Roast Stuffed Pork Loin

The title was a bit of a mouthful, but the results are a very nice mouthful. There's a lot of little bits in this, but, when you get to the end, it all comes out well and tastes great.

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250g fresh spinach	6 smallish button mushrooms
1 dozen chestnuts	0.5lb sausage meat
1 tsp Mustard	1 tsp Mace
1 tsp Coriander	a little Salt and some Pepper
2.5lb Pork Loin	2 tsp Bisto Gravy Powder
Cotton String	Red wine

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1. Measure out the spices and place them into a small frying pan for later
2. Cut the stalks from the spinach and wash it. Chop it fairly finely.
3. Peel the chestnuts - do it like this to avoid frustration and singed fingers!
1. Cut crosses in the flat sides of the chestnuts
2. Place them into boiling water for 3-4 minutes
3. Remove the heat but leave the nuts in the water
4. Two-by-two, take nuts from the water and cool a little under the tap
5. Cut in four with a sharp knife, and extract the meat. 
6. Blend/chop the nut meat - I used my Magic Bullet.
4. Chop the mushrooms fairly finely - about a quarter-inch pieces
5. Heat the spices in the pan on a low heat
6. In a large mixing bowl, combine the spinach, spices, mushrooms, chestnuts, and sausage-meat
7. With a good-sized fork, mash the parts together. You will probably end up with a mix that is way too dry, so add an egg or two until it binds together. This is the stuffing mix.
8. Now take a sharp knife and cut the loin in two, length-ways. This should give you two fairly flat pieces of meat of the same length. In the US you often get a package that contains two parts already: in this case cut each part almost in half, so that it will lie flat
9. Place one part of the meat flat and season it with a little salt and pepper, and some rosemary
10. Put as much of the stuffing mix as will reasonably fit onto the meat
11. Lay the second piece of meat on top
12. Use the string to tie the whole thing together. You shouldn't need to go around more than five or six times at most
13. If there's a lot of stuffing left, pin up one end with cocktail sticks and push more into the other end!
14. Place the meat in a (non-stick if you can) roasting pan and cover over with foil. I put a cup of wine into the tray to keep the meat moist: don't bother if your meat is not sitting on the bottom of the pan
15. Place in the oven:
1. Start at about 450F for about 20 minutes
2. Take it out, turn the meat over, recover and replace for another 15 minutes or so
3. Measure the temperature - it'll probably be about 60C inside the meat
4. Uncover the joint and raise the oven temperature to 500F or more for about 15 minutes. This will get the temperature up and also colour up the top of the joint for serving
16. Once done, take from oven and let rest on the plate or block you'll use for carving for 10 minutes or so. It's still cooking at this point! Remember that you'll get liquid out of the joint, so be sure to use something that the juices won't simply run off of!
17. Mix the Bisto powder with a cup of red wine to liquify it
18. Take the roasting tray, add a cup or two of red wine and place on heat.  
19. Use a spatula to scrape off the meat stuck to the bottom of the trat and break it up
20. Add the Bisto mix, bring to the boil. Almost immediately it will start to thicken, so be ready to pour into a serving jug.

I served this with mashed potatoes and corn. Peas or beans would also contrast well with the flavour of the pork. It'll certainly feed four hungry people.

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Enjoy your meal - we certainly did (that's why there aren't any pictures!!)!

Notice!! This is soon to be made again, so there should soon be pictures.

TTFN

Airline Food

So you're sitting in the airport lounge and contemplating your Tums and wondering if you've enough to last you through the next seven or eight hours of cramped flying with airline food attacking your stomach walls. Dismal thoughts of days of diarrhea and gastric pains occupy you until the voice on the speakers stops asking for various passengers to please turn up immediately, and suddenly welcomes you to your flight and invites VIPs and people with kids to board now.

Your stomach lurches in fear again, as if it was to be left alone to face Voldemort on a dark night. Your seating range is called, you walk down the ramp and are greeted by the young ladies in scarlet who direct you to your seat. You definitely aren't a size zero model,, and just manage to squeeze into the seat, but the belt won't cover your artificially-protruding gut. Oh the shame of it! You clamber to your feet in search of an attendant, and ask with red face and downcast eyes if they have such a thing as a belt extender. "But of course, sir. I use one myself at times. Here you are." and the object is discreetly handed over. Score one for the service on this airline!

Take-off and you get given a little plastic goodie-bag. Wow ! - socks, blindfold and ear plugs, toothbrush and paste. Still, you remember that next comes food and drink and the stomach lurches again - all I've had on Delta recently is salty pretzels and no liquids (peanuts are suddenly too dangerous), and Southwest hasn't been much better. I got the cheapest flight from NYC to London that I could ($624 return) so who knows what'll be offered. Hard tack and weevilly biscuit, maybe!

Ah! Here come the drinks: Water, juice, half a dozen sodas, including English lemonade (like Sprite), red & white wines, scotch, vodka, gin, ... is there some mistake here? Maybe they're getting us drunk and will stage a mid-air mugging later!

And now another pair with a food trolley. "Would you like beef stew or chicken curry, sir?" It took a couple of seconds to parse that, given the environment, but I managed to ask for the curry, and the AG got the beef stew. Serious surprise. There's a cup and a container of water, a small salad (lettuce, some veg, and fruit, all very fresh) with a tasty dressing. The main course is a very reasonably-sized (and very hot!!!) foil-sealed container. The curry (more a korma, really) turns out to be very tasty indeed, great flavours, and not spicily hot in the least (the AG doesn't do spicy-hot, and lots of other people are likewise disabled).

If you bought this as a frozen instant dinner in a supermarket you'd give it about an 80% overall approval mark; compared to normal airline food in 2010 it gets about 120%! It doesn't compare with my first time across the pond ("fish or steak, sir ... and how would you like you steak, sir", along with real metal steak knives), but that airline is no more, for obvious economic reasons, and steel knives are forbidden! For today, however, it's outstanding. The beef stew was, I am reliably informed, just as good. 

On the way back the overall treatment was the same, except that it was a choice of sweet-and-sour chicken (the AG claims it as very good) or "bangers and mash", which I chose. Ever the pessimist I was expecting a pair of ratty hot dogs, but receive three nice plump savoury sausages, a good helping of tasty mash, and a generous helping of onion gravy. Excellent flavour all through.

So, if you're flying the pond, my recommendation is to fly Virgin Atlantic. The prices are good and the service and food are way beyond what you'd expect these days.

[Food]
Go here! French food the easy way!

Another Version of Omlette
The Spawn wanted omlette and I was really dragging, so I chopped some spring onions (3 or 4, without most of the tails), and a good handful of sliced ham. We broke six eggs into a measuring jug, added the onion and ham, some salt and pepper, and summer savory.

We also added a couple of good handfuls of grated cheese, fresh from the freezer, and then took the stick blender and blendt the mix so well that it was entirely aerated, had turned somewhat greenish from the onions, and had about tripled in volume!

This made us two "omlettes", which were rather strange because they were really difficult to cook, 'cos the mix wouldn't flow around the pan when you pulled some back off the surface, as you do with a beaten egg mix. However, with perseverance we managed to persuade them to cook, and they turned out to be absolutely excellent on toast!

Fast Shepherd's Pie
Empty a can of diced tomatoes, some frozen green beans, and a heap each of frozen peas and corn into a big casserole dish. Fry an onion (or use onion powder, like I did, 'cos the onions were all eaten!) and mix in a pound of sausage meat (I used some "hot South Carolina" sausage) and a pound of ground beef. Cook until it's all brown and well cooked. and then add the solids to the casserole, reserving the liquid. Use Bisto (Wegman's or a British store near you) or equivalent with water to make a fair amount of gravy (at least a cup or two) in the frying pan, and add that to the casserole. Add three bay leaves and mix everything well.

Boil a kettle and make four servings of instant mash (Idahoan brand) - just follow the instructions on the tin. Smooth the spuds over the meat mix and then cook at about 350F for about 45 minutes. Serve. You'll get a very quiet table, I promise you!

TTFN