Grateful Coconut Pork

Holy fucking cranberries, Batman! I just sort of assumed nobody was reading this rag, because I never got any comments. I must confess, it monkeyed with my momentum, especially lately – my gentleman friend’s been in Alaska and we’re scrambling to get our heiners to Budapest in two weeks, without leaving anything essential un-turned in, un-packed, un-paid, and/or un-purchased.

Last night, I got around to setting up a blog upon which the kids can chronicle their upcoming Balkan adventures and lo and behold, I see something I never noticed before, a little dingbat that implied I had hundreds of comments awaiting approval. Say what? It was like finding one of those bushels of undelivered mail that were discovered in 1990’s Chicago, tucked beneath postmen’s porches and burning in wooded backlots! Most of my admirers wanted me to introduce me to hot underage sluts or improve my penile performance (I’ve been making do with what the good lord gave me…), but a few of the comments implied that a small portion of my fellow Americans are breaking out the fish sauce and taking these recipes for a test drive!

So, thank you! Thank you all! I’m sorry I never responded to your kind wishes on my blog tour and nice words on the book and queries as to whether it’s acceptable to peanut butter for peanut oil! I didn’t know! I’ll never let you languish like that again!!! (Unless I spend another year forgetting my log-in name and password…)

Brothers and sisters, I feel the spirit of momentum a-buildin’ again, especially since Greg’s taken it upon himself to fix dinner on those rare Wednesday nights when he’s not in Alaska. (He leaves for Pittsburgh on Sunday. It’s okay. He packs well under pressure. Wait, no, he doesn’t! When Uncle Stephen and I showed up at his studio apartment in 1992, to help him haul his worldly possessions into the one-bedroom lovenest in which we would live in sin (which suited Jambo just fine), he was sitting on his unmade bed, eating cereal and reading the newspaper! He hadn’t even unscrewed the dang futon frame…)

Wait, the momentum, it’s building again! Your momentum, I mean. Drop that take-out menu! Homemade coconut pork’s what's in the stars for you tonight, baby.

coconut pork

Coconut Pork
Since the butcher’s still giving you the hero’s welcome he accords all lapsed vegetarians, might as well toddle over and tell him to slice you up a pound of pork tenderloin. Tell him you like it thin, so he won’t get any ideas. (If he himself is thin, cart it home to slice yourself.)

Mince four cloves of garlic! Come on! Small and wild! Get all Benihana on it!



Now without slicing your thumb, or starting a fire, slice a thumb-sized hunk of ginger into matchsticks.

Cast the contents of your cutting board across the 2 tablespoons of oil you’ve set to sizzling in the wok. Fling 3 dried chili peppers in after, the little Thai kind if you’ve got ‘em, though their been-sitting-on-the-shelf -so-long-you-could-rub-em-on-your-eyeballs-if-you-wanted-to Mexican cousins will certainly do in a pinch.

I know, seems like only yesterday you were heating the oil and already it’s time to throw the pork in there too. If you wanted a rest, you should have applied for a job at that Kentucky Fried Chicken in the West Village.

Stir-fry the pork until it turns white or some other shade of cooked.

Add 1 teaspoon of salt
4 teaspoons of sugar
and 1 teaspoon of soy sauce.
(By the way, I recently wrote the good people at Kamada International to tell them how much I love their Dashi soy, how I pimp it all over the blog and even mentioned their website in my recently published book, thinking they’d email back something to the effect of, “You know the two cases you just ordered to the tune of nearly forty bucks? It’s on the house.” Instead, I got a little message telling me that they appreciate customer feedback! Like I don’t know that feeling! You think they’d at least slip me a bumper sticker or something…)

Now add a can of coconut milk. Not that suntan-lotion flavored cartilage they make Mai Tais out of! You know better than that. Actually, that would probably taste pretty good in a Hawaiian Tropic, Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale, Paris Hilton kind of way.

Snap yourself out of it with some single-malt Scotch while the pork simmers for twenty minutes.

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Serve it over rice, with some sliced mango which makes it look less like something you’d feed the dog and more like something you’d want to comment on before you’ve even tasted it!

∞
I don’t know how much more I’ll be posting in the next six weeks, but if you haven’t already, why not subscribe to my Dirty Feed there, so you won’t miss a single opportunity to comment ? And while you’re at it, hop on over to Whogoslavia, and subscribe to that too. You know how kids get a bang out of comments, especially when their parents are dragging them around Bosnia and such.


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