Aye, There's The Rub

I asked Jeff for the recipe for his pulled pork. You heard the cooking instructions yesterday; here is the rub recipe, which he got from the New York Times. He doubles or triples the recipe, makes it in a huge jar and uses it all summer long on chicken, steak, whatever he's grilling.

On the pork butts, it turned into a rich, black crust over the whole cut and was simply delicious, a little spicy but not crazily so.

Now, if we could just get some reasonable grilling weather, we'd be all set. Aye, there's the rub!

Dry Rub for Barbecuing, thanks to the NY Times

4 tablespoons paprika

4 tablespoons brown sugar

2 tablespoons kosher salt

2 tablespoons cracked back pepper

2 tablespoons ground cumin

2 tablespoons chili powder

2 tablespoons dry mustard

2 tablespoons ground coriander

1 tablespoon cayenne pepper

Mix ingredients together thoroughly and rub them generously all over the meat. Grill as normal.

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em

On Memorial Day, after poking through the town-wide garage sales here in the Point with our cousins Jan and Sherry, scoring a pair of purple suede gloves and giant American flag, we headed off with Cora to a Greyhound Get-Together in the Oakland back yard of our friend Jeff. All the other six dogs milling around in the yard were rescued greyhounds - Cora was the only exception. They are elegant dogs, graceful, sweet, funny and surprisingly calm. They are also very tall dogs and most of the food at a barbecue is exactly nose height for them.

We spent some time shooing them away from the main course, pulled pork that Jeff had nursed through 17 hours of smoking, getting up every two hours to check the fire. His efforts were well rewarded - this was easily the best pulled pork I have ever eaten and that includes having eaten some of the best in the world down in southern Virginia and North Carolina where they know smoking and they know pork.

He uses a dry rub on his pork butts, then smokes them indirectly on his Weber grill. It's not a fancy setup but the results are heavenly. We built pulled pork sandwiches topped with cole slaw and surrounded by toasted buns, nibbled on corn that had been grilled on the Weber as well, and enjoyed learning more about greyhounds, their lives before and after racing, and the people who love them enough to rescue them once their brief racing careers are over.

Cora spent the entire afternoon listening to her genes (the vet thinks she's half border collie and half German Shepherd) and herding the hounds - she was on the go the entire time. She will sleep all day today as a result, no doubt dreaming of smoked pork.

Red Dot Pork

Cousin Jan and I had a play day recently. We drove to Santa Rosa to tour Luther Burbank's house and garden and to get all the inside gossip about his mother and his wives from the docent who obviously relished the human side of an icon. We took a lot of photos of beautiful flowers, learned what pawpaws look like, enjoyed a day of absolutely perfect weather, and had lunch at the Santa Rosa Junior College Culinary Café.

At the Café, all the cooks, prep cooks, bakers and servers, except three instructors, are students. They have a bakery case at the front of the store with temptations from the students who are learning to bake breads, cakes, cookies, etc., but you can also sit down to eat lunch there.

The front room is lively, with a view of the kitchen and lots of coming and going. We were ushered into the much quieter back dining room and seated by the window. The menu contained several tempting offerings as well as the welcome note at the bottom that Senior Citizens enjoy a 15% discount on their meals, a little reward for getting so darn old.

I ordered a pulled pork sandwich and Cousin Jan ordered a pizza. The student waiters were charming, with lots of smiles and earnest effort. Two days into the semester, service was a little ragged but I expect they will both earn A's by the end of the term. They brought lemon-scented water and iced tea to drink, were prompt about refilling our glasses, checked back with us to make sure everything was good, and generally did as good a job as many professional waiters do.

Here's the plate they brought me - overflowing, as you can see, and served open-faced with twice as much pulled pork as I could eat on a very soft bun, with hand cut shoestring potatoes and cole slaw made with a curly cabbage. The pulled pork had a pot of mango barbecue sauce on the side, just in case I needed more. It tasted simply sweet at first, so I asked for some hot sauce and our waiter brought out not one, not two, but three brands for me to choose from. I chose the sriracha; those are the little red dots you see decorating the sandwich.

If you're looking for an inexpensive outing for lunch, I'd recommend the Café. Almost all the heads in our dining room were gray - it's clearly a place where Senior Citizens gather, a sure sign of value for the buck. Even their steak is only $9.50 and that's before they apply the 15% discount for us old birds. Plus, it makes me feel young when almost everyone else in the room is older than I.

Fair Food

When I mentioned to pal Sari that the Sonoma County fair was on in Santa Rosa, she immediately abandoned our earlier plans in favor of the fair. Turns out Sari loves county fairs. Since it was her birthday celebration, we happily went along for the ride.

We had a splendid time enjoying the goat judging, seeing baby pigs and chickens, photographing polished cows as they were paraded around the ring, admiring gigantic work horses and watching splash dogs and performing house cats. The flower pavilion was an amazing burst of color and the Elvis impersonator was convincingly fat and glittery, thank you vera, vera much.

Fair food is not good for you. Most of it is fried, or sweetened to the max. So what? It's fun and we enjoyed the sin food vera, vera much. For example, the chocolate-covered bacon, which Chilebrown had alerted us to. I have to say, I'd probably not eat it again but, what the heck, it was an experience. Chewy bacon slathered with dark chocolate - what's not to like?

On the ever-so-slightly more healthy side, we enjoyed some fresh lemonade from a stand shaped like a giant lemon with three giggly high school girls squeezing fresh fruit for us, and these pulled pork sliders from Johnny Garlic's, a Santa Rosa institution that had a stand at the fair. Guy Fieri's flamboyant self was not there but his image certainly was.

The weather was perfect, the crowd was cheerful and we were birthday mode. A perfect day at the fair.

Rosso! Rosso!

On a recent Saturday, My Beloved and I took pal Sari back up to Santa Rosa to sample Rosso again. Major, major home run!

Agreeing to share bites of everything, we started with a flatbread appetizer smeared with garlic roasted with balsamic vinegar, squeezing the dark, now-soft cloves out onto the crisp-tender flatbread and devouring it like starving wolves.

Sari ordered a pizza with egg in the middle, a drippy, unctuous, cheesy wonder of a pizza on that dreamy Rosso crust that we raved about before. My Beloved chose a sandwich of flatbread wrapped around a super-fresh filling of Dungeness Crab Louis. He didn't use the Louis dressing at all, just folded the bread around the generous crab and bit in. I tasted the Louis, however, just out of curiosity, and it was a whole different animal than the mayo-ketchup mixture that usually passes for Louis.

I have saved the best for last - my "forever-cooked" (their words) pork with mashed potatoes. If I had to choose my final meal before the blindfold, the cigarette and the firing squad, this would be it. I love slow-cooked pork in most iterations but this one rises to the level of divinity with its rich, smoky sauce and pink grapefruit sections. Yes, grapefruit! Not white grapefruit that might have fought with the almost-sweet sauce but pink that just gently cut through the richness of the dish and made it sit up and sing.

Happily full and satisfied, we drove a little further up the road to Healdsburg to stroll around the square, window shopping as we relived our wonderful Rosso lunches. Saturdays don't get much better than that.

If You Love Pulled Pork...

- and who doesn't? - you might want to give this stuff a try. In my quest to try things I've never had before, it finally dawned on me that I could try - well, duh! - some convenience foods, too. Having been taught mostly to cook from scratch, it rarely occurs to me to look for already-prepared foods. I happened upon this package at my local supermarket. I'm one of those people who will almost always order the pulled pork sandwich if it's on a restaurant menu, so this was a natural for me.

I liked it. It was mildly spicy (and I'm a spice wimp, so you can trust me on this one) and sweetly smoky with nice big chunks of tender pork. The barbecue sauce hadn't been ruined with too much sugar nor that hideous fake smoke flavor that dominates so many commercial sauces. I might have liked a little tang to follow but that's nitpicking. It was seriously good pulled pork and I'd buy it again any time I need a quick and delicious lunch or dinner. If you love pulled pork like I do, get thee to thy local store and pig out!