Spiced pork and chickpeas, with potatoes, greens & torched apple
A lightly spiced dish that brings an extra dimension to the “meat and two veg” concept.
Preparation time: Around 30 minutes (plus marinating time)
Cooking time: Around 15 minutes
With a little bit of juggling of sauce pans, this meal can look quite impressive without requiring too much expertise in the kitchen, and the lightly spiced flavours are very comforting as the nights draw in.
Ingredients (serves 2):
Pork loin steaks – 2
Paprika
Turmeric
Jerk seasoning
Potatoes – 2 to 4, depending on size
Chickpeas – 1 can
Cumin seeds
Spring greens – 150g, sliced
Apple – 1, cored and diced
Palm sugar
Method:
Around 2-3 hours before you want to cook, trim the fat off the pork steaks then rub them with the paprika, turmeric and jerk seasoning (around 1 tsp. of each) on both sides. I then put them in a food bag with a splash of olive oil, and leave them to marinade for around 2-3 hours.
Around 30 minutes before you want to cook, peel the potatoes and slice them into discs about 1 cm thick. Put them in a pan of cold water, and parboil them for around 10 minutes. You want to make sure they don’t cook too much, as you want them to still hold their shape. When done, drain them and leave them to cool off and air dry.
When it’s time to cook, heat the oven to 100°C (for fan assisted ovens). Add a little oil to a frying pan and put on a high heat, and then start to pan fry the pork steaks. At the same time, start to heat the chickpeas (they will probably just need heating for 5 minutes in a pan of water).
After the pork steaks have had around 3-4 minutes, turn them over and pan fry on the other side.
Once the pork steaks have had around 3-4 minutes on their second side (and have a good colour on both sides), wrap them in foil and pop them in the oven to rest/keep warm. You can then add the parboiled potato discs to the frying pan (so that they cook in the spiced oil from the pork) and start browning them off.
By now the chickpeas should have heated through, so drain them, and then in their sauce pan brown off some cumin seeds, paprika and jerk seasoning (again, around 1 tsp. of each) with around 2 tbsp. of olive oil for around a minute. Once the spices are fragrant, and the drained chickpeas back to the sauce pan, and roughly mash/blend them (I use a hand blender to get a relatively smooth consistency). Stir well to mix the spices in with the mashed chickpeas, and if the mixture looks too dry, you can add another tbsp. or two of olive oil. Keep warm on a low heat.
Heat a wok with a little oil, and stir fry the spring greens. They should only take around 3 minutes (if that). By now the pan fried potato discs can probably be turned over to brown on the other side.
Finally, spread the diced apple on a baking sheet and sprinkle with palm sugar. You can either try to “torch” the sugar on the apple using a kitchen blow-torch, or you can whack it under a hot grill for a couple of minutes.
Then it’s just the assembly! Dish a scoop of the spiced chickpea mixture into the centre of the plate first, and then slice the spiced pork steaks diagonally into 2-3 cm pieces and position them on top of the chickpeas, before surrounding them with the stir-fried greens, the caramelised apples, crispy potato slices.
Spiced pork and chickpeas, with potatoes, greens and torched apple
