Easter Pork or anytime Pork...
I’m a Jew, not a practising Jew but by birth I’m a french hungarian Jew (on my mothers side) on my father’s side I’m German and German’s or my dad has bought us up to celebrate all the fun things as his mother did with hime when he was a small boy.
We do Christmas and Easter and we do it well! This year my Papa bear and my step mother J9 where coming up to spend 4 days with us and celebrate Easter but due to COVID it did not happen and we were all a little sad, so as the matriarch of my small family it was up to me as always to make it as special and memorable as ever for my kids (big & small).
The Easter bunny came as always (if you don’t believe you don’t receive) they all believe…even the 21 year old😜. There was chocolate for breakfast and then I went to work to get the traditional Pork on for Easter Linner (very late lunch almost dinner) after that went on it was traditional Easter activities like biscuit making and egg dying.
The meal took all of 15 mins for me to chuck everything into my cast iron pot and throw it in the oven.
This is how I did it and what you’ll need to recreate this any day of the week.
Ingredients:
3 pink lady apples ( any flavourful slightly tart but equally sweet apple)
5 shallots (tiny purple onions) but you can also just use plane old onions I’m not fussy, it’s just what I had on hand
a whole head of pungent italian garlic - skins removed
the bottoms of half a bunch of spring onions
a handful of sage
a shoulder of happy pork bone in
1 litre of Love and Bones broth ( I used Chicken because that’s what I had)
the juice of half a lemon
salt and pepper
butter and fat from broth
How I threw it together:
the only thing I chopped up was the apple (no jokes)
everything else I removed skins and threw in whole
I slightly seared fat side down of the pork till it just started to blister and then popped it on top of the cut up/thrown in apples, garlic, shallots, spring onions, sage, butter & fat…blistered skin side up.
Squeezed lemon on top, salt and pepper and then poured 3/4 of a litre of broth over it (see my insta stories)
Popped it in an oven preheated to 180c then bought down to 120C from 7.30am till we ate at 5pm.
Removing the lid and cranking up the heat to 180c for the last hour
Sides:
I made crispy fluffy dutch cream potatoes by par boiling them and giving them a good thrashing in their pot to make them a little messy…then I added a small paddle of fat over them and put them on a baking sheet and roasted them this they were perfectly crispy (no seasoning was needed because the juice and fat off the meat was perfectly flavoured)
I added the fat of the pork 20 mins before the potatoes were ready to crisp up even more.
Then I made some steamed beans with olive oil & balsamic
And finished with a massive salad with wild rocket, cucumbers, red capsicum, apple, pear, pink grapefruit, feta cheese, spring onions, lots of lemon & lime juice, olive oil and candied walnuts for crunch & sweetness.
It was insane. I served up the meat with all extra jellied fat removed and gently broken into large pieces, I stained the leftover yumminess in the pot and made a sweet apple/pork garlicky gravy that was to die for and we all enjoyed a delicious meal.
Ok the crackling looks burn’t but it wasn’t, it was perfect.