Normal Entree Progression

     Tam and I enjoyed pork barbecue Friday night, the kind that consists of pork and a few vegetable cooked down in a smoky, tomato-based sauce with hints of sweet and spicy.  You ladle it onto buns, maybe add a little more sauce, and there you go.

     That's not the notable part.  What worth writing about is why, and what else works that way.

     The reason we had barbecue is that we had a pork roast last Sunday, a Boston Butt (still $3.99 a pound) marinated overnight in vinegar, soy sauce, Worcestershire and spices, then roasted for at least an hour per pound in a covered pan on the grill.  I'd added an apple, carrots, celery, a potato, a red onion, diced multicolored bell peppers, a can of mild green chilies, a big fresh tomato (diced) and a bottle of shakshuka tomato sauce.  In parts of the Middle East/Mediterranean, they poach eggs in that sauce, and it's delicious, but the sauce is kind of like supercharged marinara but sweeter and hotter, a spice profile that works in a lot of contexts.

     There were, of course, leftovers.  It was a three-pound roast.  I sliced the meat, bagged it in a gallon freezer bag, and laid it flat in the freezer for later.  Friday night, I put the bag in the microwave to defrost while I squeezed a couple of chorizo sausages out of their casings, fried and drained them, then poured most of a bottle of dark, smoky barbecue sauce over it and let it simmer.  I added the thawed pork roast leftovers and snipped it up small with kitchen shears and a potato masher, adding some gumbo file to thicken it (a little bit of that stuff works really well!).  The end result passed nicely as barbecue.

     Leftover pork roast can end up as pasta sauce, Hoppin' John or "chili" (red stew) starter, too.  If there's more sauce and vegetables than meat, you can poach eggs in it, and incline the spices Italian (Eggs Pomodoro!) or Middle Eastern (a version of Shakshuka you'd better not mention in its hometowns).

     Other main dishes work the same way.  Tam and I don't make much of a dent in a rotisserie chicken -- a leg or two and a wing for her, some breast meat for me.  But afterward, it's a simple job to get the rest of the meat off the bones, skin and all, and freeze it for chicken soup or stew later.  Meat loaf (I occasionally buy one from the butcher counter, oven-ready) can be cooked on the covered grill in the summer (why heat up the kitchen?*), and the leftovers become hot or cold sandwiches, or the meat in spaghetti or red stew.  A beef roast without tomatoes becomes soup or stew later; with tomatoes, it works as well as the pork roast in various tomato-based dishes.

     Looking back, I really started doing this consistently during the pandemic, but with the prices for meat never having come back down, it makes sense to continue, and the end result is pretty tasty, too.
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* Having got the charcoal grill down to an easy process -- most starts take one match, and I'm only using lump charcoal, hardwood kindling and no accelerant, after a long, gradual learning process -- I have realized the old notion of a "summer kitchen" is absolutely brilliant.  Why heat up the house when you can cook outdoors?