Royal pork

There was a party in our street to celebrate the recent coronation, on the day after, the Sunday, so as not to interrupt viewing of same on the box.

A party which included adults eating early evening, with the form being to bring your own main course, while other stuff was provided on a communal basis. Our form is to use cold roast pork on these occasions, which I can take in white bread sandwiches and which BH can take with salad and so forth.

So off to the butcher on the big day to collect my pork. He turned a whole shoulder of Old Spot into a roll - of which I took half - while I admired all the prepared meat in his display, which came in all sorts of colours, all sorts of shapes and in all sorts of flavours - and which was presumably intended for barbecues - something which we do not do.

My half of the roll weighed in at 4lbs 11oz, slightly more than on the last occasion, noticed at reference 1. So I thought that 2 hours 45 minutes at 160°C should do it, with the outturn being that I actually turned the oven off after 3 hours. Always handy to have a bit of flexibility as to timing.

So crackling salted and the roll stood in the kitchen for a bit to take the chill off it, then into the pre-heated over at 14:45. Oven off at 17:45, meat plated up and back into the still warm oven to settle shortly after.

I then did clever things with the roasting tin to convert all the brown stuff left behind into onion gravy, with freshly pounded black pepper on this occasion. Balcony scene over - for which see reference 2 - this served on bread as a tea-time snack.

A little more water and some brown rice left over from the Friday and the balance of the gravy did for my breakfast on Sunday. Thus fortified, I pedalled off to the big Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane for one of their large bloomers. This because, more than ten years on, I still can't make the sort of white bread needed for meat sandwiches. Brown bread not the thing at all: brown bread with cheese good, brown bread with meat bad. And being picky, white bread is also needed for things like cheese & tomato and cheese & onion sandwiches. White bread is better for bread and butter, unless the bread is very fresh, when both are good, albeit different. On the other hand, old & dry brown bread is quite eatable, good even, while old & dry white bread is not. And so it goes on. All very complicated here at Epsom.

In the event, these pork sandwiches were spot on. White bread fresh, meat cooked but not dry.

Then, by the Monday, we were once again into cold pork with boiled vegetables. With BH dealing with all the crackling, her back teeth being in a rather better shape than mine.

Repeat performance on the Tuesday. Waste starting to accumulate, but the current theory is that while the crows and magpies hoover the stuff off the back lawn fast enough, the lingering smells attract the foxes, which is a bad thing. So pork waste now goes into the food recycling caddy: maybe the council get to do something better than feeding the crows with it.

The trail goes cold at this point, but I think the pork did one more meal with a bit of snacking left over. Maybe a meal involving salad, that is to say cold vegetables, rather than hot vegetables. So something over eight adult portions altogether, which makes it sound more economical than it seems when you are paying for the joint in the first place.

PS 1: the day that I penned these remarks above about the colour of bread was, as it happened, also the day for the 687th batch of bread, brown as it always is these days. Most of the whites were in the early days, back in 2011 or so, when I was still trying. While brownish was the batch when I bought the wrong bag of Canadian from Waitrose and did not have nearly enough wholemeal flour to make up what was by then the regular recipe. While my faith in Microsoft's pivot tables was moderated this morning by its failing to count the one row where colour had not been coded, despite there seeming to be a bin (row 7 in the snap above) for that very category. Now corrected to 'White'.

PS 2: monarchists will be pleased to read that I am now using the 'Royalty' white bread flour from Wright's (of North London and reference 3) rather than the 'Alto', the one with the Italian flavoured packaging, which I had been using for two or three years. For some reason, unknown to me, it seems to work better for me. With the brown part of the deal still coming from the Canadian wholemeal from Waitrose.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/a-spot-of-old-spot.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/second-bite.html.

Reference 3: https://www.wrightsflour.co.uk/.