Bourbon, Honey and Mustard Glazed Pigs Cheeks

I’ve had pigs cheeks a couple of times. At Wild Honey they were amazing. And the other time they weren’t quite bad enough to be memorable. But they were pretty bad. Cook them with patience and care and you’ll be rewarded with unctuous, deep, savory flesh that teases apart and makes you realise what proper meat tastes like. Undercook them and they’ll behave like rubberised boulders.

I was going to cook bourbon glazed pork chops. But Waitrose had 7 pigs cheeks left on the counter and I couldn’t resist. I did a quick calculation and realised for an extra hour or two of cooking I’d be saving around 5 pounds. It’s very rare that I am successfully thrifty – so my trek home from Marylebone to Brixton with a rucksack weighed down with root vegetables was full of frugal bounce.

I quickly got to work by making a marinade for the cheeks. I combined a glug or two of soy sauce, three spoons of Dijon mustard, a spoon of honey and about 100ml of bourbon. I then threw the pigs cheeks into the mixture and set about getting doing something wintry and imaginative with my vegetables (I won’t bore you with the details of my leek gratin or with my celeriac mash).

After 20 minutes, or longer if you’ve got the time, fish your cheeks out and sear them in a hot, lightly oiled, griddle pan. You don’t want it to be so hot that it singes the honey, but you do want it hot enough to leave delicious brown stripes on your meat. It should only take a couple of minutes to achieve this. Remove your cheeks and put them in a small roasting tin. Then pour in the rest of the marinade. Deglaze the pan off the heat with some bourbon and add this to the pan along with a generous knob of butter. (You probably won't need any salt at all because the soy sauce doesn't hold back.)

Cook at 150’c for around an hour and half. Baste and turn intermittently. You don’t want your lovely cheeks to dry out. Once they’ve changed their feel from being hard and bouncy like an athlete’s six pack to being soft and tender like toddler’s thigh you are in business. Remove the meat and rest it in a warm place. Then pour the juices into a pan and reduce aggressively. Add more bourbon and as much honey as you think is necessary. This will help to give your sauce a rich, glossy depth. By this time your house should smell like bliss.

Pile your plate high with celeriac mash, flank it with leek gratin on one side and steamed broccoli on the other. And adorn with your sensational balls of pig cheek. Then pour over your glossy, sticky sauce and grind some pepper.



All that’s now left to do is to pat yourself on the back. This is a serious supper for evenings of Lear like weather when nothing but the most blanket-like of comfort food will suffice.

Eat, Chicken Pot Soup

Feeling a bit bored of tinned soups now... so I went for Eat's "Big Bold" option of the day... a chicken pot soup.

It was a slurry of chicken stock and root vegetables with a little bit of soggy pastry on top. Definitely not worth the £3 they charged me for it. It's all about tins...

Heinz Farmers' Market Lamb and Vegetable Soup

Tall thin can. Supposed to make you think it's classy and therefore pay a bit more for it. Do the ingredients come from farmers' markets? I doubt it. But I bought the lamb version anyway because it was the most intersting tinned soup on the shelf.

In fairness it was very tasty. Full of meat. Good depth of flavour. And was helped by giving it a healthy amount of seasoning. What I will say is that it is very explosive in the microwave. I spent several minutes wiping it clean which gave the soup a chance to cool down to a temperature that only just burnt my mouth.

Would I buy it again? Only infrequently.

Gilly's thoughts on M&S Tinned Soup

"the chorizo and tomato soup from M&S (tinned) needs alot of attention...far too bland ...shed loads of salt/pepper and some tabasco help...but my advice is don't buy it
so dissapointing as it sounds delicious". Robert Gillon.

Sounds like a case of over promising and under-delivering. Which has been the opposite experience for me over the past few weeks of soup eating.

Baxter's French Onion Soup

Having lived off soup at work 2 weeks now I am becoming a bit of a Soupaphile. And I love the tinned stuff. It's cheaper. Doesn't need a fridge and tastes great. Cartons of soup seem a bit of a waste of time.

My Baxter's French Onion soup was good. But not in the same league as its Waitrose cousin which was sweeter, smoother and less harsh. The Baxter's version was fine, but had a slightly artificial taste.



Would I have it again? Yes. But I'd always grab the Waitrose version if I could.

San Lorenzo Linguine and Amatricana Sauce

San Lorenzo's hamper couldn't have arrived at a better time. Deep into January and with funds tighter than a rope that circus performers walk along, trying not to fall 100 feet to their death, I could have kissed the nice people at San Lorenzo for their humanitarian food parcel.



Feeling tired and peckish the thought of some pasta with a bold red Italian sauce filled me with glee. And then I remembered that I had the remains of Mum's roast ham in the fridge too that has found itself in all my cooking since she handed it over to me. A perfect way to pad out the Amatricana sauce which I have now found out is made from pig cheek! No wonder it tasted so good and that they wrote the ingredients in Italian!



I simply cooked the linguine as per the instructions with a pinch of salt in my boiling water and simmered the sauce in a pan before adding my cut up roast ham.



I used my new pasta claw to transfer the al dente pasta into the sauce and turned it over a few times before seasoning with pepper - it was already nicely salty from all the pig! A few parsley leaves gave the dish an Italian flag colouration and made me the happiest man in the world for the next 20 minutes!

Delicious. Doesn't even compare to normal supermarket pasta / pasta sauces. The pasta was tasty in its own right with a robust texture and slippery finish. Not sticky. Not flabby. And the sauce was really quite special too. Deep, rich and very moreish.



Thank you San Lorenzo. I'm looking forward to trying out the rest of my goodies in due course. I recommend that if you like to cook proper Italian food at home and you haven't got a good Italian deli near you then you visit San Lorenzo's website instead. Photo to come once I get it off my phone.

Baxter's Flame Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup

The penultimate tin of soup in my collection. I will have to go and buy a fresh batch of tins! Or better still find time to make my own.

This Baxter's soup is thick, bright orange and reasurringly full of chunks of rich red pepper. It's got good depth with a kick of spice. But then again that may have come from the pepper and Tabasco I dumped into it! Great with a torn off lump of granary baguette.

Not my absolute favourite. Whilst I could just about taste the flame roasted peppers, it would have been great for them to dominate the soup. I love the transformation of peppers from crunchy and a bit dull, to smoky, sweet and soft when you pop them in the flames of the stove for a bit. Great smell. Even better taste.

Roast Ham Risotto with Mustard and Parsley

Risotto is such a good way of filling up cheaply. And an even better way of making good use of leftovers and fresh herbs.

I made a standard risotto, but instead of stock made a liquor from mushroom essence and porcini powder to add some depth. It gave the risotto great flavour and avoided the humuliation of having to use just water!

Mum's leftover roast ham made a great embellishment tasting salty, meaty and gorgeously sweet. I beat a good lump of butter and a few knobs of cheese into the rice before finishing it with a sprig of parsley which gave the dish some colour and a subtle peppery kick.

Waitrose French Onion Soup

The Covent Garden soup was good. Particularly the Winter Vegetable. But the French Onion soup from Waitrose in a very plain tin was fantastic. I added a few blobs of brie and dipped a few morsels of crunch French bread in for good measure.

It was sweet, deep, well textured and excellent value. Skip on past the chilled soup cabinet and tuck into the tinned stuff. It's great.

Baxter's Lobster Bisque

Today's soup de jour was Baxter's Lobster Bisque. Opening the tin certainly got everyone talking as the deep fishy smell spread around the office.

It was deep red, thick and laden with flavour with mini little chunks of lobster meat sitting at the bottom of the bowl. With a good grind of pepper it really came to life.

For about a quid it's not bad at all really! What would make it even better would be a little dab or rouille... mmm. Tomorrow brings French onion soup.

Covent Garden Soups

January is a bleak month at the best of times. It's even worse when you've shelled out for a skiing holiday as well. So it's a time to watch the pennies and shed some Christmas blubber. At the moment I'm feeling a bit like Rick Waller in Ricky Gervais' pork scratching joke!

So it's a time to cut back and try to get my bank balance and waist back into shape.

I've bought my week's worth of soup already and am making life more interesting by not eating sandwiches and just concentrating on soup. I'm going to make sure I note which ones are best in order to force myself into not buying extra food during the day. It's all too easy to spend a fiver a day on sandwiches and then even more money on supper. But not this month!

Soup 1



Covent Garden Toulouse Sausage and Puy Lentils

Good thick soup. Ed's immediate comment was that it looked like a tin of Heinz blognese sauce. He got it spot on. It's not an attractive soup to look at. Dull brown with a hint of grey!

It's got a deep, meaty flavour and is thickened well by the lentils. However, if you blindfolded me and fed it to me there is no way on earth that I would have guessed what it was. That said it was enjoyable. It kept my hunger away, along with a bread roll, till about 8pm whereupon I felt like I was about to die from hunger pangs!

Soup 2



Covent Garden Winter Vegetable

Now this is a proper soup. No messing around with dodgy Gallic sausage soups. This is a proper English puppy. Full of rich golden colour and thick with goodness, this soup is a winner. It tasted even better when accompanied by chewy chunks of le pain quotidien baguette.

Our only complaints were:

1. It took forever for our microwave to cook it

2. Are peas winter vegetables?

Nonetheless, great soup. Has kept hunger at bay until supper time too.