This Spicy Fried Minced Pork recipe is Steve's. Steve gives me more grief about keeping a blog than everyone else combined. He loves to point out what a big nerd I am. I think he's protesting a little too much. He enjoys my nerdiness because he (erroneously) thinks he's Charles Atlas by comparison. Any time his wife, Tanya calls him a nerd he says, "Jim is nerdier." Most of the time she buys it and counts herself lucky. I can imagine her thinking, 'At least my big dork of a husband isn't as nerdy as Jim. Whew.' I generously let Steve continue his delusion.

Wait. Who am I kidding? I AM nerdier than Steve - but not by much.

When Steve ranted about this recipe I suggested he blog it. But he wasn't falling for that. He did type it up and email it to me. This was absolutely delicious - certainly as good as Steve said. However, it was strange for me to cook this. I really had no idea what the final product would be. I realized when I pick a recipe I have an idea of what it will be. Naturally, this guides me when I make it because I imagine how each ingredient will affect the final product. On this one, I had no idea. So, I followed the recipe as close as possible and trusted that it would turn out. It did. Excellent.

For the pork, I ground up a couple pork chops I had in the freezer. Grinding it myself gave it a nice coarse texture. The only thing that I did that varied from Steve's recipe was I probably used twice the fish sauce and I couldn't find Kaffir leaves so I used the juice from half a lime.

When I was picking up ingredients at Krieger's in Cuyahoga Falls I saw they had morels. At West Point Market in Akron, I've seen morels for $189 a pound! Today, at Krieger's they had them for $19.95 a pound. I picked out five or six nice ones and when I went through the checkout they rung up at ninety-five cents. "Wait, I'm going to get more." I ran and grabbed a big double handful - $1.85. Holy crap, I need to get more. So, I bought a pound. I counted them - 148 morels. Woohoo!



I cut them in half to get out any bugs and soaked them in salt water for a few minutes. Now they're in the dehydrator. Tomorrow, after they're dry, I'll vacuum pack them and freeze them. I'll be cooking with morels for a year. Yo.