Tallasiandude came home from the H-Mart with a big pack of meaty pork neck bones that cost all of $3.50. He figured I could come up with something cool to do with them. (This blind faith in my cookery is another reason why I love my husband.)
I decided that I wanted to cook them with sauerkraut, at least partially because the recipe in Craig Claiborne’s New New York Times Cookbook sounded both simple and delicious. So I did that yesterday, browning the meat off in bacon fat and smoked salt, and then putting in onions and garlic, then topping it with 4 pounds of fresh sauerkraut, 13 juniper berries, 2 cloves, 1/2 tsp caraway seeds, cracked pepper and a bay leaf, and setting it to stew with just over a cup of white vermouth and a can of chicken broth.
It came out yummy, and the house has smelled like kraut and pork since yesterday. My intention was to make some spaetzle to go with it, since there was another easy-sounding recipe in the same book. So today, when we had some guests over, I put the water on to boil and whipped up the recipe — 2 cups flour, 3 eggs, 2/3 cup milk, salt & nutmeg. But the batter was sticky and elastic, and would NOT go through the holes of the colander no matter what I did. So I scraped it back out, added about 50% again more milk, and tried again with marginally better luck: I could get the dough out of the holes, but only slowly and with great efforts. After about an hour standing over the stove, with various helpers holding the colander or taking over completely, we did actually have enough spaetzle to eat, so we quit. I cooked the rest of it in huge lumps later on, being unable to completely give up and throw out the rest of the dough.
I suspect that I should not have used the stand mixer. Too much beating made it elastic? But it said to beat continually, and did say something about an electric mixer as an option to the hand whisk. A hand whisk would have been a complete pain with the original dough, as thick as it was. Sigh. I wish I knew what went wrong for sure. They came out tasty enough, with the right texture and taste, but it just CANNOT be that hard. Yipes.