Thyme-roasted belly of pork, cider apple sauce - and an 'au revoir'

Summer has inexorably ebbed away over the last few days. Chillier mornings are here, that beautifully clear light that comes on a sunny Autumn day, the undeniable yet indefinable 'smell' of Autumn that's there as you breathe in. The trees are heavy with apples, and overhead, the geese are forming and re-forming their skeins, honking loudly as they make pass after pass over our house from the estuary, and our top field is strangely quiet as the pigs that arrived in late Spring were dispatched early last week only to return, butchered and bagged, ready for the freezer.

You only really know how big a pig is when you try and fit it into your freezer. That's not a euphemism. As the pigs got fat snuffling around, rootling through the ground, churning it up, wallowing and generally enjoying about the best life a pig could have, I became increasingly concerned as to quite how our portion of pork - the rent, if you will, as the pigs were not ours - would fit into our array of white goods.  For weeks, we've been eating our way through the boxes, tubs and bags stashed away in months gone by - in many instances playing freezer roulette as a result of my apparently frequent labelling lapses. And each time it was my responsibility to feed the pigs, my anxiety would return. 2 buckets of feed morning and evening each day became three and then five, along with plentiful windfalls and other treats. I had to employ increasingly tactical strategies to get over the fence, into the pen and emptying said buckets into the feeding troughs without getting knocked into the mud and trampled all over by 8 eager, hungry and enormous pigs...

Fortunately, our efforts eating through the freezer were rewarded and the 70kg that came back on Friday all fitted in, along with 10kg of sausage. That, along with some lamb that also originated on our land earlier in the summer, and some fantastic grass fed beef from Esgair Farm near Carmarthen, means that we're pretty much sorted for meat for the next few months. 

Of course, we couldn't resist trying the pork this weekend: when you've spent 3 months anticipating meat that has grown up within 100 feet of your house, meat that you know has had a fantastically happy life, free to root around, free to wallow in mud, free to play football (stop press - pigs play football) and to run around having mad half hours - you just have to try it. I defy any meat eater to do anything else.

Browsing through Diana Henry's Food from Plenty, I found the perfect recipe - nothing too heavily flavoured that would mask the pork, a simple treatment - and simple is often the best. Thyme-roasted belly of pork with baked apples did the job perfectly giving incredible crackling, melting meat and some rather tasty apples to go with. Apples which had grown in our garden too, along with the thyme that I rubbed into the scored skin, along with salt and pepper, in readiness for the oven. Even better, the baked apples recipe made use of some of the Husband's rather challenging home brew cider... Although we're in no position to give it our day jobs and immerse ourselves in smallholding and self-sufficiency, there's a certain sense of satisfaction to be felt from eating a meal where the meat and a significant part of the accompaniments come from your own garden.

Caring for the pigs, deputising for our neighbour who they actually belonged to has been a big part of what has been a bit of a funny summer, what with one thing and another. Life has thrown a number of curved balls our way - nothing insurmountable, but each requiring time and attention. 

When I was blogging regularly, engaging and participating in the blogging community, I'd occasionally come across a blog which just seemed to have 'stopped'. One day, a blog post, one of a regular stream, and then - nothing. I used to wonder what had happened to those people - people obviously like me who had cared enough about what they were interested in to post regularly. Had something happened? Had they got bored? Worse? I often feared for the worst - after all my own blogging had started out of my son's serious illness - and I often imagined something of those proportions might have happened, intervening with their blogging. And then, at some point over this crazy summer - I realised that my blog was one of those - simply abandoned. Nothing to indicate the state of play, one day a post, then nothing...

I've thought about it a lot over the last few weeks, and what I've realised is that, this blog, this blog that I've loved writing, loved the comments, loved being a very small and insignificant part of the food blogging community, this blog has done its job. I started it at a time when my life was in chaos, and it gave me a focus, something I could do for me when every other moment was full of caring for a child with a life threatening illness and a baby. This year, though, with all its trials and traumas, all its highs and lows hasn't really given me any cause to sit down and blog. Fred the dog had to be put to sleep, Brexit threw me off kilter for weeks, Blue broke a foot bone, kiboshing much of our summer . On the plus side, some amazing camping and walking trips, days on the beach, sailing with dolphins, catching lobster in our own pots... and yet none of it made it to the blog. The cooking for solace and celebration - and life in general - it's all been going on, but nothing I just haven't needed to share in the way I used to feel so compelled to do so.

And Blue and Pink who gave me so much fodder for the blog - being as much of my cooking that formed the heart of the blog was aimed at feeding them healthy, varied, homecooked yet easy food - have all of a sudden grown up. I no longer feel comfortable calling them 'Blue' and 'Pink'. Blue, almost 13, is taller than me, and is as strong as an ox, enjoying life at secondary school. Pink is a maelstrom of hormones, already comfortable in the kitchen herself, and working her way through a collection of Sam Stern recipes and the children's Silver Spoon cook book. Even more significant, I can pretty much put anything on the table, and it will be eaten up. Salads, lentils, curries, fish. My work here is done.

So to those of you who came with me on my blogging journey, thank you and goodbye - well, au revoir. I'm still lurking about on Twitter and Instagram, There may also be another blog on the horizon, so watch this space (or, at any rate, a similar blog space). And if you just came across this blog and wondered what happened, well, I just moved on. I've said all I have to say about food - from now on, I'll just be cooking and eating it.

All that remains is for me to leave you with a recipe for cider apple sauce - a great way to use up cooking apples and challenging bottles of home brew cider.  With the bulk of the pork in the freezer, I actually had space left - space to fill with apples. Faced with the rest of the bottle of challenging home brew cider from the baked apples, and a pile of cooking apples, I cooked up a huge batch of cider apple sauce, which is now frozen in portions alongside the pork. It's going to be a good winter.

Cider Apple Sauce

Cooking apples

Dry cider (home brew is fine)

Soft brown sugar

Depending on how big your pile of cooking apples is (I reckon I had at least 20) take a big, thick bottomed pan and tip about 1cm of cider into the bottom, plus around 50g sugar. Turn on the heat to low.

Start peeling, coring and slicing your apples, adding them to the pan as you go. Stir the apples occasionally as they cook down and as you add more apple slices in. 

Taste as you go and add more sugar as needed (this will depend on how tart your apples, and your cider, are...)

If the mixture looks like it's drying out, add a slosh more cider and basically keep going till you've used up your apples, and they are all cooked out and it all looks like a big pan of apple sauce. If you like it a little chunky, take the pan off the heat before the last apples have fully cooked down.

Leave to cool and then portion up and freeze.

Slow roast pork (possibly again)

Thank you all of you who read my last post. I know this is normally a place for me to share my fairly inane, and fairly unoriginal drivellings about food, but occasionally, you know, an issue arises which is more important than what we ate for dinner. Actually, most things are more important than what we ate for dinner, but I can't always articulate what I feel about those things. My friend's situation, the chronic category 5 endometriosis and the fact that she has borne it  without complaining for all these years, I feel deeply about that, and as we live so far apart, writing the post was the only thing I felt I could do. The good news is that it's had huge page viewings and even made it to the front page of the Mumsnet Bloggers Network yesterday which I was incredibly chuffed about.

But today, my friend is still in hospital, and nothing has stirred me to action, so it's back to the food. Although if you haven't read my last post, please do...

There's a bit in one of the Wind in the Willows stories which talks about it being a 'golden afternoon' - late summer is the season, and if memory serves me correctly, it's when Toad has encouraged Ratty and Mole to join him in a gypsy caravan, before the onset of the motor car. Well, it's only March, but the weather has been golden over the last few days here on the West Wales coast. The tide has been low in the mornings, so my day has started with a good dose of beach, and the kids even braved the sea after school a couple of days ago.

After my jaunt to Aberporth with Fred this morning, I stopped off at the farm shop which is just off the main A487 coast road at Tanygroes (if you were interested). Down a little lane is the Golwg y Mor Farm Fresh Meats shop, and if you are in the area for any reason, like a holiday, or because you live here, it's well worth a visit. The meat is fabulous, and the company friendly and chatty. It's one of the things I really love about living here. People have the time to chat, to pass the time of day. On the downside, it makes work avoidance far too easy - I was struggling to leave the beach in the first place, and I ended up delaying the inevitable enforced time in front of the lap top by at least another 20 minutes chatting about this and that...

The conversation this morning turned to the fact that people have been slow cooking pork for years - the Rayburn being a perfect medium to bung in the joint and forget about it all day - but that all of a sudden it's 'the new thing'. He was saying he gets people coming in asking for meat to make 'pulled pork' as if it's the latest thing. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall et al have a lot to answer for - but in a good way, because if they have opened up the eyes of the cooking public to the beauty that is slow roast meat, that can only be a good thing.

I was, myself, in there for something to slow roast. A piece of pork to whack in the oven when I got home, and leave all day, delicious smells permeating the house, and meaning that when dinner time came, I simply had to knock up some veggies and do some gravy. Veg box day yesterday produced lovely chard, carrots and celeriac, amongst other things. Simply steamed the first two, and made mash with the third - perfect accompaniments. 

Speaking of unoriginal drivel about food, I know there are a million recipes for slow roast pork on the internet, and there may even be a version of this somewhere on this blog, but it's so good, and so easy that I thought it was worth posting again.

Slow roast Pork Shoulder (or whatever, it doesn't have to be shoulder)

! piece of pork - about 2 kg
a little oil to grease your roasting tin, plus 1 tbsp
1 medium onion
some sprigs of thyme
2 tbsp fennel seed
zest of a lemon
2 cloves of garlic, peeled & roughly chopped
a good pinch of sea salt
A large wine glass of white wine & water (or all water if you don't have any white wine left over from the previous night)

Pre-heat the oven to 220C

Grease a smallish roasting tin - it needs to be big enough to take the pork, but not so big that the liquid evaporates during the long cooking . Peel the onion, slice it and lay slices over the base of the tin, and chuck on a couple of the thyme stalks.

Pick off the leaves of the rest of the thyme stalks and add to a pestle & mortar (or whatever you use) with the fennel seed, lemon zest and garlic. 

Bash all this together with some sea salt and mix in the tbsp of oil, then lay the pork on the onions and smear all over with this rub/paste.

Put the whole lot in the oven and cook at the high temperature for 20-30 minutes, then remove from the oven and turn the heat down to around 110C. Tip the wine/water into the tin and cover the roasting tin snugly with foil. Return the tin to the oven and cook for as long as you need - I left mine in for about 7 hours before doing anything to it.

About 1 hr before you want to eat, remove the pork from the oven and turn the heat back up. Remove the foil and retun the pork to the oven to crisp up the crackling. Keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't burn - and cook for about 45 minutes.

Once the crackling is done, leave the meat to rest for 15 minutes or so, then remove the crackling and divide it into equal sized pieces (once you've checked that it's properly crispy and delicious of course), and pull the meat apart to serve. 

Pork & lemon meatballs - because we don't need to think about the turkey till next week...

You'll have noticed that there hasn't been much about Christmas here. 

It's not that I'm not bothered, not excited, but I'm not planning to do anything different or fancy, and as it's just us here for Christmas Day, and I don't want to have the place groaning with leftovers, I have tried not to over-cater or over-engineer anything.

I'm also quite fancying the approach Alexander Armstrong and Giles Coren took in their '12 Drinks of Christmas' programme that I happened to watch last night - line up 12 festive drinks, and let everything else take care of itself. I won't of course, but it did cross my mind...

I never really read the Dr Seuss books when I was growing up, but the Husband did, and his mum introduced them to our kids - Blue in particular - and there's a bit in How the Grinch Stole Christmas that I really love. It's this bit ('it' being Christmas):

"It came without ribbons. It came without tags. 

It came without packages, boxes or bags. 

And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. 

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. 

What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. 

What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” 

I've been concentrating on getting the exhausted children through the last few weeks of school - there have been projects to finish, carol concerts, school discos, the usual end of Autumn term madness - and what with everything else that's been going on, I haven't really had time to think about anything other than the basics, even less blog about it.

 

So on the catering front, at least, I'm taking the 'Grinch' approach. Or perhaps not the Grinch's approach, but that of the Whos - whose Christmas the Grinch was trying to spoil. 

It will be Christmas whether I manage to make cranberry sauce or not. 

Whether the mince pies have homemade mincemeat in them - or the mincemeat from the jar I found at the back of the cupboard which looks perfectly edible but has a use by date of 2009 on it (may be I'll pep it up with some brandy...). Indeed whether the mince pies are homemade in the first place ("Recipe Junkie in bought mince pie shock..." I can see it now).

Whether the Christmas Cake looks like something Mary Berry would be proud of - or not - thanks to Pink's enthusiastic marzipan modelling last night.

Particularly loving Pink's attempt to turn a polar bear into a reindeer...

We will be together, at home, and we will have a lovely time, whether we eat like kings, or not.
 
And anyway, all of that stuff isn't till next week. 

For now, we need to eat normal food; food to keep us going as we wade through the end of term. It would help if I'd been meal planning, but that's gone by the wayside too, so yesterday I was scrabbling around in the freezer and found some pork mince. It's ages since we had meatballs, and the kids love them, so with a little help from Nigel Slater, meatballs it was.


Pork meatballs with mushroom sauce

4 anchovy fillets
450g pork mince
65g breadcrumbs
zest of a lemon; juice of up to 1 lemon (see Method)
handful of flat leaf parsely (leaves only especially if stalks are a bit woody), finely chopped

2 tablespoons (about 15g) grated parmesan
plain flour for dusting/rolling in (the meatballs, not you)
40g butter
olive oil
4 largeish chestnut mushrooms, peeled if necessary and finely chopped
200ml chicken stock
50ml (approx) cream

Mash up the anchovy fillets in the bottom of a large bowl, then mix in the pork mince, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, parsley and grated parmesan and mix together, adding the lemon juice as necessary to bind it all together.

Cover a plate with plain flour.

Using a tablespoon as a rough measure, make your meatballs - I got 14 out of this mixture - flatten slightly, then put in the flour, rolling around to coat lightly.

Heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan, then brown the meatballs on both sides for about 4 minutes - I did this in batches. Once browned, set the meatballs aside, then chuck the mushroom into the pan and cook for a few minutes, then return the meatballs to the pan and cook for another 5-6 minutes, turning occasionally.

Tip in the chicken stock and bring the pan up to bubbling, scraping any bits off the bottom of the pan, then drizzle in a bit of cream. I just had some in the fridge, and I didn't measure it out, but it wasn't much - just enough to turn the sauce from 'stock' to 'sauce' if you see what I mean.

When everything's hot, serve. We had it with a mixture of wild and red rice (cupboard clearing) and some steamed kale.

 And in case I don't get the chance again, 

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

 

Pork Fillet & Coriander - and some Ginger Wine

So the veg box arrived on Tuesday and I checked out the contents and my list of likely meals culled from various sources in order to put together a meal plan and finalise the rest of the shopping requirements. I was still feeling uninspired and I won't lie that it was a chore, despite being faced with the kind of fresh and delicious vegetables that would normally make my heart sing.

Among other things, there was a small bunch of asparagus - such a treat, but not more than one serving's worth, so I supplemented with the final spears poking up from the garden and made a quiche on Wednesday.

A huge bag of spinach. Always tricky - I love it, kids don't.

A big bag of a herb that I knew I knew, but I couldn't identify.  How embarrassing.

Turned out it was coriander. Aromatic and fresh, but loads of it and I wasn't fancying carrot and coriander soup, despite the bunch of carrots. Curry? No. Pesto? No.


In the end I reached for Sarah Raven (she of the velvet gardening coat and close personal friendship with Emma Bridgewater - not that I'm jealous or anything). Her Garden Cookbook is a real winner if you have more than a passing relationship with vegetables. The book isn't a vegetarian cook book, but there are loads of good recipes, divided loosely into seasons and by different veggies, which is a Godsend when you have a glut - or a lack of inner inspiration.

 
One thing, they can often be quite fiddly, so that even 'simple' meals turn out to be quite task intensive. She also often uses some less common additional ingredients. Thanks to my foray into the pages earlier in the week, I am now the proud owner of a bottle of ginger wine. I suspect that sherry or marsala (for all Nigella fans) would work equally well here.

Pork Fillet with Coriander

Serves 4

450g piece of pork tenderloin, cut into 2-3 cm thick medallions
1 red onion, finely sliced
30g unsalted butter
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp coriander seeds, crushed
3 large mushrooms, quite thickly sliced
1 large clove of garlic, crushed
70ml ginger wine
2 heaped teaspoon soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
200ml creme fraiche
large bunch of fresh coriander, finely chopped


Melt the butter with the oil in a frying pan, then add the sliced onion and crushed coriander seeds, and cook gently for a few minutes till the onion is soft. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Add the mushrooms & garlic to the pan and cook for 2-3 minutes then add to the onions.

Add a little more oil to the pan if necessary and then turn the pork slices in the butter and oil in the pan for 3-4 minutes, before putting the onions and mushrooms back in the pan.

Add the ginger wine, sugar and lemon juice to the pan, turn up the heat a little and allow everything to cook and bubble to become syrupy.

Add the creme fraiche, salt and pepper and then stir in the chopped coriander and serve.

As Sarah suggested, it was delicious with her Spinach with Puy Lentils (my way), thus killing the spinach bird at the same time, but I have to confess that I also cooked some pasta for the kids. The creamy sauce went down very well whether it was lentils or pasta - and to give them their due, both kids ate the small amount of the lentils & spinach I gave them. 

I can feel my mojo very slowly returning...

Linking up to Herbs on Saturday hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage with the beautiful coriander that went into the dish.