The bank holiday feels like such a long time ago. This week is a week where errands — small, irritating, wasp-sized tasks — have occupied every hour of my day, swarming around my head. Can’t forget the meter reading. Need to go to the post-office. Something once-solid in the fridge has collapsed into a mulchy puddle and it is creating noxious fumes whenever I go looking for food. Some freelance work needs looked at when I’m not doing my job-job, and I still haven’t bought a tent for Glastonbury and the bathroom sink smells weird. The bank holiday feels like such a long time ago.
Over the four days, we hung out in the park, went to the pub with our friends and their adorable kids, and we went on the Elizabeth Line (my micro-review: “it’s in my top 3 train lines.” Rob: “ehh”.) We also cooked. A huge pork shoulder went in the slow cooker with honey, soy, garlic, and lime, and cooked for nine hours, and it perfumed the whole flat with this rich, sweet, aroma. The saddle of fat was scored, salted, and rubbed with Szechuan spices to make a mouth-numbing, glass-shattering crackling, because why not? This is an amazing dish to make because it’s pretty cheap and it can feed a small army. We had the leftovers in wraps, with crunchy lettuce, and spooned over rice during the week (I also made a pretty amazing sandwich, too).
The second recipe seems a little more out-there, but it isn’t. It’s using pork tenderloin, something I am 90 percent sure I’ve never bought before. Also cheap! Half of it is in the freezer, actually, ready for the next Freezer Week. Watch this space.
All of which is to say, if you’re also done-in from the sheer exhaustion of *gestures everywhere*, you’re not alone. Do what you can. Run some bleach around the inside of the toilet when you have the energy. Try and empty the fridge, and double bag the bin — you’re going to overfill it again next week and it will leak over your pool slides. Make some plans for August now, because it’ll come soon and there’s probably a few people in your phone who are dying to hear from you.
The meticulous and elegant Pet Shop Boys <3
1. One pork shoulder recipe to rule them all
We have made this a couple of times and it’s just so perfect. Honey, soy, lime, garlic – these are all sitting in cupboards and recesses of your fridge and if you need more, they can be bought cheap. The pork shoulder, as I said above, cost significantly less than a pint (lately in my corner of South London, that’s approx £6.20). And it’s just a case of making the marinade in a bowl, dousing the pork in it, and cooking over a low heat for 8-9 hours in a slow cooker.
While it cooked, we went to the park, and when we got back, I flipped the shoulder a couple of times to make sure it’s cooking evenly (the pork isn’t submerged in liquid, like the pork recipe I shared a few weeks ago, so it’s good to turn it). After 9 hours, the pork comes out the cooker and is shredded with a couple of forks, and the sauce is poured into a saucepan and reduced on the stove for about 20-30 minutes. It goes sticky and caramel-y, and the lime zest starts to impact more flavour under the impact of the heat; tiny little bursts of citrus studded throughout the salty-sweet sauce.
As I sliced the fat off the pork shoulder, Rob asked me if I had any plans for it. The truth is, I hadn’t; though I hate throwing stuff out, a whole hardback-sized piece of fat seemed like a weird thing to leave lying around. Obviously there’s crackling, but that felt a bit “meat and two veg” for our dinner plans. Unless. I went to the cupboard and found a Szechuan spice blend I’d picked up ages ago. As well as the namesake mouth-numbing chillis, it had garlic power, orange peel, ginger, black pepper, and cumin. I had the idea of scoring and salting the fat in the fridge for a bit — to draw any excess moisture out — then rubbing this potent spice blend into the fat before roasting it until it snapped and popped into a thick sheet of brittle crackling. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
I mixed the dry spice mix with some olive oil and rubbed it into the scored grooves.
The result was so good I didn’t even photograph it when it came out the oven. We had the pork with some thick chewy noodles I picked up from Sainsburys, plus all the crunchy, pickly things we could find in the fridge.
But this would be so good in tacos, or bread rolls at a BBQ. It would be great in ramen! Or, like we did a few days later, served with a bowl of steamed rice. And the crackling kind of blew my brain open. What about a sage and onion crackling, to go with pork? Would piri-piri seasoning be good, or berber spice? Who knows!
A rare two-song newsletter. What a banger.
2. Crispy pork tenderloin rice bowls
We actually made this a couple of weeks ago (spoiler alert: Scraps does not come to you every week in chronological order!) and I was saving it until I knew what I was doing with the second half of the pork tenderloin. This is another New York Times Cooking recipe, so it’s paywalled. Sorry — if you’re not able to see it because it’s subscription based, the next few editions of Scraps are complete free-wheelers. No recipes! No rules! (OK there are some rules, like turn the oven off, etc).
The tenderloin isn’t a slow-roast joint of meat — I sliced it into medallions and cooked them in my brand new cast-iron pan. It’s marinated in a mix of ketchup, honey, sriracha and hoisin sauce — again, stuff you will have around for ages once you buy them. After cooking the pork til it gets crispy, the sauce is added and it cooks in the oven right in the pan (hence the cast-iron — you can’t do this with non-stick pans). This is inspired by Chinese char sui pork, but in the spirit of doing what we damn well please, I’d love to try it with chicken thighs, or a whole roasted cauliflower. It’s a classic Scraps dish as it’s just a bowl full of crunchy things with some sticky-salty meat and some carbs. It never fails!