The Weekend Roast

This fabulous pork belly roast is adapted from a recipe I found at www.cottagesmallholder.com - a couple of years ago, I think. (Thanks, Danny!) I've changed the original recipe around, but the basic idea is brilliant.

The original uses garlic, but the Man of the House is not partial to garlic with pork. Being Danish, he grew up eating plenty of pork, but never with garlic. So, I add Danish flavours instead - onions, bay leaves, apples and prunes, along with white pepper.

Start with a piece of good quality pork belly - this one weighed around 700g. Turn it skin side down and cover the base with a good sprinkling of white pepper. Cover that with 1/2 a large sliced brown onion and 2 small bay leaves. Top this with slices of 1 apple, and then about 5 coarsely chopped prunes. Cover it with a piece of foil, which you then form around the edges of the pork (this is the clever bit). The foil needs to fit closely around the bottom and sides of the pork to keep it moist, but leave the skin uncovered, so that it can crackle! Rub the skin with white pepper and salt.

Put this in a 130C oven and cook for about 3 hours. I then turn the heat up to 250c and cook for about another 20 minutes, until the crackling is crisp.

The onion, apple, prune mixture will almost caramelise, and is delicious served as a sauce. The meat will almost melt in your mouth, and the crackling will be the type you dream about.

Snegle

These pastries fill the house with aromas of yeast and butter and cinnamon. What more could you want? Serve them with hot chocolate or a good coffee on a cold Sunday afternoon, and snuggle up with a good book. Heaven!
In Danish, they're called "snails" and they're probably the easiest Danish pastry to make at home.
The spice in them isn't actually cinnamon - it's ground cassia, also known as Dutch Cinnamon or Baking Cinnamon. It's a slightly stronger flavour than cinnamon.

You need -

For the pastry-
300g plain flour
1 1/2 tablespoons dry yeast
25g caster sugar
100g butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg (plus another one for glazing the pastries)
100 mls milk

For the filling-
100g softened butter
100g soft brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground cassia or cinnamon

Icing -
100g icing sugar
1 tablespoon hot water
1 teaspoon vanilla

Warm the milk to lukewarm and add the yeast to dissolve. Mix together the flour, salt and sugar. Rub in the butter with your fingers. Add the egg, along with the yeast and milk misture. Mix to a soft dough. Allow to rise in the bowl until double in size. Divide the dough in two. Roll each piece out to a 30cm square. Spread with half the filling and roll up. Cut into 12 slices and put them onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. Slightly flatten each snegl, then cover the tray with a teatowel and allow them to rise for about 30 minutes. Repeat with the other half of the dough.

Heat the oven to 210C. Glaze each snegl with beaten egg. then bake for about 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool (they're best when they're still a little warm), and drizzle icing over the top.

These freeze very well (un-iced) and thaw very quickly. A quick reheat in the oven, and some icing on top and you have a delicious treat to serve up!

Why not chops and mash

It's a family joke that the only thing my brother and I remember having for dinner when we were kids is lamb chops, peas and mashed potato. That's not quite true - but we did grow up on standard Australian Anglo-Celtic food. It left us a whole world of exotic tastes to discover as adults - and I've been cooking a wide range of them ever since. Every day is an opportunity to try another taste or texture, or both! I'm going to share my food adventures and recipes. Sometimes I may even remember to take a photo of the finished dish to share, before it's eaten.