I had to ask a grown man for a pork butt on Friday night because this past weekend was Not-Really-A-Party Weekend at my house. My job was to make pulled pork (and to make a cake and to buy goat cheese and also to freak out a little bit) and I had emailed all the way to Boone, North Carolina, to get an authentic recipe. “I’d like…uh, a pork butt,” I said to the nice butcher guy behind the counter. My Friday nights aren’t usually this exciting. “This pork butt right here?” he asked, pointing to a slightly smaller butt than the one I had in mind. “No, I NEED A BIGGER BUTT, PLEASE,” I yelled through the glass.
So I went to Whole Foods (for pork butt) and I went to Trader Joe’s (for crackers) and I went to Safeway (for barbecue sauce) and by the time I got home from my various grocery-related endeavors I was pretty tired and it was as much as I could do to hug Sahana and Joe, who were visiting us for the weekend, and to send them and John and Treasa off to see this Serenity movie I keep hearing about. I don’t know what you do on a Friday night when you find yourself alone in your house, somewhat at loose ends when you’ve finally had dinner and put on your comfy jammies, but apparently what I do is break out my circa-third-grade art supplies and spend some time making a multi-media visual presentation informing potential guests that they should just walk in the door and not bother knocking…otherwise known as a “sign.” I am not ashamed to tell you that I was up until midnight making this sign, that I had several sign designs I had to consider fully and then reject one by one for reasons including “too hard to read,” “insufficiently portraying the mood and character of the people who live in this house,” and “too purple.” It was pretty exhausting and only the joys inherent to lying on the floor propped up on elbows and getting the shading of multiple color pencils juuuuust right kept me going. I needed my sleep anyway though because the next day was Pork Butt Day and I was very unsure about the whole procedure.
How you make pork butt is as follows:
1) Take your pork butt, around which you have constructed an amusing anecdote, and realize that it is, in fact, a hunk of raw meat out of which blood is merrily and steadily leaking. Wash your hands for the first of three million times today, and wrassle the butt into your housemates’ giganto Crock Pot, which they received as a wedding gift and which you have never used.
2) Pour on some apple cider vinegar. Pour on some garlic powder. Pour on some season salt. Pour on half a bottle of barbecue sauce. Pop the top on the Crock Pot and discover to your chagrin that to turn it on “low” you need to press a lot of buttons that make distressingly loud beeping noises and put you in danger of waking up the entire house at eight in the morning.
3) Check on the pork butt once an hour for nine hours. Fret that it’s supposed to be falling-apart tender and it totally does not look falling-apart tender. Express this fear, along with the fear that the pork butt will a) suck mightily and b) cause everyone you know to hate you, multiple times to anyone who has the misfortune to come into the kitchen.
4) Skim the fat, around hour eight. (The recipe assures you that there will be plenty of fat left over). Use an empty mayonnaise jar and a large spoon to do this, and fight the urge to faint as you slooooooowly fill up the jar. Reflect that this right here is the reason that you eat mostly vegetarian.
5) Oh, hey, look. After TEN HOURS in the Crock Pot, it really is fork tender! Ignore your housemates’ rolled eyes.
6) Accept marriage proposals from not-really-a-party guests when they taste the pork butt (in sandwich formation) and immediately call North Carolina to relate tremendous pork butt success.
When I wasn’t attending to butt-related matters I was making a plum-upside down cake, dipping various types of dried fruit in melted chocolate, and worrying about which cephalopod shirt to wear that evening. I have three, you see. I started out with my new one of the squid pretending to be the Loch Ness Monster, which, awww…except that it doesn’t fit quite right, that squid shirt. It’s a little too big in the torso and I like more of a cap sleeve than it provides. Sarah had on a really cool shirt that said “porn” right on it and then Treasa was all awesome in her shirt and forget about Sahana, man, she was just gorgeous as always, and I was getting jealous and feeling frumpy. After conducting a short focus group on the subject, I ran upstairs to change into my orange octopus shirt, which is bright orange, has a picture of an octopus on it, and also leaves no doubt as to my secondary sex characteristics. Awesome.
Uh, yeah, right. Octopus shirt, pork butt, where was I? Oh, well, yes, then people came over and we set up Dance Dance Revolution and I put out a variety of delicious cheeses, including a goat cheese gouda that made my eyes roll back in my head. People sat around in circles drinking pumpkin ale and talking about Madonna and looking at dirty pictures and some of Treasa’s coworkers’ kids almost killed the tortoise but we saved poor Joachin from their clutches, and we had about four cakes that people brought as well as multiple cookies. I asked lots of people to come up to the cloud room to “see the wall treatments.” We had two people who were, like, DDR masters and we insisted that they give us a demonstration round and they did and it almost killed them but it was the greatest thing any of us had ever seen. I have a new camera but I didn’t take many pictures because I was too busy talking and eating and taking the garbage out in the pouring down rain and pulling my orange octopus shirt down to ineffectually conceal my well-developed muffin top.
Sunday we all slept in late and had breakfast and managed to slouch down to Cupcake Royale in the rain, determined to give Joe and Sahana an authentic taste of Ballard (BALLARD!). We ate leftovers for lunch and devolved into a long and deliciously lazy afternoon of watching Firefly (they were under strict rules not to spoil the movie for me) and a little DDR Championship, which I lost miserably. Ha. Little does everyone know that I am going to practice DDR every day for the rest of the foreseeable future, so that I may one day get past Beginner level to Light. Next time, man, next time I’m going to totally remember where my back arrow is.
It was a pretty good mix of people this weekend, I think: old friends and new friends and former housemates and coworkers and bellydancers and even an actual family member, my cousin David who randomly lives in Seattle. People seemed to like the house and the tortoise and the books on the bookshelves, and people seemed to like hanging out with each other even if they didn’t know everyone. I felt remarkably comfortable having so many people over, even when John and Treasa and Joe and Sahana left in the middle of the party to go hang out by themselves for a while. I know for other, less socially retarded people, having people come over to sit around and eat Halloween-themed truffles is not a big deal, but for me it still is. The nice thing about living with other people, though, and about having houseguests for your not-really-a-party weekend is that even if no one else shows up it’s already kind of a party, especially if you are dorky and easily amused. I still cherish in my heart the hope that one day we will actually break out one of our two Twister sets and\or play Spin The Bottle at a not-really-a-party, but I am quite satisfied regardless.
