Soaring Through Blue

pork party, of a summer's afternoon



If you get invited (via email, or by Twitter) to a pork party where nothing but pork products will be served, hot and smoky, sizzling with fatty flavor, by someone who knows how you adore pork, and who knows how to cook it better than anyone in the entire world, and if you are us, you say YES.

yes I said yes I will Yes. I will come to your pork party. Oh god, yes. Immediately.

So, in the ineffable beauty of a sunny afternoon, we went to a pork party at a French restaurant.

Hell, yeah.

Oh, HELL, yeah.

If you don't live here, you've probably not eaten at this restaurant, though people come from all over the entire country to eat here. Even if you do live here, you probably can't afford to eat here very often because it's that special. But even if you can't afford to eat here, you should WANT to eat here. Oh, god. You should really want to eat here. You really should. That's how fabulous it is.

The chef has been all over the world and also has a radio show that I just want you to know that I've been on, twice, to promote my the book that I wrote that is still available for purchase, which of course I mention only because it was fun to be on the show, not for any other reason.

For the pork party, the chef cooked up a huge platter burgeoning with pork ribs.

Oh, god.



Just look at that.

Does it not make you want to throw your face down into it, teeth bared, eyes closed in ecstasy, salivary glands pumping at top speed, heart pounding out of your chest?

These are not your average ribs that you might get from Chili's. They're your white-knuckled-fingers-in-a-death-grip-on-the-bones-not-coming-up-for-air-until-gnashing-canine-incisors-have-gnawed-every-shred-of-pork-flesh-and-muscle-off-the-bones-and-masticated-it-in-moaning-ecstasy ribs.



Oh, god.




Here we had spectacularly fatty pork belly and farro. (Of course, I couldn't partake of the farro because it has gluten, which makes me grow ill.) PapaChef inhaled second helpings with the enthusiasm exhibited by normally only by wolves, who swallow their prey whole, nearly, and sometimes vomit it up later when they have more time to chew.






Here's PapaChef digging into some pulled pork. It was different than the pulled pork made by our friend, so we didn't have to compare. (OK, it was better.)

We ate it. It was good.

(Sometimes I'm so overcome with the experience of eating pork that I can't seem to describe it on more than a second-grade level. Please understand.)




Homemade sausage. Oh, god. Look at those blobs of fat. Can you imagine the taste? Good, because, again, I'm too overcome just from looking at the photo, to write words that describe it. It was as good as you imagine. That will have to suffice.





Thick cut pork belly bacon. Oh, god. Obscene. I couldn't eat it fast enough. It was salty and smoky, like all bacon, but in some indescribable way, better.

(We want to make our own bacon this summer. Can someone come and build us a smokehouse? Or give us a smoker? We are such newbies. We have no idea what we're doing.)

Everyone there grinned in the sunshine, wolfing down such fine pork. Some of the city's top chefs had gathered, as well as food writers, and food bloggers. But we weren't there just to stuff our faces with pork. It was for a good cause.

You see, it was to promote pig farming.

Small pig farms, to be exact.

There aren't a lot of small pigs farms in this country, but they do exist, and their numbers are growing. What they produce is still a fraction of a fraction of the pork from the 16,000,000 pigs processed annually by the industrial pig farms, which is why a pork party such as this one is so vital.

We listened to passionate speeches. Everyone tried to understand each other. It felt like an important day.

And then we went back to the tables for more pork.



Oh, god. The pork.

The pork...



yes,
Shasta