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Man Eat Meat

I will always happily demolish 2 or 3 more pork spareribs in one sitting than is probably necessary or advisable, but rarely do my personal guilty pleasures come with quite as much pleasure.

Having butchered these little beauties at the Parsons Nose from the thicker front end of the pig's rib cage, I couldn't wait to give them the treatment they deserved by transforming them into modern man's answer to cave man's staple.

Which, as it happens, is as simple as smothering them in a mixture of ginger paste, all spice, 5 spice, soy sauce, honey, red wine vinegar, sesame oil, tomato sauce, garlic, salt, pepper and fresh chilli. A frequent mix-taste-add-mix-taste procedure soon helps to get the proportion of each ingredient right. The trick is to get a sticky and plentiful sauce with a good balance of sweet, sour and savoury flavours, a perfect accompaniment to the meltingly tender meat.

After an hour and a half in the oven, the meat should slide off the bone with ease, but I don't usually let that stop me dramatically ripping it off with my teeth. A few minutes later and the sight of a pile of clean, discarded bones always brings that unparelleled sense of satisfaction that man has had his fill of meat.

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Ooo Ahh Sausage Torpedos

Tired of waiting an age and paying through the nose for a soggy, tasteless hot dog at wintery themed public events? We concocted these onion marmalade fueled sausage torpedoes for the Lambeth Fireworks Display and I must say they went down with a bang! To make the onion marmalade, add a thinly sliced red onion, a crushed garlic clove, half a bay leaf, a sprig of rosemary and a knob of butter to some hot olive oil and fry until nicely coloured. Add some muscovado sugar, a pinch of salt, a splash of balsamic vinegar and enough beef stock just to make a loose consistency. Simmer until most of the liquid has reduced and top up with a bit of water. Repeat for at least an hour until it all comes together nicely, then leave in the pan to rest. Fry 4 thick Gloucester Old Spot sausages on a low heat for about 30 minutes, turning frequently to get good even colouring. Meanwhile, cut 4 lengths of baguette leaving the end on each one. Hollow them out using a knife and discard the middle bit. Or eat it. Or feed it to the ducks. Spread the inside with your condiment of choice. Once the sausages are done, rest them on a board and deglaze the pan with a splash of cider vinegar. Then add the onion marmalade to the pan and mix with the meaty juices and reduce down to make a super sticky consistency. Slice the sausages in half lengthways, sandwich a good dollop of onion marmalade between the two halves, then smear a bit of Dijon mustard on the top. Carefully slide each sausage into a baguette cavity, wrap each one individually in foil and place in a warm oven until it’s time to head out. Wash down with a flask of mulled cider and prepare to ooo and ahh to your heart’s content!

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Give Me This Day My Daily Salad

What started out as a new year's resolution has turned out to be more of a food year revolution. Not eating bread for a month might sound easy, but when you consider how much I consumed before, finding a viable alternative to toast for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch proved to be quite a challenge, especially as we get bread provided at work!

Sugar free Alpen with a sliced banana has won the breakfast honour pretty convincingly; I'm not sure where milk-soaked banana has been all my life! Bitesized clumps of soft, cold, sweet goo with a rough, claggy coating of unsweetened cereal: never have I been so in to something so unappetising! And it certainly does its bit to keep me regular.

Lunch was a bit harder though, with home-made pasta, bean or rice salads seeming too much of an effort to be sustainable, so I settled for freshly made salads at work buying enough ingredients on each Monday to last a week. But what would be interesting enough to repeat 5 days a week and filling enough that I don't end up needing a mid-afternoon slice of toast?!

After a bit of tinkering with various ingredients including wallet-stretching grilled artichokes, finger-staining beetroot and breath-destroying spring onions, I settled on the following combo:

1 vine ripened tomato cut into eighths, about 2 inches of cucumber again cut into eighths, 8 pitted black olives ripped in half lengthways, 4 leaves of little gem lettuce sliced widthways, a small drizzle of rapeseed oil vinegarette to lubricate it all, then a good sprinkling of greek tabouleh and some crushed walnuts to add a bit of bulk and roughage, topped off with a ripped up fillet of peppered smoked mackerel.

At about £10 per week it's much cheaper than a sandwich meal deal every day and I like to think the lack of bread is improving my concentration through the afternoon; I certainly feel well nourished until dinner time. But most importantly, a salad of this magnitude and variety is infinitely more enjoyable to eat.

Not only did I make it through January without eating bread, I've been eating the same salad, or variations thereof, every week since! The only drawback? Not really a concern of mine; sorry, colleagues, for taking up the whole bottom drawer in the fridge!

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Smokin' Cold

Cold smoking is another method of curing food to increase its edible life and also add flavour, which varies depending on what you burn to generate the smoke.

It’s pretty easy to build a DIY cold smoker but to get the temperature low enough to cure the food instead of cook it, the food and burning matter are usually placed in two separate boxes, connected with a length of ducting to cool the smoke. Easy enough, but a bit of a palaver.

I came across this ingenious contraption called the Cold Smoke Generator on the internet and couldn’t resist trying it out. Simply fill it with a wood dust of your choice, be it Maple, Hickory, Whiskey Oak, Cherry, Alder, Apple or Beech Wood, and light the outer end of the spiral using the tea light supplied. Close the lid of your barbeque with food ready for smoking inside and leave for up to 10 hours.

The beauty of this design is that a) the dust only smoulders very slowly over a long period of time so the flavour has more chance of penetrating further into the food, without having to top it up with more wood, and b) it produces a cold smoke, so it can be placed inside the same container as the food being smoked. A very elegant solution to a relatively minor problem.

Another elegant solution to a problem that springs to mind is that of a bacon sandwich to a minor hangover. And this also happened to be the perfect way to test my new toy out, as pictured above, centre stage with a slab of cured belly pork perched on the convenient warming rack above.

10 hours and a trip-to-the-butcher-to-borrow-the-meat-slicer later (OK not the best hangover cure if you have to make it from scratch), and what a result! And for the record I got about 24 rashers out of the 2kg slab so also a complete bargain.

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Ham Hock Terrine

Little nuggets of tender salty ham laced with tangy gherkin and caper mush, bound together with a soft, juicy meat jelly. This cheap but fancy deli favourite must be up there with my most boast-worthy pork-related achievements.

Having cured the fore and hind hocks for about a week, I brought them and a trotter to a rapid boil for 5 minutes before discarding this water and starting again in a fresh pan of water, this time together with celery, carrot, onion, leek, peppercorns, coriander seeds and a bouquet garni. Apparently the first blitz carries away most of the impurities in the skin that tend to rise to the surface in the form of scum when simmering, but I must admit I still found myself skimming scum on the second simmering.

After 2-3 hours at a gentle simmer, the hams should be tender and can be removed and left to cool. The veg is also removed and discarded.

I then passed the remaining stock through a sieve, put half in a freezer bag for soup at a later date and reduced the other half on a high heat to about a third of its volume.

While the stock was reducing, I removed the meat from the hams – possibly one of the most satisfying culinary tasks of all – before mixing the meat with chopped capers, gherkins, dill and wholegrain mustard.

Finally, I laid the chunks of meat lengthways along a cling-film-lined loaf tin before immersing it in the stock. The gelatine from the trotter comes into its own at this point as the now thick, velvety stock reduction seems almost desperate to solidify, but it’s only polite to give it 12 hours in the fridge.

Turned out onto a plate and sliced thickly, this is a thing of beauty!

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Snap, Crackle, Cheeze!

To make this moreish munchie, simply place a cheese slice atop a salt & vinegar rice cake. Munch. Smile. Repeat.

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Taste Over Presentation

When it comes to Sunday roasts, pot roasting often plays second fiddle to the standard method of dry oven roasting, but after pot roasting my tied pork shoulder joint I think it thoroughly deserves a bit more recognition.

The theory goes that with a tight fitting lid sealed with a couple of layers of foil, the meat and veg will slowly steam in their own juices to produce tender meat, soft veg and a hearty soup-like gravy.

After browning the joint in a casserole dish, it's placed on a layer of chunky root veg in the same pot. A dash of Cider Vinegar will deglaze the pan and prevent it getting too dry early on. All it needs then is a couple of hours in the oven without removing the lid more than once at the halfway point to check on its progress. After that, it's clear how well the tight fitting lid works from the amount of steam and liquid in the bottom of the dish.

My attempt at carving the meat with a sharp knife was about as effective as stirring a bowl of flour with an electric whisk: it didn't really suit the task and ended up making things a bit more complicated than was necessary, hence why the image doesn't look too appetising. It was so tender it really only needed pulling apart with a couple of forks, which I'll try next time.

But what it lacked in looks it more than made up for in flavour, with an amazing amalgamation of sweetness and earthiness from the veg and meatiness from the pork. It's not just meat with veg with gravy, it's veg-flavoured meat with meat-flavoured veg with meat-and-veg-flavoured gravy!

If there's one downside to this method of cooking pork it's the lack of crackling, but at least I can look forward to double crackling next time.

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Pub-Snack Heaven

Well without wanting to waste a single ounce of this pig, there was only really one thing to do with some unwanted pork rind from a sweet and sour belly pork stir fry: Pork Scratchings.

[Disclaimer: this recipe is not for the weak of tooth, the high of blood pressure or the absent of kitchen towel.]

So having cut the rind off the meat and into 1cm wide strips of varying length, I patted them dry with kitchen roll, placed them skin side down onto a bed of table salt and left them for about an hour for the salt to work its magic and draw as much moisture from the rind as possible.

After the hour it’s clear how important the salt is from the pool of liquid that the rind now sits in, but with a quick rinse under the tap and a second drying with kitchen towel, they are ready for the oven.

I then placed them skin side up on a thinly pre-oiled roasting dish and sprinkled them with some chunky sea salt, before roasting at 180oC for 40 minutes. During cooking quite a bit of fat renders out so I just poured it off every now and then, since the dryer it is in the pan, the quicker everything crisps up.

And after a brief rest on yet more kitchen roll (onto the second roll now), these salty, crunchy, heavenly pub-snacks were ready for some shamelessly rapid consumption!

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Last Minute Langoustines

I had a meeting at London Bridge the other day and couldn't resist popping in to Borough Market to get something quick but a bit special for dinner. These langoustines fit the bill perfectly.

I steamed them in white wine with a bit of garlic, chilli, celery and tomato, then finished it all off with some parsley and lemon juice. All within a speedy 5 minutes.

Dubrovnik is currently my benchmark for chin-licking crustacean perfection, due partly to the size, sweetness and freshness of the local seafood, but this also happened to be where I learned how to unashamedly suck the juice from the head and legs - a process that ensures every last ounze of deliciousness is extracted, and a ritual that, once tried, is never skipped.

Of course, eating langoustines in this way is a rather less speedy affair than cooking them!

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Meat That's Sweet

My palette took a few years to accept the premise of ‘meat & sweet’: Pork & apple, lamb & apricot and turkey & cranberry have only recently begun to make it into the bouche with any real enthusiasm; duck & orange still have some convincing to do. Pork & mincemeat is definitely on the extreme end of the ‘meat & sweet’ scale, but this mincemeat-stuffed pork tenderloin recipe from the River Cottage Meat Book is as good a combination as it is extremely moreish.

Usually found hiding between the spine and the loin, the tenderloin is a rarely used muscle, resulting in a very tender, very lean cut. A downside of this is that it can be quite bland and can dry out easily, hence why many recipes involve stuffing the loin with a juicy flavour booster.

Incidentally, we had tried this recipe before using a delicious brandy-fuelled mince made by Laura a couple of Christmases ago, which for some unknown reason never quite froze properly. Perhaps one of the reasons it was so good!

So, using a knife, the loin is gradually cut back and unravelled into a sheet about 1cm thick. The mincemeat is then spread on the top surface and it's all rolled up into a sausage shape and tied with string. During cooking, the juices from the mince and pork combine to make a very sweet, rich sauce, that when basted over the meat every 5 minutes, creates a nice golden crust. After 30 minutes or so, the meat can be rested and a dollop of crème fraiche added to the juices in the pan to make a more substantial sauce. Swwweeet!

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A True Thorough Bread

Discovering that bread only has 4 ingredients was a bit of a revelation for me, in fact it was almost as surprising as discovering that pasta only has two. But the magical reaction that occurs when yeast is added to flour, water and salt elevates bread high above pasta in my all time top 5 list of remarkable manmade carbohydrate staples.

This was my first attempt at baking my own bread, having been quickly persuaded by the technically detailed yet brilliantly concise River Cottage Bread Book.

Unfortunately, I must admit it wouldn’t have won any prizes for flavour or for texture – firstly I underestimated what 6g of salt looks like as it’s not too easy without a set of digital scales, and secondly, having opted for a 2nd “knock back” before the final prove, I got a tad impatient and went for the bake a little prematurely, which meant the large loaves were just on the soft side of cannonballesque. Not bad for a first attempt though, and they were still pretty good at mopping up a large bowl of soup. I had definitely caught the bug.

I have since had much more success with bread making as my technique, timing and patience have all developed, not to mention the purchase of a set of digital scales helping with quantities. I’ve also found that only knocking back once still produces excellent results, which means bread making is actually compatible with the Sunday morning lie-in.

Now fully converted to hand-baking bread, I salute the magic of yeast, crave the extra crusty crust, savour that smell and, most importantly, appreciate the satisfaction of creating something so good from so few and such cheap ingredients.

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Home Cured Honey Roast Ham

With our freezer full to the brim with pork, there was only really one thing to do with Cut No. 3 - the largest joint of leg meat - and that was to cure it into a ham.

Straight off the butcher’s block, I immersed it in brine made with a special salt cure mix provided by the butcher for the salt to work its magic, drawing moisture from the flesh and reducing the oxidisation process to prevent growth of bacteria and stop the meat becoming rotten.

5 days later, I strained the now cured pork, or gammon to give it its new name, patted it dry and rested it in the fridge for 48 hours to relax and think about the cooking process to come. It was then soaked overnight in fresh water to dilute the saltiness.

So the next day I boiled it gently for 3 hours with chopped onion, carrot, bay leaf and peppercorns in a fresh pot of water, which would eventually produce a wonderful stock. Then with the kitchen starting to smell a bit like Christmas Eve and having sampled some of the less fortunate corner bits of ham (less fortunate in that they would never mature from simply boiled into honey roasted), I transferred the cooked gammon to a roasting dish, removed the bulk of the fat from the meat and poured over a thick, sticky mixture of English mustard, honey and muscovado sugar. Then, after roasting in a medium oven for a further 1 hour with a regular basting to caramelise the glaze, the wait was over.

The result, I must say, was quite amazing. It had a perfect hammy texture with enough firmness to hold its shape when carved but tender and moist enough to melt in the mouth. The flavour of the ham was also surprisingly good, with a mild saltiness to lift the flavour of the meat before the bitter sweet glaze rounded things off nicely. Salivatingly delicious and virtually impossible to leave alone.

Who knew my first attempt at home curing - and 10 days of hassle - could pay off with such fine results! But was it worth it? Well, a week’s worth of ham sandwiches, a carbonara and 2 Litres of pea and ham soup later, I’m already looking forward to the next challenge: cold smoked streaky bacon.

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When I Grow Up...

There’s no shame in having a favourite butcher, or indeed broadcasting it, so I’m broadcasting mine. The Parson’s Nose in Fulham: A charmingly presented corner shop well stocked with quality free range and organic meat, hosted by friendly and knowledgeable butchers happy to discuss meat and other meat related subjects until the cows come home. What more could you want? Well, supermarket prices would be nice, but as I’ve learned first hand over the past couple of years, at a place like this you really do get what you pay for.

This rather unattractive pile of pork may not look like the work of a skilled craftsman, but that’s because it was me that butchered it and I am not such a skilled craftsman, although I am very grateful for the butchery course Mum and Dad got me for my Birthday.

What great fun it was being let loose with a cleaver and a carcass, one on one with the butcher himself, providing a good balance of verbal guidance, recipe suggestions and anecdotal tales of why it is a legal requirement to always have a spare first aider on the premises!

No doubt each cut will make its own appearance over the coming posts, but, for the record, here’s what you get from a 34kg half pig (extra thanks for Laura for helping me cart it home on the bus):

8 belly rashers

Leg roasting joint

Leg joint for curing into ham

Shoulder slow roast joint

Hind hock

Fore hock

10 meaty spare ribs

Tied pot roast shoulder joint

French trimmed loin roasting joint

Tenderloin

Half rack baby back ribs

7 pork chops

4 rib belly roasting joint

Hand (part of the shoulder, not a trotter)

4 serving boned rolled loin

6 serving boned rolled loin

2kg diced shoulder meat

1kg hind belly for curing into streaky bacon (not shown)

2 trotters (not shown)

1 tail (not shown)

2kg bones for stock making (not shown)

extra skin for crackling (not shown)

(What a shame the head was removed before the course – another couple of cuts and I could have made myself an advent calendar.)

So here’s to the Parson’s Nose, a butcher to celebrate and half a pig to savour. Once the freezer is empty and we’re fed up with pork, which could be a good few months, I look forward to doing it all again but with half a lamb instead.

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Big Candles, Not Small Cake

OK so I may rave about savoury a bit more than sweet (1 sweet for every 16 savoury posts to be specific), but I certainly have a lot of time for dessert, particularly when chocolate is involved. And, not usually one to play safe when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen, my first attempt at making a Birthday cake had to be this salted caramel chocolate cake from BBC Goodfood (always a reliable source of inspiration).

Having deviated from the recipe in a couple places (I used golden caster sugar instead of refined caster sugar and I chose not to add the chocolate truffles to the top, thus reducing the quoted 900 calories per slice to a conscience-easing 850), I thought the chocolate sponges went rather well, as did the ganache topping. Unfortunately, as the sticky yellow moat surrounding the cake might suggest, the salted caramel did not. Note to self: owing to it already being rather golden, cooking golden caster sugar until it goes golden takes considerably less time than non-golden caster sugar.

Well, when I say it didn’t go well, I mean it didn’t go as planned, which is to say it didn’t set enough to sandwich between the sponges. However it still tasted pretty damn good drizzled over the top of a slice, or over any other dessert we could think of for that matter!

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Blessed by St John

To say that the highlight of our long awaited meal at St John - a well established, unfussy restaurant specialising in the lesser known cuts of meat - was dessert might suggest that lesser known cuts of meat don't make for exceptional restaurant food.

In actual fact, everything we consumed was exceptional, including the wine and the bread, though you might expect that from what is also a Bakery & Wine Shop.

For starters we had Bone Marrow Salad: salty, rich, creamy, delicious and amusingly still sitting inside the bones just to remind you what you're eating, and; Braised Pig's Head and Bean Stew: melt in the mouth meat and hearty cannellini beans in a sticky, gelatinous sauce, thankfully this was just neatly arranged on a plate.

Our mains were Roast Middlewhite: a rare breed of pork served with perfect crackling and buttery greens, rather conventional but no less enjoyable, and; Ox Tongue: mildly pickled flavour, textured like proper corned beef, and an unusually familiar sensation of tongue on tongue, certainly not for the carnivorously challenged but a treat for yours truly.

And so to dessert. Barely set rhubarb jelly, shortbread and jersey cream offered a sublime balance of sweet, sharp, smooth and crunch. Finally, the best Eccles Cake I've eaten: incredibly sweet, chewy currants encased in a finger thick shell of indulgent buttery pastry, perfectly accompanied by an oversized wedge of salty Lancashire cheese, and deserved of its photo.

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Lucky Laura's Va-Lamb-Tine Treat: Part 2

On to the main event and, for a very special person, a very special shepherd's pie.

Diced onion, carrot and lamb fried together for a bit, simmered in the lamb stock and leftover gravy for about 45 minutes with a dash of wine, some ketchup, plenty of pepper and a sprinkling of fresh mint towards the end, topped with creamy mash and grated parmesan melted under the grill.

This is not a recipe of high technical difficulty or indeed of exotic ingredients, but when done properly the result far exceeds the sum of its individual parts, much like the recipe for a perfect Valentines Day if you ask me.

Having said that, we did wash it down with a rather exotic bottle of 2000 Saint-Emilion Grand Cru Laura bought from France over 5 years ago.

And as if that wasn’t enough lamb consumption for two days, we had enough stock left over for a risotto on Tuesday!

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Lucky Laura's Va-Lamb-Tine Treat: Part 1

It’s Sunday before Valentine’s Day and a perfect opportunity to hone the lamb-roasting skills. We chose shoulder for its heightened potential for thrifty post-roast meals such as those featuring in Part 2.

For the lamb, I made a marinade (Inspired by the River Cottage Meat Book) of capers, anchovies, garlic, mustard, lemon juice, rosemary and olive oil blitzed together and massaged into the pre-scored shoulder. This was given a half hour sizzle at 220oC, essential for a generous crust of darkened meat and skin, then it had a glass of wine to kick start the gravy, before a couple of hours at 160oC and finally a 20 minute rest.

One point to note for future reference is that blitzing the marinade emulsifies the oil and lemon juice, which means it doesn’t cope too well with the high oven temperature and so mine burned on the roasting dish. Not a disaster as the wine helps to deglaze it, but next time the dish will benefit from a good glug of olive oil before the meat is placed on top.

Accompanied by potato dauphinoise, this was not the healthiest of pre-Valentine’s Day meals, but the tangy gravy/creamy potato/meaty lamb combo was, rather fittingly, a match made in heaven. Part 1 was a clear success.

Essential for Part 2 was a good stock, so back on the heat went the meatless bone, having stripped off the remains, browned for a while together with the usual veg and herbs before simmering in water for an hour. The result was a very dark gelatinous stock that would set in the fridge overnight, and that I could have eaten with a spoon (but didn’t)...