Thursday, January 23, 2014

save with jamie - crispy pork tacos

Since Clea's arrival we've somehow not skipped a beat with continuing to prepare home cooked dinners. We've dove into our freezer stash on a couple hectic occasions, but cooking our simple favourite Everyday Food staples has been pretty manageable. Now I feel ready to tackle some new recipes. This past Christmas I received several cookbooks I'm really excited to dive into. The first book which seems to have got me really excited is Jamie Oliver's Save with Jamie.


The idea behind this book is to prepare a large meat staple on, say, the weekend and then carry over the excess into one (or several) meals later that week. We already tend to eat on this trend as I'm constantly building dinners off a ham or rotisserie chicken. I find this way of cooking is, as the book's title indicates, a very thrifty way to eat and can really simplify dinner prep. After flipping through this book my initial impression is that pretty much every single recipe sounds delicious and seems relatively simple to prepare. Having said that, we'll need to give this book a test-run to see if this is in fact the case.

Every January grocery stores advertise pork shoulders and legs at a reduced price. And every year we make pulled pork from an entire shoulder and freeze portions which we eat all year. This time around we purchased a pork shoulder to test several recipes from Save with Jamie. To start we slow cooked the pork shoulder in a Cajun rub with Worcestershire sauce on low for 8 hours. Once cooked we used the meat in several recipes, one of which was Crispy Pork Tacos.

The idea behind this recipe is to season the leftover pork, cook the black beans into a simple refried bean, prepare a pickled red onion & green pepper and fill with fresh lettuce and sour cream. It's been years since I've had a hard cooked taco shell, so this recipe really was a novelty and the first time Owen tried this type of taco. Although there were quite a few different steps in this recipe, the entire meal was crazy simple and super quick. Blink and it's done! But the kicker was how delicious it turned out with such minimal effort. All I had to do was enjoy them and all the praise. A big hit with the boys. This recipe totally transformed this pork into something unpredictable and delicious.


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