Christmas Special! (by G)

I am prone to impulse buys sometimes. When I saw a whole 8kg leg of pork for sale shortly before Christmas I couldn't pass it up - despite the fact I would be spending Christamas alone this year.

No matter, the day I can't single handedly eat a leg of pork is the day I retire from life.

The main issue I saw with cooking the pork was getting it in the oven. Fortunately it fitted (fairly snuggly) if I had the oven rack as low as it could go and tilted the pork on an angle.  The cooking of the pork consumed much of the day. Uncovered at a high temperature for half an hour, then wrap the leg in foil and roast at 170 deg C for a further 8 hours. Then uncovered again for about another hour to get the crackle crackled. I was pretty confident the pork was cooked by the end because the meat had pulled away from the bone and was fork tender.

 

The crackle doesn't look like much in the photo but it was the thin brittle kind rather than the puff crunchy kind - most excellent.

 

Oh, I also made a couple of salads to go with the pork. A potato salad with cubes of ham cut straight from a half leg and a spicy coleslaw dressed in mayonnaise and sriracha.

 

The end result looked a bit like the institutional kind of meal you might get in prison at Christmas but it was pretty frickin' good.