Vegetarians, look away now!

We spent last week in the beautiful sitio real of La Granja de San Ildefonso near Segovia, a small but amazingly beautiful city around 100km from Madrid. Not only was the weather perfect but the speciality of the region is roast suckling pig. One restaurant even had a whole one sitting, a la Japanese restaurants except not made of plastic, in its window. Splatted piglet just doesn't entice. Unless you've eaten it before, when you know it is one of the most delicious meat dishes there is - moist, savoury, covered in flavourful crackling. But there's no denying it is not the most attractive-looking beast ever to arrive on my plate.

Wedding breakfast

My sister got married recently. Here is what she ate for lunch beforehand.



Don't you think that's the most inappropriate lunch for a blushing bride?

Pork chop but no pineapple

While discussing the limits and attraction of representationalism, Terry Eagleton asks: "Why do we take delight in an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop?"
My answer is: "I'm not sure, but I take delight in a pork chop itself because it smells like a pork chop. And tastes like one."
Tonight we had a very simple supper - grilled pork chops with a sauce made of mustard and sour cream, courgettes and mushrooms fried in garlicky olive oil, and steamed rice. It took twenty minutes to prepare and cook, kept warm without detriment for a whole half-hour while I did a phone interview for work (stupid Americans, why can't they work normal hours?), and tasted delicious at the end of it.
But no pineapple. Who eats pineapple on a pork chop, apart from Professor Eagleton?

Posting boasting

This is boasting by proxy - I'm showing off about what fantastic cooks my friends are. Friends of ours, M and K, invited us to dinner last weekend. M has been on a diet (they're getting married in seven weeks) so he's been starving himself for a while. And so, as you can imagine, he spent a whole lot of daydream time planning the menu.

After copious amounts of champagne, we started with a lamb salad - herbs and leaves and tender slices of cannon of lamb; then caramelized quail halves with carrots and pine nuts; sweetbreads (mmmmmm yum!); watermelon and feta salad; guinea fowl and fennel salad.
At this point, M and K weren't sure if we needed another course - we might have politely said 'no, no' if we hadn't overheard K saying earlier to M "Don't you think you've sliced the bellypork a bit thick?"

So we finished up with the most delicious spicy bellypork on steamed pak choi. Mmmmm.
Technically it might have counted as an Atkins meal, which I've always thought was anathema, but it was delicious from start to finish.

I'd say it's going to be a happy marriage!

Atkins dreams

According to One who Knows, food in Turkey is all about the salad. The meat is good, but a bit same-old, same-old after a while. The really exciting thing is the salad, made from ultra-fresh fruit and vegetables, grown full of flavour under the Mediterranean sun.
Here in Dalston, it's all about the meat. Our nearest restaurant is luckily also one of the best. Mangal 1, so-called to distinguish it from its younger but bigger brother round the corner, Mangal 2, is named for the Turkish barbecue that forms its centrepiece and its main cooking style.
We went there on impulse this evening and were lucky enough to be seated immediately. This had the disadvantage that we were rushed past the list of meats available to be grilled - no such frills as menus in Mangal.
When asked to order, we looked blank, so the long-suffering waiter said 'Would you like a mixed grill to share?' In order to show some independence and originality of thought, we bravely asked for aubergine to start with.
Anywhere else, just asking for aubergine would be a bit strange. Here it brought us a plate covered with a beautiful hot mush of smokey aubergine and roasted peppers, brightly spiced and salted, with a blob of sour cream to provide smooth bass notes.
I foolishly asked for more of the hot Turkish bread to mop it up with after we finished the first basket.
Foolish only because the starter, which would have done me quite happily as a light supper, was followed by a plate with approximately half a lamb, several small birds and delicious meat-juice-soaked flatbread. After we had resigned ourselves to spending the rest of the evening chomping our way through a wall of protein, a huge plate of salad was put down in the only remaining space on the table.
The salad was nice enough - grated carrot, rocket, shredded red cabbage, small chunks of white turnip (bear with me here) and other vegs chopped up and a little salad oil poured over them.
But the meat! Oh, the meat! I am used to meat here in the UK being tender but not particularly flavourful, especially the lamb. In Mangal, every mouthful is savoury, juicy, just resisting enough to the bite to give a satisfying mouthful.
After about ten minutes (one lamb chop, a chicken wing and several bits of shish kebab), the waiter returned with two enormous adana kofte, long tubes of spicy minced lamb, delicious but slightly obscene looking.
Luckily they seem quite used to effete eaters who are unable to cope with this bounty, and volunteered to put the remains of both grill and salad in a box, so our meals for the next three days are sorted.

As well hung for a sheep as for a lamb

There are occasional campaigns to revive the British tradition of eating mutton, but they never seem to get very far. This doesn’t seem too surprising, given that the British seem to value tenderness in lamb far above flavour, although that may also explain why the mutton stalwarts continue to fight the good fight.
Having spent years failing to find lamb in the UK that carries the savoury depth of flavour that a Wicklow sheepfarmer’s daughter considers a prerequisite, I was very open to conviction on the subject of mutton.
My first foray, an attempt at Irish stew, was disastrous. The flavour was no more than ok, and the meat was almost inedibly tough. Given that I was trying out recipes for a buffet, this was an important consideration!
But this week I wandered into überbutcher the Ginger Pig to enquire about their advertised butchery courses (watch this space for further details!), and was tempted by a display of cubed Swaledale mutton, hung for 28 days and advertised as perfect for curry.
I chose a Rajasthan recipe (based on the fact that this was the only recipe I could find for which I had all the ingredients in the kitchen) which involved a teaspoon of whole cloves and a dozen dried chillies.
This ferocious dish cooked for about an hour and a half, reducing the spices to a fabulously rich, thick gravy, and I’m happy to report that mutton was precisely the right meat to stand up to this abusive treatment.
Despite looking worryingly sinewy when it went into the pan, the mutton had turned into tender chunks with a rich meaty flavour that was not overpowered by the curry sauce.
Only the fact that there is something irredeemably wrong with my rice let the meal down. Originally I assumed it was just bad karma that meant my rice wouldn’t cook right, but now I think it’s just too old. I will buy some new rice and report back on whether my karma improves.