We had some very good friends to dinner last night, & I decided to slow-roast a leg of pork. (All this entailed was using a dish into which the pork fitted quite tightly, pouring in 1/2 c of water, covering the exposed meat with tinfoil (but leaving the scored, oiled, & salted skin exposed), and instructing the daughter to put it into the oven (pre-heated to 140 C) at 3pm. Yes, I could have had some rosemary in there, but it was pouring with rain at the time I was getting things ready & I just couldn’t be bothered getting wet. Anyway, by 7pm the meat was sweetly succulent, & 30 minutes in the oven at 180 C – while the par-boiled spuds, kumara & (of course!) pumpkin cooked & I made the gravy – got the crackling to the desired level of crunch. (For those worried about greens, we had a bean salad on the side.)
There were 7 of us round the table but it was a large leg of pork, & so even after seconds there was quite a bit of meat left, plus a few pieces of kumara. So this is what I did with it tonight:
First up, I got 3 sheets of ready-made flaky-puff pastry out of the freezer to defrost. Yes, I could have made it myself – & I suspect a hot-water pastry would have worked rather well – but I didn’t get home till quite late & all were hungry. Then, down the middle of each pastry sheet, I spread some cold mashed roast kumara, & over that drizzled a little of last night’s gravy.
After that I roughly chopped sufficient of the cold pork to pile it up along the length of the pastry, atop the kumara/gravy combo. And finally, I opened a tin of apple (not having any fresh apples in the house) and put a couple of spoonfuls of that on top of the pork, before carefully folding the sides of each pastry sheet up to enclose the meaty filling. Each pork’n’apple roll went into the roasting tray, which had been lined with one of my trusty Teflon sheets, & then into the oven at 200 C for about 20 minutes, until golden brown.
Along with steamed broccoli & the remaining gravy, that was rather a nice way to have left-overs 🙂
The occasional diary of an infuriatingly casual cook 