Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Panama Pork Stew

Apologies for already being a day behind with my blog.  I meant to update last night, but was engrossed in translating A Millionaire's Dinner Party for my Latin class and it just slipped my mind.  Oh well, cenemus!

On May 27 I cooked a crock pot dinner, the Panama Pork Stew from the Crock Pot Incredibly Easy Recipes, for my roommate and one of our friends who was coming over for dinner.  I have to apologize because I completely forgot to take photos while I was assembling the meal, but you can see on the right basically what went into it.  The recipe calls for pork stew meat, cut into 1-inch cubes, but I was unable to find pork stew meat at my local grocery store.  I probably could have asked the butcher to cut some for me, but as a graduate student, time is precious and I did not want to wait, so I just got some boneless pork chops and cut it into the appropriate size myself.  (Plus, why pay someone else to cut it when I can do it myself?)

The other items in the stew are sweet potatoes, frozen corn, frozen green beans, onion, and canned diced tomatoes.  I always wonder a bit about some of these stew recipes because growing up, when my mother made stew, there was always a decent amount of broth (which could be soaked up with a piece of bread) and many of these recipes call for very little liquid.  This one only has the liquid from the undrained, canned tomatoes and 1/4 cup of water, plus any tiny bit of liquid that melts off the frozen corn and green beans.  The recipe says to combine the tomatoes, water, and spices (chili powder, salt, and ground coriander) in a bowl and then pour it over the pork which has been placed on top of the vegetables.  In my rush in the morning to get this done before heading to school, I didn't read the directions ahead and so just dumped all those things in the crock pot on top.  Now, in my defense, many crock pot stew recipes ask you to just put all the ingredients in and mix them together, so it was only reasonable that I would have expected this one to be the same instead of asking me to layer the ingredients.  So, to remedy my mistake, I just mixed everything together before cooking it on low.

This is what it looked like after cooking on low for 9 hours.

At the time the crock pot was finished, my roommate and our friend had not yet arrived for dinner, so I took some time to set out the plates, bowls, and utensils.  I had asked my roommate to pick up a baguette and to ask our friend to bring a salad to complete our meal.  So we had

sourdough bread

salad

and some white wine to complete the meal.

On the right you will find an image of what the final meal looked like.  As you can see, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was more broth in the stew than I had expected.  Of course, there was nowhere near the amount of broth that is shown in the image in the cookbook, as you can see below.  I really enjoyed this stew, which is good because I had several more meals of it.  The recipe says that it makes 6 servings, which I think is almost accurate.  Our friend and I each had two servings, and if I recall correctly, I had at least 2 or 3 meals of this afterwards (so 7-8 servings total).  If I were to make this again, however, I would probably plan to add some more spice to it, or some hot sauce to just give it a kick.

I would probably estimate 200-230 calories per serving for this stew, so adding some sourdough bread (approx. 80 calories per 1 oz serving) and a salad makes for a light supper, perfect for a summer evening when you'd like something simple.

2 comments:

  1. You're making me want a crock pot so badly!

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  2. Highly recommended. See my most recent post ("Why Slow Cooking?" for a link to a cheap one!

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