I never really thought much about making posole until recently. Shawn told me he hates hominy, but of course prior to this, he had only ever eaten it out of a can. Canned hominy is a much different animal than dried. It has sort of a squeaky texture that hominy prepared from the dry state doesn’t have. I had a feeling that this “squeakiness” had something to do with his aversion to it.

For Christmas this year, I gave my parents a Rancho Gordo care package with a sampling of several kinds of their dried beans. When I placed the order, on a whim, I decided to get a couple of packages of their dried prepared hominy. I thought I would use it to make green posole, but then Homesick Texan posted this recipe so, I had to make it.

It was absolutely perfect—the pork fell apart into shreds and the broth was rich and delicious. Okay, so it was almost perfect—my hominy didn’t actually flower because I didn’t allow enough time for it to cook, so it was a little au dente and the kernels didn’t open up the way they should have. But this actually didn’t bother me a bit. I sort of enjoyed the chewiness of the underdone hominy. Next time I would add the dry, soaked hominy at the beginning with the other ingredients rather than waiting a couple of hours as the recipe suggests.

Oh, and by the way, Shawn ate a healthy serving of posole. He said it was good and the hominy didn’t really bother him. Success!

When I came home with a head of cauliflower last week, and Shawn declared, “I hate cauliflower,” (surprise surprise) I knew I was going to have to puree that sucker. So it became soup. And you know what? He ate it. He said it tasted sort of like potatoes. He loves potatoes. Maybe the idea of heroic cauliflower isn’t so far-fetched.

Creamy Cauliflower Soup