Matina's Roasted Pork With Fennel Seeds and Lemon

Food has been a troublesome matter in the A&N household for the past two weeks. Mr A&N has been put on an exclusion diet by his Doctor to try to isolate what food (if any) causes him stomach pains. He's been plagued by trouble for years, so any possible easing of that pain would be worth the hassle in the mean time. But in the mean time, it's a hassle. Among the foods that he can't eat are:

• Wheat
• Eggs
• Dairy
• Potato
  
• Corn
  
• Citrus foods
  
• Beef
  
• Ham
  
• Alcohol
  
• Garlic
  
• Onions

I've fielded more than one lunch-time call from him, desperately roaming the supermarket aisles for something to eat that isn't brimming over with banned substances. He's ableto reintroduce one food at a time starting from next week, and he stays awake at night thrilling over what to bring back first (wheat would let him have bread and pasta again, but my we have guests next week so perhaps bring alcohol in first...garlic and onions, though, are a staple for most other flavors, so maybe they should come before anything else...).

Going out to dinner would be difficult veering toward impossible, but luckily Baby A&N is an automatic restaurant eliminator so we don't have much to worry about. Going around to friend's houses for food is equally challenging, and filled with many apologies as we turn their menus into a pile of dust or try to postpone our get-together. Our ever-accommodating Greek friend, Matina, saw the challenge head on and produced the planned roast pork main course for us normal mortals along with an improvised grilled sardine course for Mr A&N containing nothing but approved ingredients and a bit of Greek magic.

Mr A&N cooed and ahh'd over the sardines which were full of the tastes of sea and sunshine that you would hope (I tasted, I can verify). But really, the action was where the pork was. Matina used fennel seeds and lemon to flavor the meat and the crackling, and it worked incredibly well. It worked so well that it sent me into a reverie of the different times I've eaten wonderful foods containing fennel seeds, and how I ought to pay the fennel more respect by using it more often. The slow-cooking treatment rendered the pork very soft and moist, and a bit of gravy on the side helped complete the desire to drown yourself in the flavors. A perfect Sunday lunch. Shame Mr A&N couldn't join in for now, but I'll make sure he adds this to his list of Food Deprivations - To Be Rectified for when the diet is done.


Matina's Roasted Pork With Fennel Seeds and Lemon
Good for 1 1/2 - 2 kg of pork shoulder or leg joint, preferably with skin on to make crackling

• 3 tsp of fennel seeds
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 3 tsp of coarse sea salt
• 1 tsp of peppercorns
• rind of one lemon
• 2 Tbs of olive oil
• 1 kg leg or shoulder of pork
  
• 1 pint of dry apple cider (about 250 - 300ml)
  
• 1 bramley (cooking) apple, cut into 8 or so slices
  1 large onion, cut into 8 or so slices
  Flour and water (for the gravy)
  

1. Turn the oven on to 200 C / 450 F
2. Score the pork skin to help it go crispy, and dry it well with paper towels. If you want to make extra crispy crackling, separate the skin from the meat before scoring, then score and blot dry with paper towels.
3. Mix fennel, cloves, sea salt, peppercorns, lemon, olive oil in a pestle and mortar until it is thick paste.
4. If you have removed the skin from the pork, spread half the paste over the top side of the pork meat, then place the skin on top as it originally was and spread the other half of the paste on. Tie loosely together with string. If you haven't separated the skin, rub the paste into the skin quite well.
5. Put the pork in the and oven tray and add the pint of cider, apple and onion
   Cook at 200 / 400 for 1/2 an hour. Then reduce the cooking temperature to 140 / 280 and cook for another 4 hours. Check on occasion to make sure the juices in the pan haven't gone dry; top up with water or more cider if they have.
   
6. Rest the pork for 1/2 an hour.
7. Check the crackling for crispiness. If it looks like it could be crispier, bring the temperature of the oven back up to 200 / 400, and blast the skin for a further 5 minutes at a time until it's crispy enough. Remove from oven.
8. In the mean time, strain the juice for gravy. Heat the juices on the stove, adding in 1 Tbs of flour at a time until the gravy is of the thickness you like (it's easiest to stir and dissolve the flour in a glass with some water first, then add it to the gravy mix; this helps keep the flour from going lumpy).
9. Serve the pork in slices with gravy on top and some crackling on the side.

Easing Back Into Things with a Side of Chorizo Meatballs

Well hello. I'm emerging from the post-baby world, ever so slowly, and though it's currently not filled with as much palate-delighting home-made treats as the pre-baby world was, it does have its own special glow. Baby A&N is a lovely little child (except, of course, when he decides not to be) and, predictably, has an incredible appetite. Though he didn't match my friend's son's feat of doubling his birth weight by month 2 of life, he wasn't far off with hitting 16lbs by week 10 rather than week 9. For someone who loves food as much as I do, this pleases me no end.

Sadly, breastfeeding turned out to be probably the most difficult thing I've tackled (this includes any of the Daring Baker challenges) and after 2 months of antibiotics, infections, and a baby who wasn't as deft with his follow-through as he was with his need to sate himself, I gave up breastfeeding. Quite bittersweet since it was something I never questioned not doing, but in the last 2 weeks it has produced a happier mother with even just eensiest bits of free time on her hands - which lets hme do delightful things like getting out of the house, taking the occasional bath, and starting to think up things to cook again.

In the mean time, Mr A&N and I have been getting by as best we could, particularly when it has come to dinner times. A roast chicken is an ever-giving thing, giving us a hot dinner one night, a hodge-podge the second, and a soup the third. Simple pasta sauces are done in a batch, packaged up in spare breast milk storage bags (!) for their convenient pouches, and defrosted and topped up with the meat or vegetable du jour as needed. One of the best additions to pasta sauce was a Spanish-style meatball, recipe below (though no pictures since it felt enough of a triumph to make them).

We have also bowed to time pressures and tried some ready-made foods, as much as we don't like the idea. Our supplier of dinner-time salvation has been Abel and Cole, the company we get our weekly vegetable box from and who has a good range of groceries and other foodstuffs you can order through their website - perfect food shopping for someone tied to the house most of the day feeding and tending to a baby (and themselves, every once in a while). We've become huge fans of their steak and ale pie, which is a pretty perfect example of what that pie should be like: all buttery and flaky pastry, rich gravy, and good chunks of meat that aren't skimped on. Mr A&N was less impressed by the lamb and apricot pie (not enough gravy or spicing by his assessment, and I agreed) and by the steak and kidney pie (why mess around with kidneys when you could just have more steak, is his attitude - one I'm not in agreement with). So their steak and ale pie is delivered to us every other week, a bit of an indulgence but still cheaper than a take out meal.

I hope to be getting to know my cookbooks more in the coming months and not just trying out more things from them but using them to get my creative cooking juices flowing again. The Moro East, River Cafe Green, and Borough Market cookbooks have done me well in the past and deserve a re-visit, while a Shaker Cooking book given as a Christmas present makes me want to re-discover early American cooking. Hopefully Baby A&N will go along with those plan, and maybe even pick up a food tip or two for later in life.

Chorizo Meatballs (a nicely spicy, slightly Spanishy twist to your normal spaghetti and meatballs)

• 1 lb / 500g pork mince
• 1 1/2 tsp smoked paprika powder (I used hot paprika since I like it spicy. Or, if you want it a bit hot but can't find the right paprika, add in a touch of chili powder or chopped chili)
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• olive oil for sauteeing (about 1 1/2 Tbs depending on the size of your frying pan)

1. Combine the pork, paprika, and garlic in a bowl and mix well.
2. Roll the pork into small balls, somewhere between the size of a nickel and a quarter.
3. Heat up some olive oil in a frying pan, enough to coat all of the pan.
4. Cook the meatballs, gently turning after 3-5 minutes when the meatballs are looking cooked halfway through
5. Add the meatballs to your favorite tomato sauce. To bring a touch more spanish-ness to the meal, you might want to add another teaspoon or so of paprika to the tomato sauce as well.
6. Serve with spaghetti or your favorite pasta.

Slow Cooked Belly of Pork and Baked Beans

The slow cooker. It's a kitchen gadget that promises great things. Miraculous things. You become wooed by the tales of throwing in a handful of foodstuffs on your way out to work in the morning and arriving home in the evenings to fragrant wafts from the kitchen and a warm meal ready to dish up. My few experiments with the slow cooker took the shine off that promise.

Our first couple of slow cooked dinners were convenient but lacked something on the taste-front. They were watery, and lacked the rich flavour that a slow-cooked stew normally would. An obvious problem was the amount of liquids we had put in - since it's an enclosed system the water helps steam and cook everything but also doesn't escape, so natural water given off by the food coupled with any liquid added could lead to a rather watery dish.

But I'm not one to give in easily. Work has been busy, leaving me tired when I get home, and the little bubbins growing inside me gets a bit demanding for food too early in the evening for me to think of luxuriating over the chopping board and stove each night. But always on the lookout for slow-cook ideas, I found a recipe for slow-cooked baked beans at The Cottage Smallholder and I determined to give it another go. Real, slow-cooked baked beans are a wonderful thing and aren't a thing like the supposed beans-in-a-can you find anywhere in America. Though this recipe didn't use a slow-cooker to do the deed, there wasn't a great deal of liquid in the recipe and it seemed like a promising start.

To my thinking, an obvious companion to the beans would be pork, and slow-cooked pork belly was another slow-cooking winner. There was the risk of the belly pork, with its tremendous amount of fat, simply feeding its tender fatty juices to the beans over a period of 10 hours, leaving me with a delicious last meal before Mr A&N and I died of spontaneous clogged arteries. I took care to cut away the skin from the pork (it would also let me make crackling later on) as well as most of the visible fat beneath the skin in order to give us half a chance of living through the meal.

Preparation was, of course, nice and easy. Beans soaked over night, everything thrown in the pot in the morning (though I didn't follow the suggested recipe exactly, partly due to lack of ingredients). I doubled the amount of sauce for the beans so that I could coat the pork in that flavoring as well. On went the slow cooker for 10 hours, and off I went to work.

This time, I'm delighted to say, the slow cooker lived up to its potential. The pork hadn't melted into itself or the beans, but was both tender and with enough fat on it that you could trim it off and look forward to living another day. The beans were enough to make any practical New Englander swell (just a polite amount) with pride, with nicely thickened sauce and all its flavours coming together in a perfectly sweet and savory blend. Luckily, there were also plenty of leftovers so we could pat ourselves on the backs for our good work for a few days to come. The slow-cooker lives to cook another day.


Slow Cooked Belly of Pork and Baked Beans, inspired by The Cottage Smallholder
serves 4

• 500 g Roman (aka borlotti, cranberry, or even pinto) beans
• 1 large onion
• 8 cloves
• 3 Tbsp ketchup
• 3 Tbsp tomato paste
• 2 Tbsp sweet chili sauce (or if you'd rather not, just more ketchup)
• 2 Tbsp barbecue sauce
• 4 Tbsp maple syrup or molasses
• 4 Tbsp muscovado sugar
• 2 Tbsp dijon mustard
• 300-500 ml vegetable stock (approx - enough to cover)
• 1 kg pork belly
• handful of fresh thyme

1. Soak the beans overnight in water.
2. In the morning, boil the beans in fresh water for 10 minutes and then drain.
3. Peel and quarter the onion, and stick 2 cloves into each of the quarters. Set aside.
4. Combine the ketchup, tomato paste, chili sauce, barbecue sauce, maple syrup, muscovado sugar, and mustard.
5. Place the cooked beans in the slow cooker pot, and add half the ketchup sauce to it. Stir and assess - add a bit more if the beans are't quite coated.
6. Pour in about half the vegetable stock and give a stir. The stock should cover the beans and with a little bit more to spare, so add enough stock to reach this point.
7. Prepare the pork - cut off the skin and set aside for making crackling later. Cut away most of the visible fat that was under the skin.
8. Place the onions, clove side down, on top of the beans.
9. Place the thyme on top of the onions.
10. Lay the pork with former-skin-side up on top of the onions and thyme. Cover the pork, top and bottom, with any of the left over ketchup mixture.
11. Cover and set the slow cooker on for a minimum of 6 hours. (I cooked my for nearly 11 and it was still fine).
12. About 45 minutes before you'll be eating, prepare the crackling by turning the oven on to 220 C / 450 F and scoring the skin. Lay the skin on top of something that will let the fat drip off a bit. Cook for about 30-40 minutes.
13. Test the beans and pork for salt and pepper, and add as desired.
14. Serve the beans and pork warm, with some crackling on the side.

Pork Loin in a White Wine and Mushroom Sauce

Homer: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Lisa, honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

The wonderful, magical pig: it bequeaths us luscious sausages, the tantalizing smell of bacon, the versatility of ham. And yet - and yet pork in its natural state can be a difficult thing to cook well. I've had more tough pork chops than I've had tender ones, and there's not much that's appetizing about a square of gray, dry meat on the plate. A lot of it comes down the the quality of the meat, which is the result of the pigs that are being bred and farmed (there's a very interesting article about this amusingly called 'The Swine of Our Times'). It also comes down to the cut of the meat, with some pork being more easy to work with, and for this reason my favorite cut is the loin.

Mr A&N had a flash of inspiration when we last had pork loin, and so I left him to it. Or, I tried to leave him to it as best I could. I asked questions ("What are you making it with?" "How are you going to cook it?" "Are you sure you want to add *that* to it?"), made noises ("You are? ...Oh." "Umm...do you think...eer...never mind"), and tried to pretend I didn't want to interfere in the process at all. Finally, I had to leave the kitchen and just enjoy the results - which I enjoyed immensely since Mr A&N is a very good cook even despite my meddling. The accompanying sauce was so flavorful in its own right that I was torn as to whether to award the pork or the sauce as the star of the show. This should produce enough sauce so that you can be greedy with.


Pork Loin in a White Wine and Mushroom Sauce

• 1 - 1 1/2 k pork loin (about 2 - 3 lbs or pork)
• olive oil for frying
• 6 - 7 closed cap mushrooms, or 1 1/2 portabello mushrooms, chopped quite finely
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 Tbs wholegrain mustard
• 1 medium bunch of thyme
• 1 large glass dry white wine
• 1/2 Tbs flour
• splash of cream or milk
• salt and pepper
  

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 C / 360 F.
2. In a small saucepan with a splash of olive oil, briefly sautee the mushroom, onion, and garlic until the onion softens slightly.
3. In an oven-proof dish large enough to hold the pork, pour in the mushroom mixture. Add to this the mustard, thyme, and white wine, and stir.
4. In a heavy-bottomed pan or pot, heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil over a medium heat.
5. Brown the pork briefly on all sides.
6. Pour any pork juices into the mushroom mixture, then place the pork on top of this. Lightly salt and pepper it.
   
7. Spoon some of the sauce onto the pork so that it's covered on the top and bottom.
8. Cover the dish with tin foil, and place in the oven.
9. Cook for 35-45 minutes or until the pork is done when tested with a meat thermometer.
10. Pour out the mushroom mixture and all juices into a medium-sized sauce pan. Keep the pork in the oven dish and re-cover to keep warm.
11. Dissolve the flour in the cream or milk by stirring well, then add this to the saucepan with the mushroom mixture. Add salt and pepper to taste
    
12. Heat over a medium heat, stirring, until the sauce has thickened a bit.
13. Serve the pork in slices, with the sauce poured over it.