One of my favourite English recipe books is this one which I bought in 2007. If you have not heard of Lea & Perrins or their Worcestershire sauce ( first made commercially in 1837) then you can read more in another of my blogs by clicking the link below:
https://thebritishkabayan.blogspot.com/2021/11/tbk-cooks-worcestershire-sauce-with.html
This week I decided to cook some more recipes from this book and I started with Oriental slow cooked Pork
Pork ( Baboy) is very popular here in the Philippines with dishes such as Pork Adobo, Pork Sinigang, Lechon Kawali . This dish uses 2 kg of Belly Pork and slow cooks it for 3 hours in a delicious sauce including Soy Sauce, Lea & Perrins Worcester Sauce, 20 cloves of garlic ( yes TWENTY!) and Balsamic vinegar. You need a really large saucepan and the smell is amazing.
Here is the recipe, and this is British portions so maybe it will feed 8 Pinoys served with rice
Nearly the end of my Lea & Perrins, but it is readily available here
The Belly Pork after 2 hours cooking- I then sliced it and covered with the sauce
The finished dish- it tasted amazing!
I have mentioned Noel and Frythy in several blogs, they come after University on Thursday and Sunday to wash up and clean the house and I give them a meal on the Sunday when they arrive at lunch time and then pay them 500 pesos to get a takeaway on the Thursday. Sometimes they have it delivered to my house, sometimes I drop them off at Jolibee at Junction 2 on their way home .
Joven works for me on Wednesdays and I collect him at 730 am and take him back at 430 pm. I remember my days as a poor student and the kind people who fed me when I went to work for them . So now I give back to Joven by cooking breakfast when he arrives and then making him lunch ( and if he cannot eat it all he takes it home for dinner!) Usually I make bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, sausage and fried egg or sometimes hard boiled egg and we buy some Mallangay Pandesal on the way home. So when I saw three breakfasts/ brunches in the Lea & Perrins book I thought I would try them out on him!
The first was Smoky Bacon and Potato Brunch. This is made of Bacon, mashed potato, parsley which you cook and mix together and then you make a well in the mixture, crack an egg into it and grill to cook the egg and turn the potato crispy. It sounds very simple and will save a lot of washing up ( one frying pan for the egg, one for the bacon ,sausage and mushroom and a saucepan for heating the tinned tomatoes!) .I prepared the mash and bacon on the Monday and then refrigerated it and added the egg and grilled it once Joven arrived on Wednesday.
Unfortunately my Ramekins were too small and my bowl too large but it tasted good! This is what it looked like once I cooked the potato and egg:
Cute eh?!
The second was called Basque Breakfast. TJ always said she loved eating at my house because I cooked dishes from around the world and explained a little about the dish and the country it comes from. Like Mr G she loves my stories from my foreign travels. So I had better read up on the Basque to tell Joven about it as we eat their breakfast!
"Basque Country (Euskadi) is an autonomous community in northern Spain with strong cultural traditions, a celebrated cuisine and a distinct language that pre-dates the Romance languages. The vibrant riverside city of Bilbao is a hub of architecture and design, where gritty factories and shipyards give way to cutting-edge landmarks such as the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum along a revitalized waterfront"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_Country_(autonomous_community) (accessed 3.9.23)
The Basque region
I wonder if I might add another little story here. I was showing a friend around Bahrain and spouting out my usual load of figures, dates, religions, historical battles and so on. The friend, we will call him Thang, listened amazed and eventually asked " Neil , how do you remember all this information about the country?"
He was most upset when I told him I made most of it up!
Back to our Basque Breakfast! I had to wait until my money finally arrived from the UK after 20 days through a circuitous and devious route ( thanks Mike) to buy the ingredients for this. Please note they recommend you serve it with a Baguette but do not list that in the ingredients! This is what my version looked like before I added the eggs:
For this one you take a large heavy frying pan and fry the bacon, onion, red peppers ( capsicum in the Philippine's) , tomatoes together with a little Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce. Then you add the basil leaves and black pepper and finally make four nests in the pan with the back of a spoon and crack an egg into each. Then when the whites of the eggs are firm but the yolks are still runny you serve the whole frying pan on a heat proof mat and people eat from the pan. They suggest you give people a warm piece of Baguette ( french bread- The Basque region is close to France!) to dip into the pan and eat their breakfast.
Amazing- one frying pan. no cutlery or China , this is heaven!
The normal sink full of washing up after breakfast
Portakal reçeli is...... Orange jam. The "i" on the end is a requirement of Turkish grammar when two nouns go together, a bit like a possessive. ( with thanks to Keith Gardiner in Turkey!"
The third breakfast I found was Breakfast Kebabs with Seville Orange sauce. For this you make a marinade with the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce and an orange and then thread bacon , sausage , mushroom and onion onto the skewers and marinade for at least an hour. You then grill the skewers and make a sauce with orange marmalade and the marinade- delicious, different, attractive and not much washing up ! I did not have any skewers and brought a pin grapefruit instead of an orange by mistake, and my orange marmalade came from Turkey instead of Seville! It still tasted delicious!
Here is the recipe and below is what it looked like
My Breakfast Kebabs with Seville Orange sauce
You might be wondering why I am so fascinated by Worcestershire sauce. Well I lived in Worcester from 1986 to 1996 and bought my first house there. My next door neighbours had a Labrador dog and when they split up they gave him to me- his name was Trixie.
Trixie at my house in Worcester around 1990
The house was in a row of terraced houses with two bedrooms, bathroom, lounge and kitchen and a garden at the back. There was a shared path that ran through all the houses and so we used to chat to eachother over the fence and as there were 4 dogs in the road they all used to play together.
My sweet house, 6 Livingstone street
I bought the house for £18,000 in 1986 ( 1.28 Million Peso) and sold it for a lot more in 1996 when I moved to the Midlands and bought a much bigger house with a huge garden for £80,000. I later sold that for £180,000 in 2004! That was the last time I owned a house!
My little garden in Worcester
I used to eat out at the weekend and found a restaurant that I could walk to called Charlies Café Bar. It was in a very old building and they served wonderful steaks ( my favourite was steak Stilton) and Execcy Brekkies- sausages, eggs, mushrooms tomatoes, toast and coffee- perfect for a leisurely Saturday morning after a busy week travelling around the UK.
Eating a roast Sunday lunch with a pint of beer at Charlies
They also did a great Sunday Roast Lunch and I would buy the newspapers on the way there and sit and eat and catch up on the news. After lunch I would go for a walk by the Cathedral opposite down to the river, or by the Commandery Civil war centre down the road which was by a canal and served afternoon tea! Some years back Fran, the owner, was planning to retire and a customer paid for a painting to be done of the place. Fran emailed me and I ordered a print when I was in Bahrain and had it framed, and it is on my wall here in Palawan. So as you can see I had many happy memories of Worcestershire.
The Print of Charlies, Sidbury, Worcester
It has been a long time since I had a ribeye steak ( financial crisis, heathy eating etc) so the next recipe in the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce Cook book grabbed my attention:
Worcester Seared Rib Eye
I had this to celebrate the arrival of my money, Paying off all my debts and bills ( I hate having to go grovelling to people to borrow money and having to apologise to a supplier that I cannot pay them on time because my Pension has not arrived). This is the second time Lloyds Bank in the UK have delayed transferring my money and I have made my second formal complaint. I needed the money because Ribeye is imported frozen and is expensive. I got 10% discount from Puerto Deli but at least 10 % of it was fat which I gave to Chester.
718 Peso is £10. I discovered from Andy the other day to convert from GBP to PHP you multiply by 70!
Here is the recipe. I cold only afford one steak!
You make a sauce of tomato sauce, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, runny honey and freshly ground black pepper. You then marinade the steaks in the sauce for 3 to 4 hours and then barbecue them. Wow- so easy, so tasty! The sweetness of the honey and the tang of the L & P is a great combination. Although the recipe serves 4 with 4 ribeye's I just had one!
It was 1 pm by the time I cooked this and i had breakfast at 5 am so I was too hungry to make vegetables and potatoes!
Sticky Honey Ribs
I put this recipe in for my neighbour Benny who loves ribs and has just bought a new smoking barbecue. So I decided to return his kindness with some Sticky honey ribs! However first I had no money to buy the ribs and then we had a power cut. However finally I managed to make them this weekend. They are very easy to make. I bought the ribs at Robinsons and they cut them for me and then I soaked them in the marinade overnight and cooked them for an hour in the oven. They tasted delicious.
The ingredients- the marinade is on the left!
The recipe and below the cooked ribs
The marinaded ribs after cooking in the oven for one hour
Burgundy Beef
One of my English neighbours , Andy, is partial to a glass of wine and when I have to buy some for cooking I give the remainder to him- so I am sure he will love this recipe! However I discovered Lloyds Bank in the UK did not transfer my money from the UK in August, as requested online, and so I had no money to buy a bottle of wine. Instead I used red wine vinegar and sugar- sorry Andy and thanks for the loan to pay Chester's Vets bills.
You should marinade cubed braising steak in a sauce of onion, celery , carrot, bay leaves, pepper corns , olive oil and a WHOLE BOTTLE of Burgundy! You then leave it in the fridge overnight
The next day you fry the beef with the onions butter, oil and mushrooms. You are then supposed to add 2 tablespoons of Brandy ( sorry Andy , I missed that out!) garlic, thyme, Worcestershire sauce and seasoning. You then put it all in a casserole dish with the marinade and cook for 2 hours.
My version of Burgundy beef with no Burgundy!
When I think about traditional British dishes one is Welsh Rarebit, or cheese mixed with beer and grilled on toast. For those who have not heard of this :
"Welsh rarebit or Welsh rabbit is a dish consisting of a hot cheese-based sauce served over slices of toasted bread. The original 18th-century name of the dish was the jocular "Welsh rabbit", which was later reinterpreted as "rarebit", as the dish contains no rabbit."
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_rarebit ( accessed 5.9.23)
You can find the recipe here:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/welsh-rarebit
In The Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce Cook book they have a variation on this which I decided to try. I often eat 3 cooked meals a day and although I lost 1 kg when I could not afford to buy food I needed to loose more by having one cooked meal a day, a healthy breakfast, a cooked lunch and a snack in the evening.
Chrissie's Rarebit
This is supposed to use Red Leicester cheese, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, some butter, an egg and a thick slice of bread. You mix the grated cheese with the Worcestershire sauce, toast the bread, poach the egg, then place the egg on the toast, the cheese on the egg and grill- sounds interesting! I could not find any Red Leicester cheese here so I used California cheddar cheese. Just as I was about to make it we had another brownout ( power cut)- these dishes are fated! Then when the power came back the next day I forgot to poach the egg so just had cheese on toast- but the Lea & Perrins gave it a tang!
This is the recipe and below is my version
I need to buy a new toaster as mine caught fire , and a new kettle !
By now I was missing my Lamb ( Tupa) and so I decided to try their Gascony Lamb Shanks
My 2 lamb shanks ready for the oven
I managed to get the last two lamb shanks from Deli Mart and browned them in Olive oil. Then I cooked the onion, carrot and leek and added the tomato puree, Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce and the flour. As I had no red wine I used Red wine Vinegar. You then transfer it to a Casserole dish and cook in the oven for 2 hours.
Finally , for my Birthday , I had my favourite Lamb Chops with Worcestershire mint sauce . This featured in our September On line recipe book and I made a vlog of how to cook it which appeared on our You Tube channel.
TBK cooks Tupa chops
You can also find another Blog featuring this dish by clicking the link below:
https://thebritishkabayan.blogspot.com/2021/11/tbk-cooks-worcestershire-sauce-with.html
Here is the recipe from my 2018 recipe book ( Recipes around the world https://thebritishkabayan.blogspot.com/p/recipe-flipbooks.html)
This is what it looked like when it came out of the oven- enough for me, Fry, Noel and Joven to celebrate my 63rd Birthday.
If you have any special requests for my next blog please let me know. I had a lovely email from USA the other day saying "I made the inihaw ( barbecue pork ribs) . They tasted great! Thanks for the recipe" . It's feedback like that that makes blogging ( which I do not get paid for) worthwhile! Thanks AJ!
I am shortly heading off on a tour of Palawan with my friend Mike , who I worked with in Bahrain and who retired to Thailand. So we will be eating out and will share the best restaurants with you ( It's a long time since we had a TBK eats vlog or blog) .
Until then this is The British Kabayan signing out.....
Hello, I am The British Kabayan! Feel free to read my stories.
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