Friday, May 21, 2010

A few food memories from Thailand


(left) 'Tiger', my little restaurant buddy on Phi Phi Island, I wanted to bring him home!

Below; The beers are just better in Thailand! Not to mention the food...




Little Tiger Restaurant, Phuket, Thailand, the happiest place in the world :)

Berkshire Pork + The Silver Spoon = 1 very happy foodie

Tomorrow night I am finally trialing the much-praised Berkshire Pork, which I have heard great things about. I have decided I’m no longer comfortable with buying meat unless I know for sure if the meat is produced without causing the animal to have an unhappy life.

Growing up we always had our own meat butchered, so I know for certain that up until the moment of their death, our animals were fat and happy. I’m sure this is why the meat tasted so good!

Ever since I have found it hard to source good quality meat, and pork has been the hardest (we didn’t have pigs but they still seemed so much better back then). The pork of my childhood had a good half inch at least of fat in the rind, now the shoulders/loins etc that I see in many butchers or supermarkets barely have half a centimeter and the roast is always a dry, crackling-free letdown. Why on earth breeders tried to lower the fat content of the pigs is beyond me. If there are some fatties out there who can’t say no to a normal pig then that’s not my problem; I want my pork as fatty as possible (I just work it off at the gym).

Anyway, after hunting around for outlets of the much-lauded ‘Berkshire Pork’ I have a lovely loin cut that I plan to roast up tomorrow night.

And of course such a beautiful piece of meat deserves the best treatment so I will be using a recipe from my latest favourite cookbook; ‘The Silver Spoon’; I can’t believe that it has taken me this long to buy this classic. It is stuffed so full of recipes so I did the math and found if I cooked one of the recipes a night it would take me about 6 years to cover the whole book! This is my kind of cook book, not full of lovely styled photos (these have their place, but really you’re paying for pretty pictures and not many recipes), just packed with as many recipes as can fit on the pages.

Anyway, stay tuned as to how this dish turns out. I am reading ‘Everything but the squeal’ by John Barlow at the moment, hence my minor pork obsession at the moment.