Roasted Pork Belly with garlicky potatoes and red cabbage

Autumnal weather calls for autumnal food. Its been raining here for the last couple of days and the fog is hardly lifting. Seems as if the weather is practising for a haunting halloween.

Pork belly

2 heads of garlic

3 to 4 large potatoes

Red Cabbage

Salt

Olive Oil 

Preheat the oven to 160 °C (320 °F). Cover the pork in olive oil and rub with a good handful of salt. Place in a roasting dish with your potatoes and the garlic and pop into the oven.  Cook for an hour and a half, the pork skin down on the garlic.

Increase the heat to 180 °C (355 °F), turn the pork over and cook for a further 30 minutes or until the skin is golden and crunchy.

Peel the roasted garlic, chop into slivers and serve with the roasted potatoes. Serve with a large helping of red cabbage.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

John Keats

October is here and its most definately misty, the haar is edging off the sea most nights leaving a chill in the air. My food thoughts are turning towards pumpkin pie and thick gravy covering huge slabs of beef with yorkshire pudding. Autumn and winter are my two most favourite seasons, perhaps because they house my two most favourite festivals, halloween and christmas. Nothing beats hurrying home in the cold, wrapped up warm and being greeted by delicious hot food. In fact the only depressing food related thought  on the horizon is the dreaded sprout. Still need to find a way of making them palatable before december the 25th.

Beetroot Blues

The Bf's parents grow everything and in huge quantities to boot.

Red and yellow and PINK

Pink for beetroot in fact.

http://www.lovebeetroot.co.uk/

Tomato Heaven

The greenhouse is loaded with tomatos. When you enter the heavy sweet scent assails you, enticing you into a leafy grotto where the fruit hangs like rubies.

We cant eat them fast enough. Salads loaded with them, roasted in stews, raw on their own with a sprinkling of salt and crammed into fresh crusty bread with cheese. Yet they are still winning, for every one we eat, another four seem to ripen and take its place.

One of my favourite quick snacks/salad is:

• 2 or 3 tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 1 avocado, roughly chopped
• half a cucumber, sliced
• blue cheese, crumbled into chunks
• salt and pepper to taste with the juice of half a lemon or lime squeezed over it

Its simple, fresh and tasty.