Sweet and Sour Pork

I made this recipe for our Tuesday evening meal because son & heir hath decreed that he "doesn't really like that sort of vegetable thing".   He also doesn't really like anything with vinegar in it - he's definitely not keen on sour flavours (unless they're involving something made by Haribo, of course).

So he had a pizza (which made him happy) and I made the sweet and sour pork for hubby and I - and it was gorgeous.

I found the recipe on the terrific Adora's Box blog, which has been the source of two or three really successful recipes, now.  I love it when you find a blog which contains recipes that you know are going to be tried and tested and, from the write-up, you know are likely to taste this way, or that way.  Makes meal planning so much easier!

Our local butcher supplies six pork steaks for £2.99, which is amazingly good value, especially considering that they are cut from a loin and not from the shoulder.  I used four of these steaks for the two of us as they are cut quite thinly.  Even so, I should really have beaten them out a wee bit thinner as I'm sure they'd have been more tender if I had have done so.  Being loin steaks, they are easy to remove the fat from as well.  Often, I'll include the fat in the pan as I cook the steaks as the fat lends so much flavour, removing it at serving to keep for the dogs.  However, this time I didn't use it as I didn't want to lose the pieces of fat in the general melange of vegetables.  That wouldn't have gone down terribly well at all, if hubby had've found a big old globby piece of fat in his dinner!

The flavour is very definitely sweet and sour.  However, it is a gentler, more rounded flavour combination than one very often finds in these sorts of dishes.  I suspect it is a combination of the velveting of the pork to begin with (coating in soy, sesame oil and cornflour) and the small amount - 1 tablespoon - of white wine or cider vinegar used.  It is enough to create the sour flavour, but not enough to catch at the back of your throat.

Of course, the peppers are lovely in this and I included four or five chestnut mushrooms too - which were a complete joy.  I'm quite sure you could up the vegetable quantity by including carrot, baby corn, baby courgettes, water chestnuts and pak choi, if you wanted.  Certainly the quantity of meat versus the quantity of vegetable matter was weighing heavily in the meat's direction.  Not saying this is a bad thing, just putting the idea out there.

I served ours with plain white rice which was perfectly acceptable, but I'm sure that if you didn't want to include the pak choi in the main dish, some steamed pak choi would be very welcome by the side.

The next time I make this - and there will be a next time (see below!), as I love sweet and sour pork - I shall include son & heir in on the deal.  I can't see that there was anything about the dish that he could have disliked, other than the fact that it included some sort of vegetable matter.  But then, he'll be hard pressed if he thinks he's going to get away with eating no vegetable for the rest of his life!  As they say on LOLCats "aisodon'tthinkso".

18 April 2013 : I made the sweet and sour pork again last night - and this time fed it to son & heir too.  He wasn't overly impressed (and asked, in the preparation, whether "it would contain those stir fry vegetables and stuff") but he did eat it.  Well, everything except the small pieces of broccoli and he wasn't alone in that as his Dad picked those out and left them too.  According to hubby, "broccoli has no place in a sweet and sour".  Well I enjoyed my bits of broccoli, as I really like the way the fluffy head gathers up the sauce!  Tasted yummy in my opinion.  But there we are, we're all different.  Hubby did declare the remainder to be "really good", so I'm not arguing.

I didn't have any mushrooms this time, but I did have a tin of water chestnuts, which were really really good in it.  The butcher had gone mad and gave us a full kilogram of pork steaks, so I had enough left for lunch today.  With the addition of a little Mic's Chilli El Loco BBQ sauce and a few of the leftover water chestnuts, it was a perfectly delicious lunch treat.

SWEET & SOUR PORK  (serves 2)

Ingredients :

400 gm. pork, thinly sliced
3 tbsps. light soy sauce
1 tbsps. brown sugar
1 tsp. sesame oil
2 tsps. corn flour
1 medium onion
2 stalks of spring onions
1/4 cup each of sweet green and red pepper, cut into squares
1/2 cup tinned pineapple tidbits or chunks
1/4 cup syrup from the tinned pineapple
1 tbsp. white wine or cider vinegar
2 tbsps. tomato ketchup
3 tbsps. honey
3 tbsps. cooking oil

Method :

1.  In a bowl, mix the pork with the light soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil and the corn flour.  Mix very well then set aside while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

2.  Heat up a wok until very hot. Add 2 tbsps. of the cooking oil and swirl around to coat the wok.

3.  Add the pork and stir fry on a high heat for about 5 minutes or until the liquid that comes out of the pork is re-absorbed.

4.  If necessary, add the last tbsp. of oil (I didn't need to) and stir fry until the pork is glossy and dry. Add the vinegar, ketchup, pineapple syrup, honey, onions and peppers.

5.  Keep stirring until the mixture comes to a boil. Keep the heat high. When the peppers and onions are half done (about 3 minutes), add 1/2 cup of water around the pork to deglaze the pan (again, I didn't need to do this as my pan is a new non-stick and there was nothing to deglaze).

6.  Add the spring onions and the pineapple pieces. Simmer for 2 minutes then turn the heat off.

Serve.

Printable version

Two days into the new week : meal planning w/b 11.10.11

Yes, I know, I should have done this blog post by now.  Oh, but you do nag!  *chuckle*

Don't ask me what I've been doing in the meantime, but I seem to have been sat at the computer without anything useful coming of it, except I have collected quite a few new recipes and ideas for menu planning in future.  I consider this to be a good thing.

This week's meal plan is quite a good'un, I reckon.  It seems to be dominated by bacon in several instances, but three out of seven isn't all bad.

So let's have a look at what I'm planning :

Tues : Pizza for son & heir, Sweet & Sour Pork with rice for us

Wed : Spicy Chicken & Bacon pasties with salad

Thurs : Meatballs and pasta

Fri : Chicken Piccata with mashed potatoes, carrots & broccoli

Sat : Pasta Alla Amatriciana

Sun : Lamb & boulangere potatoes with carrots & garden veg

Mon : Full English Breakfast.

That all sounds really nice, I reckon.  I'm looking forward to all of it!

It's now Thursday as I'm writing this, so we've already had the Sweet & Sour Pork and my goodness what a triumph it was!  Accolades have to be given to the Adora's Box blog which is where the recipe came from.  The next time I make it (and there will be a next time) I shall make sure to include son & heir in, as I'm sure he'd enjoy it.  The flavours are gentle and rounded, not at all rough or acidic as they so often are with sweet and sour recipes.  He particularly hates vinegar-like flavours, and although this recipe contains a tablespoonful of vinegar, you'd be hard pressed to know.

Anyway, it deserves a blog post of its own, so watch out for it!

Last night was the Spicy Chicken & Bacon Pasties and apart from a complete lack of being able to pleat a pasty - my skill at doing so totally deserted me - they were really successful.  This one came from a BBC Good Food "40 Chicken recipes" booklet and you can find the recipe on the BBC Good Food website.

I will be blogging about these separately, too - and will include my recipe for them, as I tinkered about with it quite a lot!

Tonight was to have been Meatballs & Pasta, produced by hubby, but we had one of those "forgetting to take it out of the freezer" moments and so the meatballs are off.  We'll have to stop at Sainsbury's and pick up a bag of salad and some fish in breadcrumbs, I reckon.

Apparently, this is what it will look like!

Tomorrow's recipe, Chicken Piccata, is one from Foodista.  However, the author is anonymous, so I can't give him or her the credit they deserve.  Anyway, it's an interesting recipe where you pan fry the flattened out chicken breasts that have been dunked in seasoned flour with lemon zest.  Then you make a sauce which involves wine, lemon juice and capers.  I'm hugely interested to know how this will turn out, so watch the blog and I'll tell you!

Saturday's Pasta Alla Amatriciana is a bit of an experiment.  I used to have an Amatriciana recipe that son & heir and I really liked, but that didn't agree with hubby and gave him terrible indigestion.  I eventually had to bin that recipe, having tried all ways to make it okay for him to eat, without success.

This one, however, is prepared completely differently and with different ingredients (in some instances) and with no chilli.  Again, I'm intrigued by it.  It comes from Chow.com and is attributed to a Chef called Robert Sietsema.  For all that I can't replicate a lot of his ingredients as they are die-hard Italian, I'll do my best to get good ingredients locally for this and we'll see how I fare!

Sunday sees a repetition of the Lamb & boulangere potatoes that got bounced from last week.  I'm determined to do this recipe as it keeps on making my mouth water!  I'm hoping that some more of the garden vegetables will be ready to use by then.  In fact, looking down the garden from the window here, I can see a Romanescu Cauliflower peeking out the top of some leaves - so we should be okay there!

Now I do think that perhaps we should skip lightly over Monday and not talk about it too much.  *blush*  Why am I so embarrassed?  Well, it's a full English Breakfast for dinner - and I'm supposed to be losing weight!  However, it's a request from son & heir who doesn't often request particular meals - and we'd all been feeling the lack of black pudding in our diets, for ages.  A large part of the meat (bacon & sausage) will be grilled and if I don't have any fried bread and opt for a poached egg instead of fried, I reckon I should be able to get by without doing too much damage!  Ah well, it only happens once in a blue moon.

I also have a conundrum to conjur with, this week.  I have been given a huge bag of apples, which are demanding to be done something creative with.  Having had a long and intense ponder, I'm currently thinking along the lines of an apple cake.  Not so much sponge, as a more robust mix such as the Marmalade cake used.  Also, not sliced apples laid on the top, more chunks of apple throughout the cake - much as you would find cherries in a cherry cake.  Maybe some caramel aspect in there too.  I dunno - I'm still working it out.  However, rest assured that you'll hear about it quick sharp if it works out well - and with rather less speed if it's a complete disaster.

So - lots to look forward to!

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