Freelancing: Braised Pork with Tomatoes, Cinnamon and Olives

3 Feb

I’ve written a few times now about how much I adore Melissa Clark’s recent cookbook, Cook This Now. In a year when culinary hero Jacques Pepin released an expansive career retrospective, Melissa managed to write the best cookbook of the year for my money (which is not to downplay the Essential Pepin, a truly essential work).

My admiration for her work led me to reach out to Melissa a few months back, and to my delight I found myself doing some freelance work on her blog over at melissaclark.net. Melissa’s been blogging recipes over there for years, but she wanted a page that would index all those recipes. As it turns out, there are over two hundred of them in all! I’m proud to tell you that as of today, that page is live on Melissa’s site, and there’s something for everyone on it.

To wit: this recipe for a stew of braised pork shoulder with tomatoes, cinnamon and olives, which appears in Cook This Now. Melissa posted on her blog ahead of the book’s release last fall. I made it recently for guests and can wholeheartedly say it’s one of those unbelievably clutch dinner party meals: easy, delicious, and stunning to behold on its bed of creamy polenta. Perhaps best of all, it lends itself to making ahead of time. Win-win.

So go check out Melissa’s new recipe index–200 recipes from soup to nuts, literally–and while you’re at it, vote for Cook This Now as People’s Choice in Food52’s Piglet tournament of cookbooks (it was knocked out of official competition in the first round by a phoned-in entry from Ina Garten which did Melissa pretty dirty, if you ask me).

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