Notes about Recipes in this book

• Pork pernil

  • chawkins on November 23, 2014

    A very time consuming recipe, though much of it is not hands-on time. First, the shoulder needs to be marinated for 12-24 hours. I did 24. Then you bake it skin side down covered at high temp with 8 cups of water for 1.5 hours; uncover, lower the temperature and bake for another 2.5 hours. After that you turn the shoulder over, dry the skin and put it on a V-rack and back in the oven for another hour. At the end of that hour, you remove the skin and put in on a sheet pan, crank up the temp and return the skin to the oven to make crackling. You then add cilantro, lime zest and lime juice to a cup of the pan juice for service. The sauce was great, the lime and fresh cilantro added a lot of brightness to the dish and having the oven on for that long warmed up the house on a cold day and filled it with aroma.

  • Pax on February 17, 2017

    One of my all-time favorite recipes and I cook this up quite often throughout the year. As mentioned, it does take a long time to prepare this, but most is just slow cooking and hands off. My local grocery frequently has picnic shoulder on sale at $0.99/lb which means you can make a huge quantity of this yummy dish for very little money. Even at $1.99/lb it is a high value recipe. Remaining roast can be used for pulled pork sandwiches, tacos, and more....and it freezes well. Rave reviews by family and friends.

• Porcupine meatballs

  • Shewi128 on August 14, 2023

    My husband's parents used to make these when he was growing up, but this version is better (withOUT Rice a Roni). The sauce was a little watery, but the flavor and texture of the meatballs was ok.

• Monterey chicken

  • Partyof7 on October 09, 2022

    I LOVE the taste of this chicken! It’s a delicious way to serve grilled BLSL chicken breasts.

• Grilled steak fajita pizza

  • Analyze on July 16, 2017

    We've made this three times, and I realized that I'm not a big fan of the chipotle chile powder in the pizza sauce and on the meat and probably won't make this again, but if you know that you like that flavor, I'd definitely give this a try. I got my chipotle chile powder from Penzey's, so I know that it was good. Anyway, this is a very rich, delicious pizza with the steak, cheese, onions and peppers. If you're looking at this recipe in the original Cook's Country August/September 2013, there aren't very helpful instructions on how to best grill pizza, but you can always learn as you go like we did! But that was a bit overwhelming and confusing at times.

• Strawberry pretzel salad

  • jenmacgregor18 on July 31, 2021

    The difference here for me was using strawberries & plain gelatin instead of strawberry jello. Scraping & pushing the strawberry puree through a sieve was the tedious bit and an extra 15 minutes or so. Replaced half the pretzels by weight with pecans & sugar with Swerve.... My frozen strawberries weren't as pretty as they could've been & affected the appearance somewhat. The proportion of crust to cream cheese mix to jello was good, and the flavor excellent. I can't 100% say that I would make this over my standard version. It comes down to how lazy I am vs. how much I want to avoid artificial junk in the jello.