Aselin

I’ve been working pretty hard compiling a cookbook of some of my unique recipes. I’m not a vegetarian, but I’ve adopted an eating style that displaces or completely erases meat from traditional recipes. People really seem to like it, our family loves it, so I keep going. I’m up to 237 and counting. Tonight we had a fantastic quinoa bolognese.

Much of my cooking centers around a unique piece of kitchen equipment: a pressure cooker. Normally when I mention pressure cooker someone brings up family lore of great grandma’s face being blown off by a culinary explosion. Fortunately I didn’t come from a cooking family so I had no preconceived ideas when introduced to my first pressure cooker.

My relationship with my pressure cooker has blossomed into a love affair. I use the thing 3,4,5 times a week. Making delectable pots of mmm, mmm, vegetarian goodliness. I’ve gotten pretty darn good at the process.

But this week on the food network, Tyler Florence made pulled pork. As I’m wiping the drool from my keyboard I’m having flashbacks to my Austin, TX days when I learned BBQ isn’t a food, it’s a religion. Quite frankly, I’ve missed worshipping at the open pits.

So I high-tail it to my local purveyor of pork, WalMart, and purchase a lovely pork butt roast. Swathing the hunk of deadness in my own dry rub concoction I’m a little queasy. Don’t get me wrong, I still love meat, but it’s taken on a richness and paradigm for me that unseated it from the top ten things I must eat list. Browning the roast in my pressure cooker, covering it with a sliced onion and a bottle of Austin’s own BBQ sauce I seal the lid and set the timer for 40 minutes.

I can’t tell you the ecstasy with which my family devoured the fork tender roast. It was fantastic. After dinner we were all leaning back in our chairs, the kids had unbuttoned the top button of their pants and there were random moans that doubled as giddy sighs. It was dang good.

Even the dog had rolled over in a stupor after enjoying the table scraps.

So, OK you say, it was a good meal. Big whoop.

Well, I mention it to a few friends, who go home and make it for their families with the same reaction. Then they tell a few friends who make it for their families, and so on and so on... like the old shampoo commercial. I used to go out in public and be recognized for being the grain lady. All my carefully crafted and cultivated grain image building has been destroyed with one fell swoop of the pork butt. Someone I don’t even know stopped me and said “You’re the pork roast lady right?”

Well, so much for my niche. Connor tonight asked if I’d make the bacon-wrapped fillet wellington again. I guess, despite the other 363 days of the culinary year, I’m really a carnivore.