Also on Saturday, I played with a new toy for the BBQ – GrillGrates. Will be writing more about this on my Food Adventure blog later, but had a great time experimenting, and managed to achived high temperature grilling on my pellet grill, something I had been told wasn’t possible.
Tag: food
Following on from a previous post, I spent an evening earlier this week, googling for likely alternate food retailers. It was a surprisingly long list, and I intended to check a few of them out today.
Mindful of what I said on Saturday, I visited my butcher, only to be told they had had a big run on their beef burgers, presumably by others defecting from the supermarkets. I could come back later when they had made some more; I could buy some mince and make my own; or they had some pork and apple burgers.
Frankly, they are both totally missing the point.
This seemed to coincide with my other bad habit of buying prepared food and ready-meals. But it is not a coincidence. Walking round a supermarket (whether it is Tesco, Coop, Waitrose or whatever) it is just so easy to see things and think “that looks nice” and put it in your basket.
I eat a lot of soup, working from home, as it makes a quick and (usually) healthy lunch. However, although I have plenty of practice in making soup, lately I seem to be eating more shop-bought soup than homemade. Which generally means more salt, more fat and more additives.
I already have a couple of cookery resources that can be usefully used on a tablet. The original recipe book for my pellet grill, for a start, and recently the 40 page recipe guide for my breadmaker got too sticky to be hygenic, and was replaced with a pdf kindle sent to me by Breville.
However, it is fairly rare that I get an edible crop of pears from it. I have been nicely surprised a couple of years, but usually I end up with a pile of nicely sized fruit that never ripen. I am not sure what the factor is that made things work on the good years, but it seems to be all or nothing.
The resulting meat definitely has the right consistency – it falls apart, and is moist with a good texture. But the flavour is lacking, and is a little oversalty.
I suspect it is a (commercial) rub that I used, that I hadn’t used previously. Had another roll for lunch, after an overnight in the fridge, and it is no different. Pleasant tasting at first, but overbearingly salty.
I finally got my act together last week and made some pulled pork, using a couple of inexpensive rolled pork shoulders from Tescos, rather than the bone in joint that my recipe calls for. I adjusted a few things, and foil-wrapped the joints once they had had a good six hours exposure to smoke, and they came out very good. I ate quite a bit – in rolls, with salad, on pizza, but I also gave away some good-sized portions to some of my board-gaming pals.