DeRaza Iberico Pig Day Sunday 25th March | Catalan Cooking

DeRaza Iberico Pig Day Sunday 25th March | Catalan Cooking:

I soooo want to go on this! You get to make your own morcilla and chorizo out of the most delicious pig in the world and then you get to take it home and eat it!

"Join Catalan Cooking for a day of DeRaza Iberico Pig. The black iberico pig is the reason that Spain makes the best ham in the world and is quite simply the best pork possible to eat...Chef Franz Schinagl will then give us a butchery demo and a chance for you to cut your own pork up yourself.
Ben Mulock will then show how to make iberico hamburger and pork tartare. He will also cook the same cuts of iberico and white pork so you can taste the difference between the two meats. After lunch you make morcilla, sobrasada, chorizo and head cheese, followed by pig trotters paella, iberico pork cheeks in chocolate and eat them altogether accompanied by some matching Spanish wine. You can take home any leftovers and the morcilla. We will send you the chorizo and the sobrasada once it has cured."

£85 is a bargain for this. The only thing putting me off is I am pretty sure I'd never get my piggy swag on the plane home. We need one of these in Belfast or Dublin!

If you live near London you'll want to go to this. It starts at 10.30 am and will be held at Arch 76, Druid Street, SE1. You can get your ticket here.

Better than Pea & Ham Soup

Two days into the new year Tesco offers little in the way of cut price sustenance. They are absolute beggars for  pushing not-very-special-offers this weather (you know, "50p each or 4 for £3" or as the picture shows, an offer of Indian snacks which was mindbogglingly poor value, yet which managed to clear the shelf.). The place was coming down with them.

I suppose you can't blame them for making a few quid out of silly sods who are so distracted by yellow barkers that they lose the ability to do simple division. The 800g of Taw Valley Cheddar (a very pedestrian cooking cheese which I stockpiled at 30p per 400g just before Christmas!) for £10 made me laugh out loud.

However amidst the highway robbery I did notice lovely big 3lb gammon joints reduced to £3.50 and I picked up a 1lb smoked kielbasa (Polish sausage) for 50p! A pack of soup vegetables and we're ready to go make the sort of soup that will raise the dead (and may need to given the chesty colds flying around).

The killer ingredient for me was using chana dal instead of split peas. Chana dal is a split Bengal chickpea - it's very nutty and tasty but miraculously it keeps its shape when cooked. It's my all time favourite pulse but I have never tried it in soup till now. I'll be doing this again, the flavour was tremendous and I got about 3lb of delicious cooked ham and sausage mix for the freezer out of it too. So this is real feed an army for a fiver stuff! You can get chana dal in the bigger supermarkets or in your local Asian grocers.

Better-than-pea-and-ham-soup Soup

3lb unsmoked gammon

1lb smoked kielbasa

2 onions, peeled and halved

1 pack prepared soup veg, washed (choose one with hardly any carrot but plenty of leek & parsley)

12oz chana dal

Put everything except the dal in a stockpot, cover in water, bring to boil, skim any foam off the surface, simmer for two hours. Remove the meat, liquidise the veg into the stock. Add the dal, boil for 10 mins, simmer for an hour. When the gammon has cooled, remove all skin and fat and chop up the lean meat; chop the kielbasa up too. Return about a pound of it back to the soup. Freeze the rest of the meat, it will make good pie filling, pasta sauce base or could be added to a chicken casserole.

McCartney's Chorizo, Chicken & Bean Stew

Messy but completely delish!

McCartneys of Moira are going a dinger at the moment! First of all their Corned Beef beat 7,500 other entries to become the Great Taste Awards 2011 Supreme Champion, then they were named best Neighbourhood Retailer Butcher of the Year! But we knew that anyway! Their sausages are just the best thing ever and so cheap when you consider how delicious they are. I'd rather have a plate of McCartney's sausages (especially their Italian ones) than a supermarket steak any time.

I made a fantastic (even if I do say so myself) casserole for the weekend from McCartney's chorizo sausages, some chicken fillets, a few tins of beans and a tub of tomato sauce. These sausages aren't as strong as proper chorizo (they are more accurately chorizo flavoured) but they are full of garlic & paprika and perfect for a winter casserole. Incredibly easy and quick to do, this will keep us going through a busy weekend where my husband and I are doing a very accurate impression of ships that pass in the night. You can eat a bowl of it on its own or have some crusty bread and cheese on the side. I make a pretty damn good tomato sauce in industrial quantities once a month and freeze 400g or so batches of it, so that's what I used here. Use your own recipe or a supermarket one if you must, though I can't recommend one cos I think they are all awful.....if you can recommend a good one please let me know!

Chorizo, Chicken & Bean Stew
450g McCartney's Chorizo sausages (If you are not lucky enough to have McCartneys, use a premium pork sausage with a lot of garlic, paprika and spice in the mix) cut into bitesize chunks
450g chicken breast fillets cut into bitesize chunks
1 punnet chestnut mushrooms sliced
1 medium aubergine diced into 1/2" chunks
100g Kabanossi sausage sliced
1 tin chickpeas drained and washed
1 tin flageolet beans drained and washed
3-400g or so of tomato sauce (see recipe below)
1 tsp paprika
Oil for frying

Fry the mushrooms on high until caramelised and golden. Transfer to a large casserole. Do the same thing with the aubergine. Turn the heat down slightly to medium high heat. Fry the chorizo until golden and add to the casserole. Then do the same with the chicken. Put everything else (beans, kabanossi, tomato sauce) into the casserole, bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer for 45 mins.

My tomato sauce
2 x 500g cartons of passata (Tesco's 29p one is grand)
2-3 large onions
2-3 peppers (optional)
4-5 cloves of garlic
1 tsp sugar
1 bay leaf
1 tsp dried thyme or a few sprigs of fresh.

Put the peppers, onions & garlic in a food processor and whizz till finely chopped. Fry on a medium high heat till cooked through (30 mins?). Throw everything else in, bring to the boil, simmer on low for an hour or so, remove whole herbs, cool & freeze in batches (this makes 3 batches for me). If you make it without peppers it's stupidly cheap and tastes much better than any dirty oul thing out of a jar.

A Lidl more than I intended

Didn't think it was actually possible to
break the £20 barrier in Lidl!

I really only nipped in to the Castlereagh Lidl because I saw it had a bakery and I know they do a cracking rye loaf. Of course I got hugely carried away and ended up with a mighty stash - I ended up spending more than £20 which I didn't think was possible!

Lidl is tremendously hit and miss - their yoghurts & chilled desserts are dire and I still can't bring myself to take a punt on the cleaning products but I'll update as I test:

• Cheese parcels - lovely buttery pastry with a mixture of feta and mizritha cheese - I'll be buying these again!
• Kabanossi - tasty enough Greek sausage, 300g for £1.99 is a good deal and I plan on putting it in a pie with some of the cheese I bought. (Update: I ended up putting it in a lovely Chicken & Chorizo Casserole)
• Fin Carre plain chocolate is a good Bourneville substitute and at less than 30p for a 100g bar you couldn't complain at all. We'll be making truffles this weekend!
• The Greek anchovies are delish - not strong at all, soft, melting texture in a lovely herb vinaigrette.
• The sesame bagels were quite light and not desperately chewy but toasted well and were COVERED in sesame seeds which is very important for me! Eaten with the cream cheese and ham these sustained us midweek at exactly half the price I'd pay in Tesco. That's if you can find one. Tesco stock buyers, take note. There's a reason you always run out of the sesame bagels while heaps of plain and onion ones languish on the sidelines. Please address it.
• Country loaf & rye loaf - I lived on these for two days and made no impression. They are as huge as they are delicious and they both make the most amazing toast. The Country Loaf was incredible value for 89p. It made a very memorable breakfast this morning, toasted, buttered and draped with fried eggs. I recently paid £4 for a similar loaf in St George's Farmers Market and I thought that was good value, so it's definitely worth a detour to a Lidl with a home bakery on a Friday - you'll have good bread all weekend for less than a pound. 
• Gran Padano - as Parmesan substitutes go I'm afraid this was Not All That. 

I'd love to direct you to a list of Lidls with home bakeries, but I can't because their website is UNBELIEVABLY SHIT! Guys, I know it's a budget brand but Jesus H, you could've spent more than a tenner on it?

My magical powers...

Soooo.....my first blog post ever about a random little trip to Moira for corned beef ends up on national news and Mr McCartney gets a deal with Selfridges. Coincidence, or what? OK, coincidence. Been eating his corned beef sandwiches all week, moving on to his pork & walnut sausages tomorrow night. If they end up in some kind of sausage Oscars this weekend, start worrying, I have special powers.

• Moira butcher George McCartney crowned corned beef king

Good luck McCartneys of Moira - off to London for the Great Taste Awards final! |

Good luck guys!

Off to London for the Great Taste Awards Final! | McCartneys of Moira:

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Corned beef: Food of the gods?

We attended a great Doggy Fun Day organised by Beechgrove Stables near Banbridge on Saturday. Unfortunately we couldn't bring wee Sheba as she's just come into season and that's not the kind of Doggy Fun we had in mind.

Instead hooked up with the wonderful Jackie Redmond and her agility squad - we had a good chat about training sighthounds and we got to meet Lady, the elderly greyhound Jackie is fostering. Also caught up with the magnificent Mr. Jack Quaile who was letting his wee alsatian Diamond have a rake around the agility course (more of a demolition derby to be fair, but she had fun!).

On the way home we diverted to McCartney's butchers in Moira. I bought my usual 10lb of assorted sausages (I particularly recommend the Italian, Pork & Apple and Oak Smoked but to be fair it's impossible to go wrong here - everything is the best of the best). Having heard great reports about their famous corned beef I was keen to give it a go - corned beef is one of my very few "bleugh" foods so I was intrigued that McCartney's were making it. I've been going to McCartney's for 20 years and they are really creative, high quality butchers.

Got talking to the owner and he told me they are in the finals for the Great Taste Awards "the food Oscars" on Monday night for their corned beef! Getting it home I can see why. It's the most utterly moreish beef product I've eaten in a long time.

Where your usual experience of corned beef is that gruesome mush bound together by dripping (our school canteen used to add insult to injury by dipping it in batter and deep frying it!) this is luscious shreds of lightly seasoned, braised, pressed beef bound in the lightest imaginable jelly and thinly sliced. It is about as different from canned corned beef as a Porsche from a Lada. Buy it by the kilo (it's about £2 per 100g and worth every penny).

Production | McCartneys of Moira:

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