Puerco con Salsa Verde (Pork with Green Salsa)

Who's ready for Thanksgiving?  Have you done your shopping?  Made your menu yet?  I just finished my grocery shopping today and, except for desert (weird since that is my favorite part of the meal), have my menu planned out. 

I personally want pecan pie, but my hubs, who loves pecans, doesn't care much for the pie because it's so sweet and according to him, "You can't taste the pecans."  Aaaaannnnddd...this is bad????  Obviously to him, it is.  *sigh*  So sad.  I am not a huge fan of pumpkin pie although I do have a ton of pumpkin from those Halloween pumpkins.  I also have apples, but apple pie just doesn't seem Thanksgiving-ish.  So, I'll probably find myself searching Pinterest in the wee hours of the night to find something. 

What does this have to do with Puerco con Salsa Verde?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  I just wanted to chat about Thanksgiving for a minute :) 

Do you remember those pork picnic roasts I talked about the other day???  The ones that were on sale and I bought way too many of them?  Yeah, those.  Well, in the spirit of cooking the food we have versus buying more, I needed to figure out what to do with this pork.  The crockpot pork I made the other day was ok.  My family liked it.  And, don't get me wrong, it was good...it's just that I use an almost exact marinade for chicken and have trained my taste buds to expect chicken with these flavors.  So having pork was interesting.  Not bad, just interesting.  And again, my family liked it, so if it appeals to you, try it!

My husband decided to cook it in a similar way to how we do it for our tamales, only without the sauce.  When I tasted it, I decided right then that I needed salsa verde to go with this!  I don't know why, but it was perfect!!  So, that's what we did.  It's scrumptious, as my son would say (this seems to be his new favorite word lately...everything's scrumptious!).

Puerco con Salsa Verde

For the Pork:

1 pork picnic roast (or any other pork roast...shoulder, butt, etc.  Ours was about 11lbs, but feel free to divide in 1/2 if needed for a smaller cut)
salt
pepper
garlic powder

For the salsa verde:

3 lbs of tomatillos
3 jalapenos (or as many as you like to be as mild or spicy as you choose...ours wasn't spicy but then neither were 2 of the 3 chiles)
2 garlic cloves
1/3 onion
1/4 bunch cilantro

Cut the pork into small chunks.  If you have the picnic roast like we did there is the huge outer layer of skin that can be cut up and made into chicharrones, or pork rinds.  Even if you don't eat them, you can keep the lard that it gives you for any unhealthy cooking that you plan to do in the future (said with tongue in cheek...we use lard for our tamales...or those bacon fat cookies...or to add flavor to just about anything). 

Season your pork with salt, pepper, and garlic powder (if cooking the skin just season that with salt).  Place the pork in a large pot over low heat and cook, and stir, until the pork is completely done and falls apart.

Here you can see we are separating the skin from the meat.  Again, we cook all of it, but we do so in different pots since we season them differently.

 The cooked pork. 

 

To make the salsa verde, take your tomatillos and peel the skin off and clean them well.  Add the tomatillos, onion, garlic, and jalapenos (we took the seeds and veins out and just cut them in half) to a pot with water.  Just add enough water to cover the tomatillos.  Boil until soft.  Process everything (but the water) in a blender...add water until you get the consistency you want.  It shouldn't be a paste, but not soup either...somewhere in between is perfect (sorry for the lack of a pic here...I guess I was snoozing or something!).  Add the salsa back into the pot it was just in and add some knorr chicken base and salt to taste.  I can't tell you how much because it really is a taste preference...just start small.  You can always add more, but there's not much to do if you add too much salt.  Once the taste is perfect, add the pork.  Simmer for about 10 minutes on low with the lid on so the pork can soak up the flavors.

Serve with refried beans and corn tortillas!  (You can serve more than this...this was my 2 yr old's plate...I scarfed mine down waaay too fast to be taking any pictures!).   This isn't really a difficult recipe, just a bit time consuming because of the cutting and cooking the pork.  After that part is done, it goes together really quite quickly and easily and is oh so very delicious!!!!

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Happily Homemade

Sandra