Dear Reader, 

I hope you have enjoyed a peaceful and trouble-free week. 

Tonight, I’m cooking a simple pork dish to set up this coming week with leftover meat. 

I had initially thought I might cook beef short ribs and have pulled beef, but the supermarket didn’t have any short ribs to my liking. 

I’m also making a reduction sauce from marmalade and French onion soup mix to keep the meat moist and succulent. 

On pork, a paper from the journal, Antibiotics made headlines this week in the media that I focus on professionally. A group looked for antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in poultry and pork in Kenya. High quantities of bacteria contaminated 98.4% of pork and 96.6% poultry from the 393 samples collected. From 611 bacterial isolates, 38.5% were multi-drug resistant. It is worrying that supermarket poultry and pork in Kenya contain bacteria resistant to antimicrobials used for humans and livestock.^[1]

The selection of pork in the meat display at Coles is reasonable. I was looking for a shoulder roll but then saw porchetta. 

I know there is a traditional way of cooking porchetta. I am choosing the Yummy Lummy approach. Most people would dry the rind overnight in the refrigerator and slowly cook it in a low oven. 

I wasn’t interested in all that faffing about. I went with speed and power. 

I confessed my food crime to a dear friend who is Italian. She has shared recipes for lasagne and eggplant parmigiana with me. She sent me a laughing emoji, so I didn’t feel bad. 

Cooking pork, as I did, also reduces the risk of urinary tract infection.^[2] 

Recipe 

Equipment 

• Pressure cooker 

Ingredients 

• Porchetta 
• Marmalade – I elected to use Bundaberg ginger marmalade. 
• French onion soup mix – I chose the low-sodium product. 
• White peach 
• Navel orange 
• Red cabbage 
• Broccoli 

Instructions 

1. Put the porchetta into the pressure cooker cooking vessel. 
2. Boil a kettle and mix the French onion soup to about 2 L. 
3. Stir through two tablespoons of marmalade. 
4. Pour the marmalade and soup mix over the pork. 
5. Cook under high pressure for 1 hour. 
6. Put the pork into a plastic container, and refrigerate. 
7. Sieve the cooking liquor and slowly boil it to reduce it to a sweet sauce. 
8. Par boil the cabbage and broccoli. 
9. Quarter the peach and orange. 
10. Cut a slice of pork and arrange all the food on a plate. 
11. Drizzle the marmalade and French onion soup sauce over the pork. 
12. Give thanks to the Lord. 
13. Eat with a knife and fork. 

Thoughts on the meal

I found this meal satisfactory for my purposes. It’s an adequate meal for one person. 

I now have enough meat to get me through the week. 

Final thoughts

Would you consider what I did to the porchetta a food crime? 

Would you cook porchetta in a pressure cooker? 

Photographs

References

1.         Muinde, P., et al., Antimicrobial Resistant Pathogens Detected in Raw Pork and Poultry Meat in Retailing Outlets in Kenya. Antibiotics, 2023. 12(3): p. 613.

2.         Liu, C.M., et al., Using source-associated mobile genetic elements to identify zoonotic extraintestinal E. coli infections. One Health, 2023: p. 100518.