Kosher-Style Pork Cracklins

My sister, husband and niece are part of the way through a move across the country where they will now be my neighbors!! It's very exciting and a little surreal. However with five hungry mouths, I am definitely more motivated to cook rather than allow us all to eat out so often. Nice healthy options are usually expensive, and cheaper fast food consists of awful options for kids. It's a little more challenging making sure my choice of meal is something everyone wants to eat. Also, my brother in law is fairly lactose intolerant now, so a whole lot of options are not options for him. He does say that usually he cooks dinner for the ladies of the family and then makes a separate meal for himself. So at least not every meal will have to be dairy-free. However, I bet a lot of kosher meals will come in handy for this situation! My brother in law hasn't moved in yet, so the next month's worth of meals won't need that consideration.

I flipped through the latest Fine Cooking and thought the Spaghetti alla Carbonara sounded easy, delicious and kid-friendly. Pancetta was a new ingredient to me, so I looked it up online to get an idea of what it looked like. At Whole Foods, I asked a butcher where the pancetta was. He had to ask me to repeat what I was looking for, which nearly confirmed that I was probably pronouncing it wrong. The recipe in Fine Cooking serves two, so I wanted to double it. The fine Cooks suggested that when doubling, I just cook everything in the big pot instead of using a separate 10 inch skillet. This worked nicely because a pound of spaghetti is a lot of volume! Hannah really wanted to help out a lot and see what was going on in the pot. In general I had her help with the salads. It was much easier having her place vegetables in bowls than navigate her arms and hands and fingers over and around hot items.

This recipe was well received by all, and I even ate a meal of it as leftovers the next day. Still excellent!

As I have gotten more and more serious about good photography, I am more picky about my photos. The photos of the spaghetti were pretty much what you'd expect it to look like... spaghetti that looks a little shiny and greasy with bits of what might be bacon-something. Not very exciting. The magazine photo really minimized the amount of shine off the pasta, so I will have to ask my more professional photographer friends how that is done. In the meantime, I thought it would be more fun to post a photo of my niece enjoying the spaghetti!

Lessons learned:

• Because I'm using the same pot for everything, the pasta was sitting in the strainer for awhile. When I went to put it back in the pot, it was a gigantic flying spaghetti monster, all stuck together. My sister suggested I run hot water over it in the strainer to loosen it up. Worked like a charm!
• This tasted a slight bit too peppery. Maybe it was because the pepper came out of the grinder in larger than usual pieces, or maybe it was just too much pepper overall.
• Two days later, I was at Whole Foods again and decided to pick up some spaghetti just to have available for a quick dinner. I noticed the spaghetti I had picked up was actually quite expensive! Oops. There were a lot of whole wheat, organic options, and I probably picked the most expensive choice without realizing it. I picked the less expensive option the second time around.
• I just looked it up now. I thought pancetta might be like bruschetta. I was right! It is pronounced "pan-chet-uh". Now I know!

• Spaghetti alla Carbonara (Fine Cooking 92, p. 56)
• Garden salad

This recipe looked good, had familiar ingredients and it was in the quick & delicious section, so II planned on making this for dinner. While everyone at the table said it was good, I didn't think it really lived up to what it could have been. There were two problems that I can see that could be improved.

I had a hard time finding plain green olives at Whole Foods. So many people love olives stuffed or in exciting liquids rather than plain boring green olives. While I did find some at the olive bar, they had their pits in them and I didn't want to deal with figuring out how to get the pits out. I finally found a can of plain green olives and just bought those. When I opened the can, some of them had really dark black spots that just weren't very appealing. I skipped those olives or cut around them. This only required a half cup of olives, so it wasn't a large amount. I tried one of the olives, and it just didn't have a very strong or yummy flavor at all. I briefly considered using some garlic stuffed olives and taking out the garlic for this dish, but then decided against it. Looking back, I should have used those olives. I've only had one case where a not too exciting ingredient worked well in a dish, and that's because it was a tomato that absorbed a lot of flavorful juices. This is not something that's going to happen with an olive.

The other thing that I did was was not chop the onions fine enough. It just says "finely chopped", but when I compared my finished product with the magazine photo, my onion pieces seemed huge in comparision. In this case, I think smaller would have been better. Here's a nice little guide on chopping onions. Mine should have been more like the minced instead of looking more like chopped. I also think I used too much onion. "small onion" is just not a precise enough measurement for me. How small is small?

Also what is a chicken breast cutlet? I just bought chicken breasts by weight and then sliced them in half to get 8 thin pieces. It seemed to work for cooking, although the four chicken breasts sure varied in thickness to begin with.

Buying bulk pre-slivered almonds is surely the way to go!!! This worked out great.

I think this recipe has potential to be good, but I think in the future, I'd rather just make the Grilled chicken breasts with Green-Olive Relish. It has far more olives in it, and when you use the right ones, oh it's soooo tasty!! (Plus a chicken breast is a good meal size. Half a chicken breast means going back for seconds which somewhat interrupts dinner.)

• Sauteed Chicken with Sherry & Olive Pan Sauce & Toasted Almonds (Fine Cooking 92, p. 90a)
• Garden salad