goose and bacon pie

using up: cold goose, bacon, apple juice, ready made pastry

I thought we’d seen the last of Johnny Goose, but when Pete manfully tackled the carcass after we’d boiled it up for soup, there was a fair bit left. There were other bits and pieces too, so it was deemed Pie Time.

I fried off three fat rashers of green back bacon, and a chopped onion, in a little olive oil. Put the bits in a bowl with the goose remains. Deglazed the pan with some apple juice.

Made up a vegetable stock cube with a little boiling water, and added to the pan, then mixed up a bit of cornflour and water, and bunged that in.  Added some finely chopped sage.  Cooked it down till it was a gloopy constituency and added it to the bowl.

Got the pastry out of the fridge - horror! It had gone off. Quickly whipped up some fresh - 8oz flour, 3oz trex, 1oz butter - in the Magimix, and trickled iced water in till it was the right constituency.

Made the pie in a round, shallow pyrex dish - lined it with pastry, bunged in the filling, put a top on. Baked at gas 6 for 40 minutes, with roast spuds in the top of the oven. Lovely.

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Current Mood:  cold

pasta with meatballs and courgettes

Using up:  sausagemeat

Apologies for the lack of posting - Pete and I have been laid low from the lurgy, and very little has been happening in the cooking department.  We made the last of the goose into a risotto, and then we had macaroni cheese on Wednesday - one of the best comfort foods in the world.

While rummaging through the fridge yesterday, I found some sausagemeat - not enough to turn into sausage rolls, but enough to do something with.

I turned a couple of slices of bread into breadcrumbs in the Magimix, then combined the sausage meat with enough crumbs to make a nice texture, and added some dried oregano.  Browned them off in some olive oil, then popped them in the Remoska to continue cooking while I did the rest.  I love that little gadget, and now I want a bigger one!

Chopped an onion and a few cloves of garlic, and sautéd them down in some olive oil.  Sliced up a couple of courgettes and added them to the pan, and stirred about a bit, then hurled in a tin of tomatoes and a chopped dried chilli, and a sloosh of red wine.

Left that lot to cook while I boiled some quick pasta.  When it was done, I transferred the meatballs to a casserole dish, added the pasta, then poured the tomato and veg over it, stirred it about a bit, and popped a chopped mozarella on the top, and some basil leaves.

Gas 6 / 200 for 25 minutes.  Lovely.

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thai pork stirfry

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using up: peppers, basil, mushrooms

I bought one of those pots of basil - you know, the ones that last two days then die.  This one is still going strong on the kitchen windowsill several weeks on, but it does look as though it might be starting to flag a bit now.  I love basil - so sweet and peppery at the same time.

I took half a pork fillet out of the freezer (a whole one is a bit much for two of us, so I tend to bifurcate them before freezing).

Slice it thinly across the diagonal.  Also thinly sliced one red pepper, some tired chestnut mushrooms, one shallot.  Put a lemongrass stick, four cloves of garlic and a knob of fresh ginger into the whizzer and whizzed.

Fried the pork in the wok in some groundnut oil, in batches,  and set aside.  Wiped out the wok, heated more oil, and added garlic/ginger/lemongrass, stirred around for a minute or so.  Added mushrooms/shallot/red pepper, stirred around until cooked.  Returned pork to wok, added a good splash of lime juice, ditto fish sauce, and some instant coconut milk (powdered, so you can mix up how much you need - excellent larder standby).  Cooked this through for a couple of minutes to deepen the flavours, then added cooked noodled and a handful of chopped basil.

Ate from bowls.  Followed with mince pies (well, it’s that time of year, isn’t it).

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supper with friends

We’re frantically busy at the moment, what with house reorganisation, lots of work, and kittens to attend to. The latter had us inviting four friends round for supper and a KittinFest on Saturday.

I didn’t really have time for an elaborate meal, and I knew there was a stack of pork steaks in the freezer, and pears in the fruit bowl that needed eating up, so here’s what we had:

Pork and leeks in cider and cream

Chop up some pork steaks into bite sized pieces, and brown them in a large frying pan (one that has a lid is what you need),  some olive oil and butter.  Set aside, deglaze the pan with a bit of cider and pour that in with the pork.  Add more oil, and sauté as much leek as you like.  Put the pork back in, with more cider, add some chopped sage, and season.  Put a lid on, and cook over a low heat for about 1 hour.

Then fish out all the bits, and bubble the cider right down until there’s not much liquid left.  I actually added more cider, because it didn’t taste quite apple-y enough.  Then bung in a carton of double cream, and return the meat and leeks to the pan.  This can then be heated up when your guests arrive.  Served with sauté potatoes, and carrots, cauliflower and broccoli gently steamed.

Pear and chocolate crumble with  a hazelnut topping

Peel, core and slice up pears.  I added a couple of apples too, because I didn’t have quite enough pears (I found one later in the kittens’ toy basket, which was slightly surreal).  Add a little grated fresh ginger, a tablespoon of water, and a generous, but not ridiculous, scattering of good quality chocolate chips (I get mine from Costco).  Make a crumble topping of 7 oz flour + 1 oz hazelnuts, 4 oz marge or butter, and 4 oz of sugar (whatever you like - I did a mix of soft dark brown and caster, as that’s what came first to hand.

Put the fruit in an ovenproof dish, cover with the crumble topping, bake at gas 5 for about 45 minutes.  Serve with double cream.

Nice quick supper for friends - not showy, but they ate it all :)

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stovies

using up: pot roast stock and veg

At least, that’s what we call them … it’s a Scottish dish, and a great way to use up stuff.  We did a pot roast for Sunday lunch the weekend before last (sorry, been really busy decorating, so no time to write blog posts!), and were left with a big jugful of gorgeous gravy with carrots and shallots.

Cut a couple of onions in half, and slice thinly, so you have half rings, if that makes sense.  Melt some dripping - and it has to be dripping, don’t mess about with olive oil or so forth - in a large pan, and cook the onions until they are just starting to brown.

While that’s going on, slice some potatoes fairly thinly (no need to peel), and when the onions are ready, add the spuds to the pot and turn them around so they are covered in onion-y fat.  Then add sufficient gravy to just cover, put a lid on and set on a low heat for about 35-40 minutes.  You’ll get a gorgeous potful of beefy spud, which will go beautifully with cold roast beef.  Trust me.

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egg fried rice and bits

using up: cold pot roast beef, spring onions, pepper, cucumber, broccoli

I love egg fried rice - we always have it when we have a Chinese takeaway.  Not that we’ve had a Chinese takeaway in years, but we always did.

I don’t know why I’ve never made it before - partly, I guess, because you have to have cold, cooked rice, and I never thought about it in time (like the indian lentil bread I want to make, which needs starting two days before I think “Oh, that’d be nice”). However, last week, I was organised and cooked some rice, and we had egg fried rice with a thai veg curry.  It was lovely, so I resolved to do something more interesting.  And yesterday lunchtime, I cooked some rice!

So - I cut up some (not much) of the leftover pot roast beef into slivers.  Finely chopped three cloves of garlic, and sliced a knob of fresh ginger into julienne strips.  Chopped three spring onions, one red pepper, about a third of a rather tired cucumber.  Beat two eggs in a mug with some sesame oil (about two teaspoonsful, I would say).  While I was doing all this, I steamed a few broccoli florets.

Heated some groundnut oil in the big wok, and put in the garlic, ginger, pepper, spring onions and cucumber.  Stirred round till cooked, added juice of half a lemon, broccoli, cold beef.  Stirred around till they were warmed through.

Poured in egg, and stirred it round with a chopstick - it felt more authentic, somehow. As it started to set, I added the rice, then stirred it all together furiously with a dollop of soy sauce.  It was lovely - we shall have it again!

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mushroom stroganoff

[sorry - took photo with iPhone and it didn't come out well]

Using up: half a carton of double cream, some elderly mushrooms

I was going to do a mushroom sauce for tagliatelle, and then inspiration struck!  I sent Pete out to see if there was any parsley left in the herb tubs while it was still daylight, and there was, which was good.  There’s a little bit more left, which I shall use up tonight - watch this space!

Slice an onion in half lengthways, peel, and slice into rings as thin as you can.  We did 1.5 onions which turned out to be slightly too much, so just use one big one for two of you.

Put this in a big frying pan with lots of butter and a fair amount of paprika; I didn’t measure it, but it was probably a couple of dessertspoons’ worth, at least.  Let these cook down in the butter until soft, then add in a heap of thinly sliced mushrooms, and keep stirring until they’re cooked as you like.  I added a bit of olive oil, as mushrooms as buggers for pulling the liquid out of a dish.  When done, I added the juice of half a lemon, and the cream, and a good sprinkling of black pepper.

I’m slightly ashamed to say that we always have stroganoff with chips;  oven chips, at that.  I know it’s bad and wrong, but I don’t care.  It’s fab.

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mixed game casserole

We went down to Nailsea yesterday, and the farmers’ market was on.  We came home with four beautiful faggots, and a pack of venison sausages, which have gone in the freezer.  And a loaf of stilton and walnut bread, which we had with some smoked buffalo cheese we also got there, and the remainder toasted for breakfast this morning - it went surprisingly well with marmalade!

And a pack of mixed game - venison and pheasant, mostly.  It was £5.90 for 500g; not quite enough to do four meals, but too much for two, so I immediately put 100g of lima beans into soak, and made the casserole yesterday evening, to cook slowly today for dinner.  We shall have it with dumplings, and purple sprouting broccoli.

I’ve put the recipe on Nibblous, as it’s a more “grown up” one than I normally do, and I thought it deserved it.

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corned beef hash

Having tackled some of the sprout overload on Wednesday night, we looked at the 1.5 cabbages in the fridge yesterday and thought “we really should eat some of that”.

So - cut up a couple of biggish spuds into smallish chunks, and put them in the bottom half of the steamer to boil.  Shredded not very much of a cabbage - it goes a long way, does cabbage, and put it on to steam for the last six minutes of the potato boiling.

Chopped an onion, and set it to fry in some oil - unaccountably, we have run out of dripping, both in the dripping bowl, and in a packet.  Shockingly poor housekeeping there.

Diced the contents of a small can of corned beef, and added it to the cooking onion.  Stirred these around until both onion and corned beef were soft.

Drained the veg, and added the potato - mashed it gently down into the pan with a masher so everything started to meld together, then added the cabbage and stirred everything round.  Started patting the mixture down so it would brown, which it did quite helpfully.

I ate mine with lashings of HP Sauce.  Pete had Lea and Perrins, but he’s peculiar.

Haven’t had this for ages, and had forgotten what nice comfort food it is.

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stir fried sprouts

We were approaching a glut of brussels sprouts - half a stalk in the shed, and yesterday’s veg box brought us another stalkful.  As my regular reader will notice, we’re not really “meat and two veg” eaters, so sprouts don’t tend to be something that fit easily into our cooking.

So, I experimented …

Snapped the half a stalkful of sprouts off their stalk, trimmed them, and cut them in half.  Slivered some fresh ginger and garlic, and softened that in some groundnut oil in a wok.  Added the sprouts, and cooked them for about five minutes, stirring all the while.  Then added a splash of tamari, a spoonful of runny honey, and some salted roast peanuts, and cooked for another couple of minutes.

Mixed in some noodles, and ate from bowls.  Not at all bad, although I think I would parboil the sprouts a little next time.

Sorry, no photo - didn’t come out well.

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