All of Hope Egan’s ancestors, as far back as she can remember, were farmers. They ate what the land provided, so that farm to table concept is in her blood.
“My grandmother taught me how to cook,” she recalls. “My earliest memories were of standing on a stool helping her roll out biscuits and pie crusts. I remember once, when I was so little, I sat on the counter top as she was making strawberry jam. I was grabbing strawberries as fast as I could and eating them. I wish I’d paid closer attention to how she cooked, but I took it for granted. I just enjoyed being with her.”
Egan went to work at a restaurant when she was sixteen. Her childhood training came to the fore and, though she often worked as a server, she fell in love with cooking. She watched the chefs with admiration, held little dinner parties so she could experiment on her friends, and even started a small catering company. She also worked at a bevy of Tulsa mainstays, often behind the bar.
“Her inventive tastes, sharp cocktails and cunning service know-how,” one reviewer wrote in 2016, “have been a beloved fixture in the Tulsa food scene for more than twenty years.”
And it was about then that Egan decided it was time for a change.
She started a new, bigger catering outfit, Red Thistle, still in business today. (Visit redthistlecateringtulsa.com to see how to enjoy an Egan creation.) She bought a little house on Harvard Avenue, a magical place where, behind a quotidian exterior, a dining room of farmhouse tables and mismatched country chairs overlooked a kitchen. Egan held dinners there, the kind where you sit next to strangers and end up with friends. Everything on your plate was grown or raised by a farmer who was also Egan’s friend.
“Now the beets are from Three Springs Farm, that’s Mike and Emily,” she’d say. “I’ve pickled them for 30 days. You can eat them after a week, but they keep getting better.”
Then she’d bring out a dish of chicken from 413 Farms, marinated overnight in Lebanese toum then pan-seared, and it would be so good you’d stop talking.
In 2018, she moved to a farm and, a few years later, closed the house on Harvard. She became a farmer, like her grandparents.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says, though some of her most dreadful days become comic when she retells them years later.
“We used to have a pig,” she recalls, “and she was big – big and wild. She’d break into our cooler and drink the beer. One day I got shocked on our electric fence and fell flat on my butt in the pig wallow. The pig thought I was playing and jumped on top of me, so there’s me rolling around in the mud wallow with a 300-pound pig.”
Sometime in 2021, Egan caught COVID-19, and it didn’t go away. The lingering effects of long COVID changed the way she lived her life.
“I couldn’t cook eighty hours a week, and I needed to make my soul happy,” she says. “I’ve always been an artist, but there was no time for it. I decided I’d paint every single day. I started with whimsical paintings of goddesses and farm life. Later, I did big abstracts. They made me push myself, trying to express emotion as color.”
In January of this year, one of her best friends, the sculptor Lisa Regan, put a house up for rent. Egan moved in. It’s a little wood home surrounded by big, leafy trees right near a low-slung building housing artists’ studios.
She’s started cooking again, doing occasional socials as well as pop-up dinner parties. At one recently, the courses included melon gazpacho with a hint of onion, sweet corn hushpuppies, a shrimp cocktail with the shrimp perched on a corn pudding as delicate as a souffle, a biscuit with chicken and curry-spiced molasses butter, a salad with fresh peaches she bought in Porter, and, the high point, shredded pork from a pig Egan raised on her farm.
“You have dinner surrounded by my paintings,” she says. “If it’s a paint workshop, I make food as you paint and I feed you. I’m lucky enough to have a clientele of wonderful people, so my dinners have the coolest, most fun people ever.”
Chef Egan’s Pozole Verde
Pozole:
2-3 pounds pork shoulder
4 cans hominy, drained and rinsed
2 onions
10 cloves garlic
4-5 dried chipotle peppers
8 oz. canned chopped green chilis
8 cups chicken stock (or water and 4 bouillon cubes)
2 tablespoons smoked paprika
4 tablespoons granulated garlic powder
2 teaspoons cumin
Salt to taste
Salsa Verde:
2 pounds tomatillos, peeled
1 yellow onion (peeled and quartered)
1-2 jalapeños
1 bunch cilantro
Toppings:
Radish bunch
Limes
Cilantro
Half a fresh cabbage
Jalapeños
Carrots
2 cups vinegar – white, rice or apple cider
1/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons salt
Instructions:
Generously salt your pork and rub all over with salt, a tablespoon of the garlic powder and a tablespoon of smoked paprika.
Place in a large Dutch oven or large pan you can cover tightly.
Slice your two onions into quarters and give your garlic a couple of chops. Add to pork.
Pour your stock over the pork and onions and add your dried chipotles, the rest of the spices, and a couple more pinches of salt.
Cover tightly and place in 250 degree oven. Check in 6 hours. Make sure it still has plenty of liquid. I usually cook mine for 10-12, or until it’s falling apart apart tender.
When you pork is done, remove from pan, save all that liquid!
Shred your pork and remove any bones. Remove the chipotles from the braising liquid and set aside.
Put your shredded pork back in, add the hominy and green chiles and stir together. Taste for seasoning. Add more salt if needed.
Return to heat to warm hominy and let simmer. (If you need more liquid add more chicken stock and spice it up to taste.)
For salsa verde:
Place tomatillos (papery skins removed) in a pan of water with one onion and a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil 5 minutes or until tomatillos change color. Turn off heat and let sit 5 more minutes. Strain and transfer cooked tomatillos and onion to food processor.
Add 1.5 teaspoons salt, 1/2 teaspoon cumin, and 3 tablespoons lime juice.
Pulse 5 or 6 times and then add whole bunch of cilantro with stems torn off. Pulse 5 or 6 more times.
Taste for salt and lime juice and adjust. Add 2/3 of your salsa verde into your pozole and stir.
For toppings:
Mix vinegar with sugar and salt in small sauce pan. Bring to a boil and let sugar dissolve. Remove from heat and cool. Add a few ice cubes.
Chop up carrots, cabbage, and jalapeños and pour vinegar mixture to cover. Place in a ziploc bag and refrigerate.
Serve pozole hot with side of leftover salsa verde, pickled vegetables, raw radishes, lime wedges, and fresh cilantro.
