I Can Write!

There's a new page of Brainwrap up finally. Woulda been up sooner, but I was cookin'. For five hours. Read on, and you too will know how to kill an entire day making food.

Robert Rodriguez is the man. In 1991, when he was 23, he made a feature film using $7000 he raised being a human guinea pig for a pharmaceutical company. It's a fascinating story I won't go into now, so read the book. In an effort to compel every talentless hack with a video camera into making their own feature film, each of his DVDs sports a supplemental featurette called "Ten Minute Film School." Accordingly, I decided not to go to college. His latest DVD, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, also features a "Ten Minute Cooking School" -- because, as he puts it, not knowing how to cook is like not knowing how to... er, make sweet love to a woman. I did not take this attack on my sexual prowess lightly, and thus, I commenced to grocery shopping.

Specifically, the recipe he demonstrates is for a dish called puerco pibil, a slow-roasted pork item ordered by Johnny Depp in Once Upon A Time In Mexico (a dish that tastes so good it inspires him to kill the cook for some reason). But what Rodriguez's instructional spectacle lacks is a much-needed visual list of ingredients. Dauntingly, I watched the video over and over -- rewinding, pausing, fast-forwarding -- so that I may present to you, here, what you need:

5 tbsp. Annatto
2 tsp. Cumin
8 Allspice rat pellet things
1/2 tsp. Cloves
1 tbsp Black Pepper
1/2 cup Orange Juice
1/2 cup White Vinegar
2 Habanero Peppers
2 tbsp. Salt
8 cloves Garlic
5 Lemons
A splash of Tequila
5 lbs. Pork Butt
and some Banana Leaves (whatever)

An additional requirement, Robert specifies, is a coffee grinder -- but not the one you use for your coffee. The usually time-and-money-saving Rodriguez advises you to go out and get another coffee grinder, presumably so that your pork doesn't taste like coffee and your coffee doesn't taste like puerco, or pibil. Also recommended hardware: blender, oven.

Regarding some of the aforementioned ingredients, well... some of them ain't commonplace. My current roommate/sugardaddy and I had to drive 20 miles just to get the annatto and we never found the goddam banana leaves. Oh yeah -- it's important to cite that all the spices listed were purchased in their seed- or stem-like configuration. Sorry if you already went out and bought that extra coffee grinder before reading this far and then found all those spices in powder form. You just wasted your time, and you're a damn fool.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the coffee grinder. So you take your annatto, your cumin, your allspice, your cloves and your black pepper and throw it all in the grinder. Now, grind the shiznit out of those spices. Once you've pulvarized them to dust, you've created what's called achiote paste -- and, you're done with that extra coffee grinder. Throw it out.

Okay. It's time to chop up them habanero peppers. Unless you have a palate of galvanized steel, I recommend removing the veins and seeds from those peppers beforehand. After that, I advise that you wash your hands for three days straight before even thinking about picking your nose (I speak from experience). Once you've wussied up your peppers and chopped 'em, throw them in a blender with the orange juice and the vinegar.

Hopefully, you emptied your extra coffee grinder of its spices before you threw it out, so now add those to the blender along with your salt and garlic. Chop up the garlic beforehand, if you're so inclined.

Then blend blend blend, like it's a new dance craze.

The next step is to cut five lemons into ten halves. Squeeze their juicy insides into the blender like so many pimples into as many bathroom mirrors, and then add the splash of tequila. You could, while you're at it, take a swig of that tequila, but you're about to use a sharp knife to cut up five pounds of meat so... well, let's put it this way: if you're the "exciting" type who likes to leave the seeds in his habaneros, then by all means, drink up.

"Cut the butt," as Rodriguez would smirk, into two-inch squares. I know from experience that this is really fun.

Throw the cut butt chunks into a 1-gallon freezer bag, and pour that goofy vinegar-achiote mixture out of the blender and over the meat. Close the bag and squish the goo all around the meat. This has no practical purpose, but is also fun.

Here's the part with the retarded banana leaves. Allegedly, you're supposed to line the pan with them. Oh, did I forgot to mention you need a baking pan? Yeah, it should be about 13x9x2. Anyway, I used foil instead because apparently there are no banana leaves in Florida, and it worked fine. [Subsequent experiments revealed that banana leaves are an inferior pan lining to tin foil, and change the taste of the pork. - Ed.] Then dump the vinegar-achiote-meat concoction out of the freezer bag and into the pan. Finally, cover the whole damn thing with another sheet of foil, sealing the edges. If you managed to find banana leaves, cover it with foil anyway. This isn't fun and games, sonny. The foil's gonna keep the heat in.

At this point, everything in your whole stinking kitchen should reek of annatto. The next logical step, then, is to transfer that smell to your whole house by putting all this crap in the oven. It's gonna sit in the oven at 325 degrees for four hours, which is just enough time to clean up the mess you made when the tequila spilled all over the floor.

Four hours later, pull the pan from the oven using oven mitts or folded cardboard box flaps if you're poor. Serve over white or Spanish rice that you started preparing a half hour earlier if you were smart. Enjoy, ideally with a Corona or repeat viewings of the fourth season of Mr Show.

See, Robert Rodriguez? That wasn't so hard, putting it into words like that which people could print out or freeze-frame. Oh, well. The extra effort was worth it; puerco pibil is good food. As far as I'm concerned, Rodriguez has only improved his already impressive credit with this recipe... which, according to Johnny Depp, means I should kill him, I guess. But I'm too full of pork right now to move.

Posted by kyle t. at September 23, 2004 12:38 AM

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