Forever Summer (15 page)

SPARE RIBS

Until I made these, I thought they were best eaten in Chinese restaurants. But there is just something about having a huge pile of these at home that has made me rethink entirely. Sticky with honey, but salty sharp with soy and rice wine vinegar, aromatically resonant with ginger, cinnamon, star anise and five-spice powder and eaten with a fresh and spiky scattering of chilli and spring onions, these are fabulous to pick at languorously and messily, the supreme reward for unchecked greed. They are also wonderful made with shop-bought Chinese sweet chilli sauce (I use about 6 tablespoons of the stuff) in the place of the fresh chopped chilli and honey.

You can often find sheets of spare ribs at the supermarket, or ask your butcher to cut them for you.

16 pork spare ribs

for the marinade:

4 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

3 tablespoons soy sauce

2 red chillies, roughly chopped

5cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and cut into thin slices

2 tablespoons runny honey

2 star anise

1 stick cinnamon, broken into pieces

1 teaspoon sesame oil

2 tablespoons groundnut oil

4 spring onions, roughly chopped

to cook:

2 teaspoons five-spice powder

2 tablespoons runny honey

to serve:

2 red or green chillies, deseeded or not to taste, finely chopped

2 spring onions, finely chopped, or a small bunch of coriander, chopped

Put the ribs into a large plastic bag and add all the marinade ingredients, tie a knot and squidge everything around well. Ideally leave in a fridge overnight, or for at least a couple of hours in a cool place somewhere in the kitchen.

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6.

Let the marinated ribs come to room temperature, and pour the whole contents of the bag into a roasting tin. Cover tightly with foil and put the tin in the oven for 1 hour.

Take the foil off the roasting tin and sprinkle over the five-spice powder and spoon over the amber honey. Put the ribs back in the oven for another 30 minutes, take them out half way through and turn them over before returning them to become stickily glazed on the underside. Watch that they don’t catch: they may only need another 10 minutes to become crispy and glossily brown.

Take them out of their tin, arrange on a large plate and scatter over the chopped chilli and spring onion or coriander.

Serves 4–5.

LOMO DE ORZA

Lomo
is pork loin and the
orza
is the terracotta dish in which it’s traditionally marinated. I found this recipe in Penelope Casas’
Tapas: The Little Dishes of Spain
, and I can’t tell you how bowled over I was by it. You need to start it the day before you want to eat it, but in a way that makes it easier. But believe me, even if it were harder to make it would be worth it. The marinade it’s steeped in,
after
it’s fried, makes it meltingly tender and flavoursome without being heavy scented. I get the butcher to slice the pork loin leaving the fat on, as that’s what gives this its wonderful flavour, but if you’re buying the meat from the supermarket just get any piece of loin you can find and slice it thickly yourself. Simply served with a salad and some baked potatoes, it makes a wonderful low-key, evocatively sunny Saturday lunch at any time of the year.

625g boneless pork loin, cut into 2.5cm slices

Maldon salt and black pepper

250ml plus 2 tablespoons olive oil

juice of half a lemon

quarter of a teaspoon dried thyme

3–4 sprigs fresh rosemary, needles finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

Season the pork with salt and pepper, and brown in a pan with the 2 tablespoons of oil. Lower the heat once the meat has a good colour and cook for a further 15 minutes or until the pork is cooked through but still juicy.

Put the meat into a shallow dish – preferably earthenware – big enough to hold the pork all in one layer, and pour over the remaining olive oil, along with the juices from the pan. Add the remaining ingredients and make sure the meat is immersed in the marinade. Cover with foil and leave overnight at room temperature. If it’s very hot, though, it might be better off in the fridge.

When you are ready to eat, cut the meat at a diagonal (and if it’s been in the fridge take it out a good 20 minutes beforehand so it isn’t unyieldingly cold). Arrange the slices on a large plate and spoon over some of the oily marinade. Fabulous.

Serves 4–6.

LAMB KEBABS

You could use any of the marinades for the
barbecued loins
, but this is how I most often make kebabs, either to go with the
za’atar chicken
or instead of, to go with the accompanying fattoush. The nutty, deeply resonant thyme mixture is just perfect with the sweet cubes of lamb.

500g lean lamb, cubed

for the marinade:

juice of 1 lemon, plus skins thrown in

125ml olive oil

2 cloves garlic, bruised

2 tablespoons za’atar

1 medium onion, quartered

Put the cubed lamb in a large freezer bag, then add all the marinade ingredients. Tie a knot, making sure any air is expelled first, then squeeze the bag about a bit to let the marinade squelch over the lamb. Leave this in the fridge overnight (or for up to a couple of days) or, out of the fridge in some cool place in the kitchen, for at least a couple of hours.

Let the meat come to room temperature, and soak about ten bamboo skewers in water for about half an hour.

Either heat a grill, or a griddle (or the barbecue of course), then thread three or four pieces of meat on to each skewer and slap on the heat.

These are also wonderful with a cooling mound of the
cacik
.

Makes about 10 skewers.

BULGAR WHEAT SALAD WITH PINK-SEARED LAMB

This bulgar wheat salad is loosely based on tabbouleh, only using coriander in place of the parsley, lime in place of the lemon and omitting the tomatoes and adding the chilli and some raw, diced courgettes. Coriander is so much more headily aromatic than parsley that I’ve made the ratio to herb and grain skewed differently from traditional
tabbouleh: that’s to say, this is a herb-flecked grainy salad, rather than a herb salad into which a few grains have been tossed. Because the bulgar wheat is so strongly flavoured and aromatic you can leave the lamb as it is: no marinade, no nothing, just sweet and pink and warm against the green-flecked cracked wheat. If you want to serve the lamb on top of the salad, I find that two loins of lamb are plenty, but if you want to serve the meat on a separate plate, then I’d go for three. This may sound mad, but really it does seem to make a difference to how people eat.

250g bulgar wheat

2-3 lamb loins, approx. 300g each

very large bunch fresh coriander, weight of leaves, without stalks, approx. 50g

large bunch fresh mint, weight of leaves, without stalks, approx. 40g

6–8 spring onions

1 fresh green chilli

2 small or 1 medium courgette

juice of 4–5 limes

8 tablespoons olive oil

salt and pepper

Following the packet instructions, cover the bulgar wheat with water and leave to steep as directed.

Either on a griddle or in a frying pan, sear the lamb over high heat, and then turn down and let cook for about 10 minutes, by which time the meat should still be a soft, velvet pink within. When cooked, set aside until the salad is ready; you want the lamb warm rather than hot, in any case.

Now back to the salad. Chop the coriander and mint. If you promise not to leave it on for long, you can use the processor. Avoid reducing the herbs to wet mush: it’s better to have the leaves left relatively large. Finely slice the spring onions and deseed the chilli and chop it very finely, too. Take half the courgette and peel it and dice it into very small pieces.

Drain the bulgar wheat in a sieve when it tastes tender and push and squeeze as much water out as possible. Pour over the juice of 4 limes and all the olive oil. Add salt and pepper and toss well, either with your hands or a couple of forks. Reserve a small handful of the chopped coriander and mint and throw the remainder of the chopped herbs, chilli, spring onions and courgette into the dressed bulgar wheat and mix deftly. Taste to see if you need more lime juice (or indeed anything else). Arrange on the biggest dish you can find and then thinly slice the lamb and place it on top, in the centre. Get the vegetable peeler and shave thin slices from the remaining courgette and scatter these, along with the handful of reserved herbs, on top.

Serves 8.

CRISPY LAMB CHOPS

Having just come back from Rome, I can honestly say that there is nothing in this world that can match an Italian
fritto
. The joy of these, particularly, is that they are wonderful eaten cold as well, their pink juiciness trapped within their eggy parmesan coating. If you don’t have any stale bread to hand for making the breadcrumbs, then just split open some pitta breads, leave them a short while – even half an hour will do – to dry out and then tear them up and blitz them in a processor.

10 lamb chop cutlets with bone in

175g fresh white breadcrumbs or 3 pitta breads, processed

10g grated parmesan

2 eggs, beaten with salt and pepper

olive oil (not extra virgin) for frying

Remove the thick layer of fat from around the edge of each little chop, either by tearing it off by hand, or with a pair of scissors. Be careful not to lose the shape of the chop, though, or it will fall to pieces on frying.

Layer the chops between two sheets of clingfilm, and beat them vigorously with a mallet or rolling pin so that they are flattened a little.

Then, in a wide, shallow bowl, combine the breadcrumbs and parmesan, and put the seasoned eggs in another bowl.

Pour some olive oil into a frying pan, to come about 1cm deep, and put it on the heat. Dip the lamb chops first in the eggy mixture and then press them well in the cheese and breadcrumbs before frying them in the hot oil. Cook the chops for about 3 minutes each side: they should be a deep golden brown and crunchy outside, within a still tender pink.

Eat them as they are, left to get to room temperature or even cold: there is no way these are anything less than compulsively delicious.

Serves 4.

LAMB CUTLETS WITH YOGHURT AND CUMIN

The authentically Middle-Eastern way of doing this would be to marinate cubes of lamb and then make fat spears of grilled
kebabs
. But I use lamb cutlets, small and sweet and plump fleshed, and just eat them like kebabs, without cutlery, biting the flesh off the sharp little curved bones. Four hours is fine for marinating purposes, but if it makes life easier to get the lamb in its marinade the evening before, do.