But I've jumped ahead of myself.
As I was saying, Monday afternoon, I put together all my ingredients to make what some would call Souse and others would call Garlic Pork.
Souse is, by definition, pickled meat -- usually pork (most often the jowly bits but I used chops and stewing pork). I believe you can actually pickle the pork from its raw state and then eat it directly once it's steeped for days in the vinegar solution; however, leaving fresh meat at room temperature for three days prior to eating it tested the limits of my adventurousness about as far as they would go at the time, so I decided against this method, in favour of parboiling it first.
As for where the Garlic Pork in all this is found, in many of the recipes I read, it looked like Garlic Pork was a whole separate form of Souse that involved garlic rather than cucumbers. According to my Dad, Garlic Pork is what's made by simply frying up the leftover Souse after everybody's enjoyed all the pickled pig they can eat. As far as I am concerned, these aren't really mutually exclusive. I basically made Souse for Garlic Pork.
Anyway, basically all I did was layer salt, garlic and thyme in a dish with a tight-fitting lid, with pork between each layer of spices. Then on top I added a few whole cloves and a chopped hot pepper for flavouring.
Once the layers are complete, then you pour the vinegar in, and put a lid on it!
And then you let it sit there.
I checked it the next morning and noticed a very interesting and initially very alarming phenomenon.
It may be hard to see in the photos, but it was very apparent before my eyes: some of my garlic slivers were turning bright, happy blue! Whaaaaa...? Upon frantically searching the internet to find out if others had had this problem, I found out that indeed, many people have been baffled by suddenly blue garlic. Apparently it results when the sulphur in somewhat immature garlic reacts with small amounts of copper in water oooooorrr with an acid. So like, ridiculously large quantities of vinegar. Suffice it to say I was able to work past this weirdness, even though I was still apprehensive about the safety of my pork experiment.
Anyway, at this point, I sadly stopped taking pictures. However, the rest of the process was pretty simple. First, we tried the pork in its simply pickled state. It didn't kills us, and we have no symptoms of botulism or salmonella so far. Pretty tasty, but very much stronger pickle flavour than I remember from when my Dad made it, possibly because the pieces were small, fully cooked, used white and cider vinegar, and had garlic instead of cucumbers. Nonsense enjoyed it -- he's used to loads of pickles, haling from Slavdom as he does.
Next, I took a bunch of pork and fried it up, mostly in its own juices and the vinegar. With this, I made a Pilau, which is basically just a rice dish with stuff in it. In particular, I put tomatoes, thyme and beef broth, along with salt and a bit of sugar in this one. The recipe I used called for chicken as well, for a Chicken Pilau, but I already had meat, so I just made the rice. Not sure whether it still qualifies as pilau -- but it was tasty nonetheless!
And there you have it! Three days of West Indian cooking, and many more days of West Indian food to eat! Seriously, our fridge is packed. Come over -- eat food!
Three more sleeps til Caribana!
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