I’m lucky to have a great, friendly butcher’s shop near my flat. I found it, oddly enough, by reading the River Cottage Meat book which led me to the website of the Guild of Q Butchers. It was there that I discovered that the butcher’s shop H G Walters was literally 10 minutes from my front door.

Since I’ve started visiting them I’ve grown addicted to their maple cure bacon. In fact, all the pork I’ve had from them has been awesome, so last Saturday I decided to try a pork roast. I bought a decent sized  loin of pork, which the butcher untied so I could stuff it.

I’d had a plan to stuff my pork loin with a mixture of pears, walnuts, sage, rosemary and celery and serve it with a stilton sauce. But, when I came to make my roast, I noticed I had a small problem. I’d assumed the butcher would have left the string in for me to re-tie my joint, but he hadn’t. So I rang up Goon to ask him to pick some up on the way home.

Sadly, I underestimated Goon’s capacity for being lazy. Goon stopped off at the small Tesco metro instead of going to the big supermarket. I would have expected both places to stock some kind of string but apparently the small store didn’t and Goon didn’t want to walk the ten minutes extra to the big shop. So he decided to pick up an alternative. I wasn’t too pleased when I found out what he bought.

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, ‘YOU GOT ELASTIC BANDS’!!?”

Goon looked at me me sheepishly. “There wasn’t any string anywhere.”

“You’re honestly telling me that it’s impossible to find string in a large shopping centre in Hammersmith at 8:00pm on a Monday night?!”

 ”You can use these, can’t you?”

I didn’t have a clue how these colourful bits of rubber would fare in a 160 C oven but I was willing to bet they weren’t the best thing to put on my roast.

“I doubt it.”  I said. “They’ll probably snap when they get hot.” Goon started wrapping rubber bands around my pork loin. “STOP IT!” I shouted. 

“I’m sure I’ve seen them used like this before.”

I resentfully agreed to let Goon tie my pork loin with rubber bands on the condition that we test them in the oven first to see what happened. As I’d thought,the bands didn’t like the heat. Within five minutes of them being put in the oven, we had a multi-coloured gloopy mess to scrape off the bottom shelf. 

So much for the elastic band idea. I needed a new plan but by now all the shops had shut and  I couldn’t find anything oven-proof that I could use to secure my pork.

In the end, after a lot of debate, we resorted to skewering. This wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds. The main problem was that the pork skin was very thick so, to get the skewers through, I had to aim for the bits where the skin had been scored. This meant  there weren’t that many places I could skewer the pork so the joint wasn’t held together very well at all!

Yes, I know, it does look ridiculous. But at least i some of the stuffing stayed in. The rest turned into a horrible burnt mess at the bottom of the dish but I think about half survived.  

The pork still cooked well though. It was tasty and juicy and the pear-walnut-stilton combination (that made it) was great with it.  

The rest of the meal worked fine too, although you can’t really go too far wrong with boiled new potatoes and steamed broccoli can you?

Apart from the great quality pork, the stilton sauce was definitely the best bit of the dish. It was made from a little chicken stock which I reduced with some dry cider, white wine and a small sprig of rosemary which was removed at the end. Then I melted in the stilton and added a touch of double cream.

I’m looking forward to trying this idea again with a properly tied joint.