liquid egg

I don’t often post links on this blog, but this one was just too extraordinary to keep to myself.

Designed, apparently, for people who are “too lazy to crack an egg”. I despair. Spotted on Nothing to do with Arbroath, a daily miscellany that’s well worth reading.

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steak pudding

I would have preferred it to be steak and kidney pudding, but ‘im indoors won’t eat offal, so steak and mushroom it was.  I made a batch of steak and mushroom pie filling a while back, and put half in the freezer, where it languished until Friday night.

The potential problem with a snake and pigmeat pudding is the timing - if you eat around 7 p.m, as we try to do, you need to put it on about 3 o’clock, and then you’re fairly tied to the house - making sure it doesn’t boil over, and topping it up with boiling water, and having a kitchen full of steam.  So I wanted to try out the slow cooker for this.

Whipped up some suet crust pastry - 6 oz plain flour, 1 tsp of baking powder (you could use self raising flour and leave out the baking powder, but I rarely have SR flour in the house these days), 3 oz suet.  Mix together with half a teaspoon of salt, and I added a little dried rosemary.

Then carefully add water, a little at a time, so you get a nice doughy texture - don’t make it too wet.  Roll the dough into a circle, and cut out about a quarter, which you will use for the lid.  Then grease a pudding basin (I think mine was a 2 pinter), and carefully place the dough in it; the cut out portion actually makes it a bit easier to manoeuver.   Make sure there’s no gaps in the pastry.

Then in went the pie filling,  I rolled out the lid dough and placed it on top, pinching the edges together, and put a tin foil hat on it, secured with a rubber band.

I put a small trivet in the bottom of the slow cooker, put the pudding basin on top of that, and filling it with boiling water - a full kettle’s worth.  Set the slow cooker on high, and crossed my fingers.  We ate it 4.5 hours later, and it was really lovely - the pastry was very light.  If the pie filling weren’t cooked, I suspect it would need closer to eight hours, but I will investigate in due course.

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beef fried rice

using up: the last of the beef rib, a couple of very dried up flat mushrooms

We love egg fried rice, but are rarely organised enough to have cold cooked rice available. However, last night we did a double lot to accompany our south indian cabbage (a meal we love), so we were poised!

Pete slivered some fresh garlic, and finely chopped some garlic.  I chopped a shallot, some spring onions, a yellow pepper.  I put the mushrooms in some boiling water to revive them, then they got chopped as well, and the cooked beef was cut into strips.

Stirfried all the veg in some groundnut oil in the wok, added the beef and a good glug of shoyu, tipped in the rice.  Stirred it all around till the rice was hot, and served.

We’d eaten about three quarters of it before we remembered that it was supposed to have *egg* in it … but it was delicious nonetheless!

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four meat soup

This week’s soup is a real amalgam.

I marmalised  in the food processor: one leek, one parsnip, two sticks of celery, two carrots.  Into the slow cooker they went.

In the freezer were two bags of chicken and peapod stock, to make ris e bisi, but we decided to sacrifice them to the soup.  So into the slow cooker that went.  And two ladle’s worth of stock from the fruit gammon I cooked at the weekend (it was salty and very spicy, so any more would probably have been not very good).

Pete was getting some cold beef from the weekend’s pot roast ready for supper, so we hurled in the bones too. And finally, about a pint of last week’s soup, which had the lamb massaman bones in it.

Left it cooking overnight, and it smells rather good.

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fruity gammon

using up: half a gammon, some manky apples

Continuing in the mission to make space in the freezers, Pete found a small rib of beef, and half a large gammon in the outside one yesterday.  The rib is for today’s dinner (yum), and I did this with the gammon:

Put it in the slow cooker skin side down, discovering - with some amazement - that the lid would actually go on. Cut a jaffa orange into quarters, squeezed the juice over the exposed meat, and put the squished segments in the pot.  Cut up a wizened apple similarly, and hurled it in.  Added half a cinnamon stick, three star anise, and three slices of fresh ginger.

Cooked it on low for about nine hours, I guess, then left it in the water overnight.  Will shortly skin it and paint it with a glaze of mustard and maple syrup, then roast it off in the oven (which currently contains a reactive fruit cake, using up some fresh cranberries and dried prunes).

Rib roast experiment details to follow.

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the risotto that wasn’t

using up: smoked trout, a bulb of  fennel

We like risotto; sometimes I make it in the oven, and sometimes I stand over the pot, ladling in stock.  Whatever, I know my 5oz of rice to 1 pint of liquid works.

Today, I thought I’d try the slow cooker.  I did a bit of Googling, and came up with a couple of ideas.

So, chopped the fennel and a red onion, put it in the slow cooker on high with a little olive oil, left it for an hour and stirred, left it for another hour and stirred again.  OK so far.

Added 5 oz of arborio, and 1 pint of veg stock (made with the ever wonderful Marigold bouillon).  Bit of seasoning, knob of butter.  Sorted.  Turned down to low, left for an hour, stirred it, all was well.

Came down half an hour later, zapped a piece of hot smoked trout with some butter in the microwave for 90 seconds, flaked it, opened the slow cooker and … overcooked.  Ho hum.

Still, not a disaster - added the fish, lobbed in some double cream before serving, and hey presto, fennel and smoked trout kedgeree :)

I don’t know whether I cooked it too long, or there was insufficient liquid, or whether I should have put the stock in cold (there was hot water in the kettle so I used it).  But it was still very nice, and the cats enjoyed the fish skin!

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duck fail

Last weekend, Sainsburys were doing whole Gressingham ducks for £7 each - a bargain, I’m sure you’ll agree.  I hate supermarkets, and only visit one every few weeks, so I felt this offer was most timely and bore a brace of ducks home in my fair trade bags.

One went in the freezer, and one in the fridge, and we decided to do a proper Roast Duck Dinner with it yesterday.  I took it out of the fridge at lunchtime, and put it in the microwave to let it come up to room temperature (we use the microwave as a meat safe in such circumstances, as we live with five cats who love duck).

Imagine my horror when I opened the microwave later to start prepping dinner, and a vile smell emerged - the duck had gone off.  It was, admittedly, two days past its sell-by date, but that’s never bothered a duck before in my experience; I suspect it was due to the fact that it was en-gibletted.

So there went plans for four or five meals - roast, stir-fried, risotto, stock for soup, etc.  Not pleased, but my own fault, I guess.

The day continued on a food fail, when Pete went to get some apples from the big box of bramleys in the study cupboard, and we found that they’d all gone too withery to use.

Bah.

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spag bol

Pretty much everyone (apart from vegetarians, I guess) loves spag bol, and most people have their own tried and tested recipes.  We had a load of mince in the freezer, and a slow cooker needing to be experimented with, so what could be better?

We took 4lbs of best Dexter mince from the freezer, and when it had thawed, I put 1lb in the fridge to make meatballs.  The rest was browned up and set aside.

I diced three carrots, two sticks of celery and a a courgette, chopped up a big onion and 5 cloves of garlic, and sweated them down in some olive oil.

Then into the slow cooker went the mince, vegetables, a tin of chopped tomatoes, oregano, seasoning, a bouquet garni, and good sloosh of red wine.  Mindful of the imprecations about things not thickening up in there, I left it at that, fluid wise.  Also mindful of the warnings about slow cookered food not having a depth of flavour (which I find a bit baffling, but still ..), I added a teaspoon of Bovril, and a gloop of tomato ketchup.

I made this while our supper was cooking, and it was cold when we switched it on low at about 10 p.m., before we went to bed.  I went down and inspected it at 7 a.m., and it was gorgeous.  I’d say it didn’t need the Bovril at all, but Pete disagreed.

I think I’m in love with this gadget!

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I haz slow cooker!

Bought on eBay for almost exactly the sum I sold some Russell & Bromley loafers!  Been thinking about one for a while, and thought it was worth a go.

I shall be posting recipes for it (if they work!).  At the moment, we are testing it with some Indian dhal thus:

18 fl oz green lentils and 32 fl oz water bunged into pot.  One onion, and the top of last night’s leek finely sliced, fried up with chopped garlic and ginger, and spices (tumeric, coriander, cumin, cardamon seed, ajwain, allspice, black pepper, and asfetida all ground up).

Poured this spicy mixture on top of the lentils, and put the pot on Auto at about 3.45 this afternoon.  Hoping it will be ready around 7.30, and if not - well, I’ll put it in a pot on the stove.  You gotta start somewhere :)

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this week’s soup 6 jan 09 (blimey)

This is, really and truly, the last goose post for this season!

We boiled up the carcass, then put the pan in the fridge overnight so the fat would set.  I skimmed that off this morning, then magimix’d two parsnips, one leek, and a couple of carrots until they were, well, minced really.

I also decanted the stock into another pan while the main soup pan was washed up, as it was a bit greasy.

Then in everything went, with some seasoning and some pearl barley, and it’s been on the hob since about 10.30.

And now - lunchtime!

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