Prog Chefs Unite!!!

Anyway, today I am mostly cooking day-long pork belly - I started it last night before I went to bed and it's been cooking away at a low oven temperature (100ºC) or 12 hours so far - we'll eat it before its had the full "day" - probably after 15 hours. Serving that with potato, celeriac and apple dauphinoise and mangetout peas. I haven't thought about pudding yet - I picked up some fresh English strawberries at the grocers yesterday - we've a couple of meringue shells stored in a tin somewhere - an Eton mess sounds like a good solution.

 

Since the oven was going to be on for such a long time, I bought four duck legs to confit - these were rubbed with a salt/pepper/juniper cure and left for a couple of hours before being rinsed-off, dried, placed in a deep roasting tin and covered with ½Kg of melted lard (ideally you should use duck fat but that's stupidly expensive, you can use solid vegetable fat, but I prefer lard - a much maligned ingredient that is not "unhealthy" even if ½Kg sounds a stupid amount - you're not going to eat it). This was left in the oven overnight until the hot fat had dissolved all the collagen that separates the meat fibres and rendered away all the duck fat, leaving ridiculously tender meat and duck-skin that will crisp-up superbly when it get's its final roast. Once cooked the duck is kept in the cooking fat until you need it - in a fridge this will keep for several days, if the salt-cure had been longer it can be kept for months as long as the fat completely covers the duck legs (keeping out all the air and air-borne nasties that would turn it bad). When you want to eat the duck scrape off the fat (and keep it - it's great for roasting spuds) and then roast the legs in a hot oven for 15-20 minutes to drain off any remaining fat and crisp-up the skin..

 

 

Later today I'm going to tea-smoke some Alaskan wild salmon for our Bento boxes tomorrow - while stocking-up on leaf teas at my favourite tea shop (Char on Winchester High Street) I spied a pound bag of Peruvian Lemon Verbena - as lemon and salmon are best mates it seems the idea leaf to smoke the fish with... I also picked up some Orange Oolong at the same time, that's a wonderfully refreshing brew that's a pleasant alternative to lemon tea.

 

If I can find an elder tree that's not to close to a road (hence not smothered in diesel fumes) I'll be making our anual supply of Elderflower champagne this week end - sadly the tree in our garden is now over-shadowed by our neighbours beech tree so no longer flowers.

I'm having belly pork today. A recipe from a hairy Bikers book.