Bandero Pork for Christmas 2005 (Favourite Homemade Christmas Recipes)

Member Name: Cammij

Product:	Favourite Homemade Christmas Recipes
Date:	25/12/04 (914 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Easy, Easy to clean up

Disadvantages: My friend Rashid said it was not a good dish for him, Tabasco is so dear anymore

Hello and Merry Christmas, I'd like to share a recipe with all of you that has brightened and warmed up my family's annual Christmas eve party.

First off I am an accomplished amatuer self trained gourmet who specializes in Down Home cooking. For true Poor white trailer trash cooking you must understand what my style of food preparation entails. Down Home cooking tries to minimalize costs and utilizes cheap and common ingredients to create edible meals. My skills were honed in college where we had to stretch a few boxes of 39 pence pasta to feed 5 robust young men with the munchies with the addition of a can of soup and one pound log of ground turkey and some onions. The true artiste of down home cooking can work miracles with low grade cuts of meat, frankly any spanner can make a top grade cut of meat turn out alright, and any tosser with some balsamic vinegar and cooking sherry can make a meal fit for a king. I laugh when I watch the cooking shows or read recipe guides in the newspapers, written by some Swiss Banker making 15k quid a year and talking about how to prepare filets of sole that cost 30 quid a kilo. I am now gainfully employed and making some good Crosby,Stills and Nash but like most of my co-workers on the railway we are from humble origins and love down home cooking.

Last new years eve I was invited to a Russell held by a sweet young tassel named Patty. And since I knew I would inevitably end up intoxicated to the point of near death which would result in some unwanted fighting, undesired reversal of food or drink or inapproprite bodily functions (jimmy) on the floor or broom closet or in front of her dustbin lids. I basically covered all of these as well as committed acts of unwanted attention on most of the attractive single people of any gender. Knowing how I would act I knew that I had to really cook something special and I did, I made two pork roasts a Szechuan-Soy soak and a cocooned roast carmalized with honey, maple syrup, walnuts, toffee and coco-nut. If you wonder where I get my recipes I admit I dream them up myself while standing in the shower for hours.

This latest recipe is inspired by a drink I was offered by the owner of the Tea House of the Dancing lady in Sandusky Ohio. I was relaxing in his fine establishment and usually the only contact I have with such club owners is that they tell me to keep my pots and pans off the girls or Billy Bunters. I was sitting having a Gold Watch and he asked me if I would like a drink and I said sure and the bartender (who I fancy) made us Banderos. The Owner, Craig explained that a Bandero was John Wayne's (pause for a moment of silence when invoking this great man's name) favourite drink. It is a small sip of lime juice followed by a shot of tequila and then topped with a short pull of tomato juice flavored with tabasco sauce. To me it is an ultimate tour of flavors and textures, a complete awakening of the tongue, a mosaic of sensations and flavours. The sweet yet sour awakening of the lime juice followed by the spicy saltness of teh tequila and then capped with the fruity yet saline spiciness of the tomato juice. And it was Eureka for me and I knew I had found the basis of my next great Pork Roast.

The Bandero Pork Roast.


Go down to the market and have a butchers at the butcher and find a good pork shoulder roast. Get one around 1.75 Kilograms if you want this recipe to work, and we want to keep the bill under Paul McKenna. If they has them with the stringy net on them, that is good. Then you has to go into Tesco and get the big plastic bottle of Tomato juice and then a small Aristotle of Lime Juice. All the while thinking about our brave lads who popularized Lime Juice and if you really care stop and say hi to me old China Lord Nelson there at Trafalgar square. Now I shant have to tell anyone to go out and buy Tequila for this recipe as any decent bloke has 5 or 6 aristotles laying about the flat. But you will need tequila. And since everyone already has Tabasco sauce you should make sure yours is the red one. Of course you can substitute some low grade hot sauce from Makedonia or Spain but think about the scene from The Green Berets where they are sorting out the commies in the night fight and ask yourself, is this how I want to commemorate John Wayne with some third rate sauce?

Now you take all of your ingredients and sit them before you on the table and smile at them. Then you get out the crock pot and plug it in. If you live in a council flat like me you then hope it works and you won't have to call the rat man on Christmas.

Drop the pork roast into the crock pot. Then change your mind and pull it back out. Then pour all the tomato juice into the pot and then a good toss of lime and then a glorious amount of tequila, don't look at the bottle when you pour, that is bad form, that is a miserly way to cook, you stop pouring when you feel you should not when you want to economise your liqour. Then take a daniel boone and stir it up for a while and then pour in a good dose of Tabasco sauce. Truthfully, all pork pies aside, I did two roasts in the same juice yesterday, so of course the second one isn't kosher, and in the course of it all I used half of a two ounce bottle or Tabasco, and since I don't have me calculator handy I can't rightly figuree it out, so whatever half of a two ounce bottle of tabasco is, use about that many ounces of Tabasco.

Then you just leave it there and let it cook for as long as you got time to let it cook. Throughout the day jab that Daniel Boone in there and turn it about and then add either tabasco or lime or tequila on that portion so it is uneven and that way the roast will be more apt to have varying degrees of flavour of each of the three "spices". I left this last one in over night and it is so tender and delicious. It is much better than the one that roasted only 3 hours.

Maybe yours won't be any good but it is an easy meal to make and it has character. I hate showing up at a party and some wanker has the same flogger as me and I feel foolish, well I tell you what ain't nobody else gonna be making a Bandero roast around you unless you live in the council flats in Surrey with me. But it is a good solid meal, cheap with a good story to tell. You just tell them that it is a meal inspired by John Waynes favourite drink.

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