too much food

Dinner last night was a bit weird.

When I went home for Christmas my Dad gave me a bunch of food. This happens every Christmas, because, even though he doesn't buy excessive amounts, he still buys too much stuff. Basically, it's because he's buying extra things on top of what he normally buys anyway.

But also recently, he's started giving me meat. The reason is that a friend of his gives him meat (it's complicated) and because he can't eat it all, he bungs it in the freezer and then passes it on to me when I visit.

Now this is fine in concept, only he doesn't really tend to think it through enough. So, for example, last time he gave me some pork chops. This would be great - ideal even, because obviously you can do as many chops as you need, right? Except he froze all four chops as one lump.

That's a lot of chops in anyone's book and it also means you can't cook them individually under the grill or anything. I effectively had to treat them as a large roast, but then they're rubbish like that, because they're very bony and fatty, so you can't really keep the leftovers. In other words, I cooked the whole thing, but could only eat the main meat part of the chop.

Plus, I don't know about you, but I can't just eat a chop on its own as a meal, so I ended up doing a full roast, so it's really a big meal. So anyway, I informed him of this when I next saw him and he now freezes the chops individually.

However, at Christmas he game me a proper roasting joint of pork. It was a big joint and I finally decided this weekend to tackle it.

One of the things about pork I find is that it doesn't really shrink. Most meats do - if you roast beef, for example, what comes out of the oven will be up to a third smaller that what went in, in my experience. But that doesn't seem to work for pork - what come out is roughly the size of what went in.

I could easily have gotten four meals off of this joint, but instead I had big portions and did three meals. In other words, on Saturday I cooked a full roast that featured pork, apple sauce, gravy, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, carrots and peas.

From that, I ended up with cold meat, Yorkshires, apple sauce and the gravy, so on Sunday I reheated those and did some more roast potatoes, carrots and peas and had another roast.

But then Monday I obviously still had meat, Yorkshires, apple sauce and gravy left, so what to do?

Normally when I do a roast, what I do is I have the Saturday and Sunday roast, but then I make a stew on Monday, half of which I can keep and have on Tuesday. I don't do it that often - perhaps once a month? - as it's complicated and time consuming, but it also represents great value for money. Generally speaking home cooking is always cheaper, especially when your most expensive ingredient (the meat) goes a long way.

Anyway, the problem was that I don't really like making stews with pork. My stew recipe works for dark meats - beef and lamb, in particular - but it's not so good for white meats like pork and chicken.

That meant only one option - do more potatoes and carrots and have another 'roast' (I actually boiled the potatoes as it was quicker - well I steamed them technically, but you know what I mean).

So rather bizarrely I've eaten full roast dinner for three days in a row. I still feel a bit full now :/.