A week of Getting Lost

Double pulled pork, no recipe recipes, cobbler and 'Cruella's'

Hello and welcome back to Cooking the Stacks. I am so glad you are here to join me for some experimental home cooking, where I pick a foodie stack I admire, and cook or bake from it through the week.

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Last weekend, for the first time in this short project, I was struggling to pick someone to cook from. Not because I didn’t have wonderful options, but because I had too many options. I was paralysed by choice.

It was in the midst of my second scrawled and crossed out shopping list, when

Rebecca Blackwell

’s ‘What to Make in April’ post slid into my inbox. With eight recipes to welcome Spring, it was like divine intervention. That’s what I would do. I would cook every single recipe from this post. And I have.

What To Make In April

Rebecca is a cookbook author, recipe developer, and food photographer with two food blogs, as well as her Substack newsletter ‘Let’s Get Lost’. For the last five years, she has been touring the states in her RV while writing about life on the road.

Her stories and musings often resonate with me deeply. This post on introversion is excellent.

To the food…

Ah, let us speak of enchiladas, salads, bakes and two pulled pork recipes. Two!

A complete plethora of American dishes, with experimental twists at every turn. The potato salad with cashew nuts and miso, the pork tacos with Chinese 5 spice, a salad with papaya, jicama and a delicious watermelon vinaigrette.

Reader note: I still don’t know what jicama is as I didn’t find it. But read that green apple is a good substitute, so that’s what I went with.

Miso and cashew potato salad with charred red cabbage and parsley

No recipe recipes

We started the week with these Chicken Enchiladas. A no recipe recipe.

Initially I was very discombobulated by this; no measurements, freedom to tweak the dish as you saw fit. As a baker who lives by her scale, resistance rose in me.

But as I began to cook, I realised. I do this all the time. I tweak for my palate, my mood, what leftovers I have, or simply what is needed. I am constantly changing recipes to suit me. A writer openly giving you that freedom is, well, really quite liberating.

Also, my daughter loved them. Some days my daughter only eats yogurt, cheese and small bites of apples, so this is nothing short of miraculous.

This weekend, Rebecca was inspired to base an entire post around no recipe recipes. Which I was very happy to see! Check it out here.

6 Recipes That Do Not Require a Recipe

Double Pulled Pork

It’s quite a week when you cook two pulled pork recipes.

First up, sweet and crispy Pork Carnitas. Considering it’s pulled pork, this was super easy and quite quick to make. It was soft and crunchy all at the same time. I couldn’t stop nibbling as prepared the final dish.

Pork Carnitas with roasty red peppers

And secondly, pulled pork tacos with Chinese 5 spice and a fresh green slaw. A guest recipe from

Betty Williams

Pulled pork tacos with fresh green slaw

A warning in advance, you will need to put aside a day or so to make these. We didn’t, only roasting the pork for six hours. The flavours were still excellent, but the texture could have been softer.

It’s incredible how pulled pork could be interpreted so differently, both delicious in their own ways. One sweeter, the other fresher.

What a load of Cobblers

In the UK the expression, ‘what a load of cobblers’, means something is rubbish, or nonsense.

This gorgeous berry cobbler is absolutely not rubbish. Although, it may have made me jibber a load of joyful nonsense.

It is my first ever cobbler. I have enjoyed many a crumble. But never a cobbler.

According to Laura Mason in the National Trust Book of Crumbles, the best known cobbler topping is based on American soft biscuits - what we would consider scones in the UK.

Not this version, this version uses a soft crackle, sugar cookie topping. And now I am worried about trying any other kind of cobbler. I do not see how it could live up to that.

Initially, I served this with custard. While a delicious combination not to be sniffed at, it was intensely sweet.

I ate some for breakfast the next day with Greek yogurt instead. Now this, this was on the money folks. The acid from the yogurt balanced that sweetness in the cookie crust, and complimented the berries perfectly.

An Experiment

Last on the list for us, was Rebecca’s French Cruller Doughnuts. These have been renamed Cruella’s by my family, and how I shall be referring to them forevermore.

I put this one off, I admit it. It’s deep fried you see. Nothing scares me more than deep frying with the children around. All it takes is one swoosh of a running child, an out of control arm, a flip of a pan and et voila, hot oil all over a screaming child and a trip to the hospital.

One thing my children understand though, is to stand back when I am making Yorkshire puddings. This led me to thinking, could I make these doughnuts the Yorkshire pudding way, but in a mini Bundt tin? Would it still work?

And the answer to that is, yes it does. They are light, fluffy and tremendously moreish. Perhaps a little too moreish.

What is the Yorkshire pudding way?

For the uninitiated, you pour oil in a muffin tin and place the tin in an extremely hot oven for ten minutes or so. Pour in your Yorkshire batter (which is similar to the batter for crepes), put them back in the oven for five to ten minutes while they puff and rise.

I was pleasantly surprised with how well this method worked with the Cruella’s too.

As I would with Yorkshires, I poured oil into the base of a mini Bundt tin, until the oil reached about a third of the way up the tin. And placed this in an extremely hot oven, about 250°C no fan, to heat up for around ten minutes.

Just as Rebecca suggested, I placed the choux pastry in a piping bag with a star nozzle. Once the oil was ready, I quickly and carefully piped a ring of pastry into the base of each tin, before popping them back into the oven for about 7 minutes.

They puffed up beautifully, retaining their shape. And it made so many doughnuts - around 30! I didn’t at any point have to top up the oil, just reusing it for each batch.

Once done, I placed them on some kitchen towel, and left them to cool before glazing. Rebecca’s honey glaze is delicious and has a real Krispy Kreme vibe.

I loved the hit of lemon in the choux, and think these would work well with a lemon drizzle glaze too, or tossed in a lemon sugar.

This method is revolutionary for me, who is scared of deep frying. The texture may be different, but it was still absolutely delicious and I will be making these again.

Dish of the Week

It speaks well of Rebecca’s recipes that my family have been unable to choose a dish of the week. For me, it’s that cobbler, all the way. My husband is adamant that it’s the pork carnitas. My son says the Cruella’s. Whereas for my daughter it’s the chicken enchiladas.

I have to confess though, this weekend I feel… full. So very full. And like I need to spend some time in the gym. Perhaps double pulled pork and choux pastry doughnuts is a little too much for one week. Maybe best to spread over the month as Rebecca suggests.

Next week

I am excited to be supporting a fellow Brit.

Miles Dickinson

is relatively new to Substack. So far I have been enjoying his Flavour Hack ethos - making everyday dishes that little bit more exciting. First on the list is his sausage and broccoli orecchiette, which I am desperate to try.

Is there a foodie stack you are loving? Or perhaps you want to tell me about your own?! Please do let me know in comments, I’d love to hear about it.