Pork Rillettes.

I’ve decided that Mum was right. Christmas IS  about food as much as it is about the Nativity . The baking of it, sharing of it and eating it. I know she is smiling wherever she is in spirit. That was her mission in life, especially at Christmas. Make sure everyone has food and never goes hungry. I’ve been baking up a storm over the last couple of days. Today, for instance, I’ve put 2 smaller Christmas cakes in the oven for my daughters and realised I have to make another one for my brother. Joy! That means I get to bake more cake and we will also have a spare cake for us! 😀 Yesterday, I made something I’ve never made before but must order whenever I go out and see it on the menu. Often seen as part of a Charcuterie plate, Pork Rillettes. I used a recipe by Simon Hopkinson which you can find here;

http://www.simonhopkinson.tv/recipe/33/pork-rillettes.aspx

Here is what I did and how I baked it with lots of pictures to help you out.

Ingredients

1 tbsp. sea salt

1 tbsp. caster sugar

2 bay leaves

6 cloves

About half a nutmeg ( I used about half a teaspoon of ground nutmeg)

1 level tbsp. juniper berries

2 tsp black peppercorns (I used mixed peppercorns)

1.2kg belly pork, bones and rind removed, but both reserved

500g fresh pork back fat

4-5 sprigs of sage, roughly chopped ( I also added some sprigs of thyme as well)

6 large cloves of garlic, crushed and loosely chopped

200mls dry white wine

Starting bottom left corner of picture: Bay leaves, cloves, caster sugar, peppercorns, nutmeg, juniper berries, sea salt.

Using a small food processor, grind together the first 7 ingredients to a fine powder.

Cut the belly pork and fat into approximately 2 cm cubes. Add this to a large bowl and sprinkle with the powder. Thoroughly mix together with your hands, turning the meat and fat over and over, then add the bones and rind of the belly (left as large pieces making them easier to remove once cooked) into the mix. Cover the bowl and refrigerate overnight.

 

The next day, pre heat the oven to 140c/gas mark 1. Put all the meat, pork fat and bones into a solid based pot and add the wine.

  

Add the garlic and sage (and thyme if your using).

Mix everything together with your hands.

Place the pot over a low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring often: this is only to bring the pot up to heat before it goes into the oven. Put on the lid and slide it into the oven. Cook for 3 hours. Remove from oven and leave to cool for about 20 minutes.

Take out the pork skin and bones and thyme sprig left overs and discard. Suspend a colander over a large bowl and tip in the contents of the pot. Allow to drain for about 5 minutes, then decant the liquid fat from the bowl below the colander into a jug, reserving the pork juices and residue left behind.

  

Tip the long-cooked pork back into the first bowl that has the residue juices in it and, using a hand mixer on a low setting, briefly blend the small pieces of meat and fat into shreds. Add some of the liquid fat from the jug a little at a time whilst blending with the hand mixer until it forms a creamy texture. The mixture should be floppy and glistening with fat.

 

( a small warning here from someone who knows 😉 make sure your bowl is deep, otherwise everything in the vicinity gets flecked with pork rillettes)

Now pack the rillettes mixture into small pots or similarly sized Kilner jars (I used mason, it doesn’t matter). Smooth over the surface and then spoon/pour over at least 1/2 cm of the remaining pork fat to seal each one. Attach the lids and refrigerate to mature for at least a week before eating. You can keep these for up to six months as long as they’re packed into clean pots with no air pockets in the mix.

 

I use the gratuitous photobombed image for sizing of jar comparison, thank you Jason 😀

After a week, scrape off the fat to reveal the meat. Eat with either split baguettes or crackers and some nice cornichons or even a nice spicy chutney or fruit relish if having as part of a charcuterie plate.

I had such fun making these and Jason and I cannot wait to have a taste. The smell of the Juniper berries reminded me of the Bombay sapphire gin I so like. For anyone worried about the amount of fat in this dish, your only meant to have a small amount of it at a time and it is a vital part of the dish both for taste and for preservation of the meat. Don’t fret, just enjoy!

Bon apetit!

Tis the Season!

I do  love Christmas. I love that families can come together to celebrate on the day, or they can be apart and drop in over the weeks surrounding the actual day, or they can just phone up on the day. Most of my immediate family is scattered now. My sister Fronkiii of “The road to Serendipity” blog fame lives over 4000km away in Tasmania to the East, my brother Jim lives in the next town to my west, Denmark, and I live in Albany Western Australia. We used to have massive Christmases back when I was young. Whole families and their hangers on would all congregate at either one of my Aunts Alice or Margarets houses or my Grandparents places and eat, drink and be very merry. It was a lot of fun and a time to catch up on long lost rellies and welcome the newborns. Gifts would be exchanged and many plates of food eaten.

What I remember most fondly is the making of the Christmas cakes. Mum used an old recipe that her father and brother had gotten from Arnotts cake factory when they worked there back in the late 40s and 50s and had cut down to a useable size. As children we used to love helping peel the almonds and mix the fruit in and the prize of licking the spoon or bowl was most fought for! Mum passed away a couple of years ago now and we all surely miss her baking. She used to keep us all well supplied with fruit mince pies and fruit cakes and chocolate brandy truffles and savoury dishes. It’s my turn to keep up this tradition and I have offered to make my brother and daughters Christmas cakes this year. Like me, they will one day want to make their own and I look forward to helping them find their own special recipe. The recipe that follows is one I’ve used over the past 2-3 years and it is extremely versatile by way of being able to be eaten as a pudding as well as a cake with custard, cream or ice cream or all three! I’ve made it gluten free and you cannot tell the difference 😀

Rich Christmas fruit cake with Muscat.

Ingredients.

200g raisins

200g sultanas

180g dried apricots, diced

150g dried cranberries (Craisins)

100g pitted prunes, chopped

100g glace cherries

100g mixed peel

250ml liqueur muscat

5 eggs

1/4 cup treacle

1/4 cup ginger marmalade

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp almond essence

Finely grated zest and juice of 2 oranges

300g Gluten Free plain flour

3tsp gluten free baking powder

2 tsp mixed spice

1 tsp fine salt

250g unsalted butter

300g dark brown sugar

125ml brandy

One of the first things I do is to combine all the fruits and the Muscat into a glass bowl, mix well and cover with cling film. Then they are refrigerated for 2 days or until the fruit has absorbed all of the alcohol and is nice and plump.

Assemble all the rest of the cake ingredients. Grease and line a 24cm cake pan, either round or square with baking paper. Preheat your oven to 140 Celsius.

 

Combine eggs, treacle, marmalade, vanilla, almond essence, orange zest and juice in a large bowl and whisk until smooth.

 

Sift flour, baking powder and mixed spice and salt into a large bowl.

Put butter and dark brown sugar in the large bowl of an electric mixer and beat for a good 5 minutes or until light and creamy.

 

Add egg mixture to butter mixture and beat until smooth.

Fold in flour mixture and then stir in fruit mixture.

Spoon batter into tin, put tin on wire rack set on an oven tray and bake rotating every hour, for 3 hours or until cooked when tested with a skewer.

Pierce the top of the cooked cake several times with skewer then sprinkle with brandy.

Set aside to cool completely in the tin. When cold, remove cake from tin and wrap tightly in cling film. Put in fridge to mature for 1 week.

This cake keeps really well due to its liberal amount of alcohol. I tend to keep mine in the fridge.

This is a wonderful cake and I hope you all have as much joy as I do in making and eating it.

Visiting old haunts.

Yesterday, Friday the 30th August, I took myself out of the house for a drive over to my old home town of Denmark (Western Australia).  I had a wee touch of cabin fever and needed to get out and see the world. The first place I went to was the beach and I took photos of the sand bar opening. It is opened most years around mid to late August when flooding of farmers fields and rivers leads to this bridging of the sand to alleviate the flooding of Wilsons Inlet. You can see the lovely green sea water pushing in to regenerate and oxygenate the inlet. Thousands/millions of baby snapper and adult fish that have been breeding and growing in the inlet congregate around the sand bar waiting for it’s opening so they can head off to the ocean for whatever it is they do out there (have wild parties and wake up in strange unusual places?) 😀

Here is another angle of the bar opening taken looking back into the inlet.

You can see the old Denmark surf club building perched to the left of the shot. The way the bar has opened, it has torn away most of the beach and dug out a huge big trench along the front of the club rooms.

The little black dots you can see here just out from the mouth of the bar opening are a bunch of dedicated surfers that wait eagerly each year for the bars opening to make full use of the new big waves that form here. Myself, I would be wearing wetsuits that don’t make you look like a seal as some pretty big old sharks like to congregate here waiting for the fish escaping from the inlet :O

In years gone by, I would come over to Denmark and take my Mum out for a meal. Just the two of us usually. Sometimes we’d be joined by my daughters and sometimes by my partner but more often than not, it would be me and Mum. Now she’s been dead these past 2 years, I haven’t gone back to one of our favorite restaurants for a long time. Yesterday, I plucked up the courage to go it alone and I had a most wonderful meal even if I did feel at odds with my memories. I had a wonderful bowl of Mrs Jones Gnocchi served with a basil and cream pesto, sundried tomatoes and parmesan cheese. Such a heartwarming and delicious meal of little fat, fluffy potatoey morsels in a rich sauce with some lovely crisp potato skins on top.

Sorry it’s a bit blurry. My phone camera was salivating apparently 😀 I also had a yummy cappuccino to help me on my way.

I also lashed out and bought a “Trevatt” apricot tree and 3 potted Winter Lace Lavender plants that have bees buzzing about them already! I’m not allowed to plant out the Apricot till new year the garden guy said as he had just transplanted it into the big garden bag so it can grow new roots. I just soaked it in a good fish emulsion (Seasol) as soon as I got it back to Albany and the plants are looking mighty fine this morning. I’m hoping this apricot will be producing very soon and can be well established by the time my poor old other apricot finally dies.

 

The above group of pictures shows a few of my fruit trees, in order the Satsuma Plum and the double grafted Yellow and White Nectarine and my gorgeous blue Iris that are flowering or attempting to 😀

I leave you with another springish like flower that curiously likes to grow around the base of certain rose bushes in pots. I call it Bubbles Pussycatus 😀

See you all in the Spring!

Lemon Curd-Quickest preserve ever!

This is my amazing lemon tree. It grows in what looks like a pitiful buckets worth of soil, clinging grimly to the side of the big granite rocks our house is perched on. It never stops producing day in, day out. It always has flowers, green lemons and ripe lemons on it all at the same time. I never water it as it gets all the runoff from rain on the rock and I imagine it is feeding off all the minerals and organic matter that comes off the rock too. Not sure what type of lemon it is but it isn’t a sweet one and has thick pithy skin on it. I’ve never made lemon curd before so thought i’d give it a go to use up a few of the lemons I get. If ever I need a lemon, I just pop out the door off the side of my kitchen to the right of this photo and pick one.

Recipe,

Grated zest and juice of 4 large juicy lemons

4 large eggs

350gm  Golden (raw) caster sugar

225gm unsalted butter, room temp and cut into lumps

1 dessertspoon cornflour (I used gluten free cornflour, real cornflour)

Whisk the eggs in a medium sized saucepan, then add the rest of the ingredients. Place over a medium heat and continue to whisk till mixture thickens. When it does, lower the heat to low and let the lemon curd simmer for a minute whilst whisking still.

Remove from heat and pour into hot sterilized jars. Seal immediatley and store in a cool dry place till needed. This all took about 10 minutes to make once everything was prepped and ready to go. So quick to make.

I used 4 one cup (250ml) capacity mason jars and it filled all to the brim.

Now all I need to do is discover some yummy recipes to use it with. 😀

Bon appetit!

Potato and Lamb Soup

Now that the weather has decided it’s about time it was Winter in the south West of Western Australia, I felt I should share this most wonderous hearty soup that could also double as a stew it’s that thick. I call it a stoup when I make it because of it’s stew like texture. I think you could add more beef stock to thin it down or vegetable stock if that suits.

Recipe.

1 tablespoon of oil

1 kilogram of lamb shanks (about 4 shanks)

1 medium onion, diced

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 medium carrots (about 240gm) diced

2 sticks of celery, chopped

810gm can tomatoes, crushed

1 and a half litres of Beef stock

5 large potatoes, peeled and diced

2 medium zuchinni, diced skin on

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil

Half a teaspoon of sugar

Heat oil in large pot and brown the shanks all over. Remove from pan and set aside. Add onion, garlic, carrots and celery to the same pot and cook, stirring until onion softens. Return shanks to pan, add undrained crushed tomatoes and beef stock and simmer covered, for about 1 hour or until lamb is tender.

Remove the meat from the shanks and chop roughly, discard the bones. Bring soup back to the boil and add the chopped meat, potatoes, zuchinni, tomatoe paste, basil and sugar. Simmer uncovered until potatoes are tender. Serve with some crusty bread.

This tastes even better the next day.

Bon appetit!

My Chilli Marmalade tryout!

All praise for this delicious recipe must go to Emily over at chillimarmalade.com. She has the best food site i’ve discovered, plus she’s an expat Aussie so she’s great in my books 🙂

Here is a picture some of the ingredients you’ll need.Recipe follows.

Ingredients,

10 Red capsicums (Peppers), diced small

10 Long Red chillies, sliced with seeds left in

1 head of garlic minced

1 thumb sized piece of fresh ginger, sliced finely

750gm Raw castor sugar

250ml Red wine vinigar

Combine all on top of stove and cook, stirring often until it resembles jam. Bottle into hot, sterilized jars and seal with lids immediately.

I made a heartful of chillies!

Boil all together just like this!

And this is what you end up with! It actually made 3.5 one cup jars of lovely sticky hot (but not devestatingly hot) chilli marmalade. One of the nicest I’ve tried. Great with cheese, steak and inserted into stirfries. Yummo!

Bon appetite!