quite contrary

things are really starting to happen in the scrubby little excuse for a garden i'm carving out for myself at casa mitchell. it's still very much a work in progress, but all the arse-busting work i did in spring is starting to show rewards. i've got pods on my pea and broad bean plants, i've already eaten my first lettuce harvest, and i keep getting handful after handful of rocket to scatter over just about everything. my small scale herb garden is thriving. the latest success story is my perpetual spinach plants. perpetual spinach is not spinach proper, it's a member of the chard family that behaves in a very similar manner to spinach, in that you can't really tell the difference apart from the plants being hardier. i have two plants, and about say, once a week i nip out and harvest a couple of handfuls of leaves about this size:

i've been starting to pretty much plan what i cook around this weekly harvest, so reliable and prolific as it has become. part of me is intrigued to see how long my plants will keep giving if i keep them well cared for. they're sure enough not showing signs of slowing down.

while it would be easy to get lazy and just start wilting spinach into everything, like i did when i was a student and reluctant to waste any of one of those supermarket pillow packs of baby leaves which i seemed to buy every week; i have been trying to cook things that let the natural flavours of this spinach come through on their own. because if you're putting in the time and effort to grow something yourself, organically, it doesn't make sense to just chuck it any old where. not to mention that home grown produce seems to taste so much more of itself than its industrially raised counterparts, and it would seem a bit of a disservice to it to let it get lost in amongst too many other ingredients.

my most successful endeavour with my spinach so far has been in coupling my growing-to-eat obsession with my other obsession: yeasted baking. i decided, after making the pizza dough recipe from the river cottage bread handbook, that i wanted to try using the dough for calzones, and since in a calzone the filling is protected by folded over dough, there's no risk of wilted spinach scorching at the high temperatures necessary to bake the dough. so i kind of improvised this little number, and was mighty pleased with the results:

spinach and mushroom calzones

half a batch of river cottage pizza dough
1 ball mozzarella, roughly torn (contrary to what food snobs will tell you, using mozzarella bufula campagna is entirely unnecessary in recipes in which it will be melted and is not to be the primary flavour, but buy organic, yeah? unethical dairy production is way more grim than unethical meat farming)
four large field mushrooms, slicked thickly
about 150g spinach, very roughly chopped
two gloves of garlic, finely sliced
1-2 sprigs of thyme (i used lemon thyme from my garden)
olive oil
rye flour for dusting
salt and black pepper

so obviously, apart from the pizza dough prep, which needs to be done about an hour in advance, this recipe is super easy. before you get started, preheat your oven to as high as it will go, with a heavy baking tray or baking stone in it.

heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan, and brown your mushrooms, adding the garlic and thyme after a minute or two. and you shouldn't need me to tell you this, but the less you move your mushrooms and the more space you give them, the better they'll be. nothing pisses me off more in the kitchen than having an obsessive stirrer keeping me company and not leaving things to just be. just give the pan the odd shake to flip the mushrooms about so they brown evenly.

when pretty much done, add your spinach to the pan, stir it in, season with salt and pepper, and turn the heat off. the spinach should wilt pretty damn quickly. and it'll look a little bit like this:


leave it aside for a minute while you roll/stretch out your calzone dough. now, i just made two here, but i think if i made it again, i'd divide the dough into three, maybe four, because the ones i ended up with were absolutely massive, and while i have a mega appetite, i struggled with one. you need to roll out your calzones into rough ovalish rounds on a surface dusted with rye flour, size not mattering as much as the fact you're aiming for about a 5mm thickness.

assembling your calzones requires speed more than anything else, so they don't get soggy. dust a rimless baking sheet with rye flour, place one of your ovals on it, scatter your filling on one half, along with some of your mozzarella, fold over the other half, and crimp the edges up with you thumb and forefinger. slide straight into the oven and the heat from your baking sheet or stone will get to work on the base before it has time to get soggy. repeat with the rest of your dough.

they take ten minutes to cook, roughly, and come out looking like this:


not the prettiest (yeah yeah, i'm just gonna stop making mention of the fact i'm totally slapdash on presentation, i think we all get the point now, don't we?), but basically awesome. one of 'em leaked a little bit, but it wasn't really the end of the world in my opinion. mine ended up so big i didn't have anything with the one i ate for dinner, otherwise i might have been tempted by some of my rocket alongside it. and despite the bold flavour of the field mushrooms i'd used alongside it, the whole thing turned out pleasingly spinach-y, and will definitely be making a reappearance on the casa mitchell dinnertable again. especially if my perpetual spinach keeps flinging out leaves the way it is at the moment.

Patience...

Bloody hell, it's nearly two weeks since I last posted anything here, so I'd better make up for it.

So the bacon is out.  I'll avoid any attempt at suspense (I mean, there's already been enough anyway, given it's been the best part of three weeks in the making) and flat out say it's just really damn good.  I'm sure that the majority of the credit must go to the quality of the meat as it doesn't feel like I've actually done much, except wait.  And worry.  As I've divulged recently, things that fall outside of the area where I can brush things off with a swift Oh, I Know What I'm Doing tend to cause me concern, some of it almost certainly unnecessarily.  I think to watch me in the kitchen I generally exude an air of I Know What I'm Doing, even if that is not always the case, but with my first foray into curing this has been conspicuous by its absence.  To the extent that after hanging it up I pretty much ignored it until I took it out of the cellar and transferred it to the fridge.  But my overly pessimistic fears were unfounded.  The balance between meat and fat through the belly is pretty much perfect as far as I'm concerned.  Having tasted some simply fried during the process of the first recipe below I wouldn't want to leave any future bellies curing for longer than this one was, as it was quite salty but not too much as the sweetness from the sugar underpins the saltiness rather nicely.  Whilst the meat is firm, it isn't as hard as I was expecting, so much to the extent that I can just about get some unevenly thick rashers from it for breakfast purposes just using a heavy cook's knife.  I must admit that when I first sliced into it I stood and admired it for a moment or two, as it does look quite fantastic.

Anyway, my anticipation was such that I wanted to cook things where the bacon was relatively predominant.  Whilst it would be perfect to add to other dishes to add flavour, or moisture from the fat, or to bulk up meat content, I felt I needed to see how it would command a dish.  For some reason, I've been struck with a bit of a cooking blank recently.  Maybe because I've been intentionally forcing myself within the confines of things where the focus is primarily on bacon as an ingredient (not that it usually would otherwise), but on top of that I've had virtually no inspiration, and I've been totally underwhelmed by pretty much everything I've considered.  So I suppose it was quite apt that I ended up falling back on what is seemingly the only structured element of my cooking, that being my interpretation of Penne All'Amatriciana which I make on actually quite a regular basis.  I've made it so often that it really requires no thinking on my behalf.  Before that, though, I went for another Do It In Your Sleep dish, risotto.  I've had some dried porcini left over ever since I overbought them for the Zombioli, which I'd always earmarked for a risotto of some kind.  It's one thing I think anyone can make, regardless of ability, simply because it can be adapted in virtually any way imaginable and still be amazing.  Added to which the beginnings of a good risotto are the sorts of things I always have lying around somewhere, so its reliability as a strapped-for-just-about-anything recipe is invaluable.  It's easy to make a good risotto, less so a great one, and this was actually pretty great.

Here's what I did...

40g dried porcini
150g shiitake mushrooms
2 thick slices bacon or pancetta
200g arborio rice
1 glass white wine
1 small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
a good knob of butter
2 sprigs fresh thyme
4 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper

Put the porcini in a bowl and cover with 600ml of boiling water and leave to soak for about 20 minutes.  Afterwards remove the mushrooms and very roughly chop. 

Heat 2 tbsp of the oil in a heavy based pan and add the onion and garlic.  Soften on a low heat for about 10 minutes, until translucent.  Meanwhile chop the bacon into pieces roughly the size of a postage stamp and fry in a frying pan until browned and some of the fat has drawn out.  Add both the bacon and the fat to the onion and garlic and turn the heat up.  Add the rice and stir to coat it with the bacon fat and cook for about a minute.  Add the wine and allow the alcohol to cook off, then add three ladlefuls of the porcini liquid.  Strip the leaves from the thyme sprigs and add to the pan.  Keep stirring constantly, and add more of the porcini liquid two ladlefuls at a time once the rice has absorbed all that was in the pan.  Continue this process for about 10 minutes, adding more liquid as it is absorbed.  It must never become too dry, or be allowed to stick to the pan.

Slice some of the larger shiitake mushrooms in two or three.  Add the remaining oil to the pan used to fry the bacon, and fry the shiitakes until slightly browned and softened.  Season with salt and pepper.  Add the chopped porcini and the shiitakes to the risotto.  Continue to add more liquid until the rice has become soft and pulpy, but still retaining a slight bit of bite in the very centre.  Add the butter and stir in to give the risotto a rich and creamy texture (having ridiculed American cup measurements last time round, I suggest it take heed from the 'good knob', a truly flexible measurement if ever there was one; a knob of butter for this purpose is as big or small as you want it to be).  Season to taste with pepper, and if needed, sea salt.

Sort of Penne All'Amatriciana...

3 handfuls penne rigate
About 12-15 pomodorino tomatoes
2 thick slices bacon or pancetta
1 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic
ground black pepper
torn basil leaves

Fill a large saucepan with salted, boiling water (pasta is best cooked while giving it plenty of space) and drop the pasta in.  Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the bacon until browned and the fat has drawn out.  Slice the tomatoes in half lengthways to expose the seeds.  Add to the bacon and fry for a few minutes until the juice from the tomatoes has reduced slightly.  Finely chop the garlic and add to the pan, along with the black pepper and basil.  Check the pasta and drain just before it is al dente.  Turn the heat off from under the bacon and tomatoes and pour in the pasta and stir in to allow the sauce to coat.

I previously claimed that this dish would not make for very interesting blogging, and yet now here I am going back on myself.  Not least, as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall points out in The River Cottage Cookbook, recipes "will be extra tasty and extra satisfying if you use your home-cured belly."  Still, I do feel slightly disingenuous passing off such an easy thing to cook, but nonetheless I shall.  It takes as long to cook as it does to cook dried penne, about 11 minutes or so (although 30 if you're in a Butlin's self-catering chalet with The Bluntest Knife In the World and a shitty electric ring hob that has had all the heat gauge numbers rub off that's near impossible to tell actually how hot it is.)

I have previously only made this with back bacon and thought about how it might turn out using a higher quality substitute, yet in fitting with the whole cooking structure thing I have never actually got round to it, until now.  Using a much fattier cut of pork obviously results in more fat being released during the cooking, which in turn I found results in a much better sauce.  This was easily the best I've made this recipe, and I can't feasibly put it down to anything other than the fact I was using my own bacon.

Next up (after finishing off this belly, let's not get ahead of ourselves, here) I'm going to try the same curing process only with the peppercorns, juniper and bay flavourings to see how they impart during curing.  What is actually a large part of my relief at this working first time is that the conditions I've got for doing so are obviously adequate at the least.  Whilst I'll warn myself not to get too carried away, in my mind I'm already thinking and salivating about moving on to more complicated salami style curings.