Here's Licorice with her paw on my hand:
I have no exact recipe for this, I just followed my mom's instructions.
Ingredients:
2 pork hocks
1 small package ground pork
1 small package ground beef
1 chicken breast
about 3 cups flour
1-2 tbsp salt
pepper
First I put the two pork hocks in a large pot and filled it with water till about 2-3" above the hocks and added a tbsp of salt. Then I simmered them on lowest heat possible for 6 hours, adding a chicken breast at the last hour:
Then I removed the meat from the broth and set the pot with the broth aside:
I gently picked apart the pork hocks and removed all the meat from the fat and put it on a separate plate along with the chicken breast:
Then I pulled apart the pork into smaller chunks, pulled the chicken apart into shreds and put them both back into the broth, and put some flour in a pan to brown. Now I had no idea how much flour to use because I've never eyeballed how much flour to put in a certain amout of broth to thicken it before. So I used this much to begin with, but I ended up needing about 3 times that much:
The flour should be browned to a golden-caramel colour like this, on low heat, stirring constantly:
Then set it aside in a separate container large enough to add the broth to. I slowly added the broth while whisking constantly, and it turned out quite liquid:
I thought it would do like with bechamel sauce and suddenly thicken up, so I added it to my big pot with the shredded meat and the rest of the broth and started to stir it, and saw that the teflon from the inside of my pot was starting to disintegrate. So I poured it all into two smaller stainless steel pots and picked out the tiny flecks of teflon floating on top with the corner of a paper towel. I'm never buying a teflon cooking pot again. Then I brought them back up to boiling to see if it would thicken up, but no.
So I re-did the flour/broth mix twice more (I used about the same amount as the first time both the second and third time cause I was afraid of using too much) with un-browned flour, putting more flour in the bowl and slowly adding more broth and whisking till I got a thick gravy, then adding it back into the two pots. The consistency between the two wasn't the same, so I kept having to pour the thickened broth back and forth between the two and whisking to get them the same consistency.
Once the broth was finally thickened, I started making the meatballs. I salted and peppered the meat and mixed it in before starting. What you do is take bit of ground pork in one hand and roughly the same amout of ground beef in the other, stick them together and roll it into a ball roughly the size of a golf ball. I didn't have enough room in my pots to add all the meat, I didn't have much left but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stir it without spilling lol:
Here you can see the 1/2 light 1/2 dark colour of the meatballs because of the two different meats used:
And finally, at 9:30pm after two hours of standing at the stove and a very sore back, here is the fruit of my labour, eaten with a single slice of buttered white bread because I had forgotten to boil some potatoes and carrots was too tired to do so by then:
It turned out delicious, but I lost my appetite before I finished my bowl because I was just so tired and had been smelling pork hocks boiling all day lol. I'm sure I'll have more of an appetite later today :P My mom said she doesn't add potatoes and veggies to the stew (or chicken, but apparently in Mat's family that's what the recipe calls for) but you can do that if you want. I think I might take one of the pots out of the fridge later to add potatoes and carrots and boil it a while longer. When that's done I'll freeze about half the batch in small containers to eat later.
I'm gonna go get ready for chuch. Mat should be coming home this afternoon in time to leave together for the Kam Fung in Chinatown tonight. We're going to eat with a bunch of my friends, I can't wait! I'm definitely gonna have to take a nap after church though :P
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