Bring Me The Head Of Runty Garcia

Sweet in the sty and even sweeter in the freezer

This week I have discovered some deeply disturbing details about the minds of the inhabitants of the islands commonly known as New Zealand.  The Government of NZ have, over the last few weeks, updated the list of names they deem unacceptable to name babies in their country.  As of this week the names Prince, Queen Victoria and (god forbid) 4Real are all off limits along with a further 74 names.  At present though you can call your New Zealand baby either Adolf Hitler, Mr Mucky Flap Flap or Fanny Pong, although I suspect the authorities would take a very dim view of the last one. 

I was musing on the subject of names this week because the pigs that we have been looking after for the last eight months went off on their holidays to the mystical island of abattoir.  They are currently residing in the freezers of a dozen unnamed families in the Aylesbury Vale area awaiting roasting, mincing, frying and BBQing.  Now, one of the golden rules of keeping animals for meat is that you do NOT, under any circumstances, despite how funny it may seem, name them.  We made a big mistake a few years ago with a sheep called Minty.  Anyone who has seen the episode of The Simpsons where Homer raises Pinchy (a lobster) and then cries through every delicious mouthful will know what I’m talking about.

So this year, no names no attachments.  This time it was going to be ruthless, professional and clean.  However, despite out best efforts one of the ten pigs managed to worm its way into our affections.  It was a runt, much smaller than the rest but with the kind of kick-ass, go-getting attitude you’d expect from a Jackie Chan hero.  This runty porker would muscle its way around the sty like it owned the joint (Mmmmmmmm pig joint).  It was top pig and made sure the rest of the herd knew about it.  So, naturally the runt became the most talked about pig, the one we would give a few extra scraps to, the porker who got the most pats and scratches.  Unnamed but very much loved.  My wife, in particular, became very attached to Runty and would often pepper our evening conversations with tales of their exploits. 

And so we come to the horns of my dilemma.  Each time we have pigs I always ask for a head so that I can make brawn and some amazing stock for gravies and stews.  This time I was told that the head I had been given was, yes you’ve guessed, the head of Runty.  I haven’t told my wife yet as I think she would find it all a bit upsetting.  In fact, the first she knows about it will be when she reads this column.  That’s right my darling, the gravy we had a week last Sunday was made from Runty and my god, wasn’t it wonderful?

My Mum's Toasted Cheese

Check this out and tell me it doesn't look like the most delicious thing you've ever seen with your own pair of eyeballs...

The other good news apart from the fact that it looks so damn good and tastes like Jesus and Santa have just butterfly-kissed your tongue is that there is absolutely no horse in it... whatsoever.

Now, when I say Mum’s Toasted Cheese I really mean Granny’s toasted cheese as my mum was given this to eat by her mum.  It’s a real teatime classic, the kind we used to eat in front of saturday telly when the final scores were rolling in but I think you could do it easily as a dinner party starter. 

Due to it's unbelievably high cheese content and the enormous wall of 40 that my life is hurtling toward I probably only have a few years left of eating this before my cholesterol level and furring arteries scream for me to stop.  This is not diet food.  Here's how you work this piece of culinary magic.

Ingredients

1 onion

A lot of a hard strong cheese like cheddar or Lancashire Tasty

Parmesan

Milk

Chop the onion and soften gently in butter, you don’t want to colour the onion but fry it until it takes on a glistening translucent quality.  Grate the cheddar or Lancashire Tasty and then layer in an oven dish alternating the cheese and onion.  Pour in a little milk, enough to come a quarter the way up the cheese.  Season with pepper and then grate the Parmesan over the top.  Put in a hot oven for about twenty minutes or until the cheese has melted and the top is lovely and brown.  Cut up a French loaf or grab some hunks of bread, dip in the fondue-y, melting, deliciousness and enjoy.

One family variation is to top the Toasted Cheese with sliced tomatoes before you place in the oven.  My family likes a green salad with it just to give some relief to the relentless richness.  My mum says that she even remembers having crispy, grilled streaky bacon with it, although how she is still alive if she ate this I do not know.  Enjoy.

They Eat Horses Don't They..?

One of these fillets used to be a horse and one used to be a cow.

This is an article I wrote a few weeks ago for Vale Life magazine.  I didn't imagine then that it would still be so topical...

You must forgive me if I’m not my usual self but I have just come out of the Seven Stages of Early Jan.  The first stage is ‘shock and denial’ (OMG did I really eat that much over Christmas?  There’s no way I ate that much over Christmas!).  Stage two is ‘pain and guilt’ (My stomach hurts bad, why did I eat three tins of Quality Street?).  Third stage is ‘anger and bargaining’ (Christmas pudding makes me mad! Please please please give me some more of that sweet, sweet Christmas pudding).  Next comes ‘depression’ (I can’t believe I’ve got to wait 348 days until I eat turkey again).  The fifth stage is ‘reflection’ (Boy we had us some good times at Christmas didn’t we?  Remember that slice of brie?).  Next is ‘acceptance’ (So I ate a lot this Christmas.  What are you gonna do?).  And lastly in the Seven Stages of Early Jan we come to ‘hope’ (Hey is that an Easter Egg?).

Well, in this post Christmas, post New Year, post turkey and all the trimmings, post staying up all night drinking kind of world we find that THE hot food topic of 2013 so far is… horses.  In case you missed it, certain burgers in certain supermarkets contained certain traces of certain horse DNA.  Not wanting to go into the “ifs” and the “whats” and the “d’you mind if I don’ts” of feeding things to people they don’t know they’re eating, I thought I would devote the first column of the year to the hidden hippophagist in all of us carnivores.  Why is it that we are happy to eat some mammals but not some others?  Cows, pigs, goats, sheep, deer and rabbits are all eaten happily by millions of people.  However, mention that a haunch of horse is on the menu for Sunday lunch and you’ll find yourself as popular as, well as popular as some horse DNA in a supermarket beefburger.

Equine or bovine.  So, do you feel lucky punk..?  Well..?  Do you..?

In talking to people about eating horse I heard the same story from virtually everyone.  Most people seem to think that they have (a) eaten horse (b) in France and (c) without knowing that they were eating horse.  Given these unusual set of facts I did what any self respecting food writer would do.  I bought a horse steak on the internet and cooked it up for lunch.  The horsemeat in question was lean and dark, a little like venison.  When fried up for a few minutes it was quite tasty with a firm texture and a distinctive ‘gamey’ flavour.  I also cooked a fillet steak for comparison and I am happy to report that despite looking very similar the beef won hands down for flavour and texture.  Would I eat horse again?  Yes, I don’t see why not.  Would I choose it on a menu over beef?  I don’t think I would.  Buckinghamshire horses can rest easy, they are simply not delicious enough for this hungry gent.

Camping Sucks Less When Drinking Beer

That's my son.  Not me.

On my eighth birthday I had an epiphany so vivid that even now, thirty years later, I am able to bring it to my mind with crystal clear, Betamax clarity.  It was the heady summer of 1980 and the musical stylings of Freddie Mercury and Randy Crawford were battling for my affections.  For weeks I had pestered my mum and dad for a tent and finally I was granted my wish. 

The tent was a small, two-person vision in red and green manmade fibres.  It took six grown men four hours to assemble and that night, the night of my birthday, I was allowed to take a friend and sleep out until morning.  Needless to say it was a sobering early lesson in how disappointing life can be.  There really is nothing in the world like being woken up dry mouthed and sweaty, zipped inside a nylon sleeping bag that is itself locked within another and much larger sheet of nylon.  At that tender and impressionable age the names Mr. & Mrs. Smith meant a slightly dotty old couple who lived down the road but it was definitely within the confines of my first tent that my lifelong love of luxurious boutique hotels was formed.  My parents must have been very disappointed by my reluctance to ever use my birthday tent again but in that early morning sunrise, among the ants and spiders and biscuit crumbs and the terrible, terrible smells I made a solemn vow that I would never go camping again.

That was a vow I kept until two weeks ago when under relentless pressure from my two sons we bought a tent and went with friends to an Oxfordshire campsite not far from where I live.  In order to minimize the pain of the early morning wake up I decided that I would turn to nature in the form of old mother alcohol to see me through.  There has been a good deal of column inches devoted recently to the rise in sales of real ale so being the contentious food writer I thought I’d merge my need for booze and my approaching deadline by arranging a local beer tasting for my fellow campers. 

The rules for the tasting were simple.  I wanted beers from Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire that I could get from a supermarket.  The tasting itself would be done blind with no one knowing what the beers were while they tasted.  The beers were as follows... Pride Of Oxford (£2), Hook Norton Twelve Days (£2.05), Rebellion (£2.15) and John Hampden from the Chiltern Brewery (£2.40).

So far, so good.  One note of caution for any budding food writers though is don't do it when your drunk.  Or at least if you do get drunk don't expect to be able to read your notes, or find your notes, or make any notes.  The upshot of all this is that the winner of the contest is lost in the mists of time and the haze of being a bit pissed.

As a footnote I would add that from what I can remember all the beers were delicious and an excellent way of alleviating the awfulness of the early morning campsite wake-up.  I slept soundly that night and woke refreshed and ready for what the day had in store.  I was reminded of the wisdom of bar owner and drunk Doug Coughlin, as played by the excellent Bryan Brown in the movie Cocktail, whose life motto was, “beer is for breakfast drink or begone".

Shallow Grave Cooking

Warning - this blog contains a picture of a severed pig's head (although it's not as bad as I've made that sound).

Spare the axe spoil the child

OK, this is going to get grisly.  For those of a weak or sensitive constitution I'm going to begin with the good stuff.  The picture below is pure porn.  Brawn porn.

And this little piggy went all wobbly

The problem is that to get to that deliciousness you have to start with this 

It all began in those far off, crisp and cold days that history will record as ‘just before Christmas’ when we acquired a pig at a party.  I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a countryside version of throwing car keys into a bowl.  It was a perfectly normal and straightforward party celebrating the festive season where you take a bottle of wine and bring home some livestock. 

So, we tended and fed the pigs until the beginning of April and now, after some slightly more brutal ‘tending’ by the butcher, have a freezer full of sausages, bacon, chops, offal, trotters, roasting joints and, as you can see, the head.  The head I was particularly keen on getting because stock from a pig's head opens up a world of possiblities.

My one note of caution surrounding the making of a batch of pigs' head stock is to make sure you have a pan big enough to take the head.  Even though the head was split it was still a little too big for my pans and so it required a bit more *ahem* trimming.  Now the thing about the head of a mammal is that it is full of bone and teeth and so cutting it is a little bit tricky.  My knives were inadequate so I took to the shed and had my pick of tools.  I narrowed the choice down to an axe, a small saw and the hedge trimmers before settling on the axe ( a wise move I think).

My other problem was that while I was making the stock I was also looking after my kids on a sunny, summer afternoon.  Now, whilst I want my children to be aware of the realities of what goes into a plate of meat, I also recognise that the image of their father smashing an axe through a pig's jaw could result in a good deal of therapy later in life.  

So, to recap.  

1. Pig's head, carrots, celery, onion, bay leaf, peppercorns and salt boiled together for a couple of hours make a delicious stock for soup and the perfect base for brawn.

2. On balance, a paddling pool is a better way for a six year old to spend the afternoon than being the Ewan McGregor to your Christopher Ecclestone (Pig = Keith Allen in the Shallow Grave metaphor BTW)

In Search Of Perfection

The bunting is down, the complaints to the BBC sent off and my red, white and blue knickers washed and folded away.  The Diamond Jubilee has come and gone and the conveyor belt of this year’s events trundles on, bringing the Olympics into view.  I’m not going to lie to you, we’ve been pals too long for that, but I’m not much of a royalist.  However, I did enjoy the spirit of  friendliness and community that seemed to break out across the four corners of the Isle.  People in towns and villages tipped their caps to neighbours and strangers alike, grown men were allowed to paint the faces of small children they didn’t know without social services getting involved but if there was a more fitting tribute to Her Maj than Zoo magazine’s “Topless Diamond Boobilee” then I don’t want to know about it.

During the celebrations I heard a story about a certain member of the royal family and a certain foodstuff.  Don’t worry though, it’s not like the story about the certain member of the royal family and the glass-topped coffee table.  I can’t be entirely sure of the truth of the story so I will change names to protect the innocent.  Let’s just call this royal personage “Prince C” (a.k.a The Welshman a.k.a Grumpy Architect).  Actually, whether or not the story is true is unimportant because like all stories it leads us to a bigger truth.

Apparently, “Prince C” (a.k.a FA Cup Head a.k.a The Kilt) loves a boiled egg for breakfast.  And who can blame him?  A boiled egg can be a perfectly wonderful breakfast if the white is set just so and the yolk warm and runny.  Personally I also favour a few buttered soldiers that, when dipped push the yolk up and over the lip of the cracked shell like a teensy, non life-threatening volcano.

In my life, this morning perfection happens rarely.  What with using eggs that are a bit old, or making sure the kids have got their breakfast, by the time I sit down to eat, my eggs are usually a bit under or over done.  I would contest though that it is the memory of these crappy eggs that makes the moment I get it spot on all the more delicious. 

Here’s the deal with the prince.  His staff are so keen that he should have his every whim attended to that every time “Prince C” (a.k.a The Polo Prince a.k.a Baldychops) wants a boiled egg for breakers his cook makes him six.  Each egg is then cut open and inspected, five are discarded and the one that most matches the prince’s idea of eggy perfection is served to him.

So, just in case you missed it, each time Prince C (a.k.a Veg Talker a.k.a Overpriced Biscuits) has a boiled egg for breakfast it is perfect.  My question is this.  If the only time you have a boiled egg it is perfect, can you truly appreciate the perfect boiled egg?

My Favourite Apple Pie Recipe...

that reveals a truth about the universe...

Recipe To Create Universe

65 tbsp dark energy
30 tbsp dark matter
4 tbsp free hydrogen and helium
1/2 tbsp stars
1/3 tbsp ghostly neutrinos
0.03 tbsp heavy elements