Pork Lemonato and a Blogger’s Nightmare

Tags

crockpot, lemon, lemonato, pork, slow cooker

Pork Lemonato, on antique English porcelain courtesy of The Collector

It seems I’ve fallen into a nice little routine of posting a new blog post every Sunday. However, this week I’m getting in an extra one(um, I was supposed to have this uploaded on Thursday. Saturday instead of Sunday isn’t quite breaking the routine!). Anyway.

The past week has actually been a bit of a food blogger’s nightmare. First came a recipe I hoped would rock, but it turned out mediocre (will try it again before posting). This was Monday. Two days later I had a minor disaster when I forgot to turn on the slow cooker before leaving for work in the morning, and a whole turkey breast sat waiting for me all day to get home and cook it some other way (thank goodness it’s still cold these days, otherwise it would have ended up in the bin and that would have been a crime). In the end I tried two different ways, since there was a lot of meat to use up. One of these ways was a turkey korma, with a ready-made sauce (*gasp*). Sometimes shop-bought is just the best option. We’re only human. The other way however, well, that was absolutely gorgeous! But the third and most annoying disaster of the week was that I forgot to take photos of it. So I’ll just have to make it again before telling you all about it. Soon, very soon.

Finally, and having remembered to both plug in the slow cooker and turn it on this morning last Thursday, I have a dish to talk about, complete with photo (antique plate an’ all – thanks Collector!).

I’ve been wanting lately to try out a few traditional Greek recipes adapted for the slow cooker. Greek cuisine has many stew type dishes, which are called “of the saucepan” (katsarolas) because they are –surprise- cooked in a saucepan on the stove top. These are all good candidates and I’m slowly working my way through some of them, so I can share them with you here.

This dish is called Lemonato, which means “lemony”. It’s basically meat, cooked in stock and lemon juice with a few herbs and is usually made with pork, beef, chicken or rabbit (yeah, sorry about that). Mine is pork. Lemonato is mostly served with french fries or rice, or potatoes that are cooked in the pan with the meat and sauce (we had it with mashed potatoes, which is probably unheard of here!). It’s lovely with any of these, but to eat it like a true Greek, you need to also have some crusty bread on hand to scoop up the wonderful lemony sauce. So, here goes.

Pork Lemonato
Serves 3

You’ll need:
700g pork, cut into portions or chunks
2 carrots, chopped
1 cup chicken stock
½ cup water
juice of 1 ½ lemons
1 medium onion, minced or chopped
1 tsp mustard
1 sprig of rosemary (about 7-8cm/3in)
1 bay leaf
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper (or to taste)
1 Tbs corn flour (to thicken sauce at the end – if needed)

What you do:

1. Put the carrots and onion in the bottom of the slow cooker
2. Put the pork pieces on top
3. Mix the liquids and mustard together and pour over the meat
4. Add salt & pepper, bay leaf and rosemary
5. Cook on low for 8 hours
6. About half an hour before the end of cooking time check your sauce. If it’s too watery for your liking, use a cup to take some of the liquid out of the slow cooker (you want about ¾ of a cup). Mix in the corn flour, and stir well until it has completely dissolved. Then pour it all back in and cook for a further 30 minutes on high.

(Writing instructions for slow cooker recipes is brilliant)

Due to this being a work day, mine was on for about 9 ½ hours. I think there is a point after which meat becomes a bit tough again in the slow cooker. I’m not sure about this, so I’m going to experiment, but it’s happened a couple of times with some of the recipes I’ve tried, including this one. If you have any idea whether this is the case, please let me know!

This was a really nice dinner, and made even nicer leftovers, but next time I would start checking for doneness after about 7 hours (providing I’m not stuck in my office). I might also omit the rosemary (it was a teeny bit strong for my taste) or maybe replace it with some dried oregano (½ tsp at the most).

Hope you like it!

Fried Meatballs And A Lack Of Inspiration

Tags

beef, fried, ground, meat, meatballs, minced, pork

Check out the beautiful plate! Old French porcelain, on kind loan by The Collector.

Lately I’ve been a bit stripped of inspiration. It’s probably something to do with the hundred thoughts swimming round my brain. There are so many ideas, so many things I want to be doing… but 8 hours of work a day seem to be getting in the way. When I was younger I used to say that I would always want to work, even if I won the lottery. Well, I have seriously reconsidered THAT! Oh to win the lottery… (chances are minimum as I don’t actually play it) my life would be so full I wouldn’t have time to miss work. First of all I would buy a horse. Although with the number of people giving away theirs at the moment, I wouldn’t even need to pay for it. You see the problem with keeping a horse here in Greece is, well, “keeping” it. You pay through the nose for livery, farrier, dentist, God forbid vet, lessons and someone to exercise your horse if you can’t. It’s funny, because if I didn’t work I’d be able to do some of that myself (even the mucking out!) and the fees would be fewer. So if I did win the lottery my expenses would be less – how ironic is that?

The other thing taking up my time would be this blog and a couple of other internet projects. I’d really like to pour more time and energy into these. Wow, riding every day, cooking, baking and blogging about all the recipes I’ve tried. Yes, that’s how I’d like to spend my days please!

Hmm, now how can I tie all that to fried meatballs? I won’t even try, as I explained, I’m currently inspirationally challenged. So here’s a recipe for some really good fried meatballs, which we usually have with boiled greens when The Mister’s mum sends some up from the village. You could also serve them with a chopped tomato salad or salsa, Greek yogurt and warm pitta bread. Ooh I know, you could open up a Cypriot pitta (yes, they’re different) and stuff it with these babies, salsa and yogurt. Mm, good idea – hey was that inspiration knocking?

The recipe is by the Greek chef Christoforos Peskias, and is included in the book “Greek Cuisine” a Gastronomos magazine publication.

Fried Meatballs
Serves 3-4

You’ll need:
2 ½ Tbs olive oil, plus more for frying (or you can use any vegetable oil for frying)
1 medium onion, finely chopped
500g minced meat (I use a mix of beef and pork)
175g bread without crusts, crumbled (make sure it’s stale so it will crumble easily)
1 egg
juice of ½ a lemon
1 ½ tsp dried oregano
½ tsp dried spearmint
salt & freshly ground pepper
flour to coat meatballs

What you do:

1. Heat the 2 ½ Tbs oil in a frying pan over medium low heat, and gently cook the onion until it is soft and translucent (confession: up until a few months ago I thought that word was trans-cu-lent! Don’t tell anyone). Remove from the heat.
2. In a large bowl, combine the minced meat, the contents of the pan (onion and oil), breadcrumbs, egg, lemon juice, oregano, spearmint, salt and pepper. Mix with your hands and knead until well combined. Set aside for about half an hour allowing for the ingredients to mingle.
3. Get two plates and put some flour on one of them. Take a small amount of meat mixture and roll it in the palms of your hands to form a ball, about the size of a golf ball. Then roll it around the flour a bit, so it’s all coated, but shake or tap off any excess flour. You want to be careful not to have too much flour on it because it burns while frying and affects the taste. Place the floured ball on the clean plate. Repeat until the meat mixture is all gone. (Um, I assume I don’t need to tell you to throw away the remaining flour, right?)
4. Heat some oil in a large frying pan (here in Greece olive oil is used big time, although it is said it’s not good for frying, so I use sunflower oil – which is also cheaper). The amount of oil used will depend on the size of your pan, but basically you want it to come to at least half way up the side of the meatballs. My pan is quite large and I used about half a litre of oil. Heat it on high and make sure it’s hot before you start putting in the meatballs.
5. Add the meatballs to the pan one by one. For me the best way to do this is with barbeque tongs. Don’t crowd them, fry in batches if they don’t all fit in at once. Leave them alone for 2 minutes and then turn them so they brown on the other side. They shouldn’t need more than about 4 minutes in total, but check to be sure. Take one out, cut it in half, and ensure the centre is no longer pink. Don’t overcook them, they just need to be golden, barely brown.
6. Remove the meatballs from the pan and place them on a clean plate (yes I know, it’s a washing up nightmare this recipe) lined with a paper towel to absorb any oil.
7. Enjoy while warm, or cold, doesn’t matter they’re just as good.

Note: You’ll notice that none of my recipes include garlic. This is because The Mister detests it (note the bold italics). So I don’t even try to fool him by sneaking it into anything! You can add a clove to this recipe if you want, just mince it and cook it with the onion before adding it to the meat mixture.

Bolognese Sauce, In My Favourite Kitchen Gadget

Tags

bolognese, crockpot, ground beef, meat sauce, minced meat, slow cooker, spaghetti

And now for a slow cooker recipe!

The Christmas before last, my mum and I visited my brother and his wife who live in England. My brother is a talented cook, who mostly (unlike me) relies on his imagination to throw together yummy meals. At the time, he had recently discovered the magical world of slow cookers and raved about his new appliance. One evening during our stay we had a gorgeous beef stew which was miraculously waiting for us when we got home from a hard day’s money-spending. It was cool, and I had read about slow cookers a couple of years previously thinking “I should get one of those”, but actually I was not that bothered – I have no idea why. Luckily my mum knows me better than I know myself, and when she returned to Greece two days after me, she surprised me with a gorgeous little purple Crock Pot which she had lugged all the way back for me. Well, I can safely say this has now become my favourite kitchen gadget (um, after my iphone of course).

To be honest, this didn’t happen overnight. As I mentioned in my first post I like to follow recipes. So to start using my slow cooker I turned to –where else- the internet, to find some. I searched and searched, but wasn’t very happy with what I found. It seemed that most recipes were for a pot roast of some kind and always involved tins of cream of something soup, or dried soup, or jars of ready-made sauce. Don’t get me wrong, flipping back the ring of a can of Heinz Tomato Soup is one of my favourite ways to make dinner, but “recipes” featuring, for example, a can of cream of chicken AND a can of cheese soup (which I didn’t even know existed till then) did not sound very appealing. I was starting to feel quite disappointed when I stumbled on A Year of Slow Cooking. Now that was more like it! A blog with a healthy balance of mostly “from scratch” meals, but with a few quick and easy solutions for when you just can’t be bothered! Plus the added bonus of Stephanie’s great sense of humour. That’s when I got well and truly hooked on the slow cooker. A few months later I started using Twitter (an obsession I’ll talk about another time) which introduced me to a whole new world of food blogs, such as Kalyn’s Kitchen, The Perfect Pantry, Healthy Green Kitchen to name but a few. These all include some great slow cooker recipes, and Kalyn has now started a new site called Slow Cooker From Scratch, a great place to find exciting Crock Pot recipes – and not a tin of soup in sight…!

My Bolognese Sauce is based on a recipe by a well known Greek TV chef called Elias Mamalakis, who is also the publishing manager of the Greek version of the BBC’s Olive magazine. I have adapted the original stove top recipe for the slow cooker. What I usually do is make a batch and freeze half of it, either to use in a mini lasagne for two, or for a quick, easy meal after a long day at work. I hope you like it!

Slow Cooker Bolognese Sauce
Serves 4

You’ll need:
1 Tbs olive oil
500g minced (ground) beef
3 Tbs white wine vinegar
1 Tbs onion powder or 1 small onion, chopped finely
1 tin / 400g chopped tomatoes
1 cup / 250ml tomato passata (passata is a thick juice made from crushed and sieved tomatoes. Find more information here)
½ cup / 125ml vegetable stock
1 bay leaf
1 tsp sweet paprika
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp allspice
1 tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
½ tsp sugar

What you do:

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan, over medium heat. If you are using regular onion instead of dried, add it to the pan and cook it gently until translucent, about 5 minutes. If not, heat the oil over medium high heat and start at step 2.
2. Turn the heat up to medium high, and add the minced meat. With a wooden spoon break up the minced meat as much as possible and keep stirring until there are no more pink bits.
3. Add the vinegar to the pan, and keep stirring the meat until the vinegar evaporates and the juices start to reduce. A couple of minutes should be fine.
4. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the meat to the slow cooker. Add one tablespoon of pan juices. How much juice you get after frying will depend on how fatty your meat was. If it was lean you probably won’t have much, so just tip the contents of the pan into the slow cooker without worrying about slotted spoons and all that.
5. Add the rest of the ingredients to the slow cooker. Give it all a stir.
6. Turn slow cooker to low and cook for at least 8 hours. Mine usually stays on for about 9-9 ½. I’ve never cooked this on high, so I don’t know how long you should leave it, I assume about 5 or 6 hours?
7. Serve over spaghetti with a generous amount of grated cheese sprinkled on top.

For those unlucky people who don’t have a slow cooker, try this:
Use 3 Tbs olive oil and only 1 cup of chopped tomatoes. Omit the stock.

• Follow steps 1 -3 above, but in a saucepan rather than a frying pan.
• Add chopped tomatoes and passata, bring to a boil.
• When it starts bubbling add the spices, salt, pepper and sugar (and onion if using dried).
• Stir and turn the heat down to medium low or low (depending on how hot your stove gets). You want a slow simmer. Cover the pan leaving a small gap and let the sauce simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour for best results.

Update on 30th Septmeber 2012:
Kalyn has kindly featured my recipe on Slow Cooker from Scratch! Yay! Check out the post for more fab slow cooker pasta sauce recipes, or the recipe index for loads more ideas.