The Sacred Art of Eating

It was hardly my fault that, owing to snow, the Co op had had no deliveries of milk. I had to buy a 2.5 litre bottle. And so it followed that really, I had to make rice pudding. Breakfast is going to be tough tomorrow.

Rice pudding- 50g pudding rice, 2 tablespoons sugar, 600ml milk, some dods of butter (unless you’ve blue milk going spare) and a good grate of nutmeg. 2 hours at 170ºC (stir half way) and enjoy.

This time in the form of some pigs cheeks, sold by Waitrose as ‘forgotten cuts’. Also known as Bath Chaps, the fashion seems to be for braising them. These had sat in the freezer for A LONG TIME. I bought them on impulse (they were very cheap) not long after the end of the challenge, but it turned out that we had a busy schedule that week, so they went in the freezer. Once or twice I looked online for recipes (having been surprised to discover they didn’t get a significant mention in Meat) but didn’t really feel inspired.

However, Dougal insisted recently that it was high time we tackle them. Suddenly there seemed to be a myriad recipes online. The Waitrose website even had one, which I suppose makes sense if they are going to sell them, but they do rather spoil the point of  a lovely cheap cut of meat by then suggesting you serve them with scallops on top!

In the end we followed this recipe, braising our cheeks in cider. When it came to unwrapping them they were much larger than I’d remembered!

We loaded all this into the pan; browning the meat first before giving it a fizzy bubble bath in cider and whacking it in a lowish oven for an hour and a half.

The house filled with wonderful smells- very French. We shared out the remaining cider and prepared to tuck in to our meat with some buttered tagliatelle on the side. It looked a bit watery but we’d followed the instructions exactly (well, okay, apart from using onions instead of shallots and chestnut mushrooms rather than button) so we decided to give it a go.

The wateriness meant this really wasn’t a very beautiful dish. But Oh My! did it ever taste good. The meat was meltingly soft like a slow cooked stew, and the combo of flavours took me back to chalets and snow and French bread.

However we both agreed that it was generally too wet for our tastes. The following night we ate the leftovers with rice having first added more mushrooms (the other half of the original packet we’d bought) and then vigorously boiled it down to reduce the juice. Not very green but exceptionally tasty and a great improvement. I shall be looking out for pig cheeks again!