You could serve it with some roast potatoes and a bit of gravy. And I’d admire you for it. Or you could do what I did. Which is this.

Thai-style pork hock salad with crackling and prawns

For the salad

1 pork hock.
12 tiger prawns, cooked.
A handful of cherry tomatoes, halved.
2 sticks of lemongrass, finely sliced.
3 lime leaves, finely sliced. (Cut away the stalks first.)
2/3 of a long cucumber, seeds chucked and flesh sliced.
Half a banana shallot, finely sliced.
A handful of radishes sliced lengthwise.
A small carrot, cut into thin strips.
A big handful of mint leaves, picked.
A big handful of coriander leaves, picked.

For the dressing

Half a large clove of garlic.
2 thin, long red Thai chillies, de-seeded if you want to be safe.
3 to 4 teaspoons of palm sugar.
2 juicy limes. More if they disappoint.
Some fish sauce.

To finish

2 teaspoons of ground, roasted rice (Optional but nice. And easy enough to make.)

Method

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius (gas mark six) and put a large saucepan of water on the hob to boil. Take the hock, score the skin in regular intervals and plunge it into the boiling water. Make sure all the fat is submerged. Simmer it for two minutes and take out.

Season it all over with salt and pepper, put it on a baking tray and shove it in the oven to roast. After two hours, pump the heat up to 220 (gas mark seven) for half an hour, or until the crackling looks crunchy.

Now make the dressing. Take a pestle and mortar and add a small pinch of salt along with the garlic and chillies. Pound them into a rough paste. Now add the juice of two limes, around the same volume again of fish sauce and three teaspoons of the palm sugar. Dissolve the sugar into the dressing by crushing and mixing with the pestle. Taste it. It should taste equally hot, salty, and sour with a bit of sweetness rounding it off. Some limes are juicier than others, and batches of fish sauce vary in saltiness, so feel free to adjust the proportions.

Next: prepare the rest of the raw salad ingredients and add them to a large bowl.

By now, your glorious pork hock should have cooled a bit. Remove the crackling and break into bite-sized bits. Pull the meat off the bone and slice it up quite thinly. You don’t have to put all the meat in the salad. I put a third of it aside, shredded it, and made a version of this.

Add the prawns, pork and crackling to the bowl, along with the dressing and the ground roasted rice, if you’re using it. Mix it well with your hands and eat it straight away with a fork.

By the way, I should credit Mark Hix, here. This recipe was inspired by a brilliant Vietnamese-style creation of his, what I made once.

Fried halloumi salad with chilli and crispy garlic

Get yourself:

4 baby aubergines (the ones that are about as long as your finger).
1 large courgette.
Half a red onion.
3/4 tin of mixed beans (mine were chickpeas and fava beans).
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped.
Half a large red chilli, de-seeded and equally finely chopped.
5 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.
A handful of coriander leaf and stalk, chopped coarsely.

Warm the oil on a low heat and add the chopped garlic and chilli. Keep stirring until the garlic is golden-brown and looks crunchy. Then take off the heat and sieve, retaining both the flavoured oil and the crispy bits.

Slice the courgette in long diagonal lengths, about 5mm thick, and do the same to the aubergines. Peel your onion and slice in into rounds, again, about 5mm thick. Douse your veg in the flavoured oil, keeping aside one tablespoon for later on. Now season the veg with a good pinch of salt and put under a hot grill, or if you have a griddle pan: use that. As they are cooking, add your beans to a pan and begin to warm them through. Once your vegetables are soft and look nicely roasted, remove them from the grill and add them to a large bowl with your warmed beans. Add the juice of half a lemon and mix.

Now it’s time to fry your halloumi. Add the remaining spicy oil to a medium-hot non-stick pan and fry the cheese until brown on both sides.

To finish, add the chopped coriander to the salad and check the dressing with your finger – it may need another squeeze of lemon. Then lay on the fried cheese and garnish with a sprinkle of the crispy garlic and chilli mix. Hearty veg, zesty dressing, salty cheese: rude-bwoy-inna-Kingstan!