Honey glazed pork chop with British corn on the cob

I picked up this jar of honey at my local butcher shop today, so thought I should use it.  Pork chops can be good, but a honey glazed pork chop is just better!  It's very easy to do, simply season the pork chop with some freshly ground black pepper and some course sea salt on both sides.

 Heat some oil in a frying pan to a reasonably high heat and cook the pork chop on one side until it is cooked about half way through.

 Now, turn the heat down and gently pour a generous teaspoon of honey onto the uncooked side of the pork chop.  Allow the honey to run over the top and then turn the chop over, placing the honey side down in the pan.  The honey will quickly caramelise and you should see the caramel creeping out from under the pork chop.  It's important that the heat isn't too high at this stage because we don't want to burn the sugar.

 Let it cook until it's cooked through, which will probably take another 10 minutes or so, but this will depend on the size of the chop.  It should turn a lovely, golden colour on the honey side.  You can turn it over again for a few minutes if you want the golden caramel colour on both sides.

 I was keen to find a way to use some of the British sweetcorn I bought the other day, so I cooked the cob in lightly salted, boiling water for about 10 minutes, until tender.  Served this way with a knob of butter, it's absolutely delicious.

Pork pies

I heard on Saturday Kitchen this morning that Melton Mowbray pork pies have recently been awarded 'Protected Geographical Indication'. This means that they have legal protection against imitation products across the EU! Champagne has famously enjoyed similar status for many years now.

Check out the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association website for more details:

http://www.mmppa.co.uk/index.html

I think this is exactly what British food needs because it will hopefully lead to increased recognition of quality, regional produce. All to often, when people think of British food, or try to name some classic British dishes, they can only think of the bog standard 'fish and chips'. Fish and chips can be great, but British food has so much more to offer then that! Think of Stilton cheese, Lincolnshire sausages, Yorkshire pudding, Cornish pastie, I could go on and on. I think it is a real shame that we seem to have almost completely forgotten that we have so much regional variation and that 'British food' isn't a single genre.

Pig farming

It was with some dismay that I read an article in the Friday edition of the Scotsman which outlined the possible future (or lack of) for pig farming in Scotland. According to the article, there were 70,000 breeding sows in Scotland in the mid-1990s and this has now been reduced to only 45,000. It seems that the problem is the rising cost of animal feed, while the cost of the bacon on the supermarket shelves hasn't changed. The article puts this into context with the example of a 12 acre farm which has to buy about 100 tonnes of barley a month to feed just over 300 pigs. This time last year, the cost was around £80 per tonne, but that has now risen to £174 per tonne.

I have commented previously that the predicted rises in food costs due to the increased cost of feeding the animals don't seem to have happened. I am now wondering how much of this is simply because as the costs incurred by the farmers increase, the supermarkets simply squeeze them harder by refusing to pay the extra. According to the article, it has been suggested that if there isn't enough pork produced in the UK, the supermarkets will simply look elsewhere in Europe.

In one sense, maybe this is fair enough. Farming is, after all, a business and as such should be subject to the same elements of competition as other sectors. However, from the reading I've been doing it might not be that simple. I don't in any sense claim to be an expert here! I'm learning about this just as much as anyone else, but it seems that one of the reasons pork can be produced so much more cheaply elsewhere is that the required welfare standards for the animals are much lower. This would, naturally, make the process of farming them cheaper.

So, it comes down to the question of how much the consumer cares about animal welfare. An identical argument has recently been raised and publicised relating to free range chickens - which is more important, that the chicken be allowed to grow and develop in a natural environment, or that the consumer be able to buy as much cheap chicken as they want? I appreciate that it isn't always going to be that simple and I will try to find the time to explore the issue a bit further.

A quick fact about barley - According to http://www.ukagriculture.com, Britain produces around 6.5 million tonnes of Barley per year, 1.5 million of which are exported, 2 million are used in the brewing industry and the remaining 3 million tonnes are used for animal feed.