a real treat

We had planned a day out on Sunday, to do some City of Culture stuff, watch them take Blade out of Queen Victoria Square, have lunch. But it was raining, and we had work to do, so we didn’t. That’s the joy of self-employment, it’s either famine or feast. We have an Iceland pretty much…

pie!

We had a slow cooked joint of beef for our Christmas lunch this year, and while it was very nice, we’d had a couple of cold meals from it, and were a bit bored with it. So we made A Pie. I sautéd diced carrot, onion and courgette, and then added some mushrooms and cooked…

a piece of brisket

Another siren call from T L Norman’s chill cabinet, this small piece of brisket (maybe 1.25kg or so – I didn’t weigh it) went straight into the freezer when I bought it. I fetched it out on Saturday, and slow cookered it thus on Sunday: I seared the brisket (all in one piece) in a…

Jacob's ladder

I’ve written before about our wonderful butcher, T L Norman of Princes Avenue, Hull. They’re an old fashioned butcher, and keep a lot of stuff out the back (not unlike Hilary Briss in League of Gentlemen, now I come to consider it), but of late he has installed a chill cabinet in the shop, and it…

a load of mince

We are having the kitchen refitted  in the next few weeks. I cannot tell you how much I’m looking forward to the process, not least because I’m not. I want it to be done, obviously, but oh my … blocking up doors and knocking out walls and moving the gas points, etc. Still, it will…

beef in ginger and orange

How to turn 500g of stewing beef into six portions? Add 100g of bacon bits, a stack of butter (lima) beans, and a load of veg, thus. I used shallots in this – if you’re going to do this, they are much easier to peel if you soak them in boiling water for 10 minutes, and…

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…

reactive winemaking!

I’m getting the hang of this winemaking lark now, and I’m much more confident than I used to be.  We did our monthly trip to Makro on Saturday (first time the car had been out for a fortnight!), and they had a 5kg bag of carrots reduced to £2.30.   “Wine!”, I thought, and bore…

beef with clementines and ginger wine

There was a 3.75lb hunk of silverside in the freezer, and a tub of clementine mush (clementines that have been boiled and liquidised – I normally use them to make a cake with ground almonds). So diced and sautéed two big carrots, a courgette and two sticks of celery, together with a red onion cut…

meatballs

As my loyal reader will have noticed, we’re moving house in a few weeks.  And we have to empty the freezers.  We just about eaten our way through all the prepared meals, so now we’re starting to make inroads on the raw ingredients. For some reason, we had 3lbs of sausage meat in the freezer;…