"pork" news and stories

Pork shoulder becomes meltingly tender when you braise it in a slow cooker or crockpot. Add the Latin touch of a tomatillo salsa and fresh cilantro, and you have an incredibly flavorful easy-to-prepare dish that pairs well with crunchy quinoa or fluffy rice.

Recipe for Slow Cooker Braised Pork with Salsa

Browse More Slow-Cooker Recipes

"Away in an oven just kraut for his bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his meat head."

Yes, folks, the traditional manger's in danger with this meaty makeover on the classic crèche. Mary and Joseph are made of sausages and cloaked in turkey cold cuts, while the Three Weiner Wise Guys sport tin-foil crowns. Christ himself is a mini chipolata, and he ain't gonna freeze this year -- his new Bethle-HAM is set to 350 degrees.

• The first Israeli pork cookbook has been published. Rabbis (and pigs) everywhere protest.
• How would your kitchen fare in a health inspection?
• Fall's vegetable harvest is begging you to make this soup.
• Ça Va Todd English has a comfortable bar with decent wine. The food? Um....
• Baltimore may conjure up images of crabcakes, but fried lake trout is "the dish that working-class Baltimore craves."

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• Mind your words -- and alcohol intake -- for the best champagne toast.
• Wine expert says you don't have to know everything about vino to pair wine with food -- you just need eyes.
• Take a bite of some images from the SF Chefs tasting tents.
• A seminar on pig is the best idea for a seminar ever.
• Cook like a Roman with cacio e pepe.
• These stuffed peppers are perfect for those who don't like spicy foods.
• Play match the chef to the eatery with Chris Cosentino.

The CAFO Reader is meaty. Maybe it's the fact that I read it while on vacation in Iowa, smack dab in the very heart of hog and egg laying hen confinement operations. These industrial "farms" have been here for years. Pass them on the highway, and the smell can be eye-watering, even if you can't see the operation itself from the road. Locals are fond of saying, "That's the smell of money." And it is, but too often that cash doesn't make it back into the very communities where these operations live.

That's just one of the points editor Daniel Imhoff makes as he sets out on a myth-busting mission in this book. Chapters are voiced by some of the most notable thinkers in our country's sustainable food movement -- Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry Fred Kirschenmann, Dan Barber, Tom Philpott, and Eric Schlosser among them.

From intensively farmed beef, pork, chicken, fish, dairy and eggs -- the curtain of "Big Agriculture" is pulled back with fact-driven arguments on the true costs of pollution, animal cruelty, overuse of antibiotics, immigrant labor and more, which many feel has mired our food system. Republican speech writer Matthew Scully says "instead of redesigning the factory farm to suit the animals, they are redesigning the animals to suit the factory farm."