Pork, Pasta & Saint Nick - doesn't get any better than that?

For our Christmas Day feast we brought out some of the app's from Christmas Eve and made our shrimp & garlic intermezzo bumped from our Christmas Eve menu. After years of experimentation, we have come as close as we ever have to mastering the shrimp & garlic we've sopped up at so many Portuguese restaurants in Newark. The trick? We added a bit of tomato paste which gave the reddish orange color we couldn't get from our saffron threads. Of course with oil and tons of garlic can you really go wrong?

My main contribution to the day's meal was a recipe I found in Real Simple magazine for rustic pork ragu. I made this pasta dish to rave reviews at a dinner party with the Peteys awhile back and it seemed like the perfect Christmas Day meal: hearty, savory, rich, simple and delicious.

You basically brown the pork loin; remove it from the pot, brown some onions, rosemary & garlic (scraping up the brown bits at the bottom of the pan) then add some tomatoes. You return the pork to the pot and cook for 2 - 3 hours which tenderizes the meat. Remove the pork from the pot and once cooled start shredding the pork and finally return to the tomato sauce. I prefer to stick to papardelle for the pasta but you really can go anywhere with this dish just make sure the pasta can hold up to the thick sauce (i.e. rigatoni versus angel hair). Plenty of quality cheese and a sprinkling of fresh parsley are the proverbial icing on the cake.