Saturday, 30 April 2011

Wedding feast

After weeks of worrying about mouth sized jam sandwiches, bananas and rice crispie slices for the Devizes to Westminster canoe marathon and then recovering from ensuring said items were fed to M and his teamate along the banks of the Kennet and Avon Canal and the Thames, a great day yesterday was spent with a group of friends watching the wedding followed by a barbeque. Everyone came with meat and a salad or pudding. Part of my contribution was the rest of a rhubarb sauce that I made last week to go with duck breast - it went very well with the pork fillet that one of my friends contributed to the feast.

Chinese spiced Rhubarb sauce

200g rhubarb roughly chopped
2 tbsp orange juice
1 tsp chinese 5 spice
Honey to taste
Simmer until rhubarb is cooked through. Taste and adjust sweetness with honey

Sunday, 3 April 2011

Beef Braciole - Roast Pork and Rhubarb

My new favourite dish cooked by Mr B yesterday:
http://www.italianchef.com/braciole.html

For Mothering Sunday today I cooked Roast Pork and Rhubarb. A recipe that I can't find online but definitely will do again and goes something like:
Prepare the pork joint for crackling (score, dry, rub in oil and salt) and put in hot oven for 30 minutes. Take out and put pork onto a plate turning oven down to 170C. Make a layer of sliced red onions, thyme leaves (from about 6 sprigs of thyme), 2 star anise, 3 bay leaves. Put the pork back on top and pour 1 pint of dry cider around it. Cook for remaining cooking time minus 20 minutes. Total cooking time will be 30 minutes per lb and 30 minutes over.
For those remaining 20 minutes again put pork onto plate, drain off any fat in the pan then add 1lb+ chunks of rhubarb on top of the onions and drizzle with 3-4 tbsp runny honey. Put pork back on top and cook. At the end, leave the pork to rest, stir the onions and rhubarb etc together and serve with the pork.