Pork Soup

LALLI BLAH BLAH makes an excellent suggestion. Note especially step 8:

8. Cut the meat up. It will fall apart and the platter will look like a big delicious mess-pile. Cut the skin, which should be crunchy, into chip-sized pieces and serve them in a separate dish, so you can see which of your friends are smart and which don’t know how to live.

That's correct. The same lesson applies if you inadvertently leave gizzards inside a chicken or turkey while smoking it.

Four-Onion Pasta with Peas

It being spring, onions are in great abundance. Or maybe it's not that it's spring, I just had a lot of onions in the house. Regardless, I was inspired to make an onion-based pasta dish in a cream sauce and it turned out quite well.

Ingredients:

• one pound farfalle (bowtie) pasta, cooked
• one can peas (or, you know, just a lot of fresh peas)
  
• 1/2 large sweet onion
• 1/2 yellow onion
• 4-6 spring onions
• 1/2 cup shallots
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup grated pecorino romano
• liberal dose butter
• salt and pepper to taste

Procedure:

1. Boil water for pasta; cook pasta; drain and set aside
2. Chop yellow and sweet onion into 1/2" sections
3. Dice spring onions into 1/4" sections
4. Dice garlic and shallots
5. Heat generous amount of butter in large, high-sided skillet
6. Add garlic and shallots; cook for 1-2 min.
7. Add sweet and yellow onions; cook for several minutes until onions soften
8. Add half of white wine and milk; stir well and cover, simmer for several minutes
9. Add peas and remaining white wine and milk; stir well and cook for 1-2 min.
10. Add pasta; stir until all ingredients are combined
11. Turn off heat, add cheese and sitr until all pasta is coated
12. Serve and enjoy!

Verdict:

Very nice, and equally good cold and nicely congealed out of the fridge

Ebulum Elderberry Black Ale

From Scotland's Heather Ales comes the Ebulum Elderberry Black Ale. Heather's deal is making beers with traditional - read, very very old - methods and native ingredients, so Ebulum is "made from roasted oats, barley and wheat boiled with herbs then fermented with ripe elderberries." Which sounds pretty awesome, and is. Lots of flavor rich dark flavor with a nice sour-berry (not sweet) finish, best enjoyed at "room temperature" - this would be British room temperature, so that's ~55 degrees Fahrenheit - it's a nice departure from, well, pretty much everything.

Counter Culture La Golondrina

Having finally exhausted the stock of the beans that shall not be named, I decided to go with a can't-fail bean, the La Golondrina from Counter Culture. It was on sale at WSM and though I'd not had the beans before, I've had it on drip from the Daily Grind a few times, happy each time. I won't go full-on coffee geek here, but suffice to say that this is a very, very solid coffee, great flavor and body, no sugar or milk necessary at all. Highly recommended.