Salted Pork, Particularly Good

I am really happy to say that after a hiatus, the food bug has bitten me once more, and excitedly encouraged me into purchasing and roasting my first loin of pork. I’ve wanted to do a roast for a really long time, and pork being a favourite meat of mine was a natural choice for such an event.

Living circumstances have held me back in the past, as I have either lived alone, or been in various models of room share, where cooking for one, or at most myself and a couple of friends has been the norm. It wasn’t until last year, when I mistakenly froze a whole chicken prior to jointing, and was left with little choice but to provide it for a roast dinner with friends that I realised not only how rewarding and enjoyable it was to have these “big meals” with friends, but also how easy it was.

Since then, even chickens have been a rare addition to my menu with the prices of everything food and otherwise going up, so the prospect of purchasing a joint to share with loved ones seemed a distant possibility. Then, as often happens the wonderful joyful wave of “fuck it” washed over me, and within a couple of day’s of thinking about it, I’d credited a Wonga loan and collected the necessary food stuffs for a most enjoyable evening of nom!

The joint itself was a 2-2.5kg loin from a local butcher. It sat in my fridge for a few day’s before having its fat scored and generously rubbed with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. I had it sit near the top of the oven for the first ten minutes to help get the crackling going, and repeated this towards the end, allowing two and half hours for the cooking time with fifteen minutes to rest under foil when it leaves the oven. Roast potatoes occupied part of the oven, as did some Yorkshire puddings whilst the meat rested. Carrots, broccoli and cauliflower were steamed to go alongside, and softened onions added to the meat juicy created a simple gravy. I think everyone was surprised how nice it was, and for about £12.50 the joint which could easily serve five people was in my book reasonably priced and a lot cheaper than I would have expected before I looked into it, although an organic option would add considerably more the to the cost. I don’t have a picture of the complete meal, but I did manage to snap a picture of the joint at rest, shown on the right.

I am really passionate about sustainable and organic produce, which impacts my purchasing decisions when it comes to food, and as a bonus helps me feel less guilty when I’ve over spent. Consequently my first point of call regarding the above ingredients was the seasonal food delivery specialist’s Able & Cole. I’ve used them numerous times before and have found them reliable, reasonably priced and efficient. Sadly it looked like I couldn’t get my order delivered in time, so I purchased the above joint from a local butcher instead. I regretted not asking about where the meat was sourced from, but the friendly and approachable butcher answered all of my questions about freshness and suitability and left me satisfied that I was making the right purchase.

In the end my delivery did arrive in time, so I am now blessed with another loin in the freezer, and had the pleasure of using the organic veg from Able & Cole rather than having to dash to the supermarket. I am really happy that instead or rearranging my plans I decided to find out what my high street butchers had to offer. Previously I’ve only ever bought mince at a local butchers, probably feeling a bit intimidated by all of the selections and not knowing how much weighed items would cost. After finally biting the bullet, I’m definitely going to reward my butcher with another visit, and it’ll feel good to buy from a local professional rather than the supermarket.

Blog Update, Poor Title

I pondered the title of this post for a good 5 minutes… okay so that’s not that long, but still. Given that this site will be made up of a collection of different topics, with probably varying degrees of focus, and the fact I’ll repeatedly want to chat about whatever takes my fancy, I really need to develop a system of naming the posts I categorise as “casual chat”, both for aesthetic and SEO reasons… I’ll give it some thought.

Earlier in the week, as I mentioned I had an appointment to picked up some contacts to follow-up regarding some courses I need to take. I ended up being distracted by other things Friday, so I’ll be following up those leads on Monday. Another in road into improving my career prospects is to get my CV up on here, which is now listed under my new page, Hire Erika! The new page will only feature on the menu when I’m seeking work, so I’ll probably link to my downloadable CV via my about page too. In fact I’ll get that done after I publish this post. The new page is very short at the moment, effectively just acting as a place holder for my CV. I was planning to publish my CV on the page itself as well as making it available for download, but at the time I was too tired to lay it out nicely so I’ve left that for the time being. If I do publish it up, I think it makes sense to expand it and elaborate on my experiences, as the version I host here doesn’t have to be limited to the standard two or three page limit, that you’d aim for if you were mailing it to a prospective employer. There are probably some sophisticated techniques for displaying online CV’s in an interesting and creative manner, which I will have to investigate. Even if they don’t work on my current WordPress.com hosted domain, becoming familiar with the methods will help me should I move to another host.

Always trying to improve the site, and in doing so learn new, and refresh old techniques for working with websites and WordPress in particular I’ve made a few small changes to the sites navigation. I’ve created a new drop down menu entry for the site’s blog categories, and also removed the category widget which was displayed at the top of the sidebar. I did investigate placing other widgets up on the side bar, having created a little more room, but the ones I’m interested in are not suitable for my hosted domain.

Yesterday was a really good day, I did a proper good shop at the supermarket. Having ran low on so many things over the past few weeks it was really good to stock up again. I could still do to pick up more groceries, as a 1/3 of my shopping seemed to be taken up by toiletries and household items. Before hitting the supermarket I visited a local farm shop and picked up a bag full of vegetables and free range eggs. I hope to make use of much of the veg by making some vegetable pies, something I’ve only done a couple of times before, the first time making a bulk supply. There always a great thing to have in your freezer, easy to cook, surprisingly filling and packet full of veg I’d imagine fairly healthy despite the pastry, especially as I only use pastry on the top of mine.

WordPress support got back to me today regarding a problem I’ve had on the Socialist Party’s branch website I’ve been developing, so I hope to complete a couple of pages on their a bit later on. So far this morning, I’ve already finished the hoovering, had breakfast, done the dishes, emptied the washer and topped up my internet dongle, so its set to be a productive day.

About Emotivated Erika!

My About Page has undergone a rather massive transformation today, which was a rather satisfying task to get done. Within the updated page you’ll find a more detailed description of this site, what I plan to write about and show support for, as well as a section on myself, outlining a bit of history, listing a few hobbies and interests that I expect to write about. Tooked in down at the bottom is a link to my new Press Page, which currently holds a few quotes of mine regarding Occupy Leeds from regional media.

I’ve probably spent too much time on website and blog related work today actually, as I’ve still got a mountain of household chores that need completing, but it has been enjoyable and hopefully rewarding. Even more importantly I have got more work to do on career planning. Yesterday I did some research on various job profiles that I had short listed from the Next Step website, and later on I’ll continue with that, perhaps reducing my short list of careers I am interested in pursuing a little further. My main objective for tonight however is to get started on some star stories. Star stories are short “stories” you create to highlight or document your skills and experiences. There a useful aid memoir for filling out job application forms, updating your CV and can assist with preparing for an interview.

Before I get busy on tonight’s agenda, I’ll be rustling up something quick and simple to eat. I expect I’ll go with some stir fried vegetables, as I still have plenty of spinach, mushrooms and courgettes in the fridge. To ensure I’m not back in the kitchen looking for something else to eat within thirty minutes, I’ll prepare a jacket potato to go with the stir-fry.

Looking ahead to next week, there is a mountaineering club meet and Socialist Party branch meeting in the pipeline.

As predicted tonight’s evening meal / supper was a jacket potato with some fried vegetables.

Being Productive

Its been a long time coming, but finally after too many days out of the house and too many “comfort days” I have finally gotten in a productive day at home, and it an’t even finished yet! Sure things started off slow, waking up about 11am… and my guess is probably on the generous side I turned the heating on, made it just in time to catch my courier before she had to consider what to do with my mail and then went back to bed, and besides the odd dash to my desk to check Facebook or change the video I was playing, mostly for background comfort, there I remained… until a time, which would be unfashionable to disclose.

Well, eventually I dragged myself off my bed and turned off whatever video I was half ignoring, having seen it too many times, and from there I kicked my day up a notch, well several notches. The first order of business was to sort out the laundry that was drying on the clothes airers over night. The usual drill of neatly folding (read as dumping on temporarily on the sofa) anything that was dry, and replacing it with the surplus washed items awaiting its turn on the airers from my basket. Another load of washing in the machine, and the laundry component of my day was done, at least until the final load got finished in the machine.

The dishes were next. There are always more than they should be, I blame late night snacking, and the bad habit of being too hungry to sleep, but too sleepy to bother washing up before morning. Sharing my house for a few day’s and then spending an equal number of days crazily busy away from home, didn’t help matters, but eventually my worktop was visible once more. Think I took a quick dash to the local shop about this time, the lady, I suspect to be the owner, commented about me being in the paper, I failed to resist buying a pack of biscuits and soon after I was sat once more at my desk, munching biscuits and sipping tea.

The biscuits, as nice as they were didn’t hold my hunger back for long, so the next job was to get to work on lunch. Today’s menu, called for a bastardised version of Jamie Oliver’s vegetable lasagna, taken from his 30 minute meals series. .. I’ll skip the finer points, but dinner was ate and more chores got done

By now, my mom had returned so I could make the short trip to borrow her stock pot. Having defrosted three chicken carcasses the night before, a key task for today was to get to work on creating a new batch of chicken stock. Just in time too, as I used the last of my stock pile in the lasagna. A bunch of hours and a little boredom later and I’ve now got the first batch strained and in the fridge. It needs to cool enough so that I can drain off the surface fat, and whilst I’m waiting for that, the second batch is on the heat and will be ready in approximately 1.5 hours time… judging by the “quality” of the stock, I believe I can get another 2 loads out of it before it goes “too weak”, which I’m guessing will be a total of about 12 litres.

Wrapping up today’s productivity, I finally got around to narrowing my stupidly long short list of job profiles, I took from the Next Step careers website. I must have had at least 20, maybe even up to 30 job profiles, covering a reasonably wide range of industry’s, as my first step was to simply create a list of any jobs that appealed to me, mostly on title alone. After some advise yesterday, I am now tasked with reducing this “short list” to a much more manageable 3 or 4. My plan is to approach this task in stages, and tonight’s portion of that effort, which I started on just before I began writing this post, is to read the entire profile for each job profile and then categorise it into one of 4 categories. The categories I have chosen to use are; Available to me now, requires some training / experience, requires extensive training / experience and requires a degree. inevitably whilst categorizing each job profile I’ll realise I’m unlikely to pursue some of them, or after reading further decide they are not for me, so those will be left out. After an hour or so I hope to have reduce my current list down to perhaps half and be in a much better position to explore my next steps.

Only other news that I can think of is that I plan to commit more to this site, apparently posting regularly is key, so I’ll endeavour to try to have at least one post published every weekend. I may skip if I published something on the Friday and nothing worthwhile took my interest since, but generally I will try to get a new post up either on the Saturday or Sunday of each week, in addition to whatever ad-hoc posts get published also.