Lincolnshire Haslet – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 14

Wow. The last day of nose to tail fortnight and my eating along the animal challenge.

How do I feel? Full of meat. I’ve got a craving for cauliflower.

How far along the animal did I get? All the way, baby!

Here is the full nose to tail body part list: pig head, cow foot, pig lung, cow heart, deer kidney, chicken liver, cow stomach, lamb testicle, pig trotter, cow tail, sausages and caul fat.

Haslet seemed a fitting way to end my nose to tail fortnight. Here is what wikipedia says:

Haslet, also spelt ‘Acelet’, is a porkmeatloaf with herbs originally from Lincolnshire, England. The name is derived from the Old Frenchhastilles meaning entrails^[1].

In Lincolnshire, haslet (pronounced hayzleht locally), is a meatloaf typically made from stale white bread, ground pork, sage, salt and black pepper.^[2] It is typically served cold with pickles and salad, or as a sandwich filling.^{[citation needed]}

Basically it is offal and off-cuts ground up with sage, salt and pepper; the pressed out of it; wrapped in caul fat; then baked. I haven’t tried to make it myself, mostly because Hargreaves of Spalding make the best ones and I try to alway have one in my Leeds-based freezer. It freezes really well and defrosts gently over-night.

I like to eat the end slices by themselves. As well as eating it cold, you can also fry it up and have it warm. A very versatile pork product indeed. The top should be a darker colour (due to the baking). If you look carefully at the picture above, you can see the pattern of the caul fat on the top. The caul keeps the haslet bound together.

In my sandwich on Sunday, I added fresh sage leaves and a few leaves of Jack-by-the-hedge. That made an excellent sandwich.

Don’t buy the stuff from the supermarket deli counter. It is minging. If you do, I’ll play you this Cyndi Lauper clip very early in the morning, so you faint from over-exposure to Shaggy. That’s real threat.

If you’d like to try a proper one, it can be arranged. You can either find a proper Lincolnshire butcher (if he doesn’t rub his hands together, he’s not the real deal) or send me a message and I can be your dealer.

Another Lincolnshire delicacy to try is Stuffed Chine. Shaggy loves it.*

 

*I imagine he does.

Revamped Seaweed, Spinach and Nigerian Trotter Stew – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 3

We were meant to have testicles today, but I mis read the delivery date and they are in fact coming tomorrow. The funniest part of this was me waking up on one of very few lie-in days at 7am waiting nervously for a bang on the door and the balls to arrive. Didn’t happen. Too eager.

So what to have today? Despite being on holiday, the day turned quite full. Errands and lunch out and SNOOKER. We walked through the market, but didn’t have time to do any offal inspection. Luckily there was some of our Nigerian Trotter Stew left over from yesterday. One thing to note is that feet really do have gelatine in them. The sauce had turned to a jelly. That was odd looking, but something good to remember.

So night, to revamp them!

I started with the sauce, I wanted to have depth, rather than punch, so added quarter tsp tamarind paste, half tsp ground ginger, quarter teaspoon of ground nutmeg. Stirred in and set it to simmer for ten minutes while my seaweed rehydrated.

Yes. I bloody love seaweed. It’s taken me a while to start having it at home, but now I am devoted. There are several reasons – one is that it keeps in its packet it the cupboard for ages, another is that its amazing for you health-wise, a third is that it is really easy to prepare (just soak in cold water for ten mins and its ready). I have some Clearspring, but there’s lots of others. I then added the rest of a bag of spinach (about 200g). And did a little simmer for five minutes. DONE!

It’s pretty delicious! If you want the original recipe have a look at my previous post! I’m sorry I didn’t deliver testicles like I promised, but I hope you’ll be with in me in thinking that eating the leftovers and re-vamping them is all part of the sustainable eating I’m trying to promote.

One thing I would be tempted to do in the future, would be to buy a load of trotters, make a load of the basic sauce and then have portions ready to be vamped up!

As an update, here’s where we are on the carcass:

Nigerian Trotter Stew – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 2

The first thing to understand is that a stew is Nigeria is what we would call a sauce. Understand? Good.

In working my way along the animal, after the tail, the toes seemed like the next appropriate spot to move to. There’s recently been some good trotter chat on twitter, so if you want to keep abreast of that, you’d better give me a follow! Acting on the advice of Luke from the restaurant Dough, then disregarding it somewhat (sorry), I slow cooked my trotters in water with four cloves for six hours on high. This makes the most amazing stock. However, I made a beginnners mistake and realised after I’d removed the elbows that what I had were not chunky back trotters, but slimline fore trotters – that equals less meat.

Another thing to note. Always buy your trotters from the back end of the pig. Not the front. No joke.

Then I had a massive bowl of stock with lots of bones and bits of pig in it. I went through the bowl, removing the bones and breaking the skin up and removing any bits of cartilage that I didn’t think would be good to eat. I then had a smaller bowl of meat (included skin and tendons and all the bits, because of the slow cooking they are ALL GREAT TON EAT) and a bigger bowl of stock.

Now, time to make my sauce. I got the recipe from my first foodie penpal Jen who runs the Sharing Supper Club. I read it and then did it slightly differently. I must learn to concentrate whilst cooking.

So for a Nigerian stew – which means what? You need:

1 onion chopped, 1 can chopped tomatoes, quarter teaspoon cameroon pepper, half a can of stock, fresh thyme

I cooked the onion tomatoes and spice together for about fifteen minutes, then blended them to smooth and returned to the pan and added some of the bowl of pork trotter stock.

Then I had Nigerian stew. The thyme goes on top as you serve it.

It is very easy. I got the spice from Jen, but if you live in Leeds you could get it from one of the African shops in the market. I almost bought some dried smoked shrimps today – any ideas for them?

I then added my bowl of trotter meat and stirred it all together.

It goes to a really lip-smakcing sauce. We had a few spoons of it with some rice (cooked in the rest of the pork stock) and a couple of tortillas.

Lip-smacking is the word. Even Daz’s friend Bill who shuddered when Daz showed him a picture of the trotter in our fridge, liked it.

Testicles tomorrow! I’d better not balls them up! ho ho *crawls into a corner*