It only makes sense that the first recipe on the blog is a bacon recipe. This is my go-to recipe when I need to have dinner on the table and motivation/inspiration levels are low. Thankfully the whole family loves it and it’s so easy to make. The ingredients tend to be whatever I have on hand and substitutions are easy. When we lived in the suburbs we would have UHT cream in the cupboard, frozen packs of store bought bacon, and a bag of frozen peas. If I’m lucky now I might have some milk and cream from Clarisse, we always have homemade bacon in the freezer, and if I had enough time during the year to tend to my crop of peas I’d have peas stashed away in the freezer.

Home-grown, home-made bacon is the best!

We have an abundance of bacon in our freezer, mostly in giant 1kg chunks. So our bacon is often cut into slightly smaller giant chunks. How you cut your bacon will depend on how you like your bacon. I like to use the streaky/belly bacon because the fat renders down and I’m always afraid the short back/eye bacon will be too dry.

A garden harvest of purple sprouting broccoli and the first of our asparagus.

In the last couple of seasons our vegetable patch has been a bit woeful and neglected. However, I did manage to harvest my asparagus for the first time this year, and we’ve had awesome sprouting purple broccoli. The sprouting broccoli is my new favourite, I can keep cutting it and it keeps coming back. The bigger more traditional heads of broccoli are similar, if you cut the bigger head it’ll sprout from the sides but if you plant a dozen plants you end up with a dozen giant heads ready to be eaten at the same time. Not awesome unless you plan on freezing the broccoli. The pasta recipe is really a simple base for adding in whatever else you like and in the past I have added in things like tomatoes, leafy greens, and whatever else is on hand that looks to be a tasty addition.

Ingredients:

• 300g Pasta
• 300g Bacon
• 300g Sliced mushrooms
• Cream 300ml/Milk 400ml Or Just milk. Or just cream. Or whatever you have on hand and feel like throwing in to the pan
• Flour 2 tablespoons
• Butter/oil 50-100gms
• Pepper to season
• Parmesan – To serve

Optional additions

• A handful of peas
• Sundried tomatoes
• A handful of broccoli/broccolini
• Anything you think would be tasty

Method:

• Cook your pasta according to the directions on the pack.
• Brown the mushrooms in butter with a glug of oil at medium to high heat and set aside.
• Cook the bacon in the same pan but only just cooked, pink uncooked bits will be fine. (I don’t add oil here, there should be enough oil coming out of the bacon that it shouldn’t matter but if you find it dry add a splash of oil)
• Add flour and cook through. This is where the bacon will cook through completely and will brown up more. (This is the start of the sauce, the flour will thicken the sauce and you need to cook the flour so that the sauce doesn’t taste like flour)
• Check your pasta. At this point if my pasta is almost ready I’ll throw the broccoli in and turn the heat off. If it’s not even close to ready I’ll turn the heat off to the pan with the bacon and wait till the pasta is closer to being ready before I continue. I like having the pasta cooked just as the sauce is ready so I can toss it all in together.
• If you’ve turned the heat off to the bacon and you’re ready to continue, turn it back on low and gently warm it back up if it’s lost some heat.
• Turn heat up to about med-med/high, add the cream/milk slowly to the bacon, incorporating it into the bacon and flour. (Start slow, it’ll help avoid any lumps in the sauce)
• Let the sauce come up to boil and this is where the sauce thickens. If you’ve used a generous amount of flour it won’t take long and you can turn the heat down once it gets to the consistency that you like.
• Add your mushrooms, peas, and pepper to taste. Drain the pasta and broccoli leaving a small amount of the cooking liquid behind. Add pasta and reserved cooking fluid to the sauce. Toss/stir through.
• Divide into bowls and top with parmesan.

The finished product.

There’s often no leftovers but if Neil manages to secure come for lunch the next day it can be reheated in the microwave without any problems. Add a splash of water though, the pasta would have sucked up any fluid.

The hock is one of the cuts of pork I often have no idea what to do with. As a result, I often end up throwing it in as part of my pork stock or it ends up being cured and smoked for pea and ham soup.

It’s such a meaty cut! When we are having a spit pig the best part of the day is towards the end when it’s been cooking all day and the hocks just happen to fall off.  The only way to save them is by eating them right away! 🙂

The crackling is a bit different though. It’s not as puffy as what you would normally get, it’s more of a thin crisp crackling and sometimes it doesn’t crackle at all but it’s still tasty! The fat in the hock has a tacky feeling, it sticks to your mouth and the meat is sweet and juicy.

But why am I waiting for a spit pig to eat the hock when I have a freezer full of them?! So, today’s food experiment is an Asian style slow cooked pork hock. A single pork hock should be enough for two people but honestly if it was just me and no one was watching I’d probably eat the whole thing. I have a problem! I know!

What I’m trying to do with this is recreate my spit pig meat falling of the bone pork hock without having to set up the spit for my single pork hock. I’ve set up my slow cooker instead. I didn’t have a rack small enough to fit so I’ve improvised with vegetables (carrot, celery, onion). I am a big fan of pork crackling so the day before the hock went into the slow cooker I slashed the skin with a Stanley knife and poured boiling hot water all over the skin, patted it dry and then rubbed in a liberal amount of salt. I’ve covered it with some paper towel and left it in the fridge overnight to dry out some more.

I’ve lightly scored the hock

The skin shrinks back and the cuts in the skin open when you pour the boiling water over the hock.

What makes this ‘Asian Style’ is that I coated the hock in olive oil and Chinese five spice before I put it into the slow cooker. It’s what I would normally do with pork belly minus the soy sauce and Chinese rice wine and sesame oil. Of course as I type this I’m thinking I probably should have coated the hock with all those things anyway. Next time!

Rubbed with Chinese Five Spice and sitting on the bed of vegetables in the slow cooker.

Our slow cooker often saves me during the week when I know we’re going to have a busy day and no one is going to want to cook dinner. I can throw everything in and be fairly confident that it’ll all turn out alright. There have been times when the results have started to look a bit iffy half way through the day. Case in point being the first time I did a slow cooked pork shoulder. I put it on before I went to work at 6:30am and by the time I came home at 5:30pm Neil was preparing to call out for pizza. The skin had been salted and oiled before going into the slow cooker and by the time I got home the skin was looking distinctly unappetising. But I was determined to see it through to the end. I cranked the oven to the highest heat and let it come up to temperature and wacked my pork shoulder in (transferred carefully to an oven safe dish as the meat was falling apart). A half hour later and I had the best looking pork roast I’ve ever made in my life. So, if I follow the general idea of slow cooked pork shoulder and transfer that to my pork hock it should all work out right? Fingers crossed!

The end of the slow cooker process

The hock went in about 9:30am and came out about 5:30pm. You can see from the photos above the meat shrinks back a fair bit and the skin looks gelatinous. When I do a bigger cut of meat I don’t normally add any fluid to the bottom of the slow cooker but I think next time with the hocks I might add a little pork stock, half a cup maybe.

Done and delicious!

About a half hour before I was ready to take the hock out of the slow cooker I cranked the oven as high as it would go. This was going to be different for everyone mostly because my oven right now is at the end of its useable life and it’s temperamental at best. But! Oven as high as it’ll go but probably 220C. Let it get up to temperature and transfer the hock to an oven safe dish and put it in the oven for about a half hour. You can see from my picture that I didn’t get bubbling crackling all over like I had hoped and you can also see that there is a bit missing from the top corner because Neil managed to snag proper crackled crackling before I could take a picture. The skin is crisp though and it’s super tasty. The meat pulls apart easily and is more of a dark colour, almost like chicken thigh type dark meat.

Things I would change for next time:

• Do more than one hock (who’s crazy idea was it to just make one hock for a bunch of Athertons? Crazy!)
• Drying out overnight put it on a rack and let the air flow right around the whole hock
• Add some fluid to the slow cooker that way you have some type of gravy. Gravy makes everything better!