Fabulously Easy Pork Shoulder

The kids were sick of chicken; they didn't go for my curry either. It was time to try something new, and though we'd had many a pork roast, they were sick of that, too. I tried Jamie Oliver's recipe but it was too complicated for me; I whizzed through a number of others, and have now experienced the truth of the single most frequently appearing insight: the longer you bake it at a low temperature, the better it is.

Assemble the following ingredients:

Big hunk of pork (three and a half American pounds, or 1.718 kilos)
Honey
Mustard
Garlic
Olive oil (a good one!)
Balsamic vinegar
Dry red wine 
Onions (preferably red ones)
Apples
Potatoes and, if you're feeling ambitious,
Carrots
Sweet potatoes

Step one: Mix up the honey, mustard, olive oil, garlic, and balsamic vinegar in proportions that please you--I go heavy on the honey and mustard, easy on the balsamic vinegar. With your garlic press, crush about eight cloves and add to the mix. Stir or beat well with a whisk. The mix should smell good; taste it to make sure.

Step two: Coat the hunk of pork (should have a bone in it somewhere--adds flavor) with the mix, put it in a zip lock bag, and leave it in the fridge overnight.

Step three: Pre-heat the oven to 220º C (428ºF).  Take your favorite huge pot with a lid--we just decided we were grown-ups and deserved a set of Le Creuset and are painstakingly, one piece at a time, acquiring it: so I used the classic orange (which the company now calls "iconic flame") dutch oven. 

A word, quite a long one before we get to Step Four: a thing that made me fall in love with Le Creuset, apart from its wonderful quality and color, is that one of my favorite writers, Alexandra Fuller, describes how her completely insane snob of a mother (not Fuller's way of describing her, just mine) carried her own set of Le Creuset everywhere the family went during the Rhodesian bush war. A few years ago, Fuller penned, going into uncharacteristically romantic details, a  depiction of her mom (but she'd say "Mum") :  "suddenly I found myself in unexpected tears thinking about what those pots represented: Cooking pots on the top of a tiny bundle of other belongings seems to be the universal image of women fleeing war across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s; women leaving the Dustbowl of Oklahoma during the Depression; women escaping post-election violence in Zimbabwe in 2008; women displaced by the current violence in Congo and Sudan. Pots are like the external expression of a woman’s womb, the way in which she can continue to nurture and protect her family, even when the land beneath her feet has been torn from her and all real hope has been lost."

That's all very lovely, but has nothing to do with why her mother saved those pots. If I know her mother, the woman saved those pots for exactly the reasons I, a not-so-secret social climber, would save mine: because they are so damn beautiful, so breathtakingly classy, a sign that, as her mother would say, "we have breeding."

Now, I don't have a damn bit of breeding and I'm not sure her mother did either, at least not in the sense of being up there by having any relatives born above the rank of "Laird." Hey, she did better than me. We're peasants to the marrow, although one of my really horrible ancestors was a U.S. president who grabbed the Northern half of Mexico, adding it on to Texas and California. 

Step 4: Remove the pork from the fridge. Keeping it in its zip lock bag, let it cool its heels on your counter until it seems at room temperature.

Step 5: Rub some extra-virgin, incredibly expensive, super-classy olive oil into the bottom of your Le Creuset Dutch oven. Slice five or six big red or white onions, core and slice the same number of apples. If you've had time to boil a few carrots for ten minutes, add them. Pour in a cup of dry red wine. Undo the zip lock bag and dump the pork, marinade and all, on top of the apple-onion-carrot mix. Put in oven UNCOVERED for about forty minutes. 

Step 6: While the pork is in the oven, boil some potatoes--any kind; I used plain white potatoes the first time around but think sweet potatoes would be good--for about ten minutes, until you can poke a fork in, but they should be firm. Drain them and slice them, add to pot.

Step 7: Cover the pork. Turn the heat down to 170º C (338ºF). Go away and do anything you like for five hours. 

The truth is, I intended to return after three and a half hours, but an event at my child's school went on and on and on. Finally we left early, because I was afraid the pork would be all dried out and burned up, the house along with it. 

But guess what? The pork was perfect. Perfect "pulled pork." Yum. Serve with a mixed salad and a dry red wine.