Penne alla Vodka

Difficulty Rating:

This is one of my favorite recipes, not only because it's delicious and easy, but also because it has booze in it. And I like booze.

Recipe

1 tbls extra-virgin olive oil
1 tbls butter
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 shallots, minced
1 c. vodka
1 c. chicken stock
32 oz can of crushed tomatoes
salt and pepper
1 lb penne pasta
1/2 c. heavy cream
fresh basil

Heat a large skillet over moderate heat. Add oil, butter, garlic, and shallots. Gently saute shallots for 3 to 5 minutes to develop their sweetness. Add vodka to the pan. Reduce vodka by half, this will take 2 or 3 minutes. Add chicken stock, tomatoes. Bring sauce to a bubble and reduce heat to simmer. Season with salt and pepper.

While sauce simmers, cook pasta in salted boiling water until cooked to al dente (with a bite to it).

Stir cream into sauce. When sauce returns to a bubble, remove it from heat. Drain pasta. Toss hot pasta with sauce and basil leaves.

Execution

The recipe is a teensy bit vague on how long to do things for, so I'll hopefully be able to help out with that. I also didn't get a picture of the ingredients because I had to rush to get ready for my trip, so you'll have to forgive me.

So, first thing's first - put the oil and butter in the pot and let it melt, then add the garlic and shallots.

Cook that for about five minutes, and then add the vodka. Mmm, vodka.

Also be sure to try the vodka to make sure it's safe. You wouldn't want anyone to get hurt.

Cook that down until it's about half as much as you had before. Make sure you stir it because if you don't the garlic will burn.

Now, the recipe calls for a 32 ounce can of crushed tomatoes, but I can only ever find 28 ounce cans, so just buy two and add about a bit from the second one. Also add salt and pepper and, if you can't get fresh basil, add dried basil at this point. I sometimes add a bit of garlic powder if I want it to be extra garlicky.

Now is when you should put your pasta on to boil. You want the sauce to cook for a while, about as long as it takes for you to boil water and then finish cooking the pasta. It won't be super-thick when you're done, but it should cook down at least a little bit. Now, the recipe says to add the cream and then let it come to a boil and then you're done, but I like to let it simmer for another five minutes or so. Then you just pour the whole shebang over your cooked pasta and serve with some parmesan cheese.

It's seriously nummy. You can also add some grilled chicken if you want, or if you want to go vegetarian (which I did for these pictures since my sister's a filthy veggie-eating hippie) you can use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock. As a side note, they didn't have any vegetable stock at the store, so we bought a can of Progresso vegetable soup and just drained it and used the liquid. It's all about improvisation, people. Serve it with toasty garlic bread and enjoy!

Trailer Park Toffee

Difficulty Rating:

I can't believe I'm putting this on the website. This may be the weirdest thing I've ever made, and when I saw the recipe for it, I giggled and said it sounded like the strangest thing ever. I disbelieved. And then it was done, and I tried it... and then I ate, like, four more pieces. So since I was very much against this recipe before I even tried it (for example, it is not actually called Trailer Park Toffee, I was just being a jerkface), I have decided to eat my crow as thoroughly as possible and post it up for the rest of you to try. Enjoy!

Recipe

1 sleeve of saltine crackers
1 c. light brown sugar
2 sticks of butter
12 oz bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cover a cookie sheet with tin foil. Place crackers flat on foil to cover.

In saucepan, melt butter and add sugar. Boil, then reduce to medium heat and simmer for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Pour and spread over crackers. Bake 7 minutes.

Remove from oven and let cool 3 minutes. Pour chocolate chips evenly over the crackers, then bake 30 seconds to soften up the chocolate. Remove and spread the chocolate to cover. Refrigerate.

Execution

I know what you're thinking - saltines don't make toffee! However, the crackers make it deliciously salty AND sweet. Oh man. I'm having to force myself not to go raid the fridge right now.

Ingredients

I know it only shows one stick of butter, but use two.

Lay out the crackers. Now, I learned the hard way that you should really curl the tin foil up around the edges. I'll show you why in a minute.

Melt the butter and add the brown sugar...

...stir it all together and bring it to a boil!

Boil it for about 3 minutes, until it gets kinda foamy. This is a a variable, because if you don't cook it long enough it'll stay liquid, but if you cook it too long it'll turn rock hard and you won't be able to eat it.

Once it's cooked, pour it over the crackers. This'll be messy, but it's okay!

Then spread it around if you need to. Don't worry, the ones on the edge won't be as gooey. It's to be expected.

However, this is when you'll learn why you should curl the edges up to keep the liquid from dripping off edges. Or at least put some clean baking sheets under it to catch the drips. Because stuff can and WILL catch on fire. Hence the need for all the baking soda.

Whee! Okay, well, everything's salvaged, so just keep going! Pour the chocolate chips over it, then stick 'em back in the oven for a minute, just long enough so that they start to melt, and then spread the chocolate out over the whole thing.

Put it in the fridge for a couple hours to firm up, then break it up into pieces and serve! Look at that... I mean, it looks delicious! And it is delicious! Who'da thought, huh?

Om nom nom... nom nom sticky om nom.

Pecan Pie

Difficulty Rating:

I'm not even going to lie - I forgot to take pictures of the stuff while I made it. But it's such an awesome and perfect recipe that I can't help but go ahead and post it! So all you get is the finished product and the recipe, but trust me when I say it's the easiest dessert to make in the world. Gordon Ramsey's tiramisu took more effort.

Now I know what you're thinking - if this is so stupid-easy, why is it a 4-Cookie Recipe? Well, that's just because pecans aren't that easy to come by in some parts of the world. I mean, in Mississippi I could literally just walk outside and pick them off the ground, but they're a bit harder to find here in New York City. But if you search around in some of the specialty markets, you should be able to find a bag. And keep in mind that pecans can be frozen for... well, forever, kinda. I had mine in the freezer for about two years and this pie turned out spectacular. It's only a 4-Cookie because of the one ingredient. Otherwise, easy as pie.

Yes, I went there.

Recipe

1/2 stick butter, softened
1/2 c. sugar
1 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 c. pecans, chopped fine
1 c. Karo syrup
1 frozen pie crust

Using a fork, combine the butter and sugar. Add flour and salt and combine. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Pour into pie crust and cook at 300 degrees for an hour.

Execution

A few notes on the ingredients.

Apparently, it is very odd outside of the South for people to leave butter on the counter. Everyone I know keeps it in the refrigerator where it stays hard as a rock and isn't any good for spreading on toast. So if you don't keep a stick of butter softened at all times, you can just put it in the microwave for 20 seconds to get it to the proper state. Just be sure NOT to melt it.

Also, you can cut the pecans up by hand but that gets rather messy. As I stated in the post on Kitchen Basics, I like to use a Food Chopper for such things. Noisy, but oh-so-convenient!

And it doesn't matter whether you use dark or white Karo syrup. I prefer dark if I have to just pick one. My grandma always mixes half of each. Up to you whether you want to shell out for the second bottle or not.

Now. To make it!

Throw the softened butter and sugar in a bowl and squish it up with a fork until it's combined completely. That's exactly what my recipe says, by the way: squish!

Add in the flour and salt, and squish again. It may threaten to get a teensy bit dry, but the main point is to try not to leave any big chunks of butter unmixed.

I like to add the eggs and vanilla, mix again, then the pecans, mix again, and then the syrup, but my gramma just dumps it all in at once and stirs it up. It'll end up a sloppy, gooey brown mess either way. Mmmm. Sugary syrup.

Pour this into a pie crust - I like the 9" deep dish ones best. As a side note, those come two to a package, so I usually double the recipe and just make two pies, but that's entirely up to you. You can decorate it with unchopped pecans if you like; my gramma covers the whole top in them, but I like to make a design so I can avoid them when I cut myself a piece. Weird as it is, I hate whole pecans. The only way I'll eat them is in this pie.

Pre-heat your oven to 300 degrees and cook the pies for about an hour. I find it usually ends up being a little more than that, but I start checking it after an hour.

Knowing when your pie is done is a somewhat subjective artform in and of itself. The best thing to do is to check it about 45 minutes in: open the oven and (using an oven mitt, of course) jiggle the rack gently. You'll see the middle of the pies wiggle as if they're still all liquidy. This is what you are trying to overcome - you do NOT want a jiggly middle.

How like life, huh?

So after an hour, check it every five minutes or so. Just jiggle it slightly to see if the middle has firmed up yet. Don't be tempted to turn up the heat, because doing so will just burn the crust on your pie instead of cooking it any better. Be patient, and eventually you'll jostle the thing and it'll just sit there and be all brown and perfect.

Like that! How awesome is that? A Southern delicacy, all for you. Here's a close-up so you can see what the consistency looks like:

Now, you can, of course, serve it immediately, but it'll fall apart a bit when you try to get it onto the plate. If you let it sit a little while it'll firm up a bit more and be easier to serve. Since it's made of syrup and butter, you don't really have to refrigerate it as long as you're gonna finish it within the week. And really, who could possibly leave a pecan pie laying around for more than a week?? No one in my house, that's for damn sure.

Pasta with Chicken, Broccoli, and Oil

Difficulty Rating:

This one is totally my bad - I actually made this last month at my awesome friend Peter's house, and had such a great time there that I forgot I took all these pics for the blog. Good food and good company, man, this is what it does to you. Luckily I made a pecan pie and took a pic of it to put up here, and when I plugged my camera in I re-discovered all of these!

I must say, I've been lax in my blogging lately, but now that finals are almost over I should get back into the swing of things! So here, my lovelies, is a super-easy and surprisingly healthy dish for you all to enjoy!

Recipe

1 lb pasta shells, cooked
About 4 bunches of fresh broccoli florettes
1-2 cups extra virgin olive oil
3 tbls chopped garlic
About 1/2 lb chicken breast, cooked and cubed
Parmesan cheese
Salt & pepper

Add garlic and a few tablespoons oil to a skillet on medium heat and cook 2-3 minutes. Add broccoli florettes and cook until broccoli turns bright green. Add chicken and spice with salt & pepper, and cook until chicken is hot all the way through.

Add enough oil to fill pan about halfway up to the top of the broccoli, usually between 1-2 cups. Simmer on medium heat until broccoli is cooked to preferred consistency. Serve over pasta and sprinkle with parmesan cheese.

Execution

This is by far one of my favorite dishes. I could literally eat this every night for a week.

Ingredients

Peter's kitchen is soooo much nicer than mine. Look at those countertops! Mine are that fakey-marble blue. Yuck.

Now you're more than welcome to cook and chop your own chicken, we were just looking for something quick so we got the Deli-Fresh kind. You can also make this without meat at all; this was actually the first time in almost ten years of making this dish that I put chicken in it, but I was super-hungry and wanted meat.

As for the "broccoli florettes," all this means is you're only using the top part of the broccoli. Cut off all the stems, and then just chop the top of the broccoli up into smaller pieces so they're bite-sized. You'll get little green things everywhere, but it's worth it.

You can also use fresh garlic which I usually do, but again, I was going for quick and delicious so I used jarred. Dump in a couple spoonfuls of garlic and a bit of oil to cook it in.

DO NOT let the garlic burn! This is very important, because the garlic is in this for the long haul. Just stir it around for a minute until everything smells like garlic, then dump in your broccoli. Stir it around so it soaks up some of the oil, and let it cook a little. If it gets too dry, throw a little more oil on there. Your goal isn't to drown it or pan-fry it here, just to keep it sort of moist with the oil.

Once it starts turning bright green (is there anything prettier than cooked broccoli?), throw in the chicken.

You'll want to cook this another few minutes so the chicken absorbs some of the garlicy flavor and mingles with the broccoli. You should also add salt and pepper to taste.

Mmm! Now, if you're watching your figure you can just throw this on some pasta and go, but trust me when I say it'll be dry. So suck it up, remember that olive oil is good for your heart, and pour a bunch more in. I usually add it until it's about halfway to covering the broccoli concoction, as shown below.

I know it looks like a lot of oil at first glance, but remember that you're throwing this over an entire pound of pasta, so don't be shy! Let this simmer for a few minutes - the oil should turn a bit cloudy from all the other ingredients - until the broccoli is the consistency you prefer.

Then you just put some pasta in a bowl and spoon the broccoli concoction over it. I like shells the best, because there's all kinds of little niches that the oil can get stuck in and make it extra delicious.

Note #1: See what I meant about getting little green thingees everywhere?

Note #2: I am so jealous of Peter's dishes. Oh man.

Now, at this point you sprinkle some parmesan cheese over it and chow down. I like a lot of cheese, practically negating any healthy benefits of eating this meal, but how much you add is entirely dependent on your own love of cheese.

Once you've had your fill, throw the rest of the pasta into a tupperware container, pour the remaining oil from the pan over it, and eat it later with some more cheese. Mmmm, cheese.

Thanks again to Peter for helping me make this excellent meal!

Guacamole

Difficulty Rating:

Sorry it's been so long since my last update, but school's been eating my brain so I haven't been cooking lately. But! Worry not, as I am cooking a large bit of food for Thanksgiving, and that'll give you a wide array of things to love. Plus, I'm making Red Beans & Rice this week, so look forward to that!

This takes about fifteen minutes to make with prep time, and involves dumping stuff in a bowl, but since avocados have to be found in a grocery store it's listed as a 2-Cookie recipe. But, seriously, very easy.

Recipe

2 medium, ripe avocados
1/2 small white onion, chopped fine
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and veined and chopped very fine
1 large tomatoe, chopped fine
2 limes, juiced
2-3 tablespoons fresh cilantro, destalked and torn

Mash up avocados with a hand masher or fork. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix together. Eat with delicious chips.

Execution

I can't even think of what to write 'cause this is so simple. So... um... here we go!

Ingredients



You usually don't cut straight through the pit of the avocado, but my boyfriend go a little overexcited using my super-sharp awesome chef's knife. The way you usually do it is to act as if you're going to cut it in half, and just pull it apart instead of cutting the pit. Pull it out, then scoop the delicious mushy insides out and throw them in a bowl.

I use a hand-masher and get it all mushed up, and then it looks like this. Note that he already added the cilantro because he forgot I was taking pictures, but you get the idea.



So once it's all mashed up, you just add everything in. I don't really like spicy guacamole, so I scooped some out before he added the jalapenos, but if you want it to be spicy just be sure you cut the pieces really, really finely or you're gonna bite into a big hunk of ohmigoditburns!

But once it's all mixed up, you have some serious deliciousness to contend with. I like to pair it with some blue corn chips, which are tastier than crappy Tostidos anyway. Enjoy!

Macaroni and Cheese

Difficulty Rating:


This will make you fat and sassy.

Recipe

1 lb elbow macaroni
1 stick (8 tbsp butter)
4 eggs
12 oz evaporated milk
1 tsp hot sauce
2 tsp kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp garlic powder
black pepper
20 oz cheddar cheese

Cook pasta and drain. Return to the pot and add butter, tossing to melt.

Whisk together eggs, milk, hot sauce, salt, pepper, garlic, and mustard. Stir into pasta to coat. Turn on medium heat and add cheese. Continue to stir 3-5 minutes until creamy.

Execution

This is a really easy stovetop version of macaroni and cheese. It's also so delicious that you might actually hurt yourself from eating too much. Seriously. Ration it. It's dangerous stuff.

Ingredients:

First you're going to boil the pasta. Once it's done, drain it. I like to put the empty pot back on the stove and dump the butter in to let it melt first, then put the macaroni back in. Mix it all up.

While the pasta is boiling, shred the cheese. It is a lot of cheese. It will make a mountain - like this!

Whisk together everything else but the cheese, and pour it over the macaronis. It won't look like much at first.

But then. Then! The cheeeeese. It's a lot of cheese, so add a handful at a time and stir it up to melt it. It'll probably take about five minutes to make it all happen, but once that sweet time has passed, you're left with some of the most delicious thick and creamy nom-noms that you have ever tasted!

Just look at it! It's so melty and wonderful! You'll eat too much of it. I promise.

What to do with leftovers

Difficulty Rating:

This isn't really a recipe. This is more a "Hey, you don't just have to heat stuff up and eat it again - you can play with it!" sort of suggestion. Because we all know that, no matter how delicious it is, leftovers can get kind of tedious.

For instance, I made 5 pounds of Puerco Pibil. Now, it was super yummy, but I can't just eat it every damn day. So what's a girl to do?

I usually like doing pastries. Pies or puffs, or even throwing it on a homemade pizza. This time I did triangle pastries with phyllo dough, and here's how!

Phyllo, or puff pastry sheets, are very easy to work with. You can buy them frozen and keep them for a very long time, and it keeps in the fridge for about 5 weeks. You'll always need to defrost them before using them. They usually come in a bundle of large sheets, which you cut into thirds.

For the insides, I mixed the pork with yellow rice and 4 oz of sour cream (because sour cream is delicious).

Take the strip of dough and butter one side of it. Fold the sides over a little so you have a buffer zone of non-buttered dough to work with. My pictures didn't come out all that clear, but the shiny part is the butter. I melted the butter and then used a brush to apply it.

Then take a spoonful of the mixture and plop it down on one end of the dough.

Fold the end over it, then start folding it into triangles.

Once they're all folded, put them on a greased baking sheet and brush some more butter on the outside.

Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes, and then you have delicious meat pastries! Remember, everything on the inside is cooked already, so you're just waiting for the dough to cook.

These little suckers are excellent. Phyllo dough is really, really flaky, so make sure you eat it with a napkin.

You can put pretty much any leftovers in these as long as it's mostly solid. Phyllo is also great for desserts. Have you ever had a peanut butter and jelly pastry? It is amazing. Mmmm.

Beef Stroganoff

Difficulty Rating:

I've got an investor! Squee!

My friend Dave has agreed to bankroll a few of my cooking projects so long as he gets to eat them, and this is a totally okay solution for me. As such, you now have a delicious Beef Stroganoff recipe thanks to his generosity. He also brought over a copy of the first disc of Firefly, which has disappeared from my house. Dave is totally the man.

Now, the only reason this is a 3 Cookie instead of a 2 Cookie is because I use Tony Chachere's, and that might not be available everywhere so I'm offering a substitute. If you can get Tony's you damn well should have some in your kitchen. It is the most awesomest of spices known to man. Screw Emeril - yes, I said it, screw Emeril. He got nothin' on Tony.

Recipe

2 lb ground beef
1 1/2 tbls salt
2 tbls pepper
2 tbls Tony Chachere's
3 tbls olive oil
1 small or medium onion, chopped
3 c. sliced white mushrooms
1 lb egg noodles, cooked
4 cans of beef broth at 14 1/2 oz each
1 1/4 c. sour cream
chopped garlic
a few tablespoons of SR flour

Substitution:
Every geographic area has its own local spicy goodness. Tony's is the Louisiana version. You can substitute with Zatarain's, Old Bay, or even Adobo if you add some cayenne pepper to it.

Heat oil over medium heat. Add meat and cook until nearly browned. Drain excess oil. Add onions and cook until soft, 3-4 minutes. You may need to add a little bit of broth (appx. 1/4 c) just to keep enough liquid in the pan to keep the meat from burning to the bottom.

Add mushrooms and garlic and cook until mushrooms release their juices. Add noodles, 6 cups of beef broth (a little more than three cans), and sour cream. Cook 5-10 min until thickened. If it isn't as thick as you'd like, use a fork to combine the remaining broth with two large spoonfuls of flour; add this to the stroganoff and stir well, cook another 5-10 minutes.

Execution

This recipe is fairly easy - you only need two pots, and the measurements are pretty much just about eyeing it and adding what you think you need. This is definitely one of those recipes that you'll adjust based on how you like it. I actually scribbled down a few changes in my recipe book just because of how I made it last night; the original recipe called for less beef and less sour cream, which, um, it's stroganoff, bitches. Gimmie more sour cream and beef!

The point is, play around with it. You won't mess it up unless you just accidentally dump half a pound of salt in it.

Ingredients:

I know my mushrooms are a little scuzzy, they were in the fridge for too long.

The first rule of this dish is prepping your food. Go ahead and chop all your garlic and mushrooms and the onion. Cook the noodles. Mix the meat and spices. Once everything's prepped, it'll literally just be a matter of throwing it in the pot in the correct order. Easy-peasy, as my gramma used to say.

I didn't really prep because it's mid-terms week and I've spent every available moment either studying or playing Fable II to distract my brain into working after I've burnt it out with studying. So I didn't mix the spices into the meat beforehand, I just dumped them on top. And that's fine too. :)

So! Heat the oil, dump in the meat and spices.

My spoon-holder is covered in spaghetti sauce because I made bolognase, which I forgot to take pictures of.

Cook it until it's mostly brown, but still has some pink in it. This'll keep it from burning in the subsequent cooking. Drain off the oil.

A quick note on draining oil - don't ever pour that crap down your sink. Yeah, sure, you can run the hot water and it'll probably stay liquid long enough to make it down your pipes, but it'll still run the chance of coating your pipes and eventually clogging the whole thing up. I use my gramma's old trick of an empty coffee can. Label the lid "Used Oil" or something, and then every time you need to drain your oil, put it in the coffee can and then freeze it. This will keep the oil out of the way, and once it's full you can just throw it in the trash without having to worry about it leaking or clogging or anything else.

Once you've drained the oil, add in the onions and cook those down too.

You should chop up the onions properly - I don't because my roommate is allergic to onions and they need to be big enough for him to pick out. That's why most of my recipes don't actually involve onions, but if you're a huge fan you can add 'em in wherever you want.

Keep an eye on the meat. If it starts to stick or burn to the bottom, open up one of the cans of broth and add a little bit. The recipe only calls for 6 cups, which is about 3 cans and a few tablespoons from the fourth, which means you've got some extra to work with if you need it.

Once the onions are softened, add in the garlic and mushrooms. Mmmm, mushrooms.

Cook that until the mushrooms "release their juices," which just sounds like a bad line from a Harlequin novel. It's pretty easy to tell: the mushrooms go from looking all dry and spongy to looking all juicy and delicious. Nummy!

Now you just dump everything else in - 6 cups of broth, the pound of egg noodles, and the sour cream. Mix it all together and let it cook for a few minutes.

It could very well be done now, depending on how you like it. Some people prefer their stroganoff to be more like a soup, but I like mine really thick. If you want to thicken it, take a few heaping spoonfuls of flour and dump it into the last can of broth, which should be about half-full if you're following my recipe exactly. Use a fork to whisk the flour into the broth, and try not to leave any lumps. It won't look particularly thick, but just pour it into the stroganoff and mix well. If you cook that for another ten minutes it should thicken right up.

Ohmigod so good. I like to eat all the noodles and beef, and then use bread to sop up what's left in the bowl. Sooooo good!

Puerco Pibil

Difficulty Rating:

I will start out by apologizing for some of the picture-fail that came out of this recipe. It is my first 4-Cookie Recipe, and as such it's a bit more complicated, with several steps to it. Plus I habenero-ed myself pretty severely, and my camera froze twice. So... yeah, there's like two pictures missing of the final product. But I'll explain 'em really well, I promise!

Anyone who's seen Once Upon A Time In Mexico knows puerco pibil. I first learned how to make the dish from watching Robert Rodriguez' video about it, but since then I've adjusted the recipe a bit so I hope you enjoy!

Recipe

5 tbls. Annato seeds (sometimes sold as Achiote)
8 All-spice seeds
1/2 tsp. whole cloves
1 tbls. whole black pepper corns
2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 c. orange juice
1/2 c. white vinegar
2 habenero peppers
2 tbls. salt
8 cloves of garlic
1 lemon
6 limes
2 tblsp. brown sugar
1 shot of tequila
5 lbs. pork butt

Hardware needed:
Extra-large baking pan
Aluminum foil
Coffee grinder
Blender
Large freezer bag

Put annato, all-spice, cloves, and black pepper in the grinder and grind until powdered. Add cumin and set aside.

Remove veins and seeds from peppers and chop up. WASH HANDS! Add the peppers to the blender along with the orange juice and vinegar. Add the ground spices, salt, sugar, and garlic. Blend until smooth. Juice the lemon and limes into the blender and add the tequila. Blend until well mixed.

Chop the pork into 2-inch squares. Put the meat in a large freezer bag and pour the blended mixture over the meat. Close the bag and squish to distribute. Place this in the refridgerator for 4-6 hours, turning every half-hour to hour to redistribute the spices.

Place meat in extra-large baking dish and cover with foil. Cook at 325 degrees for four hours. Serve over rice.

Execution

If this wasn't so damned delicious it would just be torture. This is not a hard recipe, but it is grueling and takes all day. But I do like to do this when I'm having a party and want something that I can set out buffet-style for people to eat.

Ingredients:

Now, if you'll notice there next to the garlic I have two different kinds of peppers - red ones and green ones. The green ones are the habeneros, which are what the recipe calls for. However, you can't always find them in your local grocery store (I wasn't even sure these were habeneros since they're usually orange or red, but apparently these just weren't quite ripe enough) so you can substitute with equal an equal amount of scotch bonnets.

Also note that although the container on the counter says "Dog treats for good dogs," I do not actually have a dog. I have a cat named Captain Dog, who is always good. Mainly because he's always sleeping. Like this:

He's very lazy.

So! First thing's first - you're probably going to have to de-bone your pork. Pork butt, by the way, is not actually the butt of the pig. It's the shoulder. So if you go to the store and see no pork butt, only pork shoulder... you know, buy it. It's the same thing.

Don't cut all the fat out since that's what makes it juicy and yummy. If it's got skin on it, though, get rid of that. I usually buy a 7 lb. pork shoulder so it yields about 5 lbs. of meat. You can just keep it in the roasting pan while you do the rest of your deeds. Also, I lost the picture of the meat in the roasting pan, so here's what it looks like pre-cooking and you can just imagine it all cooked and stuff:

I always buy the throw-away aluminum ones because this gets kind of gross otherwise.

Next comes the spices! If you're like me and you occasionally grind your own spices for recipes, make sure you have a grinder that's specifically for spices. You can use a regular old coffee grinder, which runs about ten bucks at the cheap places, but DO NOT, for the love of little apples, ever use the spice grinder to grind coffee. The cross-contamination, it is dreadful to the tastebuds.

The original recipe calls for grinding up your own cumin too, but I've searched and searched and never found cumin seeds available for sale, so I just use ground cumin and throw it in with the rest once I've ground them all up.

Once you've got that done, set it aside and prepare yourself for the habeneros.

WEAR GLOVES.

I really don't know what to say other than that. Most people say you can just wash your hands immediately afterwards and be fine. But some people (like me, which I discovered this weekend) have a serious reaction to the capsaicin, which is the chemical that makes the pepper spicy. This might, say, make your hand feel like it's on fire for about ten hours after you chop up the pepper, even though you washed your hands six times. You might even spend all day with your hand in a bowl of baking soda and ice water wishing for death. Let's just say that wearing gloves is a safe bet.

What I will do for delicious food, my darlings.

Cut it open, remove all seeds and veins (the inside connecting parts and anything NOT the same color and texture as the fleshy middle).

Then you just chop it up into tiny little pieces.

Then wash everything that ever touched it.

Next dump those spicy little suckers into the blender, along with the orange juice, vinegar, spices, salt, sugar, and garlic. Bleeeeend.

Put the cover on! You don't want this all over your counters! Now blend. Yesss.

Juice the lemon and limes (the original recipe called only for 5 lemons, but I prefer it with limes) and add that and the tequila to the mix.

Now, dump all that raw meat into a large freezer bag, pour that gooey red mess on top, close it up and squish it all around. Stick it in the fridge and let it soak for a while. Soak-soak-soak. Every now and then just squish it around some more so it gets in all the meat. I say leave it about 4-6 hours. The good thing about this recipe is that you can do this the night before, and then when you wake up you're all ready for cooking.

Once that's done, just dump it back into the aluminum pan, spreading it out evenly so it can all cook. Cover with foil and stick it in the oven for about four hours. You can take it out at 3 to 3 1/2 hours, the meat will just be a little more solid. Four hours makes it more the consistency of pulled pork, where the meat just sort of shreads and falls apart. This is really just up to how you want it - if I'm throwing it over rice, I like it a bit more solid. If I'm making sandwiches, I'll cook it longer.

The cooking really is the easiest part. I'd suggest serving it over yellow rice with a bunch of very cold beers. I only had white rice in the house, so this is what it looks like:

Mmm. The cooking process and the little bit of brown sugar keeps the peppers from completely overwhelming the dish, making it spicy but still very flavorful. And you've got five freaking pounds of it, so you can feed an army or just feed yourself for a week!

And I promise you, for all my complaining I love this dish. I only make it once a year, but I eat the hell out of it when I do!