Lazy Sunday lunch

Once a teenage girl, always a teenage girl and the mention of 'pulled pork' just makes me want to snigger. But that's what we had today, although I'm calling it 'slow roast pork'. It's the perfect dish for a lazy Sunday - put it in the oven on Saturday night, wake up to a house that smells mouth-wateringly amazing, and eat it at lunchtime (whenever that happens to be - the timings are very elastic). My recipe and method are adapted from one of Nigella's.

I served it with a windfall apple sauce, a simple coleslaw and some roast potatoes. The meat fell off the bone with minimal fork action and we fought over the crisp and chewy crackling. The children were unfeasibly excited to find a large piece of cartilage as well as a sizeable bone - a kind of biology lesson and meal all in one.

Cracking crackling

Slow roast pork

A piece of pork shoulder (bone in) - mine was roughly 3 kilos
6 garlic cloves
A small piece of fresh ginger
2 red chillies
3 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons sherry vinegar

Serves 4-6

Nigella tells you to start by heating your clean oven to its maximum temperature. Heat your [insert own adjective] oven to its maximum temperature.

Prep the beast: Whizz up the garlic, ginger and chillies in a blender, then add a tablespoon of oil and another of sherry vinegar to make a paste. Sit the pork skin side up on a rack over a roasting tin and score the skin with a sharp knife if it hasn't already been done. Then rub the paste all over the meat, working it into the cut lines of the skin (I wear a pair of rubber gloves whilst doing so). Mix together the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil and 3 of sherry vinegar and set aside.

Cook it: Put the pork in the hot oven for 30 minutes, then remove it and turn down the oven to 110/gas mark 1/4. Turn piggy over (skin side down) and put it back in the oven. After about 5 hours I sloshed about a pint of water in the roasting tin and went to bed. I gave it another pint when I woke up, about 9 hours later.

Perfect the crackling: Half an hour before you're ready to eat, turn the pig over again (skin side up), crank up the oven to max and blast it for 30 minutes (be careful not to let it burn).