Totally Tropical Pork Mojo

With summers heat and humidity creeping in the desire to eat or even cook inside seems to fade.

Start with a pork tenderloin, you may have to trim the excess fat and pull off the "silverskin" before this is ready to marinate in the MOJO baby.

The Mojo sauce or marinate is a very common in Cuban cuisine. It's simple as pie to make and is lip smacking good.

Tropical Mojo

• 1/2 cup olive oil

• 8 garlic cloves thinly sliced

• Juice of 2 limes & half an orange (traditionally a sour orange is used in place of the orange and lime)

• A bunch of fresh oregano & cilantro chopped

• Salt and pepper to taste

• Splash of vinegar
• 1/2 cup of water

Heat the oil over medium high heat; throw in the sliced cloves till lightly browned. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a quick boil.

After the Mojo has cooled allow tenderloin to marinate in this for at least 24 hours.

This totally tropical pork mojo was served with the following!

• Grilled onions
• Grilled asparagus
• Grilled plantains mmm
• Black beans with cilantro, cheese and grilled onion

Nicely washed down with a DOUBLE IPA homebrew from two good friends. Very malty, sweet and high in booze. Tasted like a cross between a Sam Adams and a Dogfish 90 min..

Damn fine.

Tomatillos!

Red or green? Those 3 words make up the offical New Mexico state question. With the Balloon Fiesta around the corner and 2,230 miles between us we can’t help but think about green chile harvest season in New Mexico. Luckily, we received a nice batch of tomatillos from Steve at Parker Farm and decided to use these as a base for our pork chile verde. Given we did not have green chilies to make this truly authentic, we found poblanos to be a worthy contender.

The first step to a great chile verde involves lots of roasting. We grabbed our largest baking pan and threw in our tomatillos along with four jalapenos drizzled with oil.

We roasted our pepper pan at 500 for a good 20 minutes until the skins were slightly charred. While those were roasting in the oven, we utilized all four burners on our gas stovetop as a make-shift chili roaster for the poblanos. The chilies finished around the same time and the house smelled SPICY!

In our over-sized Le Creuset we slowly browned four pounds of pork shoulder and to this we added a puree of the roasted tomatillos and peppers, four cups of chicken stock and cumin to taste. Set to low heat, we walked away and let our stew simmer for 6 hours.

After the stew was done simmering, we had delicious filling for our enchiladas topped with fresh cilantro and jack cheese.

The Salted Cod is not one for showboating but this was an excellent chile verde and we couldn't have been prouder. It brought us right back to our stay in New Mexico.

Here is our Share!Week 7

Starting at the top from left to right: yellow carrots, "superstar" spring onions, beets, cauliflower, cilantro, basil, cucumbers.

This summer is flying by. We were so excited for more basil that we whipped up a batch of pesto to freeze for later use. The yellow carrots were an awesome snack for the work week as well as the sauteed beets for use in salads. The cilantro was excellent in some homemade guacamole.

We've roasted our cauliflower with lemon, fresh balcony grown dill, garlic and olive oil. The oven was set to 450 and let it go for about an hour. The cauliflower came out nice and crispy. It had a deep nutty roasted flavor but the lemon and dill kept it fresh which was a nice offset.






15 minute pickles!

We have adapted this recipe from The Salted Cod's favorite cookbook How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

We sliced one cuke into chips, which were then put in a strainer and heavily salted. Toss them around to make sure each chip gets salted.

After 10 minutes the chips should have released most of their water content. Go ahead and wash the chips under running water, you want to remove all of the extra salt. In a small bowl big enough to hold your chips pour 1/4 cup of white vinegar over the cuke chips. Mix in 1 tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of dried dill. Eat them quickly because they actually don't last all that long. They have been a favorite treat of many of The Salted Cod's companions this summer including confirmed pickle haters. It's a nice salty/acidic balance. Good stuff.