Cooking With Richard

The brawn is tasty, rather like a cold, meaty pâté.

We ate it with home made toast. The only problem is there’s just so much of it, a complete “loaf” of brawn which we won’t ever be able to eat in time. Luckily Hugh has a recipe for fried brawn — we’ll see about that.

Brawn with toast and salad. Everything here is home-produced!

Next time: More spices. This dish will take a large amount of spice because the pig is highly flavoured itself, and there’s such a lot of it. I think I’d want to go with a real recipe next time so we can choose to make it Chinese-spicy and British-spicy. Also more salt for the same reason.

So the pan arrived this morning and it turned out to be a little bit larger than I anticipated:

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Interesting video, how to make porchetta di testa, which is a kind of salami made from a pig’s head.

For Coco-chan:

The recipe was derived from this, quantities doubled, about 3 tbsps of sugar and quite a large amount of parmesan.

Because the bread is quite sweet, it tastes a little like a crumpet when you put butter on top. I note that real crumpets are made with warm milk.

Hello, who’s this big fellow?

More photos after the cut.

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One thing I really should do regularly is to bake bread, partly because I like bread, partly because it tastes much better, and also because it’s much better for you than the salt-filled, fatty rubbish you buy in supermarkets.

This one used my standard bread recipe (520g of strong white bread flour, 400g water) to make a single loaf. I varied it with: 1 large tablespoon of sugar, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and about a tablespoon of finely grated parmesan cheese. Cooking time was approx. 45 minutes at 190-200C.

Next time: double the recipe (to make two loaves), more parmesan.

I started with a simple soup concept with just pumpkin and potatoes, with my home made chicken stock. However it didn’t really taste that good, so I enhanced it with ground coriander and cumin to make a kind of (very mild) curried flavour. Then I had some left-over baguette which I fried in olive oil and garlic to make the croutons. Not shown in this photo, I also added flakes of parmesan cheese over the break. The result was pretty good, but the parmesan should have been grilled.

Sorry about the downtime over the past two days. I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the web server.

Everything should be back to normal now.

Sorry, Shika-chans.

The BBC says they expect more spiders this autumn and BBC listeners have confirmed it. I’ve noticed many more spiders in the past couple of months. Here is a beautiful example from our garden, just a common garden spider, but she’s looks like a little tiger.

N-sama bought it:

Previously, and previously.