In the kitchen: Fun with sauerkraut!

The problem: Last weekend, we braised a smoked pork loin in prepared sauerkraut (i.e. liquid removed, caraway added) with apple cider. It worked well enough, but had plenty of juicy kraut left over, even after repeating the process with a length of turkey sausage.

The experiment: I figured cooking the sauerkraut mixture on high heat for a while would dry it out and carmelise the cider, leaving me with a rich sweet-sour condiment. But I got to the point where it was starting to stick and it tasted sugary from all the concentrated fruit juice, but not carmelly. So I tossed in some diced sweet onion to extend the cooking and hopefully add balance.

The result: When the onion had a nice brown colour, I took it off the heat and then spread it on fried canadian bacon slices on pseudo-black bread (i.e. Brownberry "Dark German Wheat"), which I should've toasted first because the warmth and moisture made it go limp immediately. Of course the repeating cookings had pretty much destroyed any texture left in the sauerkraut, but I'm a fan of onion marmelade, so that didn't bother me much. I got my sweet-sour taste, but a little too much sharpness.

The verdict: Worth doing to rid us of the leftovers, but not worth preparing from scratch. Next time I think I would use less onion and sautee it a bit before adding the sauerkraut.

monshu announced his intention to do pork roast tonight, so I brought over the recipe for herb-crusted pork in the latest Cooks Illustrated that I've been dying to try. He's thrilled that I'm taking care of tonight's entree, I'm thrilled that I can fulfill my resolution to try at least one new recipe from that magazine each month, and hopefully we'll both be thrilled when we eat it.

UPDATE: OMFG, if that pork roast had turned out any moister, we would've fucked it instead of eating it. Definitely a keeper. The recipe made an ungodly amount of breading, though, and I could've used more herb paste. Next time, I think I'll halve the one and double the other.

"Sean-Amadán" is ainm dom

I don't know what kind of crazy, sappy mood I'm in tonight, but this short film (about 13 minutes long) brought tears to my eyes.

Grammatical tidbits, cont.: Hmong

I couldn't hold myself back from playing with my new Hmong dictionary the night I bought, even if the format is super-annoying. For reasons I can't pretend to understand, the entries themselves are bound in landscape orientation, whereas the prefatory material and appendices are bound portrait. This isn't much of a problem as long as you're only browsing within each section, but I was trying to look up entries for the kinship terms given in a chart in the back of the book and it was a royal pain. So far, I've learned three new things about Hmong Daw:

1. Hmong Daw has a lateral fricative. You know that crazy Welsh ll that I'm always trying to teach people? I know of few other languages which have it, and they're mostly concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. The only other East Asian language I can think of with [ɬ] is Hoisanese (i.e. 台山話, a Yuè dialect spoken in the "Sze Yap" or "Four Districts" region of the Pearl River Delta), so I'm more than a little surprised to find it turning up here. (AFAIK, there aren't any Hmong in the area outside of a small, recent colony in Dongguan district, so a borrowing relationship is inconceivable.)
2. Hmong Daw has complex onsets. I knew it had initial affricates like [ʦ]. I even knew it had pre-nasalisation. But I did not expect to find words like nplhiab (IPA [mbɬíə]). That initial is described as "bilabial with lateral release" and there's a whole freakin' series of them including hml (which could be written in Welsh orthography as mhll--not that even Welshmen could necessarily say it!).
3. Hmong Daw has classifiers. This, on the other hand, I could see coming. I still haven't figured out who in East Asia died and made them cool--Classical Chinese doesn't have them, but all modern varieties do--but I've learned to expect them from any language that has been in contact with Chinese more than fleetingly. Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai--so, of course, Hmong.