Memories of Devon 1

Those of  of us who serve at the chalkboard have now been back at school for three weeks or so and thoughts have turned back to the joy that was the summer holidays. I spent a few days with my mother in Okehampton in Devon chasing up the family tree and this brought back many happy memories.
When I was between the ages of nothing and about 15 we holidayed every summer in a cottage adjacent to a working farm situated in rural central Devon. In my memory the sun always shone and the two weeks of bliss was an eternity of fun. How many eight year old boys today get to drive a tractor during harvest? I know my late father considered those two weeks to be the reason he worked so hard.
My father was an appalling cook. He was blessed with my mother who was a superb family cook so all was well when it came to domestic issues.
The one occasion, during the fortnight we would all, including members of the farm family and my Godfather's family (who often shared the cottage with us), head off the area around Brat Tor on Dartmoor. This tor is special as it has Widgery Cross on top of it. We used to call the area "Black Rock" in a Swallows and Amazons sort of name change.
There was a small river which had been dammed to provide swimming pools and always a climb to the top to touch the cross and wave to our parents far below. I still have no idea how we swam in  the cold of fresh Dartmoor stream water and did not catch our death of cold.
Before we had been there long we would be called for lunch and, of course, we would ambush the adults from a direction they were not expecting.
This was my father's moment. On a twin primus stove he would be doing a "cook out" (his name for it). This was very simple: In two frying pans there would be plenty of proper butcher's sausages, sizzling, spitting, occasionally banging and being generally harassed by Dad. Once cooked, these would be thrust into a folded piece of sliced white bread (probably "Wonderloaf or "Mother's Pride"), smeared with ketchup or brown sauce and wolfed down so fast that they made us pant at the heat. Never in my life since, have I been able to recreate the sheer joy at the taste of those sausages and their pulpy, bread blankets.
My parents retired to Devon some 27 years ago. A few years before he died, my father was able to take my niece and nephew up on to the Moor for a Cook Out, on the same old primus stove, with sausages from the same butcher. I think of those days in the sun often, and they make me smile with happy memories tinged with the fact that I miss my Dad, but I still can't work out how I ever swam in a Dartmoor river and survived.

So here we go, as promised: the second installment of my adventures with pork belly.
First and foremost the left over rolled roast formed a lunch the day after. The left over veg was turned into a wonderful bubble and squeak. The cold cuts were then sliced, much thinner than the hot roast, and a little salad on the side with leftover gravy re-heated made for a splendid lunch.

If you cast your mind back (or alternatively you can look back at the previous entry) when I made this roast I took a handful of ribs and of cuts from the underside of the belly. These bones and bits actually contain a surprising amount of very tasty meat. These were all popped in a pan with stock a chopped chili, a bashed garlic clove and some chopped ginger. This was brought to the boil, covered and then allowed to simmer for a couple hours.
This was then strained (reserving he liquid) and, after cooling, all the bits of bone were picked and chopped, producing a nice little pile of delicious meat. I had kept the stalks of a couple of broccoli heads, these were now pealed and finely shredded. A carrot was given the same treatment as was an onion and a couple of left over mushrooms were sliced. Sometimes a cook must stand back from their toils and enjoy looking at ingredients, all poised and ready for action.

I cooked off some noodles and allowed them to cool. Then, with all my ducks were in line I began.
A little garlic, ginger and chili and oil were popped into a smoking hot pan; these were swiftly joined by onion. carrot and the broccoli stem. A period of mad stir frying then ensued and then  the mushrooms and meat were added. After a quick spin of the pan, the noodles were added with a ladle of the reserved stock mix, soy sauce, rice wine, and sesame oil. this was then thickened with cornflour (if its ok for Ken Hom its ok for me) and another meal was created.
From a single slab of belly, six heart main courses were produced. In fact, if push came to shove, I reckon that I could have stretched it even further. Now get to the pork belly before its too late and you need to take out a second mortgage to buy any.

On a very serious note, I dread to think how much cooked meat is wasted. As I write it is early Sunday evening and I can only imagine all those Sunday roasts being sent straight to the recycling or, suffering the indignity of languishing in the back of the fridge till it starts to smell bad. It is vital, both to our pockets and environmentally, that we eat all the meat we buy. it is far too expensive (in many ways) and precious (in even more ways) to throw away.

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!