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Cook the Book: 'The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook'
Cracked Greek olives are yummy served with homemade pita bread accompanied by tzatziki, baba ghanoush and fresh feta. I could make a meal of that. But if we are including Italian here, I would have to go with fried zucchini flowers stuffed with basil and ricotta cheese. There is nothing better!
Weekend Book Giveaway: 'American Cheeses'
It's a tie for me -- Coach Farm's Green Peppercorn Cone Goat Cheese and Cypress Grove's Humboldt Fog. Both are truly yummy!
Seriously Delicious Holiday Giveaway: Zingerman's Praise the Lard Gift Box
My most recent favorite memory has to be the pork bun at Momofuku Ssam Bar in NYC. But my most enduring pork memory dates back to my childhood when my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother would make their Sunday ragu sauces to go over rigatoni or ravioli. This long-simmering sauce contained tomatoes, garlic, onion, basil and parsley, but never oregano. But what gave it its distinctive flavor was pork, and lots of it. My favorite version of this sauce had sweet and hot Italian sausages and pork neck bones in it. My grandpa, my mother and I used to fight over the bones when dinner was served. The meat was falling off the bone, tender and succulent. I have tried recreating this family sauce countless times, but living in NYC it is hard to get pork neck bones in my neighborhood and other cuts of pork, such as spareribs and country style ribs, don't deliver quite the same flavor.
Love all of these pork posts!
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The first cookbook that I ever owned (apart from the Nancy Drew Cookbook, which I received when I was a child but never cooked from!) was the red and white checked three ring binder Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. My mother gave it to me when I went away to college. My mother, who is an amazing cook now, says that when she got married she couldn't even boil water. This was the book that taught her how to cook. I still have it and consult it sometimes. It has some pretty good basic, unadorned recipes for things like pie crust. My Hispanic grandmother is also a wonderfully accomplished cook. I grew up eating her Mexican food, and she was a big inspiration to me in the kitchen. She gave me my second cookbook New Mexican Dishes by Philomena Romero (published in 1970), which I still have. It is a lovely, homespun book featuring New Mexican home cooking recipes -- nothing very fancy -- including dishes such as Poor Man's Green Chile and even Head Cheese. I have never made the Head Cheese, but a lot of the other recipes in this book are really tasty. They remind me of the tastes and aromas of my grandmother's kitchen.