Lazy (and Cheap) Man Roast Pig

Following along in the footsteps of Lazy Man Roast Chicken and Lazy Man Pizza, it's time to check into my dealings with pig and one of my favorite cuts from that delicious animal, the shoulder. Don't get me wrong - if I had my druthers, I'd be roasting a whole suckling pig, but those suckers are expensive, I'm cooking for one a lot of the time, and who the hell can eat 10 -15 pounds of swine, no matter how tasty the beast might be?

When it comes to fresh pig and it's primal cut the shoulder, there are a couple of different names used. From the top half of the shoulder you've got pork butt (yes, butt = shoulder in pig talk), Boston butt, Boston shoulder roast, etc. and from the foreleg or bottom half of the shoulder you get picnic leg, picnic shoulder, picnic roast, pernil and whatever other fancy names the marketing geniuses have come up with recently. Here's a chart of the pork primals that I took from a classic book called Cutting Up in The Kitchen by Merle Ellis...and anyone who wants a great primer on butchery ought to have this book in their collection...it's available for around $3 used, and I've had my dog-eared copy since about 1978...

There really is no greater bargain when buying fresh pork than the picnic shoulder roast, and that's probably because it scares a lot of people off. For instance, I was walking by my local market today and pernil was $.79 a pound - that's not a typo, either. So, for about $8, you can buy a roast big enough to feed 10 hungry people and have a leftover hunk for sandwiches and the soup pot.

This past weekend Significant Eater was stuck in DC due to our ummm, inclement weather...

so I bought a small hunk of pernil - it was around 4 pounds, and since it wasn't on sale, it cost me all of $5. I took about 5 cloves of garlic, and mashed them up in my mortar and pestle, along with a handful of fennel seeds, some olive oil, grated orange rind (you wash your orange first, don't you?), the juice from that orange, fresh thyme, salt and pepper. Then, I trimmed the thick skin off the shoulder (don't throw it out, roast it along with the pernil) and rubbed the marinade all over the pork. Into a plastic bag it went, and I left it in the fridge for the next two nights. I loaded it onto a rack in a roasting pan with the juices from the marinade keeping it company...

Now the shoulder is a cut that benefits from a long, slow roast, so that's what I did - about 5 hours at 275 F, most of the time covered with that hunk of skin you see hanging out to the left. You can add a little liquid (water, wine, stock, whatever) to the pan if you like, but at that temp there's really no worries about burning things. I may have turned it over once or twice during its roast, and I took the skin off the top for the last hour or so to crisp it all up. Lookee here...

Serve this beauty up with a mess of greens (I made collards) and maybe even some beans, and you've got yourself quite a meal. Make that 5 meals - I had it again for lunch today, and it was still great. I might have to make another one real soon though, since SE's coming home early Friday for a long weekend. As long as it doesn't look like this...