Happy New Year, Puerco Pibil!

Happy new year,  breakaway cooks! It was a mellow one around here, the first in the new house in San Anselmo, and we were blessed have a handful of close friends around to ring it in.  I’ll *really* be celebrating the new year on January 20 — I think the entire world will be. Maybe Barak will really break away from the pack, like a lighting-fast point guard after a steal, with no one near him!

I made a bunch of dishes on new year’s eve:

• ginger brisket
• huge gobo (burdock root) braised salad (in onion, stock, and passionate fruit syrup)
• lotus root, holes filled with ginger brisket and then broiled
• cured saba (horse mackerel), roasted and eaten as fishcrack finger food
• simple salad of pea leaves and persimmon dressing
• stollen and various great holiday cookies (made by Delia)

but the show-stopper for me was the puerco pibil. This dish has breakaway written all over it: a few minutes of prep time, throw in oven, forget about it. The idea is to make a spicy goo, mix it in with pork shoulder cut into two-inch squares, lay some banana leaves in a casserole dish, transfer the pork, wrap it up tightly with the leaves, wrap the entire thing in foil, and bake at 275 for five or six hours.

I put it in around midnight, and woke up at 6 to hauntingly great aromas. What a breakfast! A few big chunks so tender they almost disintegrate, wrapped in tortillas and topped with avocado and cilantro, and a steaming cup of green tea.

Spicy goo: this one was toasted cumin, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, two habaneros, pear vinegar, juice and zest of several oranges and lemons, shot of tequila, plenty of citrus salt. The beauty of this dish is that it almost doesn’t matter what your goo is — just make sure it has vinegar/citrus and some heat from chiles. Next time I think I’ll try a superfruit version, with pureed fruit (both fresh and dried) and habs.

Here’s a very entertaining and very instructive video of filmmaker Richard Rodriguez cooking puerco pibil. My version came out very similar to his, though I’m sure the flavors were quite different.

Let me also say: THANK YOU to everyone here reading for the past year, and a big welcome to all new readers. This blog will be a year old in a month; we’ll have to have some kind of special celebration in February.  I’m really happy to keep cranking out new ideas, so yoroshiku onegai shimasu for 2009! May it be the best-ever, for all of us.