Nigel's Roast Pork Belly

I'm spending most of this winter travelling and working really hard, so not too many updates for the next couple of months. But here's a winter warmer we took the time to make on a rainy Sunday, and which then fed us for the rest of the week. A good recipe, although you really need to take it easy on the orange; a little zest goes a long way, when it's inside the meat and isn't evaporated off by the oven!

Chick Pea, Chorizo and Orange Salad

I spent most of last week sleeping and reading, trying to shake off a nasty cold. As a result we hadn't worn down the food stores quite as much as usual, so this week I'm attempting to cook entirely using whatever I have left in the fridge from last week. OK - I definitely cheated here, as there was a HUGE bag of red peppers going cheaply at the grocers' when I popped into the park centre to buy milk, and I did have to top up the onion supply. Now that I've made this salad, I think it's actually worth going out to get the ingredients, as it was amazing! No internet link this time; I just had ingredients I needed to use and found the right flavours to link them together.

Ingredients:

• one tin of chick peas
• one medium white onion
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• a handful of green beans
• a small handful of raisins
• a fat, spicy chorizo sausage
• two roasted peppers, skinned
• an orange
• a small handful of mint
• 1 heaped tsp dijon mustard
• 1 1/2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 3 tbsp olive oil

Drain the tin of chick peas and tip into a salad bowl. Thinly slice the onion into slivers, and fry over a very low heat until golden, translucent and falling apart - about 12 minutes. Add the sugar and cook for a further minute, then tip out of the pan onto the chick peas. Meanwhile, top, tail and blanch the green beans and raisins, then drain and add to the salad bowl.

If the skin of the sausage is tough, skin it, then finely slice the sausage and fry in the onion pan for a couple of minutes, until crisping up and colouring. If you like, blot the excess fat with kitchen paper before adding to the salad bowl. Slice or tear the peppers into strips and add to the bowl. Using a sharp knife, cut the peel and pith from the orange, then segment into the bowl; squeeze out the core over the bowl to retain all of the lovely juices. Finely chop the mint and add to the bowl.

Whisk the remaining ingredients together to form a dressing, pour over the salad, toss well and serve immediately.

Mechoui Lamb

Some of our friends have a pomegranate tree, and this year it has produced some lovely fruit, which they were kind enough to bring into the office and give away. The seeds are a lighter pink than the ones I've seen in the store, and they are tart, astringent, and aromatic. I wanted to set them off well in a dish that really needed their sharp, middle-eastern flavour, and as it happened a friend had mentioned this Jamie Oliver recipe for mechoui lamb on Facebook. I bought a whole shoulder of lamb and gave it a go! Verdict: needs improvement.

The recipe itself is missing half of the ingredients mentioned in the text, which makes it quite confusing reading. 3 hours at 220C was not enough to get my lamb to 'fall off the bone', so what Jamie implied was a little action with a couple of forks turned into a full-on Silence of the Lambs cleaver job, with plenty of swearing and bits of lamb going everywhere. I improvised a roasting rack out of a few stalks of celery, and the resulting broth under the lamb was absolutely heavenly... but the recipe makes no use of it! It was also expensive: the whole thing took around four hours, most of which was spent with the oven on, and the lamb cost around $30, but it only fed two of us, with a little lamb for leftovers. And the spice rub went entirely on to the fat and bone, so was completely wasted. It also seems really odd to have a salad with a meal that you have to eat with your hands. Not to mention it had too much dressing for the surface area of the carrot, so it all ended up at the bottom of the bowl, wasted. Much better to include the salad ingredients IN the flatbread - the flavour combination was great, but Jamie's execution was terrible. So here follows my amended recipe, which I look forward to trying sometime.

Ingredients:

• 300g lamb neck fillet
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp chilli flakes
• 1 orange
• 1 carrot
• a handful of fresh mint
• half a pomegranate
• a little natural yoghurt (optional)

Trim off any really fatty bits on the fillet, then rub in the spices. Roast in a 220C oven or bbq on a grill for 15-20 minutes, until cooked but still pink and tender on the inside; turn off the oven and remove the lamb to rest. Meanwhile, deseed the pomegranate into a bowl. Segment the orange over a salad bowl, letting the juices drip in. Peel the carrot and finely julienne with a sharp knife. (If you're in a hurry, you could grate it, but the texture won't be quite right.) Shred the mint and combine with the orange and carrot.

Pop the flatbreads in the still-hot oven for 30-50 seconds, until hot. Slice the rested lamb into thin disks and toss with the carrot and orange, then pile into the flatbreads and top with pomegranate seeds, and yoghurt, if using.

Pumpkin Pangrattato

Pumpkin was cheap at the market. Turns out that's because it has almost zero flavour at this time of year (midsummer). I have written down the basic recipe, which comes from Nigel's Tender, a book I have struggled to use well since it's aimed at someone growing vegetables in a much more temperate climate. I certainly remember the pumpkins in Cambridge being sweeter than the sad specimen I cooked tonight. Anyway, I include in italics the ingredients to include if you suspect your pumpkin is lacking a certain joie de vivre. And I'm toning down the amount of chilli: we had to have a yoghurt afterwards to cool down!

Ingredients:

• 750g pumpkin or butternut squash
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1/4 tsp dried chilli flakes
• 1 1/2 tbsp rosemary leaves
• zest of an orange
• a handful of parsley leaves
• four handfuls of breadcrumbs
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 40g butter
• segments of an orange

Peel and deseed the squash, then cut into ~2cm pieces. Steam for 15-20 minutes until just tender. Crush the garlic into a frying pan with some olive oil and fry gently until just beginning to colour. Meanwhile, finely chop the rosemary and parsley leaves, and zest the orange. Add the herbs, chilli and orange zest to the garlic, then tip in the breadcrumbs and mix well; fry for a further 3-4 minutes until fragrant and just beginning to crisp.

Tip the pumpkin into a large roasting tray and taste; if it's lacking in flavour then season with the sugar, cinnamon, salt and nutmeg. Tip over the breadcrumbs and dot with butter. Roast at 180C or on a moderate bbq for 35-40 minutes until the crumbs are deep gold and the pumpkin is tender. If you like, stir through the orange segments before serving.

Marmalade

It's orange season down under! I remember last year I was really impressed by how good and cheap the oranges were at the tail-end of winter, and this year they're just as delicious. All over Perth, orange and lemon trees are heavy with fruit, and frustratingly they're all locked away behind garden walls, much of the fruit rotting in sunshine. Some friendly gardeners pick the fruit and leave them in big boxes outside their house for anyone to take away. I've gathered a few lemons from those boxes this year, but so far no oranges. However they're less than $1 per kilo in the market, so I pick up the least ripe, saddest-looking navels I can find (no Seville down under, that I can find), shred them with our shiny new mandolin, and make a huge vat of marmalade. I have fond childhood memories of 'helping' my parents make marmalade, and I think we only used up the last of it after a decade or so! Once again, I've made about enough for a long time...

I'm not including the recipe, since frankly it didn't set the first time, and I had to empty all the jars and boil it down by another 25%! But a few rules-of-thumb are: use a really big pot, a 1:1:0.5 ratio of fruit:sugar:water, keep a couple of pectin sachets handy, and a big stack of cold plates in the freezer for the 'wrinkle test'.

Roast Chicken Drumsticks with Oranges

This is one of those super-convenient meals that you can just throw together with very little effort. It's also finger-lickingly sticky and messy and wonderful! We served the drumsticks with mashed potato and a few leaves of lettuce, but they'd be great with fresh bread or rice as well. Wings would also work - take ten minutes off the cooking time.

Ingredients:

• 4 plump chicken legs
• 2 large oranges
• a head of garlic
• olive oil
• black pepper

Set the oven to 185 C. Arrange the chicken legs in a large roasting dish, so they have some space between them. Slice the oranges into medium-sized wedges and nestle around the chicken. Put the garlic somewhere in the middle of the tray. Drizzle with olive oil and grate over black pepper; roast for thirty minutes, then flip the drumsticks and roast for a further 10-15, until the juices run clear.

Serving advice: get a spare plate for the bits, and plenty of napkins! Eat the orange wedges and chicken wings with your fingers, and squeeze out the sweet roasted garlic with your teeth or between your fingers. YUM.

Lamb and Fennel Stew with Oranges and Mash

A simple stew to make over a lazy hour watching a fan-edited version of the Phantom Menace. The editors did their best but the film is still a train wreck. Luckily we had a delicious stew to cheer us up at the end!

Ingredients

Tastier than it looks ;)

• a large, ripe orange
• 350g stewing lamb
• 300ml of lamb, beef, or vegetable stock
• two bay leaves
• Worcestershire sauce
• half a head of garlic, loosest papery parts removed
• two medium leeks
• the tough parts of a large bulb of fennel (use the fronds and tender parts in a salad)
• salt and pepper

Using a sharp knife or peeler, peel several long strips of orange rind from the orange. In a cast-iron stewing pot, fry the lamb at a moderate heat until seared and caramelised. Pour in the stock, orange rind strips, bay leaves, slosh in a little Worcestershire sauce, and drop in the garlic, whole and unpeeled. Cover and simmer for forty-five minutes, checking occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking.

Tail and slice the leeks lengthwise, discarding any tough or discoloured leaves. Wash, removing all dirt and grit, then roughly chop. Add to the pot and cook for a further twenty minutes, turning every so often. Top up with more water if needed.

Finely slice the tough parts of the fennel, treating it like a smaller version of celery. Add to the pot and simmer for another fifteen minutes. Top up with more water if needed.

In a separate pot, put on some scrubbed potatoes and/or sweet potatoes to boil. Mash with a little salt, butter and mustard and set aside covered, to keep warm.

Test the lamb for doneness- it should be tender and falling apart. Turn off the heat and uncover the pot; slice the orange into segments, dropping them into the pot as you go, in the same way one would for a salad. Squeeze the excess juice into the stew. Fish the garlic head up to the surface and pop the squishy cooked garlic cloves out of their sheaths using a spoon, discarding the papery head when it's empty. Stir through, taste and season - mine needed about half a teaspoon of salt and a good grating of pepper. Serve with the mash.

10th Anniversary Dinner: Garlic and Butter Scallops with Pasta and Fennel and Orange Salad

They had an absolutely amazing fennel in the market at the weekend, and I'd been thinking about what to do with it all week. Following the success of our excellent peeler on the courgette salad earlier in the week, I decided to finely shave the finest bits of the fennel and slice the huge and beautiful fronds into a salad, while reserving the tougher stalks for a stew later in the week. Some sort of acidity would work well with the fennel, and also I wanted to serve seafood, so again I thought the flavours would marry very well. It all turned out totally yum!

I couldn't find the sort of large, quivering Scottish scallops I enjoyed so much in the UK - I had been planning to buy just ten, one for each of our years together. As the scallops were so much smaller, I bought ten each - still a hit to the wallet but worth it for the occasion :)

Ingredients

• One large fennel, preferably with lots of green frondy bits
• One large, ripe orange
• 1 tsp grain mustard
• 100g long pasta, like fettuccine
• very good olive oil
• 20 small or 10 large scallops
• four cloves of garlic
• 25g butter
• 1 tbsp honey
• a handful of basil leaves

Cut all the nice dark green frondy bits from the fennel and reserve. Cut off the tough stalks where they meet the bulb, and remove any really tough external layers. Wash the remaining parts, and then finely shave into a salad bowl. Save the tough heart, stalks and external layers for another meal.

Place the orange on a chopping board and cut off the top and bottom so that it is flat on each end. Place the bottom flat end on the board and, using a very sharp knife, cut the peel from the orange, following the curve around to the bottom. When you have worked your way all around the orange, turn it over and cut the last bits of pith from the bottom. Hold the orange in the palm of your hand, over the salad bowl. Slice as close as you can along the skin of each segment, letting each one drop into the salad bowl, working your way around the orange. When you have removed all of the juicy segments, squeeze the pithy core out over the salad, then discard. Stir through the mustard then chill while you prepare the scallops.

Set the pasta to cook according to its packet instructions. Finely slice the garlic into slivers. Heat the butter and a tbsp of olive oil in a large frying pan, until the butter begins to colour and froth. Add the scallops and sear on one side, then turn and add the garlic. Fry until the garlic is golden and the scallops are done, then turn off the heat and tear in the basil leaves, and stir in the honey. Serve the pasta and salad onto the plate, and top the former with the scallops and butter sauce, and the latter with a drizzle of olive oil.

Giant Red Snapper with Mandarin

Another hot day, another great evening to bring out the barbie and some Great Australian Seafood! The local fishmonger was selling an absolutely enormous red snapper, which we figured would be enough for six hungry people. I'd bought some great juicy mandarins in the market and thought a citrus-y tang might be appropriate. So we cut it into thin slices and laid them on and in the fish, then put it on the barbecue for a good half an hour - twenty minutes in we were ready to eat, but the fish was just so huge that it still wasn't done :)

It doesn't even fit on my largest serving platter!

The mandarin pieces went lovely and golden, and were edible even down to the peel, if a little awkward. Maybe this dish could be iterated a bit, but it was delicious with the lemon-mustard-seed rice and yet more pepper-and-pomegranate salad.

Shark with Spiced Rice and Orange and Avocado Salsa

Terrible person alert: I saw shark at a fishmonger and bought it. Then ate it. Argh. But it was such a delicious apex predator! I can only hope I'm so delicious when our insect overlords finally arrive. I don't know how to cook shark, so I had a look round on the internet, then invented my own recipe. It was pretty awesome.

Ingredients:

• For the shark:
• 300g of shark fillets
• half a cup of orange juice
• 1 red chilli, finely chopped
• For the rice:
• a handful of cashew nuts
• 200g basmati rice
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• two bay leaves
• two lime leaves
• a handful of frozen peas
• 1 tsp black mustard seeds
• butter
• For the salsa:
• 1 ripe avocado
• 1 ripe orange
• juice of half a lime
• a handful of fresh coriander, finely chopped
• a little finely chopped red onion (optional)

Marinade the shark for 1-24 hours in the orange juice and chilli.

Halve, peel and cut the avocado into chunky pieces. Peel the orange with a sharp knife and cut segments out, leaving all the pith behind. Squeeze the juice from the remaining core and combine with the orange segments, avocado pieces, chopped coriander, lime juice and onion, if using. Stand for 30min-2 hours before serving.

Toast the cashew nuts, either in a non-stick pan on the hob or in a 200C oven for five minutes. Put the rice, turmeric, cinnamon, coriander, bay and lime leaves in a small saucepan and add hot water at a 2:1 ratio. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, until the rice is cooked but still has form. Fry the mustard seeds in butter for thirty seconds then stir through with the peas. Chop the cashews and just before you serve.

Brush a cast-iron ridged griddle pan with vegetable oil and heat until it is just beginning to smoke. Fry the shark fillets for 90 seconds each side, until charred with grill marks and cooked through. Serve on top of the rice, with a dollop of salsa on top and more in a bowl to serve.

Aubergine and Peanut Stir-Fry

Another one of those recipes brought on by an excessive craving for certain flavours. This time: meltingly soft aubergines, crunchy peanuts, and a big pile of egg noodles - that last probably brought on by the quick cycle ride and run I went for, after work. The meal was roughly inspired by this recipe, but I made a few substitutions and didn't even try griddling the baby aubergines - it takes AGES compared to popping them in the oven and going out. Oh, and this is way better than it looks - sorry the photo isn't super-inspiring, but the ready-prepared tofu just isn't that attractive. Tasty, though.

Ingredients:

• 4-5 baby aubergines, or one large aubergine
• 1/2 tsp Chinese 5-spice or ground coriander
• vegetable oil
• half a head of Chinese cabbage
• three spring onions
• thin egg noodles (we used three bundles, two is enough if you're not super-hungry)
• 3 tbsp peanut butter
• juice of one orange
• juice of one lime
• 3 tbsp cooking rice wine or sake
• soy sauce
• 200g prepared flavoured tofu (optional)

Preheat the oven to 200C. Chop the aubergine(s) into bite-size pieces. Put in a baking dish and toss with the ground spice and enough oil to lightly coat - about 2 tbsp. Roast in the oven for 30-40 minutes, until golden brown and tender.

Slice the cabbage diagonally, and finely chop the spring onions. Soak the egg noodles in boiling water straight from the kettle, then drain. Combine the rest of the ingredients in a bowl, adding enough soy sauce for your preferred degree of saltiness. Stir-fry the cabbage and spring onions for two minutes, then add the cooked aubergine, tofu, and noodles. Pour the sauce over the noodles- adding the sauce on top of the noodles ensures they will all be coated, and some sauce will sink down to the bottom and go on the vegetables. Turn off the heat, mix together as best you can, and serve.

Chicken, Orange and Watercress Salad

Another spring treat, with savoury chicken, sweet orange, toasted almonds, fresh watercress and a thick mustardy dressing. Works perfectly with sauteed potatoes, or a fresh white loaf. In summer, we eat this probably once a fortnight, as it's quick to prepare and surprisingly filling for a salad. It's also good if you have leftover roast chicken as you can skip the grilling stage.

Ingredients:

• one large chicken breast
• one large or two medium oranges
• a large handful of almonds
• a bag or a bunch of watercress
• a few generous handfuls of milder leaves
• 3 tbsp mayonnaise
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 1 tsp grain mustard
• 1 tsp dijon mustard
• 5 tbsp olive oil
• one small clove of garlic
• shavings of Parmesan

If you're serving the salad with sauteed potatoes, be sure to parboil them early so you have time to fry them. Grill or pan-fry the chicken breast until golden on both sides and cooked through -- about 15 minutes in total. If the oranges are easy to peel, peel them and tear into rough segments. If they have tough peel, segement them like grapefruits. Dry-fry the almonds on a low to moderate heat, so they become more crisp and toasted. Roughly chop the leaves and add them to the salad bowl with the orange pieces and almonds.

Combine the dressing ingredients in a jar, crush in the garlic and shake well to combine. Slice the chicken into bite-size pieces and add to the salad with the dressing. Toss well, top with Parmesan shavings and serve immediately.