Gammon, pot roasted in Cola

I was having trouble, just then, working out whether to call this "Gammon, pot roasted in cola" or "Pot roast cola gammon" or even "Cola braised Gammon ham".  It's a tricky one.

Either way, what it was trying to convey is that this blog post is all about a boneless smoked gammon joint, that was cooked in a saucepan of cola drink, celery, onion and carrots.  You can make your own mind up as to what to call it.  I call it yummy - but a terror to clean up afterwards!

I had been pondering over what to cook the bacon joint in - or whether to just pop it in the oven and roast it - for some time before hubby mentioned that we had a spare bottle of cola that I could use, if I wanted.  Having already made a ham cooked in cola (albeit a much bigger one, the Christmas before last), I thought it would be interesting to see how it translated to a much smaller piece of meat.

Has definitely succumbed to the "cola" effect!

The joint I had was around 800g, so just a little fellow - but just enough for a Sunday dinner, with a little left over for sandwiches the next day.

As is my habit, I soaked the gammon overnight to reduce its salt content.  It smelled lovely when it went into its chilly bath (I just used water, as I was only interested in getting rid of the salt, rather than getting additional flavours into the meat) and I was quite hopeful of a good dinner the following day.

I roughly chopped up the two carrots, an onion and two sticks of celery and used them to create a trivet upon which to put the meat, as I've known the bottom of a piece of meat become quite scorched when cooked this way.  In went the gammon and I poured the cola in until just covering the top of the meat, whilst still leaving a gap at the top of the saucepan.  I didn't want it boiling over - not with cola involved in it, anyway!

I left the gammon chuckling away on a low simmer for approximately an hour and a half.

What I didn't think about though, was that as the pot simmered the steam gathered under the lid and ever so slightly lifted it.  Enough for a splurt of cola/steam mix to decorate the top of my cooker, the buttons on the front of the cooker, the saucepan, the worktop to the side - and anything else that wanted to get in the way, with a sticky dark brown goo that was extremely hard to remove.  Oh - and the goo that had managed to creep in between the saucepan and the hot plate and then burn, was virtually welded on.  *sigh*  I'll have to think of a better plan, if I'm going to do this again in future.

I had used a big jam cauldron for the Christmas piece that I cooked in this way, and it obviously didn't have the same effect between steam and lid, as this hadn't happened then.

Served with roast potatoes & parsnips, creamed leeks, cabbage and carrots - delicious!

Still, the end result was worth all the mopping up and cleaning.  The ham emerged looking pleasingly dark and, when cut, demonstrated a lovely distinction between the cola-flavoured outside and the pink, succulent inside.  Between the soaking and the cooking, the ham had wound up delightfully moist and very acceptably mild in flavour.  There wasn't a very distinctive difference in flavour between the inner and outer, which is nice because you don't really want a strong cola influence in your roast dinner.

Roasties close up - no dribbling, now!

I had used the gorgeous Greenvale Farmfresh Jelly Potatoes for my roasties and can report that they are utterly perfect when used in this way.  I par-boiled them - at which they behave impeccably, not collapsing, or dissolving, or remaining bullet-like - and roasted them for the prescribed 45 minutes at 200degF.  The end result was a perfect, crispy, gently potato flavoured roastie, which we all agreed was one of the nicest roast potatoes we'd had in a very long time.

Next on the list for these potatoes is to try them in potato salad, after which I'm sure will come some mashed potato.  I can't see son & heir letting me get away without mashing them, for very much longer!

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Is it too early to be planning salad in the week's menu?

Goodness, but I hope it's not!  Although, having said that, it'll probably snow on every day that I've booked even slightly salad-like meals.

I don't know about you, but my taste buds are yearning for something fresh (and by "fresh", I mean uncooked!) in my diet.  Yes, we've had the occasional little bit of side salad with various dishes, but I'm definitely yearning for a complete full-blown salad that contains rather more than just lettuce, cucumber and tomato.

I haven't gone so far as to be planning a full-blown salad (yet!), but I think you'll agree that this week's menu is definitely headed that way.  Hopefully it'll be enough to satisfy the need.

So what are we (theoretically - it could change and very often does) going to be eating?

Tues : Trinidadian Prawn Curry with chapatis and rice

Wed : Spicy Pork Steaks, baked sweet potatoes and peas

Thur : Smoked Mackerel with winter couscous & mushrooms

Fri : Tomato & Brie Tart with mixed salad and marinated beetroot

Sat : Mexican meatballs with rice

Sun : Roast bacon with creamed leeks, roast potatoes & parsnips, carrots & peas

Mon : Turkey & bean enchiladas with potato wedges.

Pic c/o www.dragonchillies.co.uk

No, we STILL haven't managed to have the Trinidadian Prawn Curry - but I am completely determined to have it tomorrow evening.  I'm armed and dangerous, having bought the Scotch Bonnet chilli peppers, so I won't be thwarted - bad back or no bad back.  (I think I must have torn some muscles in my back, dragging the darned stool around the kitchen after me so that I can sit down and cook.  Either way, it hurt - and continues to hurt!).

The Spicy Pork Steaks are going to be along the lines of Galton Blackiston's Spiced Chicken Legs, except with pork.  I thought it would be interesting to see how the marinade translates to pork, particularly with half an eye towards barbecuing in the summer.  I've also got some sweet potatoes waiting to be used for something, so this seemed like the perfect match.

Pic c/o www.freshfishdaily.co.uk

Now, the Smoked Mackerel with Winter Couscous and mushrooms was sparked off by a recipe I saw in a magazine, ages ago (so long ago in fact, that I've forgotten which magazine - oops!).  Anyway, it involved flaking the mackerel into the couscous and included orange and watercress.

In my fevered imagination, that turned into a dish of mackerel fillets beside a luscious looking pile of couscous that contained the watercress, but also cherry tomatoes, red onion, some griddled strips of courgette, some squares of griddled red pepper, together with some sort of herb - probably parsley.  I'm also toying with what dressing to put on the couscous.  I'm tempted by a red wine vinegar/capers/olive oil combination.  The mushrooms will be upturned onto a baking tray, dressed with a teaspoonful of garlic and parsley butter and oven baked.  Mmmmn - in my imagination, it's fabulous!

Pic c/o www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk

Friday's dinner requires rather less imagination and rather more careful preparation.  The tart is simplicity itself, as it is purely and simply cherry tomatoes in an egg/cream base with cubes of Brie cheese.  However, it sounded absolutely lovely and just had to be done.  This recipe originated from Delicious magazine and can be found here, if you're curious.

The Mexican Meatballs is a recipe that came from a Good Food Magazine (can you tell, I've been going through the file marked "Recipes cropped from magazines") and the recipe is available on their website here.  Hopefully it'll make a nice change from a straight chilli - and be teenager friendly, as several of this week's recipes are a bit of a challenge for son & heir.

Not me - too cool, calm and collected!

Sunday's meal will be as close to a Sunday Roast as I can get, without killing myself and/or my back.  A piece of bacon is one of the easiest things to roast, the potatoes and parsnips will be happy in the oven, the creamed leeks are dead simple to make and the carrots & peas almost cook themselves.  Fingers crossed for a nice, fairly relaxed, Sunday dinner - instead of winding up limping, gasping and red faced, into the living room to eat when I feel more like laying down for a half an hour.

The Turkey & Bean Enchiladas is another Good Food recipe that I've adapted.  The original recipe says to include leftover roast chicken, but I see no reason why good old Turkey mince won't do as good a job.  I've done a bit of research into the spices required for a home-made fajita seasoning and there's nothing there that we haven't got individually in the herbs & spices collection (that now takes up a shelf of its own).  I'll just have to concentrate a bit when I'm mixing up the seasoning, to get the right balance of everything, but I'm fairly confident I can reproduce something acceptable.

Son & heir will usually eat anything contained in a wrap, whilst hubby usually will eat anything that has enough chilli involved with it - so I'm hopefully onto a winner here.  I'll either make some potato wedges or cop out in a big way with a bag of frozen wedges.  It all depends how knackered I am by Monday!

Throughout these meals, I've had half an eye to trying to provide a balance between everyone's likes and dislikes versus what they need to eat for either dietary reasons or health reasons.  Like most teenagers, son & heir would be very happy if he never saw another vegetable or green leaf appear on his plate again (as would hubby, in lots of cases!), but I can't just close my eyes to the degree of vitamins, minerals etc. etc. that he's missing out on.  Especially at a time of such growth - he's beginning to tower over me! - when he needs his body and brain to be supported in every way possible.

Damn! He got there first!

This is one of the great strengths of meal planning.  You can see what you're proposing to feed everyone, in context with what they will have had the day prior and what they're going to have on the day after.  Put into context like that, a fairly vegetable free day (Meatballs) can be offset against a vegetable heavy day (Mackerel and couscous).  A dairy heavy day (Tomato and Brie tart) can be offset against a lighter fish day (Prawn curry).  As for me, well, I just have to watch the fat, sugar and carbohydrates.  A lick of the pan should do for me ....

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Keeping the planning straight in the face of many changes!

It all boils down to this .....

For once, there's a fairly good reason why this meal planning post is a tad delayed.

I put the plan together on Monday evening, as usual.  Then, that evening, I watched "The Food Hospital" on Channel 4 (all about using food as medicine), which reminded me that I was going to try to find the website which gave the Inflammation Factor for various foodstuffs.

Versus this!

Having done so, I quickly realised that a great number of the foodstuffs that I had been eating were right up there on the scale of "foods that are really bad for people with inflammatory conditions".  If you consider that both Polymyalgia Rheumatica (inflammation of the blood vessels) and Arthritis (inflammation of the joints) are both conditions that have contributed towards my current disability, then perhaps I needed to do something about it.

Hence, my diet has changed fairly radically - and the menu plan had to be changed along with it. Interestingly, it didn't have to be changed all that much.  I had planned to have Macaroni Cheese on one evening, which has had to be ditched, but otherwise everything else has stayed (pretty much) the same.  It's more a case of changing what I had for breakfast and lunch, rather than the dinner meal.  In brief, the dietary changes involve the loss of a great deal of carbohydrate and the input of foodstuffs with positive scores for inflammation such as mackerel (+465), chilli (+498), green leafy veg etc.

I've got to say, that although I am missing our oaty bread (-49 for 1 ounce), I am absolutely cock-a-hoop about increasing my vegetable consumption.  I absolutely adore veggies of all kinds, so to be "forced" to eat more of them is so far up my street that it's not even funny.

You may notice a change in the types of dishes I'm blogging about, but it will be interesting to see how that change manifests itself - if at all!

No doubt I'll bore you all to tears with talk of "Inflammation Factor" scores (breakfast today - mackerel & horseradish on toast - scored +350, for instance).

So, it's probably a good thing that I didn't do all of this until Monday evening - which was after we'd been to Macdonalds to cheer up a very glum Son & heir.  (It worked, he was much more cheerful after a "Big Tasty" burger).

Here's the plan for this week :

Tues : Macdonalds - Big Tasty burgers all round!

Weds : Prawn Patia, Saag Bhajee & white rice

Thurs : son - pizza, adults - Bacon & brussels sprout risotto

Fri : Chicken & Tenderstem® casserole with cheddar dumplings

Sat : Toad in the hole with carrots, swede & Tenderstem® broccoli

Sun : Roast gammon ham with baked Mozzarella gnocchi

Mon : BBQ glazed pork steaks with baked sweet potatoes and peas.

There now, doesn't really sound like "diet" food does it?  I would say that's because it really isn't "diet" food.  For instance, with the chicken casserole with cheddar dumplings - I will have more of the vegetables than the chicken and dumplings.  So dishes that might score a potential negative score, I'll just have more of the positive scoring elements.  Easy!

I was looking forward to making the Prawn Patia (which is an Anjum Anand recipe) and had sourced an alternative Spinach Bhajee recipe from a curry recipe book that we'd had for donkey's years.

In the event, the Patia was fairly successful but the Spinach wasn't.  At all.  Anyway, I'll leave the explanation of that for the blog posting or I'll be repeating myself - and considering I'm taking Cod Liver Oil capsules at the moment, that's the last thing I want to be doing!

Hubby had a mad rush of blood to the head on Thursday and, instead of making a Bacon, Mushroom & Sundried Tomato risotto, he opted for a Bacon & Brussels Sprout risotto!  This from the man who professes to abhor Brussels Sprouts!  Is it any wonder I get confused?

I'm afraid that again, this is one which will have to wait until its own blog post to be explained fully.  However, the fact that it is getting its own blog post should tell you that I thought it was remarkably successful.

This evening (Friday), we've just had the Chicken & Tenderstem® Broccoli Casserole with Cheddar Dumplings and it was really lovely.  Well done Jo Pratt for putting together such a yummy casserole dish.  If you're curious ahead of the blog post, you can find its original format on the Tenderstem website here.  You won't be surprised to hear that I tinkered about with the recipe a little bit!


Tomorrow is hubby's first go at a Toad in the Hole.  He's bought some lovely chipolata sausages to have in the Toad, as he has a theory as to the length of time a sausage takes to cook -v- the depth of the Yorkshire pudding batter.  We've even bought a new roasting pan especially for the Toad, such is our dedication to getting it right.


I'm looking forward to this one, as I am completely useless at making Yorkshire Pudding. It will be interesting to see how hubby gets on with it - and fingers crossed that he gets a lovely crispy, risen Toad in the hole.


As I said in my last blog post, I am opting for easier dinners on a Sunday for the foreseeable future.  As such, this Sunday I shall be pot-roasting a gorgeous piece of Gammon, which we'll be having with Baked Gnocchi with Spinach, Tomato and Mozzarella (instead of Mascarpone).  Both are simple "assemble, cook and serve" dishes which should go well together.  Hopefully, I'll be capable of getting from the kitchen to the living room this time!

I'm really looking forward to Monday's dinner.  Not because of the pork, although the BBQ glaze sounds really delicious - and I absolutely adore pork - but because of the baked sweet potatoes.  I'll be making chilli cream to go in them again and just know they'll be utterly gorgeous.


Now, as far as additional bits of cooking are concerned, in the pipeline for this week I have a recipe for a lovely Cream of Celery Soup, using some truly gorgeous Fenland Celery that was sent to me to try.  I find it completely bizarre that you can't get Cream of Celery soup any longer and wonder what the majority of the celery crop gets used for!  It probably gets sent abroad because us Brits are useless at finding uses for it - like so many of our fine produce.


Aside from that, I'm just waiting for Son & heir's birthday cake to be finished, whereupon I'll be making an Avocado Pound Cake.  Hopefully this will happen before the beginning of December, as I want to enter the Avocado Brotherhood's "Blog an Avo" competition!


Oh, and of course, I'm trying to find suitable things to have for breakfast.  Breakfast seems to be the hardest meal to fulfil without using carbohydrates.  After all, we get so used to eating cereal and toast!

Jonty is hopeful of a taste!

So far this week, I've had tinned mackerel & horseradish on one slice of toast - which as I said above, worked out to be a positive IF score even with the one slice of toast.  I also had a fresh orange, which bumped the score up a bit.  A spectacular success was the cherry tomato, parsley and chilli omelette (see above), followed by a Kiwi Fruit, which went down extremely well - although timing helps with that one. I tend to have my breakfast when I return home from taking Son & heir to school - which makes eating things like mackerel and chilli a lot easier.  I couldn't eat any of that, having just got out of bed!  Even a cup of tea is often a challenge, first thing in the morning.

If anyone has any bright ideas as to savoury or fruity (particularly citrus - but not grapefruit) items that don't include carbohydrates that can be eaten for breakfast, I'm all ears!

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Ham Pot Roast

The Gammon is hiding under the creamed leeks
see the slices, peeping out all pinkly, there?

Sunday, to me, demands something a bit special in the meal department.  There's no real reason why - it's not as though we starve for the remaining six days, so need to stock up for leaner times ahead.  I suspect that it's just a hangover from my upbringing when we would always have a roast on a Sunday, with a special dessert.  When people came round to eat with us, wine was served - and at Christmas, we had the Mother and Father of all roasts, with fruit or tomato juice to drink beforehand, a starter, then the Roast Turkey with all the trimmings, together with three choices of dessert - all followed by sweetmeats such as Turkish Delight, glace fruits, chocolate eclairs and nuts, served with a sweet dessert wine or liqueurs.  I take my hat off to my Mum and my Aunt - and in earlier days, my Nanna - who slaved over hot stoves for days beforehand doing all the baking and then got up before we'd gone to bed to put the Turkey in the oven.

All this, has resulted in it not being Sunday unless there's a roast on the table.

So, this Sunday (and because they're on special offer at the supermarket), we pushed the boat out and got a gammon joint.  Not, regrettably, one of the "real" gammon joints (we're saving up for one for Christmas), but one of the rolled, munched up and stuck back together again, gammon joints.  It may not have been your pukka thing - but it sure tasted good!

Considering I'd had such success with pot roasting chickens, I thought I'd step it up a gear and pot roast the gammon.  I thought that at least, that way, it wouldn't shrink as terribly as they often do when just plain roasted and it would stand a chance of staying succulent and moist.

The recipe was one of my own, gleaned from various recipes I'd read during my research.  I wanted it to be a veggie-based broth it was cooked in, rather than a spice-based broth.  Even though I'm just hopping up and down to use my new Star Anise, I thought I'd stay on the veggie side and see how we got on.

So, as we were having creamed leeks, I used the leek tops and two onions cut into quarters, plus a hoary old carrot that was looking for a home.  All these, combined with the cider, made a glorious stock that was just beyond tasty when made into gravy.

I served the Gammon with the creamed leeks, which were easily made by sweating the sliced leek in butter and, when softened, a large tablespoon of creme fraiche and some Worcestershire Sauce is added.  Mix it all together, add some seasoning and there you have it - creamed leeks.  I'd planned to serve some Chantenais carrots and swede batons, but discovered some Brussels sprouts in the veggie drawer, so they got included too.  With roast potatoes and roast parsnips, together with the ubiquitous Yorkshire Puddings, it was the kind of dinner that Sundays were made for.

GAMMON HAM POT ROAST

Ingredients :

1.5kg gammon ham joint

2 onions, quartered

Any other veg., like leek tops, carrot, celery

300ml dry cider

4 tbsp clear honey

1 tsp ground coriander

3 heaped tsp English mustard powder

Method :

Lay the vegetables into the bottom of a large lidded oven-proof saucepan or casserole.

Nestle the joint into the vegetables and pour over the cider.

“Paint” spoonfuls of the honey/mustard mixture over the joint.

Bring to the boil on the stove top and then place, covered, into a pre-heated oven at 170deg C for 2 to 2½ hours.

When done, remove the meat and put it to rest, covered in foil in a warm place, for around 20 minutes.

Pour the juices from the pan into a smaller saucepan, add cornflour or gravy granules to thicken for gravy.

Delicious!