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

[lilysea]

Guacamole with lemon juice or lime juice
plus tortillas?

Potato salad + tinned tuna on the side, maybe with a sauce?

[wint3rpear]

https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/pulled-pork/

[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.

[thewayne]

Classic no-cooks would be gazpacho and tuna salad. I prefer less chunky gaz and use my food processer for it.

[james]

You can make kalua pork! Just about the easiest thing in the world. Rub with big grain salt (coarse, kosher), add liquid smoke and cook on low for like 16-24 hours depending on how big it is. Then you can shred it and use it for just about everything.

[hudebnik]

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

[cellio]

Salads of various sorts are no-heat options that can still be healthy -- tuna salad, black beans, hard-boiled eggs (ok you have to boil those), or cheese provide protein, and the veggies speak for themselves. Cold soups, though most of the ones I know are fruit soups, other than gazpacho which has already been mentioned. Other cold options that don't cost a lot are yogurt, bread & hummus, cheese, raw veggies.

If you're willing to use a stove your options expand a lot. We should all be able to get through the crushing heat of this week without needing to turn our ovens on.

[siderea]

I'd do pulled pork in the slow cooker, and now that I have a porch with an outlet, I'd do it outside.

Recipe here: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1164008.html

I've been hankering to do this for a month, but there's been no sale on pork.