Sticky spare ribs

Fabulous sticky ribs last night. Easy, you just need a bit of time. As it was a last-minute decision, I didn't marinade the meat, and it didn't seem to make any difference. We made proper pigs of ourselves.

Sticky ribs
for 4-5

1.5kg pork ribs

6 tbsp redcurrant jelly (or whatever jelly is to hand)
2 tbsp honey
2 finely chopped cloves garlic
1 knob of grated ginger
2 tbsp soy sauce
chilli jam to taste (I used a tsp or so of a v hot mix)

Stir up the marinade ingredients, then coat the meat. Put everything in a roasting tin. Leave for an hour or the whole day if time allows.

Cover the tin with foil and roast at 170C for 45 minutes. Take the tin out, turn the meat over, turn the oven up to 190C, and roast uncovered for 45 minutes. Baste once or twice if possible. When they're done, switch off the oven and leave them for 5-10 minutes, otherwise they'll be too hot to handle.

Spiced plum sauce for roast pork

Back from Scotland to find a HUGE glut of plums, despite thinning the tree when the fruit set. The Victoria plums are good to eat, but can't begin to compete with the greengages on a neighbouring tree, which taste as sweet as any fruit I've ever eaten. So the gages are all being eaten where they grew, only the purple plums are getting as far as the kitchen.

I made this very good sauce to go with roast belly of pork (which I smeared with olive oil and chopped thyme, sprinkled with a little Maldon salt, then roasted for half an hour at 220C and an hour at 180 - great crackling, or, if not, then a quick blast at the highest temperature your oven will crank up to).

Plum sauce

15-20 plums
2 medium onions
2 dssp runny honey
1 tsp Chinese five-spice
3 cloves of garlic, smashed
1-2 tbsp chilli jam
a sprinkle of wine vinegar

Halve and stone the plums. Chop the onions. Place in a roasting tray with all the other ingredients. This needs about an hour at 180C, so it went into the oven with the pork when I turned down the heat.

Jellied stock good enough to eat on its own

Okay, this post is not for the squeamish. But it IS for anyone who likes complex flavours in their food, for anyone who hates waste, and for anyone who has access to a butcher's shop. Emphatically not supermarket food.

For once, I'm following a recipe to the letter. Next time I won't be so literal ... I won't put in as much Madeira, because the result is very sweet. It's not exactly a waste of good Madeira, because the taste shines through, but in this house I think we'd probably rather drink it than use it quite so liberally in the cooking.

The recipe comes from Fergus Henderson's book Beyond Nose to Tail Eating. It's the sequel to Nose to Tail Eating, a book which I have not yet read, although I ordered both at the same time. The recipe for this wondrous stock - which Henderson calls Trotter Gear - has been several years in the making, and therefore does not appear in the first book. But loads of the dishes Henderson makes with it are in both books, and I will definitely be making them.


















Trotter gear

6 pig's trotters (I used four)
2 onions (peeled)
2 carrots
2 sticks of celery
2 leeks
1 head of garlic
thyme
a handful of peppercorns
1/2 bottle of Madeira
enough chicken stock to cover the trotters

Get the butcher to split the trotters. Put them in a large casserole, cover with water and boil for five minutes. Drain and rinse off the scum. Put back into the rinsed casserole with all the other ingredients. Bring to a simmer, then put in a low oven for three hours or more - until the meat is falling off the bone.

When the trotters are cool enough to handle, strip off the flesh. Shred it, and put into a Le Parfait jar. Strain the stock over it. Seal, and keep in the fridge. Do this while everything is still warm, because it's much harder when the meat is cold.


If you are a little squeamish but have managed so far, you could just strain the stock off, and not worry about using the meat. I might do this next time, because my dogs were keen as mustard to get hold of the trotters, and they'd be a fabulous treat for two Jack Russells.

Either way, the meaty basis of this nectar cost £1. Jellied stock, sitting in my fridge. Five minutes' work. So many possibilities.

Pork chops with plums and spices

Here's a lovely seasonal recipe, hard to beat when the plums are on the trees (although all ours were barren this year, frost I think). It's adapted from Diana Henry's lovely book Cook Simple. Despite the chilli and ginger, it's flavoured rather than hot, and was fine for my family of spice-haters. This amount of sauce will do for 4-6 chops

450g/1lb plums, stoned and halved
4-6 pork chops

5 tbsp runny honey
1 tsp Chinese five-spice
1 tsp ground ginger
a little red chilli, chopped fine
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
juice of an orange
1 tsp wine vinegar

Arrange the chops and plums in a single layer in a casserole, then pour over the mixed sauce ingredients. Cover and cook at 180C/365F for 45-50 minutes. Diana Henry cooks this in an uncovered pan in a slightly hotter oven: hers is crisped and brown at the edges, mine is soft and succulent.

I cooked this in the oven of our new wood-burning range ... I'll post about that soon, when I'm over the euphoria of cooking entire meals using a couple of small logs for fuel.

Petit salé aux lentilles

Do you watch tv when you're pottering in the kitchen? I do; & couple of days ago I was half-watching an old episode of Rick Stein's gastro-journey through France, when his barge stopped at Kate Hill's place in Gascony - it was lovely to see one of my favourite bloggers, her kitchen and her garden. He borrowed her kitchen, and used it to make petit salé (don't know how to get the accent ... can anyone advise?***). Petit salé means lightly salted ... it's mostly pork, but I've also eaten a petit salé of duck breast.

If you consult Elizabeth David on lentilles au petit salé, she's not particularly helpful, as she instructs you to add a "piece of breast of salt pork", as if that's something you can easily find outside France. Rick Stein started with an ordinary piece of pork belly, which he salted himself ... he didn't have much time to spare, so left it to salt for four hours. I was in a different kind of hurry, which meant I salted it one evening to cook the next. This is the kind of forgiving cooking I like; which is to say that either method works fine.

There's another point here: belly of pork is a pretty fatty cut of meat (think streaky bacon) ... there was a time when it was more fat than meat. But the consumer preference for lean meat means that even this cut now has very little fat, although it still needs long slow cooking. I cut the skin off before serving. And I cooked it with lots and lots of vegetables.


















Petit salé aux lentilles is traditional French cooking: you cook the meat and lentils, together with carrots, onions, celery and a generous bouquet garni of fresh herbs, then serve it in a soup plate with the cooking liquid. It's the kind of thing you might find on the menu at a Routiers cafe.

Petit salé

a boned half belly of pork
salt
bouquet garni of fresh parsley bay thyme
some small onions
carrots
celery
Puy lentils

Salt the pork for at least four hours, or overnight. You need to cover meat liberally, but not thickly. Put it in something non-reactive - I used a plastic box - and leave in the fridge until you're ready to cook.

Wash the salt off. Shake the meat dry. Put it skin side down in a heavy pan (Stein used a le Creuset, I used stainless steel). Cover with cold water, add the bouquet garni, and simmer for 50 minutes.

Turn the meat, then add a couple of handfuls of lentils. After about 15 minutes, add small onions (I used shallots, because that's what there was), chunks of carrot, slices of celery. Rick Stein also added chunks of smoked sausage, but I thought that was unnecessarily gilding the lily - I want to end up with more vegetable than meat on each plate. Carry on simmering until everything is ready .. you want the meat to have been cooking for about an hour and a half in total (so don't turn the carrots into batons).

Remove the meat; peel off the skin; carve into thick slices. Serve in a soup plate with plenty of vegetables and a little cooking juice, together with a garnish of finely chopped parsley. Mmm


PS you may have noticed ED's shift of emphasis in name for this recipe: hers is a lentil dish with meat and no other vegetables, apart from a chopped onion. The method and seasoning is identical.

*** huge thanks to Alex at Eating Leeds for explaining to me the intricacies of the acute accent: I'm putting the explanation + link here for anyone else who is interested, and so that I can refer to it when I need, say, a grave accent, or a ç edilla (I'm showing off now, but, as so often with show-offs, I've got my come-uppance, because I can't make it work without the gap between the c and the rest of the word).

This is what you do:
here's the link to Andy's list of html character codes

OK - on Andy's page you need to look at the very first column, headed
'Entity'. For lower case e-acute it has: eacute.

To get blogger to render this properly ... type & eacute; WITHOUT THE GAP AFTER the &.

You can just type this straight into the normal editing pane. If you want to
check whether or not it will come out properly, just hit the preview button.
Once blogger's previewed it, it will display properly in the normal editing
pane too.

After a while you should find it quite intuitive ... as things like a-grave
are just & agrave; and c-cedilla is & ccedil; etc etc.


Thanks Alex!

Spiced apricot and orange chutney

Looking for marmalade, I discovered a forgotten jar of this - made in 2005, matured to perfection. It's Delia, from her Christmas book. She also uses this to make a quick sauce for roast pork, so it's quite useful for cooking ahead if you've got some spare time. I made it as a Christmas present for 2005, with the sauce recipe attached.

Spiced apricot and orange chutney

400g no-soak dried apricots
1 tsp whole coriander seeds
225g soft brown sugar
425ml cider vinegar
1 chopped onion
50g sultanas
2 tbsp grated ginger
2 chopped cloves garlic
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
grated zest and juice of an orange

Cut the apricot into small pieces. Temper the coriander seeds in a dry frying pan, then bash them in a mortar. Put everything together into a large stainless steel saucepan & heat gently until the sugar has dissolved. Simmer half-covered for 45 minutes or so. You want soft onions and fruit, but you don't want it too thick, and it will carry on thickening as it cools.

Spoon into sterilised jars. I generally do this by putting them through a dishwasher cycle. Or you can put them into a hottish oven until they are too hot to handle.

Spiced apricot sauce for roast pork

You make this exactly as if you were making gravy: sprinkle a little flour onto the pan juices, mix to a paste, add white wine - enough to make the sauce - bubble and reduce, stirring all the time to keep smooth. Stir in a good quantity of the chutney, also some orange zest, and simmer for about 5 minutes, until the flour is cooked.

I think it would be just as good using a dash of wine and some stock.


Related posts:

Braised mixed lentils
Chilli and pepper chutney
Red onion marmalade

Useful links:

Delia Smith Online
Pomiane's anti-Delia rant

Chairman Mao's red braised pork revisited

When I made Chairman Mao's red braised pork a couple of weeks ago, none of the children was at home. When Lucius came home that evening, he went straight to bed with a temperature. So I ate it alone, two nights in a row. I thought it good enough to do again. I thought they'd all like it. So I made it last night. You should have heard the whingeing.

To be honest, it wasn't what I was expecting. What were you expecting? Well, something with a bright red thick sauce, and chunks of raw peppers and onions. You mean takeaway? Yeah, let's order. & so on & so on & so on.

It was quite hot, even though I doubled the quantities but halved the chilli. So next time I make this - and I will, later this week - I'm going to leave out the chilli altogether, thicken the sauce with a little cornflour, add a few vegetables a la Chinese takeaway. And make an egg fried rice to go with it.


PS if you make this, don't panic when you add the pork - it seems as if there's no sauce at all, but there is, as the sugar melts down. It's delicious. Just don't be tempted to add red food colouring.

PPS I made it with lean pork, much nicer. And I left out the boiling stage, with no discernable difference to the finished dish.

Chairman Mao's red braised pork

I had a lovely day yesterday watching my younger daughter and her school team (representing Oxfordshire) play fantastic hockey - and win the regional tournament. So now, for the second year running, they go forward to represent the South of England at the National Finals of the U18 schools tournament in March next year. WELL DONE St Edwards! And GOOD LUCK in the nationals!























I read this recipe in a colour supplement a couple of weekends ago, and I've been wanting to make it ever since. Quick to make, so that's a plus, but not very red, and not as good as its name, although I liked it. Lovely Chinese flavours, much nicer than takeaway.

This recipe is - I'm told - from the Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuchsia Dunlop - great name, or what? WHY didn't I call one of my children Fuchsia? Or, even better, Dahlia? No, I know the answer to that, so please don't tell me, especially if you ARE one of my children (!).

Chairman Mao's red braised pork

500g belly pork (I think it would be better with a leaner cut)
2 tbsp oil
3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp shaoxing wine
20g sliced fresh ginger (don't bother to peel it)
1 star anise
1 dried chilli
1 stick of cinnamon

Boil the pork in water for four minutes. I don't know why you do this, and I'm not sure that I'd bother again, because in the end, you couldn't tell the difference between the bits that had boiled edges and the bits that didn't. Drain, cool, and cut into bite-sized pieces.

Heat the oil and sugar in a wok (mine is non-stick). When the sugar has melted, turn up the heat and brown it. Then add the pork. Toss until each piece of meat has been coated in the sugary oil. It will spit at you, and the sugar will stick like superglue to your spoon. You can rectify this by burying the spoon under the meat as it cooks, and the sugar will gradually melt.

Add the wine and the spices. Simmer for 45-60 minutes (it will depend on the size of your chunks of meat). I half-covered my wok with its lid, because I couldn't quite believe that the meat would cook in that time. Which meant I had to reduce the sauce a little at the end, but the original instructions say you should do that anyway (I'm not sure you'd need to if you left off the lid ... there wasn't a huge quantity of sauce). I left it to cook by itself, although I turned it over a couple of times during cooking.

Serve with noodles and stir-fried vegetables. You might want some soy sauce, because it's a bit bland, despite the spices. Perhaps a little more chilli.

Worth a try, even though it's not very healthy.

Pork tenderloin with prunes

Here's a quick and delicious dinner, not too expensive either. It uses a whole tenderloin, something which is rarely seen in supermarkets, as they like to cut it up into what they call medallions. It is occasionally to be found in Waitrose, but it's more reliable to go to the butcher, where, if they're any good at all, they'll greet you like a long-lost friend after only a couple of visits.


for 3-4
one pork tenderloin
one or two onions
no-soak prunes (I used Agen)
some bacon lardons*
garlic
sage

Start by making a marinade for the pork: put two or three cloves of garlic, a handful of sage and a little salt into a mortar and pestle them into a paste. Then add some olive oil. Smear this mess over the tenderloin, and leave it as long as you can. This is something you could do in the morning to speed things up in the evening, or you could fling the whole dish together at the last minute, giving the meat only a few minutes to soak up the flavourings.

Slice one large or two medium onions into big chunks. Put them in a roasting dish (I used a French oval earthenware one, but I can't think of any reason not to use a metal roasting pan, except that the timings will probably be quicker). Fry some lardons of bacon until brown and mix them with the onions. Add a handful or two of no-soak prunes, and a little liquid - I used Madeira, but I could just as easily have used table wine, stock, or water. Put this into a hot oven, 200C, for 10-15 minutes, by which time the onion should be beginning to soften. Add the tenderloin and all its marinade, cover with tinfoil or dampened greaseproof paper, and put back into the oven for 15 minutes. Remove the covering to cook and brown for a further 15 minutes. Then rest the meat for a few minutes before carving.

We ate this with little roasted potatoes and a huge green salad.


* You can buy little boxes of prosciutto chunks in supermarkets, but I hate all that plastic waste and, anyway, the pieces are too small to be much use. I have recently solved this by buying a small but whole piece of bacon from the butcher (you can find it in a supermarket too, labelled as gammon joints). You can then cut thick slices to make large-ish cubes for soup, pasta sauces etc. Much nicer and no trouble - I can't think why we've allowed supermarkets to teach us that tiny cooking chores are such a huge problem only they can solve. Rant over - but do try it.

Slow roasted pork with plums

Yesterday, we were all busy ... Lucius was making a sculpture in the wood, the boys took Bruce down to the village for a game of cricket (we won, and Bruce took a catch off Alfred's bowling), Sam and Catrin lazed in the sun with their two tiny children, Menna, Anna and I went garden visiting .... and supper cooked itself.

The recipe is simple and infinitely variable ... you put your belly of pork into a slow oven for four hours. What you do in the way of flavouring can change every time you make it. At this time of year, like Fiona and Danny, whose recipe this is, I put it on a bed of Victoria plums, because there are masses of them breaking the boughs of our young tree (lucky us, what a great problem to have!).

As we were making a sauce with the plums and the juices, Horatio came in and asked about gravy. There's no gravy, it's plum sauce. Consternation. Call it plum gravy if you like. Disappointment. Why can't we have gravy AND plum sauce?

Over dinner, once he'd eaten a huge plateful, Horatio came up with a solution for making slow roasted pork with apple sauce AND gravy. Put a rack in the roasting tray, then put the apple slices, then the pork, so that the meat juices drip through the apples (making the apples even more delicious), and leaving juices with which to make gravy. What do you think? I think he's well on the road to becoming a food blogger!

Meanwhile, this is what we did yesterday:

Preheat the oven to 160C. Meanwhile, rub the pork belly with herbs, salt too, if you use that to make crackling (I don't, but each to his own). Put plums, as many as you have, in the bottom of the roasting tray, then place the meat on top. Put in the oven for four hours; turn it down to 140C for the last hour. When it's done, take it out to rest for 10-15 minutes, while you make the sauce. This recipe takes the same amount of time however big or small your pork is, because belly is such a thin cut ... I had to cut a little off the end of our huge piece to get it into the oven, and the smaller piece needed longer in the oven (because it was on the lower shelf).

First, pour the juices into a jug and leave them to settle. Next, ease the stones out of the plums (this is quick and easy, and best done at this point, because stoning the raw plums takes much longer). Pour the fat off the top of the juices (but not down the sink), then mush up the plums. A little wine, something to sweeten it, something savoury (especially if you didn't rub the meat with salt) ... it's hard to remember exactly what we did to make the sauce taste right.

We ate this with little new potatoes, caponata-ish, and a salad, again by candlelight out in the garden. There was a lot of rushing off to look at the moon through the telescope, and later, some people ate rhubarb and custard - the first we've picked from the rhubarb I planted last spring. I was in fast asleep in bed by then, but luckily there's some left over to eat with my breakfast porridge.

Thanks Fiona - great recipe, which contributed to a memorable evening!

Ideal food for a party - no fuss, no bother, really good, and pretty cheap. What more could you ask?

Char-sui and noodles

The recipe that follows is char sui-ishier than anything in Nigella's book, although that's what was open when I put the marinade together. A couple of pork tenderloins (aka pork fillet, why DO supermarkets like to re-name everything?) are sitting in their marinade in the fridge waiting to be cooked tomorrow night - when I'll be in a hurry and won't feel like starting from scratch.

In How to Eat, Nigella gives two recipes for char sui, one which is fairly Chinese, the other with what was in her fridge on the night. Well, what was in my fridge tonight didn't quite do her first recipe, so this is what I used for two fillets:

4 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp tomato ketchup
3 tbsp hoisin sauce
2 tbsp Madeira (no ginger wine or sweet sherry - EVER!)
2 tbsp runny honey
2 tbsp soft brown sugar

Tomorrow, I'll cook the meat (drained from its marinade) in a hot oven (220C) for 15 minutes, then turn it down to 160C until it's cooked (20-30 minutes, in my case both, because one is bigger than the other!). It needs basting with the sauce. When it's done, put the meat to one side, pour in the rest of the marinade, perhaps with a little water, and cook it through.

The resulting char sui is good hot or cold, cut into thin slices or little cubes (the meat you find in takeaway special fried rice). We're going to eat it with the noodles I made for lunch this week, and pak choi (from Riverford) dressed with oyster sauce.

Superquick noodles for lunch

Not even an attempt at authenticity, just a need for a quick, filling lunch that would involve vegetables and some of the leftover chicken sitting in my fridge.

Mix equal quantities (by eye, no need to obsess) of peanut butter, oil, soya sauce and chilli jam. This will take quite a long time if, like me, you've given up on ordinary peanut butter (full of palm oil, don't even think about it, it's the saturated fat as well as the orang utangs) and are finishing up a jar of the old-fashioned sort that separates like it used to when we were children. Boil the noodles. Mix. Add whatever you've got: today it was chopped chicken, spring onion and thin slices of red pepper. Next time it could easily involve cucumber. Or lightly cooked slices of pak choi. etc.

But some of you will have noticed from the paragraph above that I do obsess - it took me ages, and a lot of reading the small print on labels, to find a peanut butter that we can eat (in small quantities, it's still 50% fat, albeit mostly "good" ones): Organic Meridian Crunchy Peanut Butter.

If there was no chilli jam in the house, which sometimes happens, then I'd put in some ginger, garlic, perhaps a little nam pla. And it occurs to me that this sauce would be very good to pep up a bit of chicken, made in the morning and marinaded until it was time to start cooking supper.

I'm going to try the noodles out on the family at the weekend, with some home-made Char siu, along the lines Nigella calls char sui-ish ... in other words, I'm not going to consult a Chinese cookery book!


PS this is my entry for Heart of the Matter round three. It's pasta dishes this time - I didn't think Chinese noodles would count as pasta, but Ilva, who is hosting this round over at Lucullian Delights, says that it does ...

Here's a great idea ...

I've been thinking ... this sounds great .... it's Gennaro Contaldo's Italian porchetta - 5kg of belly pork should be enough to feed everyone at dinner, and you make your main preparations well ahead, give it a quick blast on the highest setting, then cook it slowly with fennel for hours and hours. I vaguely remember Jamie Oliver doing something like this in his Italy series, so I'll have to look that up. Or I could make it ahead - double quantities - and serve it cold for lunch, with herby boiled potatoes and one of Skye's beautiful salads. I think I feel a decision coming on, but I'll have to consult the butcher first ...


PS there's nothing new in the blogosphere ... I've just - belatedly - been doing an internet search for porchetta (somehow, for me, it feels more natural to go to the recipe books first, but I think I may be going to get out of this 20th century habit fairly soon!) .. and found this wonderful post, covering both Contaldo and Oliver. Thanks, Keiko!