Sunday lunch part 1 – the roast

Yesterday my younger sister and her boyfriend came over for lunch and to get the run-down regarding what needs to be done when they house/cat-sit for us when we go on holiday to Geraldton next week. Jac and I thought it was a great excuse to have a Sunday roast lunch – roast pork. Here is the pork before roasting. It came tied up with string, but Jac cut the strings off so she could easily score and salt the fat to make crackling.

Let us now fast-forward to the roasted pork.

Jac [carving pork]: Sweetie, please don’t stand there while I’m carving.
tfp: But I’m taking photos for the site. I promise I won’t get in the way.
Jac [probably thinking that bloody site!].

Carved roast pork, served up for four hungry people:

And here’s the crackling:

Jac served the pork with lots of vegetables. First, buttered steamed snowpeas and green beans:

Corn, which she roasted whole in the oven:

And a big pile of roasted root vegetables – potatoes, sweet potatoes and whole onions. Plus chunks of butternut pumpkin too. And yes, the potatoes were roasted in the same tray as the pork, in the pork fat drippings.

Jac made this apple sauce from scratch while everything was cooking in the oven and I was yakking on about housey and cat things to my sister and her boyfriend.

I just love how the house smells when there’s a roast cooking in the oven. I had eaten a tiny bowl of noodle stir-fry leftovers for breakfast, but I was hungry again. The others had not eaten any breakfast, and so they were absolutely starving. In this photo you can see we are about to commence grabbing. Okay, not quite grabbing, we are more civilised and courteous than that! But yes, we were just about to begin. One plate has no corn because my sister’s boyfriend doesn’t like corn.

I took lots of plate shots and it was difficult to choose one to feature here. There’s no apple sauce on my plate because I don’t really like sweet or fruit sauces with roast meat. I don’t have cranberry sauce with turkey or mint sauce with lamb either. I’m a gravy gal all the way. Instead of pan gravy (well, most of the tasty stuff which would’ve gone into pan gravy went into the potatoes) we had Gravox roast meat gravy in a carton. Yeah, that’s cheating, but that was the best we could do and it was yummy. I had been craving sweet corn all day but the corn was quite disappointing. It tasted old and dry and not sweet at all. Jac had definitely not overcooked it – it was just tasteless.* I’ve since taken all the kernels off the remaining cobs with a knife and stashed them in the fridge – we might be transforming the corn into something edible (and hopefully, with the use of talent and magic – from Jac, not me! – something delicious) later in the week.