My palate doesn’t seem to be quirky; it likes combinations of ingredients that most other cooks like. But I have a particular sensitivity to cumin. IMO, much of the NM-style food served in this area has too much cumin. Maybe there is a genetic component like the well-known reaction to cilantro.

The restaurant at which we ate lunch today is considered by some of my foodie friends to have the best carne adovada around. Maybe it was just a bad batch – probably it was just me. The overpowering fragrance and taste of cumin was repulsive. Way too much. A hundred times too much. LIke really bad B.O.

If I can taste the cumin in a dish, then there is too much. When I make this kind of cuisine, I use a fraction of the cumin the recipe calls for, using whole cumin seeds with an equal amount of coriander seeds, lightly toasted and pulverized in the spice grinder. The resulting flavor profile is heavenly. Overuse of cumin should be a felony. But then again, maybe this is unique to me since cumin seems to be used like salt around here.

Reconstructed Pork Butt and Pork Belly – Cured and Smoked

I bought some “Country-style Pork Ribs” because they were on sale. Permit me to rant for a moment:

OK, I get the need to sell pork butt to people who are intimated by the size, fat and toughness of a whole pork but. Cut it up into smaller pieces. Call it something appealing: Country-style. Meaningless (to me), but appealing, harking back to a simpler time when hogs weren’t raised in ginormous factories.  But ribs? Also appealing, but also totally fraudulent unless the factory hogs have been raised near a nuclear power plant. How about calling it filet pignon?

OK, rant over. I feel much better

So, I also had a small piece of pork belly in the freezer and a hankering to cure and smoke piggy parts. So what if I cure the “ribs” and pork belly, reconstruct the pork butt by putting the cured “ribs” back together hiding the cured pork belly deep inside the butt, sandwiched between the two layers of “ribs”.

Anyway, here is a little video:
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After smoking:

Re-deconstructed. Not pretty, but the best cured pork ever:

Costco, which generally has pretty good produce, is selling boxes of “Black Velvet Apricots“. Great name for a fruit that is, indeed, dark and a little fuzzy on the outside. But the yellow flesh tastes nothing like any apricot I’ve ever had. This is a plum and even thought the line is blurred with hybrids like pluots, this is NOT an apricot. It isn’t even a particularly good plum.