Lasagne, never as good as in Italy. Even if eaten outdoors.

There are many ways to make lasagne, this is what I put in one today.

First, I cooked 4 chopped onions slowly in a frying pan.

I put the following in both sauces:

Onions
Garlic
2 grated carrots and a grated stick of celery, split between the two.
A bay leaf each.
Chopped tomatoes
I forgot the tomatoe puree
Lemon Juice
Sugar
Chilli oil, there's that philosophy about including the sour, sweet and spicy tastes in small amounts to keep things interesting.
Herbes de Provence - that's just what I had.
Salt and Pepper
A Stock Cube
Cheapest fresh Mozzarella (the 44p value stuff), 2 packs for the meat, 1 for the veg in the top layer.
Hard fried oyster mushrooms (super hot so they go all burnt and meaty)
Cherry Tomatoes - they go really nice and sweet.
Butter - a bit more than I should have, more in the vegetarian than the meat sauce.
Red Wine

Meaty Version
£5 worth of minced beef from the butcher - I think it was about 500g of meat. Could have been a kilo. They mince it themselves and it has better flavour than what I find in tescos.
Streaky bacon in the top layer.

Vegetarian Version
Sun Dried Tomatoes
The end of a bottle of chinese vegetarian oyster sauce

The sauce was simmered for about 30 minutes while I prepared the cheese sauce.

The Cheese sauce was made with Cheddar with a chopped Shallot and mustard powder.

I buttered a baking dish, then layered up meat, cheese and pasta, with the oyster mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and mozzarella layered up towards the top. There were about 4 layers of pasta including the one on the bottom.

I cooked both for about 35 minutes on gas mark 6 in the oven. Win!

Big Porky Mountain!

I've never had the good fortune to eat so successful a pig in my life.

Start with a large piece of butcher fresh pork belly - my pieces had some bones left in. 3kg cost £20 and fed 13 people comfortably. Score the skin and salt, rubbing the salt in with kitchen paper, while pressing the skin to squeeze out the moisture. You can do this up to three times before it gets too salty. On the recommendation of a foodie friend, I left the meat in the fridge uncovered for 2 days to dry out the skin further.

As an experiment, I poured boiling water over part of the skin of one of the pieces - I used a mostly full kettle of boiling water, then patted the skin dry and resalted afterwards. I'd heard this would cause it shrink and give better crackling. I've come to the conclusion that it made no difference in my case.

At least the night before the day of pork, prepare and apply the marinade to the meat, taking care to leave it off the skin. I used...

Chinese 5 spice
Garlic
Ginger
Shallots
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper

I might also have used...

Soy Sauce
Lemon grass
Sugar

The marinade didn't come through as much as I wanted it to. Although it was there. In fact, at some points I thought it was subtle, and others I thought it was really strong. So, I'll leave that one as it is.

Take some celery, carrots and onions to make a bed for the pork to cook in. It's like using a flavoured rack, something to keep the pork out of the oil and fat that collects. Pour in 200ml of water to keep the moisture flowing.

Cook the pork on gas mark 2, which is about 150C for 3 hours. I placed two in the oven, and swapped the lower and higher half way through. It's a waiting game.

The internet said to cover the pork with foil to keep the moisture in. I forgot to do this, and the results were really good, presumably because throughout the cooking the skin was drying out slowly in readiness for the crisping to come, and because pork belly is so fatty that it would take a lot to dry it out. So, I won't be using foil next time, but maybe it would be better to do so for a different cut of pork.

This is what the two pieces looked like after 3 hours of slow cooking. Notice the top one is a little more crisped.

I removed the pork from the oven in order to heat it to gas mark 7, then put it back in. This is the delicate bit. The first piece of pork I cooked took 11 minutes to crackle, during which time the skin transformed from normal pig skin into fluffy crispy crackling. This wasn't quite what I was after - it was perfect traditional british pork crackling, but when I see chinese pork, the skin hasn't expanded at all, and remains thin and crispy. I consindered leaving the second piece of pork in the oven on low to try to slowly dry out and crisp the skin. However, on cutting up the first piece of pork, it was apparent that I would endanger the beautiful moist succulence that had developed, so I backed down from my experiment.

The second piece, when I did place it in the oven, took 15 minutes to crisp up on gas mark 7. It was the lower of the two for the first run in the oven, and I didn't switch them quite half way through, so it hadn't been cooked as hot. I paid very close attention to avoid burning the skin, and even then it was partly singed. Complacency never pays.

We chopped up the pork and made a mountain, which we then placed in turkish bread and ate, to avoid the need for plates. The fat content of the pork belly ensured that the meat was beautifully moist.

I would still like to know how to get the chinese style skin, and next time, apple sauce may need to be involved.

Otherwise, pork mountain was a success.

Pompeii-Penis Salad

Inspired by the British Museum Cafe, and their extensive travelling exhibition of Phalluses excavated from the Roman city of Pompeii (they have other things too, but mostly it's just Dong), stolen and reverse engineered by a woman who's made it a point of feminist pride to reclaim use of the word Kant (as in Immanuel, of course) for the sisterhood, with only a passing nod to Judith Butler, we bring you...

Pompeii Penis Salad!

Tastier than it looks. Combine the following and eat...

Cucumber (wink wink)
Raw Broccoli
Rocket (Aroooooogula!)
Dill
Broad beans (or Edemame) - I think we cooked them first.
Sun dried tomatoes
Goats Cheese
A dash of Feminism
Your favoured salad dressing.

Minted pea lardon spaghetti, egg on.

Just what it says, butter, mint and garlic on the peas, fry the lardons first, nice and hot to get that burnt pig flavour. If I had linguine, I'd have used that, minted pea lardon linguine has a better ring to it. Egg on!

Herring tomato cream pasta

There was herring from a packet, a standard tomato, onion and garlic base for the sauce, then capers, raspberry vinegar, honey and harrisa paste, parsley on top, then quite a large amount of emmental in with the sauce and far too much cream. Muhahahaaaaa!

Green Bean Casserole with French Toast

Wow, the internet is a wonderful thing. I googled vegetarian casserole and who would have expected an idea like this?

Green Bean Casserole with French Toast

French Toast:
2 day old bread
Eggs
Milk
Cinnamon
Salt and pepper
Fry it up, don't burn it while writing your blog like i did...

Green Bean Casserole:
For some reason the recipe I glanced at on my phone told me to parboil the beans first and then cool them under the tap until I was ready. I did so, I do not know why. I saved the resulting green water of goodness for stock.

Make a paste in the blender of onion, garlic and celery, with some thyme and rosemary. Fry it up and that'll go with the beans.

Place the beans in a dish. Onion paste mixed in with it. Then, the master stroke, a tin of cream of mushroom soup for that old time umami flavour - I found campbells reduced mushroom soup for cooking, which was cheaper, so I bought it. Cover with the french toast, Caramelised Onions and Sliced Almonds on top and bake for about 30 minutes on a medium heat.

Et Voila!

I had some feta cheese left over, so I took a chance with it on top of one corner just to find out. It sort of worked but didn't really add that much.

Next time I will pay more attention to the toast, not add so much cinnamon - you really don't need much, perhaps none, and I won't put the caramelised onions on until after the baking stage, they tasted good but as you can see, they looked a bit too black and crispy by the end...

Cauliflower cheese

This picture shows where my cauliflower cheese will go. I'd completely forgotten about this meal, for almost a year. Never again.

My version of cauliflower cheese has slices of halloumi on top, and cubed fried potatoes or maybe even sweet potatoes in the top, then bread crumbs sprinkled to form the top most layer. Cayenne pepper is good to throw in too.

I would put down the recipe for how to make the cheese sauce, but it doesn't always go that well for me, so perhaps you should look that one up yourselves. I can tell you not to stop stirring and that corn flour and maize flour do not have the same physical properties. That is all.