My mother made a gigantic porchetta this past Christmas, and coupled with the joy of being home, it was one of the most wonderful and heart-warming meals I've ever eaten. I live on my own--an ocean and half a continent away from her--but I wanted to recreate her magic in my own home and find a way to do it at a much more reasonable scale. At first I tried an all belly porchetta, which was wonderful but just didn't have the right ratio of meat. I went back to my mother's method of using a tenderloin in the middle, but I got a much smaller one to fit my tiny pork belly. My mother's recipe was a tweaked version of one from Chowhound. I changed the scale of hers, tweaked my spices a bit, and added in a technique from Serious Eats chicharrones to help with skin crisping. I was also lazy and cooked my vegetables in the same pan to take advantage of all the yummy rendered fat (unlike my mother who took some of the fat out, and put it in a separate pan to cook her vegetables, which does help to give you a crispier pork belly skin because you're not fighting the moisture released by the vegetables... yeah, mom's always right).

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