Pork Shoulder and Mushrooms in a Mustard Cream Sauce

Sunday night found me lonely with no guests to serve, no roommate at home,  no games on the tube, and not a whole lot to do.  So naturally I decided to make an easy French dinner to occupy my time.  The sauce in this recipe should go well with just about any basic production of pork or chicken.  It's loosely based around a Julia Child recipe with some help from a host of other cookbooks and whatever happened to be in my fridge and pantry.

Ingredients:

For the braised pork:

1.5 lbs of pork shoulder cut into 1 inch cubes
1 onion cut into thin crescents
2 cloves garlic minced
1/2 lb mushrooms (your choice) sliced and sauteed in 1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp butter
12 oz lager beer

For the sauce

1/3 cup cider vinegar
Generous portion of ground black pepper (3/4 tbsp)
1 cup heavy cream
2 tsp mustard powder mixed in a bit of water.

Directions:

1. Place pork and butter into dutch oven or other deep cast iron pot and cook on medium for five minutes.

2. Add onions and garlic and cook for a further ten minutes stirring occasionally.

3. Pour beer into pot and raise to a simmer.  Reduce heat and cook covered for 40 minutes.

4. In a separate pan sautee mushrooms with butter for five minutes on medium low heat and add to the pork.  Cook mixture forty more minutes uncovered.

5. To make the sauce pour the vinegar and ground pepper into a small sauce pan and boil rapidly until the vinegar reduces by 2/3

6. Add the cream to the vinegar, raise to a simmer, reduce heat and cook a further five minutes or until the cream is reduced by 1/3.

7. Add mustard to cream sauce and cook a further five minutes on low heat.

8.  Increase heat on pork to boil off excess braising liquid and stir frequently to avoid burning the meat.

9.  Add cream sauce to pork and stir together while raising to a simmer.

10. Cut the heat, garnish with fresh tarragon (or parsley if you don't have the fancy shit.)

11. Serve over plain white rice, or boiled potatoes.

Comments

[Willie]

I am extremely fond of reading and whenever I got interested in some book, I opened a http://www.pdfqueen.com books search engine, found the book I needed and downloaded it. But as it turned out, in the journals and articles one can sometimes find the info he/she failed to find in the book. Thus can say that from time to time such articles as yours are a very pleasant surprise for me!