The remains of the day

My ongoing quest to eat the freezer contents continues.

Lamb isn't a problem as such. I think I could eat it every day without ever becoming bored. Sadly both my doctor and my waistline would prefer it that I don't.

A leg roast once in a while is a Sunday treat, though, particularly after I have earned it by working outside in the garden all day. Cooked hard and fast, the joints from my little Hebridean sheep are as good as they come and are ready in about an hour. That's just long enough to walk Moose and get back in time to put the potatoes on.

Brown and deeply savoury on the outside, pink and succulent inside, and with enough fat (but not too much) to stop them drying out in the hot oven, I really don't think they can be beaten. For this little beauty I had a few left-over anchovies, so I studded the meat with them and some slices of garlic for added umami, but they weren't essential. On the other hand, a good ten-minute rest was.

Meal 1 was straightforward. Roast lamb, mash made with some of the last spuds from store, lots of spring cabbage and gravy made from the meat juices and a dollop of rosemary jelly. No problem. The hard part is to stop going back to the joint for just one more little slice!

Then, if it's Monday, it must be hash. Lots of onions, cubed potatoes and meat, all slowly pan-fried with the remaining gravy. Patience is a virtue here. It takes time to achieve the right amount of crispy edge, and of course a big handful of chopped parsley is needed just before that moment is reached. You could add a fried egg if feeling very greedy, but that would be painting the lily.

And so to the very last remains. The bone and the last few scraps of meat clinging to it.
Soup, of course, but where in the world shall we go?

One of the advantages of a longer than normal winter is that it gives plenty of opportunity to try out a few things in the kitchen. As citrus fruits were plentiful and cheap at the same time, and as R wasn't here to nag me to make Seville orange marmalade, I spent a couple of pleasant afternoons making lime pickle and preserved lemons.

With this in mind, it was destination North Africa!

After I had removed any decent-looking scraps of meat from the bone, it went into the stock pot with the usual aromatics. I wasn't looking for a thick, unctuous sort of stock; just some lightly-flavoured liquid for my soup.

To make the soup, I sweated the usual suspects (onion, carrot, a little garlic and a stick of celery) until softened, then added a good teaspoon each of cinnamon, ginger and cumin. Boy, does that make the room smell nice! These were followed some precooked chickpeas from the freezer, the end of a yellow pepper, a squeeze of sundried tomato paste and the chopped preserved lemon rind.

Simmer gently on the stove until all the vegetables are soft, then throw in the meat scraps to heat through and serve.
Light, warming and absolutely delicious!

Using it up

Our last pair of porkers went off to the abattoir not long before R died.
We had the usual sausage-making fest, but on a smaller scale than in previous years. We also sold a lot of the meat to family, friends and R's work colleagues, but for one reason or another a lot more ended up in our freezers than had in the past, and most of this was in the form of large joints.

My eating habits have changed so much since I have been alone. There is precious little chance of me actually turning totally vegetarian, but I would say that probably over 50% of my meals now contain no meat.

Which hasn't helped very much with consuming the stockpile of pork in the freezer.

As I would like to get another pair of weaners this Summer, it really does seem incumbent upon me to eat what I already have - that and the fact that it really does need to be used up very soon or it will only be fit for Moose to have.

So I need to find ways to use it up that do not simply involve me gnawing my way through a 6lb slab of roast pork!

This is what I did with a piece of belly pork.

The weight was in the region of 5 lb. There is a very small patch of freezer burn on the rind, but otherwise it is fine.

When our porkers came back from the butcher, I had asked for each belly half to be cut into three halves, but for the bones to be left on, for reasons that will become apparent.
The first step, though, is to remove the bones using my best filleting knife.

I then cut the meat into three equal portions.
The first was just crying out to be slow-roasted.
Now this is possibly not a meal for someone on a calorie-controlled diet, but it makes a splendid feast for someone who has been digging the garden all afternoon!

My feeling when it comes to roasting home-reared meat is that the less you do to it the better, so I simply scored the rind and placed it on a bed of chopped onions and a couple of large sprigs of thyme from the garden.

This went into a very hot oven for 20 minutes to flash roast and get the fat running, then I turned down the heat to about 160 C and largely forgot about it for a couple of hours, other than to pour off the fat every 40 minutes or so.

Meanwhile I turned my attentions to the remainder of the belly, which on this occasion I decided to turn into bacon.
The first step is to make up the curing mix. There are many recipes available in books and on the Internet - some use nitrites, some don't. I prefer to use them as I like my bacon to look pink, rather than grey, but it isn't essential if you are going to use it up quickly or store it in the freezer.

On this occasion I went for a simple mix of salt, demerara sugar and curing salt, which I rubbed thoroughly into the remaining two pieces of pork.

And then did the same with the sheet of bones that were removed from the belly.

The whole lot went into a plastic bag and then into the fridge for 3 days. And that folks, really is all there is to making bacon!

Recipes using the bacon will follow, but in the meantime I shall devote my attentions to the slow-roast belly pork...

Pork mince. Boring? Never.

Originally posted 01.06.09


This will be the first year since we moved to Wales that we haven't had a couple of weaners to fatten.
With the exception of their final road trip, every aspect of keeping pigs is an absolute joy. Their infectious enthusiasm, playfulness and appetite for eating the most unlikely-looking food combinations are so endearing. I love how they throw their empty food bowls in the air for the sheer fun of doing it, the way they fall over in a heap of quivering ecstasy when you scratch behind their ears or rootle in their bowls looking for the best bits to eat first. I am sure the world would be a better place if everyone who fancied keeping pigs were able to do so.

I can't have any more yet because it takes one person with not much appetite a long, long time to eat half a pig. I have also lost my pork pusher - R used to sell it to his colleagues at work. I'm hoping they will still be interested if I go it alone next year.

In the past, when the pigs came back from the butcher as pork we always invited a few friends and made a weekend of it, making bacon, brawn (not for the faint-hearted!), pâté and sausages. Kilos and kilos of sausages.

The first day largely involved deboning, chopping and mincing. Then came the fun part, when each participant would run riot in my spice drawers. The mixes would be made up, a couple of small patties fried, solemnly tasted and critiqued. A little more chilli needed here, too much allspice there. Perhaps polenta would be a better filler, rather than breadcrumbs.

Only after the recipe had been tweaked to perfection would the sausages be made and the ingredients written down in our Book of All Things for the smallholding. We each had our favourites, but I have to say with all due modesty that my lemon, fennel and black pepper sausage is a culinary masterpiece!

Inevitably at the end of the day there would be a small amount of minced pork left over that was not enough to put into casings. By that time, the last thing that anyone wanted to eat was another sausage. Mr M, one of our regulars at the sausage weekend, devised a Chinese-inspired mix that we put into some bread dough and baked, and so was born the Welsh pork bun.

Today it was far too hot for bread, and I needed something a little healthier than the crisps and black coffee that had been sustaining me for most of the weekend. I found a small amount of minced pork in the freezer, and decided to make Mr M's recipe and serve it with lettuce wraps, which seemed a lot more summery:

Finely chop a clove of garlic, a few slices of ginger and a couple of spring onions. Fry quickly for about 30 seconds, then add the pork mince and brown over a high heat. Add 2 or 3 finely chopped mushrooms, followed by 1/2 tsp chilli bean sauce, about 3 Tbs Chinese rice wine and a good splosh of soy sauce. Turn the heat down and cook gently for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add a little stock or water if it sticks. When cooked, stir in a small amount of sesame oil, then spoon onto large lettuce leaves and sprinkle with a little chopped spring onion and a few sesame seeds. Wrap up tightly and enjoy.

New season, new soup

Originally posted 16.04.09

At last the garden is starting to yield some produce other than parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes.

The new season kale and PSB are exciting enough, but the first picking of mustard greens from the greenhouse means one thing, and one thing alone.

Noodle soup.
Noodles and R went together like, like.... Well, they just went together.

When we lived in the city, we always headed to Chinatown for noodle soup after a post-work beer or six. After we moved away from 'civilisation' it was often his first choice for a birthday treat, and was what I cooked for him when he was feeling down.

Good stock, noodles, of course, spring onions, garlic, ginger and star anise. Plus the all-important greens and topped with the protein of choice. Crispy pork belly is good, so are chicken, prawns or beef in their own way. But for preference it was always duck. However, as it took us a couple of years to start rearing our own ducks when we moved here, we had a long wait before it returned to the menu.

But so worth the wait.

I don't recall ever cooking it for anyone else, though. It was one of our guilty pleasures together. Soup, spoon, chopsticks, dish of pickled vegetable. Then silence punctuated only by happy slurping.

It is a dish that is so bound up with R that I haven't been able to eat it since he died. But the new mustard greens needed to be celebrated, so I took a deep breath and broke my duck, as it were.

It was as good as I remembered.
Quack quack!

(This is one of my girlies. She will never be soup.)