If you’ve been keeping up with the column, you will know that my wife Jill and I have been expecting our first child. Well, the wait is over! Early in the morning on March 22, our baby boy was delivered happy, healthy and loud. Really, you should have seen the sunrise peaking into the room as it happened; it was beautiful.
Anyway, Jill and I have been happily cooing with our baby at home since. When you’re cooped up with a newborn, it’s not easy to get out to the lovely restaurants of Portage County like we would have normally done. So we changed up our plans!
Since it was going to be tough to highlight a local restaurant in this month’s column, I decided to instead highlight local business Duma Meats. They are a truly special neighborhood butcher in Mogadore with their wide variety of not-so-easy-to-find cuts and selects.
I come from a family of cooks, so once the baby was here, my freezer was thoroughly stocked. Both sides of the family were eager to take what stress they could away from our new entrance into parenthood by hopping into the kitchen. When I discussed cooking at home for a column so we could avoid taking our baby out to a nice restaurant, everyone was excited. A potluck! A family affair that could take place in my kitchen, passing around the baby and eating some great home-cooked meals.
I have been asked plenty of times what my favorite dish to cook at home is. While I don’t have one specific meal, all of my answers seem to follow a similar theme: I love to cook something that takes a good bit of time, but is mainly hands off. Homemade bolognese is a great example: dice up all of the vegetables and prepare the pork and beef, and let it cook for a few hours. Make sure to invite some friends over so they can compliment how nice the house smells.
The meal that I made used this idea and focused entirely around the meat that I bought from Duma Meats.
Duma Meats is exciting for regulars and newcomers combined. They are a family-owned business with roots trailing all the way back to the 1920s, when their great-grandpa Lawrence Duma moved to the United States from Romania. The store has grown from a little market held inside of his house to the community staple it is now.
Catch them at a busy time, and you will be surrounded by the sounds of hollered ticket numbers and the sights of bloody aprons and steaks. The line to the counter for fresh cuts might be long, but you can kill some time walking around the coolers in the center of the room filled with the cuts that certainly fill foodies with delight: whole ducks, rabbits, cuts of venison, the often-forgotten livers and hearts, and even some packages of ostrich and kangaroo!
I came with a plan in mind, however, and made my way to the counter to ask for a large slab of pork belly. For those that have never worked with it before, this is the rich, fatty cut used in the making of bacon. My mother tagged along to buy the protein for her addition to the potluck, grabbing one of those whole ducks from the cooler. Once we got back home, we got to work researching recipes and methods to cook the new ingredients in our refrigerator.
The next time we met up was in my kitchen. I had a plan with the belly, and it matched up perfectly with the kind of cooking I have leaned toward since having our baby. I started by filling the bottom of a large pot with sliced onions, garlic, fresh ginger, peppercorns, green onion and sliced apple. Then went in my pork belly, which I sliced into four pieces just to make sure all of the meat would fit into the pan. The belly was massaged with a marinade of soy sauce, sugar, miso paste and gochujang. That last ingredient is a spicy, sweet paste used frequently in Korean cooking, made from chili powder and fermented soybeans. It is an exciting ingredient that goes great in lots of dishes, and I would recommend trying it out!
After all of the ingredients were in the pot, I simply covered with a lid and set on low, planning to cook for around three hours, but I checked for doneness with a thermometer every so often.
My mom’s dish was just as exciting. She planned on making an interpretation of a Chinese Peking duck. She started by drying the skin overnight by leaving it uncovered in the fridge, which helps to give the end product a crunchy texture, aided further by the glaze we used. We baked the duck, and every half hour basted it with the glaze, made simply from soy sauce, vinegar and honey. Along with a crisp skin, the glaze created a beautiful amber color.
Just before all of the food was finished cooking, the rest of the family arrived. After all, what’s the fun in cooking if no one is around to eat everything? We set up a big dining table right in my living room because the usual two-person table my wife and I share simply wasn’t enough. We set out plates and did our best to dress everything nicely, even if it was on a fold-out table.
This was the first time having guests over for dinner since bringing our baby boy home, and I was ecstatic. As everyone sat, they took in the peppery, fatty, aromatic smells of the dishes in the kitchen we had been working on all day. We loaded our plates with steaming white rice, rich sliced pork belly and the crispy, sticky-sweet duck. To complement the heavy meats, we passed around piles of sharp red and green onions, bright cucumbers and jalapeños for extra heat when you needed it. The extra veg paired perfectly, offering something fresh and crunchy to go alongside the rich, slow-cooked meats.
But honestly, I don’t think that I needed to try as hard as I did preparing dinner. Once the plates were finished, everyone jumped back to passing around our baby. I would dare to say that the pork belly wasn’t the star of the show that night.