Oysters

The main course was a rolled and boned (heh) loin of free range pork, which we'd bought at Hagen's Organic Meats in Prahran Market. I love that shop! They have so many different cuts of meat, and really knowledgeable service. I wish they were around when I was doing my Sarah Discovers How to Eat project - it would have saved a lot of confused looks at my local butcher and odd substitutions, haha! I haven't cooked many roasts in quite a while, but doing the meat shopping for this lunch really makes me want to revisit some of those epic roasts from How to Eat!

Roast Pork Loin

I hadn't cooked loin with crackling on before, so I was nervous about it, but it turned out great. Hooray! Super crackling! I'll be sharing the recipe for the pork loin soon!

Pork!

I made two baked vegetable dishes to go with the pork - potato dauphinois and roast carrots. Both of these cooked when the pork came out of the oven and was resting, tented in foil, and took approximately thirty minutes.

Here are the potatoes! Normally I make Nigella's creamy potato gratin (from Nigella Bites), but I had a packet of Dish'd potato dauphinois with Emmental cheese in the freezer so thought this would be a good chance to use them. Dish'd is a gourmet home delivery service - I attended their launch party last week and received a free voucher to try the service, so these potatoes were a #freebie. They were easy to make (yes, I could have been neater tumbling the frozen potato discs into the dish!) and very tasty - creamy carby cheesy potato goodness. A good option to make a multi-course lunch a bit easier!

Potato Dauphinois

And here we have the roast carrots. I trimmed and scrubbed a bunch of Dutch carrots, then drizzled them with a little garlic-infused olive oil and roasted them until cooked through and lightly browned.

Roast Dutch Carrots

And a salad! This idea came courtesy of my good friend Lisa in the States - rocket, manchego cheese, sliced pear and caramelised walnuts. The recipe she sent me instructs you to make a caramel and then glaze the walnuts; I took the lazy route of using maple syrup. The salad was great though - the sweet and crunchy walnuts, sweet juicy pear slices, peppery rocket and creamy, almost nutty manchego were a fab combination, and complimented the pork so well! I'll be sharing the full recipe in the coming week.

Rocket, Manchego and Pear Salad with Maple-Glazed Walnuts

And then... it was time for dessert: profiteroles! As I said above, I made the choux puffs the night before, and in the morning while the pork was in the oven, I made the crème pâtissière and chocolate espresso sauce. Once we'd finished eating and had cleared the plates away, Sandra made tea while I filled the choux puffs with the crème pâtissière at the table, and piled them into a deep plate.

Profiteroles!

And then we poured the hot chocolate espresso sauce over and it was time to eat!

Chocolate Espresso Sauce

Chocolatey Balls

I really like this way of serving profiteroles - it's a very homey, low key way of serving a fancy dessert. They still look impressive, piled up like that, but there's none of the stress of a proper croquembouche. And for anyone who hasn't been reading my blog for that long, please see my series of posts from my Mum's Birthday Party in 2008, where I made a croquembouche as the birthday cake! (There's the croquembouche test-runs, and the finished product).

I, of course, added more chocolate sauce to mine on my plate. Yum!

Profiteroles

I'll be posting the recipe for the profiteroles later this week - so please keep your eyes out for that, as well as the roast pork loin and the rocket manchego salad!

Happy Father's Day to my lovely dad!