beef in beer

I knew there were two rump steaks in the freezer that we brought with us from Somerset – the very last of the Dexter beef.  There’s no way we’d ever eat a whole steak nowadays – it’s just not the sort of meal we have – so I decided, that in light of the chilly weather, we might have a steak pudding tomorrow.  (Pete is not offally fond (sorry) of kidney, so we never have that in a pud).

I want to make the pudding in the slow cooker; it’s much easier, never boils dry, and can be left while we go out, but in my experience they work better if the filling is pre-cooked, so that’s what I did this morning.

I normally make a base of carrot and celery for a beef casserole, but there was a head of fennel in the fridge (and, indeed, no celery), so I used that, and three carrots.  Chopped into small cubes, and sauteed down in olive oil till softened. Then chopped a large onion and a few cloves of garlic, and some fresh sage leaves, and they got the same treatment.

The steaks were cut into chunks, and browned off – the cats got the trimmings, so they were happy. All of this was put into the slow cooker, and Pete was despatched to buy a bottle of beer; he returned with a bottle of Fursty Ferret from Badger Beers, which seemed appropriate.  I deglazed the meat frying pan with the beer, added a teaspoonful of grain mustard, and a tablespoon of flour, decanted that into the slow cooker, and added salt and black pepper.

I’ll leave it cooking for about six hours – it’s smelling good!

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Irish potato scones

This is a classic Irish recipe – we used to eat them a lot, but sort of forgot about them; I made some for breakfast this morning, and thought I’d share.  It’s an ideal way to use up leftover boiled potato, too!

In a food processor, blitz 6oz cold cooked potato, 4oz flour (I always use plain, but self raising would do), and 2oz of butter or marg.  Once you have a dough, remove it from the processor and knead a little on a floured work surface.

Now, you can be diligent, roll it out with a rolling pin, and cut the dough into rounds – or you can do what I do, which is to divide the dough into 8, and pat it into rough roundish shapes.

Also, the recipe recommends frying in a little butter on a griddle, but I’m afraid I stick them on a greased baking tray at gas 6 for 15 minutes.  And I don’t peel the spuds either :)

These are just utterly delicious straight out of the oven, spread with butter, and also work really well as part of a great British fry up.

If you don’t have a food process, mash the potatoes as is (no milk or butter), rub the fat into the flour and add the spud, then continue with the rolling (or not).

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food from Unearthed

A few months ago, I was approached by a PR company and asked if I’d like to be involved in a tasting panel, and blog about the results. “Why not?”, I thought – I shall just be honest about the stuff they send.

The first set of goodies arrived today, in a white box tied round with a red ribbon – the delivery driver was quite impressed! The food is from Unearthed, and there is a fair bit, pretty much all of which is stuff we use regularly.

In the box:

• 4 packs of olives, 2 with chilli and 2 with cheese. Now, I’ve always felt I don’t like olives, despite loving their oil, but I might well be wrong (as I was about aubergines, and courgettes; but not about avocado and beetroot). Still, Pete loves ‘em, so he can test those
• 2 packs of saucisson sec, one with herbs, one not, and some proscuitto – might try a pizza with some of these
• 2 packs of barrel aged feta – we love feta, and I’ve only ever eaten the standard stuff so I’m looking forward to that
• a pack of mini chorizo, which I fell upon with glee – I haven’t yet found anywhere local that sells whole chorizo sausages, only chunks, so I’m well chuffed with these

So watch out for some recipes featuring these products. I had a lentil and feta dish planned for Saturday, so that’s where I’ll start.

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pancake day

We don’t normally bother with pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, although Pete did actually make some last night. He is In Charge of pancakes, drop scones*, chilli con carne, dhal, to name but a few.

Pancakes are so easy – flour, egg, milk, salt. And yet, all over our local small supermarkets for the past few days has been Betty Crocker’s Shake
and Make pancake mix – ingredients (including, presumably, dried egg and milk) in a plastic bottle, with room to add the requisite amount of water, shake and pour into a pan. This strikes me as just extraordinary – pancake batter is so quick and easy to make, and fun for children to do too. And the *waste* involved – are people really too idle to decant the mix into a bowl and add water from a measuring jug, even if they won’t make them from scratch? I despair.

*but, curiously, not Yorkshire Pudding.

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baking and winemaking weekend

Sorted out some wine – filtered and bottled one gallon of parsnip, although the other one went cloudy again, racked the three gallons of rhubarb (which was really 2.5 gallons and racked down to 2 + a bottle), racked the two gallons of apricot and stopped the fermentation, made a gallon of Earl Grey just to see what it’s like.

Had a baking session on Sunday – made Norwegian cinnamon buns for tea – I followed Nigella’s recipe slavishly, but the dough was ridiculously sticky, and a quick Google finds I am not alone.  I’ve amended the recipe on Nibblous to reflect, but they really were rather delicious.  We had no powdered cinnamon, and had no desire to go out, so just whizzed up some cinnamon quills in the little blender, and that was fine.  Also made some bread dough for lunch today/tomorrow, which has just come out of the oven.

We had reactive sausage rolls for tea too – frozen puff pastry (because life really *is* too short to make your own; I did it once, just to prove it), and the stuffing left over from the Christmas goose, which had been shoved in the freezer.  It was sausagemeat, breadcrumbs, lemon sage, cranberries, shopped shallot, garlic, if I recall correctly.  Pete manfully did the rolling out, and they were fab.  We ate them all. Oink.  There was some filling left, so I shall fry it up for lunch, accompanied by egg, and freshly baked bread.

For Saturday supper we had spring greens in coconut milk – I recommend this to you, it’s utterly delicious, dead cheap and very quick.  Try it! It works with kale, or curly cabbage (but not white, I wouldn’t think), or purple sprouting broccoli.

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I’ve got to try this – teabag wine!

8 x fruit teabags of choice, 1kg sugar, 1 teaspoon yeast, 1 teaspoon nutrient, 2tsps lemon juice.

Pour boiling water onto teabags and sugar in a large jug and leave until lukewarm. Discard bags and pour liquid into a demijohn. Top up with water to the ’shoulder’ of the demijohn. Add yeast and nutrient. Fit a suitable airlock – and away you go!

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I have a wine filter kit!

A friend who used to do a lot of home winemaking told me that I should get a filter kit to “polish” my wine.  They’re not cheap cheap (about £22 or so with carriage), so I trawled eBay and found somebody selling his father’s old Boots kit.  I offered him £8 including postage, and a deal was done, and it arrived this morning.  This is handy, as I have two gallons of parsnip for bottling.

With great excitement I took it out of the box, read the instructions (which must have been written quite a long time ago – I might scan them for your edification), tried to work out where the filter papers should go (and failed), but assembled it reasonably successfully nonetheless with one of the filter pads.  Then I realised that it could probably do with a wash, and indeed a sterilise, before polishing my parsnips (that’s a nice alliteration, and is not in any way a euphimism, I assure you).

So I ran a bucket of water, put some sterlising powder in it, and dunked in the filter kit.  Pad and and all, damnit.  It’s now drying on the hall radiator – wonder if it’ll be useable …

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inspirational stuff from Jamie Oliver

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reactive entertaining

Last night’s supper was already planned, insofar as I knew we needed to use up some of the veg in the fridge, and we’d been eating rice for a few days, so it was time for pasta for a change.

I chopped up a fat leek, a red romano pepper, and several cloves of garlic, and set them to sauté down in some olive oil.  Then I went to answer the door, as someone had just knocked.  It was a friend from up the road, who wanted to watch himself on the local news (he doesn’t have a television).  So we offered him supper.

I added another red pepper, and some strips of pancetta, while Pete grated up lots of parmesan.  Boiled some big pasta shells, chopped some sage from the garden, put it all into the pan and served in bowls.  Instant supper, and very nice.

Well, we thought so!

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elephant bread

elephant bread, originally uploaded by ramtops.

I made some more 5 minute dough yesterday morning, and decanted it into a couple of tins.

This one (topped with sesame seeds) was clearly over enthusiastic, and spilled over the tin in a pleasingly proboscis-like way :)

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