Ravioli and stuffed olives for a bunch of people

I mentioned the other day that Linda found Aunt Mary's recipe for a whole lot of meat ravioli after Angela and I semi-finalized the mad plan for December 19th.

Here it is:

For the Dough:
5 pounds flour
8 extra large eggs
12 oz warm water
Knead approx 20 minutes
Roll out dough into tube and cut into slices
Press slices flat and dust flour on both sides
Run through pasta machine first on 1 and then on second to last slot
Put in meat, fold over and shape

For the meat filling:
8 pounds of cooked chicken and pork total weight
1 cup bread crumbs
1 cup cheese
4 cups chicken broth
4 eggs
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tblsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1tsp parsley
Grind pork and chicken mixture together and fill pasta

(The recipes for the dough and filling are next to one another on a card, so I assume the meat mixture is designed to fill the amount of rolled dough that the dough recipe will produce. Assuming it's a recipe for about 200 ravioli that would mean about a half ounce of meat in each ravioli.)

On the back of the same card is a recipe for cheese filling:
1 pound of ricotta
Cheese to taste
1 egg
1/2 tsp parsley
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbl bread crumbs
Mix together and fill pasta

(Clearly the Ricotta recipe is not in proportion to the dough recipe, so my guess is that she wrote that on the back of the card for reference and it isn't meant to be used with the 5 pound dough recipe.

On the other hand Angela remembers the old time dinners consisting of fried meat ravioli, boiled meat ravioli with cheese and cinnamon, and then boiled cheese ravioli with gravy. So perhaps this is a recipe card for those occasions. But even that doesn't explain the problematic proportions since 1 pound of ricotta filling would not have made enough cheese ravioli with the sauce for the dinners for 15 or so that they used to have, even on the assumption that we had already eaten fried and white meat ravioli..

We'll learn the truth on December 19th. I'm figuring we'll do fifteen pounds of flour for dough and then fill with 16 pounds of meat and 8 pounds of cheese so as to end up with about 600 ravioli.

In addition we're going to do six times the following recipe for stuffed olives that Angela sent me so as to end up with about 450 olives:

2 1/2 lbs spanish olives (about 30 olives to the pound)
1 1/2 lbs ground veal and pork
3 eggs
1/8 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp parsley
2 tbsp romano cheese
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp garlic powder
3 tbsp bread crumb

Footballs

Foods you enjoyed as a kid never taste exactly as you remember them; but sometimes you can get pretty close.

Today we made footballs according to the by guess and by gosh method. Using the old hand cranked grinder we ground up about a pound and half of leftover turkey (both white and dark meat) along with about the same amount of cooked Swiss Chard. Then we added about an ounce or so of grated Locatelli, about a teaspoon each of salt and garlic powder, and about a half teaspoon of pepper. I mixed that all up well, Alex and I tasted it for flavor, and then I formed it into footballs about two inches in diameter at the equator. I floured, egged, and breaded those; and then deep fried them.

Excellent! We ate them with mashed potatoes, leftover turkey gravy and swiss chard saute'd with garlic.

Now the question is whether they actually were different from Mom's because she used frozen spinach and we used the last picking of Swiss Chard from the garden (leaves only - the stems are now pithy); or whether 62 year old taste buds don't work exactly the same as 10 year old ones.

Either way they were very fine indeed. A very fine way to dispose of leftover turkey without having to suffer the taste of leftover turkey.

A new recipe you may or may not want to try

I haven't tried the recipe Beppe Bigazzi talks about at the link below; but perhaps I will the next time something that cooks up "better than chicken, rabbit or pigeon" comes wandering around. Ruperto de Nola, writing in the classic days of Italian cuisine, recommended spit roasting after basting with olive oil and garlic. Remember to soak for three days in spring water. Very popular in Arezzo, they say.

Watch the short video! His young assistant keeps trying to get him off the subject; but she can't once he gets on a roll.

Fluffy, the other white meat.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article7029058.ece

The sad degeneration of the human race

These three modern age wimps plan to ride from China to the English Channel on horses. They're planning to take three years to cover the 5,000 miles, riding less than 5 miles a day, which takes less than an hour on a walking horse. No doubt they'll spend the other 23 hours in each day luxuriating around the pool of a luxury hotel eating dainty finger foods and giving interviews about their arduous journey.

Back when men were men and horses were horses the Mongols covered fifty or sixty miles a day even though they often had to take time out from covering ground to attend to a bit of rape and pillage.

But the Mongols ate finger foods just like these modern wimps. Before setting out in the morning each Mongol put a nice cut of meat under his saddle blanket. Bouncing along on top of the meat all day tenderized it; and the heat and sweat from the horse cooked and seasoned it. I'll bet that steak was tasty at the end of a long day in the saddle.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.bfe2a5099d50f7a32a3ab49f3447dd0e.671&show_article=1

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night

I've been told that some folks have been wondering why I haven't posted anything here for a while. Part of the truth is that my laptop, on which I'm writing this, has a virus that has been causing it to crash regularly. Another part of the truth is that I've been immersed in a couple of pretty good novels. And the final part of the truth is that I've started several blog entries that haven't worked.

So, I'd be working on a frustrating blog entry and the laptop would crash. And when the laptop crashed I would use it as an excuse to pick up one of the novels. Then when I returned to the laptop after it restarted, I would find myself facing the still unsatisfactory blog entry. So I would try a new start for it, or a new middle, or a new end, and then the laptop would crash again. And I would go off to one of the novels again.

The two novels were Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven, which I finished a couple of days ago and Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, which I finished an hour or so ago. Both were excellent, but now they're done. I plan to loan Playing for Pizza to Sam and Jas because it's about football, Italians and food; but Fleet of Worlds will go up on the shelf with the other science fiction since nobody around here likes science fiction.

We had a great Christmas Eve gathering here earlier even though we missed Al R and Angela. Al's down in Florida crowing about the warm temperatures every time we talk to him on Saturday mornings. Angie's out in San Diego waiting on a back operation that's now scheduled for New Year's Eve day, of all the days. Hopefully they'll get to cutting on her back before they get to partying.

Thankfully Catherine and Liana came over to help with the food preparation. Linda and I couldn't have done it without them. There is a tempo necessary to preparing the various fried foods.

Incidentally, the laptop crapped out after the line above and restarted itself. I went out and had a cigarette and read the beginning of The Godfather Returns by some schlemiel named Mark Weingardner. How can it be that the best writer they could hire to continue the godfather saga can't write one tenth as well as Mario Puzo? Well, at least this novel is set in the time of the original novel and uses some of the original characters.

Anyway, we had a great Christmas Eve gathering of the tribe. Marianne and Dave managed to find the old pogo stick I wrote about a few days ago and gave that to me as a Christmas present. I was encouraged to try it out; but I'm not that stupid. Nor was I that drunk. I'm told that Samuel managed to do ten jumps on it when the younger and more foolish folks took it out to the driveway, so the darn thing still works fifty three years after I first got it as a gift. Meanwhile it's now propped out there by the front door, so I'm stuck with it again.

Rebecca brought very serviceable red baccala stew, although it wasn't a hundred percent Aunt Mary style, and Rebecca fessed up to messing with the recipe. Caramelize some tomato paste indeed! Mom would have said "quan de gatsa de mossa." But I think Mom would have approved of the flavor. Also, Rebecca gave Sam a Marche' cookbook which looked interesting. It had what looked like some of the traditional recipes in there. I have to borrow it from Sam and read it.

The fried foods were as delicious as they were unhealthful. And, as usual, the folks ate an unbelievable amount of garlic and oil spaghetti. Some of them corrupted it with a topping of the quite good tomato gravy that Deb brought, but all seemed to enjoy it. There is a segment of the family that refuses to recognize that garlic and oil spaghetti is too good to mess up with tomato sauce.

I'm always amazed when they compliment that spaghetti on Christmas Eve. Just for the record there's nothing magical about why it tasted the way it did. The secret is in the garlic, the fresh instead of dried parsley and the egg noodle spaghetti instead of water based pasta. It's an everything to excess recipe.

One bulb of garlic for each 14 ounce package of egg pasta even though your hands get cramped from chopping so much garlic. Buy a chopper if you don't want your hands to get cramped. Don't cut down on the amount of garlic. And one supermarket bunch of chopped fresh parsley for four packages of pasta, which is how much we went through tonight. Also, a couple of tablespoons of salt at least in the pasta cooking water and a tablespoon or so of salt in the couple of cups of olive oil in which the garlic is cooked until some of it is browning. Forget all that stuff you were told about not overcooking garlic. Some of the garlic has to be overcooked.

Truth to tell, in my own opinion, I could have browned the garlic a bit more than I did tonight. I was a bit too quick to put in the water and parsley. But things were a bit hectic over there what with the four packages of pasta being a bit too much for the size of the cauldron that Kathy loaned us. Also, I was getting a bit tired of cooking by that point, and I had forgotten the garlic and oil for a bit and they were on high. So I panicked a little when I saw the first brown bits and put the water and parsley in maybe a couple of minutes too soon.

Fish stories

Don A down in Florida helpfully provided a list of baccala recipes. The one below looks pretty much like the one Grandmon L and Aunt Mary R used to make on Christmas Eve, and which Angela made more recently, but without the green olives, capers and pignolis which are only appropriate if Don Corleone is coming to visit. There are some other interesting looking baccala recipes on the document Don sent me. If you want the full list send me an email or leave your email address in a comment.

A warning - If you decide to make this or anything else with baccala you need to remember, as I often haven't, that two pounds of dried salted cod is a lot, a very lot. After you soak it, it will swell up like a monster set loose in Phoenixville into something like four or five pounds of fish. I think this recipe must mean two pounds after it's been soaked; so it's a recipe intended for maybe half of one of the hard as wood dried cod fillets that you find being sold right out of the wooden box in a proper market.

One time I showed up at Mom and Pop's house with three dried cod fillets of which I was pretty proud because I had ignored the dirty looks of the clerk and leafed through the fillets in the box just like Mom used to do to get the ones with the thickest thick ends. Pop, who didn't like baccala, took one look at the maybe six pounds of dried cod and said, "What the hell are you gonna do with all of that damned stuff." Mom just laughed. As I recall she kept one of the fillets to use for Christmas Eve and one for later and sent me home with the third along with instructions about how to soak it. So me and Linda had a second Christmas Eve, at least from a baccala standpoint, in late January of that year. Come to think of it I made the red baccala that year myself, so Mom must have said something like, 'soak the fish, fry some garlic in olive oil, put in a can of chopped tomatoes, some potatoes and some raisins and cook it 'til it's done.'

You need to start forty eight hours before you plan to cook the fish by putting the dried fillet in a big pot of cold water. Bend it or cut it in half if need be so it's fully submerged and put the pot in the refrigerator. Change the cold water at least twice and finally change it again before boiling the now swelled up and soft fish. The fact that the whole house will smell like a Portuguese fishing boat for a day or so after you boil it is part of the fun, it adds atmosphere. The fish ends up looking pure and white, surprisingly like fresh fish, given that it starts out yellow and fibrous; but it has more body, more texture and bite, than fresh fish.

I'm always amazed that only me and Sam and Angela really look forward to the red bacalla on Christmas Eve. The rest of the family at best tolerates it and at worst takes Pop's attitude. Pop never met a fish he really liked even though he liked to fish when he was younger.

PESCESTOCCO ALLA MESSINESE
This classic bacalla dish includes potatoes and green olives, found in many sicilian dishes
2 lbs of bacalla (soaked, cleaned & deboned)
1 cup of olive oil
2 med onions - sliced
2 celery stalks - sliced
4 tomatoes - peeled, seeded and chopped
1 lb potatoes - peeled
10 green olives - pitted
2 tbls capers
2 tbls pignoli nuts
4 tbls raisins
Heat the oil in a deep skillet or sauce pan/saute the onions & celery and cook till softened/add the tomatoes and 1/2 cup of warm water/bring to a slow simmer/cut the bacalla into fairly large uniform pieces/cut potatoes into quarters/add the bacalla, potatoes, and the rest of the ingredients to the pot & simmer for 30-40 minutes

Quit the whining

Lately it seems everybody I talk with wants to whine about higher food prices. And they're right; in the past few years it's been getting outrageously expensive to go to the market and buy ripe mangos air freighted from Brazil and fresh lettuce from Mexico and hot chutney from East Africa which sometimes I can't even get; so I have to be satisfied with the inferior stuff from India.

And don't even get me started on how expensive it's getting to top off the shopping cart with those little frozen creampuffs and cashew nuts and seedless cucumbers from England and that breakfast cereal with the crunchy freeze dried strawberry slices that are so delicious they're probably harvested exclusively by virgins working under the light of the new moon.

Then there are the Costa Rican plutocrats who must think their Hearts of Palm are made of solid silver. Madonna! I just want the things to fancy up a salad, for God's sake. And the Sicilians - just how much more do they think I'm going to pay for their fattening damn Caponata in the little cans. The Chinese are a bit more reasonable with their Mandarin Orange segments; but even they're getting greedy.

So this week Linda and I stepped back into the past. We stepped back to simple, healthful, slow food, you might say. Slow, economical food, if I may say so myself.

Early in the afternoon on Sunday I started a pot of Goya Great Northern Beans. Ignoring the ridiculous recipe on the label, I rapid boiled a pound of beans in eight cups of water. Mexicans have a lot of guts even proposing a recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli, if you ask me, even if Mexicans are a tiny bit Italian, being diluted Spaniards who are basicly diluted Romans.

After about an hour, I drained and rinsed the beans with cold water so I could rough them up a bit by rubbing them between my hands to loosen the skins and float them away. Then I put the beans on the stove again with eight cups of water, a couple of teaspoons of salt and about half a cup of olive oil to slow simmer for a few hours until they pretty much disintegrated. That's the way Pop liked them, the way his mom made them, more like bean sauce with little broken up soft chunks than like intact beans in liquid.

A couple of hours before I shut off the heat under the pot I broke up a bulb of garlic and peeled and sliced the cloves. Like Mom and Aunt Mary R, I carefully sliced the first few cloves nice and thin; and then the slices might have gotten a bit thicker and less regular as I got tired of the task. I threw the garlic into the pot to simmer with the beans and then turned off the pot at about ten to cool down a bit so I could put it into the refrigerator at about midnight.

It was then a simple matter to come home on Monday at about 5:15, start a pot of water with a half a handful of salt in it for the Ditalini, dip about a third of the bean sauce into a saucepan to heat up, dump in a box of ditalini once the salted water was boiling, let the Ditalini boil for precisely the eight minute minimum for al dente specified on the package, poured off as much of the cooking water as I could without letting any of the Ditalini escape from the pot, poured in the now just boiling bean sauce to join the remaining water in with the Ditalini, and ladled the completed Pasta e' Fagioli into shallow bowls by 5:35.

Between us, Linda and I ate about one-third of the Pasta e' Fagioli for dinner, so the pot contained about six meals. There were also two more potfuls worth of bean sauce that I froze later. Figure two bucks for the beans and two bucks each for three boxes of Ditalini. Add in about three bucks for a cup and a half of olive oil and a buck for three bulbs of garlic. Total cost of eighteen meals? About twelve smackeroos. Sixty-six cents per meal.

And. . . I defy anyone to make a better meal, both from the perspective of health and from the perspective of taste, if taken with fresh Corropolese bread and a nice salad dressed with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Plus the garlic will keep away vampires and other pests.

So quit your whining about the cost of food.

Food is costing us more because we're eating like decadent Roman aristocrats. No, that's not right. We're eating far better than pampered Roman aristocrats because we also get to enjoy Hearts of Palm from Costa Rica which add a nice crunch and flavor to our salads. And we have Cheetos and Mountain Dew, which are lots better tasting than flamingo tongues and sour wine.

Lucullus would have swooned with pleasure if given access to the foods we consider common; but they wouldn't have made him any happier.

I'll let Epicurus explain; "If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires."

Update: I forgot to say that I added a can of diced tomatoes to the pot early on in the process. I did that because I didn't have a little can of tomato paste or a medium can of tomato sauce. It's mostly for color anyway. Without something to make it a little bit red this soup looks pretty sickly. I'm too lazy to update the cost information above but a can of something tomato-ey costs about 60 or 80 cents, trivial.

Update 2: 80 86 64 88 :<(

An interesting and excellent fig salad recipe

In the unlikely event you have a fig tree and run into the problem I've suffered lately - namely the figs bursting open before they're fully ripe - I tested a recipe I remember reading about.

Rinse about ten figs and cut off their stem ends (the stem end is even less ripe than the burst end)
Then quarter the figs and sprinkle about half a tablespoon of sugar and half a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar over them.
Let them marinate for about a half hour and you have a superior salad.

Of course, I would rather that the darn figs hadn't burst in the first place. Oh well, at least we enjoyed a few truly ripe ones before this rainy period came on.

Baseball bat stew

Anyone who has grown more than a couple of zucchini plants knows that the squashes can grow surprisingly fast after a rain, and that some of them are extraordinarily clever at camouflage. As a result it's a rare year when you don't have to harvest at least a couple of two foot long six inch in diameter monsters. Most folks throw these on the mulch heap, and I usually do that too, but I've always hated doing that, which is why I invented baseball bat stew, not that I've ever called it that before.

Mom used to very occasionally make a somewhat similar stew but she used little meatballs that she would mix and painstakingly roll by hand, and she used regular sized zucchinis which meant she had to carefully gauge the cooking time or they would turn to mush. She also used to core out peeled medium sized zucchinis, stuff them with meatball mixture, brown them a little and then put them into her tomato gravy to cook, but she didn't do that often which makes me think Pop probably didn't like zucchinis.

My recipe is for the lazy cook - cutting up Italian sausage into small pieces is a lot easier than making little meatballs, especially if you put it into the freezer for an hour or two before cutting it. Also, a big old squash is not going to get mushy, or at least not too mushy, no matter how long you cook it. The squash will get mushy if you freeze the resulting stew, but I actually don't mind it that way so I freeze lunch sized portions for me to eat later.

Ingredients:
About 90 minutes of preparation time
1 very large zucchini squash or 2 pretty large ones
2 pounds of hot Italian sausage (it also works reasonably well with sweet Italian sausage)
12 or so garden tomatoes or 2 sixteen ounce cans of chopped tomatoes
2 large onions
4 or 5 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup olive oil

Cut the Italian sausage into pieces about one inch long and put it in the pot with the olive oil on medium high to saute, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile chop the onions coarsely and slice each garlic clove a few times across. Also cut the ends off the squash, peel it, cut it in half and use a soup spoon to remove the seeds and pulp around them. Then cut up the squash into one inch cubes.

Throw the onions in the pot after the meat is reasonably browned and saute them a bit, then throw the squash cubes in and stir the whole mess around to coat the squash with oil as it also sautes a bit. Then dump in the peeled, seeded and roughly chopped garden tomatoes (or the cans of chopped tomatoes. Add a level teaspoon of salt. Put the top on the pot and boil it on medium low for about an hour, stirring occasionally. Add a glass of water if it seems to be two dry after it has cooked for a half hour or so.

Having a sliced Corropolese seeded split loaf on hand is a good idea.

Note to self - arrange a ravioli making party

Last night at Sam's we had a great dinner with Delores and Samuel. After dinner I got talking with Samuel about the fact that excellent meat filled ravioli are available at Russo's market in Reading. That lead to remembrance of how great it was when Grandmom Luzi, mom and Aunt Mary Raimo made hundreds of ravioli with the meat and cooked them three ways.

Is there a food better than fried ravioli with powdered sugar, especially when topped off with a hearty plateful of ravioli with gravy and at least a few of the curly kind eaten white with grated cheese?

Angela surely has the recipe and the memory of how to make meat ravioli. Marianne has the rolling machine and perhaps she also has the grinder for the meat filling. Marianne probably also has mom's ravioli cutter and sealer, but if necessary we can cut them with a cup and seal them with a fork. It takes a long time to make ravioli for a big crowd but it's one of those meals which rewards almost as much by the camaraderie of the making as in the eating.

What holiday was reserved for meat ravioli? It wasn't Easter and it wasn't Christmas. It was probably New Years Day. Did they make the ravioli with leftover turkey from Christmas? Angela will know. How would one go about getting all the pieces of this project together?

Swiss Chard with garlic and oil

This is the easiest recipe that's worth putting down in print.

Ingredients:
1 bunch of Swiss Chard from the market, or as much as there is to pick in the garden.
3 or 4 cloves of garlic
Olive Oil, Salt and Pepper

Wash the Swiss Chard even if it comes from the garden and looks perfectly clean. Even if your garden is well fenced birds and bugs are doing things down there that you almost always do in a special room in the house. As you wash the chard strip the veins out of the stalks.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil on medium in the bottom of a deep pot while you peel and chop the garlic cloves. If you want to enjoy this this the way mom and Aunt Mary Raimo made it when they were in a hurry chop the first clove very carefully and fine, then take a few quick whacks at the next clove and at least a whack or two at the last two cloves.

Throw the chopped garlic into the oil and then cut the stalks of the Swiss Chard crosswise into pieces about one inch long. Throw the chopped stalks into the oil with the garlic, hopefully before the garlic starts to get that slightly sweet burned smell that means it's suitable only for the most refined tastes.

Next roll up the Swiss Chard leaves like a big fat cigar, slice it lengthwise once, and slash it crosswise a couple of times before throwing the pieces on top of the simmering stalks and garlic. Sprinkle a half teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of pepper over the top of the big mound of chard leaves and then cover the pot and turn the burner to low.

The beauty of Swiss Chard is that it's almost impossible to overcook it. It should be more or less done steaming and cooking down in a half-hour during which time you can cook the rest of the dinner, and it won't hurt it to steam in that pot for an hour if you occasionally stir it to keep it from burning on the bottom.

If it seems to have too much liquid in it after it's mostly cooked leave the cover off the pot for a while and the liquid will vaporise and join the great hydrologic cycle of the earth perhaps to fall as rain in the Sudan where they need it.

The other day my brother Sam told me Swiss Chard was recently named as one of the ten healthiest foods by the chard growers association or some other such reliable source. But anyone who has eaten the stuff already knows it's healthy. Suffice it to say that a big Swiss Chard eater today will not suffer from biliousness tomorrow.

Porkette the way Mom and Aunt Carmella made it

I've been meaning to get this recipe down in print. It comes from watching my mom make it and then later asking my Aunt Carmella Russo why her version had an especially good flavor. You don't have to be on top of this every minute while it's cooking, but it is an all day at home and into the evening recipe.

Ingredients:
At least 6 hours of cooking time (8 hours is better)
1 three pound pork roast - the best is the kind in the elastic netting
1 bulb of garlic (not 1 clove, 1 bulb - using 2 bulbs won't hurt)
1 bunch of celery
1 bunch of parsley (fresh is best but dried can substitute)
1 bunch of rosemary (fresh is best but dried can substitute)
1 tablespoon of worcestershire sauce
Salt, Pepper, and a handful of Flour

Peel the cloves of garlic and wash the rosemary while you preheat the oven to 425. Stuff the whole cloves of garlic and the rosemary into the slits in the roast. The elastic netting roast is made up of pieces of deboned pork so there are gaps into which you can stuff the garlic. If you use another kind of pork roast you have to cut slits into which to stuff the garlic and rosemary.
Salt and pepper the outside of the roast fairly heavily and then roll it in the flour to coat the outside.
Put the roast in a dry oven pan and roast for 1 hour at 425, then roll the meat over and roast for another half-hour or so at 425.
Lower the oven temp to 325, put the bunch of parsley under the roast and pour enough water into the roasting pan to cover the roast about 1/4th to 1/3rd deep (depending on how wide the pan is). Wash and strip the strings out of the celery (don't go crazy about it because you're going to be cutting this celery crosswise later), split the celery stalks in half, and put them in the water around the roast. Roast for 2 hours at 325, turning the roast over every hour or so. Then lower the oven temp to 275 and roast for 2 more hours, again turning the roast over every hour or so.

If you started at about noon it's now near 5:00 PM so it's almost time for dinner. It's hard to steal some of the big roast out of the netting, but if you had the foresight to cook a half-pound or so chunk of pork (or a couple of pork chops) in with the big roast this would be a good time to make some mashed potatoes, and some gravy from part of the water and drippings around the roast. Enjoy a dinner of the little piece of pork and the mashed potatoes while the netted roast continues cooking at 275 for another hour. Then turn the oven off and leave the roast in the oven for another hour or so while you digest the meal.

Remove the roast from the oven and let it cool long enough so you won't burn your fingers when you cut and strip the netting off it. The netting is great but it's tough to remove and the process is sure to be messy. But you shouldn't have started this recipe if you have a problem with greasy fingers and a few grease splashes on your clothes, the top of the stove, the counters, and the floor around the stove.

Pour the drippings and water from the roasting pan in a big enough pot to hold them and the pork and put it on a burner turned to low. Put the netting which is still crusted with browned flower and the outer fat from the roast into a smaller sauce pan with a couple of glasses of water and put that on a burner turned to medium. Throw the sprigs of rosemary into the saucepan with the netting as you find them inside the roast.
After the chunks of the roast have cooled enough to pull them apart by hand pull the pork into strings and put the strings of meat into the pot with the drippings, along with the cloves of garlic which are now so soft that they will disintegrate into mush as you squeeze them. Cut the celery and the leafy tops of the parsley crosswise and throw those into the pot also.
Throw away the grosser pieces of fat and gristle and such - old timers used to throw that stuff in the pot too, but we're conscious of cholesterol now and throwing that stuff away will let you maintain the barest fig leaf of an illusion that you're making the porchetta healthier.
Add the tablespoon of Worcestershire Sauce to the pot with the pork with thanks to Aunt Carmella Russo for revealing this secret ingredient. Also pour in the water that has now boiled all the flavor out of the netting and pick any remaining pieces of meat and any crushable mush of browned flour out of the netting.

Bring the pot of pulled pork to a boil and test it by putting a generous helping on a medium kaiser roll and enjoying an evening snack. If you think the resulting sandwich needs salt and pepper add a level teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of pepper to the pot. Add some olive oil to the pot if the mouth feel is not silky enough.

Refrigerate the whole pot overnight if this is for a picnic tomorrow, or separate the meat and liquids into six or eight freezer containers and put them in the refrigerator overnight before freezing them if this is for a series of meals at home. A three pound pork roast will make about 15 to 20 sandwiches on medium kaiser rolls.

A word about kaiser rolls. Get them from a real bakery like Corropolese or Bakemeister or Sarcones and ask the counter guy to put them in a paper bag. A kaiser roll that has seen the inside of a plastic bag is barely suitable for feeding to birds let alone eating yourself.

A word about healthiness. Grandpop and Grandmom Luzi ate this with the fat. They also ate truly serious cholesterol builders like suffrete and sota panzetta. Yet they lived in good health into their mid-eighties. Of course they only ate fatty stuff like that a few times a year. Most of the year they ate nearly meatless meals of pasta and greens and beans.