How the pork got stuffed

I've always admired stuffed food - literally stuffed, that is, not "ruined" or "gone wrong" or "completely had it". But it can be a bit intimidating to tackle. I'm a dab hand now at stuffed mushrooms, and I can manage to stuff some large veges, but there's a piece in my book about failing to make a stuffed chicken. And until a couple of weeks ago I'd never stuffed a pork fillet.
     

I had quite a small one on hand for dinner with two women friends, and I wanted to serve it with the lemon risotto in my last post. So I leafed through my Italian cookbooks. The newest one is Easy Tasty Italian, by the very glamorous Laura Santtini, and it had exactly what I was looking for: pork fillet stuffed with artichoke and bay.



Only instead of cutting a pocket in the side, as she suggested, I decided to try making a hole and pushing the stuffing down along the length of the fillet. The cooking method was my own invention, because I didn't want it to dry out. I only experiment like this with very good friends - fortunately it all worked remarkably well.

Pork fillet stuffed with artichoke and bay paste 
(after Laura Santtini. Serves 4 delicate eaters, 3 moderate ones or 2 hungry ones.)

1 small pork fillet (sorry, I forgot to note what mine weighed, but it was about 6 cm in diameter.)
For the paste: 
85g artichoke pieces in olive oil (from a jar), drained
2 bay leaves, as tender as possible
1 garlic clove
1 Tbsp olive oil
1-2 pinches of salt flakes
freshly ground black pepper
To cook:
150ml white wine
large oven bag

Set the oven to 170C.
Blend the paste ingredients together, adding a little more oil if it's too thick.
(I did mine in the food processor. I needed to pick out the remaining larger bits of bay leaf, but most of it got successfully ground up.)

Push a long thin knife into the pork fillet, not quite to the end, and wriggle it around.
Using your fingers, stuff a little of the artichoke mixture into the hole.
Using a long thin wooden spoon handle, gently push the mixture as far down the fillet as you can.
Repeat until you've used up all the mixture and the fillet is full of stuffing.

Put the fillet down into the oven bag so it's resting across the bottom of the bag, and add the white wine.
Fold the bag over loosely so the wine can't escape, and place it in a roasting pan.
Cook it for about 25 minutes.
(The pork will turn pale and be fairly firm to the touch. It will swell and become shorter. Some of the stuffing may ooze out, but this doesn't matter.)
Carefully pour off the white wine and meat juice and save it for another use. Remove the pork and rest it on a warm dish under a teatowel for 15 minutes, while you prepare a long warm serving plate and the accompaniments - mashed or boiulanger potatoes, for example, or that lemon risotto.
To serve, slice the pork neatly across to show the stuffing. Some of it escaped in mine, but that did not matter in the slightest. All very satisfying, to make as well as to eat.

Back to the beginning

I've been busy lately writing up recipes to go in the back of my e-book food memoir (cover and title coming very soon). One of the first recipes I put in dates back to when I first started learning to cook - I was about to get married, so I had to learn fast. Luckily I was able to turn to my married friend Frances for help (her mother had been a home science teacher). Here's a tiny advance taste of that chapter:

I had been married barely a month when I asked my favourite English professor, Tom Crawford, to dinner. It all seemed simple enough. The meat would be seventeenth-century pork chops (a recipe from Frances), spread well ahead of time with a mixture of parsley, chopped onion, oil, salt and lemon juice, and then grilled. With them we would have rice (because potatoes were boring and bourgeois and I often got them wrong) and green beans (frozen, so no problems there).

... The chops weren’t raw but they were rock hard. The rice was gluggy and the beans were grey. Tom bravely chewed his way through it all, keeping up a flow of urbane literary chat.

I did get it right eventually - the secret is to bake the chops instead of grilling them. The other night I made this for my neighbour, who is also called Frances. Here's the recipe.

Seventeenth century pork chops

1 small onion

2 Tbsp parsley

2 tsp lemon juice

3 Tbsp olive oil

salt and ground black pepper

2 large pork chops

- Peel onion and grate it into a small bowl. Finely chop parsley and add it to onion. Add lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and mix well
- At least 1 hour and up to 10 hours before cooking, brush one side of chops with the remaining 1 Tbsp olive oil and place them in a shallow ceramic baking dish, oiled side down. (You can also use a metal dish – this speeds up cooking, but it can also dry the chops out, so keep an eye on them.) Spread onion mixture over their upper sides. Leave in refrigerator until 30 minutes before cooking.

- Preheat oven to 180°C. Place baking dish on rack in middle of oven. Bake chops for approximately 1 hour, until topping is browned a little and a thin knife slides easily into the meat. Lift out and rest on kitchen paper for 10 minutes before serving.

Baked Agria potatoes are good with this. I had two large oval ones, so I scrubbed them well and halved them horizontally, brushed them with oil, sprinkled them with salt, then put them into the oven at the same time as the pork chops, to bake on a lower shelf.

     We had a rare treat with our chops: beautiful fresh runner beans from Ali's garden (I haven't got room to  grow them here). I have a neat little bean slicer that works perfectly for them, peeling away the stringy sides. Harvey preferred his beans cut into traditional angled chunks, but I love the thin green ribbons my slicer produces, with slivers of pink dotted along them. A brief steaming is all they need.

Look Mum, no waste

Tonight, on TV7 (screening for the very last time thanks to the idiots in charge of TVNZ and its funding), I saw a documentary about the incredible amount of food wasted in the USA. And I have to admit I felt reprehensibly smug, because I'd just had a delicious dinner made almost entirely of leftovers.

        I don't quite know where I acquired my horror at wasting food. Certainly we didn't waste much at home, but I think it also came from being married so young and trynig to produce good food as cheaply as possible - which meant not throwing anything away.

         For a midwinter feast last weekend, we had a roast of pork (I'll write about that later). Although it wasn't enormous - about 2.7 kg, including a small bone - there was a lot of meat on it. Five of us ate our fill to start with, then I had a cold meat dinner, and the next night I and a friend ate slices heated up in the gravy (which was particularly good, because I made it with pork stock from the French pork and potatoes dish). Then I had to go away unexpectedly (more about this tomorrow on Elsewoman), so I cut up the rest of the meat and froze it. 

          I got back today, and thought about what to have for dinner. It's been the coldest day of winter so far,  barely getting to 9C at best, so the last thing I wanted to do was go shopping. I got out half the frozen pork slices and left them out to thaw (didn't take long, as they'd been so recently frozen). Then I put the oven on to 160C (fan forced), poked holes in a Red Jacket potato, coated it lightly with oil, and put it straight onto the oven rack about an hour and a half before I wanted to eat it. I had leftover rhubarb, too, so I made a little crumble topping and sat that in the oven, near the bottom, while the potato cooked.

           The pork, some leftover bread, and some onion got ground up separately in the food processor, along with some garden herbs - parsley, sage, thyme - that I dashed out into the cold for. I used all this, plus two eggs, a bit of flour, a dash of chili sauce and plenty of salt and pepper, to make rissoles. I had some leftover red cabbage and apple, cooked with apple juice, apple syrup and balsamic vinegar, so when everything else was ready, that got heated up in the microwave.

The rissoles were terrific (and I've got more for later), the potato was perfect and the sweet-sour cabbage was great  with it all. I had just enough cream left to go with the crumble (half of that left for later too). 

         I know the prospect of leftovers can sometimes feel dreary, but honestly, it was one of the nicest little dinners I've made myself this year.

             

Rich and rustic: pork and potatoes

Wellington has been absolutely, positively freezing for a week. So when I saw some nice pork chops at the butcher's, I thought it was time to revive a dinner I haven't made for years: Elizabeth David's pork chops baked with potatoes, or if you prefer, Terrine de Porc (though it isn't, of course, what we would usually think of as a terrine at all).

Her instructions (which are always a little vague - I've spelt them out a bit more) are to cook it in a ceramic dish in "a very slow oven" for three hours, so I thought it would work  even better in a slow cooker - and it does. But the oven would be fine too. It looks like a long recipe, but it takes very little time to put together.

Pork chops baked with potatoes 

(adapted from French Provincial Cooking, first published in 1960 and probably her best book from a cook's point of view)

4 pork chops

2 large cloves garlic

8 juniper berries

Olive oil or pork fat (I had some duck fat so I used that)

700g Agria potatoes

1 onion

150g thinly sliced shoulder or middle bacon

1 small glass white wine or cider (about 125g)

salt and pepper

parsley to serve

Put the slow cooker on to high, or the oven on to 150C.

Make a little slit in the meat alongside the bone of each pork chop. Push in half a clove of garlic, sliced lengthways, and two juniper berries. Brown the pork chops on each side in a little fat or oil, and set aside.

Peel the potatoes and slice them evenly and as thinly as possible (a food processor does this very well).

Peel and thinly slice the onion.

Arrange half the potatoes on the bottom of the slow cooker dish or in a large, deep ceramic oven dish with a lid.

Strew half the sliced onions on top.

Place the chops on top of the onions and potatoes.

Cover the chops with the rest of the onions, then the potatoes. Season lightly with salt and pepper.

Lay the bacon slices neatly over the top to cover everything. Pour over the white wine or cider.

(I was making this for two, so it looks a bit smaller - I used 2 chops, less bacon, about 2/3 of the potatoes, and the other ingredients stayed the same.)

Place a layer of kitchen paper, folded double, between the dish and the lid.

Slow cooker: either turn the temperature down to low and cook for 6 hours, or cook on high for 4 hours and on low for another 1-2 hours.

Oven: Cook for 3 to 3 and a half hours.

The cooking time depends on how thick the potato slices and pork chops are. To see if everything is cooked, gently push a thin sharp knife down through the layers. It should go in quite easily, meeting only slight resistance.

When it's cooked, grasp the dish firmly and carefully pour any remaining liquid into a bowl. This will be mainly fat from the chops.

Serve hot, on hot plates, with other veges on the side (though the French would probably eat these as a separate course). Sprinkle finely chopped parsley over the top (only I didn't go out to get any, it was too cold and wet).

That chop looks pinkish not because it's undercooked, but because the bacon seems to give it a bit of colour. "This is heavy, rustic food", says Elizabeth, "but the flavour is delicious." It is too - totally satisfying on a winter evening. Any leftover potatoes are excellent gently fried up for breakfast with an egg or a little sausage. 

Birthday rillettes

For my birthday dinner, Ali made a first course of rillettes, that wonderful French concoction which is like a kind of heavenly cross between pate, terrine and the very best brawn. She served them with bread and butter, tiny gherkins (cornichons) and her own feijoa chutney. Magnifique.
         She's very kindly given me her recipe, which is a well tried and tested blend of recipes by Lois Daish, Elizabeth David, Stephanie Alexander and Nigel Slater. 
          "Traditionally, rillettes were made with very fatty meat, and sealed with fat to preserve them. Nowadays pork is much leaner, and we have fridges - but for the recipe to work you still need some fat. If the meat looks too lean, ask your butcher for some extra pork fat. The recipe can also be used to make duck or rabbit rillettes. If using rabbit, add 500 gm of pork belly to provide enough fat."

Ali's pork rillettes

1.5 kg of skinned pork belly, cut into chunks

1 Tbsp salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2-3 bay leaves

2-3 sprigs of thyme

3 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed

1 cup (250 ml) water.

1. Place the meat in a large bowl, with the salt, pepper, bay leaves, thyme and garlic. Mix well, cover and leave overnight in the fridge. 

2. Next day, transfer meat etc to a heavy casserole dish with a lid. Add 1 cup water, cover, and cook in a slow oven (140° to 150° C) for three hours or until the meat is very tender. Check occasionally, and adjust the temperature if necessary: the meat must cook very gently, otherwise it will develop an unpleasant sandy texture. (You can also use a slow cooker, but Ali hasn't tried that so can't say how long to cook it for. I would suggest about 5 hours, but check it carefully to see it isn't drying out or overcooking - you don't want sludge.)  

3. Remove casserole from oven (or ceramic pot from slow cooker) and allow to cool slightly. Strain the meat through a large sieve or colander over a bowl, to collect all the fat and meat juices. (There should be about 1½ to 2 cups of liquid.) Transfer the pieces of meat to a separate bowl, removing any bones, and the bayleaves and thyme, as you do so.

 4. Traditional method: Use two forks to tear the meat into fine shreds. Add the drained liquid and mix gently together. The resulting mixture should be quite soft and moist, though it will become firmer once the fat has set.  

OR, using a food processor: in 2 batches, ‘pulse’ the meat and liquid until well combined but still a little chunky.

5. Taste carefully, and add a little extra salt and/or pepper if necessary (it may not need any, as the meat has been well seasoned to start with). Pack into jars and seal. When cool, store in the fridge.

6. Bring to room temperature before serving with crusty bread or toast, little gherkins, and a fruity chutney. Leftovers can be kept in the fridge for up to a week, or frozen.

Rillettes are hard to photograph so that they look as good as they taste, but I've done my best. This may look like a small helping, but (a) rillettes are very rich, and (b) it was the first of seven courses! Of which more later.

Lazy-cook dinner for one

I didn't post last week because I didn't have anything I considered interesting enough to write about. But tonight I made myself such a nice little dinner I thought I'd share it. It can of course be sized up to work for two or three or four, and you can play around with it to suit what you have handy.
            What I happened to have was: a nice piece of pork fillet, about 14 cm long and 4 cm thick - just right for me - along with some rich leftover sauce from the slow-cooked chicken I made last week, with apricots,  prunes and red wine, plus 5 rather ancient dried apricots which I'd had the foresight to soak in boiling water the night before, and two softish, longish Jersey Benne spuds, the last of a box.

I looked up The Lazy Cook (Harvey bought it, it was one of his favourites) to see whether I could flash-roast such a small piece of pork.







It seemed to be okay, so I heated the oven to 220C on fan forced, sprayed a small roasting dish with olive oil, and sprayed and salted the pork. Then I followed his suggestion about putting the pork on a bed of the soaked apricots, cut through into their separate halves.

I peeled the spuds, cut them lengthwise into 1/2 cm slices, put them flat on the tin around the apricots, sprayed them with olive oil and put the tin on the top rack of the oven. I cut up some pieces of broccoli to microwave separately. The apricot soaking water went into the sauce, ready to microwave in its Pyrex bowl.
         Then I set the table. I bought a new lamp recently, two halogens on a black pole, so I could stand it near my chair. It's always felt a bit too dim sitting there by myself, so the extra light was just what I needed to persuade me to eat properly, instead of having a tray on my lap.
          The Lazy Cook recommends 12-15 minutes for each inch of thickness. But when I tested the pork it was nowhere near the proper temperature in the middle - it should be 70C/160F, you certainly don't want rare pork. So I turned the potato slices and put it all back for another few minutes, while I cooked the broccoli and heated up the sauce. Then I took the tin out, checked the temperature and let the pork rest while I warmed my plate in the turned-off oven (with the potatoes on it to keep hot). It's these very small things that make all the difference, even when it's just for me.

So here it is, and it was absolutely delicious from start to finish. Well, the first slice was a tiny bit dry (it's been cut off already in the photo, as usual I started eating before I remembered to take one), but the rest of it was perfectly moist, marvellous with the apricots. The potatoes worked really well too, I wasn't sure if they'd cook that fast or maybe burn, but they were fine. I felt I'd taken good care of myself.

Shelling out

Every so often I know some kind of pasta with lots of sauce is what I really want to eat. When I felt like this on Saturday and opened my Food of Italy, out fell a months-old Dom-Post clipping - a Jill Dupleix recipe for pasta shells with pork ragu and parmesan cream.
         I had everything listed except the shells. My first impulse was to make do with one of the other five kinds of pasta in the pantry, but it was a nice day, so I stifled that unworthy thought and set off for Gamboni's. His beautiful shells were superbly named
"conchiglioni al bronzo", making them sound like an Italian toyboy.

They cost $6.95. Once upon a time I would have thought, "that's a whole $4 more than supermarket pasta - no, that's too much". But now I've learnt better - the right thing to compare it with is the cost of eating the same dish in a restaurant, twice.
      So here's the recipe. It's a little ironic, because Dupleix's latest book is called Lighten Up, and on her website she says, "I have always loved good food, but now I want it to be good for me too. So I have learned how to lighten up on everything but freshness and flavour, without the cream, pastry and unnecessary animal fats that slow me up and weigh me down." There are lots of veges in this - but the cream is the whole point...


Pasta shells with pork ragu and parmesan cream (Jill Dupleix)

It says "serves 4" but that  must mean four starving Italians - I reckon this will feed at least 6.

(original recipe photo)




2 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp butter
1 onion, finely diced
50g pancetta or ham, finely diced
2 medium carrots, finely diced
1 celery stalk, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, finely grated
500g coarsely minced pork
1 Tbsp plain flour
400ml tomato passata
2 Tbsp tomato paste
1/2 tsp dried oregano (I used more of the fresh leaves)
salt and pepper
2 Tbsp flat-leaved parsley, chopped
250g large pasta shells (e.g. conchiglioni) (so I got this EXACTLY right!)
150g frozen peas (I admit, I left these out)

Parmesan cream
150ml cream
50g grated parmesan
1 tsp grated lemon zest
a few fine grates of nutmeg

* If you have a food processor, instead of finely dicing the veges by hand, put chunks of onion, peeled carrot and celery into the bowl and pulse until finely chopped together.
* Heat 1 Tbsp olive oil in a large pan, gently cook garlic, then add veges and cook gently for 10 minutes. Add pork and cook till browned. Scatter with flour and cook for another 2 minutes, then add tomato passata and paste, oregano, parsley, salt, pepper and 300ml water. Stir well and simmer gently for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until thickened.
* Put large pot of water on to boil for pasta. Heat oven to 180C. Cook pasta shells in boiling salted water until just tender (I find this takes about 10 minutes), then scoop out and drain carefully (the water tends to get stuck inside them). Cook peas, if using them, in the pasta water for 1 minute, then drain.
* Toss shells in the other 1 Tbsp olive oil. Spoon the ragu into each shell and arrange in a lightly oiled baking dish. (I found it was easier to arrange them first and then fill them.) Scatter with peas and put another couple of large spoons of ragu over the top.
* In a small pan, gently heat the cream with most of the parmesan, lemon zest, nutmeg, salt and pepper. Pour over the top and scatter with remaining parmesan. Bake for 20 minutes until golden and bubbling.

I think I took this before I cooked it - I was sure I'd taken one after as well, but it's vanished. Annoying, because the finished dish looked exactly like the picture (minus the peas). But you get the idea. Ample red wine, a green salad and enough other people to stop you making a total maiale of yourself are the only other things you need. Buon appetito.

Cosy casserole

It's been a foul day in Wellington - non-stop heavy rain since last night. It's days like this that I'm cravenly glad not to have to go Out to Work, managing all the paid stuff on-line instead.
         Given the weather, and following last week's surfeit of takeaways, I thought it was time for a cosy casserole. We had some rapidly-going-soft tamarillos (not as pretty as the ones in the picture) and in the freezer there was a pack of pork pieces, so I put together a recipe that Harvey invented, only with variations, of course. It's called, with stunning originality, pork and tamarillo casserole!


Pork and tamarillo casserole

Approx. 500g lean pork pieces (cut them up if necessary so they're all as much the same size as possible - the bought pieces often vary wildly in size)
6 tamarillos (fewer if very large, more if very small)
1 large onion
2 cloves garlic
Some interesting liquid to cook it with - white wine, red wine, cider  - for this one I used leftover juice from cooking apples and the last of the bottle of port, plus extra lemon juice
Juice of 1-2 lemons (depending on how tart you like it)
Bay leaf
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil

For the slow cooker:
- Heat cooker on high, with lid on, for 20 minutes while preparing the ingredients.
- Finely chop the onion and garlic and check size of pork pieces (they should be no bigger than 2 cm square).
- Put oil into cooker and add onion and garlic. Leave to sweat for a few minutes.
- Cut the tamarillos in half, scoop them out of their skins and halve again.
- Add the other ingredients, using just enough liquid to cover meat.
- Cover and cook for 5-6 hours on high.

Without a slow cooker:
- Either in a casserole dish that can go on the hob, or in a pan, heat olive oil gently and sweat onions and garlic till softened. Prepare the rest as above.
- On top of onions and garlic in casserole dish, add other ingredients and enough liquid to cover meat. (Check while it cooks - you may need to add more if it evaporates in the oven.)
- Cover and cook for 3 hours in a slow oven (170C).

Check to see meat is tender. If liquid is too thin, mix a little flour in cold liquid, add, and cook a little longer.
We had this with the everlasting mashed potato, but rice is good and so is couscous or orzo pasta. The colour is good and the flavour is deliciously fruity and tart.