Well that was a successful weekend’s cooking.

As I said in the previous post, Friday’s carbonara was a great success.

The boss gave me a gold star for the Mediterranean dinner on Saturday. She has always turned her nose up at the vegetables when I’ve had them whilst in Mallorca; she has never liked courgettes and has never been keen on cooked peppers; but she cleared the plate. I think it was the honey and extra virgin olive oil coating that did the job.

Last night we were going to have mushrooms stuffed with bacon and stilton as a starter. Unfortunately the mushrooms didn’t look that appetising when I started to prepare them, and I didn’t want to take the risk; so we made a change to prawn cocktail. That’s when we found out we had used the last of the 1000 island dressing. You know that tomato relish I spoke about in the last post? turns out that adding mayonnaise to a couple of spoonful’s made a close substitute.

Then came the main course; The Hawaiian Pork. The only changes I made to the ingredients were to use dark soy source (use light if you have it to get that orange look), and we couldn’t get canola oil, so I used groundnut oil to brown off the joint. We can back up the comment at the top of the page; that was a plate licking meal*. The sauce, a little darker than shown in the link picture, was like nectar.

Oh, and I made a loaf of bread, which also turned out well, so I can have left over pork loin and pickle sandwiches for lunch today.

*I can’t be alone in wanting to lick the plate when I’ve had a great tasting meal. I know it is not polite, but to me it is the highest compliment you can pay a chef, if etiquette didn’t get in the way. And yes, I will admit to doing it if the boss isn’t looking; or, alternately, surreptitiously running my finger over the plate to get that last taste if I’m not in one of those places that give you a bread roll. For some reason my kids get annoyed at me because their kids lick the bowl – can’t think why

Stay safe folks