A Couple of Home Cooked Meals

It has been a little while since I last posted so I am going to combine two short posts into one.

The first dish is a marinated Korean short rib with fried rice.

The marinade for he short rib was soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, green onion, chili pepper, ginger. It was supposed to be for the night before but things happened and so it was marinated for 24 hours. It really penetrated the meat and added a lot of flavor deep in the meat. To cook the short rib I preheated my cast iron skillet in the oven and then added the rib meat side down so it seared and the bone was on top so all the fat and goodness self basted the meat. It turned out really tender. The fried rice was normal minute rice with onion, carrot, garlic, and spinach. It was all stir fried in a very hot wok. A mix of soy sauce, tumeric, curry powder, dried mustard was added to the rice to finish the fried rice. A dipping sauce for the meat was made of soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, crushed red pepper, green onion. In mine I added finger hot chilis and a Korean chili paste called gochujang for an added kick. The fried rice was nicely balanced with the sweet from the carrot and onion with the salty of the soy sauce and spice of the curry powder, tumeric, and dried mustard. 

The second dish was a pork shoulder that was braised in our new CrockPot. This was a dish that Mel made for us.

I wish I could remember everything that went into the braising liquid, but all I remember was that one f the main ingredients was milk. Regardless, the pork just fell apart. It was very flavorful and the pork was incredibly tender. I never would have thought to put milk in the liquid but it worked really well. On the side was a roasted carrot with balsamic glaze and a gratin potato. The carrots were cooked really well in the oven with a nice little glaze of a good balsamic. The potato was a homemade gratin with cream cheese, some other cheeses (I don't remember exactly which), green onion, and some other seasoning. The potatoes were very good. In fact I would say they were restaurant quality. The potato was cooked perfectly and it had an incredible cheese flavor.