Pig's cheek stew with cauliflower mash

Waitrose has a clever thing at its meat counter called "forgotten cuts", where they sell the odds and ends of animal, which have become so fashionable in the last four or five years.

Usually it's just pork belly and kidney and I'm like "Yawn, not forgotten by me, laddie-me-lad" but the other day they were offering a pack of pig's cheeks. And I said to myself "Hello. Now that really is interesting." So I bought them. Here they are.

I always consider recipes that work first time (for me) as "easy" recipes, since I am so liable to get things wrong. And when I say get things wrong, I mean be too lazy to read the recipe properly, or to measure ingredients out correctly, or put the kitchen timer on. But since this recipe went right first time, I categorize it as being an "easy" recipe. I also had with it a cauliflower mash, inspired by the fashion and food blogger Liberty London Girl, who was busy poking fun at me the other week for my fear of carbohydrate. But I put a potato in it. Ha! (DID YOU LIKE MY HYPERLINK?)

So here we go. This stew makes the pig's cheeks taste quite like beef, but in a nice way. The recipe is a bastardisation of a thing I found in a Gary Rhodes book, the name of which now escapes me.

For the pig's cheek stew:
For 2

4 pig's cheeks
2 carrots, quartered
2 stick celery, quartered
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 medium onion
1/3 bottle cheap red wine
1/3 pint of stock
4 black peppercorns
Assorted herbs: parsley, sage, thyne and bay leaf. But do not worry if you don't have any/all

1 - Brown the pig's cheeks in a large frying pan for about 4-5 minutes each side. I think it's important here to fry in either ground-nut oil or lard and NOT olive oil because the olive oil will burn and taste horrible. Remove the cheeks to a casserole dish.

2 - Fry the onions, carrots, garlic and celery for 10 minutes over a very low flame. I know it's boring and it seems like nothing's happening but if you cook them any hotter they'll burn, you know they will.

3 - Add the red wine and the stock to the vegetables and bring to a brisk simmer. Then add to the cheeks. Stir round and then add the herbs and four black peppercorns. Give it another stir and put the lid on and cook on a low heat for 2 hours. Season to taste with salt after it's cooked.

Here are some herbs. I happened to have a lot hanging around so I put a lot in, but this would work just as well with whatever you've got - thyme OR bay leaves or sage or whatever.

For the cauliflower mash:
For 2

1 cauliflower
1 medium sized floury potato (like a King Edward)
1 tablespoon of cream
1 large pinch of salt

1 - Boil the potato and cauliflower until soft - the potato takes about 25 minutes, if chopped into 4 and the cauliflower takes about 5 minutes.
2 - Put the potato and cauliflower into a blender and WHIZZ. Add a tablespoon of cream and a large pinch of salt. I had to blend my cauliflower and potato mix in two batches.

So there we go. Not very summery, but then it's not really summer yet.

Don't mind me, I'm just trying out a hyperlink

Which hasn't worked. It's supposed to go to Jamie Oliver's website, but it just hits a brick wall. Does anyone know anything about this shit?!

...... [Later]........

Ha! It works!!! Many thanks to my technowhizzkids who helped out by posting advice below. This is going to usher in a brand new world of Recipe Rifling.

xxxx

Better late than never

A visitor to this blog reminded me that I haven't posted those wedding photos that I promised. So here are one or two...

Me and the Hamburgler. She isn't actually as tall as that, she is wearing mega shoes. But even without them she's pretty tall.

All-important back view of the dress...

Cake! Obviously

I'd post more but then it would start to be like a spread in Hello! And also my teeth being in their ongoing state of mangling - by my damned handsome bastard dentist - look at the moment like a tankful of pirahnas. They are higgledy and piggledy. So frankly they're not really for public consumption.

I can stick some more shots of the food up though? But how interesting would that be really? I can't tell you how to make any of it because I don't know. Although I was thinking about getting the wedding cake recipe off Angela Hartnett because it was just amazing. A sort of banana carrotty cake thing. It made me slightly angry it was so delicious.

While we're all just waiting around

So, I'm planning to write about pig's cheeks in a bit. But not until tomorrow, realistically, because I'm cooking them for dinner tonight. And for lunch today we're having chicken soup, and I know you won't give a rat's ass about that. So I'm at a bit of a loss of what to write about. And I know that if you're going to do a blog you have to do it every day or people think you're a lazy tosspot who's only doing a blog because your husband is on telly and so you can't be arsed to get a job.

I hate soup, have I mentioned that? Urgh, hate it. What, honestly, is the point of soup? I am not a baby. I have a lot of very large, some very sharp, teeth. I can chew stuff. I like chewing stuff. I don't need my food boiled up and then WHIZZED, thanks.

Whenever I am flicking through a recipe book in a shop, if it's got an entire section on soup I don't buy it. I will eat soup that has good bits in it, you know, beans, barley, chunks of meat, entire quarters of carrot - all that jazz. So that's what we're having for lunch. It's only acceptable because I found this huge chicken in Waitrose, amazing, free range, slow growing bird - looked like it had a pretty good life - and it was reduced by £5 to £8 or something crazy. So I took it home and roasted it up and we've been eating it cold since then. Except this lunchtime, when it will be hot. In soup.

But I've been writing a thing for a magazine about other food bloggers and it's made me realise that I am just like totally missing a trick. So many of them write about restaurants! They're crazy for them! They go in and take photos of their food before they eat it and then post them on the internet and write about them.

And they go to foodie parties and get actual journalistical stories and break news on their blogs. The reason that this is all new to me is that I haven't been able to bring myself to have a really good look at other people's blogs because they're always so much better, with cooler photos and more interesting shit on them than mine that I get depressed and have to go back to bed for three or four days.

But with this in mind, maybe while we're passing the time before I go to the shops and buy the stuff I need for my pig's cheek thing (carrots, celery, cheap red wine) I should tell you about a food party I went to last night?

Okay, so it was a party for Tom Aikens at Somerset House. He's got some new restaurant thing opening there. There were lots of red lights everywhere and the music was really loud and there were canapes but we couldn't seem to access them, so Giles agreed to do an interview on camera (for "Tommy TV" or something) in exchange for 4 mini cheeseburgers AND THEY NEVER BROUGHT THEM.

But the foie gras and tomato chutney thing and the chicken skewer I had were both really nice. I think it will be a good restaurant. And Tom Aikens who, when I was a baby hack, had a reputation as not being especially nice, is charming! A really cheerful, smiley guy. I was amazed. We had a little joke - titter titter - about both being redheads and how shit it is. We compared freckles in the scary red light. He was wearing Converse, which I always think is the mark of a good fellow. I don't know if he's always been like that or it's because of Giles or maybe a touch of bankruptcy is good for the soul, but I give him 9.5 out of 10.

Then I had a couple of fags (or did I just mean to?) with my old mate Rob Sharp from the Independent and worshipped Elizabeth Day from the Observer for a bit and talked world domination strategies with Zoe Strimpel from City AM. And then we drove home and ate cold chicken as I nursed a really painful attack of heartburn.

And THAT, ladies and gents, is why I don't write about restaurants or food parties. Best left to the real food bloggers.

Peace out. Pig's cheeks soon.

Crispy pork with lemongrass and chilli

I've been trying for a while to re-create a Thai minced pork dish that , seven years ago, I used to eat at least twice a week for lunch.

It hasn't been going very well because I don't know what it's called - either in Thai or in English - and so I can't find a recipe. I tried to just, you know, wing it once and piled in fish sauce, soy sauce, ginger, garlic and whatever else I could find in my cupboards onto my minced pork. And it was disgusting. Genuinely the worst thing I've ever cooked - apart from that time at university when I made pasta with a black peppercorn sauce meant for steak.

But then as a wedding present a friend got me Books for Cooks 9 and while flicking through it I found a recipe for Crispy Pork with Lemongrass and Chilli and I thought that it must be an approximation of my Thai thing and so I made it today. For lunch.

The reason I've got such a desire for this thing right now is all because of the election. You see, my first job was as a researcher at The Week, which is a news digest magazine. You might not believe it to look at my vacant little face, the dim spark in my callow eyes, but I used to be, like, well into politics, bruv. And my job at The Week meant that I had to read all the papers, every single day. ALL of them. Every day. And not just the fashion pages and the first paragraph of some crappy feature about Prozac. I mean all the politics pages, all the leaders, each columnist on every comment page from start to finish, right from the dull opening paragraph to the tedious conclusion. Everything. I used to be able to guess the columnist 9 times out of 10 from the opening sentence. Like a newsnerd's version of Name That Tune.

It's why these days I only read the fashion pages and crappy features about Prozac.

Even if I hadn't been interested in it, I couldn't help but know everything there was to know about the politics of the time; when I was there it was all about the dodgy dossier, Hutton, Iraq, Alastair Campbell's departure from No. 10, all that Sexator stuff: Rod Liddle and Alicia Monckton, Boris and Petsy Wyatt, David Blunkett and Kimberly Quinn. This last was triply exciting for us as Kimberley Quinn used to receive, and probably still does, a personally-posted free copy of The Week, which was mailed to her house every Thursday by whatever poverty-stricken Arts graduate was sitting on reception that day.

I sat through 2 years of it all in that little office on Westbourne Grove, reading the papers, photocopying, making coffee, cutting out and blu-tacking up Giles's columns to the wall, sweeping up, finding my boss's glasses, piling up old newspapers against the far window which used to bulge and leak whenever it rained.

And then, when I was feeling rich (because it cost £6 with rice) I'd go to the Thai takeaway round the corner on Chepstow Road (I never knew and still don't know what it's called) and purchase this flaming hot, dark, rich porky thing and scoff it at my desk with a large glass of water reading - as a bit of light relief - the fashion pages and crappy features about Prozac.

So say "24 hour news" to me, and I reach for the nam pla. Yesterday's departure of Gordon Brown and the arrival of David Cameron, David Dimbleby's timbre, the speculation about ties, outriders, policy, who's got what in the cabinet, the minutiae of Buckingham Palace protocol, made me forget all the bad things about working in an office. For a couple of hours last night I longed to be back in that room in Westbourne Grove, eating my expensive Thai lunch and watching BBC News 24 on the fuzzy telly in the corner of the office with the boy who sat opposite me and talking about what was going to happen next.

But you can't ever go back. The office has long gone, anyway - moved somewhere else, I can't remember where, and thus the Thai place is no longer round the corner. But as a pretty fair substitute I can sit in my kitchen eating an approximation of the Thai thing with my husband, listening to the lunchtime news on Radio 4.

So here we go:

Crispy Pork with lemongrass and chilli - from Mince! 100 Fabulously Frugal Recipes by Mitzie Wilson, via Books for Cooks 9

For 4 as a starter, for 2 as a light lunch

For the sauce:
4 tbsp fish sauce
juice 2 limes
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
1 tbsp sesame oil

For the pork:
1 tbsp sunflower oil
500g pork mince
1/2 onion, chopped
1 lemon grass stalk, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 spring onions, sliced
2 tbsp roughly chopped coriander
fish sauce
Tabasco

1 - Make the sauce by whisking ingredients together
2 - Cook the pork and onions together over a medium heat, breaking up any large lumps of mince until it looks fine and crumbly (about 10 mins)
3 - if your mince is very fatty you can drain some of it away and return to the heat
4 - Cook for another 5 minutes. The recipe says "until crispy and golden" but I didn't really achieve that. You might.
5 - Add the lemongrass, chilli and garlic and cook for another 2 minutes. Stir in your sauce, coriander and spring onions. The recipe say cook for another 2 minutes, but I blasted it for a bit longer, about 5-7 minutes, with a bit of water so that the spring onions and garlic were a bit less scary.

Have this with large leaves of iceberg lettuce, which you wrap the mince up in like some insane Atkins fajita. Serve with PMQs.

Quail's eggs

Are quail's eggs seasonal? I just don't know. All I do know is that I went to the butcher on Kentish Town High Street the other day and he was selling some on his counter top. And I thought "quail's eggs!" I haven't had any of those for ages (neatly forgetting the zillions I guzzle regularly at Jin Kichi in Hampstead).

There are two tricks to cooking quail's eggs passed on to me by the mighty Mark Hix. Actually, make that three tricks.

1 - Boil for two minutes and then plunge into very cold water, which stops them cooking and makes the yolk go that lovely fondant consistency
2 - When you peel them - which can be a bugger - start at the pointy end rather than the fat end. It makes the white less likely to rip
3 - Eat with CELERY SALT, which you make by baking some celery leaves (just lop them off a bunch of celery stalks) in a hot oven for 3 minutes until brittle and flaky and then pounding together with some salt.

The best thing to do with quail's eggs, to my mind, is to have them as a starter. They have an interesting gamey flavour, which I think is lost if you put them in any sort of salad. Much better in my opinion to leave them as they are.

Girls eat about four as a canape and boys about 6.

By the end of all that peeling you'll be an expert.

Escape from Blue Palace

Aloha! Or whatever the fuck they say in Greece. Look, I totally won't bore you with a million photos of my honeymoon because it's only the modern equivalent of getting you all round to mine for a 4 hour slide show of holiday snaps. And anyway, I know you don't care about Knossos or sea views or any of that smulchy crap: you want to know about that damned food.

So, okay, here we go: eating in Greece is as tricky as eating anywhere else in the world: big hotels will insist on serving you 19€ cheeseburgers or dim sum and sea-view lunch joints (even on teeny tiny islands) will fob you off with limp, cold dolmades straight from the fridge and a sad chicken souvlaki with giant puffy white rice and carrots and peas out of a can.

Fine for some but not OK for us, right? So, I whittled down for you the best places to go in Agios Nikolaos (Crete) and Santorini. Specifc? Yes, but I only had a ten-day honeymoon and we had to sift through a lot of shit to find nice places.

We stayed first in a huge mega hotel called the Blue Palace. Nice, if you do want that 19€ cheeseburger or dim sum at 4am, but in terms of food, about as real as sour-flavour Haribo. Nearby, in Elounda  was a restaurant called Vritomartis (do not confuse it with the naturist hotel if you are looking it up), which did fantastic dolmades and actual fresh fish - for only about £10,000! A snip. Here is a nice view of the sea from Elounda harbour:

Then in Agios Nikolaos there is a brilliant place called Pelakonos, which has a sort of tree-house feel and has delicous spinach pies, more fish and shrimp saganaki, which is shrimp in a kind of spicy cheese and tomato sauce.

Here is Pelakonos:

... isn't it nice? And here's a shot of the food:

yum.

[N.B. I would like to point out that although I disapprove quite strongly of taking photos of your food in restaurants (it freaks the kitchen out, it freaks other diners out) I took a photo here because we were the only people having lunch. This is no reflection on the quality of the place, it was just early May and very quiet.]

Anyway, after about a week we did a runner from Crete and went to Santorini, which is what people are talking about, I guess, when they rave about Greek islands. It is, it must be said, teeming with Japanese and American tourists. I didn't mind, as all the prevalence of Japanese and American people usually means is that a place is a) clean and b) picturesque.

We stayed at Perivolas, a hotel at the end of a mile-long stretch of "Traditional houses" - that is, rooms made out of caves carved into the side of the cliff - in Oia (pronounced "Eee-yah"). Whitewashed, all clinging to the side of the teetering cliffs, these hotels were just bloody gorgeous. The main town of Oia was beautiful, quiet and mostly traffic-free.

Here's a nice view from our cave-room:

... and one from Oia:

and Giles hard at work (seriously):

The two places we found here to eat were Dimitris, in Ammoudhi bay and Krinaki in Finikia. None of this is useful or makes sense or is interesting unless you are planning to take a holiday in Santorini. But if you were, what a stroke of luck this post would be.