Potted Pork Shoulder with Green Peppercorns, from the leftovers of a roast

A generous handful of green peppercorns adds bite.

Every now and then I slow-roast a hefty shoulder of pork, because this is a joint that's still relatively affordable, and because brittle golden crackling is such an old-fashioned treat.  Mostly, though, it's because I crave the toothsome stickiness of tender, fall-apart pork.

There are usually plenty of leftovers the next morning: my kids aren't enthusiastic about pork, although they will politely eat it if there are also roast potatoes and gravy on offer.  I slice up the cold wodges and slap them between slices of fluffy white bread, with plenty of mayonnaise, Dijon mustard and shredded iceberg lettuce, or I heat them up in the microwave with leftover roast potatoes to guzzle on my own when I need to grab a quick lunch.  But my favourite use for the remainders of a pork shoulder is this  indulgent dish of potted, shredded pork with green peppercorns.

The best potted pork, in my opinion, is made with good pork belly - here's my recipe - but this is also a fine way to use up the leftovers of a roast shoulder.  It keeps well in the fridge for up to a week, and is heavenly spread on hot toast or toasted ciabatta slices.

For instructions on how to slow-roast a shoulder of pork and make crackling, please see my Cook's Notes at the end of this blogpost.

It may seem laborious to make a stock for this dish, but I don't find it much of a hassle, as stocks tend to look after themselves once you've flung them together, and this flinging-together really need take no longer than the time it takes for the kettle to boil.

I can't give exact quantities here, because this will depend on how much left-over meat you have.  This is a recipe that involves a lot of tasting, and not much measuring.

Serve the potted pork with hot toast or ciabatta bread, and some capers, caperberries or gherkins.

Potted Pork Shoulder with Green Peppercorns, from the leftovers of a roast

leftover roast pork shoulder, still on the bone (see Cook's Notes, below)
4 Tbsp (60 ml) butter
a large sprig of fresh thyme
a few tablespoons of green peppercorns, drained, and to taste
a pinch or two of freshly grated nutmeg
salt and milled black pepper, to taste

For the stock: 
one large onion, skin on, quartered
2 carrots, peeled and thickly sliced
1 cup (250 ml) dry white wine
2 cups (500 ml) water
2 bay leaves
a big sprig of thyme
10 peppercorns
a few stalks of parsley

Heat the oven to 200 ºC. Strip most of the meat off the joint, leaving behind the fatty bits and any pockets of meat close to the bone. Put the stripped-off bits on a plate, cover with clingfilm and refrigerate.

Place the bones in a roasting pan and add the onion and carrots, along with any left-over crackling.  Roast the bones and vegetables for 20 minutes, or until they have a nice golden colour. Put the roasting pan onto the hob, turn on the heat and add the wine, water, bay leaves, thyme, peppercorns and parsley.  Bring to the boil, stirring well to dislodge any residue on the bottom of the pan. Now tip the contents of the roasting pan into a stock pot, place over a low heat and simmer, uncovered, at a gentle burble, for 2 hours, turning the bone over now and then. Strain the stock into a bowl and discard all the solid bits. Return the strained stock to the rinsed-out pot, cool to room temperature and refrigerate overnight.

Lift off all the solidified fat from the surface of the stock - which with any luck will have jellied by now -  and place the pot back on the hob. Cook over a lively heat, uncovered, until the stock has reduced to about a cup of liquid.  Strain this through a fine sieve and set aside to cool slightly.

Tear the reserved stripped-off meat from the joint into shreds and place it in a bowl.  Strip the leaves off the thyme sprig and add these to the bowl along with the green peppercorns (again, I can't give you quantities here, but be generous, and reserve a few for scattering on top).  Season with nutmeg - just a whisper -  and with salt and plenty of black pepper.  Mix everything together and pack the meat into a pâté or terrine dish, or into several small ramekins.

Press down firmly on the surface of the meat to level the surface, but don't pack it in too tightly, or the stock will not seep between the shreds of pork. Trickle some of the still-warm stock over the meat so that it is well moistened, but not drowned in stock (the liquid should be just level with the surface of the meat).  Refrigerate until the stock has jellied.

To seal the potted meat - which will make it last longer in the fridge - melt the butter in a saucepan and skim all the white foam off the top. Remove from the heat, allow to cool for a few minutes, and then strain through cheesecloth or a fine sieve onto the top of the potted belly. Press a bay leaf or a sprig of thyme on top, cover with clingfilm and refrigerate.

Serve with hot toast.

Cook's Notes

To slow-roast a shoulder of pork: 

1. Ask your butcher for a whole, untrimmed pork shoulder, on the bone. This is important, because butchers sometimes 'neaten' the shoulder and remove some bones, but what you want is the Full Monty. Ask him to score the skin into 1-cm-wide strips, or do this yourself at home using an extremely sharp craft knife.

2. Heat the oven to 130 ºC.  Place a layer of thickly sliced carrots, onions, celery, lightly crushed unpeeled garlic cloves, and herbs of your choice on the bottom of a heavy roasting pan. Perch the pork, skin-side up, on top.  Pour 250 ml wine (or cider, or apple juice) into the roasting pan, cover it with two layers of heavy-duty tin foil, and bake undisturbed for 3-4 hours (depending on the size of the shoulder) or until the meat is so soft and tender can be pulled apart with a fork.  Alternatively, you can set the oven to a very low temperature - 100 ºC - and bake the pork overnight.

3. To make crackling: Take off the tin foil and turn the top grill on to its highest setting. Peel the skin off the shoulder in one piece and place it, fatty side down, on a baking sheet. Sprinkle the skin generously with salt.  When the grill is glowing red, put the baking sheet into the oven, 15-20 cm below the grill.  Leave for 8-10 minutes, or until the crackling is golden, crunchy and blistered.  Watch the crackling like a hawk: it burns in an instant. If it shows any signs of catching or charring, turn the grill down a little, or move the rack down a notch, but don’t remove the skin from the oven.

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Low-Carb Seared Tuna with a Burnt Tomato & Caper Dressing

This is an easy and interesting dish starring just a few beautiful ingredients - spanking-fresh tuna, olive oil, capers, baby herb leaves and Rosa tomatoes at the peak of their ripeness.  I'm going to ask you deliberately to burn your tomatoes to make the dressing, and please do so with confidence, as it is the sweet charred flavour of the scorched tomatoes that gives the dish such a lovely flavour. Suitable for diabetics, and for anyone on a low-carb #LCHF regime.

Jewel-bright colours and just a few top-quality ingredients.

The idea for this dish came to me last weekend when I was cooking some tomatoes and tuna on the same griddle pan.  I tasted some of the sticky residue left by the tomatoes, along with a flake of tuna, and found the combination most agreeable.

The first time I made the dressing, however, I added too much balsamic vinegar, which overwhelmed the delicate taste of the fish.  The second batch, using just a teaspoon of vinegar, had the right balance.  The capers and rocket leaves are there to offset the natural sweetness of the tomatoes, and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end brings everything together.

I use pole-caught yellowfin tuna, which is presently green-listed on the SASSI database; albacore is another green-listed species.

This is a dish that can mostly be prepared in advance: see Cook's Tips, at the end of the recipe.

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Seared Tuna with a Burnt Tomato & Caper Dressing

1 x 400 g slab of fresh tuna
a little olive oil for frying
salt and milled black pepper
3 Tbsp (45 ml) capers, or more, to taste
a handful of baby wild rocket leaves (or the smallest leaves you can find in the packet)
a little fresh lemon juice

For the dressing:
8 Rosa tomatoes (or 12 cherry tomatoes)
1 tsp (5 ml) balsamic vinegar
5 tsp (25 ml) extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

Heat a griddle pan (ridged, if possible) until it is fiercely hot, almost - but not quite - on the point of smoking. Rub a film of olive oil over both sides of the tuna and season with salt and pepper. Sear the tuna for 45 to 60 seconds on both sides, or until the flesh is cooked to a depth of about 3 mm. Set on a plate to cool, then place in the fridge to chill while you make the dressing.

Sprinkle a tablespoon of olive oil onto the blazing hot griddle pan. Halve the tomatoes lengthways and place them cut side down on the pan. Leave them, undisturbed, for about two minutes, or until slightly charred on the underside.

Using a metal spatula or pallet knife (or similar: I use one of those flexible metal scrapers designed for filling cracks in walls), carefully loosen each tomato, making sure that the scorched surface doesn't stay behind on the pan surface. Flip them over and cook them for another minute or two, or until just soft, but not collapsed.

Put the hot tomatoes into a bowl (or a mortar) and lightly mash and squash them to release the juices.  Tear up the soft tomato halves into smaller pieces. Stir in the vinegar and olive oil and season to taste with salt.  Allow to cool.

Slice the tuna using an exceptionally sharp knife (this is easiest when it is cold) and arrange the strips on a platter.  Drizzle over the tomato dressing, and scatter the capers and rocket leaves on top.  Add a spritz of lemon juice - to taste - and a generous grinding of black pepper, and drizzle with a little more olive oil. Serve immediately with some fresh bread for juice-mopping.

Serves 4 as a starter.

I snipped some baby chives off a pot growing on my window and they added a delicate
oniony note to the dish.

Cook's Tips

• You can make this dressing (and sear and chill the tuna), well in advance, but I suggest you put the two together just before you serve the dish, or the acid in the tomatoes and vinegar may 'cook' the fish.
• If you're not a fan of rocket, use any small herb leaves of your choice: finely snipped chives, parsley tips, micro-herbs, and so on. 
• Capers aren't everyone's cup of tea, and if you're not a fan, I suggest you scatter some finely-chopped baby gherkins over the tuna. 

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Effortless Fennel, Sausage & Tomato Tray-Bake

No one in my family likes fennel.  Or at least they didn't until last weekend, when I set out to change their minds by making this tray-bake brimming with lovely fresh fennel, snappy pork chipolatas, shallots and dear little carrots.

Roasting vegetables concentrates their flavours and brings out 
the sweetness in shallots, carrots and fennel.

My husband, who loathes the taste of aniseed, demolished his plateful - 'But the fennel is so sweet and delicious!', he cried - and so did two of the teens.  So there you go: you can bend your family's tastes to your will if you persist.

I added the pork sausages because they taste wonderful with fennel, but mostly because everyone in my household adores them. If I sprinkled them cunningly around the dish, I reasoned, they'd make the medicine go down, and they did.

This is an absolute breeze  to make, and (as is the case with all wonderful, abundant tray bakes) you can add anything else you might fancy - black olives and feta at the end, for example. I've used a simple dressing (I like to think of veggie tray-bakes as cooked salads) of lemon juice and olive oil, with just a little garlic and white wine, but feel to experiment with other ingredients, plus herbs of your choice. I'm very fond of rosemary with fennel, but this would also be good with plenty of fresh thyme.

If you can't find shallots - which are still like hens' teeth in Cape Town; these ones are from Woolies - use onions, quartered lengthways, or whole pearl onions.

Top-quality veggies make all the difference here.

Fennel, Sausage & Tomato Tray Bake
4 large fennel bulbs, trimmed
500 g cherry tomatoes, halved
350 g shallots, or 4 onions, quartered lengthways
a large sprig of rosemary, leaves stripped
250 g baby carrots
300 g pork chipolatas (If you can't find tiny ones, buy the finger-length ones and twist each one into two)
flaky sea salt and milled black pepper

For the dressing: 
4 Tbsp (60 ml) olive oil
3 Tbsp (45 ml) white wine
2 Tbsp (30 ml) fresh lemon juice, plus extra for sprinkling
2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely grated
1 tsp (5 ml) brown sugar

Heat the oven to 190 ºC.  Cut the stalks off the fennel and slice the bulbs lengthways into quarters (or sixths, if they are very large). Use a paring knife to chip away any tough pieces of white core.

Put all the ingredients for the bake in a large, deep roasting tray.  Season generously with salt and pepper, and scatter the rosemary leaves over the top.   Whisk together the dressing ingredients, pour this over the contents of the tray. Mix well so every piece is coated - I use my hands for this.

Cover the dish tightly with tin foil and bake at 190 ºC for 30 minutes.  Now remove the foil, turn the oven up to 200 ºC (fan on, if your oven has one) for 25-30 minutes, or until all the moisture has evaporated, the fennel is tender and sticky, and the sausages are a rich brown.

Sprinkle a few drops of lemon juice over the tray and take it hot to the table.

Serves 4 as a generous main dish; 6 as a side. 

More of my fennel recipes:

• Wine-Braised Baby Fennel in Crisped Prosciutto
• Salad of Shaved Baby Fennel, Apple and Smoked Mackerel
• Egg and Fennel Salad with Nasturtium-Leaf Mayonnaise
• Spring Salad of Edamame Beans, Fennel, Avocado and Pancetta
• Fennel Salad with Caramelised Pears, Walnuts and Blue Cheese

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Low-Carb Green Bean, Tomato & Prosciutto Salad with Basil Oil

Substantial meal-in-one salads are so quick and versatile. I can fling them them together in the late afternoon, then serve them for dinner a few hours later (on their own for family members watching their waistlines, and with warm bread or crunchy potato wedges for those of a scrawnier build). You'll have to forego the bread and potatoes if you're on a low-carb regime, of course, but I don't think you'll miss them: this salad is quite filling, packed as it is with fibre-rich baby beans.

This salad is good with a dab or two of Tabasco sauce.

I also love how fresh and abundant these veggie salads look when they're heaped in glistening piles on large platters, and the fact that you can use all sorts of store-cupboard ingredients to add texture and contrast: toasted pumpkin and sunflower seeds, sultanas, dried apricots, olives, croutons, and so on.

I make this sort of salad often in winter using, variously, butternut, carrots, couscous, chickpeas, rice and lentils combined with spicy, garlicky dressings, left-over roast chicken, feta and chopped fresh herbs. (At the end of this post you'll find links to some of these recipes.)

That's not to say that a meal-in-one salad should be regarded as a dustbin into which to turf ingredients that are past their best.

For a salad of utter simplicity, such as this one, only the best ingredients will do, and my strategy is to combine one or two luxurious foodstuffs with inexpensive, beautiful veggies at the peak of their ripeness.

Here, I've used gorgeous prosciutto made by Richard Bosman’s Quality Cured Meats, luscious peppered cream cheese from Fairview, and a selection of interesting cherry tomatoes in yellow, red and near-black, from Woolies.

I wouldn't make this with elderly, stringy or lumpy green beans, because there are only so many of them you can eat half-cooked before they set your teeth on edge.

If you're making this ahead of time, blanch and refresh the beans no longer than 45 minutes before you serve the salad, or their lovely green will begin to dull to a muddy algae colour. You can, however, cut up the tomatoes, douse them with basil oil and leave them to steep up to four hours ahead.

A few shining ingredients are all you need
 to make a beautiful salad.

Here's my cunning short-cut for topping and tailing a whole lot of beans in double-quick time: make sure to buy beans neatly aligned in their packet (not the ones jumbled up in a roomy bag).  Shake the bag, stalk-side down, so all the ends are flush against the packet seam. Now slice off all the stalks in one go, cutting straight through the plastic wrapping with a very sharp knife.  Do the same thing on the other side to trim off the 'tails' (although I usually leave these on because I like how they look).

If you'd like a more garlicky dressing, add as many cloves as you fancy to the basil oil. I prefer just a flicker of garlic in this salad.

This recipe makes more basil oil than you'll need to dress the salad, but you can save the rest to use in salad dressings for the next few days.

The oil may partly solidify in the fridge, but it will turn liquid if you leave it out of the fridge for an hour or two.




Low-Carb Green Bean, Tomato & Prosciutto Salad with Basil Oil

2 punnets (about 1 kg ) mixed cherry tomatoes
2 packets (about 750 g, or enough for 6 people) baby green beans, topped and tailed
12 slices of excellent prosciutto
1 x 100 g roll of peppered cream cheese (you can use peppered feta instead)
juice of a small lemon
salt and milled black pepper

For the basil oil: 
a large bunch of basil
1 cup (250 ml) olive oil
a small clove of garlic, peeled and sliced

First make the basil oil. Pick the basil leaves off their stalks. Fill a very large bowl (you'll use this for the beans later) with cold water and add a handful of ice cubes. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil, drop in the leaves and blanch for exactly 10 seconds. Fish them out with a strainer and plunge them straight into the iced water: this will help to set their colour. Leave them for two minutes, then squeeze them into a ball and pat them as dry as possible with kitchen paper or a clean tea towel. Place them in the jug attachment of a stick blender,  or a similar liquidising gadget. Add the olive oil and sliced garlic clove and whizz until the leaves are very finely chopped, but not puréed to a sludge. Pour the oil into a bowl and set aside for an hour or two in a warm place.  After this, you can strain the oil through fine cheesecloth to produce a clear green oil, but I never bother with this.

Cut up the tomatoes - some crossways, some lengthways, for variety - and put them into a bowl. Drizzle over just enough basil oil to coat them generously.  Add a good squeeze of lemon juice, plus salt and pepper to taste, and toss well.  At this point you can set them aside, covered and at room temperature, for a few hours.

Add more ice cubes to the bowl if the chilled water is no longer very cold.  Reheat the water on the stove and add a few pinches of salt. Throw in the beans and cook them until just tender-crisp. This will take between two and three minutes, depending on the size of the beans; I suggest you set a timer for 2 minutes, and then cook them for a further minute if they're still too crunchy.  Plunge them into the iced water, as described above, pat them dry on kitchen paper and add them to the bowl of tomatoes. Toss everything together and have a taste - you might want to add more lemon juice, basil oil, salt and pepper.

Pile the beans and tomatoes onto a large platter and tuck the slices of proscuitto into the salad, as shown in the picture. Pinch off pieces of cream cheese and scatter them over the salad.  Drizzle over some more basil oil, and take the salad straight to the table.

Serves 6. 

More salads like this: 

Moroccan-Spiced Carrot and Chickpea Salad with Mint & Almonds

Roast Aubergine, Gammon & Mung Bean Salad, to please a crowd

Feeding a crowd: Roast Butternut and Baby Corn Salad

Herby Rice Salad with Feta, Walnuts and Dried Pomegranate Seeds

Salad of Green Beans with Lemon, Garlic, Olive Oil, Toasted Hazelnuts and Peppered Cream Cheese

Lemony Green Beans with Frizzled Prosciutto, Fried Breadcrumbs and Aïoli

Spring Salad of Edamame Beans, Fennel, Avocado and Pancetta

Crunchy Quinoa Salad with Beetroot and Feta

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