Stuff yer bake

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

As it turns out, not only am I clumsy, I am also forgetful and bad at reading things like recipes, but lets gloss over that for now. I unwittingly left two chicken breasts in the oven for about 47 mins at 200 degrees centigrade. Remember boys and girls don’t try and write a blog entry when you’re meant to be keeping an eye on the dinner! So the result was that the flesh is as dry as the Sahara but the upside is that the skin is lovely and crispy (shame we’re not using the skin in the pilaff it’s going into). As for the Delia dish , it was actually quite nice, so I don’t screw things up that often. The aforementioned pilaff is tonight’s speciality, which is quite simple, tasty and conforms to some of the rules of the accursed Weightwatchers. I am quite proud of the fact that my own flat leaf parsley will be added to the finished dish, a plant that a mentally challenged, physically handicapped chimp could grow if he was blind folded, but I’m proud none the less, as my fingers are distinctly ungreen, but turning a sort of shade of lime as I continue to learn. Hopefully some purple sprouting broccoli should be sprouting in my direction come the start of next year, so I will keep you posted.

Technorati Tags: chicken, parsley, broccoli, gardening, pilaff

I have found it and I have bought it!. I have purchased the zenith of all kitchen electrical equipment, the artisan Kitchenaid food mixer (hopefully some nice attachments are winging their way to me with this plug, Kitchenaid). “You cannot have possibly bought that on ‘your’ NHS salary” you may exclaim, but don’t worry I got it on ebay for no less than £120 from a nice lady who lives in Birmingham (it made all the arguments over directions to go pick it up worth while). Sure it’s American made, I need a transformer to plug it into the mains and I have a slight worry that the difference in wattage may blow up my house, but it was a bargain!

I’m officially in love! I haven’t really made a hell of a lot with it as yet, but it’s so pretty it wouldn’t matter if I never made anything in it ever again. I will of course be using it again because not only is it pretty, it’s sturdy and does lots of cool things, like beat stuff (without the elbow grease, blood, sweat and tears).

I haven’t as yet managed to jam any appendages in it yet, as I am likely to do at some point, as I am one of, if not the, clumsiest person I know (and I want to go into cake decorating ’cause that won’t all end in tears, and a small but essential amount of swearing).

This all leads me to cooking with a disability. Last night, on the way out to aerobics (I’ve gotta work off the cake somehow) I slammed my middle finger in the, rather hefty, wooden front door (my boyfriend still maintains it was to get out of aerobics). Some stamping and tears ensued and now a rather bruised chippolata-like finger has emerged, rendering me somewhat impotent in the culinary department. You may think that calling it a disability is something of an exaggeration, but you trying jointing a chicken with an insanely sharp Japanese chef’s knife and an essential finger out of action! But, as the ever faithful Goddess, of the domestic type, (well just cooking really as I don’t scrub my front step nearly as often as I should) I struggle on and have managed to rustle up a chicken and tarragon Delia Smith dish for tonight’s dinner (I’ll let you know how that goes).

Technorati Tags: Kitchenaid, chicken, tarragon, disability