Sundays are meant to be slow. They’re supposed to be lazy, a small chance to rest after the trials and triumphs of the week gone and to prepare for those to come. I start Sunday with a lot of coffee, a pile of maple syrup covered pancakes on the kids’ plates and a newspaper, sat on the shabby chair next to the window, and I let Sunday meander along, finding its own course. Nobody seems to mind, or to care, if nothing much happens before eleven except newspaper-reading, cartoon-watching and coffee-drinking.

This week, we went off somewhere else at eleven and carried on doing much the same thing, just in a different place with some different people. And somebody cooked us lunch. A really very good lunch indeed.

There’s a community centre in Shipley, Kirkgate Community Centre. It’s been there forever, but I’ve never really taken much notice of it, until it started to host some interesting things such as an alternative market packed with good things, Saturday afternoons given over to building things out of Lego – piles and piles of Lego, a superb record club on Saturday evenings, a film club, a bread group – a chance to learn more about making bread and making it better.

And then, the Shipley Slouch … a pop-up community café, run by volunteers who clearly feed off the buzz of cooking for lots of people, of seeing people enjoy their food. A chance to sit around, talk, read, eat while the collected kids of the community run around, make friends, pile massive cushions six high to climb on top of. This, apparently is the best fun ever.

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Ginger is a common flavour in lots of cakes and biscuits, but the way it gets there is usually through the use of dried and ground ginger. Fresh ginger is more normally used as one of the first things in the pan at the bottom of an Asian or Chinese dish.

In its dried form, the flavour is concentrated and intensified, but dulled slightly. It warms rather than stings. It’s a similar but subtly different taste.

This cake turns the tables completely over, using fresh ginger for its punch and bullishness. The quantity of ginger might seem alarming when compared to how much dried ginger you’d use in a gingerbread recipe, for example, but remember that dried ginger is a concentrated form – a ratio of six to one, fresh to dried is appropriate for substitution, so the mighty oracle of Wikipedia tells me. Even with this seemingly vast quantity of fresh ginger, the taste isn’t overpowering.

The first thing to do is get prepared. Thoroughly grease a 23cm cake tin with butter and line the base with greaseproof paper. This part is slightly embarrassing, but I persevered for years trying to cut perfect circles out by folding greasproof paper into a cone, estimating the radius of the tin and snipping and trimming the end so that when the paper was unrolled, I had a rough circle that never quite fit. A while ago, one of the kids saw me doing this and said “Dad, why don’t you just draw round the bottom of the tin, like we do at school?”.

So much easier to use a sharp knife just to score round the base on a chopping board for a perfect liner.

Moving swiftly on…

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My kids are quite adventurous when it comes to eating. They’ll try most things, and often surprise me by eating the most unexpected of foods with relish, whilst turning their noses up at something very, very normal.

We still have episodes about ‘green bits’ every once in a while.

The most striking thing about their eating habits is that if they’re involved in any way in the preparation of their food, they’re far, far more likely to eat it in the end.

It doesn’t seem to matter how slight the involvement, even just doing some of the shopping seems to work, but if they’ve sat in the kitchen and peeled and chopped and measured and stirred, there’s a better than normal chance that they’re going to eat it.

And so it turned out with this dish.

A very unusual take on a familiar basic ingredient for our kids, this red-cooked pork dish simply disappeared when I put the finished bowls down in front of them.

They’d shopped, chopped, measured and stirred and we heard no questions, no protests, no complaints, and saw two happy children wolfing down what’s actually a challenging meal for a young palate.

Red-cooked pork is a fantastic alternative way of using belly pork. I usually just roast belly pork slowly in a low oven, and I still think that’s the best way to prepare it, but there are many other ways, and it’s a staple ingredient in a lot of Chinese cookery, particularly the more down-to-earth, home-focussed styles.

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This might sound stupid – and that’s mainly because it is – but the reason I tried this recipe is simply so that I could chop up a whole chicken with a massive cleaver.

I’ve spent years in fear of dinging the edge of my ridiculously expensive German knives doing something as mundane as jointing a chicken, and I’ve learnt to dissect poultry with a surgeon-like precision using nothing but a sharp two-inch blade.  That tiny knife won’t get through a breast bone, though, so recently I’ve taken to using a pair of scissors for that.

Scissors from Staples. Scissors meant for cutting pieces of paper, not chicken bones.

The cleaver changed all that. It’s a fearsome sight, sat up there on my knife rack, dwarfing every other knife in sight. If it ever accidentally fell off, it’d probably smash a floor tile on impact, after taking somebody’s leg off on the way down.

It makes short work of a chicken, and at less than a tenner, I’m not afraid to wield it with some force to get the job done. It’s primitively satisfying, and worth the space on the knife rack. If you want one, go to a Chinese supermarket.

So, a typical, everyday Spanish chicken dish originating in the mountain range that runs parallel to the Santander coast. It’s rustic and wholesome food, with a beautiful little twist right at the end that elevates the taste to a different place altogether.

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