Pork Skewers: or, A Book of Cookrye goes outdoors: or, Math Class is over and pork chops were on sale

We at A Book of Cookrye have reached a point of delirious ecstasy! You see, our math class is over! Not only is our math class over, but it's the last one we will ever take. WE ARE DONE WITH MATH CLASS. Had someone said to us on our first day of college, still 18 and Cloroxing away our acne,  "Before you graduate, you will take calculus I, II, and III," we would have laughed and said "There's a third calculus?" before mocking the sort of pathetic, lifeless, masochistic sap who would voluntarily do that to themselves. But here we are, having gone right to the end of the calculus book we had to buy and feeling damn good about being able to permanently close it.

Pork Skewers 2 c wine (if it's old and starting to turn into vinegar, it's still just fine for this) 2 c cider vinegar 9 oz (2 small jars) minced garlic 18 pork chops 2 onions 1 bottle spicy brown mustard Cut the pork chops into quarters or sixths, depending on how big and how thick they are. Cut up the onions (you can leave them in big enough pieces to skewer with the pork or separately roast wrapped in foil, or you can finely chop them). Mix everything except the mustard and marinate overnight. The next day, skewer the pork (you can put the onions on the skewers with it if desired). Before starting the fire, thickly coat skewers in mustard and leave them to sit and absorb it until the fire is ready. Grill them to taste.

Furthermore, look what was marked down 30 percent!

Still a bit pricy, but I only finish math classes for life once.

We devised the marinade by the time-honored "what bottles of stuff are sitting forgotten in the cabinet?" method. Initially we considered buying beer for the express purpose since it did such wonders for the steaks, but since we left our driver's license at home, the chops got vinegar and wine instead.

Thank you to the person who left his massive frying pan under the counter for nothing else was big enough to hold all of this.

The cookout aspect was masterminded by a friend from the Philippines. While I've never operated a grill in my life, she has watched others doing it. Therefore, the meat ended up skewers- the only one of us who knew anything about grilling was doing it the way she'd seen it done at home.

Her: "We're doing it Philippine style!"
Me: "Is there anything Philippine about this besides it's on sticks?"
Her: "Not really."

We initially intended to do an end-of-math-class marshmallow roast. However, when we went down to one of the campus parks to gather firewood (you didn't think we'd pay for that, did you?), we may have been a bit overzealous. This led to us having nowhere to put a decent-sized woodpile (we'd thought we'd stash the handful of logs in the hedge so the maintenance people didn't throw it out when they did sidewalk patrol), but we ended up having to waylay everyone who came downstairs asking if they drove a truck.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Well, I've got a stack of firewood that---"
"Gotta go."
Someone eventually agreed to let us store the wood in the back of his pickup and even helped move it.

Yes, my math book is on the counter with everything else to take out to the grill.

As usually happens when grilling, this turned into a social occasion. People hearing that we were outside preparing to throw my math book upon the embers to make up for three semesters of misery and tears grilling brought out things they'd had stashed in the freezer, turning this into an impromptu potluck. And I don't mean someone bringing out a couple of scraps. One person had an entire package of hamburger patties. Another person brought out bratwursts. What previously had seemed like so much wood I'd have to find someone to give the rest to began to look like it may not burn long enough for everything to cook. Granted, none of us actually knew how to grill in the first place and we were doing this in the middle of the night when a flashlight was required to see if the meat was done, but we figured it out quick enough.

There were three more batches of stuff to put on the grill by the time everyone who was going to had brought something out, plus marshmallows.

And so, we at A Book of Cookrye bid our classes for this semester good-bye! The pork skewers were so delicious, we'd deliberately buy more wine and vinegar and find more firewood just to do them again. Besides, we managed to make the coals last long enough for s'mores!

We even had leftover firewood to give away.