Porco com cominho

Sunday Feb. 4
This is a Portugese dish from the Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking - both the book and the recipe are favorites. We had just bought a big boneless loin of pork on sale at IGA, and when you cut it up to freeze - one roast, a couple of packages of thin scalloppine, a couple more of thick slices - there are often scrappy bits left over, perfect for a pork stew. So here's what you do. Make a marinade out of a half cup of white wine, the juice of a big lime, 3 crushed cloves of garlic, a teaspoon and a half of ground cumin, a bay leaf, a teaspoon of salt, and some black pepper. Toss in your pork cubes, and we also put in a couple of sliced onions, and marinate overnight. The next day, drain and reserve the marinade, get your dutch oven out, and brown the meat and onions. Then pour the marinade back over the meat, cover it, and simmer until it's tender, an hour or so. While you're waiting for that, de-stem a bunch of fresh coriander/cilantro; you throw this into the pot in the last five minutes of cooking, along with a handful of dijon-style black olives. Thus you obey the unwritten law of all Mediterranean cooking: where there is cumin, there must also be coriander, and plenty of both.