This little piggy stayed home ...

One of the things that you have to learn when your household down-sizes is creative ways to deal with leftovers. Case in point - Malyon ran off to Glasgow a few years ago, which left three of us, and now that Jeremy's boarding at the lycée technique hotelière (where you'd have thought he'd have learnt enough to help out with the cooking around here, but that's another story) there's just the pair of us for most of the week. And as I've still not quite come to grips with little things like quantities for two, that usually means there's more than enough food, even after we've both pigged out.

Like the other weekend, when I did a rather nice pork roast. A bit of rolled shoulder so it was just nicely marbled with fat which melted into the flesh as it cooked, and on top of that cooked just right so it was still pink inside. (No, I'm not advocating eating your pig all wobbly, but as sanitary controls are so strict these days that you're far likelier to have a grand piano fall on you in the bath than you are to catch trichinosis,  there's no need to cremate the joint until it becomes gray tasteless cardboard. Unless, of course, you actually like it that way, in which case you probably shouldn't be reading this. Just saying.)

So, what to do with it? Honestly, what I often do is grind the rest up in the whizz and stick it in the freezer in ziplock bags ready for making steamed pork buns, but this time (as the freezer's full anyway) I thought I'd go for a little gratin, sauce piquante. (Which, incidentally, is rather nice done with left-over tongue, if that's what you happen to have.)

First of all, make yer sauce piquante. Start by finely chopping an onion and stewing it gently for ten minutes or so in butter so it goes all soft and lightly golden (I said, "gently"), at which point you could usefully sprinkle over a teaspoon of sugar and carry on cooking for another few minutes until that caramelises. Then sprinkle with a tbsp or so of flour (you will probably have to add more butter) and stir that around, and add a tsp or so of instant beef stock (good stuff, please), and stir some more.

Add some water (not too much just yet) and whisk it round to incorporate, and then add 2 tbsp of vinegar (I like to use my vinaigre aux piments for a bit of added excitement, but cider vinegar's fine if that's all you have) or more if you really like piquante qui pique, and whisk that in too. Some would add a bit of mustard powder: I leave that to your discretion. Add more water if required to get a nice thick sauce, add some finely chopped gherkins and/or capers, and leave that to cook very gently (off to one side on top of the wood-burner is good) for ten minutes so that it doesn't have that faint whiff of wallpaper paste about it.

While that's going on, pour yourself a glass of white (you could use that instead of water for the sauce, which gives you a good reason to open the bottle, should you need one), butter a gratin dish, and slice the meat into thickish slices. This should only take five minutes, which leaves you five minutes for another glass before putting the dish together.

Which involves nothing more complicated than spreading a layer of sauce in  the gratin dish, arranging the slices of meat on top of that, covering them with the rest of the sauce and then sprinkling the whole lot with breadcrumbs and grated cheese. Into a hot oven with it until the sauce is bubbling and the breadcrumbs have formed a nice crust (another ten minutes or so, I reckon) and it's fit for purpose.

Were it summer I'd serve it accompanied with a decent salad and lots of bread for lunch: as it's not, I found buttery mashed potatoes and petits pois à la française went pretty well.

The latter, by the way, provide an excellent way of cooking frozen peas. Put as many of these as you think you're likely to need into a saucepan with a lump of sugar, a 1/2tsp salt and the bare minimum of water: bring to the boil. When that comes to pass add five or six lettuce leaves (I use my old favourite, rougette, but you may have to make do with feuille de chêne) either ripped into pieces or sliced into strips (some hold that slicing lettuce leaves makes them bitter. This is utter crap.) and a sliced spring onion or a shallot or heaps of chives, and turn the heat right down whilst the lettuce wilts and you stir in a bit of beurre manié to thicken it up.

This is no more than a heaped tsp of softened butter into which you've incorporated a tsp or two of flour to get a smooth paste. It means you'll have no nasty floury lumps appear when you stir it into the peas. With any luck the mixture will be quite (very) thick: stir in cream (personally, I like to use crême fraîche, aka sour cream, but ordinary pouring cream is fine) until it's the consistency you like, and cook gently for another five minutes or so before serving.