Happy Valentine’s Day
For breakfast, I made heart shaped cranberry and orange muffins.
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Chicken and Artichoke and Mushroom Pie
This started off in our heads as a casserole but, somewhere along the line, became a pie, and a tasty pie at that.
We started off by browning the chicken and removing it from the pan, next we softened some onion, garlic, celery and carrot. Then we threw in the mushrooms (chestnut, white and another strange type that Stephen can’t remember the name of) and the peeled and halved Jerusalem artichokes. When this was all cooked down, we added some chicken stock, salt and pepper, bay and thyme and cooked it for about an hour – basically, until the majority of the liquid had disipated.
We then put it in a pie dish (the new red one, isn’t it pretty?), added a puff pastry lid (and some decorative hearts as it is almost Valentine’s Day) and baked it in the oven for about half an hour.
We served it with winter greens and peas.
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Venison Casserole
We’d been talking about cooking venison for a while, so today we did. We cooked it in a casserole with bacon, onions, mushrooms and red wine and ate it with mashed potato, winter greens and red cabbage. The casserole turned out rather well – the meat was tender with a typically venisonny (is that a word?) flavour and texture to it and the sauce had a good depth of flavour. The red cabbage on the other hand was rather too tart to eat much of – it was cooked with juniper berries, apple juice and cranberries. We left most of it behind.
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Pizza
We’d planned to make pizza on Friday night, but went to the pub instead. So, we made it on Saturday night instead. We used our normal dough recipe but, this time it was a bit doughier. Not sure why.
We topped it with the cheat’s Waitrose bruschetta topping, some really peppery salami, some artichokes and some olives and ate it on our laps while watching a DVD. It was good but next time we’re going to vary the toppings – roasted peppers and onions and maybe some tuna (for Stephen).
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Flaked Baked Salmon with Pasta and Roasted Cherry Tomatoes
Another quick dinner, this time one that we made up ourselves. We roasted the salmon with a little tomato pesto on it. Then we stirred some more tomato pesto into the cooked pasta before adding the flaked salmon, roasted cherry tomatoes, parsely and lemon juice.
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Pork Stroganoff
We cooked this last night. Really simple, really quick and really tasty. Sliced pork fillet with onions, paprika, parsely and soured cream. We served it with rice and waiting for the rice to cook was the longest wait. We’ll definitely be exploring many variations on this theme in the near future.
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Cottage Pie
Mmmmm cottage pie. Kerri assembled this yesterday and we baked it tonight. It was made with really good mince from our butcher, which had a wonderful texture and taste. We had it with some vegetables – brussels sprouts, carrots and peas. Also some gravy that I’d made which wasn’t that great – luckily we didn’t really need it.
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Venison Sausages
I got home from work (and pub) a bit late today and Kerri had cooked some venison and red wine sausages. She had also made bubble and squeak. The aroma when I arrived home was really brilliant. The sausages were tasty but had dried out a little; maybe they would be good in sausage casserole?
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Rack of Lamb with Sauteed Potatoes
Mmmm rack of lamb. Served with sauteed potatoes and a selection of vegetables – brussels sprouts, carrots and salsify. It’s the first time I’ve had salsify; not quite sure what to make of it. The lamb and potatoes were good.
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Steak and Ale Pie… and Cheese Straws
During the week Kerri ordered a lovely red pie dish. We had planned to make pie during the week, but some semi-unplanned midweek partying laid waste to those plans. So we tried it last night and were struck with some of the karma of having put it off during the week.
Steak and Ale pie it was, and the filling needed to be simmered for an hour and a half. We left the saucepan in the care of our slightly dodgy hob but the lowest setting of the smallest burner was too high and when we came back to check on it (after only an hour rather than an hour and a half), we found that it had cooked dry and half of it had burned. So we sorted through it all and cut off the burned sections of the burned bits and added some more stock, along with some parsnip in the hope that a bit of sweetness would counteract the burned taste. It tasted good in the end, but we’d lost some of the filling and that caused the pie lid to sag in the middle.
Sadly the lovely red pie dish isn’t really visible in that picture; I’ll be more attentive to such detail next time.
We made cheese straws with left-over pastry; they worked without a hitch 🙂
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