I know I can’t be alone when I say that being in the kitchen in the summer is a drag. It’s hot outside, I don’t need it to be hot inside, too. And since it’s Utah, where central air is not especially common inside homes – they favor swamp coolers here – it is frequently already hot inside anyway so the last thing I want to do is make it hotter. I prefer to flavor my food with kosher salt, not beads of sweat.

Gross.

Anyway, like most people we move to a great deal of low-maintenance cooking in this wretched heat, like grilling or things that cook quickly, and especially things that can be served cold, like this fantastic pasta salad from the June/July 2010 issue of Cooking Light. It is everything you could want in a summer dish – bright, sunny notes from the fresh dill, the tang of lemon, the smooth, silky bite of cold orzo and the crunch of crisp red bell pepper and cucumber. And the best part? I listed nearly all of the ingredients right there. The full recipe is, as usual, behind the cut.

I know, too, that it’s been a long time since I’ve updated. I won’t apologize for it, since I was using that time well, or promise that I will update more frequently, because you can see that’s worked out so well in the past, so instead I will encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed so that you’ll get the updates whenever I do get around to posting them.

And you don’t want to miss the chocolate peanut-butter cookies coming soon!

Lemony Orzo-Veggie Salad
adapted from Cooking Light
(yields four 1 1/4 cup servings)

You will need:

3/4 cup uncooked orzo (get the bronze-die cut, it’s worth it!)
1/4 tsp lemon zest
3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 large clove minced garlic
1/4 tsp honey
1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup diced English cucumber (these are frequently marketed as seedless, longer than standard cucumbers, and might be wrapped depending on your store)
1/2 cup diced red bell pepper
1/3 cup thinly sliced green onions
1 Tbsp chopped fresh dill (Utahns: Sunflower Market is great for fresh herbs)
1/2 cup (2 ounces) crumbled goat cheese (optional)

Cook your orzo as the package recommends, but don’t salt or oil the water. Drain and rinse with cold water, drain again and place in a large bowl.

While the orzo is cooking, combine lemon zest, juice, olive oil, salt, garlic, honey and black pepper in another bowl, whisking well to get them all together and full of deliciousness.  Pour over your cold orzo, stir well to coat. Add cucumber, bell pepper, onions and dill, and toss gently again to coat veggies. Sprinkle with the goat cheese, if you like that sort of thing. Crumble cheese are not my thing. Stick your head in the bowl and enjoy.

Just kidding. It’s for eating – so eat!

You may say to yourself, wait, hasn’t she made something like this before? And yes, I have – matambre is a roulade as well. Roulade (from the French word “rouler”) just means “to roll” and can apply to anything from a jelly roll to sushi. In this case, it’s a butterflied slab of pork loin slathered in a paste made of Italian parsley, a bulb of roasted garlic and lemon juice, seared and chucked in the oven. Couldn’t be easier. Let me show you.

You will need:

1-2lb pork loin
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/4 c white wine, chicken broth or water
A bulb of garlic, roasted
A small lemon, cut in half
A bunch of Italian (or flatleaf) parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Kitchen twine

If you’ve never butterflied meat before, I strongly encourage you to look up a Youtube video. I will try to explain it here but I think it’s one of those things best viewed and I should know since my matambre butterflying was just a disaster. It was actually kind of catastrophic, but we all have to learn somewhere, right?

Go ahead and roast up your garlic, if you so desire. I served this with roasted potatoes so I just oiled up the bulb with the potatoes and roasted it for about 40 minutes at 425F. If you don’t want to roasted, I recommend slicing it very thin or mincing well. With either method, once you’ve prepared your garlic the way you choose you’re going to smash it together with a pinch of kosher salt, the juice of half a small lemon, and as much chopped parsley as you would like. I started with a fork but finished with a pestle, and that was with roasted so those of you using unroasted garlic may want to do the same – just add a teaspoon or so of olive oil to help bind it all together.

Grab your hunk of pork loin and lay it on a sturdy cutting surface, long side facing you. You’ll want a very sharp knife for this, so use the best one you’ve got. Make a vertical slice halfway through the thickness of the meat. Lift the edge of one side of the cut up enough to angle your knife and slice through horizontally to make an even plane of the meat, then repeat on the other side. Think of it like opening a cardboard box, first one flap, then the other. You should have a relatively even surface of meat now. If you see any obvious thicker sections, feel free to pound it out with your meat mallet.

Haha, beat your meat. Please excuse me, I’m obviously 10 years old. MOVING ON. Here’s a little photographic help to show you what it should look like:

Make small slits with a sharp paring knife here and there on the surface of the meat, then spread your garlic mixture on top. Try to cover the whole surface as evenly as you can, but don’t sweat it if you’ve got bare spots. Finish with a little black pepper, then turn the meat so that the short side is facing you.

If you can do the fancy butcher knots with a single strand of twine, bully for you. I am very bad at it and so I cut 4 equal lengths of twine and set them aside. You can start at either the top or the bottom, but roll the meat up, gently but firmly. Lift up and place your twine underneath at about 2” intervals, and tie tightly.

I would insert another picture here but – and I know, I KNOW, this is completely and remarkably immature of me but I can’t post it. It would get me censored. It’s so phallic it might as well be pornography. So, if your pork loin tied up looks like it could MAYBE be something else, something attached to the human body, you know you did it right.

I have no dignity. I apologize.  Let’s get back to the food, shall we?

Preheat the oven to 350F. Heat a large skillet or dutch oven over medium-high heat, add the olive oil and allow to get hot enough to shimmer but not smoke. Add the pork loin and sear on all sides, about 3-5 minutes per side or until browned. If your skillet is not oven-safe, put your pork in a roasting pan, add a quarter cup of chicken broth/wine/water, and cover tightly with aluminum foil. If you’re using a dutch oven, add a quarter cup of chicken broth/wine/water, cover the loin itself inside the vessel loosely with aluminum foil, then cover with the lid and into the oven it goes for about 25-30 minutes. Check it after 20 minutes – pork dries out quickly and this cut doesn’t have a lot of fat to keep it moist, so once that center hits about 145F on an instant-read thermometer you’ll want to take it out and let it rest for 10 minutes or so, the temperature will continue to rise and should peak at no more than 155F*.

From here, cut the twine, slice into your desired thickness and serve. If you used wine or broth, you’d have the makings of a nice pan sauce, too!  Roulades are great, there’s no end, really, to what you can add as the filling. Traditional German rouladen has pickles, Italy’s braciole is breaded and has cheese. Set your creativity free!

(* – the USDA says the appropriate internal temperature for well-done pork is 170. Pork frequently disagrees with this by turning into something like a mouthful of pig-flavored sand. You don’t want to eat it raw, but I think – and so does Mark Bittman – that a little pink is OK. 150 is the perfect happy medium for me.)

Something about that picture puts me in mind of a fish. No idea why. Anyway, so in yet another magazine post (hey, at least it’s a different one), Food Network magazine puts out 6 issues per year, instead of the usual one per month. This recent addition is action-packed with recipes, including one for hot buttered rum. I’ll give you one guess as to who created that one!

Buried amidst the plethora of turkey and stuffing and other traditional Thanksgiving feasts was a section entitled “A Cuban Feast” and it had me at this title: Slow-Roasted Pork with Citrus and Garlic. You might have picked up on it by now, but I love pork. I think I  subconsciously look for the pork recipes before I even consider other meats. This particular recipe calls for a 6-8lb Boston butt, which is a shoulder cut (also used to make the incredibly and surprisingly delicious cabbage soup from Veselka) and not only does the grocery store I use to buy my meats not carry any that size, it’s just too much for my small family. The side dishes listed weren’t great for us, not big squash eaters here and bananas flambé, well, let’s just say I think it’s better if I don’t intentionally light things on fire in my kitchen since I do it so well accidentally already. I served this up with some honey-balsamic glazed carrots and some pan-fried corn with red pepper and parsley.

I can’t lie to you, this was an insane amount of prep for a roast that was not particularly spectacular, which actually did not surprise me too much as Saveur’s Caribbean pork roast was also heavy on prep but disappointing on flavor. I don’t want to discourage you from making it though, because taste is such a subjective thing, but be prepared. I’ve cut the recipe in half here and it should serve 4 comfortably.

Slow-Roasted Pork with Citrus and Garlic
(adapted from Food Network Magazine)

5 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon fresh oregano
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 bay leaves
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
1 3-to-4-pound Boston butt pork shoulder
Juice of 3 oranges, peels reserved
Juice of 2 lemons, peels reserved
Juice of 2 limes
2 Tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
6 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 white onion, thinly sliced

OK, here’s where the work starts. The magazine said prep would be 40 minutes. My experience was closer to 90 minutes, and it might be because I don’t have a juicer so I squeezed my citrus by hand, and since I had cuts on both hands I opted to leave the peel on and just cut it off after. If this is something you plan on doing as well, I did score four lines down each fruit before cutting in half, to make peeling easier.

In your food processor (or blender, or mortar and pestle) blend the first five ingredients into a paste. It may not look like one, but it should feel like one. Don’t expect the spices to get too finely ground, this is more like a slightly damp rub than anything. Trim any excessive fat from your pork and cut deep slits about every 2 inches all over. I tend to just stab mine with a paring knife, I’m not sure precision is especially important here. Rub your spice mixture all over the pork, into the slits, and set aside for now.

In a large glass or plastic (no metal! acids + metal = reaction!) bowl, whisk together the juice of the oranges, lemons and limes, the Worcestershire sauce and the olive oil. Submerge the pork as best you can in the marinade, then top with the onions and finally, the orange and lemon peels. Cover with plastic wrap (not foil! acid + metal = reaction!)  and marinate in the fridge for at least 8 hours and up to 2 days. (I let mine marinate for 12 hours.)

Preheat the oven to 450F. Remove the peels and chuck ‘em into the fridge for later. Place your pork onto a rack and into a roasting pan and roast, uncovered, for an hour. Keep the marinade and onions, you’ll need them later. After an hour, take your pork out and turn the oven down to 350. Pour the marinade over the roast and top with the onions, cover with foil and roast for another hour. Take the pork out, add the peels on and around the pork,  and roast for another 1-2 hours, basting with the juices occasionally. The recipe says to cook until it reaches 190, but at it’s peak mine only got to about 184. It doesn’t matter, pork is safe at 160 (Mark Bittman says 150) and is lovely, juicy and flavorful at that temperature anyway. Let it rest for 10 minutes, slice and serve.

Can I just tell you, the idea of leftovers, chopped, on toast with gravy? It’s really working for me right now. I’ll have to try it.

Anyway, I’m going to be up front and tell you that the proportions for these side dishes are going to be estimates. I didn’t work from a recipe (!) and it’s so fun to just throw some of this, toss some of that, that I failed to write down what I used. So play with it a little, both recipes here are extremely forgiving.

Honey-and Balsamic-Glazed Carrots

4-6 medium carrots, peeled and julienned
1 Tbsp. butter
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup honey
3 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

To julienne your carrots: slice in half lengthwise, then into thirds across. Take each piece and slice into 3 or 4 pieces lengthwise. If pieces look large, turn them on their sides and slice again lengthwise. Though really, there’s no reason you couldn’t do baby carrots or coins instead of strips, you would just need to adjust the steaming time.

Speaking of steaming time, add the water and the pat of butter to the skillet, give it a few minutes to warm up, then add the carrots. Cover and allow to steam for 10-20 minutes, crisp-tender is the goal but your preference is key. If you like softer carrots, let cook to the long end of the time frame. Once the water is almost evaporated, add the honey, stirring to coat, and then the balsamic, and allow to reduce to a glaze. Towards the end, add your salt and pepper to taste.

Pan-fried Corn with Red Pepper and Parsley

3 ears of corn
1 Tbsp butter/margarine
Pinch of red pepper flakes or cayenne
1/2 tsp dried parsley, or 1 Tbsp fresh Italian parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

Really, any kind of corn will do here. You could use drained canned or thawed frozen, but as a former contestant of the Little Miss Sweet Corn pageant of Gibson County, Indiana, I favor fresh yellow sweet corn.

To prepare fresh corn for the pan fry, shuck the ears (if you peel from the bottom, the silk is easier to deal with), trim the bottoms and steam for 10-20 minutes, or until crisp-tender. Corn should not be mushy, it needs a bit of bite to it, imo, but again, it’s all about preference. Once it has reached desired doneness, run under cold water to cool and slice kernels off the cob. Don’t worry if it stays in chunks, it’s nicer that way anyway. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat, add butter and allow to melt.  Add corn, red pepper, dried parsley and your salt and pepper, and cook just until corn starts to brown. If using fresh parsley, chop and add to corn once corn is finished cooking.

I would love to know what you thought of that pork roast, so tell me if you try it out!