Post the Sixty-seventh (in which the Heineken Cup quickens)

Possibly the last Heineken Cup, in its current form, anyway.  Irish readers, even those with virtually no interest in rugby, will be well aware that PRL (Premiership Rugby Ltd., i.e. the English clubs) attempted a breakaway from the ERC this year.  In a nutshell, they wanted more money from the communal kitty, believing that the Premiership is a superior competition to the Rabo Direct Pro12, and, as such, they should be entitled to more money and more qualification slots.  They initially managed to get the French on board, but they abandoned ship shortly afterwards and rowed back in with the ERC.  So then the Welsh regions jumped on the breakaway competition wagon, but they're such a non-entity in European rugby at the moment that winning them over must surely seem like a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for Quentin Smith et al.

Anyway, the debate about the future of European cup rugby is definitely worthy of a post in its own right.  Nobody knows what form the competition will take next year, so for now, all we can do is enjoy the current showdown.  Round 5 finished this weekend with Leinster grinding out an away win against Castres to see us topping our pool, with Ospreys at home on Friday to finish out the pool stages.  All we need to qualify is a losing bonus point, while a bonus-point win would give us a very vague chance of getting a home quarter-final.  However, as shite as Ospreys have been this year, they have ever been our bogey team in the RDS, so a losing bonus point would do me, quite frankly.  Round 6 always throws up a few surprise results, but as it stands, the quarter finals look likely to shake out as follows:

Toulouse v Saracens
Toulon v Ulster
Clermont v Leinster
Leicester v Munster

Clermont.  Again.  I honestly don't know which team will dread that fixture more.  Travelling to the Stade Marcel Michelin is always a daunting prospect, and our back-to-back losses to Clermont put us out of the competition last year.  Having said that, revenge is always a great motivator.  And I don't think there's any team in the knockout stages who'd relish the prospect of hosting us.  It's going to be a very interesting set of quarter-finals, that's for sure.

So, onwards to the food.  Today's recipe is the third of the Lidl "7 Family Meals for €50" collection.  I should point out at this juncture that I'm not posting these in the order they appear in the booklet, but rather the order I felt like cooking them in.  This is the "Sunday dinner" of the booklet, probably because it's the most expensive dish of the lot.  But you know me, I'm nothing if not rebellious, so we had this for dinner on Friday night instead.  It might sound a *little* esoteric for the more beige-palated amongst you, but you really should give it a go, even if you think you don't like one or more of the individual ingredients, because they really do marry brilliantly together to give a whole that's a lot greater than the sum of its parts.

Pork Chops with Gorgonzola and Roasted Pears - serves 4

4 pork loin chops                                     4 pears, cut in half & cored
4 small onions, peeled & quartered         100g gorgonzola
20 sage leaves                                          1 tsp sugar
12 baby potatoes, quartered                     3 tbs olive oil
Knob of butter                                          150ml water
Salt & pepper

1. Preheat oven to 180C.  Put the potatoes, pears and onions into a large baking tray, drizzle over the oil, season with salt & pepper and give everything a good toss to coat.  Dot with the butter, scatter over the sage leaves, add the water, then cover with foil and roast for 20 minutes.

2. Remove the foil, jack the heat up to 200C, sprinkle over the sugar and return to the oven for another 10 - 15 minutes until everything is lovely and golden.

3. Meanwhile, pan-fry or griddle the pork chops for 3 minutes on each side, finishing with it on its side to crisp up the fat. 

4. Split the potato & pear mix between four warmed plates, scatter over the gorgonzola and top with a pork chop.  Enjoy!

 

 

Suggestions: I spread both sides of the chops with wholegrain mustard before cooking.  Also, the second time I made this, I added the gorgonzola to the baking tray for the last couple of minutes in the oven rather than waiting til it was plated up, and it made for extra-delicious oozey meltiness.

 

By the way, you should totally use the leftover gorgonzola to make the blue cheese butter used in the Mexican Lasagna post from last week.

             

Post the Fifty-second (in which our heroine returns to the kitchen)

So, your sometime correspondent returned to the kitchen last night.  I genuinely can't remember the last time I cooked a meal, to my shame.  There was much jubilation in the Coffey household.  I even invited a special guest in the form of my friend A.  (But it was really only cause I knew she'd bring Prosecco...)  Your correspondent pondered muchly on just what she should cook.  In the end, she plumped for Mexican, which should surprise no-one who has been a regular peruser of this blog.  Ok, I lie; strictly speaking the recipe is from Arizona, or at least it's in the "Arizona" section of the Jamie Oliver cookbook from whence it came, but sue me, I'm listing it under Mexican as, quite frankly, I can't see myself having enough Arizonan (Arizonian?) recipes on this blog to make it worth my while creating a whole new set of tags. 

We've discussed in depth my love of Mexican flavours previously on this blog.  This recipe has pretty much all of them - chillies, lime, coriander.  But it's quite different too - the addition of mint and sage give it a zing and freshness that make it really dance on your tastebuds.  Plus, it's ridiculously easy to make, which is a plus in anyone's book, right?  Perfick Friday night grub with a few cold beers.  I'd imagine that, like most chillies, it would be even better the next day, but to be honest, I've made it twice now and on neither occasions have any leftovers made it through the night in order to test that theory.

Btw, your correspondent is also on the blocks next week in the Boards.ie Cooking Club and this is the recipe I'll be using, with the addition of Navajo Flatbreads, so if you'd like to know how to make them, have a shufti over there next Friday.

Jamie Oliver's Green Chilli - serves 4

800g lean pork mince                                            1 tsp dried sage
2 large onions, diced                                             2 green peppers, seeded & diced
6 small green chillies, roughly chopped                4 cloves garlic, crushed
4 large, ripe tomatoes, deseeded & chopped         Bunch coriander, chopped
Small bunch fresh mint, chopped                          Juice of 1 lime
1 Romaine lettuce                                                  Bunch spring onions                                            
Yoghurt & tortillas to serve

1. Heat a little oil in a large pan or pot and brown your mince until no pink remains.  Make sure you give it a good going over with a fork to really break it up.

2. Add your sage (use twice the amount of dried oregano if you can't get sage), onions, peppers, chillie and garlic and cook on a high heat for about 10 minutes, or until any water from the pork/veg has been driven off.

3. Stir in your tomaters and half a glass of water.  Season well with plenty of salt and fresh black pepper, turn the heat down slightly and let everything simmer away nicely for another ten minutes or so - this chilli is supposed to be quite dry, so again you want to let most of the moistsure cook off.

4. When the chilli is almost ready to serve, stir in the lime juice and the chopped coriander and mint.  Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed (it will likely need more salt), then turn the heat off but leave the pot on the warm ring.

5. Wash and dry your lettuce and spring onions, then roughly chop them.  heat a flour tortilla per person, fold it into quarters and pop it into a bowl.  Ladle over your chilli, then scatter over some chopped lettuce & spring onions.  Serve with yoghurt or sour cream on the side for the wimps at the table.

                                        

Post the Forty-ninth (in which we see the worst photo of the blog so far)

It really is quite bad.  Apologies in advance.  I'm staying in my mam's at the moment and my camera (as crappy as it is) is at home, so I'm stuck with phone pics for the time being.  The sad thing is that the blurry, out-of-focus, badly composed photo you're about to see is the best of the five or six pictures I took.  We're in for a rough couple of weeks on the blog, folks...

I will probably also have a battle on my hands to be let cook enough to even maintain the blog.  I've mentioned before that my mother never seems overly-keen on the idea of me cooking.  I think this is down to the fact that A) she feels like she should be minding me, and B) she is always secretly convinced that I'm going to poison everyone. Anyone who eats their steak bloody clearly can't be trusted in the kitchen...

I did, however, win the battle for the kitchen last night. It remains to be seen who will win the war...

Pork & Feta Pie - serves 4-6

500g pork mince                        500g pork chops, finely diced
250g feta cheese                        1 egg
Zest of 1 lemon                          Medium bunch fresh coriander, chopped
1 onion, diced                            1 stick of celery, diced
4 cloves garlic, crushed              1 large red chili, finely diced
1 tsp ground cumin                     10 sheets filo pastry
Salt & pepper                             Oil for brushing

1. Place the mince, diced pork, onion, garlic, celery, egg, chili, coriander & cumin in a large bowl.  Crumble over the feta, season well and mix everything really thoroughly.

2. Brush a rectangular baking dish (preferably metal, but it's not a deal-breaker) with oil. Lay five of the filo sheets in the dish, allowing a little to hang over the edges; brushing each one with oil as you go.  Press the pork mix into the dish and smooth over. Lay the other five sheets on top, again brushing each one with oil as you go.  Fold over the overhanging edges and brush the whole lot with one more layer of oil.  Stab a little cross in the centre to allow steam to escape.

3. Bake in an oven preheated to 200C for 40 minutes.  If the pastry is browning too quickly, cover loosely with foil until the last 10 minutes of cooking.  Allow to stand for 10 minutes before slicing into six pieces.  Serve with spinach salad, yoghurt and maybe some potato salad.

Post the Forty-fifth (in which Leinster begin their defence of the Heineken Cup)

It was an away match, so we weren't there.  Our budget unfortunately doesn't stretch to travelling for the pool stages.  So down to the pub it was, because our budget also doesn't stretch to Sky Sports.  Our budget doesn't stretch to much at all, truth be told...

So our opening game was against Montpellier.  French teams are perennially accused of being more interested in their domestic league than the Heineken Cup, but that doesn't matter when you're playing them at home.  An outbreak of mumps in the Montpellier camp had seen them miss their match the previous week and there was some expectation that they might be a bit rusty as a result; but by God, that was not the case.  Despite the fact that you can never expect to easily beat French teams at home, Leinster were still expected to battle out a victory in the end.  As it happened, we were extremely lucky to come away with a draw. Montpellier were completely dominant at the breakdown, their defence was nigh-on impenetrable and their discipline was good enough that they conceded very few penalties.  It was only in the final twenty minutes or so that Leinster were able to build any kind of momentum, and even that was more down to the Montpellier pack getting tired than any improvement in our play. The ref. awarded a rather suspect penalty and Johnny Sexton equalised with the very last kick of the game.  Two points in the bag, and I suspect that the team were more than happy with that, given the way Montpellier played.  Onwards and upwards from here, hopefully.

The plan was to watch the match, which kicked-off at 1.30pm, come home, have a bath while Emmet did some work on his car and then make a fish pie for dinner.  However, we ended up getting into a bit of an impromptu session in the pub, and staggered home at about 11pm with a bag of chips each.  Ah well.  I'm going to do the fish pie today instead.  It's just as well, really, seeing as the pheasant I was hoping to get today appears to be unforthcoming.  (Hint hint, Chris!)

The recipe I'm about to give you, I made on Wednesday.  One of the great things about this blog is that it has forced me to widen my repertoire a bit - nobody wants to read five chicken recipes a week. This recipe uses pork mince and it was so delicious.  Really fresh flavours, and a nice way to get away from the chicken-fillet-or-beef-mince rut we all find ourselves in from time to time.  I served them with pitta bread, Greek salad and homemade hummous.

Sheftalia - serves two

450g pork mince                      1 large onion, very finely diced
3 garlic cloves, crushed             Small bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Juice of 1 lemon                        25g feta, cut into 6 cubes
6 black olives, chopped            1 fresh green chili, finely diced
Pinch of ground cumin               Salt & pepper

1.  Put half the chopped onion into a large bowl and add the mince, garlic, parsley, lemon juice and season to taste.  Mix well until everything is evenly distributed.  Divide into 6 rough balls, push a cube of feta into each and then mould into tight ovals.  Pop back into the fridge for half an hour to firm up.

2. Heat a couple of glugs of veg or sunflower oil in a large pan.  Cook the sheftalia on all sides until evenly golden-brown all over - this will take about 15 or 20 minutes.  Drain on kitchen towels and keep warm.

3. Add the rest of the onion, the chili and the chopped olives to the pan.  Sprinkle over the ground cumin and cook gently until the onion is soft but not browned.  Squeeze over a little extra lemon juice if you fancy.  Serve the sheftalia on warmed plates, topped with the onion mixture.

Post the Thirty-first (in which our heroine finally caves and joins Twitter)

I was so strong for so long.  I really, really was.  But since a certain over-zealous mod on Boards.ie banned blog links in their Cooking & Recipes section, I've been forced to consider other ways to get this blog out there, and it seemed that Twitter was a bit of a no-brainer.  So, if you feel like following me, I'm @CookingCoffey.  I promise to restrain myself as much as possible, ok?  All tweets will be put through a rigorous quality-control system to ensure that only the funniest and most acerbic (and food-related, obviously) make it though the brain-to-keyboard filter.  I'll still talk as much crap as I want on Facebook, though.

So, if you're still interested, we're on to day three of the pulled pork.  Definitely not one for the instant-gratification brigade, but in food, as with all things in life, good things come to those who wait.  By the way, this is perfect party food, and if you have a large-capacity slow-cooker, you could totally increase the size of the pork joint - just make sure to increase the other ingredients by the same volume.  To give you an idea, though, this recipe quantity fed Emmet and I for two nights in a row.  And Emmet eats a lot.

Pulled Pork Day Three

3 tbs brown sauce                        2 tbs "normal" vinegar (optional)
Soft baps                                     Whole pickles
Coleslaw (see recipe below)

1.  So, your pork is cooked to perfection, so all we need to do now is sauce it and serve it.  Remove the pork from the cooking liquid and stick it on a large chopping board.  Strain the cooking liquid into a smaller pot (discard the veg) and place over a high heat.  Bring to the boil and allow to reduce to about a third of its original volume.

2. While the sauce is reducing, pull your pork.  Simply grab two forks and shred your pork roughly with them.  When it's all shredded, go across it once or twice with your biggest knife, just to make sure it's all nice and even.  Bung it back into the pot with your reduced sauce, add the brown sauce and vinegar (have a taste first if you're not sure about using the vinegar - I like sharp tastes but you might prefer it a bit sweeter), season with salt & pepper, if needed, and heat through.

3. Serve on a warmed platter in the middle of the table with the soft baps (Aldi do a pack of eight miniature soft rolls which are PERFECT for this), coleslaw and pickles.  As you can see, I made chips too.

Thanks to Ashlie at www.feedingmyobsessions.blogspot.com for the coleslaw recipe (with one or two minor changes).  I hate mayonnaise, and by extension have always hated coleslaw, but this one is really, really good.

Homemade Tangy Slaw

250g white cabbage, shredded               1 huge carrot, peeled & grated
150ml natural yoghurt                             2 tbs lemon juice
1 tbs red wine vinegar                            0.5 tsp sugar
Pinch each of: cumin, smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, chili powder.
Salt & pepper to taste

1.  Mix the cabbage & carrot in a large bowl.  If you have time, leave your carrot to drain a bit on kitchen towels first, as it can be very wet.

2. In a small bowl, mix the remaining ingredients.  Have a good taste, and adjust any of the spices if you fancy.  Give it all a good whisk, then pour into the cabbage & carrot and mix well.  Enjoy!

Post the Thirtieth (in which our heroine has a very bad morning)

Y'know, one of those ones that makes you just want to dig a hole, jump in and pull it closed over you.  Let us examine the reasons for this:

- I put €20 diesel in my car yesterday morning, and by the time I got home, the fuel light was on again.  I had to put another 20 friggin quid in it this morning.  Now, I don't know about you, but for me, €100 a week on diesel is just not sustainable.  A note to my American readers (as I know there are a few of you): lest you feel tempted to complain about the price of gas, spare a thought for your cousins across the pond - diesel here is currently at the equivalent of $7.25 a gallon.  Petrol is even worse again, at about $9.80 a gallon.  And the happy news is that those prices are only likely to rise.  Oh joy.

- I applied to see if I'm eligible for an income-levy refund and came home from work yesterday to find a massive package from the Revenue Commissioners telling me I need to fill out full income tax returns for the two years in question before they can process my claim.  WTF?  Everyone else I know who applied either got a cheque or a "Ha ha, we don't owe you anything letter" straight back, not a small forest's worth of forms to fill out.  I have long said that it's complete pot luck whether anything you send into the Revenue actually makes its way to someone who knows what they're doing.  Clearly, my application landed on the desk of a Fás reject who had no idea what to do with it and decided to try and fob me off instead.  Well, I won't be fobbed, I WILL NOT, I tells ya!  I'll be on to them first thing tomorrow with my best angry voice.

 - I got paid this morning and am still €30 in the red.  Not helped by the fact that I got emergency taxed, even though payroll have my P45.  See point above about the efficiency of the Revenue service in Ireland, so I can probably expect the tax to be refunded some time in 2017, when, with inflation, it will be worth approximately 49c.

Indeed, pretty much the only redeeming factor about today is the fact that I won't have to make dinner this evening, as we'll be having the remainder of the pulled pork.  I can just go straight onto the wine when I get in, which is a perfectly legitimate way to deal with a bad day, as we all know.

Anyway, here's day two of the pulled pork recipe.  I know three days seems like a lot of effort for what is, essentially, peasant food, but it's pretty much all marinating and cooking time, there's very little actual work involved.  You can also amalgamate days two and three if you get the pork on early enough, but I'm splitting them because it gives me an extra blog post, so there.

Pulled Pork Day Two

500ml Coke                      250ml cider vinegar
1 tbs nam pla                     1 tbs Worcestershire sauce
2 tbs black treacle              Couple sprigs fresh thyme
2 chilies, cut in half             Bunch fresh coriander, chopped
Large onion, diced             5 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
2 sticks celery, roughly chopped

1. Place your onion, celery, garlic, chili & thyme in the bottom of your slow cooker or casserole and sit your pork on top.  As you can see, the pork has gone a gorgeous deep red colour from the spice rub.

2. In a large, shallow bowl, mix the coke, vinegar, nam pla, worcestershire, coriander & treacle.  The treacle is like bloody tar, so you'll have to whisk like bejaysis to mix it into the other liquids, which is why you need to use a shallow bowl.  Pour the whole lot over your pork, whack on the lid (making sure the pork isn't touching it) and bang it into the oven at 80C for at least eight hours or, if you're using a slow cooker, set it to high and leave for eight hours.  Turn the pork over once halfway through cooking.

(As an aside, if you're using the oven and want to get more value for your gas/electrictity money, this is a perfect time to bake potatoes for the thrice-baked spud skins - just throw them into the oven with the casserole.  They'll take about 5 hours at this temperature, just slide a knife into them every so often to check if they're done.)

3. To check if the pork is done, grab it with a tongs and give it a pull - if the meat comes away with no effort, it's done; if not, give it another while.  When it's finished, remove from the oven/switch off the slow cooker and leave to rest in the cooking liquid.

And that's it for today - as I said, if you get the pork on nice and early in day two, you can continue with the day three steps straightaway, but for the purposes of dragging out this blog as much as possible, we'll come back to it tomorrow.

Laters, peeps.

Post the Twenty-ninth (in which our heroine falls afoul of a dud recipe)

I hate that.  You come across a recipe, you like the sound of it, you add a few little tweaks of your own (because the original is woejusly low on seasoning) and, at the end of all your effort you're left going "Meh."  This happened me on Friday evening.  I had mince defrosted and the plan was to make a variation on a Weight Watchers recipe that they call Beef Moussaka, but which is really somewhere between a cottage pie and a moussaka.  The reason for the tweaking is that, for some reason known only to the home economists at Weight Watchers, they just don't do herbs or spices at all.  As in, the only seasoning/flavouring in this was salt & pepper.  Snooze-fest.  This is a recurring theme with Weight Watchers recipes, and I don't understand it at all - pretty much all seasonings are points-free.  Why would you try to convince people to adopt a healthy-eating plan, then bore them to death by making the food as bland as possible?  And, let's call a spade a spade here, the vast majority of people who end up in Weight Watchers aren't going to have the kind of  food knowledge that would enable them to improve a recipe by adding their own seasonings.  Get onto it, WW!

Anyway, despite the addition of copious amounts of garlic, oregano, ground coriander, worcestershire sauce & aromat, the recipe was still a dud.  It was perfectly edible, but just did absolutely nothing for me.  So I'm not going to bother posting it for you.  There are far too many other, tasty things you could be cooking instead.  What I will do, however, is give you day one of the pulled pork recipe I was planning to do in one big monster post.

Pulled Pork is one of those American comfort foods that absolutely everyone in certain states eats all the time, and which barely anyone in Ireland has ever heard of.  It's not haute cuisine by any stretch of the imagination - quite the opposite - it originated as a good way of making very cheap cuts of pork both palatable and tender.  Thanks to Sparks at the Boards.ie Cooking Club for the original recipe, which I've tweaked very, very slightly.

Before We Begin:  This recipe can only be cooked in a slow cooker or in the oven in a cast-iron casserole.  If you don't have either of these, it can't be done, sorry.  You may not believe me, but take my word for it.  The reason is that it needs a very long, very low-temperature cooking.  Slow-cookers are designed to do this, so no problem there.  Domestic ovens, however, aren't really designed to work in the <100C range.  If you set the temperature to, say 80C, which is what's needed for this recipe, your oven will constantly cycle between about 120C, and then knock the element off for a while, resulting in a mean temperature of in and around 80C over the complete cooking time.  You need the insulating properties of cast-iron to protect your pork from these variations in temperature and keep the contents at a fairly constant heat.  Glass, aluminium or stainless steel dishes simply won't do this for you.

So, do you have a slow cooker or cast-iron casserole?  Yes?  Right so, let's get started.

Pulled Pork Day 1 - makes 6-8 servings

1.2kg boned pork leg or shoulder           3tsp paprika
1 tsp onion granules                                1 tsp chili powder
2 tsp cumin                                             1 tsp smoked paprika
0.5 tsp garam masala                              0.5 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tsp sea salt - do NOT use table salt as the iodine will turn the pork blue

1. Mix all of the spices together.  If your joint has twine holding it together, remove it and flatten out the meat.  Lay your pork (don't be tempted to use fillet, it'll just go tough) on a large sheet of clingfilm and rub all over with the spice mix, until completely covered.  Leave the caul of fat on - it will impart a lot of flavour to your sauce in the cooking.  Worry not, we'll remove it before we pull the pork, you won't be eating it.

2. Wrap the pork tightly in the clingfilm and leave to rest in the fridge overnight.  And that's it for day one.

No pics today, sorry.  The "Moussaka" wasn't worthy of one and I never thought of taking one of the pork.  Ah well.

In other news, Ireland remain top of their world cup group after beating Russia 62-12 yesterday morning.  And Mushy of all people scored a try!  I never thought he had it in him.  Granted, it kind of looked like he just fell over the line by accident, but hey, we'll take 'em any way they come.  So, we're down to our last pool match this week (Italy) and if we win this one, we'll more than likely meet Wales in our quarter-final, and France or England in the semi if we win that.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves, eh?