Best laid plans

Two of my new favorite shops in Saffron Walden, both played a big part in my locally sourced meal.

I had made my mind up on what I would be cooking and how I was going to cook my locally sourced meal. I had the meat delivered from Gilbeys, our local butchers. I had the beers for each course, very helpfully picked by Dead Time Beers. I had the monkfish and prawns ordered and ready for collection form Saffron Fish Co, and my wife had made the desert. All I had to do was go to the market on Saturday to get the veg and pick up the fish. Then the inevitable happened. We received a phone call from my daughters nursery that my daughter had a temperature and we had to pick her up. We then obviously had to have a covid test and await the results. So that meant no veg and potentially no fish. Saffron Fish Co closed at 16:00, and thankfully for more than a few reasons the negative result came through at 15:00, so I jumped in the car a managed to find a close car parking space and made the pick up. I then had to go to Waitrose for the veg as the market is only on Saturdays. The plus side to this is that I was able to get some padron peppers for a pre-starter.

So all was not lost, I tossed the padron peppers in a little oil and gave them a good pinch of flaked sea salt. Then put them over the coals at high heat until the skin blistered. These were a great and simple pre starter.

For the stater I had decided on prawn and monkfish skewers. Matt from Saffron Fish Co had diced up the monkfish already which saved me some prep time so I alternated them on the skewers with the prawns. I lowered the coals on my Charbroil and placed the skewers on the grill, basting them with some black garlic butter. Considering I didn’t think I liked prawns, they were great!

For the main I brined the pork overnight in a mixture of cider, sugar, salt and water. I hadn’t tried this before and I was very happy with the results. The flavour of the cider really came through in the pork. So once patted dry, I put the pork on the rotisserie and onto the Grden Grill, having banked the charcoals in one half of the grill. Using the lower grill plates I also put in the parsnips for roasting, having covered them in honey from Saffron Honey. The pork came out great with a really good layer of crackling. Paired with a bottle of “much merriment” cider from the Cambridge cider company, there wasn’t much left for seconds!

Then onto desert. My wife had made an awesome cake using another beer bought from Dead Time. She had previously made a Guinness and chocolate cake so we swapped out the Guinness for a really nice vanilla porter called bad kitty. It worked really well and although not cooked on the BBQ I'll put the recipe on the website for you to try.

So all in all not a complete failure, but definitely not how I had planned it. I guess that’s the world we’re living in now. I've already started planning another locally sourced meal as I really enjoyed the planning and cooking what I could, and I’m sure all of our local shops could do with a boost right now!