William Petruzzo

It feels something like my life revolves around cooking these days. Much of the time I’m not eating, I’m looking foreword to whatever the next meal is going to be. When I’m cooking the next meal, I’m starting to think about whatever the meal after that will be. I really am kind of a freak. Last week, as you might remember, I posted a painfully boring blog containing a recipe for chicken chili. I don’t really know if anyone was daring enough to try and make it (I hope you were), but regardless, being that summer is starting up soon and it’s time for tons of cookouts and pot-lucks and stuff (I’m not a 40 year old housewife, I promise), we’re gonna continue down this road of culinary and communal delight.

So, before I get into it, I gotta tell you, what I’m about to recommend that you cook is ridiculously good. I don’t use that word lightly. I mean it, ridiculously. If I may, let me demonstrate just how good I think this concoction is. If you look here on the left, you’ll notice my busted nose. Just a tad above that on the right, you’ll notice the bike rack on the back of my car. When leaving the grocery store after collecting all of the ingredients necessary for his meal, I caught that bike rack square in my face. As it turns out, I ought to be more careful when shutting the trunk of my car. I didn’t let that slow me down, no no, I just kept my eye on the unbelievably delicious prize: sweet, spicy, juicy, tender, pulled pork BBQ sandwiches. That’s right, your dream and mine, come true.

Here’s the beauty of this recipe. First of all, it’ll last you a long time. Make it once and you’ll be smooth sailing for a week or so. Second, it’s a manly dish. Third, it’s pretty hard to mess up (You’d probably have to be trying to mess it up). Fourthly, just in case I haven’t driven the point home enough, it tastes freakin’ awesome. So, without further adieu, let’s dive in.

Now, in this recipe I make my own BBQ sauce from scratch, which I think makes the recipe. However, if you don’t have any of the ingredients necessary for it, then you should just go and pick out your favorite bottled sauce.

The trick to really good pulled pork is letting it cook for a really long time. So you’ll need to get things started at lunch time if you want pulled pork for dinner. The pork cooking part is so easy, it’ll only take about 5 minutes to get started, then you can just leave it alone until its done. Here’s what you’re gonna need:

Pork:

• 4 lbs boneless pork (whatever is cheapest)

• 2 cans of beef broth (again, whatever is cheapest)

1. Empty the cans of beef broth into a slow cooker (i.e., crock-pot); if you don’t have one of those, you can just use an oven-safe pot (or a tin turkey roaster) and cook it in the oven. Without doing anything to the pork, put it into the broth. If you’re using a crock put, set it to high and put the lid on it. If you’re using your oven, cover the pot with a lid or tin foil and set the oven to about 250f. Now, walk away for about 4 hours.

2. When about 4 hours is up, fish the pork out of the broth and put it onto a cutting board. It’s gonna look pretty gross right now, so you’d better be okay with that. Using two forks (one to hold the pork still, and the other to rip it apart) shred the pork into little pieces. Don’t worry about being too tedious about it. When you’re done, you should have a big pile of stringy, gross looking pork, like on the left side of the photo below. Dump all that into big bowl.

INTERMISSION

Next we’re gonna need your BBQ sauce. If you’re not making your own sauce, skip this step and move on to the next one.

BBQ Sauce:

Here’s what you’re gonna need for the BBQ sauce:

• 2 cups of ketchup

• 1 can of tomato sauce

• 1 ¼ cups brown sugar

• 1 ¼ cups red wine vinegar

• ½ cup of molasses

• 4 teaspoons of liquid smoke

• 2 tablespoons of butter

• ½ teaspoon of garlic powder

• ½ teaspoon of onion powder

• ¼ teaspoon of chili powder

• 1 teaspoon of paprika

• ¼ teaspoon of ground cinnamon

• ½ teaspoon of cayenne pepper (add a lot more if you like it spicy, try 2 tablespoons)

• 1 teaspoon of salt

• 1 teaspoon of regular pepper

I know, those are a lot of ingredients. Don’t be intimidated. It’s really easy and your measurements don’t really need to be super precise. There’s a few things on that list, you probably aren’t going to recognize and might not have on hand. Namely, liquid smoke, molasses, and paprika. If you aren’t a poor college kid living alone, you probably have the rest of that crap in your closet already. The BBQ sauce takes about 20 minutes to cook, so you might want to start cooking it just before you take the pork out of the cooker.

1. When making the sauce, just take out a big sauce pan (like pictured), put it on medium heat and mix all the ingredients together well. Once it starts bubbling, turn the heat down to low and let it sit there for about 20 minutes. The longer you let it cook, the thicker the sauce will be.

RESUME PORK

1. Ok, so you have your big bowl of gross, stringy pork. Next your gonna dump your BBQ sauce (you’ll need about 2 ½ cups, or around 18 oz) into the bowl of pork. Use a big spoon and mix it all up real good.

2. Next, grab an oven safe pot or tin (if you used your oven to cook the pork the first time, just dump out the broth and use the same pot). Dump your stringy, porky, BBQ-y mess into the pot and cover it again. Turn the over up to about 350f, and slide the pot in. After about 30 – 45 minutes, it’ll be ready to eat.

3. Grab a bun, or just a spoon, and dig in.

I hope someone is daring enough to give this a go. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you share it. I hope everyone is filled and encouraged by the conversations shared over it.

I remember back when I first started serving as a youth leader we were having these weekly leadership meetings. The church we were part of didn’t have any kind of college age ministry, so the youth leadership team kind of became that ministry. Pretty much everyone college aged at the church was on the “team” and every week we would get together for some teaching, prayer and sometimes some kind of worship. It was a good time for most, although in hindsight there were all kinds of things inherent to the ministry that I definitely wouldn’t agree with today.

I remember one week we did a spiritual gift inventory test in order to learn what our spiritual gifts were. If I remember correctly, I’m a prophetic apostle with the gift of healing, flight and time travel. Alright, that was a joke, but needless to say, the inventories were a little bit off the wall in their assessment. I don’t really remember exactly what it determined my spiritual gifts were, but I do remember scoring pretty high in the “hospitality” category (I didn’t know you needed that spiritual gift to be hospitable… who woulda thunk it?); maybe it was marking “yes” on the question asking, “Do you enjoy being hospitable?”. Regardless of the test, that assessment has definitely been reflected in my life. I love to entertain people, I love to feed people, and I love to invite people over and help create a friendly, comfortable environment for people to make new friends or become closer with current friends. In that world of hospitality, one of my favorite things to do is to cook. I really enjoy putting my mind to learning new types of food—I’ve been told that I’m going to make a woman very happy and fat one day.

So, I think today I’m going to try something new. I’m going to share with you my most recent favorite recipe (Ha, this is pretty weird). I hope you’ll try it out and enjoy it and entertain others with it. Maybe over it, you’ll encourage a brother or sister in the Lord, or perhaps share the Gospel with some poor lost sinner.

So, my recent favorite recipe is Chicken Chili. Now, don’t get intimidated; there aren’t that many ingredients and it’s a hard recipe to mess up! One of the things I love about this recipe is that you don’t really need to use white meat chicken (chicken thigh will do), which means you can save money on your protein, or you could even omit the meat altogether and it’d still taste great. Here’s what you’re going to need:

- about 2 lbs chicken meat (chopped into little pieces)

- 2 green peppers (diced)

- 1 red pepper (diced)

- 1 onion (diced)

- 1 cup of canned corn (drained)

- 2 (15 oz) cans dark red kidney beans with liquid

- 2 (15 oz) cans light red kidney beans with liquid

- 2 (15 oz) cans of diced tomatoes

- 1 (15 oz) can of tomato sauce

- 2 tablespoons of chili powder

- 1 tablespoon of dried parsley

- 1 teaspoon of garlic powder

- 1 ½ teaspoon of ground cayenne

- ½ teaspoon of ground cumin

- 2 tablespoons of cornstarch

1. If you don’t think you’re much of a cook, you’re going to find that chili is pretty hard to mess up. You want to start with a big pot. Coat it with cooking spray and turn the heat up to around medium, then add your chopped peppers, onion and chicken. Stir it around every so often for about 15 minutes until the veggies start getting soft and the chicken looks reasonably well cooked (don’t worry about under cooking, it’ll have a chance to finish cooking later if it doesn’t finish now).

2. Next, add your corn, kidney beans, diced tomatoes and tomato sauce. Stir everything around, and rest assured, it will definitely look gross at this point.

3. Once you’ve got everything mixed up, you can add the chili powder, dried parsley, garlic powder, ground cayenne and ground cumin. (DO NOT ADD THE CORN STARCH YET!) Mix everything up real well then let it come to a boil.

4. Once you have the pot of stuff boiling, spoon out about half a cup of the juice from the pot (avoid the other ingredients) and put it in a bowl. Add your cornstarch to the juice you just dished out and mix it real well until all the little corn starch lumps are gone. Add the little mixture back to the larger pot and stir it up real well.

5. Turn the heat down to low and let it simmer. It will taste pretty good after about an hour of simmering, but it will really taste good the next morning for breakfast.

When you’re all done and ready to eat, you can top it with cheddar cheese, sour cream and tortilla chips, or try it with sour dough bread or some corn bread. It’s probably going to be good no matter how you serve it. The other great thing about chili and other stews is that you’ll have leftovers for like a week. If you don’t eat it right away, freeze it. It’ll heat up great.

            Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with twelve full posts about Christmas; in fact this is probably the last one for another 364-ish days.

            As I shared a few days ago, gift giving is not a huge deal in my family. We select names out of a hat and buy gifts only for the person whose name we drew. When buying for that person there is a fifty dollar limit that cannot be exceeded (at least not without getting a bunch of grief from the family). This year, I selected my mother and my father selected me. Here’s a run down, for all of your anxious to know what I got:

1.) Badly needed camera bag, large enough to hold my gear and comfortable enough to wear on my back for an extended period of time.

2.) Small square table to set next to my chair so that I can read and drink coffee/tea more comfortably.

(What can I say, I really like reading)

3.) Citrus zester; Santa overheard me complaining about using a cheese grater to zest a lemon the other day.

4.) A replacement lens cap for one of my poor lenses who’s UV filter is taking a heck of a beating.

            So this Christmas, I got pretty much everything I needed and asked for and abundantly more than I deserved when I consider the Life that we celebrate on this day.

Christmas Eve and Christmas are two dates out of the year where the Petruzzo family gets together for some serious tradition. Which frankly, is kind of weird. Most other times there’s really not too much tradition involved in my family. But tonight and tomorrow night are among the exceptions.

Tonight, Christmas Eve, we share a simple dinner passed down through my father’s family. It came from the tradition of meat abstinence before Christmas. Originally, my father’s family would have plain olive oil pasta and seven kinds of seafood (I can’t say for certain what they were, although I know eel was in there somewhere). After my oldest sister was born the meal became simpler; only green salad, olive oil and bread crumb pasta, and shrimp. Over the years the simple Christmas Eve meal elaborated itself in other ways. Today we usually share the meal with a small army of people who enjoy a few hours of each other’s company and the free beer.

Tomorrow will be a smaller affair, although no less tradition involved. Joining us will be our family’s closer friends. We’ll eat homemade cheese ravioli with my grandmother’s homemade meat sauce, escarole soup and a salad dressed with my father’s recipe. In our family, it is this meal that is the most coveted. We look foreword to eating the ravioli all year long and when it finally comes we usually stuff ourselves stupid.

Of course, in the end it’s always the conversations and the relationships that are remembered and it’s the tradition we hold that they ride in and out on every year. So, I guess tonight, more than anything, I would simply like to thank God for a season in the year that gives families reasons to gather around each other. Thank you Jesus.

          Well our Agape Dinner hosted at my house last night went excellent. We enjoyed a spiral cut ham, pineapple casserole, green beans, baked potatoes, macaroni and cheese, fresh baked bread, salad (with two types of dressing; dairy and non), then followed all of that by a small army’s worth of desserts; brownies, cookies, chocolate and lemon cake, cinnamon buns. Everything was excellent. We enjoyed excellent conversation and time together.

            Following dinner we spent time in worship together, thanks to the leading of a good friend. In the midst of worship we shared in communion together and finally sang our way out to “Joyful Joyful.” I believe the time was honoring to God and edifying to our spirits. I cannot wait until our next opportunity.

            If you’re local, and would like the chance to be involved next time, please let me know.

            Here I am, in my kitchen, making an iced lemon pound cake for dinner tonight. Tonight is the fourth “Agape Meal” that’s been shared at my house in the past several months. They spawned a while back when a good friend of mine had an urge during worship to share a meal together. About eight of us who were worshipping that night selected an evening that we were all free and we made our plans. That first night had an uncanny closeness to it. We each made different parts of the meal, spent some time in worship and prayer and then when we were finished we shared communion. All of us were encouraged and, at least speaking for myself, strengthened in the Lord. As I’ve been working on stuff for the meal tonight, it reminded me of some things that I’d like to share. Sometime in the future I plan to write more, but for now I will share in brief.

            A few months back, before we started having these meals together I had a conversation with a close friend of mine. I was in a rough patch in my life (and faith) and there were a lot of questions I was asking that perhaps didn’t need answers or shouldn’t be answered; questions primarily concerning the body of Christ and disappointments therein. It was at this time that my friend shared a vision that he had for the church; one in which the church would be encouraging. Where we could even meet a complete stranger, but were they in the Lord you would walk away from the conversation encouraged and inspired to press into God. The sad truth is that this just isn’t really the case on a large scale.

            Since that conversation, the scripture seems to just leap off the page at me; word after word after word telling us to be encouraged and to encourage one another. I believe that our primary responsibility to each other is encouragement; to lift up, edify, strengthen, exhort and admonish when necessary. I long for myself to be encouraging, to strengthen my brothers and sisters and I long to receive those things from God through them as well. That is part of the purpose of the Agape Meal; a specific time where we gather with the intention to encourage each other. I pray that as the body we would begin to ask God where it is our selfishness and pride drains us of our ability to be encouraging and that he would begin to correct that in us.