My thanks to Nancy, Patty’s client who motivated me to update this sadly neglected blog with an inquiry about Father’s Day. Having too much free time has actually hurt my writing. In the middle of the summer off with Daisy as my only responsibility, it’s been hard to get anything done even though she gives me three hours off every day in the form of naps. It’s said that if you have something important to do, you should give it to the busiest person you know. I am not that person.
Our precious little one spends her time adorably eating, playing, and napping. Playtime we call “redistributing,” which is a euphemism for making a mess. So my time is spent feeding, cleaning and yes, napping. I do bear the added responsibility of feeding and cleaning up after Meghan on her work days, so it does add up to a fair amount of work. When the little girl goes down for her afternoon sleepytime, so do I—which is why I haven’t written much. I realize that normal adults get through their day without a nap (I, for example, do so during the school year), but there’s nothing so delicious as a little shuteye in the middle of the day—a tiny holdover from the siestas of my time in Paraguay. There’s my excuse for not writing.
That brings us back (way back) to Father’s Day.
I still had a fair amount of the pig I bought in September stowed away in my freezer, and I was pondering what to do with some of the larger parts. The rear leg, divided into shank and butt was still taking up room and I decided it was finally time to do something with it. With the skin already removed, there was no acceptable way to cure it for ham, but after a little poking around on the internet and consulting the paperwork I got at the Seabreeze Farm Butchery and Charcuterie class, I decided it was time to make some porchetta.
Porchetta is Italian fast food which is ironic because it takes hours, if not days to make. In its most traditional form, it is an entire pig roasted over coals, carved and pulled to order and served as sandwiches, often outside of sporting events. I think this to be true because I have internet access, not because I’ve ever been to Italy.
My version of porchetta would just be the shank end of the fresh ham. To get started, I made a paste of olive oil, garlic, rosemary, sage, salt, and pepper. Then came the fun part, which was stabbing the ham about a hundred times with my paring knife–right up to the hilt. After that was the not so fun part, which was stuffing the paste into each and every aforementioned cavity. That took a while. Next, I wrapped the beast in plastic and crammed it into the fridge to have a slumber party with a few random companions—homemade fudge sauce, dodgy parsley and the ever-present mystery crust, just to name a few.
I was up at 4:00 the morning of Father’s Day to get the roast started. Every home recipe I found on the web just has you plop your porchetta in the oven, but knowing that the original version is cooked over coals had me thinking that the oven was the easy, and certainly inferior way out. So I arranged a few aluminum trays at the bottom of my Weber to create indirect heat and catch the drippings, surrounded them with coals, and set the pork to roast with the lid on.
Porky, porky porchetta
After about three hours (flipping on the hour), the temperature started to drop on the grill. Not wanting to spend the entire day tending the fire and with the knowledge (from the good people at Cook’s Illustrated) that the first few hours over the coals provides all the best fire flavor, I transferred the roast to the oven to cook at a moderately low temperature. At 1:00, when my mom, dad, Patty and Meghan were starving and the roast still wasn’t ready, I started to feel guilty, so I did something I don’t normally do: I selectively carved a bit of meat off the still-cooking roast and shredded it while hot. The dark meat near the trotter was tender and juicy, but the interior meat was still cooking, so I trimmed off enough of the former so that I could serve lunch and put the latter back in the oven to finish. No regrets.
The curious after-effects of porchetta on Father John
We piled the juicy, savory, garlicky, herby, delightfully greasy meat onto light buns smeared with garlic aioli and topped it with caramelized onions and peppers. I carved a bit of the crispy subcutaneous layer of fat off the roast and served it to my guests, and they devoured it with gleeful abandon, the crunch giving way to a juicy spurt of insanely good, salty fat filling the mouth with porky flavor. Unlike many American pork barbecues that are heavily smoked and sauced, the flavor of porchetta keeps pork where it belongs: right up front and center. If we’re going to go to the trouble to raise and kill an animal, we should probably taste it, and taste we did. I noticed curiously that even though I saw fat going onto everyone’s sandwich, I saw none was left on the plates. Everything tasted so good that no one could bare the idea of deprivation. So breaking family custom, we chewed, savored and swallowed the pork, fat and all—as it should be. Amen.
Triumph.
Daisy in Daisies
I can only hope for the same success as a parent. Father’s Day, as it should, caused me to reflect on my new status as someone’s Daddy and the great, sacred responsibility of it all. I know that not every moment will be as great as porchetta, but I strive to provide Daisy with a constant smorgasbord of love, security, joy, guidance and of course, good food. I will love her mother even more so that someday, Daisy will learn to find a partner that puts her first, and she will accept no less. I quite simply, aspire to be everything she needs me to be.
But I’m pretty sure that no guy will ever be good enough for my little girl.
Crawford Eats 