Tropicalsenior

The recipe sounds great to me but I do have a question. Do the spices that follow the mix of peppers go into the spice mix or go into the chorizo? For anyone wanting to make their own chorizo, if you find a recipe that does not have the vinegar, pass. I usually freeze the extra raw in 3 oz portions. Then I can add it in however I like. The little snack size bags are great for this. I don't have access to all the dried chili peppers but I do have a big supply of New Mexico ground pepper. I usually just use that.

The good Mexican stuff has a lot more fat, stronger spices, and probably a lot of stuff you don't want to know about. But yes, it is much more flavorful.

Another meal for me when I don't feel like cooking is pizza. I just make up a batch of @Duvel's Emergency Pizza Dough, throw on whatever is lurking in the refrigerator and I have a quick meal.

A lot of people won't eat it because they also call it the dolphin fish.

The two-day cooking marathon was a lot less work and a lot less traumatic than cleaning up the kitchen after him.

If you can get fresh ground pork, Mexican chorizo is very easy to make.

That's why you've got to add the salad. And it's even lower calorie if you have it with a Diet Coke.

One of my favorite quick meals is real Fettuccine Alfredo. Only four ingredients. The only real cooking is boiling the noodles. Add butter, cream, and Parmesan cheese, simmer a bit to thicken the cream and you're done. Add bread and a green salad and you have a full low calorie meal.

My husband liked lamb and when we lived in Seattle we would have it quite often. I could eat it but to me it was just nothing special. All the lamb in Costa Rica is imported and extremely expensive so I was saved from having to fix it very often. However, he loved Menudo and the main ingredient of menudo is tripe. I hate tripe. I hate the smell of it raw, I hate to handle it, and I hate the smell of it cooking. Making menudo was a two-day process and when it came to seasoning, he had to taste it and tell me what it needed because not one drop of that %&#@ was passing my lips. I made enough to have six or seven months worth of servings in the freezer so that I didn't have to go through it all that often. It was an act of love but it sure was an endurance trial.

Mahi mahi is Dorado. Of course they are a completely different fish than halibut but the texture of the flesh is similar. I'm not particularly fond of fish but Dorado is plentiful here and about the only one that I buy if I can't get Chilean salmon. Halibut is a cold water fish and something that is never available here. I do miss it.

I don't know if it is ever available to you but mahi-mahi or Dorado is a firm fleshed fish and is the only one that I like other than halibut.

Since I wrote that, one more opened up across the street and down one house. They are open from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. 5 days a week. They opened May 21st and since then we haven't seen one single customer there. I don't think that I will be ordering chicken from them.

While I do like pork belly, in order to stay with the theme of the topic there are parts of the pig that I just cannot abide. Head cheese makes me want to gag. There are probably good versions out there but my first experience was some horrible stuff that my mother-in-law made. Since then the very thought of it makes me nauseous. I'm with Heidi in that when you have something that is cooked to your liking, it makes all the difference in the world. When I get a hold of a particularly lean cut of pork belly I like to cut it in strips and prepare just as I would oven-style ribs with barbecue sauce. It's just like barbecue ribs without the bones.

I'm wondering how many pork belly heaters love bacon.

Now you tell me! Mine looked more like a navigational error.

In my pizza from last night, I kept trying to cut between the lines. Didn't work.

So far they haven't put ours on a diet yet. Pork is one of the best Meats in the country. And the chickens are allowed to get old enough to put some meat on their bones.

When you mentioned that recipe I went to Google and looked it up. It seems to me that the lengthy cooking of it would render out a lot of the fat and that most of the fat would then be in the sauce. Much like the fat is rendered out of chicharones. As soon as I get my package from Darienne I'll give it a try and let you know.

Exactly, it's got to be cooked correctly.

I think the reason that I enjoy the fat is that I grew up on a farm eating only lean pasture fed beef. So when I finally got a taste of marbled beef, it was a real treat for me and I liked the fat on meat ever since. My husband was one that would trim every tiny piece of marbling or fat from his prime rib and it would just kill me because I always thought it would be gauche to grab it off his plate before it went to the trash. Then I got smart. I would leave a little bit of mine and ask to have everything put in a doggy bag for my Pooch at home. And, oh yes, you might as well throw in all that nasty stuff that he left. I'd always have another little feast when we got home.

Nor mine, because I think I just drooled on my telephone.

@Darienne if you don't like the fat there probably isn't anyway that you can prepare it that you would like it. It would just be like putting lipstick on a pig. However, I will send you my address in a PM and you can send it on down.

If somebody gave me that I would have died and gone to heaven. However that is neither here nor there. You could make bacon out of it. After all, that is the cut that they do make bacon out of. I've done it with whatever little resources I had here in Costa Rica. The only thing that I couldn't do was smoke it but other than that it was darn good bacon.

I just looked that up and it looks very much like mine but I don't think it's quite as tall. I'm glad to see that it isn't digital. Most of the bad reviews that I have seen with countertop ovens are problems with computer systems. Does yours have the air fryer system? If so, let me know how you like it. I'm glad that you didn't go with the other one recommended here because I saw some scary bad reviews on that one.

I must say that I am a little disappointed in you but I also realize that since Ed does most of your shopping, you don't have it right there in your face tempting you like the rest of us do.