I had been meaning to try this classic Portuguese surf-and-turf dish for a couple weeks. Tonight was the night!

This recipe features a pork tenderloin cut into large cubes and marinaded in a smokey-spice paste with wine. The marinade has very little salt; I’ll have to see what Harold McGee has to say about salt in marinades, but I normally think of brining pork as a good thing. (McGee says that marinades use acidity to tenderize the meat and help it retain moisture while also infusing flavor. I think the reason the marinade does not use much salt is because the liquid is traditionally added back into this dish to form the broth. Brines typically have a high salt content, meaning one could easily over-salt this dish if the marinade is also a brining liquid and that is added to the broth. At the same time, I would recommend adding as much salt as you think the dish will later need to the marinade as it should only improve the meat and dish, especially if the salt is added to the paste rather than after the wine if poured over.) The dish and a side of “Sautéed Kale with Pine Nuts and Onions” took about 3.5 hours to make.

Cooking Notes: Select small new potatoes. You may also notice that the image in the book depicts more traditional roasted potato cubes, which I’d like to try next time. I would add salt to the marinade as the pork came out dry. When browning the pork, don’t use too high of heat as the marinade has lots of garlic in it that will turn into a black glob of carbon (or just be careful to remove this glob.) When cooking, make sure the pork is evenly submerged and try to cook it to temperature (so add it later to the pan than the clams and experiment with a thermometer. Also, maybe add more liquid if you’ve lost more than expected.) I cooked a lot of the liquid out of the kale and liked this. If you are using cider vinegar instead of wine, go easy on it and taste frequently. Remember to heavily salt the water for your kale.

Tasting Notes: The sauce and clams in this dish were amazing! The pork was dry and tough though; this cut needs more attention during the cooking than I gave it. The most popular English versions of this dish online actually braise the pork, so that may be worth trying. It could be that the traditional version, which uses the loin, has somewhat chewy and dry pork. The kale seems fairly superfluous; I was mostly hunched over the clam and pork bowl without remembering this side, but I’m glad I made a green vegetable nonetheless. Going to try to make some “heavenly” salt-cod the next time I cook from this book, I think!

Joe’s Rating: 6/5 (clams & pork / kale)
Difficulty: 7/4

Another “vegetable” dish from this very flavorful cookbook. I substituted chorizo for the Linguiça, which sounds less spicy. The recipe actually suggests chouriço as a substitute, which is a Portuguese sausage that is similar to chorizo. There’s 6 oz of very flavorful meat in this recipe for a pound of frozen peas – not insignificant. The chorizo is used to flavor olive oil at high heat, which in turn flavors the other components of the dish.

For some reason I have rarely (if ever) cooked with sausage. I normally like to make my ingredients from scratch, and sausage skirts the line of something that can be made at home. This recipe will change my practices – it is clearly worth using a potent sausage like chorizo as a cooking ingredient. The resulting flavor was unique – smokey, but also a bit earthy/gamey/leathery. This is not a flavor that can be readily achieved through just spices and uncured meat.

Several eggs are poached in the peas before serving. I served the peas on top of a light serving of plain white rice. I would recommend this. As I mentioned, the flavor was deep, smokey, and meaty. With the rice, this definitely stands alone as a course or meal. Using this as a side to another meat dish would be very decadent; I think it would be important to make sure there isn’t too much overlap in the smokey cured-meat flavor. I couldn’t help but have seconds and ended up feeling surprisingly full (more so than a calorie count of the ingredients would have suggested.) These peas set a pretty high bar for the cookbook and I’m excited to make more recipes!

Cooking Notes: Don’t go light on salt; by the time you season, most of the salt will have left the meats, so you don’t need to account for that. A tsp is probably good (but go by taste.) The cooking can use a notch or two higher heat than suggested to good results (note I was using cast iron.)

Joe’s Rating: 7.5
Difficulty: 4.5

I decided to make some Portuguese vegetable-focused dishes for personal sustenance. This is my first time cooking out of this 2018 book by Ana Ortins. I researched Portuguese cookbooks over the Christmas holiday and decided on this one; however, I cannot recall what led me to that decision. My experience with it so far based on this one recipe is positive.

This dish is clearly a relative of Moroccan spiced carrots (the cookbook Plenty features a version of this that I cooked in 2016.) The carrots are roasted then tossed with a spicy dressing made with a mortar and pestle. I recall the Plenty-version being more of a spice powder. This version has less cumin and a lot more lemon and garlic. I’d actually go easy on the lemon, especially if they’re big. Try 2 tbsp instead of 1 lemon. The number of servings is definitely for a small side. As a main with rice, this feeds 2.

The carrots are potent: garlicky, lemony, with lighter notes of earthy spices. I really like the pine nuts, especially that they called for 1/2 cup. This makes them very prominent in the dish. There’s also enough dressing to coast some rice or bread. The cook is given the option of cilantro or parsley; I went with the former as it’s featured in the title of the recipe.

Joe’s Rating: 6.5
Difficulty: 5