[7] Pork & Sweet Potato Stew

[kilerkki]

Well, Dreamwidth is certainly not going to replace Twitter and Discord as my go-to space for sharing food photos, since at a casual glance I can’t figure out if photo uploading has changed at all since the old LJ days when we hosted on Photobucket and then rummaged around with HTML… Let’s keep the HTML very simple, then, and say here is a photo of tonight’s dinner, which was pork & sweet potato stew with brown butter cornbread.


A month or so ago we got a giant pork shoulder at Costco, which we took home and hacked apart for freezer storage. (We did three or four quart-sized bags of small cuts, suitable for cassoulet or hong shao rou, as well as several larger pieces for char siu.) This weekend I defrosted one of the “cassoulet-style” bags, but since we’d made red-braised lion’s head meatballs last week neither of us wanted to do red-braising again quite so soon—and I hadn’t had the forethought to soak beans last night. Fortunately I discovered a can of navy beans in the back of our pantry, and with those plus a sweet potato I started putting ideas together.

I used this recipe as a starting point but ranged pretty far afield.

Ingredients, as best I remember them:

1 lb pork shoulder, cubed
1/4 cup flour, seasoned with Kosher salt, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, Penzey’s southwest spice mix
1 onion, chopped
Dried sage, rosemary/marjoram/herbs de Provence
1-2 Tbsp Shaoxing wine
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
2 shiitake mushrooms, sliced
1 Tbsp ssamjang (or a smaller amount doenjang + gochuhang)
2 cups beef broth
2 bay leaves
1 small can fire-roasted diced green chiles
1 sweet potato, cubed
1-2 stalks celery, diced
1 can navy beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup frozen peas, defrosted in warm water, then drained
1 small zucchini, sliced in thin half-moons

Instructions
Preheat oven to 350 F. Pat the pork dry with paper towels. Dredge in seasoned flour. Heat a little oil in a large Dutch oven and sear the pork, in two batches if necessary. Remove the pork to a plate and set aside.

Sauté the onions in the Dutch oven until soft. Add garlic, sage, other herbs, and sauté until fragrant. Deglaze with shaoxing wine if necessary, scraping up the browned bits. Add ssamjang and beef broth, plus one cup water. Bring to a simmer. Add bay leaves, green chilis, and shiitake mushrooms. Return pork to Dutch oven, ensuring each piece is at least half-submerged in broth.

Lid the Dutch oven and place in 350 F oven for one hour.

After one hour, stir gently, and add sweet potatoes, celery, and navy beans. Return to oven and bake another 30 minutes, then add zucchini and peas, and cook a final 10-15 minutes until vegetables reach your desired doneness. Taste and adjust seasonings as necessary.

Comments

[umadoshi]

Mmm, thank you for writing this up! I'm enjoying lurking on Discord, but AFAIK there's no way to bookmark things (?), which is hard on my mildly compulsive need to somehow keep tabs on all the things that sound lovely that I will, um, never actually cook. ^^; (But there's always the possibility that scruloose will!)

DW does have some photo hosting (I think not a ton of storage space, but I don't know how much offhand) and you can include photos that way. I just don't do it often enough to remember how to do it without looking it up every time. ^^;

[stultiloquentia]

Yup, DW does have a reasonable amount of photo hosting space. Uploading to your gallery is just completely separated from blog posting, so you have to upload first, then grab the embed code (the html is provided in a little text field, if you don't have the tags memorized), then go back to your draft and drop it in. It's not hard, just tedious compared to all them newfangled websites.

You start with the "Upload Images" link in the "Create" dropdown menu at the top of the page.

[kilerkki]

Oh, I wrote this on my phone in bed last night, which explains why I didn't see the Create dropdown at all -- the beta "Create entries" page is a lot simpler on mobile. And a bit easier on my tired end-of-day eyes!

[kilerkki]

Yeah, Discord leaves a lot to be desired in terms of bookmarking/finding content, though at least it's got a hefty search function (if you remember the proper name of the thing you're searching for!) I'm going to try to use my "food" tag consistently when I post recipes here, at least. I still find myself going back to my 15-year-old livejournal sometimes when I want a recipe that I made in university...

[umadoshi]

though at least it's got a hefty search function (if you remember the proper name of the thing you're searching for!)

That's good to know! ^_^