This is me procrastinating

While I know this is usually my Monday night thing, I decided I would work on a script tonight.

Warning: This entry is about pork knuckle, there are no mentions of any vegan friendly things. That is all.

So instead of that, I am now here…on WordPress…thinking about how good the pork knuckle I had on Saturday was and how being a member of the German club may mean I eat a few more of them next year.

I really liked the pork knuckle, it is most definitely a dish they excel in.

The crackling was incredible, the meat tender and the potatoes and sauerkraut accompanying it were pretty good too. A few people I know don’t get that far. They get as far as the pork knuckle, maybe even half. It’s not a bad effort for them, it’s a pretty big dish.

In my eyes, and possibly to some of the readers, the potatoes and sauerkraut are scarcely more than a garnish. Ignored until the main part of the dish has been sufficiently devoured and all you are now doing is idly stabbing at a potato before swirling it around the gravy for a while. Maybe, just maybe, you might eat it. If you weren’t full of the succulent trotter you had just gorged on.

The trotter is the real star of the show here. It’s obvious to people who aren’t even eating one. To the people who you share your crackling with, and to those who just long for it. If the potatoes had more than just the role of an extra with a few lines, they would be crisper on the outside and fluffier in the middle. The sort of roast potato that crunches when you bite into it, and straight after your teeth just glide through the potatoey goodness. The potatoes that you know you should stop eating after your second or third plateful, but you don’t. You keep stealing small pieces wherever you find them, be that the tray on the stove or the plate of someone who is not paying that much attention.

The sauerkraut is the second extra in this. A small, but powerful, voice in a salty sea of gravy, potatoes and pork. Cutting through the greasy, moist mouthful of meat like a limp vinegar sword. I don’t know what I am saying either, because I am not thinking of the sauerkraut or the potato.

I am thinking of the pork knuckle. Pork Knuckle. I am thinking of cutting into the side of it and extracting bits of fat and flesh, cooked to perfection. Gradually picking off little bits of crackling as I need to, but preferably eating the meat from underneath it. Leaving just a shell of crackling to enjoy crunching into. Once the act has finished, and the extras have gone, you then begin to examine the remaining bones for any bit of flesh, fat or crackle that may have been missed. Any of it. If the show went well, all that will remain on the crockery stage is a few smears of gravy and some naked bones.

OK, I’ll stop procrastinating now.