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Alternative Festive Feasts
Our KP gift to you this Christmas is a couple of ideas for Alternative Festive Feasts. Many of us will soon be sitting around a dinner table sharing a festive meal together, so we thought we’d end the year by offering you some recipes to give your dinner a twist. First up:
Roast Pork By Fish, Wings & Tings (as featured in Recipes from Brixton Village by Miss South)
How about this year we cook Trinidadian Roast Pork instead to spice things up a wee bit? For those who can’t bear the sight of turkey and don’t give a damn about goose, here is a more tropical take on the festive main dish.Very simple but packed with flavour! Light up Xmas Day, Boxing Day or whenever you wish with a heavy dose of hot sauce. In this glorious dish pork belly is marinated in a powerful blend of ginger, garlic, thyme, scotch bonnet, dark rum and other lovely stuff. It’s 100% guaranteed to transform your festivities for sure. Just serve up with rum punch and dancing!
Ingredients
Ask your butcher to score the skin on the pork or use a super sharp knife to do this yourself. Place the pork in a dish and season well with salt and pepper.
Finely grate the ginger and then squeeze the pulp over a small bowl to extract the juice. Discard the pulp. Add all the remaining ingredients to the ginger juice and mix, then pour the marinade over the meat. Massage it into the pork (it’s best to wear gloves for this if you’re sensitive to chilli) and leave it to marinate overnight in the fridge.
Preheat the oven to 250C and take the pork out of the fridge to come up to room temperature. Line a roasting tin with foil and place the pork in it, scraping off any excess marinade.
Roast the pork for an hour, then remove from the oven and allow to cool. Cut the pork into cubes and serve with hot pepper sauce on the side. The skin will be crisp and the meat very tender.
Buy Recipes from Brixton Village by Miss South here
And for those diners who are tired of meat, could we suggest:
Aubergine Parmigiana from The Parlour Cafe Cookbook
Alternative festive feasts are also for veggies! Layers of piping-hot aubergine, tomato, mozzarella and basil will make for a golden and bubbling treat. Serve it all up in one dish and save on washing up time allowing you to focus on more important things like vino and zoom calls with friends.
Ingredients
Preheat the oven to 220C.
Heat a couple of large baking trays in the oven. Cut the aubergines into 2cm slices widthways. toss the slices in 5 tablespoons of the olive oil until they are all glistening. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and space them out on the hot oven trays, making sure they have enough room. Put them in the oven and bake until browned (20 minutes should do it).
Cut the tomatoes in half and scoop out the seeds with a teaspoon. Toss them in the remaining olive oil, season and put onto hot oven trays, then douse in sieved icing sugar for the sweet sensation and bake for 20 minutes.
Reduce the oven to 180C.
Cut the mozzarella into thinnish slices. Spread some of the tomato sauce over the base of a large, deep oven-proof dish 9at home I use an oval one about 30 x 20cm and 6cm deep).
Once the aubergines and tomatoes are out of the oven and have cooled, start building your parmiagana. Start with a layer of aubergine, then tomato, then mozzarella and basil and repeat, finishing with a layer of mozzarella.
Now place some more dollops of tomato sauce loosely over the top and sprinkle generously with shavings of Parmesan. Bake for 30 to 40 minutest until golden and bubbling.
Buy The Parlour Cafe Cookbook by Gillian Veal here
Mountain Cafe Mulled Wine
Mountain Cafe Mulled Wine – it could be time to add extra brandy?
Let’s face it, many of us will be gathering in whatever groups we are allowed to around fire pits and beneath makeshift gazebos this festive season. So we thought it would be a good time to share our favourite festive tipple with you all.
Recipe from The Mountain Cafe Cookbook by Kirsten Gilmour
Every winter I love to look out of the kitchen around 4pm to see the cafe full of skiers, walkers, climbers and winter adventurers, sipping our hot drink specials and devouring cakes after an epic day in the Cairngorms.
Mountain Cafe Mulled Wine Ingredients
How to Make Your Mulled Wine
Place everything in a heavy-bottomed pan and bring to the boil for 10 to 15 minutes. Reduce to a simmer for 30 minutes to an hour. Taste and add extra brandy, sugar or orange juice as you like.
That’s it!
Buy The Mountain Cafe Cookbook here – you’ll not regret it.
Flavoured Butters
From The Seafood Shack – Food & Tales from Ullapool
by Kirsty Scobie & Fenella Renwick
Flavoured butters are really quick and easy and are something Kirsty & Fenella use all the time to boost flavour and jazz up their seafood. In the Shack they use them instead of plain butter in most of their dishes. And they’re not just good for fish dishes – put a slice on a steak after cooking, stick some in your baked potatoes, stir into pasta. Whatever you’re cooking, these little flavour bombs will take it to a different level of tastiness. You can store them in the fridge for weeks or pop them in the freezer to take out when needed. Some of the flavours Kirsty & Fenella make at the shack include Chilli, Paprika and Lime; Mixed Herb; Lemon, Caper and Dill; Pesto and Saffron and Sweet Shallot but here’s the recipe for one of our favourites, Roast Garlic and Chive.
Roast Garlic & Chive Butter
To make your butter
First roast the garlic.
Preheat the oven to 120°C. Slice the bottom off the garlic bulb so the ends of the cloves are exposed. Now get a sheet of tin foil, scrunch it into a small bowl, and put in your olive oil and a good amount of salt and pepper. Put your garlic bulb on top of the oil, cut side down. Wrap your tin foil over the top of the bulb to seal in a parcel and cook in the oven for around 45 minutes to an hour.
Check if the garlic’s ready by removing from the oven and giving it a wee squeeze – it should be super soft. If it’s not, put it back in the oven for another ten minutes or so and cook until soft but make sure you don’t burn it. Remove the garlic from the tin foil parcel. Once it’s cool enough to touch, flake off any loose peel and squeeze the soft garlic cloves out of the skin. They should slide out easily.
Place the roasted garlic flesh in a bowl with the softened butter and the chives and mix with a wooden spoon. We always season our butters with just a little amount of salt and some fresh black cracked pepper.
To roll your butter
Get some clingfilm and cut it about the size of an A3 sheet of paper. Lie this out flat on your worktop and spoon the butter mixture across the middle in a horizontal line, leaving about
a hand space on either side. Now hold the corners of the clingfilm closest to you and fold over the butter. Run your hands along the butter to the edges to smooth out and remove any air holes. Twist the clingfilm at either end and gently roll your butter to form a good cylinder shape. Perfect for storing in the fridge and freezer! Now why not try some more flavoured butters with your own favourite seasonings?
Buy The Seafood Shack – Food & Tales from Ullapool here