Actually, let's start with the carnitas, since they are the least exhilarating.
I'll let the Homesick Texan explain carnitas (I actually used the recipe from her book, which also appears here, blogged by Smitten Kitchen). They're basically braised and then browned pork chunks, usually eaten in a taco.
Mine look more like cat food:
I'm not sure what happened here. The meat cooked to pulp even though reduced the cooking time by half an hour (because the meat looked like it was getting pretty done), and, at the end where you increase the temperature again, they cooked almost dry in maybe 10 minutes. And they burned onto my cast iron Dutch oven like nobody's business; I spent Sunday boiling them off and reseasoning the pot.
They taste all right, though. I had part of a jar of green tomatillo salsa in the fridge so I got a small avocado at the store and processed them together to fake green sauce (worked pretty well!), and had carnitas tortillas for dinner. There are carnitas under that pile of cilantro, I promise:
That's with Ranch Style Beans and Mexican rice on the side, and a bottle of Real Ale Devil's Backbone, which I bought for the silly label:
but which turned out to be good. Very strong flavor, though, with a strong alcohol taste; it actually drowned out the lime and heat in the salsa. I wouldn't recommend it with Tex-Mex but it's good, and it would be good with something less . . . lime-y.
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I didn't get a whole lot done on the quilt but I did get three rows of tumblers sewn together (the ones on the left are sewn into strips). I still have a pile of tumblers to cut so I'm not sewing the strips together yet. They shorten a lot once they're sewn together; I think I have enough new tumblers to add six to each strip.
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