Osso bucco of pork

Osso bucco of pork

A wonderful, inexpensive and satisfying meal for the cold winter evenings. Osso bucco (Italian for 'bone with the hole') is usually made with veal shanks, but this variation uses pork, which needs to be cooked slowly until the meat falls off the bone.
Ingredients (serves 2)

• Four pieces of pork shank. Ask your butcher to cut these into slices an inch to two inches thick.
• Cornflour
• A white onion, chopped
• Two carrots, chopped
• A stick of celery, chopped
• Button mushrooms
• A pint of home-made chicken stock
• Thyme and oregano, fresh if possible
• Three cloves garlic
• A glass of red wine
• Olive oil

To serve, mix together:

• Grated zest of a lemon
• Flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
• One clove garlic, minced

Heat some olive oil in a large casserole dish. Season the pork shanks with salt and pepper, then coat them in cornflour and fry until golden. 

Add the onion, carrot, mushrooms and celery, reduce the heat and place a lid on. Once the vegetables have softened, add the stock, wine and herbs. Stir well, replace lid and reduce heat to the lowest point you can. Now you just need to find yourself a nice big chair, start a log fire and doze off* for a generous couple of hours, taking care to wake occasionally to stir the osso bucco. It will be cooked when the meat starts to loosen from the bones, and will taste even better if you can allow it to cool overnight. Make sure you reheat it for at least half an hour before serving.

Serve two pieces of pork shank, on the bone, per person, with a generous helping of the sauce and some freshly baked bread.  Garnish with the lemon, garlic and parsley mixture. Don't be too embarrassed to pick the bone up and suck out the delicious marrow afterwards – it's full of goodness and is the perfect way to do justice to this hearty, warming dish.


* At your own risk

Porchetta style roast pork

A delicious, hearty roast pork dish traditionally made in Umbria using the whole animal. But for those of us who don't have the capability, appetite or kitchen space to roast entire pigs, this easy to make cut-down version packs an incredible amount of flavour into a small space.

You will need:

• A nice large piece of roasting pork from the butcher. I favour hock because it's fatty (therefore full of flavour) and cheap, but the dish could equally be made using pork belly.
• Three cloves of garlic, sliced roughly
• A lemon, sliced
• Plenty of fresh sage, rosemary and fennel, chopped roughly
• Olive oil, salt, pepper

Firstly, pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees. You will be roasting the pork slowly, allowing the flavours to permeate the meat, creating a lovely, sticky finish on the outside and a juicy inside.

The key to getting this dish right is to get all of the flavouring right inside the pork. If you are using a hock, the easiest way to do this will be to score the skin deeply with a sharp knife. Season well and slide the garlic slices and herbs into the cuts, before drizzling with olive oil and arranging the lemon slices on top.

If you are using pork belly, your butcher will either sell you the meat in one flat piece, or rolled and tied with string. If it's the latter, remove the string and lay the meat, skin side down, on the work surface. Season and arrange the garlic, lemon and herbs directly onto the meat, before rolling it up like a Swiss roll and securing it with fresh string.

Now just wrap the pork in foil and roast for two and a half hours. Your kitchen will fill with the most delicious aromas as the herbs start to break down and flavour the meat.

Make sure you remove any large pieces of lemon before serving it!  I prefer to set the meat aside to cool, which makes it easier to slice thinly, and serve it with a green salad and some fresh bread, but it's equally delicious served hot and served with greens and potatoes. 

Rillettes de porc

Some rillettes, yesterday.  Not my picture; mine
frankly looked a bit anaemic but tasted amazing

Winter is a strangely contradictory time of year, isn't it?  Wracked with guilt for eating too much festive fayre over Christmas, the whole country collectively pretends to go to the gym and eat healthily in a miserable and half-hearted attempt to get fit, while our brains and bodies tell us to comfort-eat our way out of the doldrums!  I say, plump for the latter - start the diet when it's a bit warmer!

And so it came to pass that with a delicious roasted hock of pork - one of the great forgotten cuts, and terrific value for money - I thought I'd try my hand at rillettes.  The hock is a delicious but awkward cut; with a huge bone running through the centre, it can be difficult to carve it neatly. 

Having slow-roasted the pork for two and a half hours in tin foil, I drained and reserved all the meat juices before removing the skin (you could, of course, salt it and return it to the oven to make pork scratchings.  I'm not encouraging you - just suggesting it!)  Having carved enough meat for the Sunday roast, there was still plenty left on the bone, which I couldn't bring myself to throw away, and, remembering the delicious rillettes I once enjoyed with French bread in the south of France, I set about doing something about it.

You will need:

• A leftover pork hock bone (cooked) with plenty of meat left on it
• Juices and fat reserved from the pork hock
• Some scraps of fatty pork belly
• Salt and white pepper to taste
• Several hours to spare

Place the pork hock and belly pieces in a saucepan and cover with water.  Add the juices and fat that you drained off earlier, and leave the entire thing to simmer, covered, for an hour and a half, topping up with water as necessary. 

After a while, the leftover meat can just be flaked off the bone and the belly meat easily removed from the fat.  Set the meat aside, and return the pan to the heat.  Keep simmering until all the water has evaporated.  Mash the meat up with a fork, add a very generous shake of white pepper and salt, and spoon it into some ramekin dishes.  Pour over just enough of the hot fat in order to seal it.  Leave to solidify, and chill.

Rillettes are best served spread onto fresh, crusty bread and, I think it's safe to say, best when not eaten to excess.

Kimchi (fermented cabbage)

Kimchi fried rice (recipe below)

Kimchi is a preserved cabbage dish popular in Korea.  So popular, in fact, that it is eaten with most meals.  Kimchi reputedly carries some excellent health benefits, so after eating all those rillettes, I thought I'd try my hand at something healthy to counterbalance my diet!

Finding myself with an elderly cabbage which was crying out to be given a decent burial, I thought I'd have a go and see what all the fuss was about. Kimchi can be eaten either as a side dish or on its own as a snack. It's particularly good in fried rice (see serving suggestion right and recipe below), but this is definitely not a dish for the faint of heart..

• Half a large Savoy or Napa cabbage
• One white onion
• One apple
• Fish sauce
• Minced red chilli paste - a good couple of tablespoonsful at the least
• Two cloves of garlic and about the same quantity of ginger, finely chopped
• Chopped spring onions
• Plenty of salt

No, it's not a leftover prop from "The Man With Two Brains"

Preparation time: 6 hours to brine the cabbage and a further 24 hours or more to ferment

Chop the cabbage roughly and remove any really thick stalks.  Dissolve four tablespoons of salt into some warm water and pour over the cabbage until covered.  Cover it, and then just forget about it for six hours!

When you return to the cabbage, it may appear to have shrunk slightly, but that's nothing to worry about!  Give the cabbage a good rinse to remove all the salt water.  Drain and place cabbage in a mixing bowl.

Now, the fun part!  Take a couple of tablespoonsful of minced red chilli and spoon over the cabbage.  If you can't buy minced red chilli and don't fancy making your own, then you could always add a few drops of hot water to some dried crushed chillies to make a paste.  Stir well, taking care to coat the cabbage as evenly as possible without bruising it too heavily.  Add the garlic, ginger, spring onions and fish sauce and continue to stir.  You could mix it with your hands, but remember the dangers of handling red chilli.  Taste and add more chilli if needed.  If it doesn't burn the mouth slightly, then you probably need to add more chilli.

Peel the apple and the onion.  Chop them roughly and blend them together with a cupful of cold water.  We're not over-concerned with the apple and onion flavours here, but the fermentation process will cause the all natural sugars to leech out and help to flavour the kimchi.  Pour over the cabbage and give a final stir.

Now layer the cabbage carefully into a sterilised jar.  When you reach the top, just keep pushing the cabbage further down.  While you want to pack the jar densely with cabbage, you must take care to leave an inch or so at the top because I will not be held responsible for any exploding jars!  Finally, pour over any of the liquid which may be left at the bottom of your mixing bowl.

Leave in a warmish place for a day or so to ferment, then refrigerate.  It may be possible to observe some light bubbling in the jar prior to refrigeration, which is a good sign that you're ready to chill it.

Kimchi will keep, refrigerated, in the jar once opened, for two to three weeks.

Kimchi Fried Rice (serving suggestion)

Cook a few handfuls of ordinary white rice in the usual way.  Drain and pour over boiling water. Set the rice aside.

Fry some chopped spring onions and a handful of whole sugar snap peas or mange tout in a little vegetable oil.  Cook the vegetables for no longer than half a minute, before adding some thinly sliced strips of steak (or any other meat, or maybe some prawns) .  When the meat is cooked, add a drizzle of soy sauce and pour in the drained rice.  Add a little chopped cucumber, perhaps a few crushed dry roasted peanuts and a good few spoonsful of the kimchi.  Stir constantly, over a high heat, and add freshly cut red chilli to taste.  Serve with a fried egg on top.