Pineapple flambé

Often you don't know when something happens for the last time. The last time you go into a store or cafe. The last time you see someone. You say see you soon, but then for some reason that just never happens. Often when I see updates from old friends on Facebook, I realise I can't remember the last time we saw each other and if it was a goodbye or a see you soon moment. Obviously, I hope I will be seeing many of them in the future, maybe by mistake or maybe intentionally. But then there are also times when you know you are doing something for the last time. Like the last day at work. You know you are walking over to the cafeteria for the last time, you give your last presentation, you say those awkward goodbyes because you don't quite know what to say. My wonderful colleagues made my last day at work very lovely by joining me for a nice pub lunch, and I was also showered with gifts and flowers. Had I known you get this much presents for leaving, I would have done it sooner! Naah, just kidding. 

And then there is the last time you write a blog post in the tiny shoebox of an apartment that in so many ways has been the centre of your life for the last two and a half years. Your safe place. This is the last night I spend in here. All of my stuff is hauled away to the Culinary Consultant's bachelor pad, and I have spent most of the day cleaning the apartment from floor to ceiling. Scrubbing the sinks, cleaning the fridge, wiping every possible surface, vacuuming, trying to get rid of all that nasty limescale in the shower. I'm pretty much done now, it's not only clean, it's Finnish clean (and that is a very different concept to UK clean!). Now I'm just waiting to go to sleep for the last time in my little penthouse. So much has happened here. I have laughed, I have cried. Mostly I have just been slouching on the sofa, watching Big Bang Theory. I wrote my first blog post here. I spent evenings in candlelight with someone I thought liked me (I was wrong about that). I have curled up on the sofa wrapped in blankets and blasted the radiator trying to keep warm in the middle of winter. I have gone to sleep under a wet duvet cover to cool myself down during the hottest nights of summer when the flat has been hotter than the inner circles of hell. I have woken up from dead sleep by the fire alarm and stood on the street watching flames come out of the window of the apartment under mine, hoping my place with all my stuff in it won't burn down. I have crawled home drunk after parties, and I have cried myself to sleep over boys. I cooked the first meal for the Culinary Consultant here. I had friends over for my birthday and served them Pink Unicorn cake and macaroons. I have made cards and I have eaten way too much chocolate. My wonderful man brought me flowers and ice cream when I was sad (or mad). I have been going crazy over my noisy neighbours, and I have been swearing while carrying my bike up  the 52 steps of stairs to my apartment. All of that will be a memory tomorrow. 

Today is my birthday. It's kind of weird that my birthday is my last day in this apartment. But at the same time, it's so fitting that I will have this one last night here to just go through all the motions. I am so excited about all the new things that are happening soon, but for this one night, I'm just allowing myself to be sentimental and think of everything that happened here. But yes, I knew the birthday celebrations would have to be postponed this year. I did have a nice little stack of birthday cards waiting for me this morning, along with some lovely gifts. But there was no cake this year. I'm happy to wait though, there will be time for that later. Hopefully lots of cake made in a big new kitchen. I did manage to find time to nip into Cambs and get me some birthday fudge, so today wasn't totally free of celebration. And I have had some scrummy almost-birthday meals. On Saturday we made BBQ burgers with Stilton, caramelised onions and a fruity mayo salsa (go check out the pic on my Facebook). That was a bit like a celebration, I love love love homemade burgers. And then yesterday evening we made pineapple flambé. I didn't quite know how to do it, so I googled a few recipes and then just made it up as I went along. If lighting things on fire isn't celebratory, I don't know what is!

Pineapple flambé (serves 2-3):
1/2 pineapple
25 g butter
1/4 cup light muscovado sugar
1/4 cup rum or other alcoholic beverage of choice
To serve: whipped cream, ice cream or custard

The howto:
Peel the pineapple, and cut half of it into three slices. Take out the hard middle part of each slice, so that you end up with three rings. Melt the butter in a frying pan, and add the sugar. Let melt into the butter, and caramelise for a minute or two, but make sure not to burn the sugar. Add pineapples and let cook for a few minutes on each side. While the pineapple is cooking, heat the alcohol in a saucepan. Take pineapple off the heat (turn off any gas flame). When the alcohols is warm (but before it boils!!) pour it over the pineapple and light on fire. For added dramatic effect, turn off the light. Make sure you are not doing this under an extractor fan, and also remember to have a lid close by just in case the flames get out of control. Better safe than sorry, although at least for me the flames were very moderate with no fear of anything getting out of control. After the dramatic display of flames, cook on medium heat until most of the liquid has evaporated to form a light syrup. Serve with ice cream, whipped cream or custard. 

You just have to take my word for it, but these are
some of the flames! In my defence, it's not easy
taking photographs when you are squealing
excitedly and jumping up and down.

The verdict:
So the secret (well not so much of a secret as something you just need to know) is to warm the alcohol before lighting it. Apparently, if the alcohol is room temperature, there just isn't enough alcoholic vapours for it to ignite. Also, the optimal alcohol to use for flambé is something with around 40% alcohol, such as rum or brandy. Although I think my little flambé experiment turned out rather nice, I think next time I would use a bit more sugar as the syrup wasn't quite as sweet as I would have liked. Maybe a mix of caster and muscovado. However, that will completely depend on your sweet tooth. I would also add some vanilla, which I would have done would I have remembered which box my vanilla sugar was in. The scrapings from a vanilla pod would have been even better. However, the dark rum we used gave the syrup a wonderful vanilla-y flavour. I haven't had a very good track record with flambés in the past, but this one lit up beautifully and I was jumping with joy watching the blue flames. So not a traditional birthday celebration, but I don't mind unconventional. Especially if things are lit on fire!

My going away flowers from my lovely colleagues!

Sweet and fruity pork

It's funny where ideas for recipes come from. Sometimes you stumble upon a recipe online which looks so great that you just go out and buy all ingredients that are needed to make it. Some other time you have things at home you need to use up, and try to think of ways to combine them in a way that won't make a disgusting mess. Other times you run across something you know you really want to use in a recipe but have no idea how but go ahead and buy it anyways because you assume you will think of some way of using it up at some point. Today's recipe is a bit of a combination of all of those. And one more very important element, the financial factor. This is the very detailed (and probably very boring) story of how today's food came to be. And yes, it's another Crockpot recipe. I won't apologise for that anymore, what can I say, I heart my Crockpot. I know it will lose it's appeal at some point, but until then, I'm a Crockpot gal.

It all started a few weeks ago with some sort of fair at Parker's Piece. There was a petting zoo for kids, some local crafts and a huge tent with all sorts of food. Me and Best Friend went to have a nose around, obviously aiming for all the foodie goodies. And you know when you walk among a display of all sorts of food from baked goods to cheese, from meats to alcohol and from candy to all sorts of strange condiments that you won't walk away with all your hard earned money intact. And it's great when there are usually samples available of everything, so you have the chance to try things out ahead of buing. We took our time strolling down the lines of stalls craving pretty much anything they had on sale. We also strolled around having a look at the animals, and made a few new friends.

The most interesting thing I ended up buying was two jars of pachadi, an onion one and a garlic one. They are made by a company called Manjira from West Sussex. Wikipedia tells us that pachadi is "refers to a traditional South Indian side-dish. Broadly translated, it refers to food which has been pounded." On the jar, it says use as a chutney or like a pesto. Stir into pasta or rice. Basically it's an oil based paste with onion or garlic and some other flavouring stuff in it. I used the garlic one for stir frying prawns in, and that turned out delicious. But I wasn't sure what to do with the onion one.

Part two on the journey to get to today's recipe: I was browsing crockpot recipes online and came across this recipe for ribs and pineapple. Basically you just mix mustard and smoked paprika, smear that over the ribs, put the ribs in the slow cooker and put the pineapple on top and cook for eight hours. That was what I was going to cook, the only problem was that I was too lazy to head out to the big supermarket and the smaller grocery store downtown didn't have rack of ribs, so I had to skip the whole rib idea. However, they did have pork loin steaks on sale for half price, and as we are close to the end of the month and I'm trying to budget to make the last pennies go as far as possible, that sounded like a good deal to me. Pork ribs or pork loin, it's all pork anyways. I'm not a great connoisseur of meats, but I have learned that you can throw pretty much any piece of meat in the Crockpot. Slow cooking will make anything taste delicious. I'm pretty sure I could trow in a pair of my old shoes if I get really tight for money, cooking them slowly for eight hours should produce something perfectly edible. Although thankfully I'm not quite broke enough yet to test that idea.

When I came home from the grocery store and was going to start mixing the Dijon and smoked paprika, I thought why not add some of the onion pachadi to the Dijon. And I thought Tandoori curry would go better with the flavours of the pachadi than paprika. And I added a bit of warmth with a pinch of Cayenne. While I was preparing the pork I was snacking on a raisins. After adding the pineapple on top of the pork steaks I thought why not throw in a bit of raisins as well, as I have to use up the whole pack today anyways (otherwise I will just end up eating all the raisins in one go, I think I might have mentioned my raisin addition a few times before as well. I just can't let them be if I have any at home). So that was the long and winding road that gave rise to this particular recipe.

Sweet pork with fruit (serves 6):

1 kg pork loin steaks (6 steaks)

2 tbsp onion Pachadi 

2 tsp Dijon mustard

2 tsp Tandoori curry poweder

1/2 tsp Cayenne pepper

432 g tin of pineapple in juice

1/2 cup raisins

1 tbsp cider vinegar

The howto:

Mix the onion with the mustard, curry and Cayenne. Coat the steaks with the paste, and place at the bottom of the Crockpot. Add the pineapple (including the juice), raisins and vinegar. Cook on low for 7-8 hours. Serve with a nice fresh green salad.

The verdict:
To be honest, I'm not a big fan of pork. Or to be more accurate, I wasn't a big fan of pork before the Crockpot. I have cooked pork a few times now, because they have been good value for money buys at the time. And I have liked it every time. The difference between pork and beef is that the fat on pork is easier to remove whereas in beef it's between the muscle fibres so you can't remove it. In case you wanted to that is. I'm still sticking to the bootcamp mantra "Fat doesn't make you fat, sugar makes you fat". Well of course that's fat in moderation, but still.

Fat or no fat (and I do think a thin little strip of that fat makes the meat all the more delicious), this pork turned out perfect. The slow cooking made it amazingly tender and I'm a huge fan of fruit with meat, here I love the sweetness from the pineapple juice. The mustard and onion pachadi gives the dish great flavour but it's subtile enough not to overpower the pineapple. Once again the Crockpot produced a winner. With about two minutes of prepping time, this is another recipe for anyone who is super busy and thinks they don't have time to cook. The only thing that could have been done better is that I think the dish would have been even better with fresh pineapple. Unfortunately I couldn't find any decent looking pineapples in the grocery store today. And I tend to pile on the tinned food, so it's good to try to use it all up every once in a while. I'm pretty sure I would survive a nuclear winter with the amount of food I stockpile in my kitchen. With such a tiny kitchen I should really try to avoid to buy anything beyond the groceries I know I will need that week, but I just can't live without having some basic stuff in my kitchen. But I do feel slightly relieved that I was able to use up the last of my Dijon for this dish, that's one less half filled jar of stuff in my fridge as well as one less tin of pineapple. Now if I could only figure out what to do with the ten packs of chickpeas I have accumulated in the recesses of my food cupboard... I guess next week will be hummus week!