News

I've been up early.

Today, as many in the last few weeks - there's a lot on my mind.

We have news, and today's the day we tell the children.

The news must wait till after Remembrance Day parade, though. Perhaps, somehow, the message of what others have been though, and continue to go through, in the name of their country, of freedom, of stabilisation and humanitarian aid, will help them put the news, when it comes, and as they digest it over the next few days, in perspective. 

I suspect not.

I peel shallots, dice vegetables, brown meat. I take extra care to make sure the flavours are right: rosemary and bay, a couple of anchovies, wiped of oil and snipped up, hopefully to melt in to the gravy. The slow cooker is on, and there's a crumble to prepare. 

Nothing fancy:  comfort food, familiar food. 

Food that will tell them that they are loved.

Uncomplicated food that we can sit down and eat without really thinking, so we can concentrate on telling them the news.

Wish us luck.

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Beef & Beetroot curry - and the balance of power between garden & kitchen

Pickled Chillies. Some like it VERY hot.

The Husband, as you know, is the grower of vegetables in our house. I am involved in executive decisions at seed buying time, and he gets on with the growing and the harvesting. The Husband does a lot of pickling - this year gherkins and chillies - and chutney making, but the day to day use of vegetables is down to me.

Sometimes, I get it wrong. This is not an untypical conversation:

Him: "Please don't use the shallots like you normally do."

Me: "???"

Him: "Well, just like another oniony thing. Can you use them like shallots?"

Me: "???"

Him: "So, don't just slice them up because you haven't got any onions. Use them in recipes that use SHALLOTS".

Me: "Oh".

You see, I am sure I do appreciate a good shallot when it's needed - whole in a casserole, or in a pot roasted chicken dish that I do sometimes, but I am guilty as charged: I'll be scouring the kitchen to pull together whatever it is I need, and if the recipe calls for onions, but there are only shallots, well, shallots will have to do. 

And then, to add insult to injury, when he actually wants shallots for something, there are none left. 

I am a bad person.

However, after the shallot conversation, I have been slightly more wary of how I utilise the produce from the allotment and the  garden.

Beetroot, for example, has been something that doesn't get much beyond being boiled or roasted and then eaten as part of a "pull it all out of the fridge on to the table and pick out the best bits" weekend lunch. Occasionally, it gets grated raw, or turned into a hummus type thang, but not much more than that. This is how we eat beetroot. 

We have decided to give back the allotment and create more growing room in the garden, and so we're currently making sure we get the last bits of this year's veg before handing it over. This has included some extra beetroot that we weren't counting on. 

With some trepidation, I suggested a curry - I had some braising steak, and I knew that I'd seen a recipe for Beef & Beetroot Curry somewhere before, which has been playing on my mind. I don't normally consult the Husband about the menu, but given the reaction to the shallot (mis)usage, I felt it was only right and proper. After all, I haven't been aware of any beetroot in Rick Stein's recent (fabulous) series on Indian cooking, and a quick persual of the indexes to my Madhur Jaffrey books reveals only a beetroot chutney.

As it turns out, beetroot works quite well in a curry, adding an earthy depth. Unfortunately, it doesn't give you a vivid pink or deep purple plateful (disappointing when you see the curry paste that you make with it), but, if you live with a beetroot hater, you don't really know it's there. I can attest to this, because Pink, who is an avowed hater of beetroot (what was I saying about not having fussy children...) ate this - AND it had a green chilli in - one that escaped the pickling pot... 

Beef & Beetroot Curry

serves 4

200g cooked beetroot (if you buy it, don't get the stuff in vinegar) 
'top thumb joint' piece ginger, chopped 
1 large garlic clove 
1 whole green chilli, seeds and all 
small bunch flat leaf parsley 
3 cardamom pods 
1 tbsp tomato ketchup 
1 tbsp treacle 
1 tbsp ground cumin 
1/2 tbsp ground coriander 
1 tsp fennel seeds
 pinch ground cloves 
fresh ground black pepper
1 tbsp sunflower oil 
500g braising steak cut into big chunks 
1 onion (not shallots), chopped 
1 beef stock cube made up to 250ml stock with boiling water
flaked almonds to sprinkle (toast them if you have time - I forgot)

If like me, you're making this in a slow cooker (and why wouldn't you, marvellous thing that it is), turn the cooker on to low to pre-heat.

Make a paste by blitzing the beetroot, ginger, garlic, chilli, parsley, cardamom, ketchup, treacle cumin, coriander, fennel seeds, cloves and a good grind of black pepper in a food processor.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and brown the beef in batches, returning them to the slow cooker crock pot once browned.

Once all the beef is in the slow cooker, add the chopped ONION to the pan and fry for a few minutes, then add the paste to the pan and fry for about 5 minutes more, till you've got all the beefy bits scraped up from the pan and it all smells fragrant. Tip in the stock and bring to the boil then tip over the beef, put the lid on the slow cooker and leave for 8 hours or 
overnight.

Serve with rice and poppadums (and, in our case, cauliflower and broad bean curry) with the flaked almonds sprinkled over the top. You could add in some chunks of cooked beetroot at the end as suggested in the original recipe, but we'd eaten all that we left for lunch...

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Old-fashioned cookbooks, bags of nostalgia and Boeuf a la movie - a random recipe

I have recently inherited a collection of old recipe books from my mum. 

A couple are 'fundraising' efforts, with recipes provided by the good people from a variety of parishes. In the case of "My Favourite Recipe" (circa. 1984), in aid of the Merseyside Association for Kidney Research, it includes Ken Dodd's 'Steak Diane', John Inman's Beef Wellington, and my personal favourite, Willy Russell's 'Midnight Madness' - which is essentially how to cook 2 slices of toast when you come home rather worse the wear for drink... reminds me of a story of a friend from law school who was once roundly berated by his wife, the long suffering Barbara (I never knew any more about her, and never met her) for frying ice cream wagon wheels one night, which he mistook for burgers. The mess was apparently something truly terrible to behold.  Willy Russell's method for toast fills just over 2 pages of the book:

"Switch on the kitchen light; you may have just put the world to rights and drunk eight pints of bitter beer but, and I am quite confident of this, YOU CANNOT SEE IN THE DARK, the best chefs of the best kitchens of the world agree with me on this." etc

The Carrier book "Childrens Party Menus" is one I remember flicking through incessantly as childhood birthdays approached.

Mum, why did you NEVER make me the carousel cake? Or hard boiled eggs decorated like mice and rabbits?

Best of all, the pile of books included 2 notebooks from a Great Aunt. Handwritten recipes, cuttings, little comments - I love them.




I was blessed with some great ,Great Aunts, though none of them are still living. I've already mentioned the one who not only worked full time but went home to cook a 2 course lunch every day for her husband - another Random Recipe entry, in fact.

The Great Aunt to whom these notebooks belonged was a cabinet maker and worked with the renowned (and currently in vogue) Edward Barnsley. I am lucky enough to have a stool that she designed and had made in the later years of her life by one of her own apprentices. I believe all her great nieces and nephews have one, elegant and beautiful.

She herself was a fantastic character. All tweed skirts and sensible shoes. She smoked like a chimney (indeed it was the fags what done her in, in the end) and lived with her devoted 'companion' (no other attribution or recognition could be given in those days, even though their relationship was far more devoted than many marriages I have seen). As I recall, they shared their home with a grey African parrot. I always remember how interested she was in anything and everything I was doing; What was going on at school, what I was studying. I was off to France for a year - fantastic! what a great opportunity. She spent hours telling me about her own travels. In fact, she sadly died while I was in France and I missed her funeral, but somehow being in the Languedoc at the time, an area I know she loved, made it more bearable. My memories of her are fading but I have some clear images of her and her partner, their house and beautiful garden, which I know will stay with me.

Having her notebooks has brought many of those images and memories that I do retain back to the forefront of my mind. I can't date the notebooks accurately. One of them includes recipes attributed to "(Delia Smith TV)" in the exquisite handwriting you might expect. In fact all the recipes that have been written out by hand are attributed - names I recognise from my childhood - Jessie (my granny), Mrs Godfrey, Beth - and some I don't. There is an article about aubergine, cut out and kept from a newspaper from the day before my 6th birthday (I am sure the events were unrelated, but it puts things in context for me). I am particularly tickled by the comment accompanying a recipe for Roast Duck: "Very satisfactory." Those 2 words transport me right back in time - the sensibleness and practicality of them. No flowery nonsense. Just "Very satisfactory". I can hear her voice now.

But what of the random recipe? Well, this month the randomness is down to us: Dom's challenge at Belleau Kitchen is to choose a book our own way but to be sure to select a recipe randomly from it.




Alas, the roasted duck was not the random recipe. You'll understand why I had to choose one of these notebooks as my recipe book, tbough, so I very scientifically held them behind my back, swapped them over a couple of times and in my right hand the ringbound, falling apart Sherwood Notebook from Boots Stationery Department. 






And the recipe? Well, the page that I opened included 4 recipes cut from newspapers. 2 veal recipes ('Veal Cutlets - Victoria', and stewed breast of veal), another one  for a 'Standing Pie' (lots of lard) and this one. I couldn't resist. I love the idea that whenever this was written (imperial measurements, oven temp in Gas mark/farenheit only), people were thinking about how best to make sure they had a hot meal on the table - even if they wanted to go out and enjoy themselves in the meantime.

I copy it out directly because I am sure that any copyright has long since passed. If it hasn't and you recognise this as yours, please let me know, and I will offer full attribution.

Boeuf a la movie (for 2)

So called because you throw everything into a casserole, go to the cinema (and come back and eat it)

1lb stewing beef
small tin tomato soup
glass red wine
2 medium carrots, sliced
2 medium onions, sliced
1 medium potato, sliced
bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon of salt, and some screws of pepper

Put everything in a casserole and cover it closely. Put it into the middle of the oven with the heat at mark 1, 275F and leave it for 4 1/2 hours. When you return, serve it with tinned Swedish red cabbage (heated).

And that's it.

I defy anyone to say "Wow, what a beautiful looking dinner" - because frankly it wasn't:

The soup in the sauce made it alarmingly orange, and the fact that you don't brown the meat first meant that there was really quite a lot of fat floating around, but it was all cooked and quite tasty actually. It was completely hassle free - as all slow cooking is - and for a day when I was out at a training course and backwards and forwards on the school run and then delivering children to Rainbows etc, it was super-convenient. The only changes I made were to slightly up the vegetable quantities and I used a large tin of soup to stretch it to 4 of us. I also couldn't bring myself to serve it with tinned red cabbage - indeed I couldn't find any (although I didn't look too hard), but in keeping with the recipe, I did liberate some red cabbage, left over from Christmas, from the freezer.

I'm not sure it's the kind of thing I'd want to come back to from watching a movie, but I can certainly imagine Vera & Freda (you knew they'd have names like that) coming home - more likely from a concert at the Liverpool Philharmonic than the movies (although you never know), kicking off their brogues and sitting down, with their napkins on knees, to a big plateful of this...

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Sunday Special - Slow roast merguez shoulder of lamb - and a comedy potato

Just before Christmas, we were in receipt of a lamb. Melvin's lamb.

I think I have written before about Melvin's pork (although I can't find the post). Melvin is our friendly, local, slightly erratic small holder. A couple of weeks before Christmas, the Husband rang Melvin to inquire about the availability of logs for the woodburner. During the course of the conversation, Melvin let slip that the lamb that he and the Husband had discussed some months previously was about to be butchered. We had all but given up on getting a lamb this year. A week before Christmas, realistically, we had neither budget nor freezer space for a butchered lamb, but these opportunities do not come along everyday, and before I knew it, Melvin was on my doorstep with the lamb, and the freezer is now creaking.

Fast forward to last Sunday and we have friends for lunch and a shoulder of said lamb out of the freezer. What to do, what to do? Faced with the meat, I had a crisis. Slow roast or conventional cook? English traditional or something more adventurous?

Much as I love the traditional English pairing of lamb with garlic and rosemary, my time in the South of France, on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border, has made me a huge fan of the 'merguez' flavours from North Africa. I have fond memories of barbecued merguez sausage - spicy and piquant: chilli, harissa, garlic, perhaps fennel, cumin and coriander...

Lamb as good as Melvin's already has a fantastic flavour, but it was too much of an opportunity, and 'adventurous' (if Sunday lunch could ever really be called adventurous? I don't know. Humour me) won out, although I kept the chilli down as a nod to the the less mature palates at the table. 

The only thing you really need to know about this is that it does need about 4 hours in total to cook, so get in the kitchen early, but then you have the luxury of just leaving it to do its thing while you get on with other stuff.

Slow roast merguez shoulder of lamb

1 shoulder of lamb (bone in) - 2 kg will feed 4 adults and 4 kids, possibly with leftovers
1 tsp each cumin seed, coriander seed, fennel seed & black peppercorns
1 cinammon stick, broken into pieces 
1 tsp smoked paprika
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 large sprigs of rosemary, leaves only, finely chopped
zest of a lemon, finely grated
2 tbsp olive oil
1 glass of red wine
1/2 glass water

First, pre-heat your oven to 220C and score the skin of your shoulder of lamb. While the oven is heating, make your paste: toast the seeds (cumin, coriander, fennel and peppercorns) and cinammon stick in a dry frying pan over a medium heat for a minute or so. Bash up the toasted spices with the paprika, rosemary, garlic, lemon zest 

and mix with the olive oil, then smear half of the resulting paste over the scored lamb (which you have, of course, put in an appropriately sized roasting tin. (If you were more organised than me, you could of course make the paste and smear the lamb the night before).

Put the meat in the hot oven for 30 mins, after which, remove from the oven, and smear the remaining spice paste over the meat - use a wooden spoon or somesuch to do this. Pour the wine and water into the tin around the meat (but NOT over the meat - you don't want to wash that paste off), then cover the joint with tin foil, seal it round the tin and put it back in the oven. Reduce the heat to 130C, and cook for about 3 hours, when it will be easy to pull apart, and taste delicious.

In my usual haphazard fashion, I made a gravy from the juices, some sherry and the water that I'd parboiled the parsnips in. We had whole roasted new potatoes (from last summer's crop - still going strong in a thick (and large) paper bag), parsnips (also homegrown) roasted with honey, rosemary and ground cumin, and steamed carrots and leeks. The great thing about home grown veg is the opportunity for amusingly-shaped specimens, and I'm sorry, but I can 't resist showing you this potato (snigger)

Haphazard gravy and comedy potatoes aside, this is a really fantastic way of roasting lamb. Hugh suggests roasting at a slightly lower temperature for longer (6 hours) but by the time I was contemplating what to do, a 6 hour roast would have meant eating at around 3 in the afternoon - no good when small children are involved. Also, I have done a longer roast and for me it hasn't turned out quite so well, although I added more liquid to the roasting tin this time than I have previously, so may be that helped. It's a method of cooking that lends itself to fiddling around, and because it's at a low temperature, there's less chance of ruining the meat by overcooking.

We had a fabulous afternoon, a lazy lunch then we sent the kids outside to build an igloo while the grown ups stayed firmly ensconced around the table with the wine. As we got our snow on Friday, and had already had plenty of opportunities for sledging and snowballing, what better way to spend a snowy Sunday afternoon?

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Everything tastes better with bacon - sausage casserole, pasta bake and the promise of soup

So, we're well into Austerity January, and so far, so good. The freezer has lots of stock in it - good for soups, and also lots of left overs from pre-Christmas bulk cooking: I know there is a venison casserole in there waiting to liven up a Sunday sometime soon. There's some ham and turkey, and a whole load of lamb, but I'm also trying to use up as much as I have accumulated in the cupboards in my subconscious hibernation/'what if there's a nuclear winter' strategy that I seem to have inherited from my mum. Shelves are there to be filled, and while it's nearly all in date (bar a tin of pineapple slices that I can't bring myself to either open or throw away), the cupboards are groaning. There are lots of pulses and tinned tomatoes, and I have jars of olives that I forgot I'd bought - plenty of stuff to make good meals out of, and to keep the post-Christmas shopping bills down.  Even more exciting, this week things have been livened up by the last pack of streaky bacon which has been lurking in the back of the fridge since Christmas, and was just about to go over.

The thing about bacon is that it's just so tasty. The Husband is of the 'there are only 2 food groups: bacon and everything else' school of eating, and I have to say that he has a point: Bacon always comes at the top - or near the top - of things most likely to make a vegetarian falter. For me, it's not a camping trip without a bacon sandwich to wake up to - preferably with a cup of a coffee and a blinding view, but even without the coffee (packing fail) and when the rain's sheeting down (or, more soul destroying, when faced with persistent drizzle), there's nothing more likely to lift the spirits. I went to school with a lot of kids from the Jewish community in Leeds, and they were always off to Macdonalds for Bacon Double Cheeseburgers (ssssh! Don't tell anyone). There is just something about bacon.


We had a sausage, bacon and split pea casserole which I managed to get in the slow cooker one lunch time, and by bulking up a pack of sausages with some bacon, along with the pulses and veg, I made enough casserole to feed us for 2 meals. I can't now recall exactly what I did, and I didn't take any photos of it (to be honest it didn't look very interesting), but it was mighty tasty. I did have to plan ahead and soak the peas over night, but that used up the end of a bag that would otherwise have leaked all over the cupboard until the next time I want to make pea & ham soup. It was also dead easy, and you could cook it on the stove top - or in the oven - if you didn't have a slow cooker: I sweated some chopped onion, celery and carrots before adding them to the slow cooker, and tipping the split peas (these had been soaked over night then boiled rapidly for 10 minutes) on top. I cut the bacon into pieces and each sausage into 3 (I find they go further cut up - if you leave them whole, people know for sure how many sausages they've had, and one is never enough), then fried these off and drained off excess fat. Chucked all that into the slow cooker with a bunch of thyme, then deglazed the frying pan with a slosh of red wine, a can of chopped tomatoes and some stock - probably about 2 tsp of stock powder made up in the tomato can to swill out the last bits of tomato. Poured into the slow cooker, stirred around and cooked on high for 4 hours. Perfect with rice for tea.

Yesterday, we had bacon and leek pasta bake which is one of my regular meals. It is very quick to make, and by baking it at the end, it gives you the option to make it in advance - otherwise it's just cold pasta, isn't it, and frankly, who wants to eat that? This way, if you want, you can make it earlier in the day, then put in the oven with some cheese on the top at teatime and bingo - delicious and comforting. I should 'fess up and say that Blue is ambivalent about it, mainly because he doesn't like the 'crunchy bits' (strange child) but everyone else loves it and it's one of the few meals that Pink will ask for seconds of.  Last night it was extra specially good because there was some left over double cream in the fridge that needed using up. Marvellous. When I made it last night, I actually concentrated on what I was doing and how much I was using, so I can share a recipe with you.

Creamy Bacon & Leek Pasta Bake - serves 4

woops! nearly all gone before I took a pic!

300g pasta
15-20g butter
3 leeks, cleaned and sliced fairly finely
200g streaky bacon, derinded & chopped into fairly small pieces
2 tbsps plain flour
2tsp stock powder
approx 30ml double cream (optional but lovely)
salt & pepper
grated cheese (I failed to weigh out how much I used, sorry - but you  know, you just need enough)

Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions. While you are doing this, melt the butter in a pan, and add the leeks and bacon and cook for 5 minutes or so till the leeks have softened and the bacon is looking like it's on the way to being cooked. Chuck in the flour and stir in so that you can't see any left. Cook it out for a minute or so. If necessary remove from the heat till the pasta is cooked. When you drain the pasta, reserve the cooking water and mix approx 400ml with the stock powder. Put your leeks & bacon back in the heat and slowly stir in the pasta water/stock till you get a smooth, thickish sauce. 

Depending on how thick or thin you like sauces in these kinds of dishes, you may want to use less than the 400ml or more to make a thinner sauce. Pour in the cream if using, and grind in some salt and pepper, then allow to cook for a couple of minutes. Tip the pasta into an appropriately sized oven proof dish and stir the sauce through it.

Cover the top with grated cheese and bake at 180C for approx 20-30 minutes (depending whether you need to avoid 'crunchy bits' or not - in a rare display of patience, last night I actually left a corner of the dish un-cheesed to reduce crunchy bits, but I'm not often that tolerant of foodie foibles!) 

The last of the bacon then, will go into what I hope will be a particularly satisfying soup for this evening. I was on one of my rare forays to a supermarket the other day and walking down the soup aisle, noticed a pot proclaiming bacon, red pepper and lentil. Mmmmm. In an uncommon display of harmony, the kids both chose today for their school lunch this week. As I know they are both having a hot meal (fish and chips) I can be a bit more relaxed about what to give them for tea, although the Husband has only had sandwiches.... We have lots of red lentils knocking around, and there's most of a red pepper needing eating up, so bacon, red pepper and lentil soup it is.This soup (in my head at least) seems to be a good solution to how to feed everyone this evening. We'll see!

I'm linking this up to a new blog event 'Credit Crunch Munch' hosted by  Helen at Fuss Free Flavours and Camilla at Fab Food For All. This is all about creating delicious food for less, and I think both the casserole and the pasta bake fit in with that idea. And I'm liking the logo a lot!

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Laying ghosts of dinner parties past - Beef & Brown Ale Casserole

I have a clear memory of a lunch party my parents held while I was (I think) still at college. Friends of my father’s – twin brothers with whom he had served in the Navy, and one of their wives – were in the area and had made contact. As I remember it, it had been some considerable time since they had seen each other. All were out of the Navy – one of the visiting brothers was running a bar in Spain, the other had been flying helicopters in Saudi Arabia. I have no memory of why they were in our part of Yorkshire. 

They arrived at the appointed hour and conversation ensued. The wife came with the helicopter pilot. Money abounded. She was very nice, but appeared to be rather high maintenance in a way that my mum and I most definitely are not. Long blonde hair. Impeccably groomed. Squashy fur coat. You get the picture.

All went well. Mum had, as usual, produced a magnificent meal. I helped clear away the main course and went into the kitchen to find her in a bit of a state. One of the kittens had walked along the chocolate loaf dessert, leaving beautifully formed kitten paw prints along the top.  As we somewhat hysterically decided that the best course of action would be to sieve icing sugar over the top and add a sprig of holly – we were in the post-Christmas period after all – for a festive touch, the wife came in. Instead of blagging it, Mum burst into gales of laughter and spilled the beans. The look on the wife’s face (I think her name might have been Sheridan. Or Scheherazade. Or something exotic) was a picture. She had the fruit salad in the end.

Why do I tell you all this? Well today, in similar fashion, we hosted an old friend for lunch. A colleague of the Husband’s from when they served in the Army together in York, many moons ago. I cannot recall exactly when the last time we saw him was, but it was certainly when we were living in Army quarters on the edge of Salisbury Plain, probably 10-12 years ago. I remember well the meal I cooked. How could I forget? In joyful and recent possession of The Return of the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver, I decided we would have roasted fillet of beef rolled in herbs and porcini and wrapped in prosciutto. We scoured Salisbury for the meat and ended up paying an obscene amount of money for it in Waitrose. Ditto the prosciutto, which we diligently asked the butcher to slice thinly and lay side by side on some waxed paper – what for assisting the rolling element of the recipe. Oh! The DINKYs we were.

Now, the oven we were blessed with in our army quarter was completely and utterly rubbish. However, being as I was a relatively novice cook, I simply didn’t appreciate the need to be able to cook the finished roll of meat in a blisteringly hot oven. To be honest, I quite like my meat rare, but I would never presume to serve it to guests in that state. Having already cooked it for far too long, I proudly bore my creation to the dinner table and carved. Despite the appearance of being cooked on the outside, it was completely and utterly bloody. Literally. We haven’t seen him since. I’d like to think that was mostly down to life – but there’s always been a niggling suspicion that it was the beef...

Anyway, trying to set that thought aside, we were really pleased that he had got in touch, and jumped at the chance to invite him and his wife and kids (none of whom were around at the time of the previous get together) for lunch.

What to serve has therefore been occupying my mind for some days now, ever since the visit was arranged - typical man fashion – via LinkedIn. Obviously, I was anxious not to repeat the disaster of the last meal, although we no longer live in Army accommodation, and I am far more confident in my oven’s ability to reach a specified temperature. Would it be a roast? I can cook a roast in my sleep but there is always fiddling about at the end with gravy and what not. Should I slow cook a stew? And pudding – what to make?

The pudding will be the subject of another post, although I’ll tease you by saying that it involved pumpkin, but not as you might have known it. In the end, casserole and baked potatoes seemed like the best option, and because the Husband begged suggested that it might be a good idea, I made dumplings too. Along with the baked potatoes, I served roasted cauliflower – I bought a beautiful green romanesco cauli and an ordinary white one and roastedthem with sea salt and olive oil. Gorgeous.  

On a rain-sodden, dreary day, and if I do say so myself, this totally hit the spot. Even if I did manage to turn the oven down almost to off while the casserole was doing its last bit of cooking with the dumplings, causing a minor panic on my part as the children rampaged around, gnawing the furniture... Fortunately, I noticed, and the day was saved. And as the dog only has 3 legs, there was no chance of him getting up on the kitchen table and romping joyfully over the pudding.

Beef & Brown Ale Casserole– served 4 adults & 4 children

1kg braising steak, 3 tbsp plain flour, 1 tsp mustard powder, about 50g lard (yes, I know – you could use olive oil if you didn’t fancy it), 1 large onion, peeled &  sliced and about 10 shallots, peeled, 500g whole Chantenay carrots, 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce, 1 tbsp mushroom ketchup, 1 bottle brown ale (I used Newcastle Brown), a handful of thyme sprigs, 2 bay leaves, 2 beef stock cubes made up with 200ml hot water, salt & pepper.  

If you haven’t already asked the butcher to do it, chop the meat into bite sized pieces. Put the flour in a bowl or plastic bag, add the mustard powder, salt and pepper, mix/shake up then add in the meat and toss it in the flour. 

Pre-heat the oven to 160⁰C/140⁰ C fan.

In your oven-proof casserole dish (one which has a lid), on the hob, melt half the lard and brown the meat in batches, setting aside in a bowl or dish once browned. If you need to add a little more lard during this process, do. When the meat is browned, and set aside, use a splash of the stock or the ale to deglaze any tasty bits that are threatening to stick to the bottom of the casserole and burn, then melt the rest of the lard and add in the onions and shallots, frying for a few minutes till softening. Put the meat back in the pan, add in the carrots, the ale and all the rest of the ingredients, bring back to the boil, then pop the lid on to the casserole dish and put it in the oven.

Yes, I guess it does look a little heavy on the carrots...

My casserole took 2 hours to cook till the meat was deliciously tender – it might take up to 3 – but if it finishes cooking before you’re ready for it, it will stand on the stove until you need it. You can always pop it back in the oven if needed for dumpling purposes as I did.

Now, I know you're going to ask me about the dumplings. They were exceedingly good, despite our guests' 3 yr old son pronouncing them "Deegushting" much to the general hilarity of the table (grr). However, I totally made them according to a Hairy Bikers' recipe in the October 2012 Good Food mag. The casserole is also based on their recipe from the same feature, but I changed it sufficiently. If you're interested in dumplings (who isn't?), I used vegetarian suet, and mixed in 4 tbsps of horseradish sauce and some cold water as the binding agent. Having slow cooked the casserole in a low oven, I whacked up the heat dropped the dumplings in to the top of the casserole and baked for a further 25 minutes (plus extra when I realised that I'd then turned the heat down by accident). They were very good. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pics.

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Porchetta Inglese (with apologies to Ms Lawson)

Mmmmmm slow cooked pork, stuffed with an aromatic filling. For reasons that will become clear, I’m calling this ‘Porchetta Inglese’ (with apologies for any incorrect use of Italian there).

The last thing I did on Saturday night before collapsing into bed after our day at the Olympics was to got a leg of pork out of the freezer on Saturday night with no particular ideas in mind, just knowing that we had to eat the following day and that I would probably be knackered. The fact that I remembered to do this is to be applauded – otherwise we would just have had gooseberry and elderflower cake. No great problem in itself, I guess…

Anyway, yesterday was hot, hot, hot. I wasn’t particularly in the mood for a big, traditional roast dinner, so I picked up Forever Summer for inspiration. I was thinking slow roasting on the basis that although the oven would be on for longer, I could just whack the meat in, leave it there and get on with something else.

Unfortunately, by the time I got round to consulting recipe books it was already after lunch, and bearing in mind I was aiming for the kids to have a reasonably early night, there didn’t seem to be much time for slow roasting. However, Forever Summer practically fell open at the recipe for Porchetta, and it looked good. So what that I wouldn’t have 24 hrs to marinade the meat in the fridge prior to cooking: my joint was slightly smaller than that specified, and I had (just) the cooking time.

In order to make use of the beautiful sage that I have in the garden at the moment, and with an eye on making a more English tasting meal for our French guest, I changed the stuffing, and made a mixture using sage and Bramley apple rather than rosemary bay and garlic. Hence Porchetta Inglese.  I did leave in the ground cloves though, from the original recipe. I had some shallots from the garden that needed eating up because they hadn't dried properly so would have rotted if we'd tried to store them, so i peeled and split them and roasted the pork on top of them. And finally, to add to the ‘English’ experience for our guest, I rubbed salt and fennel seed into the skin that I had removed, and roasted it in a very hot oven so that we could have crackling. 

Porchetta Ingelese

1.5-2kg boned leg of pork (The Goddess uses boned shoulder and neck)

1 large onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 cooking apple, peeled and diced quite small

Large handful of sage leaves, finely sliced

1 tablespoon of fennel seeds

1/2 tsp ground cloves

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

Some peeled shallots if you have them

Pre-heat the oven to 180⁰C/160⁰ fan.

Deal with your joint of meat: using a sharp knife, carefully remove the skin and fat. If you know that you are going to be doing this with your joint, you could get the butcher to do it for you, although remember to take the skin home with you if you want to make crackling too. Then, if necessary, slice further into the middle of the joint, where the bone was to enable you to flatten the piece of meat out, then bash it with a rolling pin/meat tenderiser till it's approx 3 cm flat. 

It might take some bashing, and approx is fine - bear in mind that you wil be rolling it up around some stuffing, and tying it with string, so it needs to be a big enough piece of meat after you've bashed it to do this.

Make your stuffing. Heat a splash of olive oil in a frying pan, and cook the onion for a few minutes till it's softening. Add the apple, sage, fennel seed and ground cloves and carry on cooking till the apple is starting to look soft and it all smells lovely. 

Let the stuffing cool a bit, then spread it inside the meat. Once you've done this, you need to roll the meat up and tie it with string at intervals to hold it together. Not the easiest - if you've got a handy helper around,  all the better.

If you have any shallots (I did), peel them, break them into their individual 'cloves' and put int he bottom of your roasting tin. Put the meat in the tin (on top of the shallots if you are using them), grind over some salt and pepper, splosh on some olive oil, and put in the oven for 3-4 hours. Check after 2 hours and if the meat is browning too much, cover with some foil.

When the meat is cooked it will fall apart and be totally delicious. 

The recommended way of eating this is in big floury ciabatta rolls, but as the garden is in full flow at the moment, we ate it more conventionally with new potatoes, and steamed carrots and beans, freshly picked (smug).

Now I am linking this up to 3 linkys this month...

First, you guessed it, Forever Nigella#18 - fridge raider snacks. If you can't imagine how delicious this meat would be cold, picked straight from the cooler in a slinky dressing gown, then you really shouldn't be cooking this. I love cold roast meat, and I can confirm that this definitely hits the spot. 

Lavender & Loveage is hosting the event for Forever Nigella

 

 

Secondly, because of the lovely garden sage I used in the stuffing, l am linking up to Lavender and Lovage's Herbs on a Saturday. 2 links to this gorgeous blog at once...

Finally, I think this is worthy of an entry on to Funky Foodies.

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