Ragu bolognese

In the old days I used to make pasta to go with this. I used to love pasta - good, homemade pasta, with ragu, with tomato, with mushrooms, sage and butter - but I don't really miss it, surprisingly.

Now I just have the ragu without the pasta - with veg, or occasionally a little rice. This time I took a step towards authenticity I'd never taken before; that is, I added chicken liver. It was good; very rich, though whether that was from the liver or from the gammon stock I also added (I didn't have any pancetta to hand) I don't know.

Steak, again

Valentine's night. Bigger than last time.

Beetroot, caraway and dill soup

I made this to go with some smoked salmon, another souvenir from Iceland. The secret ingredient in the soup is cumin; I find it brings out the earthiness of beetroot. Plus a wedge of lemon, squeezed and then left in the soup as it cooks, and some horseradish.

The salmon was really excellent. Soup was pretty good too.

Pork stir fry

Leftover roast pork, cubed and marinaded in a mix of apple sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, chilli and star anise. Stir fry until browned, remove from pan, briefly stir fry veggies, reassemble.

The apple sauce helps the meat to caramelise, and adds a good sweet and sour note.

This only took a few minutes, and I actually enjoyed it more than I did the plain roast pork the first time around, good as that was. Just as well, given there's a fair bit of pork left over.

Hand of pork

Hand of pork is one of those traditionally-cheaper cuts. I say traditionally cheaper, because these days, as soon as a cut becomes known as unglamorous it promptly becomes re-glamorised: celebrity chefs fall over each other to sing its praises, demonstrating their own earthy savvy and thriftiness, and the price rises accordingly. Thus a lot of cuts of meat supposedly cheap are in fact not so spectacularly cheap as you might expect.


Nevertheless, as pork roasts go, the hand joint is still not much more than two thirds the price of a shoulder joint, so it's pretty good value. I ordered this one from the place I get my veg box; it arrived boned, which I wasn't expecting, but never mind. I put juniper berries, peppercorns, bay leaves and cider in the roasting dish, gave it half an hour in a hot oven, then about five hours in a cool-ish oven. The pics show it raw, finished and 'carved'. Had it with braised fennel, parsnip and celeriac, and some swiss chard.

Skyr

Skyr is a dairy product, somewhere between a soft cheese and yogurt, native to Iceland. It has a mild flavour, closer to yogurt than cheese, and a rich creamy texture, which is surprising given that it's very low fat. And given, again, that it's very low fat and high protein, it's surprising that it hasn't been marketed outside of Iceland. Well, maybe it has, but I've never seen it.


Anyway, low fat is definitely not on my list of priorities, but traditionally Skyr is served with cream, apparently, which solves that, and that's what I did.

Iceland itself was breathtakingly beautiful, and despite having been told the climate wasn't that dissimilar to the UK, there was thick snow everywhere.

And it was very, very, cold.

Steak

I had a small piece of ribeye left after I'd cut two bigger steaks from it - about five ounces, probably. Put it in the freezer thinking it
would do for steak and eggs some morning,
but I needed cheering up tonight and this fit the bill.

It was bigger than this when I started. I just took the picture to illustrate what I'd call well done. Not overdone, well done: soft, tender, and with just a hint of pink in the centre at the thickest points. There is a common misconception that well done means incinerated or vulcanised. Wrong.