House Fire Carnitas

You may not know this from my absolutely wonderful attitude, but our house caught on fire a few weeks ago. Actually, you probably know all about it because every time someone innocuously asks “how are you?” Eric or I will respond with “okay I guess…” which totally leads into the whole “aww, what’s wrong?” question and then we get to tell a gesture-filled story of what happened a few weeks ago. Eric’s side of the story really does not matter because he didn’t answer the phone the first two times I called to tell him I might die. He will receive floggings for this for the next 10 years. So here is what happened.

After a very busy day of doing nothing but lying in bed eating Chicago Mix popcorn and watching Bravo TV, I decided it might be time to take a shower. I had just put the ingredients for my favorite carnitas in the crock pot that I got for Christmas. It might be a good time to admit that I have never owned a crock pot before this year. I saw this rainbow crock pot at Target that was so fly I knew it had to be mine. So, I loaded it up with the ingredients that I previously had cooked on the stovetop and then finished off at a lower temp in the oven, and went about lounging. We had friends coming over for dinner at 7, and I had 2 hours to kill before then when I would make Spanish rice and guacamole. There was also a cheesecake chilling in the fridge. More on that later.

I decided that, because my life was now leisurely given the existence of my beautiful new crock pot, I should take this extra time to really focus on being a better me. I grabbed coconut oil and a fresh razor and set out in the shower to shear my winter coat from my legs.

 

It was halfway through my backbreaking labor of leg shaving that I noticed Zooey (our dog) had come into the bathroom. I’d like to point out that she never, ever, ever enters the bathroom. She is afraid of naked people. She refuses to go anywhere near the shower. She is a fearless dog who once attacked a drunk neighbor of ours for jumping out of the bushes waving Duck a l’orange in a to-go box. She obsessively stares out the window at strangers and their dogs until her eyelashes tremble so much that they fall off. She fears nothing in this world, but the shower? It’s just too much for her. One of her best party tricks is when we say “Zooey, do you want to take a shower?” and she cowers in fear in the lap of someone. It’s usually someone who has said they think that Zooey dislikes them. Yes, I’m aware that this is emotional animal abuse.

 

She stood outside the shower door and stared at the wall behind me. I assumed she had seen a ghost and decided to keep doin mah thang so that my legs would match in both color and hairlessness. Instead, she escalated her odd behavior and started grumbling a lot. She is not a very vocal dog unless she’s barking herself into a seizure at a doorbell ring. I noticed that the shower was beginning to feel very hot, and I turned the heat down on the water as I coughed at what I thought was steam in the shower. The water got colder, but the shower air remained brutally hot. I began talking to Zooey to try and comfort her, because she was obviously having a stroke of some kind. I kept coughing as I did this. This only served to upset her more, and she started clawing at the shower door. By this point I began to feel a lot more anxiety about her behavior. I opened the shower door to ask her what was wrong, thinking smartly to myself that maybe she was thirsty very specifically for only shower water from my hands. It was at this point that she jumped in the shower with me, something she has never done in her 6 years in my care, and started clawing at my leg, almost pulling me down. I figured that maybe she just needed to pee?

 

Throwing on my pink bathrobe (which had conveniently been shrunk in last week’s wash) with shampoo still in my hair, I ran out into the living room with Zooey to let her outside. What I saw scared the non-existent pants off of me. I could see random white people trying to climb our fence outside. I thought one of them had  an axe but that could be the stress talking? I thought to myself, “wow, that’s a really obvious way to rape someone.” Then the doorbell started ringing non-stop and I heard banging on the front door. Now I was convinced that not only was this a planned rape, but that there was a group of people who were going to ritualistically murder me. I watch a lot of crime shows. I know what’s up.

 

I called my husband to tell him my goodbyes. Really, what I said was “um, there are a ton of people banging on the door and FYI I am NOT answering. Call me back.” Then I decided to face my fear and die with dignity, so I flung open the front door angrily to show how put out I was by this rape/murder before a dinner party, and yelled “WHAT????” I was met with the faces of probably 15 neighbors that I had never seen before, and one young woman led the pack. She said that our house was on fire.

 

My first thought was that it was the crock pot, and I had somehow misused it and was now being punished for using the devil’s cooker and not doing backbreaking slow cooking work on my own. I quickly apologized to the neighbors, who at the time were faceless to me, and grabbed the dog and my car keys, and started to head for the garage. They told me not to get in my car because the garage was on fire. I yelled back “IT’S A LEASE I DON’T KNOW WHAT INSURANCE COVERS” and started to get in anyway.

Then it hit me. They were totally going to cut the power on the house when the fire department got here. The cheesecake would collapse. It had only just started setting. I ran back inside, turned the crock pot down to low, and then grabbed the cheesecake and a jar of chocolate dulce de leche. Priorities, people. Then I escaped my burning house.

 

It was all kind of a blur after that. I got ahold of my husband and my dad. I called our dear friend, who immediately sent me to voicemail because we have a deal not to talk on the phone. She’ll have PTSD from not answering for the rest of her life. I tweeted a picture saying I was okay in case it made it on the news and any of our friends knew it was on our block. Friends arrived to comfort me. 3 different people tried to make me put on clothes, and finally I was convinced that me being naked was upsetting other people. Then I appeared on the nightly news with no bra on under my tshirt and bathrobe and no make up on and shampoo still in my hair. We had our lives, and we had our dog, and we were safe with friends for the evening. Our neighbor's young son was unsupervised and burning leaves in the backyard, and it lit both their house and ours on fire. It was awful to watch our very first home, purchased only 6 weeks earlier, burn in front of us. 13 firetrucks came. It was all unbelievable.

 

And Zooey saved my life. I am eternally grateful. 

 

Here’s the point of this story. Even though our house was a disaster with huge holes in the ceilings and water damage on everything, the kitchen seemed unscathed. So we totally ate the carnitas the next night, and they were delightful. It was kind of nice to know that something good came out of the fire. Without further ado, here’s the recipe that made everything better the next night. They’d never tasted so good.

 

P.S. These carnitas have plenty of life-changing zesty flavor. They go great on top of brown rice, scrambled in with eggs, or with whole wheat tortillas, a little red onion, and avocado. Citrus is in season, and this is a versatile way to use it. The recipe makes plenty of leftovers that only taste better with time.

Ingredients:

6 lb boneless pork butt, fat trimmed and cut into 2 inch cubes

1& ½ tsp pink Himalayan salt

1 tsp fresh ground pepper

1& ½ tsp ground cumin

1 & ½ tsp dried oregano

1 onion, peeled and quartered

2-3 large limes, juiced

1 medium orange, juiced and keep the juiced halves

3 cups water

 

Directions:

1. Adjust oven rack to lower middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees (alternately, dump all ingredients in a crock pot set on medium heat and let it sit for 4 hours). Combine all the ingredients in a large pot or Dutch oven, including the spent orange halves. Cook until meat falls apart when you poke it with a fork, about 2-3 hours.
2. Remove pot from the oven. Keep the liquid intact. Use a slotted spoon to remove meat from the pan and place on cutting board.
3. Strain the liquid from the Dutch oven and place pot back over high heat on the stove. Let the mixture reduce, boil until it is thick and syrupy, for about 20 minutes. Do not give up! Just when you think it will never reduce to a thicker mixture, it does. You should have about 1 cup of liquid left.
4. While the liquid is reducing, use a steak knife to shred the pork into small, bite-size pieces. Move the shredded pork onto a jelly roll baking sheet. Set aside.
5. Pour the reduced sauce evenly over the shredded pork. Taste, and add any additional salt and pepper. Place the pan with pork into the oven and broil on high for 5 minutes. Remove from oven, stir the pork around and flip over, and broil for an additional 5-7 minutes. The meat should be moist, but well-browned and edges should be slightly crisp.
6. Serve immediately