Overnight slow-roasted pork

I've been eyeing up the recipe for slow-roasted pork for months. I am very partial to slow-cooked meat in general, although I'd never tried roasting pork for as long as this recipe requires. Undoubtedly I'd have tried it earlier, but for the instruction to cook a 5-6 kg piece of pork shoulder on the bone, followed by the reminder to check that your roasting tin - and your oven - are big enough. I don't suppose either my trays or my oven would have been; in any case, we'd have been eating pork for months, which might have prejudiced my feelings about it. Usually I am undeterred by scaling recipes down, but another sentence put me off: 'this recipe only works with a whole shoulder'. I couldn't see why but I am an obedient cook and I thought that this (along with those elusive live lobsters) might prevent me from cooking right through this book. Which would be a shame because I genuinely love slow-cooked meat. Anyway I consulted an anonymous Scottish oracle who advised me on how to adapt the recipe to the meat I could find. I bought a 3kg piece of pork shoulder and cut the cooking time slightly; the smell emanating from the oven all day was seriously tempting, a clarion call from the kitchen as I indulged in a Sunday afternoon novel. I could hardly wait for it to be ready.

To prepare the pork, lay roughly chopped carrot, obion, celery and fennel (fennel again...) in a roasting tray with bashed garlic cloves and some thyme sprigs. Bash up fennel seeds with salt and massage all over the scored skin of the pork, pushing the mix into the scores to boost the flavour of the meat. Put in an oven preheated to maximum for 20-30 minutes until it has begun to colour, then turn the oven down to 120C and cook for 9-12 hours. Then tip a bottle of white wine into the tray and cook for another hour. Mash the vegetables in the tray. Add chicken or vegetable stock to the tray and boil until you have an intense gravy. Serve with borlotti beans, braised greens, roast veg mash and tasty sauce.

My method differed marginally. I did everything as suggested, kept the oven at 120 even though mine is a seemingly turbo-charged fan oven, wherein 120 is not really 120. I cooked it for 6 1/2-7 hours at that temperature before adding the wine.

I also didn't mash up the veg; I threw it out. I know that sounds wasteful, but it had absorbed so much fat from the pork that it didn't look appetizing. I served the pork with borlotti beans, steamed purple sprouting broccoli and the light gravy.

Before Gravy:

After Gravy:


It was utterly delicious; Simon called it a 110% dinner. The pork was as promised meltingly tender and it had absorbed masses of flavour from the fennel. The sauce was equally lovely. I would make it again, like a shot - it was so easy and yet fantastic.

It occurs to me that I would never think of making this sort of food when people come over. When people invite you over, they tend to serve prime cuts, presumably so you don't write them off as cheapskates. That is all wrong - this sort of food cooks itself while you rest; nobody ends up flustered and red-faced thanks to the last-minute cooking that prime cuts inevitably demand. This is ideal food for entertaining, or for a lazy Sunday when you feel like reading and drinking tea while the meat looks after itself in the oven. Given the oven is on so low, you could even pop out to the pub...

Blackened barbecued pork fillets

On an ill-advised leaving do at work some years ago held in the Newcastle branch of Old Orleans, I ordered blackened chicken; it arrived cremated. I sent it back; they returned another burnt offering; I gave up, and had toast when I got home. So many collective work dinners turn out that way; the thought of going out, paying a lot of money, eating burnt food and talking about work can be decidedly unappealing. Anyway I now avoid ordering 'blackened' anything like the plague, for fear of more inedible dinners. That embargo does not extend to home cooking, and my friend Kirsten had already tried Jamie's blackened pork fillets and praised them, so I was not particularly anxious about creating a home-made version of blackened food.

The recipe was easy: marinade one pork fillet per two people in a mixture of crushed cloves, cumin and fennel seeds, paprika, orange zest and juice, thyme, garlic, ketchup and balsamic vinegar for at least an hour but up to half a day. When you're ready, barbecue or grill them until nicely charred.

I should say at this point that our grill is ridiculously feeble; it char-grills only in the loosest possible sense, but it did eventually succeed. I served this with sweet potato and carrot mash, and sprouts (okay the sprouts don't particularly go, but I had some to use up... and they tasted good!).


I enjoyed this dinner, but not as much as I would have had it been barbecued on a proper hot flame. Similarly I think the whole vibe of the barbecued dish would be better in July than in deepest darkest December; it worked, but it didn't make my taste buds sing. That will teach me to try dishes that would, I could tell as I ate it, be fabulous in the summer, in December.

Reading this back, I don't at all want to imply that I didn't like this - we both liked it a lot. I do feel, though, that food tastes differently according to the climate, and I could imagine this on a hot summer's day with a cold beer, as Matt Skinner suggests, more than on a windy December dark night with a glass of red. I will make it again, but I'll wait until the seasons change.

On another note, my lovely husband has ordered me some gingerbread syrup as I have been wanting it since I read Nigella's 'Christmas in a glass' recipe in the Radio Times. How lucky am I? We have also, finally. put up the tree, and the house feels gloriously Christmassy and I predictably feel that the holidays have begun, which obviously they have not. I had better wait for that gingerbread syrup to arrive.

Pork chops with apple and sage

Looking at this recipe gave me a sense of deja vu: I am sure Delicious magazine published a version of it as one of 'Jamie's quickies' (they came in small cut out card form) last year, and I tried it, and it was delicious. I subsequently mislaid the card and so I was eager to see this one, which I don't think is the same but is quite similar. I love pork chops, apples, and sage, not to mention the optional blue cheese (when is optional cheese ever just an option?). So: tonight I finally made the dish.

I made regular cuts along the fat of the pork chops and then fried them in a hot pan to render the fat out and crisp the chops up. I then transferred the pork from the pan and placed on an oiled baking tray, browned segments of a Cox's apple in the pan the pork had been in and then placed the apple wedges on top of the pork, before adding sage leaves and topping with the 'optional' cheese (Jamie suggested strong cheese; I went for Stilton). The baking tray went into the oven for 5 minutes.

Simon's chop, on a bed of mashed carrot:

I served this with the braised cabbage I described in the previous post. A very very tasty and comforting dinner to ward off the rain that was battering on our windows...

Oh and I nearly forgot. Yesterday we had friends over as a sudden impulse (a casual midweek affair, no planning, no fuss) and I decided not to cook from Jamie as we had The Great Fish Store to use up (remember I bought enough fish to fill the freezer last week...). So we had Delia's plaice with parmesan crust, which I didn't take a picture of because it would have looked sad, with salad and red cabbage and then Nigella's store cupboard choc orange cake, only I replaced the marmelade in it with chestnut puree (recipe courtesy of the baking experts at Nigella.com). Mmm. I must say that this easy-as-can-be cake is immeasurably comforting - if Jamie's lemon drizzle cake cheered me with its pure lemony hit, this cake is calming, gentle, the sort of cakey equivalent of Sunday night television. I can wholeheartedly recommend it: it almost makes itself, it smells divine, and it is genuinely heart warming: an unpretentious, but incredibly comforting, mid-week chocolate cake.

Schnitzel with watercress and spiced apple sauce

Hmm, schnitzel. I tend to associate Jamie with funky pasta dishes and vibrant herb-strewn Thai dishes, not with schnitzel, which to be honest somehow evokes school dinners for me. I hated school dinners with a passion I barely recognize now. I was an extremely picky child and I couldn't bear being forced to eat up mounds of lumpy mashed potato and gristly meat, not to mention the stodgy mass of rice pudding that came after. Apparently, I used to hide and cry before school, not to avoid school, but to avoid school dinners. In my defence, the whole dining room stank of over-boiled cabbage, and we were effectively force-fed - if you didn't clean your plate then scary dinner nannies would want to know why. I think. I stopped eating school dinners a year or two after I started school; I must have been six at the most, and I don't really remember, and I have probably demonized the whole experience in my head.

Anyway. Schnitzel. I have moved on from then but I don't recall ever eating schnitzel, never mind cooking it (although I have cooked food in breadcrumbs - mainly fishcakes). But the picture looked inviting and I thought I would give it a go. Basically, I seasoned and crumbed batted-down pork escalopes and fried them in olive oil; the crumbs didn't fall off as I had feared, and didn't even burn too much (OK so they did have teeny dark patches...). They were served with the spiced apple sauce, which was absolutely delicious - a mix of cooking and eating apples, cinnamon, orange juice and zest, sugar, nutmeg and cloves. They tasted like a non-alcoholic mulled wine and feel totally right for the autumn. The watercress I just washed and dried and tossed onto the plate with a squeeze of lemon.

It was delicious! I can feel myself becoming a convert to Schnitzel. I loved the tender meat inside the crunchy breadcrumbed exterior and the sweet, cinnamony hit of the apple sauce, against the bitter cool watercress. It is a dish of contrasts: soft and crunchy, sweet and bitter, and the combination is perfect. Another dish I feel myself returning to as the nights grow colder and darker...

Slow-roasted pork belly with fennel

Pork belly... for years the forgotten part of the pig, it is now making regular appearances on menus; along with lamb shanks and shin of beef, it is beginning to upstage the old faithfuls of sundried tomato and rocket. Or at least it is right up there with them. And rightly so, because slow-cooked pork belly is delicious: the crunchy crackling and the meltingly tender meat are a winning combination.

Jamie's recipe for the pork is fairly standard: rub it in fennel salt and roast it briefly in a hot oven to set the crackling off, then turn the oven right down and cook it slowly to tenderise the meat. But Jamie's recipe takes the fennel theme further: the pork is cooked on top of fennel bulbs tossed in thyme, olive oil and garlic. After an hour, add a bottle of white wine to the tray. The wine and the garlic, thyme and fennel make for a delicious sauce, which flavours the meat as it cooks. The meat emerges beautifully tender, the crackling sublime and the 'gravy' a winey, garlicky jus.

Apparently fennel is an acquired taste - in which case more people should try to acquire it. I love it, and it works fabulously with pork (Jamie has a recipe in Happy Days for a fennel and salami pasta dish which is also delectable).



As an aside, I'm making muesli tonight. Not a Jamie recipe. I've tried a few variations - from Nigella; from Tessa Kiros; from Bill Granger, the God of Breakfast and Brunch. This one is another variant from Bill - with dessicated coconut, oats, almonds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, apple juice, and a bit of vegetable oil, plus dried blueberries. Some muesli recipes contain so much sugar that you might as well just have a doughnut for breakfast. Some might argue that life is too short to toast your own muesli and perhaps they would have a point, except that to make your own muesli you simply toss all of the ingredients bar the dried fruit together thoroughly, spread onto a baking tray, bake for half an hour, and decant into a jar, where you toss in the dried fruit to mix. How easy is that? and yet it is another way of making the kitchen smell wonderful, and making yourself feel like a domestic goddess, with minimal exertion and to maximum effect.