FORKFACE — — Page 2

What a cheek.

by Lee on June 7, 2009

You can love chicken, but hate chicken livers. You can adore steak, but loathe ox heart – but let me tell you: if you’re a fan of pork, I guarantee you will go completely tongue-under-bottom-lip-mad for pig’s cheek.

Pig’s cheek is, quite simply, one of the finest hunks of meat you’ll ever taste. Yes ‘hunks’. If anything deserves the appellation ‘hunk’, ladies and gentlemen, pig’s cheek is it.

It’s an over-sized meat oyster. It’s a dense, unprocessed nugget of porky joy. It’s a pocket-friendly porcine flesh wonder. It’s a savoury meat handful. Pork marketers can buy these descriptions off me for a reasonable fee. That fee is six pig’s cheeks, half a chorizo picante and a bottle of good cider.

Pig’s cheeks with cider and chorizo

Ingredients

6 pig’s cheeks
115g of chorizo picante (cured, spicy chorizo)
A 500ml bottle of decent cider (I used Weston’s Organic)
About 2 glasses of water
A handful of finely chopped parsley

Method

Slice the chorizo into 5mm coins and add them to a medium-hot frying pan with no oil. Once they’ve browned up, remove them with a slotted spoon, leaving the red oil from the sausage in the pan.

Lightly season your pig’s cheeks on both sides and place in your hot, chorizo oiled pan. Leave for a few minutes, then when they’re nicely coloured, flip them and do the same to the other side.

Now add your pig’s cheeks, your chorizo and your bright red chorizo oil to a large saucepan along with the cider and a two of glasses of water.

Cover the pan and lower the heat to a simmer. Every now and then take the lid off and give everything a stir – if ever things start looking a bit dry, add more water.

After about two and a half hours, check the pig’s cheek with a fork. If it’s super-tender, you’re nearly done. Now, with the lid off, keep things simmering until the sauce has reduced to just a few tablespoons.

Last of all, add your parsley and serve along side a mound of root vegetables, roughly mashed with lots of butter.

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You’ll always look neat, in a hat made from meat.

by Lee on May 23, 2009

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Vindaloo? Hmm, fishy.

by Lee on May 19, 2009

Vindaloos have a bad name in this country. And for good reason. Order one in a standard British curry house and you’ll get some diced chicken breast in a dull sauce with a daft amount of chilli powder chucked in. What is that? I have no idea, but let me tell you, it’s not vindaloo.

Real vindaloo, the Catholic Indian dish from Goa, is one of the best curries you can eat: soft pork simmered in a paste of garlic, fragrant spices, a touch of vinegar and, yes, a fair few red chilli peppers. But it doesn’t have to be blisteringly hot; the chillis involved are those long, dried ones, which are normally pretty tame. Unlike curry house ‘vindaloo’, the part they play is as much about colour and flavour as it is heat.

One downside of proper vindaloo is the time it takes to make. You need to marinade the meat overnight, and if you’re using pork shoulder (which you should), it’s going to need simmering for quite a few hours.

The good news is, there’s a stunning Goan fish dish called rechade, which uses a very similar paste, but takes a fraction of the time to make.

I made a version of it the other day, which I served with a crunchy apple and red onion salad, and I’m telling you, it was special. So, next barbeque, you know what to do.

Goan-spiced mackerel with apple and red onion salad

Ingredients

Two whole mackerel, gutted and cleaned

(For the marinade)
6 cloves
6 cardamom seeds (take them out of the pods)
2cm of cinnamon bark
1 teaspoon of black peppercorns
Half a teaspoon of fennel seeds
Half a teaspoon of ground turmeric
A big pinch of salt
6 fat cloves of garlic
6-8 long dried red chillis soaked for 15 mins in warm water and seeds removed
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of sugar

(For the apple salad)
1 Braeburn apple, cored and finely diced
1 small red onion, finely diced
A pinch of salt
Half a small green chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
A handful of finely chopped coriander leaf and stalks
The juice of a lime

Mix the red onion with a pinch of salt and set aside.

Grind the spices in a pestle and mortar, a coffee grinder or whatever you normally use, then add the mix to the rest of the marinade ingredients and blitz in a blender.

Take your gutted and cleaned mackerels and make diagonal slashes in the skin, on both sides, at 2 centimetre intervals.

Massage your marinade into the fish, making sure to get it right inside the cuts.

Next, add the rest of your salad ingredients to your salted onion and mix through.

Now, pan fry – or even better – barbeque your fish on a medium flame for about 5 minutes each side . Don’t worry if it chars a bit, that’s a good thing. Oh, and if you do fry it and there’s any leftover marinade in the pan, make sure you spoon that over the top of the fish.

Serve the mackerel straight away, with the apple salad on the side.

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Pasta la vista.

by Lee on May 14, 2009

Ask people the question “Why do you like to cook?” and you’ll get various answers. “Because it’s creative” is one. “I find it relaxing” is another. Some people will even admit to doing it because they like to “show off”. Nothing wrong with any of those, but there’s only really one reason why I spend any time in the kitchen at all: because I love to eat.

OK, sometimes I’ll be in the mood to create, and on those occasions I’ll happily shut myself away for a few hours to labour over something difficult involving galangal. Other times I really can’t be bothered, I just want delicious food, now. Is that too much to ask?

Well, no actually. Where I live, in Shepherd’s Bush, there’s a cornucopia (I’ve never written that word before; good name for a futuristic chiropodists) of amazing places to eat. Wonderful Thai (Esarn Kheaw), Damascene (Abu Zaad), pub food (The Princess Victoria), Polish (Patio), West Indian (Ochi), even amazing Eritrean (The Red Sea). And you wonder why I haven’t posted any recipes recently?

I have to say, though, magical as these places are, and strange as it might sound, I’ve actually started to miss my own cooking. So yesterday I promised myself I’d go home and make something from scratch.

Well that thought lasted about an hour. By the time I left work I just wasn’t in the mood for chopping, so I said to myself, “Sod it, I’ll try that Chinese on Uxbridge road”.

Is this all getting a bit too autobiographical? Should I really be giving you all this detail? You would tell me, wouldn’t you? It’s just I don’t want to turn into one of those bloggers who blithers on: “Oh, then I did this, and then I went to the shop and then I came home and you never guess what…” Yeah you’re right I’ll never guess what because I’ve just hanged myself.

Oh, fuck it, I’ll finish the story anyway. Basically, I accidentally walked straight past the Chinese (I was kind of joking before but this really is dull now) and I couldn’t be bothered to go back and find it, so I just picked up a chilli, a lemon and a bunch of parsley (like some kind of lone maverick) from the grocer near my house (am I really still typing?) and decided I’d just make something up when I got home (I think we’re in ‘renegade’ territory now) probably involving pasta (yes pasta, motherfucker!)

By the way, Oliver Stone, don’t even think about it, OK? I own the copyright to this shit, so forget you ever read it. If I get wind of some kind of Hollywood smash involving pasta and/or parsley and lemon I will come down on you like a tonne of bricks, whether you are involved or not, Oliver Stone. And I’m talking metric tonne which is heavier than an imperial ton so don’t start thinking, “A ton? that’s not too bad” either. Because it is; it’s very bad indeed.

Enough! The point I am trying to make is this: If you can’t be bothered to cook, cook the recipe below, because it’s an absolute piece of piss and it tastes really nice.

Maybe I’ll just write that next time.

Linguine with chilli, garlic, parsley and lemon

linguine with parsley, garlic and lemon

With a dish this simple, the quality of the pasta is very important. Don’t buy cheap, supermarket own-brand stuff for this. In fact, don’t buy cheap, supermarket own brand pasta, ever. Why? Firstly it tends to be really smooth-textured, so sauces don’t really stick to it. Second, the packet instructions are normally wrong, and leave you with something hopelessly overcooked. Lastly, good pasta is still a really cheap dinner. I normally buy De Cecco, in the blue and yellow packaging , it’s about £1.50 and it does about five portions. Good food doesn’t really get cheaper than that.

Ingredients

200 grams of linguine
Extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt
Half a lemon
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 large red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped
2 handfuls of freshly grated Parmesan
2 handfuls of parsley, coarsely chopped

Method

Get the biggest saucepan you’ve got, fill it with water, and put it on to boil. Add a big pinch of sea salt, then, once it’s bubbling furiously, drop in your pasta.

When there’s six minutes to go, pour about two tablespoons of extra virgin into a small saucepan and put it on a medium heat. Now add your chopped garlic and chilli, along with another big pinch of sea salt. Stir and fry until the garlic is nice and brown, then take off the heat.

When the pasta’s done, drain it and return it to the big pan. Now add your fried garlic and chilli, and put the pan on a low heat. Chuck in your parsley together with a good squeeze of lemon, and mix. The lemon juice should combine with the oil to make a kind of dressing. If it looks a bit dry, add a little more olive oil.

Add a handful of your Parmesan and give one last mix.

Serve with the leftover Parmesan sprinkled on top. Like I say, piece of piss.

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