Pork stew with vinegar

This stew could not be simpler. The meat and onions caramelise in the pan (because they’re not submerged in liquid), and the vinegar loses some of its astringency through evaporation.

The only issue is the oven temperature, which depends on how long you’ve got, how heavy your casserole is (they can take a good while to warm up), and how warm your oven is (your gas mark S may be very different from mine).

You could stir in black olives at the end. You might also want to include herbs such as thyme or rosemary.

Serves 2

2 or 3 slices of belly pork, cut into fork-sized pieces
2 red onions, roughly chopped
6 whole cloves of garlic
150ml vinegar
Salt, pepper

Mix all the ingredients in a heavy casserole, with seasoning to taste.

I cooked my stew for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, stirred it, gave it a further 30 minutes at gas mark 4/180C, stirred it again, and gave it a further 60 minutes at gas mark S/130C.

Spare rib chops in barbecue sauce

If you find that pork chops are too often dry, you may be pleased to find spare rib pork chops, which come from the shoulder (whereas, confusingly, spare ribs come from the belly). You can grill or fry them, and you can also braise them slowly, without causing them to turn tough. The ones I cooked yesterday – from the excellent Highbury Butchers – were tender, with just enough fat to keep them moist.

In a recipe for Hawaiian pork chops in yesterday's Guardian, Yotam Ottolenghi advised that you marinate the chops, then scrape off the marinade before grilling them, and then recombine them with the marinade for a brief roasting. If cooked for longer, the chops will become tough. But you can poach spare rib chops, for about an hour and a quarter, before slicing them and combining them with your marinade. Finish them by blasting them in a hot oven (gas mark 8, 230C ) for 15 minutes.

The first advantage of this two-stage process is that you get tender meat. The second is that if you had roasted the chops from raw, you would have found that they exuded a good deal of water, making it difficult to achieve the ideally sticky result. The third is that if your marinade includes ingredients such as honey and soy, it will not spend long enough in the oven to burn.

My marinade, for 2-3: two cloves of garlic, crushed with a little salt; 2tbsp tomato ketchup; 1tsp honey; 1tsp Dijon mustard; a few splashes of soy sauce; 1dsp sunflower oil; generous grindings of black pepper.

Don't throw away the liquid in which you poached the chops. Today, we enjoyed a lovely soup made with this liquid and onions, garlic, squash, and red lentils.

Cannellini beans and ham hock

I chaired a panel discussion at the Chorleywood cookery festival with Jojo Tulloh (The Modern Peasant) and Ms Cupcake (a.k.a. Melissa Morgan, author of The Naughtiest Vegan Cakes in Town). I’m sure I’ll get round to the making a vegan cake soon, but I’ve gone first for a rustic dish from Jojo’s book.

Here, slightly adapted, is her recipe (for 6), followed by a few comments about my experiences in cooking it.

200g dried cannellini beans
1 smoked ham hock
1 small onion or 2 small shallots, unpeeled
1 head garlic, unpeeled
Sea salt and black pepper
Olive oil
Handful flat-leaf parsley, freshly chopped

Soak the beans in cold water overnight. Soak the ham hock too. Drain them when you are ready to start cooking.

Pre-heat the oven, if using, to gas mark 2/150C.

Put the beans into an ovenproof, heavy casserole. Add the onion, garlic and ham hock and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer for two hours, either on the hob or (having brought the pan to a simmer first) in the oven.

Remove the ham hock and set aside to cool slightly. Remove the onion and garlic, and use a wide chopping knife to squeeze out the purée-like flesh from the skins. Grind the pulp in a mortar to a smooth paste, then add a little liquid from the casserole to create a creamy sauce, which you can return to the pan.

Cut off the skin from the hock and remove the meat, discarding fat and gristle.

Return the meat to the casserole and mix it in. Season to taste (you may not need much, or any, salt.) Your ideal is a mixture of creamy beans flecked with tender pink ham; if you have more ham than you need, reserve the extra for a hash or other recipe. Warm the stew, zigzag over a little olive oil, and scatter over the parsley.

As you may be able to see from the picture, I did not submerge my ham: to do so, I would have needed a good many litres of water, much of which I would have had to discard at the end. I used enough water to submerge the beans by about 2cms; even so, I had to boil the beans vigorously once I had removed the ham in order to thicken the stew.

The woman at the butcher told me that the ham hock was unsmoked, and did not need soaking. She misled me on both counts. It was pretty salty. I have suggested in the past that the notion that beans will not soften in salted water is a myth, and that instead they tend to become mealy rather than creamy; but my beans took a long time to soften.

I followed Jojo’s quantities, but used all the ham. The dish served 3.

Pork and chorizo salad

The flavour of raw spring onions and red onions in salad is often too harsh, I find. My solution is to expunge some of their acidity with boiling water. Slice them, put them in a bowl, pour the water over them, leave for 30 minutes, give them a squeeze in the water, and drain.

If you find that this treatment leaves them too soft for your taste, try soaking them in cold water instead.

Serves 3 to 4

3 slices of belly pork
2 red onions or a bunch of spring onions, treated as above
3 red peppers, turned under a grill on a low setting until blackened, then peeled and sliced (Grilled peppers)
450g Jersey Royal or other new potatoes, scraped and, if necessary, cut into even pieces
1 clove garlic
Splash of olive oil
3 cooking chorizos, sliced
1 tin chickpeas, drained
1tbsp white or red wine vinegar
1/2tsp Dijon mustard
1/6tsp honey
Salt, pepper
2tbsp sunflower oil
1tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Cover the belly pork with water in a heavy pan, bring to a simmer, and cook for 90 minutes to 2 hours, until very tender. Remove the fatty layer, and shred the meat.

Simmer the potatoes and the garlic clove (unpeeled) in salted water, until tender.

Put the oil in a heavy pan over a gentle heat, and fry the chorizos. Tip in the chickpeas, and cook until their water has evaporated and they are coated with the chorizos’ paprika-spiked oil.

In a large bowl, mix the vinegar, mustard, and honey, seasoned with salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze the poached garlic from its husk, and mash it in. Whisk in the oils.

Slice the potatoes, and mix them with the vinaigrette in the bowl while still hot. Stir through the pork, onion, peppers, and chorizos and chickpeas.

Serve with mayonnnaise.

Belly pork, pot-roasted

The best way to produce meltingly tender meat from a joint such as lamb shoulder or belly pork, in my oven, is to pot-roast it. The heat inside a heavy casserole is lower than the oven temperature at the lowest setting (about 130C). See also Foil and slow roasting.

You can get good pork crackling, too. Following a long quest for crackling perfection (I have written numerous entries on the subject), I have so far yet to record a failure after rubbing vinegar over the skin. The theory behind this technique is that the acid helps to break down the collagen, the protein that provides the skin's rubbery texture.

I had a 1.2kg piece of belly pork, which serves four people easily.

Try to leave the pork uncovered for a while, with salt sprinkled on the skin. When you’re ready to cook the joint, use a paper towel to wipe off the moisture that the salt will have drawn out. Smear a little oil on the meaty underside. Smear a tbsp of vinegar on the skin. Season all over with salt and pepper. You may like to use fennel, too.

Put the belly pork into a grill pan, and grill the skin until it starts to brown.

Slice two onions into rings, mix them with a little oil, and put them into a heavy casserole. Lay the bellow pork on top, put on the lid, and cook at the lowest possible heat at the bottom of the oven, for five to six hours.

Slice off the skin, return the pork to the casserole, and cover to keep warm. Turn the oven to its highest setting, put the skin in a dish or on a baking sheet, and bake until it is crunchy.

The meat from the joint should be tender enough to cut with a spoon.

Meatballs with fennel and chilli

Rocco, our much-missed deli owner, used to make his own sausages, spiked with fennel and chilli. It occurred to me that I should try this combination in meatballs. Delicious.

Meatballs without breadcrumbs sometimes become compacted. The cheese may counter that effect here; certainly, these ones were crumbly (withoutout falling apart) and moist.

This quantity makes about 20 golfball sized meatballs, probably serving two.

150g beef mince
150g pork mince
1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed with a little salt
2tbsp Parmesan, grated
1tsp fennel seeds
1 or 2 dried chillis, whizzed in a small electric mill or coffee grinder
Salt and black pepper
Olive oil, for frying

Mix the ingredients (apart from the oil) with your hands, and form meatballs between your palms.

Put a little oil in a heavy pan over a medium heat, and fry the meatballs, in batches if necessary. Turn them once. Remove when brown – they do not have to be cooked through.

Make a tomato sauce: soften a finely chopped onion in the oil in the pan – 5 to 10 minutes. There may be some bits of meat left in there too; you’ll probably need to turn down the heat, and perhaps add a little more oil, to prevent the onion from catching and the meat from burning. Throw in a chopped garlic clove for a minute. Tip in a tin of tomatoes with a little salt, and simmer, uncovered, breaking up the tomatoes. As the mixture starts to thicken, return the meatballs to the pan, and simmer them in the sauce (still uncovered, unless it appears to be getting too thick) for about 15 minutes, turning once.

Serve with rice.

Chorizo sauce for pasta

For 2

4 chorizos (the uncooked kind)
Olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 large red onion, sliced
1 large red pepper, deseeded, cut into fork-size pieces
Salt

Chorizos, unlike ordinary sausages when cut up, do not have a tendency to stick to the pan. You may not get a sauce flavoured with crusty bits, but you do get the paprika-spiked oil that the sausages release.

How you cut them up is a matter of taste. You may like discs; I prefer to skin them, and chop them into small pieces.

Put a splash of oil into a heavy pan over a gentle heat. Throw in the chopped chorizos, and fry them gently until they lose their raw colour and throw off their oil. You may find that you now have plenty of oil with which to cook the garlic, onion, and pepper, which you add to the pan now, with a little salt. Stir everything, and cover the pan, cooking the contents gently until the onions and peppers are soft. If they exude a lot of liquid, evaporate it by uncovering the pan while you cook the pasta.

I like conchiglie (shells), or tortiglioni (big tubes, larger than penne), with this.

Of course, numerous variations are possible. You might, for example, add cumin (1tsp), throwing it into the pan and frying it for a minute before adding the vegetables. You might heat up the sauce with dried chillis, or with a tsp of harissa, stirred in once the onions and peppers have started to collapse.

Bacon hock 2

I see from my previous post on this subject that I recommended simmering bacon hock in a heavy, uncovered pan, so that only a bubble or two rose to the surface of the liquid. The theory is that this sub-boiling temperature is quite sufficient to tenderise the meat, whereas a faster boil might dry it out.

That is the theory. But yesterday, I simmered a bacon hock for two hours in water that showed scarcely any activity, and discovered when it was on the plate that it was not as tender as I had hoped. I suspect that, despite the science, a covered pan would have produced a more pleasing result.

I covered the hock with several cms to spare, so that I could ladle off some of the liquid for cooking lentils. I had soaked the lentils (Puy; 100g, for 2) for two hours – they cook more readily after this treatment, I find. I barely covered them with the stock, and simmered them, with an unpeeled garlic clove, in a covered pan, topping up the liquid when they threatened to dry out. Meanwhile, I softened an onion with a clove of chopped garlic in olive oil. When the lentils were soft (after about 30 minutes), I tipped them on to the onion, allowing them to simmer further until there remained just enough liquid to moisten them. I squeezed the garlic from its skin, and stirred it in. Because of the saltiness of the bacon, the lentils needed only a little salt, but benefited from several grindings of pepper.

Bacon hock

Brining pork chops

In my last entry, I wrote about my unsatisfactory experiment with brining chicken. But I have had much more joy from brining pork chops.

This time, I took my advice from Matthew Fort, who in turn was indebted to Heston Blumenthal in recommending a 5% solution. My brine consisted of 1 litre of water, 50g table salt, 25g caster sugar, and about 10 black peppercorns and 10 juniper berries, the latter lightly crushed. I put three chops in an oven dish, poured over the brine, covered the dish with cling film, and refrigerated it for 4 hours.

My mistake was to fail to dry the chops thoroughly. I put my heavy, shallow oven dish over a medium heat on the hob, waited for it to get hot, poured in a little sunflower oil, and fried the chops. But because of their moisture, they failed to brown. So I had to turn up the heat to maximum. The result was that there were lots of charred patches on the dish by the time the chops were browned. So I had to clean the pan before making the sauce, sacrificing a good deal of flavoursome material.

I put the chops in a low oven while I softened four sliced shallots, along with four bashed cloves of garlic (to flavour the sauce, rather than to be eaten with it), in a little butter. Then I added a tbsp of white wine vinegar, boiled it hard to evaporate it, and poured in 150ml of chicken stock, boiling it until it thickened slightly. Last, away from the heat, I stirred in a knob of butter.

Pork chops are so often dry and tough. These were tender and delicious.

Skillet lasagne

As the title, and indeed the entire concept suggests, this is an American recipe. It comes from The Complete America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook, accompanying a show that, having been through 12 seasons, has spawned a tie-in that weighs 28 kilos. It is quite American, with a Stepford Wives-ish flavour and chapter headings such as “Who wants pasta?”, “The Flair of the French”, and “It’s grill time!”, but it has lots of valuable advice on why the recipes work, and on what methods the team discarded before coming up with their final versions. I may become slightly obsessed with it.

My recipe is an adaptation, in part because I was cooking for a different number of people.

The only ricotta in my corner shop was Cypriot, and turned out to be quite unlike the real thing: as you can see in the picture above, slices of it remained intact when warmed.

Serves 3 to 4

Olive oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
Dried chillis to taste, finely chopped (in a coffee grinder or small electric mill)
200g minced beef
200g minced pork
Salt
1 bay leaf
300g lasagne sheets (the variety that does not need pre-cooking)
500g carton passata
Water or stock
200g ricotta
4tbsp Parmesan, grated

Warm a tbsp or 2 of olive oil over a low to medium heat in a 28cm frying pan, if you have one with a lid. (I used a shallow casserole dish.) Throw in the onion, garlic, and chillis (if using), and cook, stirring, until softened – about five minutes. Regulate the heat, and/or add more oil, if the onion threatens to catch.

Add the pork and beef mince, along with salt to taste and the bay leaf, and continue to cook until the meat is broken up and is no longer pink. (The book does not suggest that you need to brown the mince, and is in line with other recipes in giving this advice – see previous entries on Bolognese and moussaka.)

Turn the heat to its lowest. Break each lasagne sheet into four or five pieces, and lay the pieces on top of the meat. Pour over the passata, along with enough water or stock to cover the lasagne pieces.

Turn up the flame slightly to bring the contents of the pan to a simmer, then turn it down again, and put on the lid.

Stir the meat and lasagne mixture after five minutes. Try to separate the lasagne pieces, which may stick together. Put the lid back on, but keep stirring the dish regularly.

This kind of lasagne absorbs a good deal of liquid. You may find that you have to add more water or stock, particularly because the thickened mixture may threaten to stick to the pan.

The lasagne should be tender after 20 to 25 minutes. Take it off the heat, and stir in 2tbsp of Parmesan. Dot the surface with dollops of ricotta, cover again, and leave to stand for five minutes.

Sprinkle with the remaining Parmesan, and serve.

I missed the béchamel. But this version was very nice in its own right.

Browning mince

Pork, lemon, and garlic stew

This recipe appears in my book, Don't Sweat the Aubergine, about which I may have some more to say in the coming weeks. A new, revised edition appears in April from Black Swan.

I haven't revised this recipe, but I might have done. In the book, I suggest that you brown the pork before putting it in the casserole. But, not being submerged in liquid, it may brown to a certain extent while cooking anyway. So this version (serves 2) could not be simpler.

2 slices of boneless belly pork, each cut into about four pieces, or left whole if you prefer
2 onions, roughly chopped
1 head garlic, separated into cloves but not peeled.
1 lemon, quartered
1 bay leaf
1 sprig rosemary
1/2 chicken stock cube (optional)
2tbsp olive oil
Salt (remember if you use the cube that it is salty)

Toss the ingredients together in a heavy casserole, and bake, covered. I cooked my stew slowly, at gas mark 1/140C and then at gas mark S/130C, for three and a half hours. I turned down the dial once the stew was simmering, after about an hour and a quarter.

I confess that, after two and a half hours, there was little evidence of the browning I had expected. So I uncovered the casserole. I am reluctant to follow recipes that tell you to brown meat towards the end of the cooking time, fearing that the high temperature will cause the meat to dry out. But in this case, the temperature was low, and belly pork is a particularly forgiving cut. The surfaces of the meat browned in about half an hour, after which I turned it.

The meat, onions and lemon create plenty of sauce, which has a delicious tartness to offset the rich fattiness of the pork.

Pork and marinade

If you barbecue a thick or tough cut of meat, you may well need to cook it first, before marinating it and subjecting it to the fiercely hot coals. But what if you are cooking it indoors? Do you still need a two-stage process, when you can get decent results by simply putting the marinated meat in a low to medium oven?

I often buy spare rib chops, cut them into pieces, coat them in a marinade, and cook them in a low oven. But this cut gives off quite a bit of liquid, which you have to allow to evaporate before the meat browns and the marinade turns sticky. You don't know how long that will take, and you may have to fiddle with the oven temperature to speed the process. The pork can become tough.

I poached four chops (in a pot with a chicken carcass - they contributed to the resultant stock) for about 50 minutes. Then I cut them up and marinated them. Later I cooked them under the grill until browned and warmed through, first on a high heat, then on a lower one.

It works better than the one-stage method, I think. The meat is more tender, and the marinade penetrates it more efficiently.

Marinade recipes here and here.

Chorizo and chick pea stew

New potatoes for 2
Olive oil
4 chorizos (the kind you cook, not the salami-type), skinned and cut into pieces
1 clove garlic, chopped
1tsp cumin seeds
2 medium red onions, sliced
2 red peppers, deseeded and cut into fork-sized pieces
1 tin chick peas, drained and rinsed
1tsp harissa, or cayenne pepper to taste

Scrape the potatoes. Cut them into even-sized chunks, put them into a pan of cold, salted water, bring to the boil, and simmer gently until tender.

While the potatoes are cooking, put a splash of oil into a heavy pan, and fry the chorizos over a gentle heat, until they release their own, paprika-hued oil. Throw in the garlic and cumin, and fry for a minute; throw in the onion, and cook for about five minutes, until slightly softened. (Add more oil if the slices threaten to catch. But you may not need it.) Tip in the peppers and chick peas, stir in the harissa or cayenne, cover, and cook gently.

When you have drained the potatoes, stir them into the stew. Continue to cook until the onions and peppers are soft.

This dish might also include tinned or whole, chopped tomatoes (to skin them, drop them into boiling water for 20 seconds, cool them under cold water, and peel off the skins), added with the peppers and chick peas. You may want to cook the stew uncovered, to thicken the tomato sauce.

You might also poach a couple of eggs with the stew - a common recipe in Middle Eastern cooking. I crack the eggs into a cup before tipping them, very gently, on to the surface of the simmering ingredients. They will cook in an uncovered pan, but I usually cover it, and give them about five minutes.

P.s. I've decided to switch to the verdana typeface. It is spacier than arial, and more readable, in my view.

Crackling perfection

A feature of this blog has been its obsessive revisiting of certain dishes - crackling, rice, cheesecakes - in a largely futile search for perfection. As the last crackling I made was perfect, I won't apologise for writing about it.

Frying was the answer. In my previous blog on the subject, I recommended grilling. But frying enables you to control the heat more easily, particularly because of the layer of fat in the pan.

I had braised slices of belly pork, for an hour and a half, in a broth flavoured with onion, juniper berries, and peppercorns. (The pork went into a salad.) At the end, I sliced off the rind, and let it dry.

I warmed just enough sunflower oil to give a thin layer in a heavy frying pan. On the lowest flame, I fried the pieces of rind, turning them frequently to prevent their burning. Until the water had vaporised, they crackled and bucked alarmingly. After about 15 minutes, they were crisp and golden; they shattered in the mouth like honeycomb.

A kind of hash

An ideal hash would contain plenty of crusted bits. You need a good pan, though, or else the mixture will stick and burn. I played it safe with this version, gently warming through the bacon, cabbage and potatoes. It was still good, though, thanks particularly to the bacon fat. 

Serves 3 (obviously, the contents are adjustable).

3 large potatoes
1 cabbage, tough outer leaves removed, quartered, core removed, chopped (you may think you have a lot of cabbage, but you'll find that it cooks down)
9 slices streaky bacon (I used unsmoked), chopped into fork-sized pieces
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 red onions, chopped

Peel the potatoes, and cut them into pieces. (I usually cut a large potato into three crossways, and cut each of these sections into three or four pieces.) Put them into a pan of lightly salted water, bring to the boil, and simmer gently until soft. Drain.

Cram the cabbage into a saucepan with a little water. Cover, put the pan over a medium heat, and cook for about five minutes, or until the leaves are wilted, stirring from time to time. Drain.

In a heavy casserole or frying pan, fry the bacon pieces gently in a little olive or sunflower oil (they will exude their own fat) until they brown and crisp. (If you use cheap bacon, it will throw off a lot of water. Turn up the heat until this liquid evaporates.) Throw in the garlic and let it fry and soften for 20 seconds or so; now throw in the onions, and fry for five to 10 minutes, by which time they should be soft.

Throw in the potatoes and cabbage, with salt and pepper to taste. Stir everything around as it warms through - there's no harm in breaking up the potatoes. If you're confident in your pan, you could turn up the heat slightly, allow the base of the mixture to brown, and then stir everything up and repeat the process, until you have a kind of green and purple-flecked, crispy mash.

Grilled bacon

I've come to prefer to cook bacon in the bottom of a grill pan lined with foil. Pour in about a dstsp of oil (I use sunflower, mostly), and smear the bacon in it - the oil is both a conductor of heat and a protector from the flame. Set the grill to low, and turn the bacon when you start to hear it sizzling. Thereafter, and particularly if your grill is as hot as mine is, you need to turn the rashers with increasing frequency, because otherwise the rinds will burn. I usually cook them until they're crispy.

Stewed belly pork - and crackling

Poaching or stewing belly pork does not mean that you cannot crackle the skin. On the contrary, it may help, because it will break down the collagen, which is what causes rubberiness. The crackling above comes from slices of belly pork, simmered in a stew with beans.

About 30 minutes from the end of cooking, lift the pork from the stew, and slice off the rind. Return the pork to the pot.

Line a grill pan with foil, and pour on to it about a tbsp of oil. Pat dry the pork rinds (which will be sticky). Toss them in the oil in the pan, and arrange skin-side up. Grill them at full setting at first, but turn down the heat as soon as they start to make crackling noises. The danger is, if you keep them too close to a high flame, that they will burn before turning crisp. I move the pan down to the floor of the grill.

The process will probably take about 15 to 20 minutes.

Belly pork, new potato and asparagus salad

This salad consists of belly pork, new potatoes, asparagus, rocket, spring onions, and olives. I won't give the quantities - any ratios would work. Instead, I'll offer a few comments about cooking the pork, and preparing the vinaigrette.

Pork
I had three slices of belly pork, but of course a whole piece would have been just as good, if not better. The two questions I asked myself about poaching it were: should I cover the pan, and should I salt the broth? Both might have cooked the meat more vigorously and therefore toughened it: the covered pan because it causes an agitated simmer, whereas an uncovered pan can be kept at below boiling point; and the salt because it raises the boiling point of the liquid. On the other hand, salt has a tenderising effect. Another point to consider, if I wanted to use the cooking liquid again as a stock, is that I'd have to be careful about the seasoning of anything made with it.

I covered the pork with water, and threw in a peeled onion, a couple of sticks of celery, some peppercorns, and some juniper berries; and added salt. I covered the pan, brought the contents to a simmer, put a heat disperser underneath, and put on the lid. I cooked the pork for two and a half hours, allowing it  to cool in its broth before shredding it by hand. It was beautifully moist and tender.

Vinaigrette
I like this recipe, from the Guardian's "How to make the perfect..." series. My vinaigrette differed in two respects: I simmered an unpeeled clove with the potatoes, and mashed the flesh into the vinegar; and I used a 2/1 oil/vinegar ratio. Combined with the pork and the potatoes, the sauce does not taste too sharp.

Inauthentic moussaka

Elements of this recipe (for 4) repeat my earlier recipe for moussaka. But this one is even less authentic. Moussaka should contain lamb, I believe; and I don't suppose that Greek cooks add Worcester sauce to it, or use Cheddar in their bechamels. I included potatoes - waxy ones would have worked better than the maincrop ones I used - because I didn't have enough aubergine. 

Since writing the earlier entry, I've discovered a new favourite method of stewing mince.

2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Olive oil
200g pork mince
200g beef mince
1 bay leaf
Chicken stock
1/2 chicken stock cube
1tbsp tomato puree
Few splashes Worcester sauce
Salt
1 large aubergine, cut into rounds the thickness of 2 £1 coins
3 medium potatoes, cut into rounds the thickness of 2 £1 coins
3dstsp plain flour
35g butter, or enough to make a roux with the flour
300ml milk
1 egg, beaten
3 tbsp Cheddar
A few scrapings of nutmeg

Over a gentle heat and in a heavy-bottomed pan, soften the onions and garlic with a little salt in a tbsp or two of olive oil. After about five minutes, add the mince, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as it starts to cook. Continue to cook the contents of the pan gently, stirring from time to time. After about 25 minutes, and once the liquid from the meat has evaporated, the mince will start to brown. (I used to worry that the onions would burn before the mince browned - but for some reason they do not.) When it is browned, add about 100ml of chicken stock, or just enough to produce a stew that is moist but not runny. Stir in the stock cube (which is not necessary, but does add extra savouriness), puree, and the Worcester sauce if you like, and add the bay leaf. Allow to bubble for a few minutes. Test the seasoning - the cube and the Worcester sauce are salty, and you may not need more salt.

Meanwhile, pour some olive oil into a saucer. Dip in a fork, and brush the aubergine rounds with the back of it. Place them in a roasting tin or on a baking sheet. Season with salt, and with pepper if you like. Bake at gas mark 6/200C for 20 to 30 minutes, until soft. (This is a far easier method of cooking aubergines than frying.)

Put the potatoes into lightly salted cold water, bring to the boil, and simmer until the potatoes are tender. Drain.

Make a thick bechamel. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over a gentle heat. Add the flour, and stir it in. The roux should have the consistency of wet sand. Cook it for a minute. Pour in the milk gradually, stirring to incorporate each portion before adding the next. Let the sauce bubble for a minute or two, stirring constantly, then turn off the heat. You want a thick, almost pasty consistency. When the sauce has cooled a little, stir in the egg. (After baking, the sauce should puff up.) You could season the bechamel with nutmeg as well as salt.

Assemble the "moussaka". I spread a little of the bechamel on the bottom and sides of the oven dish. Then I built up the layers: potato; stew; potatoes and aubergines; stew; aubergines; bechamel.

Bake in a gas mark 6/200C oven for 30 minutes, or until the top is brown and everything is bubbling.

Moussaka is particularly delicious warm, rather than piping hot. We ate ours after it had been sitting in the turned-off oven for 45 minutes.

Belly pork and bean stew

One of my favourite things. A lot of garlic is important.

225g cannellini or other dried white beans
5 cloves garlic - 1 chopped, 4 unpeeled
3 slices belly pork
A little sunflower oil
1tbsp olive oil
1 small pack (80g) smoked pancetta
100ml chicken stock
2 bay leaves
Salt

Soak the beans in filtered water, preferably, for five hours or longer. (This process is not essential, but speeds the cooking of the beans and ensures that they soften more consistently.) Drain and rinse. Cover with fresh water (again filtered, if possible) by about 3cms, throw in the garlic cloves, bring to the boil, and simmer, with the pan partly covered, until soft. Times vary; my cannellini beans took 75 minutes. (Top up the water if necessary.) Drain, reserving the liquid in a clear jug. (Cooking dried beans)

Rub a little sunflower oil over the pork slices, and brown them quickly on a hot griddle or frying pan. (Browning meat for a stew)

In a heavy casserole, soften the chopped garlic in the olive oil for a minute or so. Pour in the chicken stock. Sludgy bean liquid will have settled at the bottom of the jug; pour off (but keep for some other purpose) the thinner stuff on top, leaving about 100ml, and pour it into the casserole. Add the pork slices.

Squeeze the softened garlic from the cloves you drained with the beans. Throw away the skins. Tip the beans and the garlic into the casserole. Add bay leaves, and salt to taste. Compress the stew slightly to submerge everything in liquid, but do not worry if the beans are not covered.

I started the stew in a gas mark 4/180C oven, turning it down after 30 minutes (when it was bubbling) to gas mark S/130C.

However, after an hour I wanted to use the oven for some roast potatoes, so I moved the casserole to the hob. There was more liquid by this time, and I simmered the stew gently, uncovered, until thick. Then I replaced the lid, and put a heat disperser under the casserole, so that it carried on cooking very gently. I cooked the stew for two and a quarter hours in total.

Pork and bean stew
Pork and bean stew 2