A little about frugality and a lot about pork.

The Easter break, for those of us who work at the chalkface, is a welcome respite from the rigours of preparing youngsters for public exams. It provides me with a chance to plan meals with a little more order and organisation. This inevitable leads to making much more from the food that I buy, grow or earn. I spent a couple of days with the Kitchen Gardener over the break and so feel I have had my "hands in the soil" as well.
So, on to the pork.
I am a little loath to tell you about my adventures with pork belly for one very good reason. From almost nowhere, over the past three or four years, the whole chefy world has begun to talk more and more about the less expensive cuts of meat and how they provide great flavour and value.
The first to fall foul of this was the Lamb Shank. Those of us who cared knew that this was probably the best tasting piece of the beast and that it was very inexpensive. Then some celebrity chef slapped it on their menu, probably using words like "unctuous" or expressions like "fall off the bone" and then the price rocketed to beyond the spending power of Midas! The beautiful wife referred to this as the "Lamb Shank redemption": it now turns up on the tables of the hottest restaurants and Gastro pubs in the country.
I am pretty sure that this has now happened with chicken thighs as their price is starting to climb and I am very worried that my beloved belly pork will soon go the same way. Rumour has it that there have been sightings on some Michelin Stared tables already.
Anyway, back to the cooking. I purchased a 2Kg piece of belly from Newitts in Thame. I always ask for a bit from the Thick End if given a choice, this means that you will have some rib bones attached. Buying from a proper butcher also means that you can score the skin yourself or ask the expert behind the counter to do it for you. I then headed home to Corner Cottage with my prize.
A word about Crackling. For those who did not grow up in this green and pleasant land, most of the UK is obsessed with pork skin. Many a mother's ability to produce crackling with roast pork is the reason their children never leave home.
I have my own "never fails" way of producing great crackling (don't we all?) Mine is, however quite controversial. I remove the skin from the roast, score in shallow thin strips and the throw a handful of sea salt on top of it. After an hour or so I brush this off and repeat the process. This dries out the skin and helps it to be wonderfully crunchy. I then roast it on a baking tray before I even consider putting the main meat in the oven.

Scoring the skin for great crackling

The crackling is then allowed to cool and broken up to be served as a garnish to the roast (and its a super cheeky snack for the person who is taking all the trouble to make dinner!)
Then we move onto the meat itself. The first thing I did was separate the bones from the main slab of the meat. Do not worry if bits of the meat comes away with the bones, it will be fine, I promise you.
I was then left a reasonably square piece of meat with alternate layers of fat and lean. A handful of Fennel seeds were bashed up in a pestle and motor and several cloves of garlic sliced thinly. This fennel and garlic mix was then strewn over one side of the pork with ample seasoning.

Garlic and Fennel, Salt and Pepper

I then rolled the pork and tied it with three lengths of string. I used the butchers knot taught to me by the guys at Ginger Pig but any knot that holds it tight will do.
The next Job I did was to split the ribs into individual bones. This is very easy, I simply slid a knife between the ribs and, when I met resistance pushed through it. If you hit bone whilst doing this, just change the angle and it should slide though the connective tissue. I was then left with a board of rolled belly, bits of bones, and a sheet of skin!

The board ready for cooking.

This time I roasted the crackling and belly, in separate trays at the same time, keeping an eye on the crackling to ensure it didn't burn too much!
I roasted potatoes, boiled carrots and made a gravy using the ample juices flowing from the roast. After resting the belly was carved and served with a garnish of crackling.

Garnish or cook's treat? You decide!

The pork carved like a dream, into nice thick slices, the fat on the outside had formed a soft crisp, delicious and salty.If you wish to find out what happened to the leftovers and the bones, tune in next time......

Carved and steaming

Ready to eat?

Sorry....

Primarily I must apologise for the lack of posts over the past few months. The truth is that I have simply been far too busy to even turn around twice in a day and my ranting about food has had to take a back seat. However, I am back and a little bit cross.
A few weeks ago I was driving home to a pile of marking when, on the radio there was a report on the quality of Hospital food.
Hospital food, like Airline food has been the butt of jokes for generations and I understand that an NHS Hospital is not an hotel but there can be no excuse for feeding people who are poorly or recovering from operations poor food.
Just to reiterate, here's the logic path: People in hospitals are in need of care and cost the country a great deal of money. So, it is in everyone's interest (especially the patient's) that they get well quickly. So, in order to help this healing they should be fed high quality and appropriate nutrition. So, we should be supplying hospitals with fantastic cooks, producing great meals. So, the patient spends a shorter period of time in hospital. So, each patient is less costly to the exchequer.
To me this seems like the simplest equation in the world, though there are those who I am sure have much "bigger" brains than I who just do not see it. Several celebrity chefs have tried to make a difference in this area and whilst their efforts are to be applauded, the overall effect seems to be small.
Here comes the sadness - Most of the food production in hospitals is done by large. highly diversified companies who also tender for the cleaning contract, the waste disposal contract and other services to the hospital trust. Often these are rolled into one contract so supplying the nutrition to people who are trying to get better very quickly becomes a set of sums on a proposal (probably based on cost reduction) rather that a drive to improve the "wellness" of individuals.
If I were a senior medical professional I would probably be pulling out the last remnants of my hair at the fact that I was providing (by and large) first class healthcare with the handicap of poor nutrition.
It is high time that we stopped racing to the lowest cost with these issues and climbed our way to the highest benefit.  

Let the madness begin!

It is that time of year again, we are less than a month away from the Christmas dinner! A host (some heavenly some not) of food writers will be tell us how to have a stress free Christmas day with their easy recipes and methods. So here's the truth. Christmas dinner is just a roast dinner on a slightly larger scale. It may require a little more planning than your average Sunday fare but lets not get things out of all proportion here.
However it would be remiss of me not to offer some advice on how to produce the Yule feast in a relatively stress free way and on a reasonable budget.
So today I have two bits of advice for you:
1. If you have a lot of guests for the big day, order your meat now. Many years ago, the Beautiful Wife and I were planning to have a duck for the roast. I left it till the 24th to buy the bird and found myself trouping round the whole of North London to find one - not a particularly pleasant occupation on Christmas Eve,
2. Buy chestnuts now. They will be sold out when you go on the 20th to do your last shop. The vacuum packed ones are fine for the purpose of sprout re-invention.

Sometimes it's not all about the food.

The beautiful wife is a Brown owl to a local brownie pack and last weekend was their annual pack holiday. It was a joy to see so many young people with healthy and unfussy appetites. In fact most of the Brownies ate adult portions and then came back for seconds. Fresh air, excitement and activity are wonderful sharpeners of the appetite. However, it is not the quality or quantity of the food or indeed the ferocity with which it was eaten which will stay with me from this weekend.
Sometimes you encounter a situation where you know instinctively that, for a few minutes, everything is "right". God is in his heaven, the stars are aligned, the fates are on your side, however you want to describe it. This sense of "right" is not a learned response, it comes from within, a sense of settled calm and comfort; you simply know that all is as good as it could possibly be in that moment. You also know that you would not choose to be anywhere else in the world.
On the Saturday evening the Brownies had a fireside picnic. At the Guiding centre where they stayed there was a fire pit on some open ground and the Brownies made their choice of sandwich grabbed a piece of fruit, a cake bar and a bag of crisps and headed out to sit around it and eat their Tupper (A cross between Tea and Supper, I'm told).
The adults managed the fire and sat on benches among the youngsters who, all in a circle tucked in. One of the Young Guiders, a 19 year old on a gap year, brought out a guitar and as soon as the food was finished she played and we all sang. The weather had been fine and there was the tiniest hint of autumn's chill but the fire soon saw that off and there we sat in the shadow of the beautiful Chiltern Hills. The most glorious sunset was taking place around us, lines of pink and blue and grey thrown across the sky. For one precious hour, everything was perfect, so perfect that it made me want to cry. Lifelong memories were made that evening and I, for one have never enjoyed a plain ham sandwich more.

.....mellow fruitfullness....

I have always loved this time of year. As a child, whilst September meant the end of the summer holidays it also meant the start of the rugby season and I considered that was a fair price to pay for spending hours working my way through Chaucer or drawing Ox-bow lakes. If early spring is the hungry period then surely late summer is the period of full bellies. There is an abundance of food available at this time of year, some of it is even free (think blackberries). But September can be a month of contradictions. The two photos above illustrate this point perfectly: The tomatoes were picked from the tiny garden of Corner Cottage and they are to me the symbol of a fine summer yet it was so chilly last night that the only option was toad in the hole!

Preserving the summer to eat in the winter.

A few weeks ago I ranted about the fact that we do not need fresh strawberries on our Christmas dinner tables. Much better, I suggested, to make jam. In a very rare display of following my own advice I have been producing preserves with any fruit that croses my path. It started with some raspberries from the kitchen gardener and then came the visit to my mother in Devon.
My mum hails from the Northeast and whilst living in the South for 55 years has softened the accent it has not changed that region's unending ability to understate almost anything.
So, when we arrived and were told to pick the remainder of the blackcurrants, redcurrants and goosberries left in the garden, I felt a slight feeling of diquiet. "There can't be very many left" she asserted.
A few hours later and having avoided the wasps and the rather agressive gooseberry thorns I returned to the kitchen with4lbs of blackcurrants, over 3lbs of gooseberries and just under 2lbs of redcurrants.
On our return to Corner Cottage I set to with the fruit and some sugar. We now have four jars of gooseberry jam, 9 jars of blackcurrant jam and 2 jars of redcurrant jelly. Adding this haul of conserves to a couple of jars of raspberry jam made earlier in the summer and we are set until next summer arrives.

The joy of the summer holiday

One of the great joys of being a teacher is the summer holidays. They are not quite as long as they seemed when we were young but they do provide a proper break from the battle to educate. One of the nicest aspects of this time off is the fact that it provides the opportunity to take lunch rather than grabbing lunch.  For the beautiful wife an I this is often some homemade bread and a lump of pate or maybe some cheese. This is sometimes accompanied with a salad or two and followed by fruit. There is no better way to use up cold cuts from a roast or any over left overs than an idle lunch which is not limited by time. We have been working hard in the garden at Corner Cottage during the last few weeks so lunch has been taken at any time from 11.45 to 3pm.
A few days ago I made the following recipe for lunch. It's based on an idea from the food phenomenon that is Rick Stien.
Take five or six ripe tomatoes and cut them in half. Place them on a baking sheet and smear some finely chopped garlic on the cut side of the toms. Season them well and pop them in a low to medium oven and allow them to dry in the heat. After about an hour they should look like jelly when gently squeezed with a pair of tongs. (Do not do this with your fingers, the juice of the tomatoes will be hotter than the sun!) Take the toms out of the oven and allow them to cool a little. Take a sheet of puff pastry and roll it to the same size as a heavy baking sheet. Cut a magin around the outside of the pastry without cutting completely through the pastry. Place all of the toms on the inner area of the the pastry and sprinkle over a blue crumbly cheese. Bake in a medium oven until the pastry is cooked and the cheese is all melted. Cut up into "hungry man" slices and serve with salad.