Having nothing better to do after Christmas, I decided to have a go at making a classic French dish as described in (one of) my Marco Pierre White cookbooks. He says to allow three days for the preparation for Braised Pig's Trotters 'Pierre Koffman' - and he's right!
I laboured and laboured but after two and a half days I came to a halt (I have to say I wasn't helped by my Spanish butcher slicing them on the wrong side). The feet are supposed to be emptied of bone and gristle leaving the skin to be filled with a mixture of sweetbreads, morels (I was using setas instead) and chicken mousse. This takes a lot of cooking and cutting and slicing and dicing and blending and boiling and somewhere I went off course.
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| Setas and a big Sweet Potato |
Anyway, I finished up making the stuffing into a passable meatloaf, the sweet potato planned as an accompaniment made soup (with a bit of ginger for luck) and I also have a litre or so of stock that you could use to stick back your broken bathroom tiles. I don't really know what to do with the remains of the trotters . . . . .
On the positive side the egg poacher from Father Christmas works a treat and makes a satisfyingly symmetrical egg, now all I need to do is get the bacon into nice straight lines :-)
