Further adventures of talking pork and little dragons

I suppose you'd say that I've always been an improvising cook. Probably it all started because I was chronically crap at following other people's recipes and found it easier to make it up as I went along. To be honest the results were just as dire at first but over the years you get to learn a thing or two.

For instance, pork tends to like it hot or with fruit or with beans. So here's Belly pork with pineapple, red peppers and kidney beans as dreamed up today for Sunday lunch.

The joy of improv cookery is making something good out of whatever you happen to have. I'd got the pork, Claire lobbed me the pineapple on the grounds that it needed eating and by astonishing good fortune I'd got a fresh green chili.

This is no mean feat in our part of SW France where hot chillies are not easy to come by; the French in general don't seem to like their food trop piquant. Sometimes you find things labeled piment fort or strong pepper but 99 times out 100 piment fort = dwarf green pepper absolument sans chili and about as hot as Pingu the Penguin.

However I got one or two proper chillies from our favourite veg lady on Canet market and they were just the biz. Actually she gave them to me as she couldn't guarantee them being hot, which I thought was pretty damn good of her.

I like belly pork. It's cheap but flavoursome, though persons like me with fat old git tendencies are well advised to cut off the majority of the rind and fat. The bones too are small, sharp and best excluded. After trimming, there was about 600g of meat. So:

*Fry up a chopped onion, three crushed cloves of garlic, 2-3cm grated ginger root and the chopped up pork.

*Add a chopped green chili, plus a small diced red pepper, about 1/3 of a chopped, fresh pineapple and 250g of pre-cooked, washed red kidney beans.

*Chop up and add a handful of fresh parsley and two or three sprigs of fresh basil, a teaspoon of good red paprika, a bouquet garni stock cube and a sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper. Bouquet garni cubes are exceeding useful as you can use them for practically anything, rather than having to keep a range of cubes.

*I might well have added a slosh of white wine if I'd had any but I didn't.

* Add about a mug and a half of water, bring to boil and reduce heat to simmer.

*Simmer for maybe 15-20 minutes, stirring and reducing the fluid until the sauce thickens. I always finish sauces this way. I never add flour or similar and think that getting the fluid content of any dish right is one of the keys to success.

* Serve with rice or pasta. We had pasta. Serves between 2 and 4 depending on the size of your gannets.

I've also been having a go with fresh tarragon. One of the bonuses of living here is that I have l'estragon growing in a pot outside No.5. I'm told that it's not so easy to source in the UK where it tends to be found dried (which I never liked much) or Waiting for Godot. The etymology of the word is related to dragon; hence the title of this piece.

Poulet à l'estragon avec des champignons went a bit like this:

*Chop up two chicken legs into bite-sized pieces, dice an onion and crush three cloves of garlic.

*Fry the onions and garlic, then add the chicken and fry until the meat is browned over.

*Cut up and add three large mushrooms

*Add a bouquet garni stock, cube, a teaspoonful of paprika, a sprinkle of freshly-ground black pepper, a slosh of white wine, and three or four chopped up sprigs of fresh tarragon about 10cm long.

*Add about a mug and half of water, bring to boil then simmer for about 20 minutes, reducing the fluid until the sauce thickens.

Serves two with mashed potato and other veg of your choice. Why not asparagus? There's plenty of it about just now.