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Posts Tagged ‘cider vinegar’

I found this in my old paste-in foolscap notebook and have been meaning to try it for a while.

Cabbage has been on my mind since leaving Strasbourg–and pork for that matter!

An example of this brightly colored variety of red cabbage was waiting patiently in the fridge for my return.

So lunch yesterday was a pork chop on a bed of red cabbage.

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion–sliced fine

red cabbage–shredded not too fine

2 sticks of celery–sliced fine

1 apple–peeled, quartered, cored and chopped into chunks

10 juniper berries–crushed

Juice of a lemon

Juice of an orange

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

salt

  • In a pan large enough to hold all the ingredients, sauté the onion gently in the oil until it is soft–about 5 minutes.
  • Add the shredded cabbage, the celery and apple and turn these over with the onion and oil.
  • Cook this mix for another 5 minutes until the cabbage begins to wilt.
  • Pour over the two juices, the vinegar and the juniper berries.
  • Add a good pinch of salt.
  • Turn it all over carefully to distribute the liquids.
  • Cover the pan and continue cooking for about 20 minutes–the time depends on the toughness of the cabbage–it should be nicely tender to the bite.
The cabbage and apple married well with the pork.
I’ll write up the simple pork recipe tomorrow.
Next time–red cabbage with a slow cooked fillet of salmon.

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This is adapted from a recipe by Matthew Fort (food columnist for The Guardian) that I spotted recently.

Cooked long in a low oven, it’s simple and straightforward–requiring minimal effort on a hot day.

Hand of pork [jarret in French] is located below the shoulder and on the bone . It’s a tasty but less expensive cut–and stays moist through the long-ish braise.
Four of us just had it for lunch.

Two hands of pork–deboned and skinned (the butcher will do this when he’s not busy) or leave the bone in–just makes it harder to carve, but the meat should fall off the bone anyway.

1 teaspoon of juniper berries

6/7 bay leaves

1 teaspoon of black peppercorns

150 ml cider vinegar

100 ml water

pinch of salt

I added a couple of small fennel bulbs I had in the fridgecleaned & halved (optional)

Preheat the oven to 150C/300F

  • With a sharp knife carefully strip off as much as you can of the fat layer left on the pork.
  • Put the bay leaves, juniper berries and peppercorns and fennel pieces in a casserole.
  • Lay the pork hands on top–(ours had separated into 4 largish pieces after boning)–and lightly salt them.
  • Pour over the vinegar and water.
  • Bring this gently up to a simmer.
  • Cook in the low oven for 2 hours.
  • Take the dish out of the oven.
  • Leave aside the pork pieces in the warm casserole–but ladle or spoon the liquid–which will be too tart– into small saucepan and reduce it by half.
  • Taste it–and when it tastes like a sauce you like, pour it into a warmed gravy jug.
  • The pork pieces don’t carve easily.
  • We served the pork in tasty looking chunks with a little of the gravy poured over them.

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Homemade MINT SAUCE with apple and onion (goes well with roast lamb or lamb chops):

Meredith and I both grew up in houses in the fifties with mint in the garden.

Chicago and London–little did we know…!

The homemade mint sauce that went with the lamb roast at our house was tasty–my mother was a good cook!

Made with the traditional ingredients, as I remember–fresh mint, sugar and malt vinegar.

In this version an apple (not sugar) provides the sweetness in the sweet-and-sour sauce, which cuts the richness of the lamb.

This is included in my book Delicious Dishes for Diabetics, to be published in the UK in August and the US in November.

Leaves from a large bunch of mint

An apple–peeled, cored and roughly chopped

A small onion–quartered

Mix these ingredients in a food processor–not too finely; it should have  texture.

Then add salt and a good splash cider vinegar.

Taste it for balance before leaving it in the fridge to marinade for an hour.

Bring it back to room temperature and taste again before serving.

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