Hola, 2012: Pork and Sauerkraut

Remember all the cabbage we were fermenting into sauerkraut? Well, two weeks later, we took the brick and the plate off the crock to see what we had:

Mmmm. That forkful was salty, but full of flavor. As with Virginia ham, salt is the major preservative of sauerkraut, and it is a good idea to rinse it a bit before eating it. As you can see above, our sauerkraut after two weeks is still quite green, and it is also still fairly crunchy. This could probably sit in the crock for another two weeks to be fully finished, but we really wanted to have some on New Year's, so we called it done. We also decided that we would call this concoction "new sauerkraut," since it is still pretty mild and fresh tasting — like a new, fresh pickle instead of one that's been in brine for six months. I think the kids liked this mild version better than the stronger, more traditional sauerkraut. 

At this point you may be wondering: why the obsession with eating sauerkraut on New Year's?  Pork and sauerkraut is a traditional good luck dish to be eaten on New Year's Day in Pennsylvania Dutch country, where we are originally from. That may sound terribly old fashioned, but I am from a corner of the Lehigh County where the old timers still spoke Pennsylvania Dutch (sometimes almost exclusively) and we still sang "Silent Night" in German on Christmas Eve — in the 1980s. 


So, yeah, we do our best to uphold some of the German traditions we grew up with — especially in an age in which regionalisms are dying out fast, and in which we are realizing that our children don't entirely share our culture (they are from Massachusetts, you know, and call their aunts "AHnts" instead of "Ants," for example). 


New Year's dinner consisted, then, of the traditional pork and (new) sauerkraut, served with gravy over spaetzle. (Side note: We serve our sauerkraut as a side dish, rather than cooked with the pork in the same dish as is most common in Dutch country.) We also roasted up some of our last carrots: 

The non-traditional part of this dinner was the salad appetizer that Kirk made: apple, fennel, raisins, walnuts, our baby Brussels (yes, I know, I'll tell you all about it later), and goat cheese. Man, was that good — the kids even loved it! The other break with tradition? We ate it on January 2. I alluded to our roaring hangovers in my last post, and that is the reason we postponed. I am proudly PA German and love this tradition, but good God — no one over the age of 21 was ready to eat much of anything on January 1 this year, let alone sauerkraut!