Month 8 day 21: Corn fritters and caramel-lacquered pork belly

I spent a lot of today cooking! Both of these recipes are from restaurants, so they were a little involved but very impressive.

Today I made:
Corn Fritters with Roasted Tomatoes and Lime Aioli, Cooking Light September 2010
Caramel-Lacquered Pork Belly with Quick-Pickled Honeydew, Food & Wine September 2010

Can you see the corn fritters and roasted tomatoes under all that arugula?? The picture in the magazine had just a few sprigs, but the recipe called for a half-cup each layer!
The main downside of this recipe is just that the tomatoes roast in the oven for 1.5 hours. Ours might have been in a little longer (1.5 hours is enough time to get distracted!), and in the end they tasted like sun-dried tomatoes but with some juice still. We liked the roasted tomatoes and think they added some good flavor, but I wonder if this recipe could be turned into a just-as-good quick recipe by using fresh tomatoes or cutting up some sun-dried ones for inside of the corn fritters or something like that.
The corn fritters are kind of like a pancake batter with scallions and fresh corn inside. They're quite small, but they cook quickly and are straightforward.
On top is a piece of prosciutto and a lime (and lemon in our case, since I ran out of lime juice) aioli.
I think if I were going to make (and photograph) this again, instead of making a tower, I would put a bed of arugula on the dish and then alternate the fritters and tomatoes overlapping (like a Caprese salad). It is sort of intimidating and difficult to eat something that is towering anyway!
This recipe is almost vegetarian, and I think it could easily work for breakfast, lunch, brunch, or as an appetizer.

Not too long after lunch it was already time to start on dinner, which takes 4 hours in addition to overnight curing :-P Although, it was a little faster for us because we could only buy pre-sliced pork belly instead of one two-pound slab and I didn't wait for it to cool down fully (I didn't understand the logic of this step, unless it was supposed to slow down cooking in the second roast, but given our thin slices I figured it was a lost cause anyway, so no point in waiting).

Although this recipe takes a long time, there aren't really that many steps-- they just each take a while. It's rubbed with some sugar and an excessive amount of salt, which is supposed to get washed off later but didn't! This was super fatty and super salty-- I am pretty thirsty now. But since I've been getting dizzy every time I stood up today, it's probably good to have eaten this! Raise the blood pressure up a bit.

Then the pork is roasted (braised? There's some water in the dish), and it leaked out sooo much extra liquid. I'm not sure if that was juices from the meat or fat that was getting liquified. Then it's supposed to just cool completely. Meanwhile, you heat some sugar until it caramelizes, then stop the cooking with some water and then add a bit of flavors-- fish sauce, tamarind paste, chile, and lime juice. Then the pork is added back in and roasted again until everything gets coated, concentrated, and crunchy.

During one of these long waits, the honeydew is just cut up and mixed with some flavors and "pickled" for about an hour.

This was our first use of the Dutch oven!! It did a great job. I wish I had taken a picture when it came out of the oven! It was completely covered in solidified caramel, but after heating up some water everything scrubbed off perfectly. So much nicer than our cast iron skillet :)

We liked this, but I hope in the future I can wash off more of the salt-- it definitely required a lot of white rice and honeydew to balance it out. The flavors were rich and good-- it did seem like a restaurant recipe! The honeydew scent reminded me of something I used to get at a restaurant as a kid maybe, but I think it used to be with cucumber instead of honeydew. I only used half the melon thinking that we might not like this, but it was pretty good after all.