Pork Belly

Megan took me out for dinner last Friday night to The Boat Street Cafe in Seattle. When I go out to eat, I like to get food I've never had before or something I wouldn't normally cook myself. Well, the Boat Street Cafe had the perfect menu for that kind of gastronomic adventure. I had never eaten pork belly before, let alone seen it on a menu, so I had to give it a go. (I guess Megan wasn't feeling all that adventurous. She ordered a steak.) Pork belly is essentially a chunk of uncured bacon, complete with a bit of rind, a lot of fat, and a few streaks of meat. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it? Well, the way they prepared it, it was delicious. The rind gave it a bit of a crunch, the fat was light and almost buttery, and the meat held up it's reputation in some quarters as nature's candy. It was served with a salty, sweet, spicy-hot cranberrry sauce that complemented the very rich pork belly perfectly. The sauce was so good that I tried to duplicate it serve with a batch of my world-famous ribs that I made on Sunday. It turned out pretty well, so well in fact, that the sauce may become a standard accompaniment to the ribs.

On Saturday we went to see Burn After Reading, the latest offering from the Coen brothers. Like most of their movies (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, to name a few) , it was very well done and very entertaining, and made you think on top of it all. It had another trademark of Coen Bros. films - for me at least - I walked out knowing I seen a good movie and was well entertained, but I wasn't really sure if I got it.

I had an email from daughter Megan today. She's off in the wilds of Ukraine on a business trip. She was shocked to have been served some very Mennonite-looking dishes at a restaurant in Kiev. I reminded her that our ancestors came to Canada from southern Ukraine 120 years ago, so it's not too surprising that the Ukrainians may have stolen a dish or two from them.