27 March - pork belly with spicy rhubarb sauce

We had some slightly green rhubarb hanging around that didn't quite feel pink enough for crumble, so I decided to do something savoury with it instead. I googled "pork and rhubarb" and came up with a few recipes - the below is sort of a combination of several:

• Blend two large shallots, 3 cloves garlic, 1/2 inch grated fresh ginger, 2tbsp honey and 2tbsp extra virgin olive oil to a paste.
• Coat c.750g piece of pork belly with the mixture and put it in a roasting dish with c.300ml dry cider and a red chilli just snapped to release its flavour. Cover with foil and cook at 180C for 90 mins (maybe a bit less or a bit cooler as it rather dried out) - check and add more cider if necessary (I ended up using a full 500ml in the end)
  
• Uncover and add c.250g chopped rhubarb and cook for another 15 mins until the rhubarb's tender.
• Remove the pork to rest and discard the chilli. Then bubble the sauce gently on the hob, adding a bit of cold chopped butter to make it smooth.

The resulting sauce was quite stunningly tasty and really had quite a chilli kick. Served on top of the lovely tender pork belly (we only ate about 2/3 of the meat, but all the sauce) along with some spring greens and beans, it was absolutely top!

2 February - squash soup, pork bolognese and wonderful rhubarb

There's been a large squash hanging around for weeks and the last chunk was starting to go a bit mouldy, so I finally used the last of it up in some soup for lunch. I roasted the squash, then added the flesh to some sweated onion in a pan, added some chicken stock and liquidised the whole lot before adding a slurp of cream. With a few bits of fried bacon on the top, it actually wasn't too bad.

I went back to Ruby & White as they'd said they'd put some pork mince aside for me today. As usual though, I somehow managed to come away with more than I really wanted. I was going to use half and keep the other half for something else, but then I was a bit late getting started on dinner and in my rush to get it going, I dumped all the mince into the pan - d'oh! So rather than using up the half a tin of tomatoes I'd specifically kept from yesterday, I had to open a new tin and we ended up with more bloody leftovers! The pork bolognese recipe from my Mum was quite simple and not much different from my usual bolognese - apart from substituting pork mince for beef and red wine instead of white. It was quite nice though and made a little bit of a change.

I'd wanted to keep the pasta portions small because I had plans for pudding. With a bit of a glut of milk in the fridge, I made some rice pudding and also cooked up some lovely new season rhubarb, using a recipe from the weekend Guardian. You bake the rhubarb with some sugar, dessert wine and vanilla - with some chopped pistachios sprinkled on top it was absolutely delicious and great with the creamy rice pudding!