Oh, my! What a treat! We got Goldbelly giftcards a few times over the years. I ordered smoked fish from some nice NJ smoke shop, and pastrami from the Pastrami Queen.
And last year, friends gifted me a whole party pack from Katz’s. What a feast that was!
Whoa there!
Very nice sandwich-making skills to go with the very nice ingredients!
(I’ve had a pastrami craving for months now, and you’d think with options within walking distance I would have satisfied it by now 
)
I portioned some pork belly the other day for double-cooked pork and it was a bit more than I needed, so I cut the extra off. I remembered a favorite rice cake prep and decided to cure those pieces of pork belly with 2% salt, sugar, pepper, and rose wine to make it taste like Cantonese sausage. After it had cured for some days I cooked it sous vide remembering how bacon cooked sous vide becomes very tender and melt-in-your-mouth while being crisp. Before cooking it I tasted some fried and it was so delicious. It really did taste like lap cheong.
Today I made stir-fried rice cakes with some bok choy I had and this cured pork belly, along with fermented black beans, chili bean paste, and Taiwanese soy paste.
What type of sancocho is it? I only ever see corn in South and Central American sancocho (Colombian, Ecuadorian, Venezuelan…), but weirdly blogs show Dominican sancochos with corn in it. Have never actually seen it in any sancocho in DR, though. Corn itself is just not consumed all that much here.
This plate may not look like much, BUT. I had a little bit of one of two ginormous king oyster shrooms leftover that I didn’t use for my paccheri ai funghi last night, so I fried them up in a mix of bacon fat and butter, just lightly salted and brushed with a little bit of soy sauce - after making fancy diamond cuts for MOAR browning and flavor. Finished with Penzey’s Sichuan seasoning.
The outside had a nice caramelization to it & was al dente, whereas the inside was creamy - almost reminiscent of foie. Vegan foie in this case.
I gotta get more of those beauties next time I’m at the Asian grocer 
…and unbelievably cheap too!!
My local steam table joint in BK was Dominican, and the corn in their sancocho was not as prominent. Occasionally there would be a ring of it almost like a garnish - I probably discarded it.
The place where I ate today has a Dominican flag on their menu and lots of mentions of DR on their Facebook page, but I don’t know if it’s Dominican-owned or where the folks doing the cooking come from. The folks at FOH struck me as more likely to be Mexican or Ecuadorian, based on appearance and accent (that’s to say I could actually speak Spanish with them, which sometimes I can’t with Dominicans.)
There aren’t many Dominicans around here, to be honest.
Or maybe I’m completely clueless about that, because if there weren’t, why else would a restaurant be branding itself as Dominican?.. Clearly I am talking out of my ass now.
I think part of it is that restaurants make things differently, especially in the USA, and sometimes blog recipes reflect that. In a lot of restaurants they throw a bunch of stuff that’s available to bulk things up.
There’s a supermarket chain here called La Sirena and they have food courts and the sancocho is actually quite good. I usually get it if we eat there. Even being a chain I’ve never seen additions like corn.
If you tell my mom that a sancocho has potatoes, carrots, or corn she’ll scoff that Dominicans love to copy things (with additions you might find in other countries) when we already have superior sancocho. 
She feels very strongly that sancocho must have three meats (pork, beef, and stewing hen), but will accept two (she favors pork and beef if you must forgo one). Growing up I never saw things like smoked pork chops or ribs in sancocho, but it seems to be more common in recent years.
Vegetables strictly plantains, yuca, yautía (which is taro, but there are four types and mom tends to include yellow, white, and purple), and ñame. Pumpkin is used for color and thickening the broth but not left in pieces, though occasionally I see some sancocho with a few bits of pumpkin. Lots of people skip some of the types of yautía and ñame since the cost adds up and sometimes you can’t get your hands on all of them.
Colombian sancocho tends to have fewer starchy veg (plantains and yuca typically included along with potatoes, and sometimes pumpkin in large pieces, but not the others), and always has corn that I’ve seen, which makes sense since they consume a lot of corn overall. They also use spices like cumin (a very unpopular spice among Dominicans) and achiote for color.
Btw my mom loves to express discomfort about my charcoal grill producing smoke when lit and bothering neighbors, and I have to point out to her that people here regularly light firewood on the sidewalk next to their homes to cook big pots of sancocho, along with the music blaring, so surely me lighting my grill on my yard is not worse than that. 
The joint in BK had the veg you describe as typical, and never ever carrots. Today’s bowl had carrots in it, which surprised me quite a bit; had never seen that before. But a beggar can’t be a chooser, and the broth was delish. I almost licked the bowl.
I would imagine they’d be Dominican if it’s in Brooklyn since there’s lots of Dominicans there, and I do think sancocho gets associated with Dominican food even though it’s made in various Latin American countries. In Queens you can find Colombian and Ecuadorian ones more easily.
(I’m in PA now, if that wasn’t clear. The BK place was v obviously Dominican. The PA restaurant is a mystery!)
Saw Cook’s Country tuna melt recently and it made me instantly crave it, so I made it with some of my tater tots. It looks nicer with yellow cheese, but getting American cheese isn’t always easy and I already had white cheddar (Cabot aged reserve). I used Gouda for the second cheese. Delicious even if not as eye-catching!
Well, thx. Now I’m craving a tuna melt! 
Yeah, I know it looks like something out of a horror movie - like a dangerous growth from a distant planet that might attack you at any point…
BUT it tastes much better than it looks: the last of the maitake chopped up and sautéed in a mix of bacon fat and ghee, 2 scrambled eggs with fresh dill & parsley, topped with hollandaise.
Omelets have become my regular Sunday lunch. Today’s was prosciutto and havarti, with ramen (again).
Back in the day when I delivered food, I was friendly with - well, most staff at most restaurants (using the term in the broadest sense possible here 
). One early afternoon I had a pickup from Five Guys, and one of the guys was like “you look hungry - want a burger?”
And he was right. I hadn’t had lunch & was starvating. I got a little cheeseburger and devoured it in my car after dropping off my delivery. It was SOFA KING good!
