Time Immortal

The art of Cooking, in my experience, is:

• 1/3rd skill
• 1/3rd luck
• 1/3rd willingness to take a risk that dinner might taste awful if you mix those two ingredients
• 1/3rd deliberate ignorance of proportions in the recipe

Your mileage may vary, O Reader, but this is basically what I’ve learned after working in kitchens for just long enough.

Hence tonight’s dinner recipe: steak marinated in olive oil and cherry juice, dusted with cocoa and cayenne pepper, and grilled. Oh, and some kind of grilled vegetables. Hey, the weather is nice, so why shouldn’t I use the barbeque?

As part of my contribution to the “Free Piglet” campaign, here is the first in a series of pork-based recipes that I’ve either come across or come up with in the last little while.

This one is a little recipe that I came up with a few years back after I first moved to Rocky Mountain House for a summer workterm. It was just a variation on the same-ol’ same-ol’ pasta-sauce-with-ground-beef recipe that I was getting bored with, and for a student diet it worked rather well.  It’s become a personal “comfort dish”.

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Ingredients
* keep in mind that these are approximate measures. I almost never use any sort of measuring utensil or container if I am not making something that involves the use of flour.

Meat & Marinade:

• 1 or 2 pork cutlets
• 1/4 cup wine (cooking wine will do, real stuff is better)
• 1/8 cup olive oil

Sauce:

• 5 or 6 roma tomatoes
• 1/4 of a typical red onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 a green pepper
• 5 or 6 mushrooms
• Basil (dry flakes will do)
• Greek seasoning
• A touch of sugar

• 1 cup capelli di angelo or vermicelli

Cooking:

1. Thaw pork cutlets overnight. In the morning, slice thinly and place in a bowl. Pour wine and oil over pork and quickly mix the liquid into the meat with your hands. It takes only a few minutes, and lets the meat marinate all day. Refrigerate.

2. That evening, half-fill a medium-sized pot with water and set to boil. Add a touch of salt.

3. Finely chop onions and garlic and simmer in olive oil in a pan. Add marinated meat (including liquid). Continue to simmer on medium heat.

4. Chop or semi-liquify tomatoes and add to pan once the pork slices have started to cook through. Dice mushrooms and add to mixture a minute or so later.

5. If you’ve timed it right, the water should have reached a rolling boil right about now, so quickly add noodles to the water and reduce heat. Cover the meat and tomatoes and let simmer.

6. Once noodles begin to soften, chop green pepper and add to meat and tomatoes (which should be taking on sauce-like qualities now. Add water if sauce begins to reduce. Reduce heat on sauce and add basil (generously), greek seasoning, and sugar (sparingly — just enough to take the edge off the acid of the tomatoes). Cover and reduce heat to low.

7. Drain noodles when ready. Serve noodles onto plate(s) and cover with sauce.