The Italian Job

For reasons too tedious to explain, this week has been rather stressful -- as a weekend treat, I planned a day of cooking on Saturday, culminating in dinner and poker game with friends. There is a wonderful Farmer's Market which pops up in Headingley for a morning on the second Saturday of every month. I nearly always miss it (which is perhaps fortuitous as it's always at the end of the month just before payday, and I have no self control when it comes to buying nice food). This week, though, it was there and so was I. And I bought half a pig.

Supper also consisted of a starter of focaccia bread with oil and vinegar. If you only take one of my recommendations, click on the link above and make it this one. It does take an afternoon of tender kneading and proving in a warm place, but the result was genuinely one of the nicest things I've ever baked. It even elicited the compliment 'I thought it must've been from Waitrose'. Proud? I nearly burst.

The pork came from Swillington Organic Farm. I really believe you get what you pay for with meat and this was happy meat. I'd never roasted a pork joint before, so I was a bit nervous about risking burning two expensive ones. But the lady on the market stall was quite correct when she told me to stick them in the oven on 170 and forget about them for three hours. I gave the crackling a bit of a rub with some oil and salt, shoved some herbs and veggies in my roasting tray for gravy purposes, and let it get on with it. It turned out very well -- there was even some crispy crackling, which was pure luck, as I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I was trying for an Italian-esque menu, so I served it with some roasted potatoes and peppers and onions.

I rounded off the evening with vanilla panna cotta from The Silver Spoon. Easy enough to make: it just involves heating up milk, whisking in gelatine, adding to boiled cream and sugar, and then chilling. I served it with the recommended sauce, a sort of boozy should-have-been-hazelnut custard. (My sauce ended up being almond based, as I burnt the hazelnuts I should have been toasting -- c'est la vie, it still tasted nice.) The panna cotta tasted good, although it was extra firm and a bit too set for my tastes. The Silver Spoon is an Italian cookery bible in translation and does have various errors in it -- I suspect the large amount of gelatine in this recipe may be one of them. Or of course, there is the very real possibility that the Italians make the authentic version of the desert a lot firmer than we do over here. 

There are no pictures this week -- I'm afraid that a combination of red wine and a desire to be the hostess with the mostess meant that photographing my wares got forgotten. However, that's twenty seven recipes done and dusted. There won't be a blog next week, so I'll report back in a fortnight with news on recipes which I have cooked or cocked up.