February 13, 2012: Dinner – Pork and tomato sauce over spaghetti with sautèed mushrooms and spinach

February 13, 2012:  Dinner – Pork legs and tomato sauce over spaghetti with sautèed mushrooms and spinach

Last Wednesday I went to Pro’s Ranch Market and found something I have not seen before there.  Pork legs.  They are the upper leg with a lot of meat and a fair amount of bone and they are 9 or 10 inches long.  I bought about seven or eight dried Guajilla chilis and some onions and garlic.

We had eaten a dish in Zacatecas two years ago: pork legs seasoned with Guajilla chili, onions and tomatoes or sofrito and wrapped in aluminum foil and slow cooked, so that when you opened the packet, the meat fell off the bone into a puddle of its own juice.  Finally on Monday, Suzette and I decided to cook them in the crock pot so they could slow cook all day.  Suzette seared the legs while I chopped 1 onion and de-seeded the chilis and sliced 1 lb of carrots and threw all those ingredients into the crock pot with the seared bones.  We decided we needed lots of sauce, so I opened an institution sized can of crushed tomatoes and filled the crock pot almost to the top with tomatoes.  Then I started coking it.  After it heated up, I added about 1/3 cup of black olives and two cloves of garlic. 

When Suzette came home we tested the dish and the meat was tender and fell off the bone, but it lacked a complete and complex flavor, so I added about 1 Tbs. of oregano, about 1 Tbs. of salt and about ½ tsp. of ground pepper. Then I chopped up five cloves of garlic and 1 shallot and about eight baby portabella mushrooms and de-stemmed about 1 Tbs. of thyme and threw all of that into a skillet Suzette had heated with olive oil and sautéed it for a couple of minutes and then Suzette added two handfuls of spinach to the mixture and sautéed all the ingredients while I heated the PPI spaghetti.  This was an adaptation of the sautéed spinach in garlic we had eaten at Mondo Italia in Taos on January 27, 2012.

In honor of our Zacatecas dinner Suzette went to the basement for beers.  We put the heated spaghetti in pasta bowls, then ladled the pork and tomato sauce over it and garnished the top with the sautéed mushrooms and spinach.

We had cooked breakfast burritos with PPI steak and bacon and fried PPI potatoes and eggs for breakfast so by 7:00 p.m. we were hungry and really enjoyed the pork flavored tomato sauce with sautéed spinach in mushroom and garlic washed down with gulps of beer.

And we have about 2/3 of a crock pot of pork and tomato sauce left for further meals.

Do I have a sense that lasagna is looming on the gastronomic horizon?

Bon Appètit