[tba]

Pork in the slow-cooker. Cat food (and dander wipes, cross your fingers!) bought, gym attended, iron pumped, apartment cleaned. To-do for the evening:

• roast cauliflower [check!]
• clean & cut up collards [check!]
• chop & saute onion
• saute collards
• bake frittata (cauliflower, collards, onion. eggs.)
• cut up carrots and red peppers (library snacks)
• cut up squash
• roast squash
• cut up & cook brussels sprouts
• eat dinner (pork, squash, brussels sprouts)

And thus ended spring break.

I bought a pork loin roast yesterday at Whole Foods. It was on sale, and better on the animal happiness scale than other comparably priced options. And the butcher said it would work in the slow-cooker, that it wouldn’t fall apart like pulled pork. That all sounded good.

I haven’t eaten this yet, I don’t know if this is going to turn out bad. I realize it already sounds like that.

But this morning I hit the webs looking for what to do with this, and I was excited to see a Chowhound thread - I like their advice. But then almost everyone was all, Don’t cook pork loin roast in the slow cooker, Don’t cook pork loin roast in the slow cooker. Apparently it’s too lean and will dry out. They recommend the oven, which is not usually the way to not dry things out, but Chowhound is never wrong.

But I did it anyway - there were enough voices of dissent, and I still don’t own a proper roasting pan. Spice rub of salt, pepper, garlic powder, thyme, and cumin; browned in olive oil; in the slow cooker on top of onions, under and next to more onion, smashed garlic, anda sliced apple; two bay leaves; almost covered in about 2 cups of chicken stock, a little cider vinegar, and water; sprinkled with some leftovers of the spice rub; a drop of fish sauce cause why not. It will probably be 7 or 8 hours on low. We’ll see.

There are pros and cons to prepping beef stew for the slow cooker at eight on a Sunday morning, before you leave for the Upper East Side to tutor. There is the Sunday night dinner that will feel effortless when the time comes. There is the enlivening sense of competence, with all this done and leaving the house pretty much on time, and enlivening is a dear thing on these Sunday mornings. There is the suspicion, on leaving the house, that despite your conscientious use of a splatter guard, the spitting grease of searing beef has lodged itself and its smell in your hair. This is a good smell, but probably overall a drawback of the endeavor. There is the fact that the stew will be ready around 3pm, which is not dinner time. And there was the sad moment when you poured half a bottle of wine in the stew but because it was eight in the morning and you were on your way to work, you could only take the tiniest sip yourself, which is such a sad thing, such a joy - drinking the leftover recipe wine - to miss out on. But there is also the fact, from that one tiny sip, that even though you don’t really like red wine, the man at the wine shop up the street from you was right, t’s good, and you’re grateful for that wine shop, especially in a neighborhood like this.

(Saturday evening prep)

• 1.5lb ground beef, browned
• 1 large onion, sauteed
• half a red pepper
• half a green pepper
• 2 cans of Trader Joe’s fire-roasted tomatoes w/ green chiles
• half a thing of mushrooms, sliced
• some diced eggplant, roasted
• about a cup of pureed pumpkin, allegedly for thickening?
• three smushed cloves of garlic
• cumin
• chili powder
• paprika
• oregano
• garlic powder
• salt
• pepper
• honey
• 1 tbsp of cocoa powder, as instructed by the same recipe that said pumpkin puree

I think that’s everything. In the crockpot, in the fridge, ready to be started tomorrow morning before I leave for tutoring (with the addition of a cup or two of beef broth, if it will fit). Expecting 8 hours or so. (Chopped fresh parsley and cilantro will be added right near the end.)

For the last however long time, I’ve been saving scraps in my freezer. So this is a very crowded freezer, because next to the compost collection and the eggplant mush I made and froze over the summer, and the frozen cubes of beef broth that smelled really weird when I made it, which I’m going to get rid of very soon, I added a ziploc bag of chicken bones from cooked chickens & parts, and a ziploc bag of onion ends (when I remembered not to compost them) and a bunch of celery that went wilted before I could use it. And then today, trimph!, I threw the chicken bones and most of the vegetables (and two broken-up carrots from the crisper) into the slow cooker (poor, dusty slow cooker), covered it with water, threw in two bay leaves and some pepper, and if the smell in the kitchen is any indication, I am making some viable chicken broth!

(Apparently, with the beef broth, the bones needed to be roasted first. Not boiled raw.)

Baby dinosaur kale, canned tuna, feta, mint, greenmarket grapes.

Be bold with random shit you have on hand, and you may end up with something impressive.