Delicious meals to cook this weekend

Looking for two delicious meals to cook this weekend? Well look no further. To spice up your Saturday or Sunday, try these two recipes taken from the Real Meal Revolution, a low-carbohydrate, high-fat and no-sugar diet book.

Black mushrooms baked in walnut butter with clotted cream

Serves 2

Ingredients

4 large flat mushrooms
1 cup walnuts, gently crushed
2 cloves garlic, left whole
120 g butter or lard
120 g clotted cream
Salt and pepper

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
2. Lay the mushrooms out on a baking tray and place one clove of garlic in the centre of each one.
3. Mix the nuts and the butter together and divide the mixture evenly between each mushroom, placing it on top of the garlic.
4. Place the mushrooms in the oven and roast them for about 15 minutes (or until cooked).
5. Serve immediately with a big dollop of the thickest, creamiest clotted cream you can find on each mushroom.

Note: If you’re not a fan of whole cloves of garlic, simply remove them before serving.The flavour will have penetrated right through the mushroom anyway.

Pork belly, crackling, onions and sage

Serves 4 – 6
Pork, salt and fennel! Like Snap, Crackle and Pop, they belong together.

Method

FOR THE BELLY
1.2 kg pork belly (bones out,
skin on, unrolled)
1 tsp fine salt
1 tbsp whole fennel seed
1 tbsp coarse salt
3 tbsp melted coconut oil

FOR THE ROASTED ONIONS
4 onions, skin on, cut in half
from root to stem
40 g butter
Large handful torn sage
leaves
3 fresh bay leaves, torn

Preheat the oven to 160°C.
1. Pat the pork belly dry with paper towel then massage the coconut oil and the salt into the skin, giving it a good coating – with this recipe, we don’t score the fat.
2. Now, sprinkle both sides with the coarse salt and fennel seeds, patting them to make sure they stick.
3. Put a roasting rack into a medium-depth oven tray and place the pork on the rack, skin side up. Add three or four cups of water into the tray (making sure the water doesn’t touch the pork) and place the tray on the bottom rack in the oven, leaving it to roast for 1½–2 hours.
4. While the belly is roasting, get a heavy-based, ovenproof frying pan on the heat. Melt the butter and add the onions, skin sides up. Let them simmer in the butter for about ten minutes until they start to go brown and the butter turns nutty. Add the bay and sage to the pan and place in the oven with the belly for about an hour.

5. After 1½ hours, check to see if the crackling is very crispy. If not, give it another 30 minutes (you might need to add an extra splash of water).

6.  Check again after 30 minutes and if necessary crank the heat up to 200°C and leave the pork in the oven for another 20 minutes. You will achieve crackling success but you may need to keep an eye on it.
7. Once the belly is done, drain the juices from the tray into a small saucepan and reduce to a rich gravy (depending on the amount of water you put in, you may not need to reduce this). You could add anything from mustard to some fine herbs to give this light gravy a little more depth.

Note: This will also go very nicely with cauli-mash and/or braised fennel.