This week I have tried a couple of new meals, using more fruit. Yesterday, we decided to try a meat free meal, technically not vegetarian, as I ended up using Chicken stock rather than vegetable stock. I tried out cooking Jack Monroe’s Peach and Chickpea curry. I added in the left over vegetables (Swede / Turnip and Carrots) from Sunday’s stew. My Wife didn’t want something very spicy, so i toned down the spices I put in. I must say, it went down very well in our house. There was enough left over for my lunch today, so i used a couple of pitta breads and reheated the remnants. If anything it was even better!

Tonight, I needed to use up some pork loin steaks, and some apples, so I had a search around and found some Fruity Pork Steaks on BBC Good Food. Again, I adjusted the recipe to match what I had in the cupboard.
Ingredients
- 4 Pork loin steaks, boneless and trimmed of fat.
- 2 tsp Lebanese seven spice *
- 1 tbsp rapeseed oil *
- 4 small red apples, cored and cut into eighths.
- 2 tbsp apple sauce *
- 1 tbsp Balsamic vinegar *
- 200ml Chicken stock
Note: anything marked with a * shows ingredients that I changed, either because i did not have the required ingredients for the recipe, or because I prefer the ingredients I used.
Method

- Dust the pork steaks with the Lebanese seven spice powder.
- Heat half the oil in a pan and fry the pork for about 3 minutes on each side.
- Transfer to a plate.
- Add the remaining oil to the pan and reduce the heat.
- Add the apples and cook for 3 minutes.
- Add the apple sauce, Balsamic Vinegar and Chicken Stock.
- Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes, allowing the sauce to become syrupy and the apples to soften and become tender.
- Add the pork back in, allow to slowly reheat and become coated with the sauce.

I served the meal with lemon and lime couscous (Couscous, 1 1/2 tbspn lemon juice, 1 tbsp lime juice, add boiling water to make up couscous as normal)
It was, to be fair, pretty good, though the balsamic vinegar did make the apples a little bitter, but we had 2 cleared plates. So I will try it again with white wine vinegar next time.
M