Mothers Day, savoury
Since last night, the house has smelled reeeeally delicious – we were both busy cooking for today’s Mothers Day lunch. After eating leftover chinese for dinner last night, Jac cooked up a pot of soup while I baked chewy chocolate brownies (details coming up). And as soon as we woke up this morning, we were back to work. While I vacuumed, changed the cat litter and cleaned the loo, Jac did the dishes, put the pork in the oven and prepped up the vegetables for roasting. She also made a batch of fresh apple sauce. I’m really not into fruit with my meat (I don’t go for cranberry sauce with turkey, or apricot chicken, for example; the exception is that I looooove ham steaks and pineapple)
After the pork had been roasting for sometime, she added three kinds of potatoes (royal blue potatoes*, orange sweet potatoes and white sweet potatoes) to the tray of pork. The pork was roasting while sitting on a rack, and the pork fat had been dripping down into the tray. The potatoes were rolled in the pork fat (it smelled absolutely unbelievable!) and then the whole tray was put back into the oven for pork and spuds to cook.
Here is the pot of soup. It was a cream of butter bean soup, a recipe Jac tried for the very first time. Unfortunately, the recipe didn’t yield as much as we’d expected (supposedly it would serve 4 to 6), and we realised there wouldn’t be enough, even just small serves (maybe tiny serves, but we didn’t want to do thaaat!), for seven people (we don’t know what happened there… oh well). So in the end, Jac added tinned cream of chicken soup to the pot. The original soup was a tasty creamy vegetable flavour, but of course once the cream of chicken was added it became more chickeny (duh), but it was still a very savoury and tasty soup (we didn’t have any tinned vegetable soup, you see), so we weren’t too upset about it. And so we had “cream of two soups” for the first course:
I took some photos of the pork while it was resting:

Once the pork had rested, Jac got to work carving.
While Jac carved I plated up the roasted vegetables.



My plate:
Those potatoes were so good! Potatoes cooked in pork fat are just the best. And the white sweet potatoes were really delicious. I want more more more! Look at that roasted caramelised goodness.
Dessert post coming up.
*The royal blue potatoes are blue-skinned but white on the inside, hence the lack of blue-ish spuds in the photos.
The Mothers Day 2006 flickr set is here (people photos are friends and family only).