Carbonnade of Beef
We ate carbonnade of beef when we were in Brussels and immediately vowed to make it when we got home since it was so good. We had a whole day at home today which was lovely and while we wanted to spend some time in the kitchen, neither of us wanted to be in there for hours so this was the perfect dish. It takes a little bit of work to begin with but then it just sits there happily, simmering away and making the house smell really good.
I did quite a lot of research beforehand and found most of the recipes to be quite similar. There was a lot of discussion over whether to add the traditional slice of gingerbread spread with mustard for the last hour of cooking and while this appealed to me, it would have meant changing out of my pyjamas to go to the shop and it wasn’t that kind of day. We improvised by adding some all-spice at the beginning and a spoonful of mustard on top of some white bread towards the end instead.
It was a triumph. For something so simple and with relatively few ingredients, there was a huge amount of flavour going on. The beer added a savoury, rounded note that was far less fruity and sweet than it would have been had we used red wine instead. We served the beef with the traditional accompaniment of stoemp, which is mashed potato with vegetables. We used carrot, cabbage and leek. The leek contrasted very well with the savoury beef and lifted the whole dish. Belgian frites are the alternative accompaniment and are what we ate in Belgium, I preferred the stoemp though.
Carbonnade of Beef
Serves Two
Flour
Salt and Pepper
Oil
500g beef shin
Two rashers of bacon, finely sliced
Two white onions, finely sliced into half-moons
Salt and pepper
330ml Belgian beer
300ml beef stock
3 sprigs thyme
One teaspoon all-spice
Two bay leaves
Two small slices white bread spread with Dijon mustard
Start by seasoning the beef well with salt and pepper. Add some oil to a large pan and brown the meat in batches over a medium heat. Remove to a plate. Deglaze the pan with some water or beef stock and add that to the beef.
In the same pan, cook the bacon until the fat has rendered. Remove from the pan and add to the beef.
In the same pan, add some more oil, turn the heat to low and brown the onions. You want them to be dark and sticky which will take about 30 minutes. When they’re cooked, stir in a tablespoon of flour and cook for a couple of minutes.
Return the beef and the bacon to the pan with the onions, season, add the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil, reduce the heat and allow to simmer for two hours.
Remove the lid, add the mustardy bread and cook for 30 minutes to one hour. Check for seasoning and serve.
Fish Friday (Prawns followed by Ray, Cockles and Chestnut Mushrooms)
Fish Friday isn’t a regular occurence in our house. If I’m honest (and I’m getting this in quickly while my mum is without Internet access) it tends to be more about Fizz on a Friday in our house. Don’t worry, we didn’t go thirsty and there was indeed sparkling wine but Stephen also went to a huge amount of effort to cook all this food after a long and miserable week for which I was very grateful.
We started with prawns which were cooked simply in garlic butter and which we ate with some really good wholemeal bread. Prawns used to be one of my favourite foods but for reasons I’m sure you can work out yourself and don’t need me to go into any detail on a food blog, I went off them for a while. These reminded me of why I used to love them so much though since they were beautifully sweet and cooked to just the right level of doneness.
The prawns were followed by ray with cockles and chestnut mushrooms inspired by a Mark Hix recipe for ray with periwinkles and ceps from his British Seasonal Food book. The ray wings were huge and neither of us managed to finish them but they were delicious nonetheless. I find the combination of fish and mushrooms slighty challenging. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the texture, but the flavours certainly worked well especially since the ray has a sweetness that is balanced by the woody mushrooms. We ate this with some crushed potatoes and purple sprouting brocolli which were good but largely ignored due to the enormousness of the fish.
Happy Friday!
Mexican Corn Salsa
The corn in Sainsbury’s was only 30p a head last weekend so we bought some. I keep reading about how cheap it is at the moment but I haven’t been food shopping for ages so hadn’t noticed it myself. This was indeed a bargain but I didn’t have a plan for it. Not so much of a bargain if it ends up in the bin so we boiled it up and turned it into a salsa. We’ve done this a few times before but this was definitely the best attempt so far. For dinner, we ate it with some refried beans and wraps but the leftovers were especially good stirred into salad the next day.
Mexican Corn Salsa
Serves Two
Two heads corn
Half a red onion, finely diced
Large handful of chopped coriander
One red chilli, finely diced
One avocado finely diced
Salt and pepper
Juice of half a lime
Cook the corn for about six minutes, or until cooked through. Leave to cool.
Combine with the other ingredients and reserve until needed. This is best made a little way in advance so that the flavours have time to combine.
Tomato and Mozarella Pasta
We met up with a friend for lunch yesterday and while waiting for him, popped into a small Italian deli for some coffee. I love the unusual pasta shapes you can find in these kinds of places and managed to limit myself to buying just two. This type is called caserecci and has a great rough texture that really encourages sauce to cling to it.
We picked up some mozarella while we were there which we added to a tomato sauce flavoured with capers and olives, a little like puttanesca but without the richness that comes from the anchovies. It worked quite well but was a bit soupy in consistency. Next time we’ll leave the juice from the tomatoes behind. We’ll also need to tear the cheese into smaller pieces so that I don’t have to think up excuses to make Stephen leave the table so I can steal from his plate.
Burgers
First of all, I should probably point out that we’re not dead. And apologise to those people who have emailed us to check that the mystery dinner wasn’t the end of us after all. We’ve just been busy. Again.
This was actually last Friday night’s dinner, eaten on our laps in front of the TV. It was the opposite of what he had planned for the evening (a trip to the Tate Modern for a small amount of culture followed by dinner in the restaurant) but was exactly what we needed at the end of another long week.
The burgers weren’t as good as usual and we realised afterwards that this was because we normally cook them on the barbecue. The crunchy outsides and charcoal flavour that comes from outdoor grilling was noticeably absent and served as another reminder that Autumn is definitely here. That doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t barbecue, it just means that I need to hunt Stephen’s raincoat out of storage and remind him to do the right thing next time he suggests burgers for dinner.
Mystery Dinner
We have a blackboard in our kitchen that lists the items in our freezer. Sounds a bit anal I know but, even though it’s a really small freezer, I’ve becoming pretty good at filling it full of stuff. We have a selection of different sized freezer bags to use in said freezer, the type that has a handy space to list what’s in the bag. Alongside the freezer bags, there are various permanent markers in the kitchen drawer for doing the listing. All sounds very organised doesn’t it? And it would be, if I remembered to write on the bags and update the chalk board.
Which is how we came to find ourselves sitting down to something we had to look up afterwards to find out what it was. I had meant to defrost the mystery bag this morning but forgot so, when Stephen got home he took the bag out of the freezer and started to slowly heat it through. Thinking it was bolognaise sauce, he put some pasta on to boil too. It smelt like bolognaise sauce to me too but then I looked at it and wondered if it might be leftover lamb rogan josh, since the texture of the meat seemed more lamb-like. It didn’t smell like curry though so we served it up with the pasta and tasted it. Not a particularly strong flavour, possibly veal? Really not sure, until I checked back through the archives and realised it was probably lamb ragu. From January.
It tasted alright and I’m sure it won’t kill us but if I’d known it was so old I wouldn’t have eaten it. Needless to say, the chalk board is all up-to-date now.
Slow Roast Shoulder of Lamb – The Leftovers
The best thing about cooking a half shoulder of lamb for just two people? The leftovers.
You don’t need a recipe for this: just heat up a wrap, add some hummus or tzatziki (or both), some salad and the lamb, roll it up and eat.
Slow Roast Shoulder of Lamb – Moroccan Style
Due to our successes with slow roasting a shoulder of lamb with garlic and rosemary, we thought we would try a different slant on it this weekend and give it a Moroccan style treatment. We had half a shoulder and the evening before cooking it, we rubbed it with a spice mix and left it in the fridge overnight before cooking in the usual way. It worked brilliantly, giving the same succulent, deeply flavoured lamb except this time it had a spicy crust and aroma. We served it with couscous and turlu turlu (which is a roasted vegetable dish from the Moro cookbook).
Slow Roast Shoulder of Lamb Moroccan Style, serves 6:
Spice mix:
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tsp sweet paprika
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp ground fennel seeds
1/2 tbsp turmeric
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1 whole shoulder of lamb
1 whole bulb garlic (2 if you love garlic!)
1 preserved lemon, mostly rind, finely chopped
Half a handful of olives, coarsely chopped
400ml chicken stock
Small bunch coriander leaves, roughly chopped
Smaller bunch mint leaves, finely chopped
The day before you plan to cook the lamb, prepare the spice mix by mixing together all of the spices. Score the skin of the lamb shoulder lightly and then rub it all over with the spice mix, working it well into the meat. Wrap the shoulder tightly in foil or cling film and refrigerate it overnight.
On the day of cooking, preheat the oven to 150C. Break up the garlic bulbs into individual cloves, but no need to peel the cloves. Sprinkle half of the garlic into the bottom of a lidded casserole big enough to hold the lamb shoulder. If you don’t have one big enough then you can do it in a roasting dish and cover it with foil. Unwrap the lamb shoulder and place it on top of the garlic cloves, then sprinkle the rest of them on top of the lamb. Put into the oven for 3.5 to 4 hours with the lid (or foil) on. There is no real need to babysit the lamb, it will quite happily cook itself slowly, but it’s fun to check on it now and then as you can smell the delicious spices drift through the kitchen.
When the lamb is cooked, remove the casserole dish from the oven and remove the lamb shoulder to a large plate and cover it with foil to keep it warm while it rests. Be careful when moving the lamb, you might need to get a large spatula underneath it to prevent it from falling apart. Take the roasted garlic cloves out of the casserole and put them onto a plate, then squeeze the delicious roasted garlic out of the skins. Pour most of the oil out of the casserole, then put it onto the hob on a medium heat and add stock and the roasted garlic pulp. Bring the stock to a simmer, scraping the bottom of the casserole with a wooden spoon as you do so, to mix in all of the delicious lamby bits.
Then add the chopped preserved lemon skin and the olives, the coriander leaves and the mint leaves. Let it simmer for a while, stirring often. The lemon should add both a sourness and a bitterness to the sauce, to balance out the herbs and the sweetness of the caramelised lamb juices from the casserole. You can thicken it if you like, but we generally don’t. Check and season with salt and/or pepper before serving.
Then pull the lamb apart with a couple of forks and serve with the sauce and whatever else seems appropriate – we went with barley couscous and “turlu turlu” roasted vegetables and chickpeas. Delicious!
Turlu Turlu
Serves Two
2 courgettes, sliced
1 aubergine, sliced into wedges
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1 green pepper, sliced
1 large carrot, sliced into wedges
Oil
1/4 tsp allspice
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 large tin chickpeas
75ml passata
Handful parsley
Handful coriander
Salt and pepper
Mix all the vegetables apart from the courgettes together with the oil, garlic, spices and salt and pepper. Spread onto a baking tray and cook in a pre-heated oven (220 degrees) for 45 minutes, turning every 15 minutes. Add the courgettes and cook for another 15 minutes.
Heat the pasatta and chickpeas together and then stir in the cooked vegetables, Season, add the herbs and serve.
Mexican Corn Soup
I spotted some pancetta bones for sale at Union Market a little while ago and thought they would be brilliant for adding flavour to soups and casseroles. It was mid July at the time and definitely not soup or casserole weather but the seasons seemed to have changed very quickly this year and, almost without warning, it’s time to embrace the colder evenings and get down to some Autumnal cooking. This isn’t something that fills me with much pleasure, I don’t like the colder months and try to hang on to Summer for as long as I can. The one thing which makes that transition a little easier is the arrival of different produce and the opportunity to start cooking all those things that you’ve been craving but don’t want to eat when it’s hot outside.
It might just be coincidence but the arrival of the cooler weather has coincided with my feeling like I’ve got a cold coming so I thought some chilli would be a good way to clear my head. The chilli oil from this Mexican soup was really good so I made some of that while the pancetta bones were boiling away and becoming stock.
The result was pretty good: the pancetta bones had made plenty or richly flavoured porky stock which formed the base of the soup and was echoed in the bacon we added at the end. There was fresh chilli cooked with the garlic and onions as well as dried chillies in the oil which, alongside lots of freshly ground cumin, provided a good counterpart to the super-sweet corn and it all worked together to form a cohesive dish. I would have preferred slightly less sweetness though and shouldn’t have allowed the onions to caramelise or used the sweet cure bacon which can add too much sweetness. Not a bad way to welcome Autumn although I couldn’t help thinking I would have preferred that corn hot from the barbecue, eaten outside with some chilli butter.
Mexican Corn Soup
Serves Two (with a little left over for lunch)
4 rashers bacon, diced
3 heads of corn, hulled
1 onion, finely diced
1 red chilli, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon cumin
1 litre stock
Start by frying the bacon until the fat has rendered. Remove from the pan and blot on some kitchen paper.
In the same pan, fry the corn for about five minutes, or until soft. Remove from the pan and blot on some kitchen paper.
Add some more oil to the pan if necessary and add the onion. Cook for about five minutes before adding the chilli and garlic. Cook for another couple of minutes.
Next, add the cumin, stir and cook for about two minutes.
Add the corn back to the pan, pour on the stock, bring to the boil, reduce the heat and cook for 10 minutes.
Remove from the heat, blend until smooth, add the bacon and serve with the chilli oil.
Chilli Oil
2 dried chillies (I used ancho, the book specified pasilla), stemmed and seeded
Olive oil
1/2 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon oregano
Salt
Cut the chillies into 1/8 inch slices. Heat the oil over a medium heat, add chillies and the oregano and stir for 1 minute. Remove from the heat and add the vinegar, 1.5 tablespoons of water and a little salt. Leave to stand for half an hour, stirring occasionally.
Mussels with Garlic and Cream
We ate mussels in Brussels. Obviously. If you like mussels then that’s one of the reasons to go to Brussels. There’s beer too of course and chocolate but the mussels are excellent; at least the ones that we had were. When we were in the restaurant waiting for our mussels, we realised that the way that they cooked them was different to the way that we usually cooked ours.
Most recipes that we’ve seen say to soften your onions, celery, garlic, etc, then add some wine or stock and then add the mussels and remove the pot from the heat as soon as all the mussels have opened. In the restaurant, they seemed to leave the mussels on a lot longer than that and they had been delicious, so we thought we would give it a go. Also, Kerri had ordered hers with garlic and cream, and they added both of these at the end of cooking.
So we softened a little finely chopped onion and some coarsely chopped celery and then added some white wine and fish stock. When the alcohol had cooked off the wine, we seasoned with a little black pepper and added the mussels. Then we put the lid on, turned the heat right down and waited for 15 minutes. While the mussels were cooking, we briefly fried some finely chopped garlic in a little oil and then added double cream. When the mussels were done, we added this garlic and cream mixture to them and stirred.
Mussels with frites are obviously very good, but we thought that bread would be very useful to soak up the sauce and we were right. The mussels themselves were tender and delicious and hadn’t dried out from the extended cooking time. Certainly the way that we’ll cook mussels next time we have them.
