Braised Pork Sugo

By Iron Chef Leftovers

One of the nice things about making pasta sauce is that it is a fairly simple process and can be used in a variety of ways. One of the things I tend to do with my tomatoes is to make a really simple sauce and freezing it so that I can use it as a base for a more robust pasta sauce later in the year. One of my favorite sauces is a sugo – a hearty sauce that I love in the cold of winter. It was part of one of my courses at a recent dinner party and it is a nice sauce to feed a crowd.

The Software

3 lb. pork shoulder, cut into 1 inch cubes

2 medium onions, finely sliced (about 2 cups)

3 carrots, peeled and cut into 1 inch lengths

3 celery stalks cut into 1 inch lengths

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 can diced tomatoes (16 oz)

1 1/4 cup chicken stock

1 ¼ cup red wine

1 teaspoon minced garlic

5 cups tomato sauce

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon minced sage

1 teaspoon minced rosemary

2 teaspoons olive oil

The Recipe

Preheat oven to 275 degrees. In a dutch oven, heat one teaspoon of olive oil over medium high heat until just smoking. Add 1/3 of the pork and brown on all sides (about 4 minutes per side). Remove from the pot to a plate and reduce heat to medium and add 1 teaspoon of olive oil. Add onions and cook for 8 minutes until they start to become translucent, stirring occasionally. Add the tomato paste and cook for 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add celery and carrots and cook for about 10 minutes stirring occasionally. Add stock, tomatoes and red wine and increase heat to medium high until liquid comes to a boil. Add the pork and cook until the liquid returns to a boil. Cover and put in the oven. Cook for about 2 hours or until the pork is fork tender. Remove from the oven. Pull the pork from the liquid and set aside to shred. Take the vegetables and add them to a blender. Strain the liquid to remove the fat and then add to the blender with the vegetables. Puree until smooth (you may need to do this in a couple of batches). Add the puree and the pork back to the pot and combine with the tomato sauce, oregano, rosemary and sage. Heat over medium heat for 15 minutes, add salt and pepper as needed and serve over pasta.

Notes

This recipe is better if you make it a day ahead of when you want to use it. I use an even split of marsala wine and dry red wine, but just about any red wine will work in this recipe. You can adjust the amount of tomato sauce depending on how much sauce you like. If it is too thick when you serve it, add a bit of pasta water to it to loosen it up. This would also be nice with a bit of red pepper flakes added to the initial braise.

Recommended Game — Starship Catan

by A.J. Coltrane

Title: Starship Catan

Game Type: Exploration/ Euro-style resource allocation, shares traits with the other Catan titles.

Number of Players: 2

Complexity of Rules: Low-Medium/ Medium

Time to Play: 60 minutes

The Concept: Each player controls a spaceship. In the quote box is further explanation from boardgamegeek (I can’t improve on it, so here it is) –

Players explore randomly shuffled decks of cards [ed: star sectors] looking for potential colonies, good trading deals, opportunities to help planets, and either avoid or combat pirates. Players can upgrade their ships’ systems, including weapons to combat the pirates, thrusters to be able to explore further each turn, scanners to see (and avoid) cards that are coming up, and several others. Victory Points are earned by establishing colonies, building upgraded ship’s systems, having the most friendship points, and having the most hero points. The first player to 10 Victory Points wins.

Why I Like It: Like many of the other Catan and Euro games, it’s about the tradeoff between what you have, what you want, what you need now, and what you’re building towards. As the sectors are explored, the pirates get bigger and nastier, and the danger ramps up.

The game features good-sized cardboard cutouts that represent the ships. You can see it in the picture below. The yellow token attaches to the back of the ship and represents an engine. The blue pointy token goes in the front and represents cannons. The arrows in the middle of the ship point to how much of a particular resource that you have. The squares represent different bays of the ship that can be upgraded for a cost. There are also the Colony and Trade pods at the back. Collect resources by exploring the sectors and upgrade as you think is appropriate. .

The boy cat was interested in playing too:

Starship Catan is now out of print. The going rate on ebay is $22-34. We recently purchased a 2nd copy on ebay with the idea of keeping one “nice” copy. As it turns out, the one purchased on ebay is in better shape, so it’s now the “keeper”. Highly recommended.

Beer of the Week: NW Peaks Chair Pale Ale

By Iron Chef Leftovers

The counterpart to the recently reviewed Silver Pale from NW Peaks is the Chair Pale, a Belgian style pale, and one which Mrs. Iron Chef was looking forward to. According to the NW Peaks website, the beer may still be available in growlers, so if you are so inclined, you should see if they still have it.

From the NW Peaks Website:

The name. The mountain. Chair Pk is an intimidating mountain right off Snoqualmie pass. It heads the alpental valley and is a popular technical winter climb offering both ice and steep snow routes. All around Chair is a winter playground with “the chair peak circumnavigation” one of the most popular backcountry ski tours in the area.

The Beer. Chair is Belgian style pale ale. We used the Ardennes™ yeast strain to introduce the typical fruity esters (banana) and spicy phenols (pepper) typical of Belgian beers. The Belgian characters dominate the beer, but are supported by a nice hop character. The fruity and floral notes of Amarillo and NZ Saaz hops complement and support the Belgian character very nicely, resulting in a drier, crisp belgian style pale ale.

Malts: Pale, Pilsner, Vienna, Wheat, dextrin. Hops: NZ-Saaz, Amarillo, Cascade. ABV: ~5.25%

The beer pours golden yellow in color (and is hazy, which is not an indication of any issues) with a classic Belgian nose – clove, banana and yeast dominate the beer. The beer has a slightly hoppy bitterness on the initial sip but that fades quickly into the flavors that you would expect from a Belgian – coriander, yeast and banana linger for a long period of time before finishing in a slightly sweet and bready finish. Complex and well-balanced, Chair Pale drinks easily and is a nice change of pace from the hop heavy NW Pales that you commonly find.

NW Peaks Chair Pale Ale takes a seat at the table with 4 rockers out of 5.