Rolled Pork Loin with Porcini, Pancetta and Garden Greens

I’m oh so tired of politics and, after watching The Big Short today, the best way to restore sanity is to return to one of my other favorite things, cooking.

I’ve been playing around with this dish for a while. It’s certainly not original but this version works. There’s a lot of flexibility and, as noted, all kinds of substitutions and additions can be made. It serves 4 - 6. If you brine the meat as suggested start the day before. If not it takes about 2 hours.

Start with a 2 or 2 1/2 lb boneless pork loin. Double butterfly it. Lay loin on its side and about 1/3 third of the way into the loin, cut down to about 3/4 inch before the edge. Open the loin. You’ll have an uneven piece with one side twice the thickness of the other. At the inside edge of the thicker side begin cutting in the same manner through till about 3/4 inch before the outside edge. Open again. You’ll have one large piece three times the length of the original loin and 1/3 its original thickness.

Brine the butterflied loin. A brine that works for this dish is 1/3 cup kosher salt, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 2 bay leaves, 8 juniper berries and 8 pepper corns in 6 - 8 cups of water. Any of a variety of flavored brines are okay. Refrigerate overnight.

“Truffle” flavored butter paste

2 oz dried porcinis, rehydrate in warm water and chop (chanterelles or pine mushrooms work too). Strain soaking liquid to remove grits and save to add to the sauce (see below).

5 garlic cloves - mashed, chopped

1 t kosher salt

1 handful of fresh herbs, chopped finely (rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano — heavy on the rosemary). If you don’t have fresh use dried but reduce amounts.

3 T butter (soften)

3 T olive oil (or a mix of olive and truffle oil)

1 T ground black pepper

Mix everything together in a bowl. Adjust amounts of anything that you feel it needs. The paste should be thick but spreadable. Other tastes can be combined if you wish. A dollop of Dijon mustard works.

Filling

8 (or more) oz thinly sliced Italian meats (cured meats like pancetta, prosciutto and capicola as well as mortadella all work well)

6 (or more) oz of greens (chard, spinach, collards all work — just use the leaves, remove stems and save for another dish)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 325° F.

Remove loin from brine, pat dry, lay flat and cover with plastic wrap and using a rolling pin or kitchen hammer pound the entire piece to about 1/2 inch thickness.

Spread paste over the open loin. Add a layer of greens and one of meats. Spread more of the paste over the top. Add another layer of greens and meats. If you still have meats and greens left, do another layer.

Roll the loin and tie with string. You’ll probably need to tuck in bits of meat and greens. Score fat gently and brush with the remaining paste.

Bake in a oiled pan, fat side up, for 50 minutes. Raise oven temperature to 425° and bake another 20 minutes. Interior temperature should be around 145° - 150°. Remove and let sit while making sauce.

Sauce

Put roasting pan on burner at medium heat. Remove any large pieces of fat. Deglaze with a mix of:

3/4 c chicken stock, 1/2 c beef stock, 1/4 c red wine and the left-over soaking liquid.

Scrape pan, bring sauce to a gentle boil and thicken with a mix of cornstarch and chicken stock (about 1 or 2 T’s of each should do). Add slowly. If the sauce is lumpy use an emersion blender.

While sauce thickens, remove string from the loin and slice.

Goes well with risotto.

Will the UK Bar Trump?

Amusingly, the Brits have a nice way of forcing governmental and legislative issues to the forefront. It’s the formal petition process wherein a petition that receives a sufficient number of valid signatures must be brought up for consideration in the House of Commons.

Recently a petition to deny entry of Donald J. Trump into the United Kingdom received the required number of signatures. Actually, within a rather short period of time it received over five times the needed number.

Parliament is now obligated to debate the issue and the Home Secretary (Theresa May) will be obligated to take any recommendation into consideration. The office of the Home Secretary issued a statement affirming that she “may exclude a non-European Economic Area national from the UK if she considers their presence in the UK to be non-conducive to the public good.”

If Trump is barred it will have a significant impact on his campaign for the GOP nomination. It will, I predict, increase his popularity with Republican primary voters by at least 10 points.

Fear and Loathing in America: It Keeps Getting Weirder

The US has had six acts of terrorism that can be traced to radical Muslims since 9/11 with a total death toll of 35. In that same time period there were over 360 terrorist attacks in other countries that took the lives of many thousands. Details can be found here.

Tiny Israel, with its 8 million residents in an area a bit smaller than New Jersey, has had some 70 such attacks and suffered over 450 deaths in the same time period. The recent Paris attacks were worse and deadlier than San Bernardino but France, rather than calling for barring all Muslims from immigrating, announced it would continue to accept Syrian refugees.

Other countries where terrorism is rife manage to continue to function without bursts of paranoia; their residents manage to live without constant pummeling by calls for genocide, programs to ban immigration and messages stoking fear and despair.

In the wake of Paris and San Bernardino, Obama called for calm and tried putting these events, terrible as they were, in perspective. He might as well have been trying to beat back the tide with a canoe paddle. The Republicans were in full-bore fear, dismay, dread, panic mode, each of them trying to find the line that would truly evacuate the bowels of Americans.

Rubio started simply by saying that Americans are “really scared” then, perhaps recognizing that simply speaking truth wouldn’t work, went for the warning that ISIS “is the most sophisticated terror group that has ever threatened the world or the United States.”  

Kasich proclaimed that “our way of life is at stake.”

Christie announced that, while most haven’t noticed, “World War III had begun.”

Jeb! revealed to any doubting soul that ISIS is “organizing to destroy Western Civilization.”

Carson noted that “our very existence” is at stake.

Trump called for the need to battle “radical Islamic terrorism” while “building up our military… our strength.”

Graham warned that terrorists “are trying to come here to kill us all.”

Of course, these kinds of apocalyptic ravings are nothing new. We have long had a peculiar fondness for suspicion, a proneness to see plots and schemes, raging madmen and stealthy killers and thugs around every corner and behind every bush. Over the decades we’ve worked ourselves into a lather over the Illuminati, the Masons, the New World Order, the League of Nations, United Nations, Black Helicopters, Communists, Papists and recently, in the Jade Helm paranoiac spasm, our own US Army.

As historian Richard Hofstadter noted back in 1954 this knee-jerk tendency contains a weird disconnect. These fake conservatives, from the pathetic Fiorina to the worrisome Trump, march to the drum of America’s greatness, its over-arching power, resilient peoples and unbeatable military yet they quiver at the power of these enemies of America. Rather than calmly stating that, while things can and likely will get dicey from time to time, we’re a strong and effective people with the leaders and knowledge to handle the situation, they rant about losing everything, warn of the destruction of civilization, the end of our way of life.

It makes you wonder. Do they realize the paradox? See how bizarre it is to tout the US as the greatest, most powerful country yet claim that its demise is in sight and will be brought about by a tiny bunch of fanatics? Do they know that you’re more likely to be killed by falling furniture than a terrorist, that a bolt of lightning is four times more likely to take you out than a terrorist?

I suspect they haven’t even thought this through. They have no intentions of thinking it (any other issue for that matter) through because thinking is the last thing they want anyone to do. They want to instill fear and loathing of the other, the stranger, the alien. And they know who the real stranger is for each and every one of the GOP candidates for president has put the blame for these threats to America squarely on the shoulders of The Black Dude. It is, as it always is with them, Obama’s fault.

It just keeps getting weirder.

David Frum and the Schism within the GOP

David Frum is one of those oddities, an intelligent, often insightful Republican. He’s like a David Brooks with more IQ points. I call him an “oddity” because he really shouldn’t be a Republican. It’s like he started out there, got comfortable, got recognition (he was one of Dubya’s speech writers) and ended up with this as part of his self-identity. There are lots of folks like this around. I do wonder whom they vote for when they pull the curtain closed. I’m pretty certain that this year it’s going to be Hillary.

Frum has a long article in The Atlantic dissecting the schism in the GOP, the one that no one saw coming. His argument is that the elites who have always run the Republican party misunderstood why they’ve lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential races. They thought it was because the GOP had failed to reach out to the growing Latino voters and that they needed to support progressive immigration reform. And, in fact, they tried. Rubio joined the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” who tried writing an immigration bill that would even have included pathways to citizenship.

But while the bill was withering on the vine (like virtually all even modestly progressive proposals do) Donald Trump happened and the GOP began reeling like a honorable gent who got sucker-punched on his way to his country club.

Suddenly Frum’s Republicans were marginalized. Walker and Graham pulled out, Bush is floundering, Kasich vanishing and Rubio and Christie have leap-frogged each other in desperate efforts to be ever more extreme.

Frum is correct that Trump’s appeal is not to be found in what he calls “Conservative Classic” which is traditional values, pro business, small government and lower taxes. Instead the GOP is suddenly overwhelmed by angry, poorly educated, frustrated, white, mostly male racists and xenophobes who despise the upper classes, don’t trust politicians, are mostly ignorant about government and actually support programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Frum gets the problems with the current GOP right. Then comes the fun part: What to do about this mess?

He makes several suggestions, among them what the party could/should be doing — quoting now:

“Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuition. Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right.”

It’s like the first half of almost every David Brooks column, it makes you wonder why he’s not a Democrat — then you hit the last line, the standard bow and bended knee to Reagan and you can see what Frum, for all his intelligence and probing analysis, does not.

Frum still doesn’t, cannot grasp that all that is wrong with the GOP began with Reagan. The line that the government can’t solve the problems because government is the problem set the tone. The attack on and demonizing of unions began the unraveling of the middle class. The tax cuts that favored the rich began the redistribution of wealth.

Frum is right that the elite, the country club Republicans, never realized what was happening. Alas, they (and he) never realized that Reagan’s policies created the underclass of poorly educated, blue-collar white males whose wages have stagnated and whose life-expectations have crashed and burned — the very ones who’ve boosted Trump to the top of the polls.

GOP Debate Score: Nil- Nil- Nil- Nil- Nil- Nil- Nil- Nil- Nil

Yup folks, a nine-way draw and no goals. To score, in my book, is to present a sensible, workable solution to a problem, a proposal that has at least a prayer of working, a program that would actually benefit the country, make the lives of ordinary Americans better, safer and more satisfying.

Instead we were force-fed two hours of posturing, huffing and puffing, casting of stones, fear mongering, naked xenophobia and hatred, calls for war, carpet bombing, indiscriminate killing of children and innocents and, incredibly, calls for dramatic increases in the military budget.[1]

No one introduced even a hint of careful, balanced negotiations or cooperative arrangements among nations. In fact, the only time another country was mentioned it was in the context of how “tough” the candidate would be with Putin or the Chinese or the Saudis or the Ayatollahs and how that deal with Iran would be scrapped.

ISIS would be wiped out, crushed, killed, eliminated — though no plan for doing so was ever even hinted at, except for Cruz who would carpet bomb them and Trump who would target their families. No one seemed to appreciate how bizarre these ideas were or that deliberate killing of children and non-combatants is a violation of the Geneva accords and, in a sane world with sane people, unthinkable.

“Islam” was never mentioned without the words “radical Jihadist” in front. Obama was the cause of all of our ills and Hillary would be even worse. Apparently no one in the GOP thinks Bernie has a chance to be the nominee.

The proceedings were rich with the usual sprinkling of lies and misrepresentations. The one that topped the weirdness chart was Fiorina saying (at least twice) that the government needed to come to the technology experts in Silicon Valley for advice on how to deal with encrypted message exchanges. She dressed this up with the claim that they did when she was head of HP and her cryptologists gave the government the needed help.

PolitiFact dubbed this one “Pants on Fire.” When the government asked the techies in Silicon Valley they turned them down for the obvious reason that ways into encrypted systems could not stay secret. If they could cut through the terrorists’ firewalls or build devices with “doors” in them, the terrorists (or ordinary hackers) would use the same techniques. We’d lose security, not gain it.

She followed up with the claim that she’d bring back “the warrior class” including (among others) Generals McChrystal, Petraeus and Keane who, she said, were sacked for saying things that Obama didn’t want to hear. Actually McChrystal was sacked for wholly inappropriate comments in Rolling Stone, Petraeus for revealing classified information to his mistress (for which he was lucky he wasn’t indicted). Keane, of course, resigned in 2003 well before Obama became president. And, oh yeah, she’d “met” Putin … in a green room before a show.

No wonder she got booted from HP.

It was all about fear folks, fear and loathing. The more they can make us afraid, worried, looking constantly over our shoulders, being suspicious of our neighbors, of the stranger on the street, the man with the beard, the woman with head scarf the more we lose the very freedoms these people say they want to protect.

Why this full-bore panic? Why are the candidates so fixated on San Bernardino and the Boston Marathon but no one mentioned the 33,000 who die here every year from gun violence? No one recalled the very Christian Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols or keyed in on the fact that Farook was born in Michigan. No one mentioned that there hasn’t been a single terrorist act from any of the nearly 800,000 Middle Eastern immigrants the US has admitted since 9/11. Do any of them know about the children and grandchildren of Syrian immigrants who have enriched our country including Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Jobs, Paul Abdul, F. Murray Abraham and Paul Anka.

To the Republican candidates: Stop it, please, just stop it.

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[1]The US already spends more on the military than the next 10 countries combined — including China and Russia.