Telling porky pies

By: Mrs Robot

I had my first-ever go at making hot water pastry over the weekend. Mr Robot got me a 'Simple Simon' pie mould* for Christmas and I finally got round to testing it out. The mould is cunning because you can rearrange the dividers to make one big pie, six little ones, or all sorts of configurations in between.

I followed the recipe in the Ginger Pig Farmhouse Cookbook. I was a little apprehensive because of the time it said it took, but actually a good chunk of that was boiling two trotters to make the jelly. We had so much jelly left over I've frozen the leftovers – that should speed up any future pie making. The pastry was something else that seemed daunting but was surprisingly easy; I boiled the fats and water together and stirred it into the flour with the handle of a wooden spoon, by which time it was cool enough for my asbestos fingers to work with.

The recipe quantities were enough for three equal-sized pies in the Simple Simon, plus three more slightly smaller ones that I made in fancy metal cake/jelly moulds as that was all I had that looked the right size! The results weren't the prettiest, but I'm pleased with them nonetheless. When I make another batch I'll probably increase the amount of salt in both the pork and the jelly, and perhaps add more herbs or spices to the jelly too. These were nice, but with a little tweaking we could have pie magic.


*This blog is not monetised; the link is purely for information and we do not benefit from it in any way.

Retro recipe: Pork in Cider

By: Mrs Robot

Traditional cookery. It's rarely pretty, but it can be very tasty, and this pork in cider is no exception.

I've never seen any food bloggers refer to Susan Campbell's book English Cookery New and Old online. I love old cookery books, and this is from 1981, but looking back for traditional recipes. Campbell wrote several cookbooks in the 1970s but seems to have been largely forgotten as a cookery writer - though she's now the country's leading expert on walled kitchen gardens, so she hasn't lost her love of British food history. This book is divided into menus. Many recipes are preceded by a little paragraph explaining their origins or, if a recipe is 'new' rather than 'old', why it's being included in a book of English cookery.

The recipe that really caught my eye in this book was 'Grassy Corner', a pudding served at Cambridge May Weeks just after the Great War. It's a strange cross between a trifle and a charlotte, and as I love trifle and between-the-wars history, it appeals doubly to me. However as that serves 12 it'll have to wait until we've got plenty of guests coming. Instead, Pork in Cider was what I made. Layers of pork slices, separated by a mixture of onions and mushrooms, splashed with cider then topped with a layer of cooking applees and cooked for a couple of hours before being topped with a mix of Double Gloucester cheese and breadcrumbs and baked to crisp, it's far from the most attractiive thing I've ever made. Oh, but it is good. The juices from the meat, apples, onions and mushrooms combine with the cider to make a delicious sauce that will go perfectly with mash and green veg. I'll definitely make it again.

Dan Dan DAAAAAN!

By: Mrs Robot

I've had a real craving for noodles all of a sudden. I'm not sure why - maybe the coming of spring has put me in a mood for lighter foods than my winter pies and stews. It was a good excuse to revisit some favourite old cookbooks. Given what we had in the kitchen, Dan Dan Mian from Mi Mi Aye's book Noodle! seemed like a good plan.

We'd made Ching-He Huang's recipe for Dan Dan Noodles some time ago, but it wasn't quite our thing. However, her recipe uses tahini paste and Mi Mi's doesn't, plus Mi Mi's seems to use a lot more spicy ingredients, so I thought I'd give it a go and see if we liked her version any better.

As with so many recipes in Noodle!, while the list of ingredients seems long, a quick read of the recipe reveals that the process for making Dan Dan Mian is actually very simple. You can't just start and throw in ingredients as you go along, you need to get everything ready in advance, but as long as you do that, it's very easy to make the dish. Most of the ingredients are store cupboard staples: soy sauce, black vinegar, xiaoxing wine and so on. The only thing we didn't have was Szechuan preserved vegetables. I don't know what those taste like, so subbed in some of Mr Robot's homemade kimchi as that was preserved, vegetable, and tasty.

("Oh, we just substituted homemade kimchi." How poncy does that sound?)

We both very much enjoy Szechuan peppercorns. They have a fearsome reputation, which they really don't deserve. They're numbing, not burning. Chillies make me hiccup, but I can eat those peppercorns with no problems (I occasionally chew them raw, straight out of the jar). Mi Mi's recipe began with oil seasoned with a whole tablespoon of the things, and only got better from there. The resulting minced pork sauce was rich and dark with soy sauce, spicy with Szechuan peppercorns, then stirred by each diner through bland, delicious noodles.

We could quite easily have eaten twice as much, not because the portions are small but because it is delicious and we are greedy. Ziggy, one of our two feral kittens, came along and tried to help himself, but was shunted off pronto.

I will definitely be making this again.

Croquette and tubbies

By: Mrs Robot

We love Spain, and one of its very best products is jamon, cured ham. Along with simple slices of the stuff, one of my favourite tapas is croquetas de jamon, ham croquettes - cylinders or patties of bechamel and jamon, coated in breadcrumbs. I have to try not to order them too often when we're on holiday, as it's important to try other things!

We bought a whole leg of ham from Asda just before Christmas. It must have been some sort of special as they don't usually have them, but there it was, lying in the chiller cabinet. It's been living in our dining room ever since, covered in a clean tea towel to stop flies and dust getting on it. The packaging recommended wrapping it in cling film, but that's just an easy way to get a mouldy ham...

Today I carved off a chunk of the ham and turned it into croquetas. I didn't follow a recipe, as it was a simple matter of make bechamel (not forgetting a grating of nutmeg, but omitting salt as the meat itself is very salty), sling in finely-diced jamon, then later coat balls of the cooled mixture in breadcrumbs, egg wash and another coat of breadcrumbs. Mine were a bit large, as I haven't yet mastered the art of scooping small amounts (it's amazing how what seems like a little amount of mixture turns into a large cylinder). After a brief fry, they were ready to eat.

Going through the process of dicing, making bechamel and crumbing does seem a bit of a faff for a snack, but as the croquetas are pretty high in salt and fat that's probably a good thing.

Tales of Caceres: El Pato

By: Mr Robot

Leaving Old Caceres on the western side, one passes through the Puerta de Estrella, gleefully translated by nerds everywhere as The Stargate.

Stepping through with an appropriate vwooosh sound, the childish traveller finds himself in Plaza Mayor: a fine colonnaded square (ok, rectangle) and the site of numerous restaurants that are probably the most tourist-trappy you'll find in the city, but also often crammed with locals so can't be that bad.

Plaza Mayor, Cacares. Not shot through The Stargate because physics

Thus we reasoned anyway, and resolved to try a few.

We originally headed towards a roasting house but were pounced on by a waitress seeking to drag us in (worrying sign) and who proudly held out a menu in (gasp!) English.

At this point Mrs R gently wigged out and we scurried next door: she has a morbid fear of translated menus believing them to be a step down the slippery slope that ends in El Breakfast Ingles.

Next door turns out to be El Pato (The Duck - no idea why) where we're greeted by a genial silver-haired gent and presented with, um, a translated menu. Oh well.

El Pato

We'd already sampled El Pato a day or two earlier when we'd spent some happy time propping up the bar and been pleased with both beer and tapas, so we cast aside any concerns and set to.

Tapas of light, soft cheese and paprika. Free with beer.

In any case, we were already seated and far too English to run away a second time.

The light of my life opted to start with Migas: fried breadcrumbs normally made using just a very little meat and veg for flavour rather than substance. It's quite a favourite here - no surprise since it's a humble dish of the rural poor and Extremadura, like much of central Spain, is a pretty humble rural area.

A fried slice by any other name...

She deemed it very tasty, though the salt pork they'd used was both a tad salty (duh) and served in whacking great chunks with unrendered fat that was just the wrong side of grim. Still, trimming that off was no great burden.

I went for revueltos: scrambled eggs. Quite how we came to lose our respect for scrambled eggs is beyond me, but the Spanish still revere them and have taught me to do the same so I get them at every opportunity. You will rarely go wrong, I submit, in any Spanish eatery that offers more than three varieties of revueltos.

Revueltos con Trigueros y Setas, or, Eggs a la Smelly Wee

These came with mushrooms and tiny but intense asparagus stalks, and were delicious. If anything there was a little too much asparagus but that is such a petulant complaint I won't demean myself to make it.

From there Mrs R went for rabbit stew and I believe enjoyed it greatly, but honestly I can't tell you anything more because I had this to contend with:

Cochinillo - roasted fat piglet

Yes, a whole leg of roast suckling pig, and it was immense - in every sense of the word.

Skin so crisp it was practically brulee and meat so soft it was, well ok, not creme but you get my drift. Simply served with fries and a comedy salad of half an iceberg and five quarters of tomato. But frankly with that pig headlining, who gives a damn about the support acts?

Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside . . .

It shames me to say we declined puddings. Instead, as clouds started to roll in over the square (ok, rectangle) we girded our tums and waddled off to a much-needed siesta. I doubt El Pato will ever be accused of Fine Dining, but there's some mighty fine lunching to be had.

All images (c) PP Gettins

Remembering Thadingyut

By: Mr Robot 

Thadingyut: the festival of light at the October full moon.

M-O-O-N spells Thadingyut

We were in Maymyo (now Pyin Oo Lwin) last time around, digging into Mrs R's heritage, and it was a wonderful experience.

We walked around the town as the sun set, and areas that were unprepossessing by day - and any other time - became magical this night. There were streets of wooden houses surrounded by irrigation ditches, with little wooden bridges across and balustrades around - all lined with dozens and dozens of candles.  Clearly there was precious little in the way of plumbing or electricity. It was dreadfully picturesque. Yet small children excitedly ran out to greet us, and everyone was smiles and goodwill.

It's the closest thing to a Dickens Christmas I've ever seen.

From our hotel. We bought our own candle elephant to remember this night

Amazing to think that was a year ago, but the moon says it must be. So we decided to mark this Thadingyut in our own small way, with some Burmese food and, of course, candles.

Since it's a 3-day festival we've had a couple of nights to play (sadly the third night - the big celebration - is logistically compromised) and turned as ever to MiMi Aye.

For the first night we returned to one of the first Burmese dishes we made: Mogok pork curry. This is a deep, dark, savoury dish, rich with soy and ginger, and soft, sticky pig. It's extremely simple to make and demands only the patience to let it simmer for an hour or so.

We're never entirely sure how runny to make it: it starts off very liquid - intuitively, too liquid - but I suspect my love of massively intense reductions pushes me a bit too far. Certainly all the curries we had in Burma were quite saucy (ooh!), no doubt to spread flavour across the customary ton or two of rice.

Mogok Pork Curry

Mind you, we hardly pretend to great authenticity but merely fudge our way through as best (and respectfully) we can. It's always jolly good anyway.

For the second night we picked up the first of MiMi's recipes we ever saw (Mrs R found it - big up her), and one of the funniest pieces of food writing I've ever read. Honestly - it's right up there with Jerome K Jerome's pineapple tin. Note, however, that this is probably not the moment to get the children involved in the kitchen.

Anyway, once you've got past the evisceration scene, there's the recipe for Gahlar-thar Hin, or Bachelors' Curry: a chicken dish presumably so called because the chances of a snog afterwards are exactly zero. It's VERY garlicky.

Actually that's unfair because I did a big fail: the recipe calls for a shed-load of garlic, onion, tomato, chilli etc to be blitzed into a paste and then cooked off. Guess who got impatient and, therefore, a load of raw garlic...

Bachelors' Curry. Enjoy it - it's the only hot chick you'll get tonight

So if you make this - and I urge you to - be sure to give it a good long time to cook the paste through properly. I mean, there's a lot of paste there. A LOT. It'll take longer than you (or at least I) think.

Happily I was making it a day ahead so was able to give it a good long time to cook most of that rawness out, and let the whole thing mature overnight to boot. This is, as MiMi says, quite a soupy dish with "rice swimming in rich gravy" which turns out to be an excellent idea. It's unusually spicy for Burmese food (in my tiny experience), not bonkers but with a decent hit, and extremely satisfying.

Oh, and if you have a stinking cold ignore all the cooking out stuff and keep the garlic nice and punchy: clears the tubes out a treat.

Happy Thadingyut everybody.

All images (c) PP Gettins

Recipe Review: Bun bo Hue

From Noodle! by MiMi Aye

 

by: Mr Robot

For some reason I got it into my head that this beef & lemongrass delight was called Bun ho Hue rather than Bun bo Hue so I fear I've been saying something absolutely dreadful for the last fortnight. So in the finest tradition of men everywhere - I'm deeply sorry for whatever it was I said. 

I wouldn't have persisted with my error quite so long were it not such an involved dish: I'd planned to cook it last week but given the vast array of meat needed, I had to put a special order in with the butcher (who did us proud as always) and try to control my impatience.

Crucial to any good recipe: vast amounts of MEAT

Pork bones, shin of beef, pork hock and oxtail all get simmered together for about 3 hours to make a wondrously rich broth served over noodles. Simple eh?

Well kind of, but there's plenty of other stuff going on - not least 12 stalks of lemongrass (basically clearing out Asda's supply for the week) - along with onion, ginger, garlic and pineapple. Supposedly rock sugar too but all I could find was palm so that had to do.

Lemongrass, and lots of it. Also pineapple, onion, ginger, sugar and shrimp paste

One thing that gave me some concern was the shrimp paste. Four tablespoons of the stuff. It's an ingredient I treat with something between caution and terror being so very pungent and frankly waaaay too fishy for comfort. But if I've learned anything from MiMi's recipes it's to shut the fuck up and do as you're told. So I did.

And of course I needn't have worried. Not only is the shrimp paste distributed in several litres of liquid (I'd kind of over-ordered on the meat!) but the hours of simmering cooked out the fishiness to leave an intense savouriness. A bit like people say anchovies will, only they lie.

In fact it was a fascinating process. Early on the smell (and an unwise tasting) was pretty grim and I feared we'd end up with a horrible waste, in every sense. But as the afternoon wore on it just smelled better and better.

This is a recipe that demands faith of its followers, yea verily and they shalt be rewarded.

A big pot o' love

So after a considerable period of lounging on the sofa saying things like, "Gosh that's starting to smell good" and, "Ooh I just got a big whiff of lemongrass" and, "Bollocks - I've just remembered I meant to save half that oxtail for something else" we eventually haul ourselves up to see what we've got.

Sorry but it actually was pulled

The recipe says to slice up the pork and beef but so very tender was it that I just gave it a Paddington hard stare and it basically dismantled itself. Perhaps that meant I'd overcooked it but it was so delicious I couldn't give a monkeys.

At this stage I did take the opportunity to remove the bigger lumps of fat and strip the oxtail from the bones. I've no doubt this would give any self-respecting Vietnamese person the shudders but I'm still dealing with the trauma of my Grandmother's cookery so believe me, it was for the best.

From there it's very simple - pile noodles, meat, broth and garnishes in a bowl and start grunting.

Do not forget the trimmings

As with so many of these recipes though, the garnish isn't some optional extra - it's vital to the overall balance of the dish. So far we have a bowl of complexity but huge - in fact challenging - richness. You need something to balance that out: in this case lime, blanched onion, chilies and coriander leaves give acidity an freshness and take the whole thing up a level. 

In fact Mrs R commented that my laying thin slices of lime on top of the warm broth caused the lime scent to rise above the bowl making the whole thing more aromatic. Naturally I feel quite smug about that even though I'd only done it to look pretty. Remember that then.

I should also have had beansprouts on there but due to the delay getting my meat in, they'd gone a bit manky, which was a shame because they would have given a nice textural difference. As it was the only crunch was from the onions and of course I didn't want to overdo those.

Overall this is a lengthy operation - a good four hours start to finish - but it's quite undemanding and most of that time is your own. Given the quantity and variety of meats I'd consider this an Occasion dish, for which a 4-hour simmering one-pot is ideal, and could see it making a great alternative for those jaded by the Christmas turkey. Because what you get after all that time and very little effort is something rich, fragrant, complex and comforting - it felt like a real treat on a miserable grey weekend.

 

Update: Mercifully the recipe makes a HUGE quantity and after accidentally losing a whole day to the pub, I can testify that it's a wonderful restorative for the filthily hungover...

 

 

As ever, if you were hoping to blag a free recipe here you’ll be disappointed – we don’t do that. These cooks need to make a living just like anyone else. However you can buy a signed copy of the book direct from MiMi's website, and isn't that much better really?

All images (c) PP Gettins

Bau wow

By: Mrs Robot

Today I made Chinese dumplings - bau. I love bau, but until today I've only ever bought frozen ones.

Let's go back in time, back to when I was a 15-year-old squirt with my first Saturday job, doing food prep in the kitchen at the local Chinese. I wish I could say I learned to cook there, but in truth I mainly learned how to chop buckets of mushrooms and onions! But I did get to try things like mooncake, and learned to reduce ingredients to paste with a cleaver. Knowing I was working there, some elderly friends of my mum gave me a Chinese cookbook, which they'd bought in Hong Kong. It's called The Cuisine of Cathay by Genia Lee, and it was scary. Such strange ingredients, the likes of which you'd never find in the tiny town supermarket. No matter how many onions I'd chopped, I wasn't about to try anything from the book, though I'd look at the pictures and dream of making such delicious things.

Fast-forward a quarter of a century. Mr Robot and I have been exploring Asian cookery more, and have amassed all sorts of ingredients. Suddenly, The Cuisine of Cathay isn't scary at all. In fact, it's probably more user-friendly than a lot of Asian cookbooks we own, as it was made in a time when a lot of Westerners hadn't had much experience of cooking Asian foods, so Genia Lee starts out by describing various ingredients in depth, from various kinds of rice to different types of bamboo shoot (gwei-giew, spring, fuzzy and more) to melons and gourds and more greens than I'd know what to do with. She doesn't make too many concessions to western tastes, though: sea cucumbers and fish maws are in the ingredients section, and the very first recipe calls for a dozen duck feet.

We get through buckets of spring onions nowadays...

Looking at her recipe for bau, I realised I could make them. I only needed to buy pork and spring onions; we had everything else already. The dough is remarkably similar to the one I used for pizza; it calls for 'all-purpose flour' so I used bog-standard plain. The filling is an easy blend of pork, spring onion, soy sauce, sesame oil and a few other things. Just as she very carefully shows you all manner of Chinese ingredients at the start of the book, alongside each recipe Genia has step-by-step walkthroughs of unfamiliar techniques, and she has very precise instructions and a sequence of photos explaining how to make the bau. Mine rose less than the ones I'd bought in the shops, but perhaps I just need to give them more rising time next time. They certainly tasted delicious.

You have to make the dough thinner at the edge, so it's not
too thick when all pinched together.

So, now I can have bau whenever I like, with whatever fillings I like. And now I'm no longer scared of The Cuisine of Cathay, I look forward to trying many more of the recipes in it, starting this week with Szechuan-style shredded beef. Bau? Such wow, as the doge might say...

End this madness now

By: Mr Robot

Among my many failings neurotic pedantry has always been a favourite, and recipes provide almost infinite opportunities for a crisis of common sense.

I've been playing with Jason Atherton's Social Suppers - a fine book which I won in Page to Plate's giveaway (thanks!) and am enjoying greatly - but today ran into a particular bugbear: the ludicrously unnecessary precision that comes up in these things.

Not that I'm singling Chef Atherton out by any means - it's just the book that happened to be in front of me - but here he gives a fine example of this pernicious habit.

Very slightly less than half a bottle of wine

The recipe calls for, and I quote:

2 onions

2 carrots

2 sticks of celery

1 head of garlic

1 leek

...

125ml soy sauce

375ml white wine

etc etc

Go through that that again, slowly. Three hundred and seventy-five ml of wine? Really?

If you have a certain mindset, that already looks suspiciously precise for what is basically half a bottle, but read on and it gets better.

Once the veg are softened the (also dubiously specific) soy sauce goes in and gets reduced "by half". Then the wine goes in, again to be reduced "by half".

Never mind that my veg are beardy organic types in deviant sizes, how in the name of sanity am I supposed to establish that, of this pan of vegetable, cooking oil, soy sauce and wine, precisely 187.50ml of it is el vino?

I reckon that's 203.48ml wine - another 2 minutes then 

It's absurd, clearly, and drives me mildly potty. So why bother with it in the first place? I have two theories. Either:

• The obsession with detail required to become a Michelin-starred chef is so all-consuming they simply can't help measuring absolutely everything no matter how inappropriate - which begs interesting questions of, say, the wedding night, or
• This is something dreamed up by editors and publishers who believe that we, the humble book-buying public, need it for the sake of credibility or overcoming our own ineptness. 

I lean toward the latter, and imagine the editorial meeting thus:

Editor:  This "half a bottle" of wine you've got - can we change that? It's a bit woolly.
Chef:    That's how much goes in
Ed:       But it's not very cheffy is it? They'll think you're just winging it.
Chef:    Ok then, put 350ml
Ed:       Nah, no good - they'll see right through that
Chef:    [sighs] Fine, make it 375ml but don't blame me if some nutter starts ranting on the internet

Not that I want everything to be like our venerable Quaglino, where the assumption is that the cook knows practically everything anyway and the book is largely redundant. Opening a page at random we find
FAISAN CASSEROLE: cook pheasant in butter and finish with pieces of bacon as a garnish, a little gravy and serve 
which is followed by
FAISAN DEMIDOFF: Same procedure as for Quail Demidoff 

(I suspect M. Quaglino was a fan of Spinoza)

Quaglino's Complete Hostess

But there must be some middle ground where we can get useful detail without being treated like children with recipes that, if you think too hard about them, start to look like fairy tales.

Perhaps it's just my peculiar mental frailty that I even notice these things, never mind get wound up by them. But if the interweb is good for anything, it's surely the opportunity to inflict our personal neuroses on the world.

Incidentally, the recipe in question was Braised Pork Belly with Chorizo & Pepper Puree and Spiced Onions. Once I'd stopped ranting and actually cooked the thing, it was absolutely magnificent.

Bun cha bonanza!

By: Mrs Robot

MiMi Aye's bun cha - so good I had to copy them!

From this blog it probably looks like I don’t do as much cooking as Mr Robot. I actually cook quite a lot, but it’s usually the sort of thing where I look at what ingredients we have in the kitchen and work out what I can turn them into. A sort of day-in, day-out invention test, if you like. Today, though, I did make something from a cookbook. At the launch for MiMi Aye’s book Noodle!, she served little Vietnamese pork patties (bun cha; excuse my lack of accents), and they were so good I decided to make some to treat our workmates. I made the patties yesterday and refrigerated them overnight, and assembled the food before work today.

I copied MiMi Aye’s serving method from the book launch. She’d balanced the patties and some rice noodles on a lettuce leaf so they could be eaten as finger food. I didn’t make any pickles, because it seemed likely to get all jumbled up when I transported the things to work, and I jammed each little leaf-noodle-patty pile together with a cocktail stick. I made the dipping sauce, but put it in a little squeezy bottle for practicality. It’d be a bit embarrassing having to get a new keyboard from computer services because someone had dropped fish sauce in the old one! Also it allowed people to have as much or as little sauce as they liked.

Le Creuset grillpans are honestly worth every penny. Fab results.

Feedback from both teams was excellent – mine were very taken with the look of the patties, while Mr Robot’s workmates loved the sauce. If you have access to your fridge at work, this would make an outstanding packed lunch dish.

I really like these patties. I’m tempted to experiment further with them. After all, if you’ve got lettuce and a patty, you’re nearly into burger territory. Add a sesame seed bun, make up some garlic and chili mayo with a dash of fish sauce in it to replace the dipping sauce, and it could be a winner. The patties would also be great done on skewers on the barbecue, as a sort of Vietnamese kofte, served up with a green leaf salad, and with the dipping sauce minus the water as a salad dressing.

As usual, we don’t give out the recipes, but if you mosey on over to MiMi Aye’s website, Meemalee, she’ll direct you to places where you can buy the book.

Nice dish of grilled patties. I ate some at this stage - quality control, you understand.

All images (c) PP Gettins

Recipe(s) Review: Morito Three Ways

Recipes from Morito by Sam & Sam Clark

By: Mr Robot

So the wife has already waxed (waxen?) lyric about Sam & Sam coming to Bath to talk about the Morito book. She has also cooked the most delicious courgette tortilla though I'm afraid there are no pictures because we were both too bloody starving. But trust me it's a darn good way to clear a courgette (or indeed egg) glut.

However as I've noted before, my first instinct is to hit the pork belly, and since Morito has two recipes on adjoining pages the only appropriate response is to declare Fornicate It and do them both. 

Double pig

Perhaps facile to say (hence it comes so naturally) they are variants on a theme: rub with goodness, roast as you will, and dress afterwards. Dress the dish that is: I don't think The Sams are suggesting you dally with pork fat naked.

Why god gave us trousers

 So the recipes in question are:
     Chicharrones (described as basically pork scratchings with the meat still on!) and
     PX, meaning done with Pedro Ximenez sherry

Spagnophiles that we are, we have oodles of sherry kicking around but PX is a bit challenging for casual drinking so we're always up for a good use for it.

Pedro Ximenez is not, repeat NOT, casual

Both recipes call for a kilo of meat each, so I bought one kilo and halved them - regular readers will recognise the massive restraint involved here. Chicharrones, then, are seasoned meatside with garlic and fennel, while the PX is garlic and rosemary, then cook your pig.

I must commend The Sams for their generosity towards, and confidence in, the reader: they give a roasting method but make a point of saying, if you have a method that works, use it.

Bugger two hours roasting, this was poached Vietnamese style

This is good on two fronts: 1) a friend had already tried the chicharrones recipe and been sad about his crackling (oven seal not up to snuff would be my bet) and 2) I've found Uyen Luu's approach to be infallible.

Of course I could use my own method without the authors' permission, but it's still nice they give it.

But more, much more that this..... I did it Uyyyeeenn's Waaaay....

Anyway, do that. Hack the chicharrones into easily scoffable pieces, and with the PX piece remove crackling for serving and do same. The chicharrones simply get served with lemon and cumin, while the PX gets returned to the oven with Pedro Ximenez, sherry vinegar and bay to get stickily glazed.

Pork, you say? In sherry? Where do I sign?

By now, observant/pervert readers will be shouting YOU PROMISED ME A THREE-WAY or something and wondering where the third element is. Well it was a late decision to do what the book calls Wrinkly Potatoes but the rest of us know as spuds arrugadas. These Canarian joys are new potatoes cooked in seawater until they look like your fingers after three hours in a hot bath, but are a whole load tastier.

Now, I could've sworn an oven should be involved but the book says hob, so hob it is. Here's where it all went wrong. Undoubtedly it's my fault, but I honestly can't tell you why: maybe there was too much water; maybe not enough salt; maybe the wrong level of low-to-medium simmer; maybe it just hates me.

Whatever the reason "20-30 minutes, until water is gone and spuds are wrinkly" turned into "after an hour of getting very cross, open another beer and 17 seconds later find that all the water has gone, the pan is basically destroyed and the potatoes STILL aren't f'ing wrinkly."

See the wrinkles? Nor do I, curse it

At that point of course you curse vividly, dish up like nobody's business, try to persuade the wife that she should be at the table, the cat that she very definitely should not be on it, and admit the pork has probably suffered for sitting in a warm oven for however long. And realise you've forgotten the sodding lemon & cumin on the chicharrones.

After all that, sitting down with a triple-whack of Morito plus - bless her - Mrs R's tomates alinadas is a monstrous relief and, moreover, an absolute delight. Ok so my arrugadas were a little short on arruga but they do all the right things on the tongue.  The pork PX is sweet, sticky, slightly sour, rich, smokey; in fact it has a lot in common with char siu. The chicharrones are amazingly crispy (in your face, failure-friend) and the belated lemon & cumin give a zing to cut the fatty soft meat and increase dribblousness exponentially.

Go on - complain. I dare you.

Overall time to cook is between one hour and twenty hours, depending on how wrinkly you insist upon the potatoes being. More practically, 10-15 mins prep, 30 mins or so cooking but both pork recipes need to cool before finishing: do any of this when you can wait an hour or so before eating. You really won't be sorry.

Gratuitous pork p0rn

If you were hoping to blag a free recipe here you’ll be disappointed – we don’t do that. These cooks need to make a living just like anyone else so if you like the look, buy the book

All images (c) PP Gettins

Recipe Review: Crispy Pork Belly

from My Vietnamese Kitchen by Uyen Luu

 By: Mr Robot

Give me a new cookery book and odds are the first thing I’ll make will involve pork belly. It’s one of my favourite things in the world anyway, and the prospect of a NEW favourite thing is pretty much irresistable. So it was with Uyen Luu’s My Vietnamese Kitchen – an excellent, stimulating book that’s become something of an obsession lately.

Having spent the customary couple of hours monkeying (point...Oooh...point....Oooh Oooh...point...OoohOoohOooh-pointpointpoint) I trotted down to the butcher. A vast slab of meat, my good man, and don’t even think about scoring it. Pigs away.

The recipe itself is simple but very effective. I’m always up for a new crackling technique, and this one starts with poaching the pork belly for 5 minutes in bicarbed water. Then there’s patting dry and rubbing the skin with a mixture of lime and salt, and then starting the roasting skin-side down before flipping it later.

As I say, that’s a new one on me (it may be tiresomely obvious in the Asian world – I don’t know enough either way) but it works an absolute treat. In fact it’s joined the sainted Kerridge at the top of my What To Do With a Lump of Pig list – no matter what you’re doing with your pork belly, this is a damn good way of roasting it if you want the kind of crackling that makes you weep with joy.

While the lime and salt business is going on skinside, there’s a marinade for the meaty bit – spices, soy, fish sauce etc – that gets half an hour or so. If we had any niggle with the recipe at all it’s that this element got a little lost; certainly you don’t want to overpower the pork but next times I make it (there will be many) I might be inclined to marinate it a bit longer.

Then it’s just served up with some rice noodles and a dipping sauce.

Whatever you do, DO NOT SKIMP ON THE DIPPING SAUCE. Give it at least as much love as the pork itself - as with many of these recipes, it absolutely makes the dish: salty, sour, sweet, punches of chilli and garlic . . . . hard not to dribble just thinking about it.

The rice noodles carry the sauce flavour beautifully, which cuts the fattiness of the pork, while that amazingly crunchy skin gives vigorous counterpoint to splidgy meat and soft noodles. It all goes round and round like circular stairway to heaven.

Overall cooking time is about 2 to 2 ½ hours but actual work time is only about 40 minutes or so. At the end you’ll have one of those dishes that triggers cries of delight at the first taste, and tears of regret at the last. Guaranteed.

If you were hoping to blag a free recipe here you’ll be disappointed – we don’t do that. These cooks need to make a living just like anyone else so if you like the look, buy the book

All images (c) PP Gettins