I went to Sainsbury’s last week and I happened to walk past a display with trace of pork belly. Pork belly I think I normally do not even pay any attention to. However earlier that week I had been to my friends house and she had treated me to a bowl of red pea soup. This is the traditional Jamaican dish, consisting of kidney beans and normally made with other meats (oxtail etc) but she had used pork belly and it was so tasty I thought I’d like to reproduce it. So I left the shop with this £3.50 tray of meat and went home excitedly thinking I was going to do the same thing.

Turns out that didn’t quite happen. I didn’t have any kidney beans I only had potatoes and sweet potatoes and I actually didn’t have any coconut milk (until halfway through cooking I drove up the road to get some cans of coconut milk for the local Tesco express). So I created something completely different with haricot beans, sweet potato and potato.

I chopped up the sweet potato potatoes in the little cubes. I added them to the pot with the chopped up pork belly. I chopped up an onion and sauted the onion and then added some oregano and a crumble stock cube into the onion mixture. I then added that pot with water and I let that cook for about 45 minutes and then halfway through I realised that it probably wasn’t really going to be anything tasty or interesting until it had coconut milk so that’s when I left to go to Tesco to go and get the coconut milk

The whole thing was quite nice, very spicy. Oh forgot to add, I also add some branches of thyme from my herb garden and a scotch bonnet pepper and garlic cloves. At the end I removed the cloves of garlic, squeezes garlic from its skin and mash out the garlic and put it back in. I took out the leafless branches of thyme. I took out the scotch pepper. Scotch pepper is meant to add a little bit of heat and warmth to the dish, which it did without being overly hot and unpalatable.

So that was my impromptu and rather random haricot bean and pork belly stew.