This recipe from Waitrose Kitchen magazine was utterly delicious.
I’d use half the amount of star anise next time, and I substituted a small amount of nutmeg as I didn’t have any mace. I fished out the bay leaves, cinnamon and star anise before serving. Perfect for a firework night supper, and a great way of cooking cheap packs of diced pork shoulder. (Click on the image above to get a larger image of the recipe).
I had half a tin of kidney beans, half a fresh chilli and half a tin of tomatoes left over in the fridge when making brunch – out of hunger & necessity was born Spicy Breakfast Beans. They’re very similar to Huevos Sloberos, so you could maybe have them in a wrap with a fried egg on top.
Chop & fry the onion in a little olive oil with the chopped chilli, until the onions start to colour & get a bit sticky. Chuck in the tomatoes, kidney beans a dash of Worcester sauce (or maybe soy sauce if you’re strictly veggie) and a tiny bit of something sweet – a tiny bit of sugar or agave nectar or whatever you have to hand.
Simmer for 20 minutes or so, while you cook sausages, bacon & eggs. Delish!
I wanted to make some slow-roasted pork. Quick google. Ah, Nigella! Read recipe. Recipe tells me I should have put pork in oven this time… yesterday.
Life is too short for slow-roasted pork that takes 24 hours to cook. Even Jamie’s 6 hour slow roast is pushing it a bit, frankly. So here’s how I took a recipe from Jamie’s Home and turned it into quick slow-roasted pork, with crispy crackling and succulent pork that falls apart as you pull it:
Put the oven on to 150 C.
In a pestle & mortar, grind the fennel seeds, salt and rosemary.
Rub sea salt into the scores in the rind of your pork. Heat a splash of olive oil in a roasting tray big enough for your meat on the top of the stove. Place your meat fat-side down and fry until the fat starts bubbling up and going golden. While it’s doing this, rub the salt / fennel / rosemary mix into the meaty side.
Thickly chop the onions and celery. Remove the meat from the roasting tray, then make a bed for it in the tray with the onions, celery, unpeeled garlic cloves, bay leaves. Place the meat on top and seal tightly with tin foil. Put in the cool oven. After about an hour, check on it to make sure there’s plenty of juice. If it seems like it’s drying out, add some apple juice or water. It should look something like this:
Then pop it back in the oven for another hour or two – you’ll need to check on it from time to time to see that it’s not burning, and that the meat is cooked. It should be juicy and fall part when you pull it with two forks.
When it’s cooked, whack the oven up hot. Take the tray out, and remove the crackling. Set the meat aside for later. Put the rind in its own small roasting tray and season again with salt and pepper. Cook in a hot oven for 30 mins or so. Remove, dry on paper towels and munch with a glass cider, while you wait for your roast vegetables to cook in the hot oven.
Make gravy with the juices & veg left in the main roasting tray. Put it on the stove, sieve some plain flour in and stir in with a whisk until it thickens a bit. Gradually add half a litre of hot vegetable stock and a splash of soy sauce. Scrape all the bits off the pan and sieve into a gravy jug when nice and thick. Delicious.
We had this with roasted potatoes, parsnips and butternut squash, plus sauce made with home-grown apples simmered with a little butter, sugar, water and a nip of Somerset cider brandy. The aroma was heady and heavenly.
This looked quite nice, tasted even better. Sadly we scoffed it before I managed to take its photo.
Put the oven on, around 200 C.
Slice the onion roughly and fry in olive oil with some of the rosemary and thyme until translucent. Towards the end add the roughly chopped garlic and fry quickly. Scrape everything into an oven-proof dish large enough to hold 4 pork chops.
Season the pork chops generously with sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper. Fry quickly in batches on a high heat to brown the outside of the chops. Place the browned chops on the onions, add the rest of the herbs. Slice the apple and place a slice of apple on each chop. I sprinkled oil in top at this point, but if you do go sparingly – I ended up with too much.
Seal the dish with tin foil on top and put in the oven for about 45 minutes. The result was succulent, juicy pork chops that were really fragrant. The slice of apple melted and provided a blob of apple sauce for each chop.
We had this with roast potatoes and cabbage fried in butter, lots of black pepper and soused in a splash of vermouth.
We planned to get veg in Lewisham market today and fish in Deptford (I wanted lunch at Panda Panda). We didn’t quite make it to Deptford, but we got some bargains in the market:
Having found the fish we needed in Lewisham, we didn’t really need to go to Deptford. I’m afraid we went to Tesco – where I found Thai coconut milk for 69p a can (they also sell tins for 99p and £1.30 so make sure you find the right one – it’s called Cocofresh). We use a lot of this in curries. And as we weren’t going to Panda Panda I bought these udon noodles which I pimped with finely-sliced carrot, chilli, radish, peas and prawns. They were about £2.19 for 2 packets – and it was an excuse to get the Japanese mandolin out of the cupboard where it’s been for the last 12 years or so. They were tasty. And Chewy. I always insist on Chewy brand udon.
We have one veggie in our house so we often cook ‘split dishes’ – they start out the same and then get split in two at some point in the cooking process when meat is added to one pot and not the other. This is a bit different because it starts out with two pots but you cook both dishes simultaneously.
Serves 4. You will need:
Chop the onion and fry in a little olive oil with the garam masala spice in two separate pans. The spices should cook a bit and flavour the oil. After the onion has cooked a bit add half the chopped garlic to each pan. Add a teaspoon of harissa paste to each pan and give a good stir.
Cut the chicken breasts into strips and add to one pan, stirring so they get coated with the spices and cook all over. Add one third of the drained, rinsed chickpeas to the chicken, and then put the rest (two thirds) in the veggie pot.
When the chicken strips look cooked, add a handful of apricots and a tin of tomatoes to each pan, season with salt & pepper, top up with a little water if needed, put lids on and simmer for half an hour or so. Make the cous cous up by following the instructions on the packet – I just poured on boiling water to slightly more than cover the cous cous in a bowl, left it for 10 minutes and fluffed it up with a fork.
Give everyone two large spoons of cous cous and put the stew on top – serve with a dollop of yoghurt if it’s extra spicy, or and / or some chopped coriander leaves.
It was delicious. The veggie one ended up much spicier than the meat one for some reason – I must have put more harissa in it. I’m having the leftovers with Turkish flatbread for my lunch tomorrow. Can’t wait.
The hipster coffee maker in the previous post really divided opinion, but it’s a nicely made film and it, plus the Guardian article and associated comments, really got me thinking about coffee. I love coffee, but I’m not a snob about it. I make drip coffee at home with pre-packed ground red label Lavazza in a cup-top filter cone (it takes 1×2 size filters) and my favourite regular coffee shop is Ravellos on Dean Bradley Street in Westminster. They can make a black Americano that is so smooth you’d swear it had cream in it. I’ve dabbled with Dark Fluid coffee from Brockley Market and the With Jam & Bread Café but I’m not totally convinced yet.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the comments on the Guardian article on coffee, but a few useful common themes seem to emerge:
Ok, not exactly food, but I do like a nice cup of black coffee, and this is mesmerising:
via http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/09/how-to-make-the-perfect-espresso
the Goods Shed lunchtime menu on 14th Feb 2012
I had lunch in Paris recently, in a fantastic restaurant, Terminus Nord, just across the road from the Gare du Nord. It occured to me that you would not find such a great eaterie so close to any major railway terminus in London. Well that may or may not be true, but there is an equally wonderful, but very different, restaurant right next to Canterbury West railway station.
The Goods Shed is a kind of fixed, indoor farmers’ market with a restaurant. There’s a huge variety of amazing produce on sale: meat, fish, cheese, vegetables, an extraordinary selection of bottled and kegged beer and cider, cakes as well as a cafe and ready-made food to take away and eat at home.
The restaurant sits around the outside of the shed on a raised platform. The atmosphere is informal and the food is amazing.
Eldest son had slow-roasted pork with marmalade sauce (£14.50). This photo really doesn’t do it justice – it was a BIG piece of meat. The pork just melted in the mouth and the crackling was perfect: crispy on top, without a hint of being burnt, and utterly melty underneath. The mashed potatoes and curly kale were perfect with it.
I had duck breast with roasted pears, hibiscus sauce… and some kind of mash and curly kale. At £16 this was the most expensive dish we had, and I was a bit disappointed with it. If you got each ingredient on your fork at the same time, it was lovely, but the duck on its own didn’t taste of anything very special to me.
My daughter had chicken – it was a leg, and being a leg they were unable to split it for a child portion. But what chicken! This was easily the best chicken I have ever had. It was cooked utterly perfectly – the source produce, seasoning and cooking process were all top-notch. And, like the pork, there was a lot of meat on the plate here. Superb.
There was also a very tasty, generously-portioned vegetarian platter on offer. I’m sure the puddings are amazing, but we were vanquished by the genorosity of the portions… and we thought we probably ought to visit the Cathedral, which was (ostensibly) the main purpose of our visit to Canterbury in the first place.
A very filling one course lunch for 2 adults and 3 children (two of whom had adult portions) came to £77.40 including one local ale and five soft drinks.
Thoroughly recommended – we’ll be back. And thank you to @ginandting for suggesting it.
Web site: http://thegoodsshed.co.uk/restaurant/
Closed Mondays!
I rounded off the day by watching one of my favourite films: Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 masterpiece A Canterbury Tale.
I like carrot & coriander soup, but I wanted something with a bit more kick to warm me up. This kicks ass.
You will need:
Fry the onion in some oil for 5 minutes. Add the potato, one of the red chillis, chopped with seeds and all, fresh ginger and ground coriander. Fry for about 10 minutes. Add the carrots and vegetable stock. Simmer for 20 minutes. Add a knob of creamed coconut, let it melt then blitz in a blender. Season to taste.
Sprinkle some slices of red chilli and fresh coriander on top when you serve. Hot, spicy and delicious.
