Blackberry

Hey

I finally tried a recipe from my new Rachel Khoo cook book - My Little French Kitchen. I had the day off, so I went down to the butchers to get the meat for the recipe. They only had pork ribs so pork ribs is what I went with.

I picked to cook sticky cassis ribs with couscous. The recipe in the book is for mint and broad bean couscous but I'm not a fan of the broad bean so I changed it slightly and made mint and pea couscous instead.

The ribs needed to marinate so that was the first task after getting back from the butchers. For the marinade you combine the crème de cassis, blackberry jam, runny honey, pepper, salt and lemon zest. Once this is whisked together coat the ribs and add the roughly chopped lemon and leave for anything from 1 hour to overnight (I left mine for 4 hours). Once you have left the ribs for as long as you like, turn them into a large cooking dish, cover with foil and cook for 2 hours on 150C.

After the 2 hours, uncover the ribs, turn the oven up to 200C and cook for a further 30 minutes. Drain off the sauce and reduce it down in a saucepan. I returned my ribs to the oven to crisp up further, although the recipe says to just cover to keep them warm. As the sauce is meant to reduce for 10 minutes, this is the perfect time to get the couscous going as you need to leave it for 10 minutes. Measure out the couscous and put it into dish. The mint stalks, peas are boiled in the water, and once boiled add to the couscous, cover and leave for 10 minutes. 

Once the couscous is ready, remove the mint stalks, stir through the chopped mint leaves and fluff up with a fork and serve along with the ribs.

I need to practising reducing sauces as mine didn't thicken that much. The crème de cassis is amazing on the ribs. This dish would definitely work well as a sharing dish for a dinner party.

xxx