If you don’t care for my silly story, you can find the recipe here.

Hello Reader,

How are you? I hope you’ve had an edifying week. I’ve been pondering how good life is right now.

I feel happy in all areas of life, apart perhaps from the direction of my body weight. To be fair, I talk about it too much and do very little about it apart from eating more unhealthy food.¹

We’re all told to balance work and our personal lives. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt joy in so many ways. The best part of every day is chatting with my girlfriend, Katie. It’s amazing how good it feels to chat and ventilate and get to know each other better. Katie and my daughters are the best part of my life.²

Work has also been rewarding in so many ways. I love the feeling of competence that comes with being able to enjoy time in the office. The best thing about my job is the people I work with. I also like applying my training to the work at hand.

How is any of this related to what I’m cooking tonight? When I’m not chatting with Katie or working, I’ve been watching cooking YouTube videos. I saw someone do a crispy pork belly and I wondered if I could do something similar with the skin and fat on a piece of pork loin. I’ve also been watching videos on pickling vegetables.

As a kid, growing up in Brisbane, I spent much of my pre-school years with my maternal grandmother, my maternal grandfather, and my grandfather’s brothers. They all lived together in a house on Hale Street. I often dream of that house. I can smell the flour bags in one of the storerooms, I can see the firecrackers in boxes, and I almost always dream of the downstairs kitchen with three gas hobs and well-seasoned carbon steel frying pans used every morning to make the flour-based wraps for the large chicken rolls which would be sold in the Golden Pagoda³ later that day. One of the distinctive smells was the odour of pickled vegetables, Chinese pickles. As a kid I don’t think I was a fan, but as an old man now, I must be getting my Chinese on because I’m wanting to eat pickles more and more.

The other great thing about that house was being able to see and hear Lang Park. I could also see Mr Fourex atop the Castlemaine Perkins Brewery. This brewery in Milton is home to XXXX beer. Contrary to popular belief that Queenslanders cannot spell beer, the Xs denote the strength of the beer. Lang Park and XXXX beer are forever linked as the home and sponsor for the Queensland Maroons (pronounced ma rones).⁴

Like most things I cook, I rarely follow a recipe unless it’s something Mum tells me⁵. Then for the first time, I will follow what she says I should do, knowing that most of the time, Mum’s recipes are more guidance rather than instruction. She cooks with feeling and that’s how I cook too. With feeling.

So my experimenting with pickling has been about the flavours and textures I’m imagining in my head. Chinese rice vinegar, salt, sugar, cloves, and ginger form the base of the pickling juices.

Recipe

Ingredients

• Pork loin
• Salt
• Rice vinegar
• Sugar
• Cloves
• Ginger
• Cabbage
• Carrot
• Daikon
• Brussels sprouts⁶
• Bird’s-eye chillies

Instructions

Pork

1. I bought a large slab of pork loin a week ago. It was about 30 centimetres by 20 centimetres and 5 centimetres deep. I cut it into three blocks and vacuum-packed each and then put them in the freezer.
2. On Wednesday evening I moved one of the blocks from the freezer to the refrigerator.
3. On Friday evening I unwrapped the meat and dried the outside surfaces with a towel. I took a sharp blade and scored the skin and fat and then rubbed salt into the skin and muscle.
4. Place the prism of pork on a rack over a tray and place it uncovered in the refrigerator to dry brine overnight.
5. On Saturday afternoon I removed the meat and turned the oven on to low heat, about 120 °C.
6. I vigorously rubbed the skin while being careful not to tear the skin and fat from the meat. The objective of the vigorous rubbing was to dry the skin to prepare it for becoming crispy and crackling.
7. To avoid drying out the meat, I wrapped aluminium foil around the muscle and left the scored fat and skin exposed.
8. The problem with a dry brine is the amount of meat shrinkage which occurs in the cold dry environment. It suggests to me the meat was injected with water to plump it up to full tumescence prior to selling to make it look more impressive than it is. This shrinkage means I had a little trouble mounting it properly in an erect position. I wanted the skin pointing up and I didn’t want the meat at an angle while it was in the oven.
9. I placed my prism of pork loin wrapped in aluminium foil on a rack over a tray and then into the oven for about three hours. I fashioned the aluminium so it kept my meat erect in the oven.
10. I looked at the meat reasonably regularly in case the skin started to burn.
11. After the oven cooking phase, I removed the meat and drained the pork fat into a stainless steel frying pan and turned on the hob to heat the fat.
12. I placed the pork skin side down into the fat and left it there to crisp the skin.
13. Because of the meat shrinkage, I needed to use wooden toothpicks to keep the meat upright. Nothing like a little prosthetic surgery while cooking. 🤔
14. When the skin was crisp I moved the meat to a warm place to rest. Resting your pork is important. It’s probably more important to rest your pork than any other species of meat. I’ve heard some cooks say that pork should rest for nearly as long as it was cooking.
15. After seeing the size of the finished product, I dissected away the skin and remaining connective tissue that used to contain the fat from the shrivelled muscle meat. I thought I’d sequester the meat for cold cuts and enjoy the crackling with the vegetables tonight.

Pickled cabbage

1. Shred some cabbage.
2. Shred some Brussels sprouts.
3. Dice some peeled ginger.
4. Slice the Bird’s-eye chillies.
5. Julienne some carrot and daikon.
6. Dissolve some sugar and salt into a quarter of a cup of rice vinegar.
7. Place the vegetables plus a handful of cloves into a vacuum bag and then pour in the pickling liquid.
8. Vacuum seal the bag in a vacuum chamber.
9. Towards the end of the pork cooking, heat up a water bath to about 75 °C and cook the pickled vegetables for about 30 minutes.

Plating up and serving

1. Open the bag of pickled vegetables and transfer the vegetables to a dinner plate.
2. I know some people like drinking pickling juices. It’s not to my taste.
3. Place the crackling on top of the vegetables.
4. Give thanks to the Lord.
5. Eat with a knife and fork.

Thoughts on the meal and lessons identified

1. The crackling was good.
2. The vegetables were good. I liked how the heat from the Bird’s-eye chillies permeated the pickling juices and every bite was hot, spicy, and sour.
3. I will cut my pork loin into fatter chunks next time. I think this would be a better meal with a big fat lump of pork rather than a thin shrivelled remnant.

Final thoughts

1. Do you dream about the first home you lived in?
2. Do smells and sounds feature in your dreams?
3. Do you like pickles?

Footnotes

1. This morning I weighed in at 75 kilograms. I’ve been eating too much chocolate every day. I’m not sure if you’ve ever experienced salted caramel peanut slab. I buy it every week from a local shop. It’s very good. I think I have an addiction problem. I know I have an addictive personality. When I get the first taste of something good or pleasurable, if I can get more I’ll go for it.
2. Amongst the many things we chat about, food comes up regularly. For example, the other night we were talking about shaved lamb meat and chips. The morning, I had this craving. Yes, I do eat a lamb and hot chip snack pack with metal chopsticks! 😆 The tzatziki sauce was good as it oozed over the warm tasty meat.
3. The Golden Pagoda was a café/restaurant at the truck stop in Rocklea in Brisbane. I don’t know if the trucks still stop near the markets much. The Golden Pagoda was destroyed in the 1974 Brisbane floods. At that instant, my grandparents and my granduncles all stopped working. I remember ‘working’ there as a youngster. The chicken rolls we served were basically a cross between a spring roll and a Chiko roll. Not much chicken and lots of cabbage and deep-fried. They were about 20 cm long and quite girthy. As a little boy, I needed two hands to manage one. My most entrepreneurial grand uncle told me the makers of the Chiko roll stole his idea.
4. This Wednesday night the first State of Origin game is played. As always, I’m hoping for a Queensland victory.
5. Following a recipe from Mum can be hilarious. Me “Mum, you know that recipe for x? I tried it and it tasted a bit odd.” Mum “Did you use the y? That’s the essential ingredient and you need to do z with it.” Me “No, Mum, you didn’t mention y or z; no wonder x tasted odd.”
6. Do you like Brussels sprouts? If you don’t, may I suggest the next time you cook them, don’t! Just shred them finely and add them to a salad like coleslaw. I’ve also found cooking them shredded removes the bitterness. Check out this meal I cooked last night. I mixed shredded Brussels sprouts with cheese and added it to this tray bake of pumpkin and potato towards the end of the cooking process. Melted cheese and shredded Brussels sprouts make for a wonderful combination.