Porcine Holocaust

When it comes down to liv­ing the good life, you don’t have to spend up large.

One of my favourite things about hav­ing been a dish­pig or assort­ed-kitchen odd-body for a num­ber of years is that you soon learn that the most expen­sive foods are often the crap­pyest.

So, to help you all out, here’s a few point­ers about sur­viv­ing on a par­tial-gourmet diet in Welling­ton. Now, all of these pho­tos were tak­en at gourmet and some­times 4x4 cen­tral, Moore Wilsons.

Fact Num­ber One. Pork is good for you. To prove it, here’s a great exam­ple right here.

A kilo of pork bel­ly for a miser­ly $12. There’s a bit of fat on there, but noth­ing you can’t han­dle.

Of course, you don’t want to go over­board. Too much pork makes Che a rather fat boy. But every­thing in mod­er­a­tion, no?

So, I men­tion the pork bel­ly because it’s a main ingre­di­ent in cas­soulet, some­thing I’ll be dis­cussing in more length over on Object Dart. Soon­er or lat­er.

Prob­a­bly lat­er.

But, there’s heaps of stuff you can find at Moore Wil­son you can’t find eas­i­ly any­where else. So here’s a few more

Braatwurst is a kind of Ger­man sausage made of… yup, pork. It’s light and deli­cious, and is good in a cas­soulet, but bet­ter with some­thing like a farmer’s plat­ter. These things aren’t so expen­sive when you con­sid­er how many you get in a pack. Plus you’re doing your bit to reduce the porcine prob­lem. We all know there are too many of the lit­tle bas­tards in this world…

Just so you don’t think my mind only grav­i­tates to dead ani­mal, you’ll also be want­i­ng to buy some of these fen­nel bulbs from Moore Wilsons.

They’re extreme­ly deli­cious, espe­cial­ly if you caramelise them in the oven. They’re one of those veg­eta­bles no-one real­ly things about. But even if you’ve cooked the beje­sus out of them the keep a remark­ably sweet flavour, and always have that fresh aniseed zing about them.

Of course if you’re roast­ing fen­nel, or a cassoulet/farmers plat­ter for that mat­ter, you’ll need a tub of this.

Duck fat is use­ful for just about every­thing. Be warned though, it has a very par­tic­u­lar odour, and will prob­a­bly keep your kitchen smelling like an avian butt for days… All is for­giv­en when your roast pota­toes are gold­en brown and charm­ing the Jone­ses though.

OK. Back to pork. Kassler is a type of smoky bacon used in a lot of Euro­pean cook­ing. It’s one of the ingre­di­ents of both the cas­soulet and the farm­ers’ plat­ter, and the best qual­i­ty I’ve seen in town is def­i­nite­ly here at Moore Wilsons. You can buy it from the super­mar­ket, but the fat on it just does­n’t have the light “fluffy” white colour that good pork fat should. If your fat looks dis­coloured, it is not good for you.

And that means both peo­ple and their foods…

OK. Let’s wind this up with this pic­ture. These olives are about $20. The thing to note is that they’re kala­ma­ta olives. Most peo­ple have dif­fer­ing tastes in this regard, but kala­ma­ta are the olives of choice in my mind.

Nor­mal­ly I’d buy these from the Mediter­ranean Ware­house, but that’s anoth­er post. The trick in this instance is to tip all that brine off the olives, and put them into a con­tain­er like this one here. These green con­tain­ers keep the sun­light off your olive oil and stop it going bad. You can always start out with black olives (pic­tured), and slow­ly add green, kala­ma­ta, what­ev­er.

The trick is lose the brine by tip­pingthe whole she­bang out into a colan­der. Make a bou­quet gar­ni of some rose­mary, some thyme, maybe some whole chilis, and some whole gar­lic cloves. Tie them up in some cheese­cloth, and leave it in the bot­tom of the now-emp­ty olive con­tain­er. Put your olives back in, and top up the con­tain­er with half-olive half-sal­ad oil.

Voila. You’ll have the best mar­i­nat­ed olives in all of Welling­ton. Bar my house, of course.

Just top up the oil as it grad­u­al­ly runs down (keep it above the lev­el of the olives each time you refill the con­tain­er), and the flavour will improve over time.

Enjoy!

And say you read about Moore Wilsons here. You’ll get a 10% dis­count. Maybe. If you do, tell me.