This weekend I am mostly.... Roasting Brassicas

 Like I say, I'm not a great menu planner. Things cluster. Even wildly unlikely ones like a sudden craze for roasting brassicas. But this is quite a good pairing, one oven, but two very different outcomes. 

One is a very simple soup - broccoli, but with a bit more oomph than if you just boil it. The trick is to take loads of broc (700g says the recipe), and chop half of it smallish, removing any thick stems, and roast it for about 20 mins in a hot oven. I got over the stems thing by having tenderstem, so I just bunged it all in.

 

Meanwhile, sweat off a chopped onion on the hob, add in a good load of garlic and cook briefly. Then add your chopped stems from the stuff in the oven and from the reserved half of your broccoli, which you've had time to chop up. 

 

Give that 5 minutes, then add the rest of it, the florets that don't take a lot of cooking. Give it another 5 minutes and shazam, the stuff from the oven is probably pretty much ready. You want it a little bit browned in parts, intensifying the flavour. Bung that into the soup, give it a minute. 

 And then blend. It's going to come out gloopy, but very flavourful.

Meanwhile, in relatively deluxe weekend cooking, I invite you to consider caramelised coconut pork, with roasted cabbage. And I really do invite you, because this was LUSH. 

There are three things going on, one of them a pork fillet, which you'll brown for 2 minutes per side and put on a baking tray (with sides). The second is a load of green cabbage, chopped not especially finely and bunged into a roasting tin. Add a bunch of chopped spring onions (and a bell pepper says the recipe but you know the drill on that for me now). Oil, seasoning, 200degrees plus, but don't give it too long. 10-15 minutes or so. Again, you want it to get a bit of a char. 

 The third thing is a caramel coconut sauce, which is the point... It sounds weird, but it's one of those Asian-inspired sauces that combines salt-sour-umami-sugar and delicious coconut for your better tastebudding. In this case, fish sauce, sweet soy, sugar, coconut milk, curry powder and lemongrass, which looks like Nothing On Earth when you start. 

I'm sure you could bung in a chilli at this point btw. That's often in this mix. Anyway, once brought to a boil and given 5 minutes, it becomes a decent smooth sauce. Salty good, but a bit on the sweet size. So squeeze a whole lime into it, and it'll turn much more interesting.

 

You want to pour some of it over your browned pork (recipe says half, I say that will be a flood tide and you may want to use less) and then put that into the hot oven you're using for your cabbage. Give it 15 minutes, ideally basting at least once. Then rest for 5 minutes. 

Serve slices of the pork, with the cabbage, plain rice, chopped peanuts (don't pick up cashews absent mindedly, they are not ideal for this), and lime wedges, and with the reserved sauce.

It is a Plateful, and it's excellent. I thought the cabbage might be weird with this, but it makes it both wintry and a bit less determinedly exotic. Pork and cabbage, properly wintry. I should also say I actually forgot to include the curry powder entirely (doh) and it was still an interesting and delicious thing to make. But I might do it properly another time.