Slow tomato-roast gammon with butter sauté potatoes

Dinner

Cooking method: Slow
Serves: 2

Time: Long - longer than 60 minutes
Difficulty: Average - a standard adult who feeds themself could do it

Equipment

• Frying pan
• Saucepan
• Slow cooker
• Steamer

Ingredients

• Condiment, cube, or tube
• Garlic - some
• Tomato puree - some
• Drink or liquid
• Wine (red) - some
• Eggs / cheese / dairy
• Butter - some
• Cream (double) - some
• Herb
• Marjoram - some
• Meat
• Gammon - 350 gm
• Oil
• Olive (extra virgin) - some
• Vegetable
• Potatoes (maris piper) - some
• Carrot - 3
• Tomato - 2
• Onion (chopped) - 1

Method

Start your slow cooker heating on medium, and seal the outside of your lump of gammon all over, together with the chopped onion, and chop your tomatoes as well and chuck them in. Drizzle some extra virgin olive oil over the gammon (extra virgin to add that little extra bit of flavour which should be preserved, since you're slow roasting rather than hot roasting or frying, so it won't be wasted), and grind some pepper on to it. Leave this going for about an hour and a half or so.

After about an hour, thickly chop your carrots and throw them in.

About 15 minutes or so before you want to eat your dinner, bring a steamer pan to the boil, chop your potatoes into chunks, and put them on to steam until they're - as the professionals say - 'al dente'.

Take a small saucepan, put a tiny bit of oil in it and bring it to heat, and fry some chopped garlic in it for a few moments. Then go to the slow cooker and drain off the liquid that will have emerged from the meat and the onions and the tomatoes in all that time into the saucepan. Squirt a bit of tomato purée into it, pour some red wine in, and boil to reduce that liquid down a bit. When it's reduced down a bit, sprinkle a bit of marjoram in, pour in some double cream, and continue reducing. Take the gammon out of the slow cooker and place on a plate to rest whilst you finish off the potatoes.

In a frying pan heat a big blob of butter, and transfer the potatoes in and stir them around to get them nicely crispy on the outside.

Assemble your dinner on the plates by slicing the gammon how you like it, spooning the remaining tomato, carrot and onion mixture from the slow cooker in an appropriate place, and drizzling the correct amount of sauce over the gammon and the vegetables, then placing the potatoes in a space on the plate that's remaining, trying as much as possible to avoid the sauce. You don't want to get nice crispy sautéed potatoes wet, now, do you?

You probably bought a lump of gammon bigger than will feed you in one dinner - save the rest of it for sandwiches or salad or something. There may be more sauce left -save that for something else. There will probably be a load of butter left in the pan you sautéed the potatoes in - under no circumstances wash that up straight away, save the pan with its potatoey buttery goodness left in it for the next meal.