Grilled Pork Satays and Peanut Sauce for #SundaySupper

Next week is July 4, Independence Day, that most American of holidays. To mark the occasion, this week's #SundaySupper theme is celebrating with family and friends. To me, a summer celebration is incomplete if you don't fire up the grill. What can I say? I love the grill. I loved the flavor of the smoke; I love how elemental and self-sufficient it is.

Grilling is also how I remember the most festive celebrations of my childhood. In the white light of summer, my cousin and I would run around in the woods until the call floated through the cool twilight air, "Dinner's ready!" My mother's signature dish was always chicken or beef satays served with peanut sauce. All the cooks in my family wanted her recipe, but she still keeps it a secret to this day.

In part to honor that treasured memory and my mom and in part to try and swipe that dish (sorry mom), I decided to try to re-create something like her satays and peanut sauce. And I think I've succeeded pretty well. I used pork instead of chicken or beef (because most of the meat I eat comes from Haskins Family Farm, who sell mainly pork and chicken), and I served it with some grilled corn and a super-simple salad of cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and vinegar instead of a baked potato with sour cream, but I stayed true to the memory of family festivities.

Although the meal has a distinctly Asian flavor, it celebrates the history of America by highlighting some New World ingredients, such as peanuts, and showcasing how they incorporated themselves seamlessly into dishes from faraway lands. Other ingredients that have become pillars of Old World cuisines but originated here in the Americas are tomatoes and peppers. How much more American can it get to celebrate a gracious and delicious expression of the melting pot?

For this dish, you will need some wooden skewers (which you can get at most grocery stores). To minimize burning them, soak them in water for at least an hour before you thread the meat on them. Also, be prepared to get your hands messy. It's just that kind of dish.

Ingredients
FOR THE MARINADE

• 3/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup rice wine vinegar
• 1/4 rice wine
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 Tbsps honey
• 1 tsp dried ginger (or 1 Tbsp fresh, chopped, if you have it)
• 1 Tbsp sesame oil
• 2-3 lbs pork loin, cut into 1-inch cubes

FOR THE PEANUT SAUCE

• 1 16-oz can light unsweetened coconut milk
• 1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
• 1 shallot, chopped finely
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tsps vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• salt to taste
• chopped chives or green onions (optional)

Directions

1. Combine the marinade ingredients with the meat in a ziplock bag. Push as much of the air out of the bag as possible. Place the bag in a bowl or on a plate and refrigerate for at least six hours up to 24. Flip the bag a few times while it's marinating.
2. About two hours before you plan to grill the meat, grab a handful of skewers and soak them in water. (Don't worry about using too many; you can re-use the ones you didn't use, just let them dry out a bit.)
3. About an hour before grilling, get the meat out of the refrigerator and let it come to room temperature (or thereabouts). 
4. Start your grill. You will be using pretty high, direct heat for this dish.  
5. Thread the meat cubes onto the skewers (about eight cubes per stick). 
6. While you wait for the grill to come up to temp, make the peanut sauce. In small sauce pan, heat the vegetable and add the shallots. Let them brown a bit. 
7. Add the coconut milk to the pan. Mix in the peanut butter, garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar, and salt. As it cooks, it will thicken a bit. Keep it warm.
8. Grill the satays, turning them about a quarter turn every two to three minutes. 
9. Serve the satays with the peanut sauce, sprinkle some chives or green onions on top.  

And don't forget to check out the delicious dishes that the rest of the #SundaySupper group is serving up for the 4th of July!


Main Dishes:

• Tender & Sweet Crockpot Brisket Juanita’s Cocina
• Savory Patriotic Chicken Kabobs Big Bear’s Wife 
• Firecracker Salmon Rolls Comfy Cuisine
• Red, White & Blue Grilled Pizza Momma’s Meals
• Baby Back Ribs with Balsamic Peach BBQ Sauce Damn Delicious
• Bubblin’ Brown Sugar Baby Back Ribs In The Kitchen With KP
• Buttermilk Oven Fried Chicken The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen 
• Grilled Hawaiian Teriyaki Beef Mrs. Mama Hen 
• Cantaloupe and Prosciutto Salad with Perfectly Grilled Chicken and Potatoes Daddy Knows Less 
• Texas Smoked Brisket Doggie At The Dinner Table 
• Grilled Chicken in a Blueberry BBQ Sauce Small Wallet Big Appetite
• Chicken Burgers with Curried Cabbage Slaw-Indian Soni’s Food for Thought
• Finger Foods for the Fourth Pescetarian Journal 

Salads and Sides:

• Southwestern Corn and Black Bean Salad Supper for a Steal
• Roasted/Grilled Asparagus with Parmesan Katherine Martinelli
• Patriotic Ranch Potato Salad The Meltaways 
• Roasted Red Pepper & White Bean Salad Are you hungry
• Texas-Creole Crawfish Potato Salad The Weekend gourmet
• Spicy Italian Peppers in Sauce What Smells so Good?
• Sangria Fruit Salad Cindy’s Recipes and Writings 
• Stuffed Black Olive Cookistry
• Mexican Quinoa Salad with Creamy Avocado Dressing Dinners Dishes and Desserts 
• Low Fat Pasta Salad Basic and Delicious 
•  Bean Salad with Pickled Vegetables Diabetic Foodie
• Tomato and Mozzarella Appetizer Family Foodie

Desserts:

•  Red White & Blueberry Ricotta Cupcakes Sue’s Nutrition Buzz 
• Red Velvet Brownies Magnolia Days
• S’mores Pastries Daily Dish Recipes
• Red, White and Blue Firecracker Cupcakes Chocolate Moosey
• Caramel-filled Vanilla Cupcakes with Vanilla Bean Buttercream The Messy Baker 
• Strawberry and Cream Cake Cupcakes and Kale Chips 
• White Chocolate Berry Tart Vintage Kitchen Notes 
• Red White and Blue Coconut Rum Cake Family Spice
• Individual Red White and Blue Triffles Chelsea’s Culinary Indulgence
• Mini Carrot Cakes Mama’s Blissful Bites 
• Plum and Apple Pies Cositas Bonitas

Fabulous Pairings by Martin from ENOFYLZ

Season's first grilling: Pork shoulder marinated in lime and orange juice

Some friends of ours came up from Richmond to have dinner with us on Saturday night. Of course, somehow we missed the memo that we were cooking dinner until Saturday morning, when we discovered this and became a tad anxious. Thankfully we still had a freezer full of meat (thanks to the Haskins Family Farm CSA we signed up for this year), so I decided to take a gamble and grill a nice piece of pork butt (which is actually the shoulder, but "pork butt" elicits more giggles) that was taking up a lot of space in the freezer and shred it for tacos. That way we could probably keep the kids happier than they would have been with some of my more esoteric meals.

But before I get too far into the details of making that dinner (which finally took place about two hours later than planned), I just have to mention this recipe for eggs poached in buttery sorrel sauce, which we had for dinner tonight and was absolutely wonderful. Thanks to Orangette for turning me on to it.

Anyway, back to the pork butt adventure, which at first seemed like it was going to be a fiasco, but turned out reasonably well in the end.

So, I had dinner to make out of a five-pound hunk of meat that needed to be defrosted and marinated and then grilled for at least three hours (or so I thought). I decided to take a chance and marinate the meat while it was defrosting. I made a marinade of

• lime juice from five limes
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1 cup orange juice (delivered to us from South Mountain Creamery, which delivers our milk to us; yes, we get our milk delivered, and hearing the chink of bottles in the cooler on the front porch every Friday is wonderful, but more on that some other time)
• 3 Tbsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 Tbsp dried oregano
• 1 bunch cilantro, chopped finely (I actually got this from my back yard)
• 3 large garlic cloves, crushed
• 1/4 cup brown sugar

I mixed the ingredients together, placed the frozen pork butt in a plastic bag, and poured the marinade over it. I sealed the bag, pushing as much air out of the bag as possible, and then submerged the whole bag in cold water to try to speed defrosting. While it marinated, I turned it over a few times. I let it sit for about three hours (wish I had thought of it a lot earlier, an overnight soak would have been fantastic). 

At about three in the afternoon, I decided I had to start the grill or we were never going to have dinner. In another first, I decided to try my new chimney starter to start the fire. I wasn't sure if it was really going to work at first. It kicked up a LOT of smoke, but soon the coals glowed nicely, so I was happy. 

While the coals were heating up, I prepared the meat, which was still quite hard and cold, but I had to give it a try. I got the meat out of the bag (reserving the marinade), dried it off with some paper towels, and then rubbed it with a dry rub that I had left over from last summer (dry rubs usually include sugar, salt, dried mustard, cumin, and other dry spices).

Back at the grill, I poured the coals from the chimney starter into one half of my grill. (When you grill a large piece of meat, you use indirect heat, which means that if you have a coal-fired grill like I do, you place all the coals on one side, place the meat on the other side, and close the grill to basically create an oven.) Then I put the grate down, oiled it with some canola oil, and placed the meat on the grill, skin-side up. 

When the meat was on the grill, I decided to take a quick peak at my copy of Steve Raichlen's BBQ USA to get a sense of how much time I was looking at and how frequently I would need to add coals to maintain the heat in the grill. Of course, imagine my shock when he says that it's going to take four to seven hours, and our friends are expecting dinner in three. Oh dear. Well, hopefully it would be good enough to make up for the wait. 

In the meantime, I made a mild salsa with cherry tomatoes (organic from Florida, closest to home I can find right now), some local strawberries, a little spring onion, a sprinkle of salt, and a splash of red wine vinegar. 

After about an hour on the grill, I added 12 coals to the fire per Raichlen's instructions, but I wasn't thrilled with how low the fire had gotten in that hour, so I decided to add fewer coals more frequently (about six every half hour) to maintain the heat. (When you add coals, you want to leave the top off the grill for about five minutes to make sure they light up.) I also mopped the meat with the reserved marinade, which I had boiled for about five minutes to kill any bacteria that may have developed during the marinade.

And so it went. For about four hours, I added coals every half hour, mopped the meat with marinade, and anxiously watched the thermometer (I had pushed our meat thermometer into the thickest part of the meat and was aiming for 160 degrees). I knew I wasn't going to get meat that was falling-off-the-bone tender in the time frame that I had, but I sure as hell wasn't going to serve my friends undercooked meat. 

It was a long wait. Dinner didn't happen until about eight (half an hour past my four-year-old's bedtime). We had to feed the kids peanut butter sandwiches to tide them over. When dinner did finally happen, I set the candles on the table on fire, so things got a little chaotic but thankfully the house didn't burn down. But the tacos were delicious. The meat was incredibly flavorful, the salsa was juicy, tangy, and fresh. I'll definitely make it again, but next time I will start much, much earlier.