Emily sent me to the store for a hamhock, and I came home with a pork butt. This is (just one of the many) reasons I’m not a butcher. What it means is that we have this pork butt, now, and no idea what to do with it. Apparently we’re not the first people to find ourselves in this situation, though, because stuck to the package is a handy little foldout of recipes titled “Let’s talk pork… FREE! Quick-Fix Recipes”. Hooray! The National Pork Board — you know, the other white meat people — clearly haven’t gotten around to applying their marketing genius to pork butt. Most of the recipes are of the “heat up something else that comes out of a can or box, and serve it with pork butt” variety, e.g. “we don’t know what to do with it, either.” But this one is the clear winner: Emily, just on hearing the name, immediately began howling “Nooooo! I’m Jewwwwish! Nooooooooo!” which is as good an excuse as any, I suppose. The recipe consists of water, frozen broccoli, and condensed cheddar cheese soup. Oh, and the pork butt of course. Somewhere in America there is a person to whom the idea of butt-cheese soup is appealing. That this person also enjoys condensed cheddar cheese and frozen broccoli is perhaps unsurprising. I am not this person. And I still don’t know what I’m going to make for dinner tonight.“BROCCOLI-SMOKED BUTT-CHEESE SOUP”
Heh. Hehehehehehe. I tell you, these are the dangers of eating meat. We vegetarians or pescatarians never find ourselves confronted with an animal butt and no idea of what to do with it. :)
I generally find allrecipes and epicurious to be pretty good reliable recipe sites, and I believe that both will let you search by ingredient (like, say “pork butt”. Heh. Hehehehe). Epicurious is more hoity-toity, and requires more time and ingredients (but is often very tasty), while allrecipes tends to be more simple all-american fare.
-Amy
I settled on a slightly modified version of this pulled pork recipe — mostly because it was the only one I could find that didn’t include a crock pot, crumbled ritz crackers, or both…
Hey, Jen and I make that soup all the time! It’s good! Well, sans-butt it is. The addition of butt to my cheese soup however might be intriguing!
-Josh
Pork Butt is terrific stuff - it’s the raw material for sausage, for one thing. All you need is some garlic, salt, pepper and intestine and you’re in business, assuming you’ve got a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer. (You do have a sausage stuffer, don’t you?) -E