Pozole!

Pozole is a traditional Mexican soup, commonly consisting of a pig-head and dried red pepper stock. It stains like a mofo, but is ever so good!

***WARNING***

At the bottom of this post I will be including pictures of the pig head. And my crazy friends posing with it.


The recipe itself was quite simple. You simmer 20 chiles for a while, blend them up, and pour into a 5 gal stock pot with a couple of onions and garlic and herbs, and a 15 lb head. Simmer for several hours, remove meat from head, remove fat from meat, and serve meat and stock with hominy, radish slices, minced onion and tostadas.

As with many great soups, it tasted decent on Saturday, but I can't wait for it to sit a couple of days and let the flavor mature!

Now for the adventure. There is always an adventure when I cook.

After a couple of hours of cleaning off the meat, we were finally ready to serve ourselves and eat, when my roommate dropped the can of hominy into a gallon sized bowl of the bright red soup. Did I mention it had 20 dried red peppers blended into it? Does anybody have any clue how potently peppers can dye things? Do you know how much fat is in a pig's head? Yeah, all over the kitchen. And my friend Cassie. It was like Carrie's prom scene. And judging by the look on Cassie's face, we were thisclose to being incinerated. Luckily I managed to clean it off with Dawn soap while she showered. And even though we put a lot of effort into cleaning the kitchen, it is still greasy. That's going to be our project tonight after work >.<
Wilbur.


The perk of working in a chem lab is that I have gloves for devaining the peppers!


After a few hours simmering with the peppers. I think his ear was getting chapped.


Wrestling the head out of the pot was such an ordeal! Bastard was slippery like a wet pig!


Getting down and dirty taking off the meat.


After fondling a pig head for an hour, it kind of loses its mystery, and turns into a fun prop!


Because we needed to take a break from playing D&D.


The first time I have ever been thankful for synthetic fabric!


The next day, all the gelatin in the soup made it very jiggly ^_^