Pork Meatballs with Creamy Mushroom Sauce

A somewhat Swedish vibe for this lovely supper, which can be served with rice or pasta.  For 4 people, mix 500g of minced pork, a thick slice of white bread turned into crumbs, a medium onion, finely chopped, 2 cloves of garlic, crushed, 1 egg, a tablespoon each of chopped dill and parsley, the zest of a lemon, and plenty of salt and pepper.  Mix well with your hands, then form into meatballs - whatever size you prefer, but I got 20 out of the mixture.  Brown the meatballs in oil, then finish off in the oven on a baking sheet at 180C for about 20 minutes to cook through.  Whilst that is happening, melt 40g of butter in a pan big enough to hold the meatballs later.  Over a medium heat, fry a finely-chopped medium onion for 5 minutes until soft and translucent.  Slice 500g mushrooms (I used chestnut mushrooms) and add to the buttery onions.  Stir and cook for a further 5 minutes.  Now stir in a tablespoon of flour and 300ml of vegetable or chicken stock.  Simmer for 5 minutes until thick and the flour has cooked out.  Now stir in a small (150ml) pot of double cream or equivalent of creme fraiche, along with a further tablespoon of chopped dill and parsley.  Taste for seasoning, add a squeeze of lemon juice, and stir in the now cooked meatballs.  Pork mince is good value, and can be substituted with turkey mince if you prefer. Either way, this qualifies for under a fiver!

Balsamic-glazed Pork Steaks

Can I say right out that I am not a fan of Balsamic Vinegar?  Unless it is very good quality (and, therefore, very expensive) stuff from Modena, I tend to find it sharp and overwhelming.  This is a good way to use it, however - in small quantities, and tempered with the sweetness of honey.  It is dead simple - saute a couple of boneless pork steaks (organic, free-range, outdoor reared, and British, please) in a knob of butter and dash of olive oil.  Make sure the meat is well seasoned with salt and pepper, and don't fiddle with it.  Let it get a good crust on each side, around 5 minutes for the first side and 4 for the other.  Unless your pork is very thick, this will be plenty of time to cook through, yet still be moist and juicy.  After about 9 minutes is up, pour in 120ml of white wine, 2 tablespoons of Balsamic vinegar and a tablespoon of runny honey.  Stir and baste the meat with the sauce and let it reduce down to a syrupy glaze.  Serve straight away with the glaze poured over.  It went very nicely with simple boiled rice, some braised fennel and steamed broccoli.  Mash would be good too.

Pork Stir Fry

Sorry for the media blackout (although Facebook followers were spammed with about 40 old recipes - sorry about that chaps, it weren't me, honest!).  A busy week and the weekend away at a friend's wedding were enjoyable, but we fell pretty badly off the low-fat wagon.  Still, you can't stay in a lovely B&B with full English breakfast, and then attend a brilliant wedding with canapes, a delicious sit down dinner, as much booze as you could drink, late-evening cheese and crusty bread and home-made truffles AND a chocolate wedding cake and whinge about being on a low-fat regime.  So, sod it - relax and have fun, and hop back on the wagon today.  A stir-fry with masses of veg- sugarsnap peas, broccoli, carrots, celery, onions, garlic and ginger - hits the spot, along with strips of pork fillet marinated in Five Spice powder.  A rich sauce of soy sauce, Chinese rice wine, more garlic and ginger and thickened with cornflour brought it all together nicely.  Savoury, filling, healthy, crisp, and low-fat.  Mind you, still fantasising about that chocolate cake....and the truffles.......and the cheese.......mmmmmmmnn, cheese.....

Char Siu Pork Fillet

I have no idea how authentic this is, but I like it!  It doesn't have the slightly suspicious red tinge to it that you sometimes get, which I suspect is produced by some sort of colouring.  You simply marinade a good-size pork fillet - organic and British, please - in 3 tablespoons of Hoisin sauce, a tablespoon of honey, a tablespoon of soy sauce (I use reduced sodium), 3 cloves of grated garlic, an inch of fresh ginger, peeled and grated, and a teaspoon of Chinese Five Spice powder.  Marinade it overnight for a real injection of flavour.  Now, roast in a hot oven (on a foil-lined tray, or you'll be scrubbing for weeks) for about 20-25 minutes until just cooked and still juicy, and a deep, caramel, burnished colour.  Serve sliced, with stir fried veg and noodles or rice, or even just stuffed hot into a bread roll.  I imagine this would do well on a barbecue too.  Oh, and low fat, of course!

Pork Burgers with Thyme and Lemon

OK, it's not easy to make minced pork look sexy, but believe me, these little mouthfuls taste scrummy!  This was a blend of two recipes I've cooked from Nigel - the ingredients (more or less) for his Pork and Lemon Polpettine, and the cooking method for his Chicken Patties.  This recipe was made so much easier by the use of a mini chopper (pause for 'Carry On' style jokes....) which made light work of 4 spring onions and an entire head of 'wet' garlic - actually very mild.  It then minced 70g of pancetta.  All of this was added to 500g of pork mince with a good teaspoon of fresh thyme leaves and the grated zest of a lemon.  Add salt and pepper - be generous, and mix well until all combined.  Your hands are the best utensil for this.  Form into little patties or burgers - this amount will make 12 to 16 of them, enough for 4 (I froze half).  Saute them for a few minutes until browned, put into a dish and pour over about 200mls of veg stock, and bake at 180C for 15 minutes to finish cooking.  This keeps them moist and juicy.  Add a little fresh lemon juice to the baking juices, and serve with tagliatelle or new potatoes, and lots of spring greens.  Yum!

The Lifecycle of Joint of Roast Pork

So, next meat to get the lifecycle treatment.  A wonderful piece of pork loin - really good, outdoor reared and organic.  Not cheap, but we will, again, get three meals from it for the two of us, so fourteen quid well spent for superb meat.  Yesterday, it was roasted on a bed of thickly sliced onion with fresh sage and rosemary.  This base made a marvellous gravy later.  Tonight, with a desire to eat lightly after yesterday's fudge sauce excesses, I made egg noodles with stirfried cavolo nero, onions, pork, and mushrooms in an aromatic broth of chicken stock, deeply flavoured with chopped ginger, garlic and red chilli, and a splosh of soy sauce.  Light, low fat, yet filling, this was perfect.  More tomorrow on the remaining chunk of roast meat.

Spanish Pork and Chorizo Stew

This is largely based on Delia's Spanish Pork recipe, but I added a jar of Spanish butterbeans instead of potatoes this time. I love this recipe - it works in the summer as well as winter, and the smoky paprika from the chorizo is addictive. If possible, make it the day before, as you can remove any set fat (oily sausage and fairly fatty pork shoulder give flavour but render a lot of fat on cooking) and the flavour only deepens with a bit of maturing.

Zhejiang Mein [#236]

Or 'Mixed Well Sauced Noodles' according to Ching-He Huang. This is a kind of Taiwanese 'Spag Bol', with minced pork (or you could use beef), stir-fried with spring onion, garlic, mushrooms, red pepper and beansprouts, and then simmered in chicken stock, Chinese rice wine, Hoi Sin sauce and red chilli paste until thick and sweet. Toss through some cooked rice or egg noodles along with some coriander, and you have a delicious, sweet/salty/spicy supper. Yum! Just don't put Parmesan on it.........

Asian-style Ribs [#233]

A delicious marinade from Donna Hay of Hoisin sauce, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, masses of grated ginger and a little sugar and five spice powder. However, as with Nigel last year, she suggests marinading raw pork ribs and then roasting them. This would be anathema to most Aisan cooks - I know - my great friend Gi makes a mean pork rib, and she ALWAYS cooks them before hand, in water, for about an hour. The meat is then already tender and much more receptive to the sticky marinade - a final blast in the oven for 20 minutes is enough to have them emerge glistening with the meat dropping off the bone - just delicious, and it is impossible to stop eating them! Do make these, but also, do follow my advice if you want tender succulent meat and a glaze that hasn't burnt.

Gyoza [#224]

These are so addictive, aren't they? Little dumplings of minced pork and prawns, flavoured with garlic, spring onion, ginger, chives, sesame oil and sake, wrapped in wanton pastry skins, which are then fried in a little oil and, finally, steamed. Dipped in a mixture of soy, chilli and sake (or rice vinegar if you have it), they are irresistible, and we polished off 16 of them between the two of us! Another successful dish from Harumi Kurihara, the Japanese Delia. We balanced it out with a super-healthy stir-fry of sprouted mung and edamame beans, pak choi and red pepper. As for the question of what to drink with them, Hubby couldn't get any Japanese beer, but we had some excellent St. Peter's Organic Ale from Suffolk, which he said was very similar to the beers he had in Japan.

Honey and Mustard Baked Pork Fillet with Parsnips [#223]

I love Donna Hay. I could so easily have made her the subject of the Challenge for the entire year, and might well do in 2011! Her recipes are elegant, simple, healthy and always work. This could scarcely have been simpler - pork fillet spread with grain mustard, honey and oregano, and roasted over chunky parsnips, which in turn absorb the fragrant juices from the pork, emerging tender and soft, not tough and charred, like roast parsnips often do. Loads of leftovers for tomorrow, too. We drank an Alsace Pinot Gris with this - crisper and less sweet than a Riesling, but still with enough fruit and honeyed sweetness to match the pork.

Yakisoba [#212]

As an occasional visitor to Wagamama, I thought I knew what Yakisoba was - a big pile of noodles fried with chicken or tofu or prawns with some veg, sesame seeds and quite a bit of oil. A nice dish, but nothing at all like Harumi Kurihara's version, the first from her book for this challenge. Rather, what she does is to fry cooked egg noodles in a flat 'pancake' on both sides in a little oil until crisp. This is then served with a saucy stirfry on the top of pork and pak choi, with mushrooms added in my case. The sauce is made from chicken stock, soy sauce, hoisin or oyster sauce, sesame oil and rice wine, lightly thickened with cornflour. It was unexpected, with really interesting textures and quite delicate flavours. As Harumi is generally hailed as the Japanese 'Delia', I am sure this is more authentic than the Wagamama version!

Grilled Pork Chop with Vermouth and Fennel [#184]

Very nice way with a pork chop, marinated in rosemary, garlic and lemon juice and then (in my case) fried until still succulent and served with a pan gravy of vermouth and caramelised braised fennel. Nigel recommends grilling, but I felt I needed the sauce you get with a sauteeing. We drank a delicious Pinot Gris d'Alsace, not too sweet, with this and it set it off beautifully.

Pork Ribs with Honey and Anise [#161]

My other half has just said 'yum', which for him, is quite an emotional outburst. These have just gone into our top 10 of recipes cooked so far in this challenge - but a word of warning....you MUST cook them my way, not Nigel's!!! Nigel puts the delicious marinade/coating of oyster sauce (hoisin in my case), honey, chilli and garlic onto the raw ribs and then bakes them. As any of my Chinese readers will attest, this is anathema! My lovely friend, Gi, who makes the world's most delicious ribs, insists that you simmer them in water first for an hour. This renders some of the fat and tenderises the meat. It then soaks up the marinade much more readily, and cooks in the oven to a succulent tenderness. But, apart from that, top recipe Nigel, with sweet, lightly spiced flavours enhancing the meat to perfection. We served ours with a stir-fry of bitter kale and sweet red peppers, which were a lovely counterpoint to the pork. If you cook this recipe - and I strongly recommend that you do - you might think that 1.5 kilos of ribs is waaaay too much for two. Let me tell you, it isn't, and you will find yourself greedily wondering why you didn't double the recipe as you sink your teeth into your twelfth piece.

Roast Pork Belly Sandwiches [#150]

Didn't make sandwiches! We had the marvellous burnished belly of pork with pan juices and roast potatoes. I have never been a fan of pork belly, worrying that it was too fatty - but after 2 and a half hours of slow roasting, the fat had virtually all but rendered. (Nigel only cooked his for an hour, which isn't really enough). The fragrant rub of very finely chopped fresh bay leaves and rosemary, with fennel seed and crushed garlic was pure Italy and the finished result tasted of that cuisine's classic porchetta. I picked the pork belly up for three quid in M&S so this is credit-crunchtastic gastronomy at its finest. Leftovers for a stir-fry tomorrow too. Drank a Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages 2007 with it, picked up cheap from Waitrose, so feeling very virtuous. Again, the smells as this dish cooked were incredible. Tasting note: the leftover pork, cut into 'lardons' for want of a better term, made the most glorious stir-fry - sauteed until crisp and doused in hoisin sauce and soy, stirred through egg noodles with stir-fry pepper, courgettes and spring onions. Nom-nom!

Roast Pork with Lemon and Potatoes [#75]

More of Nigel's favourite lemon flavour, though I used only 1 lemon, which was plenty. What really sang out in this lovely roast pork loin dish, though, is an ingredient uncredited in the recipe title - fennel seeds, which added a most unusual and delicious, almost Italian note - the Italians love fennel in their pork sausages. Really nice recipe, delicious served with local purple sprouting. Started with asaparagus wrapped in prosciutto (more pork!) and we'll finish with a little creamy rice pudding and local rhubarb baked with orange zest and juice. Sorry, can't find the recipe online, but basically, pork loin, chunky wedges of new potatoes, wedges of lemon, fennel seeds and olive oil. Roast it all till sticky and brown and unctuous.

Pork and Lemon Polpettine [#65]

Once again, Nigel triumphs with his meatballs (erm...you know what I mean!). These were zingy with lemon and savoury with thyme, parsley, Parmesan and anchovies. Served with pasta, lightly dressed with tomato and basil, and also some purple sprouting broccoli, they made a lovely, Italian-inspired supper, with a bottle of chilled Italian Soave to help it all down. By the way, we had an aperitif of gin with some delicious bitter lemon from Fever-Tree - not cheap but miles ahead of any other bitter lemon had before! Do try it - from Waitrose, and others, no doubt.

Mustard Chops [#63]

This is a nice, simple treatment for chops - pork, in our case, rather than the lamb that Nigel suggested - what is Nigel's obsession with lamb? He does eat a lot of it, and there are around 16 recipes using it in the book, as opposed to just 2 for beef! Anyway, can't find a recipe online, but dead easy. Crush garlic - lots. Mix with grain mustard - lots, but probably not as much as Nigel suggests (1 heaped teaspoon, rather than a tablespoon - yes, a tablespoon!). Add the juice of a lemon and a good splosh of olive oil, and lots of salt and pepper. Mix, and pour over 2 large, fat pork chops. Leave for an hour or so, and then grill, basting with the marinade, until crustily brown but still juicy in the middle. Lovely served with spring greens and plump grilled mushrooms.

Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce

Perfectly nice recipe, similar to ones that I have turned out time and again - essentially, sauteed pork chops, with a sauce made from the deglazed pan juices (with white wine), cream and mustard. I used considerably less cream than Nigel (which is turning out to be the norm!) - 30ml or 2 tablespoons, instead of the 225ml he suggsts in the recipe. His unusual touch (which isn't in this online version but IS in The Diaries) is some chopped cornichons, which add a nice crunch and piquancy to cut through the creaminess. Served with plain Basmati rice and some excellent Italian organic broccoli, it made for a nice Valentine's supper. Delicious bottle of slightly sweet La Couronne des Plantagenets Vouvray to accompany it.

Pork Burgers with Lime Leaves and Coriander

These little Thai flavoured burgers were gorgeous, sticky and deeply flavoured with kaffir lime leaves (frozen and finely chopped in a packet from Waitrose - brilliant time-saver), ginger, chilli, coriander and garlic. Served with egg-fried rice with peas, sweetcorn and edamame beans stirred through, and little dipping dishes of soy sauce and sweet chilli sauce mixed together. Spritzed with lime before serving, the whole plate sang with Asian flavours. We even have half the mixture to stash away in the freezer - yippee! This is definitely one to eat again.