You may be familiar with ‘ragu’ brand spaghetti sauce.  If you tried it and enjoyed it, there is little reason for you to continue reading…  If your initial reaction to seeing this name are the same as ours, i.e. a loss of appetite, shelve your expectations, read on, and brace yourself.

Simmer in Oil

We saw a recipe in the L.A. times and couldn’t resist the quadruple-dose of pig meat and cooking time that is the neapolitan style ragu.

To our surprise, we followed the recipe to the letter, and we couldn’t be happier.  The only note from the final work is that it would probably be great to add some celery at the beginning.  That said, it’s an inspired work.

We started around 2:30, after a long run, starting the pig paste simmering.

Once that was on its merry way, we made some eggs and hashbrowns to tide us over to the estimated 9:00PM sit-down time.

Dan on the flip

At this point, the involvement of the recipe dwindled; I scurried off to build a desk, and Erik manned the pork butt dance (shake the bootie every 15min, add wine, repeat).

Erik got 4 lbs of pork butt, so we could double the recipe if we wanted.  We decided against it, and instead made slow-grilled pulled pork out of the second half.

Second Butt cheek

Desk complete, I made a simple Quinoa salad out of chopped parsley (nobody eats parsley!), chopped onion, olive oil, lemon juice, quinoa, cubed heirloom tomatoes, salt, and pepper.

The Blend

I made the quinoa a bit crunchier than normal, (3 parts chicken stock (‘RFCS’), 2 parts dried quinoa), so that it could absorb some of the juices of the salad.  Make sure to let the quinoa cool before adding it to the raw ingredients.

The final meal was started by a pre-game snack on the grilled pulled pork, as we got impatient.

Snacking

We continued with a bowl (or two) of ragu on pasta.

Quad Pig Ragu

The complexity of the flavor is incredible, and drinking the last of the bottle of wine we added was a terrific complement.  It’s a game to try to detect the different flavors of the many cuts of pig that went into this…  Then we dug into the actual pork butt that we cooked in the ragu, with a side of the quinoa salad.  Awesome, and awesome.