "trunk and branch" pieces
¼ cup unsalted butter
4 anchovy fillets (or even a whole tin; it doesn't end up tasting unpleasantly fishy)
12 ounces dry spaghetti (or another pasta that cooks in 10 minutes)
2 tsp. salt
½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes
Grated Parmesan, for serving (optional)

Put the "trunk and branch" pieces of broccoli in the frying pan with butter, anchovies, and thinly-sliced garlic, and saute for 2-3 minutes. Add the florets, spaghetti, salt, red pepper flakes, and 5 cups of water. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently with tongs, until the pasta is cooked, by which time the water should also have mostly disappeared. Top with grated cheese.

[conuly]

I’ve cooked pork shoulder in the slow cooker before, which is how I know for sure it’s twice as much pork as we can eat at once. But maybe what we have is pork butt and I didn’t look at the package last hefting it up.

[hudebnik]

Possible but unlikely: it's a lot easier to find pork shoulder than pork butt in grocery stores.