All posts tagged: roast

Five spice roast pork belly with peaches

Published by

Summer is in full swing. It’s muggy AF and I am chancing mosquitos to sleep with the window open. So far so good. I haven’t left Auckland this summer, instead, I’m enjoying local day trips. I’ve hit 70k steps every week so far – it’s only been 2 weeks – and regularly include Mt Eden summit in my daily walks. I’m a little obsessed with my FitBit and doing well with my “more steps” resolution. Yesterday, The Koala and I explored Duder Regional Park, enjoyed ice cream truck treats and swum at random beach on our way home. We usually stay central, or head north or west so exploring east is new for us. I hope to discover more of Auckland’s regional parks this year. My first recipe of the year is fiercely seasonal and embodies the kinds of food I love to eat. A shit-ton of vegetables (another resolution) and some beautifully cooked free range meat. Yes please! I usually order pork belly if I see it on the menu so it makes sense …

Roast Pork With Crackling

Published by

Ah pork crackling. Crunchy and salty with a layer of slightly gooey richness just below the surface. It’s that still chewy layer that gets me. Crackling shouldn’t ben bone dry and crunchy all the way through. Unctuous and flavoursome, that layer of fat before the meat is glorious. My parents opened a roast dinner shop in Bayswater when I was in high school and I was always spoilt with roast meat sandwiches. We had roast chicken, roast lamb, roast beef and the king of roasts, roast pork with crackling. I didn’t take it for granted if that’s what you’re thinking. After all these years, roast pork is still my number one choice when we get roast dinner takeaways. I’m ashamed to admit I never tried to roast a pork with crackling. Until now. I searched far and wide for the crackling recipes known to man. And then of course, I took the best recipes and I took a few shortcuts. The recipe below is based mostly on the hands down, best recipe you can find …

Roasted Garlic

Published by

Garlic is always unreasonably cheap and I use a lot of garlic in my cooking. Sometimes though, I do buy too many bags of garlic to use before it starts sprouting, so roast garlic is a great way to eat up garlic quickly. Roast garlic is some kind of voodoo magic where the flavour vastly differs to the raw stuff. Roast garlic is really mellow, smooth and sweet. The cloves shrink inside their pods making them easy to remove from the paper. They are squishy, so you can either dig each clove out with a butter knife or use your fingers to squeeze them from of their papers. Or as I do, squeeze them out and pop them into my mouth. To use, mash with a fork, or crush with a knife to make a roasted garlic paste. If you are smearing into toast, you can just spread a whole roasted clove as you would a pat of butter. This recipe makes 4 bulbs of roast garlic but you can easily do more or less, just …

Roast Chicken with lemon, garlic and herbs

Published by

The second kilo of Turks free range chicken thighs found a home with lemon slices and juice, herbs and garlic. I sprinkled a little raw sugar on these but you could use honey. Our honey was as hard as nails so sugar was the lazy option. The little lemon tree in our backyard is carrying mega lemons. There aren’t heaps of lemons, but the ones we have are big, thick skinned and look like they could win a bar fight. We haven’t gotten sick this winter (yet) and hopefully a bulb of garlic each will keep us going for a little while longer. I slice off the bottom, rub a bit of oil into it and season with salt, pepper and herbs. It’s good. I prefer rice with a roast dinner. To me, they go hand in hand. It probably seems weird to some, but I never had yorkshire pudding to soak up the juices, it was always rice. I guess it doesn’t really come as a surprise that we owned a roast dinner shop …