Once again I'm returning to a recipe I found at Simply Recipes. Here's today's variation.

Ingredients

• Two 27-oz cans of La Costeña canned whole tomatillos (which I found at Food City on Apache)
• Garlic, 8 cloves
• Pork shoulder, 2 lbs
• Olive oil
• 2 onions, chopped
• Chicken stock, 2.5 cups
• One cup of diced, canned green chiles
• 1.5 tsp of oregano
• Salt, pepper

Procedure

1. Cut pork into chunks. Salt and pepper generously. Brown in small batches in Dutch oven with olive oil. Put aside.
2. Broil five unpeeled cloves of garlic. Remove from oven. Peel.
3. Put chopped onions and three cloves of raw garlic in frying pan. Fry till soft.
4. Drain the cans of tomatillos. Reserve the brine.
5. Put tomatillos through blender with broiled garlic. Pour into Dutch oven. Add meat, chicken stock, oregano and green chiles. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat so that it simmers/slow boils uncovered for three hours or until pork is fork tender.
6. As necessary, heat up remaining brine and add to Dutch to maintain liquid. If you cook only three hours, you probably won't need it. If longer, you might.

Once again this recipe turned out really well, and the secret is definitely the canned tomatillos. This time I used La Costeña brand, which worked great. I also used powdered caldo for the chicken stock. If you do that, you definitely do not want to salt the meat before you brown it. If you are using homemade, unsalted chicken stock, then maybe you want to salt the meat when you brown it, but bear in mind that the canned tomatillos have some salt in them. Save adding salt till the last step or until you are at the dinner table.

2013-01-05: I must have misread my cans earlier. Canned tomatillos are definitely salty, but their pickling makes all the difference in the taste of the dish. Use them, but then use low-salt chicken broth and don't salt the recipe. Don't use the tomatillo brine in place of chicken broth. Actually, you could probably use just plain water instead of chicken broth.