Marinating Meats and Pig Belly Chef Ideas‏

Lavish dinners are always in my repertoire of things I like to do. I think this one takes the cake for best meal or close to best meal of the month so far.  I love marinating meats. One of my fortes in cooking is preparing sauces and marinades. I love the strength of a good marinade and its capability to turn something that’s just ordinary into something absolutely extraordinary. So for this marinade, I decided to create two different styles of flavor. I don’t necessarily know if I meant to eat all this in one meal or break it into two meals, but I wanted to cook both proteins anyway, so that’s just what we did.



If you haven’t had pork belly, you should eat it right away. Pork belly is brilliant, fatty, decadent and delicious. The sweetness and tartness of the tangerine is a really nice combination with sort of Spanish flavors. I love balsamic marinated steaks. They give that luxurious feeling of tartness and the char that you get when vinegar is grilled is something that is an unlikely flavor combination. I can’t really say anything more about sausage and Swiss chard. It’s probably one of my favorite combinations, though I do love a little rapini as well. But the Swiss chard gives a little bitterness and crunch to the polenta, along with sweet red onions and spicy pork sausage with fennel and other Italian seasonings, you honestly can’t go wrong. If you took the sausage out, and made spicy red onion marmalade with Swiss chard and rapini, that would be delicious as well.




Menu

Balsamic, Honey, Garlic, Parsley and Worcestershire Sauce Marinated and Grilled Skirt Steak

Tangerine, Cumin, Coriander, White Wine and Cilantro Marinated Pork Belly Slow-Braised Then Seared

Spicy Italian Sausage Polenta with Swiss Chard and Red Onion

Grilled Asparagus and Grilled Zucchini


It’s unlikely that you’ve cooked with me, unless we worked together.  I have to be in the right mood to cook with others, and since I’ve mostly cooked on my own for the last year and a half, it’s a learning experience to cook with someone else in the kitchen. I love teaching and showing people how to cook something new, but I think it’s a mindset; you need to be in that mode of thinking. If I’m just creating from a space of freedom, it’s harder for me to vocalize exactly what needs to be done. Lucky for me, I have Bistecca who already pretty much knows what I’m thinking anyway and if I have my moments of insanity, he already knows how to deal with them. Like the occasional, “Hey don’t burn my stuff!” Even though he’s cooked a million steaks and grilled a billion vegetables before. I can be quite the kitchen tyrant at times; it’s a territorial thing. He got a pretty amazing meal out of it, so I think it was worth it. I’m sure you’ll see many a brilliant meal from the two of us in the future, but this one was pretty phenomenal.

cheers

-Unrivaledkitch