Smoked Pork Hock Soup

Soueee!

by burnishings on Flickr.

We discovered a wonderful source for local smoked pork products at the Duncan Farmers' Market in the Square a couple of weeks ago: Ravenstone Farm. We'd been making a delicious pork & beans recipe in the slow cooker, but I wanted something different. I cobbled together a couple of recipes from Art of the Slow Cooker by Andrew Schloss, my "go to" manual for slow cooking and pretty much 80% of our dinners lately! I used a roasted vegetable soup with what I'd been doing for the pork & beans recipe, and got something like this:

Smoked Pork Hock Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 carrots, peeled & chopped into 1" rounds

1 sweet potato (the orange fleshed one!), peeled & chopped into 1" pieces

1 small squash (I've used butternut and Marina di Chioggia), peeled & chopped into 1" pieces

3-4 celery ribs, chopped into 1" pieces

1 large onion, chopped into 1" pieces

4 whole garlic cloves

4 cups total liquid - I used about 2 cups red tomato salsa and 2 cups chicken broth, both home-made

1 medium (about 2 to 3 pounds, depending on the size of your slow cooker - ours is a Crock Pot VersaWare, I think 6 quart) smoked ham hock

1 to 2 cups cooked (or canned) chick peas, drained

1/2 tsp cracked white or green peppercorns

1 cinnamon stick

1 bay leaf

Preheat oven to 425F. Toss the vegetables and garlic in the olive oil and spread over a rimmed baking pan. Roast in the oven for 30 minutes or until softened and slightly browned at edges. Place ham hock in the slow cooker. Scrape vegetables into slow cooker. You can use some of the broth to wash off the pan into the slow cooker if there are bits stuck, but I've not found that necessary. Pour the chick peas into the slow cooker. Add the salsa and broth and stir the ingredients together a little to distribute. Add the peppercorns, cinnamon stick and bay leaf and cover the slow cooker and cook on low for about 10 hours, or high for at least 5 hours, or until the ham is falling off the bone and the vegetables are tender.

This is a very versatile recipe: use whatever root vegetables you've got on hand that you feel like including. It's wonderful with parnsip, turnip (rutabaga), etc. Just enjoy! And like most soups & stews, it's even better the next night. And if you happen to do the baked beans recipe (which I'll have to post at some point) as well, it's fabulous mixed in with this.

Winter Sprouts

A couple of weeks ago a ordered Rodale's Stocking Up by Carol Hupping. It's a great book - it covers all sorts of food storage options, from freezing to canning to drying, and looks at not just fruit & veg, but also meat, poultry, fish, dairy, grains, seeds and nuts. One of the final chapter discusses sprouting, so we've been giving that a try lately. Not only are they tasty, but they're good for you and ridiculously easy to do, once you get into the habit of multiple rinsings during the day. The book provides a table for sprouting various seeds, grains and legumes, with how many rinsings per day, how long to let the sprout grow, flavour comments, etc. According to Stocking Up (p. 561):

When you sprout beans, seeds, and grains, you're unleashing their full nutritional potential. Wheat and millet sprouts, for instance, contain more than 5 times the vitamin C of their unsprouted counterparts. The amount of vitamin B grows substantially as bean sprouts grow, and most sprouts double their original protein content.

We have tried buckwheat and a couple of different types of lentils so far. The lentils are the easiest to grow, and most familiar flavour & texture. I would like to get some mustard/radish seeds to try for that extra zing, and Dave would really like to try sunflower seeds, as we both love sunflower sprouts. I currently have the seeds in clear mason jars with plastic mesh lids (to aid in draining), which works fine for short sprouts, but I think I'd need some kind of tray for the sunflowers.

Today, I used the sprouts in our luncheon "hamlette": a friend of ours gave us a chunk of Irish ham this week, and I've been turning it into hash and omelette-type food for our lunches.

Hamlette

1/2 cup cubed ham (this is ready-to-eat ham)
2 large mushrooms, finely sliced
1 celery stick, finely chopped
1 tsp dried crumbled oregano
dash fresh ground pepper
dash Louisiana Hot Sauce
two eggs
1 tsp fresh crumbled Parmesan cheese

Fry up the ham in small cast-iron pan over medium low to warm it up, add the mushrooms & place lid over pan. Once mushrooms are mostly cooked, add celery & cover again for about 2 minutes. Add seasonings and mix into meat & veg. Break eggs over the mixture (but don't scramble them in), and crumble Parmesan on top. Cover again and cook until you are happy with the consistency of the eggs. Split between two people over toast. You can add a splash of catchup if that's you're leaning. Enjoy!