Happy pigs
Well it’s been a few days since my last post. My parents were over this weekend, which seems to take much organising, cleaning and tidying accompanied with an over indulgence of food and drink, followed up with some necessary cleansing and purging of ones body (hence why I’m having pasta and healthy tomato sauce for dinner on a Sunday night).
It was worth it though, as I discovered a few good places in Coventry. Someone in work told me about Berkswell Farm Shop, just 8 miles away from where I live in Coventry, that sold free range meats and game and rare breed pork. I thought that my parents and I should go and see what there was and maybe get something for dinner for the two nights they were eating here.
We arrived at the shop which is surrounded by outbuildings and lots of chickens and a few sheep and a pony (there was a rabbit too, but unfortunately he was hanging by the door like a furry bell pull). We went into this quite small but welcoming shop, which was packed to the rafters with preserves and cheese as well as fresh fruit and veg. We ended up getting a brace of pheasants and a shoulder of pork which were both delicious. My Dad cooked the pheasants with dry cure bacon and served it with a brandy cream sauce and I slow roasted the pork, which is probably the best way of doing it as it’s quite a fatty cut of meat.
The pork had wonderful crackling which we haven’t really properly achieved before, and I think that is partly due to the quality of the meat. I think it’s really important to buy these old breeds but even more important to buy free range food and support this method of animal rearing. The meat you get is so much better, and the little piggies and other animals get to root about the place happily.
We cooked the pork to a recipe that I have seen many chefs and cooks do. I don’t know who did it first but I saw it in one of the River Cafe books. The pork skin needs to be scored, which is better done by your butcher as they are tough skinned little buggers, and then the whole joint is rubbed with quite a few cloves of garlic (they suggest 8-10 but use however many you like, remember the garlic will mellow with cooking and it is cooked for a long time) crushed with salt and a good handful of fennel seeds ground in a pestle and mortar. They also suggest putting a crushed dried chilli in with it but I leave it out. Finally drizzle the joint with olive oil and put it in a oven as hot as the very fires of hell (as high as your oven will go, about 240 degrees centigrade) for half an hour to get the skin crackling. Then the joint is taken out of the oven, turned over so it’s skin side down and lemon juice is squeezed over (a couple of lemons will do). It is then returned to the oven which has been turned down to about 130 degrees centigrade and it will roast happily for anywhere between 8 and 24 hours. I turned it over again towards the end to crisp the skin up a bit more. We served it with roast potatoes cooked in duck fat and braised red cabbage Delia style.
The other place we found was a really good nursery in Baginton called Smith’s. My parents got me an apple tree and my Dad got a Hazelnut tree, but they had a huge array of plants, all beautifully kept and presented and the staff were very knowledgeable and helpful. So hopefully sometime maybe next year I may be getting my own eating apples from the garden, but I won’t get my hopes up, I seem to kill plants with the greatest of ease.
Well I will finish now and attempt to digest the remainder of the weekend’s food. Keep rootlin’ and tootlin’ happy pigs!
Technorati Tags: pork, free range, organic, rare breed, recipe, game, pheasant, farm shop, nursery, plants, trees, gardening, cooking, cookery, delia smith, red cabbage