Sunday Gravy with yeah right Special Thursday Edition. Carnitas.

Greetings folks!

Since the Vikings are playing Arizona on Thursday Night Football I thought I could drop a theme recipe here. The Mexican food throughout the Southwest is notoriously delicious. I live in LA but have traveled to Arizona many times. and I can safely say that Arizona knows what the fuck it is doing with Mexican food just like California does. I’ve got a crazy redhead friend who I will visit there on occasion and she is also a big fan of the Mexican food scene. She took me to a restaurant a couple of times that made some of the best carnitas I have ever had.

My standard rule of thumb for ordering whenever I first visit a Mexican restaurant is to order the carnitas. If a restaurant can hold their own with their carnitas then it says to me that the rest if the menu should be good as well. Crazy Redhead Girl judges a new restaurant based on the quality of their beans, which is also a very valid measuring stick. Carnitas are extremely easy to prepare, require some quick prep work and they have easy to procure ingredients and are fairly unfuckupable.

For the record I made these last Sunday and this dish was so goddamn good I felt I needed to share it. Plus if you read this now you will have time to purchase the groceries and maybe give these a try yourself over the weekend.

Carnitas:

one 3-4 pound pork shoulder (also called Boston butt). Can be bone in or boneless doesn’t matter.

1 12 oz cerveza (beer) work with me on this, I only know like 4 or 5 phrases in Spanish.

32 oz or so of chicken stock

1 large onion cut into chunks

2 jalapenos, chopped with seeds removed.

1 orange cut into about 6 slices

5-6 cloves of chopped garlic

1 tablespoon of salt – just to get started more to season later.

1 tablespoon ground black pepper

1 tablespoon of chili powder

1/2 tablespoon ground cumin

For garnish:

red onion minced

cilantro chopped (very optional)

For sides:

Corn or flour tortillas (corn tortillas and carnitas are the SHIT yo!)

Shredded cheese

Refried beans

Chips and salsa

And of course some of my world famous chile tepin. From my very first Sunday Gravy post. Memories!

Cut your pig into some chunks. Maybe 5-6 chunks for a 3-4 pound pork roast. I commented last week during the open thread that when I purchased my delicious swine last week they didn’t have the standard 2-4 pound pork shoulders at the store. In the Southwest tamales are a huge goddamn deal around the holidays and pork is a prime ingredient. All I could find was this 8 pound fucking behemoth that required much hacking and butchering. The good news is I still have a 4 pound slab-o-piggy that I can cook for Christmas dinner. Nice!

Anyway throw your chunks of pork into a large dutch oven. Add in the beer, enough chicken stock to cover everything and also your onion, jalapeno, orange slices, garlic,  salt, pepper, cumin and chili powder. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and let this motherfucker do it’s magic for about 3 hours. Stir occasionally. Get the pig to the fall-apart off the bone state and let cool. Reserve about 1/2 cup of the cooking juices for the next step.

Once Porky has cooled off, preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Remove as much or as little of the fat from the cooked pork as you would like. This is where it’s fun to be the cook because some of them chunks of cooked pig are just too fucking delicious looking to even get to the second stage of prep. Break apart the chunks into whatever size pieces you would like. I break them up to about the size of a walnut or a little larger. Put the chunks into a 12×9″ baking dish, cover with the 1/2 cup of reserved sauce along with another 1/2 teaspoon of cumin, another 1/2 teaspoon of chili powder, another teaspoon of salt and a couple of grinds of black pepper. Place the dish into the preheated oven and let cook for 20-25 minutes. You want to get the pork on top to a nice browned almost crispy state.

Quick note: Some folks will fry their chunks of pig in lard or bacon fat instead of using the baked method to finish and it does make a delicious batch, I just prefer the baked way. Personal choice.

Remove the carnitas from the oven and serve with the red onion/cilantro garnish, some tortillas, cheese, some beans and salsa. You can also just grab some tortilla chips and salsa and just start a-shoveling. These are amazing the next day – if they make it that far – and can be presented as a taco or just as a stand alone meat entree.

Serve with many, many of these:

Followed by some of this:

Followed by a nice lengthy nap.

Now let’s get to the goddamn debacle of a game tonight.

Vikings In Arizona game preview:

Vikings are going to get their asses handed to them.

Alright a little more detail. Minnesota is missing their best defensive players from each level of the defense. NT Linval Joseph is out again with a foot INJURY. I despise when announcers say “He is out with a foot”. No shit fuckwagon, he’s actually out with 2 feet it’s just one of them is hurt. It’s foot INJURY, Al not just fucking foot. Also missing from tonight’s game is the Vikings best LB Anthony Barr. He’s out with a groin. See how goddamn stupid that sounds. It sounds as if he’s on a date with a stand alone groin. What the fuck? Also missing are starting safeties Harrison Smith, knee and hamstring injuries, Andrew Sendejo, knee injury, and the back-up safety Antone Exum, on the IR with broken ribs. This feels like a mail-it-in type game for the Vikings who will go on a mini bye week after the Thursday game and will need these guys back for the final 3 games. All of the 3 remaining games will be outdoors and likely cold as a motherfucker. The first two (Bears and Giants) are in Minnesota and they close the regular season in goddamn Green fucking Bay. Holy shit, that’s a cold finish.

Final score prediction: AZ 37 Minny 14.

Bet accordingly.

And seriously, try these fucking carnitas, they are delicious porky goodness. For the record, the best carnitas I’ve ever had are at El Tarasco in my home town of El Segundo. I do a damn tasty batch but I can’t replicate their’s. I think they add crack as a secret ingredient.

Happy game day everyone.