Lentil Ragu

Another quick, easy and familiar offering this evening. Our teeny store-cupboard is about to burst so we’re trying to use up as many things as possible, as quickly as possible. It’s not often we base a meal around what we already have in the cupboards but it’s a great way to make room for new and interesting things, it’s cheap too.

I’ve posted this recipe before but since I’ve altered it slightly this time, I’ll post it again. I usually add bacon to this but left it out and, even though I’m a firm believer in the phrase “bacon makes everything better”, this dish really is good enough without it.

1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 stick celery, chopped
2 small carrots, chopped
250g mushrooms, chopped
Large handful herbs, finely chopped (I used fresh oregano, sage, thyme and rosemary)
250g puy lentils
Salt and pepper
Nutmeg
Glass red wine
300ml vegetable stock
Worcester sauce
1.5 tins tomatoes
3 sundried tomatoes, soaked and finely chopped
Tablespoon tomato puree

Soften onion and garlic in a little olive oil. Add carrot, celery and mushrooms and soften these too. Add the herbs and cook briefly before stirring in the lentils. Once these are incorporated, season and grate in the nutmeg. Deglaze the pan with the red wine and allow the alcohol to cook out. Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil and then simmer for around 40 minutes.

Each time I make this, I make a note to add more tomatoes but forget. I think two tins are required to create more of a sauce.

We ate this with some crusty bread but it’s equally good with pasta.

Lumaconi Bolognaise

We’re going back to basics this week. After the excitement of Eating Eurovision last week and the WOM challenge yesterday, our creative juices have stopped flowing and we’re both in need of something familiar that requires little thought. This is one of the first things I learnt to cook and have been making it fairly regularly ever since, it changes each time depending on what’s at hand when I come to cook it but the basic recipe generally remains the same.

This time, I used sage, oregano, thyme and rosemary from the window-box and some sundried tomatoes that I wanted to use up; I didn’t have any red wine so used white instead.

It was really good, rich and meaty with a heady top-note from the fresh herbs. The sundried tomatoes didn’t add much in the way of flavour but they freed up some much-needed cupboard space so I’m glad I used them. The meat was particularly good and was tender and melty right from the beginning, I normally cook this down for about four hours but only needed two this time. I got it from the butcher but can’t remember where it comes from unfortunately. We enjoyed the pasta too, a variety we haven’t had before which apparantly translates as “giant snail shell”. Mmm, snails.

WOM Challenge – Two Courses for Five Pounds – Courgette Soup and Crab Spaghetti

There has been a lot of discussion over at the Guardian Word of Mouth (aka WOM) blog because some people wrote pretty scathing responses to the “Dinner for under a fiver” feature that they ran in their G2 supplement.

A lot of the criticism was based around two points: 1) the recipes were boring and 2) they didn’t account for random teaspoons or sprinkles of seasoning when calculating the cost – it might only be a teaspoon or sprinkle, but many people don’t ensure that they have some paprika on hand at all times in order to sprinkle it here or there for “no cost”.

So they set people a challenge of cooking two interesting courses for under five Pounds, so we tried it. We have taken all ingredients into account other than salt and pepper, and we have taken the whole package into account even if we only used half of it. Some of it is pretty bargain basement stuff where we couldn’t buy in smaller packages, but where possible we have bought individual items…

From Sainsburys:

tinned crab £1.99
1/2 pack spaghetti – 39p for economy pack
2 courgettes – 82p
1 white roll – 19p for a marked-down 2-pack
economy butter – 84p

From shops along the local market:

1 onion – 13p
1 bulb garlic – 25p
1 lemon – 20p
1 chilli – 10p

From our window box:

1 bunch parsely – free (this much would have cost 7p in our local deli)

Total cost: £4.98, so just snuck in there; we would have left out the bread if we hadn’t managed it.  And of course we could use fractional amounts for the butter, spaghetti, garlic and rolls and left out the parsley but wanted to cost all ingredients completely.

So, armed with these we got to work.  The first course was courgette soup and the second was spaghetti with crab, chilli and garlic.  We’ve cooked both of these to varying degrees of success before, but usually with slightly more financial freedom than this, so we had to cut a few corners.  The lemon and parsley find their way into both dishes in different ways.

Courgette soup

We usually make this in a richer style, using vegetable or chicken stock instead of water and adding cream at the end.  This is a lighter, more summery version which was cheaper and also seemed more appropriate at the moment.  It still contains a fair amount of butter though… better use vegetable oil or olive oil if your doctor is watching.

2 courgettes
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1/2 lemon, zest and juice
parsely stalks from bunch
1 white roll or slice of bread, preferably a bit stale
butter
salt and pepper

Slice or dice the onion and slice both cloves of garlic, but keep them separate.  Reserve half of one courgette and cut the rest into pieces.  Melt some butter in a saucepan and when it is hot, add the onion on a low to medium heat.  After a few minutes, add one clove of garlic and stir, still on a lowish heat – you want the onions and garlic to soften but not take on much colour.  When they are soft, add the chopped courgettes and stir around.  You want to get a little colour on the onions and the white parts of the courgettes here, just a light golden-brown sheen – you might need to turn up the heat a bit but don’t let anything burn.  When the courgettes have coloured a little, add the parsley stalks and then add just enough water to cover all of the ingredients and let it simmer until the courgettes are soft.

While that is happening, cut the reserved half of courgette into julienne sticks.  By the way, if this bit sounds like too much hassle, just chop up this half of courgette with everything else in the beginning and put it into the pot!  Then melt some butter in a frying pan and fry the courgette sticks until golden brown.

Cut the roll or slice of bread into little centimetre (half-inch) cubes.  Either in the same frying pan after the courgette stocks are done, or in a different pan, heat up some more butter on a low to medium heat and then add the other sliced garlic clove.  Stir this around for a bit and then when the garlic is starting to colour, remove it.  This will leave the butter nice and garlicky.  Turn the heat up a little and then add the bread cubes, turning them after a short while to colour as many sides as you can without letting anything burn.

Now blend the courgettes, onions and parsely to make soup.  You don’t want all of the liquid that’s in the saucepan, so if you are doing it in a standing blender, just add the solid ingredients and a dash of water and blitz them, add a little more of the cooking water if it is too thick.  If you are using a stick blender in the saucepan, pour some of the liquid out into a separate bowl first and then add it back in if needed.  Add the lemon zest and lemon juice and blend some more, then check for seasoning and add salt and pepper – we tend to add quite a lot here!

(PS just thought to give this a little more flavour, put all the cooking liquid in with the courgettes, etc, when blending and then put back into the saucepan and reduce it down a bit)

Serve into bowls, and garnish with first the courgette sticks and then the croutons.  If  you are not trying to do this for under five Pounds, add some cream or use stock instead of water, or cook some prawns and add them whole to the soup.

Spaghetti with Crab, Chilli and Garlic

A couple of years ago, we used to eat this quite often.  There aren’t that many on Dinner Diary though; we must have gone through that phase before we started blogging.  This dish needs nice extra virgin olive oil on it, but of course we couldn’t afford that in this version.  We have also tried it with fresh crab, but the delicate flavour tends to get lost if the chilli is too strong and it’s a waste.  This is a really quick dish; waiting for the spaghetti to cook is the longest part of it.

1 tin crab, drained
250g spaghetti
1 red chilli
1/2 lemon
2 cloves garlic
1 bunch parsely, leaves only
butter (or olive oil)
ground black pepper

Put on plenty of water to boil in a large saucepan and when it is boiling hard, add a little salt and put in the spaghetti.  Finely chop the chili and garlic.  In a frying pan, melt some butter (or heat oil) and fry the chilli and garlic in it, reserving a small amount of chilli.  Coarsely chop the parsley leaves.

When the spaghetti is cooked, drain it and then return it to its saucepan.  Add the garlic and chilli, along with the butter or oil in which it was cooked and most of the parsely.  Stir this well.  Add the crab to this and stir more gently so as not to break up the crab too much.  Season with pepper and a squeeze of lemon.  Serve topped with the reserved chilli and garlic.

So we made it.  The courgette soup initially didn’t seem as interesting as it should do (lack of stock and cream), but adding the lemon lifted it and saved it.  The crab spaghetti was okay, but is better with loads of good olive oil all over it.  If we remove from the total cost the left-overs of the ingredients that we didn’t completely use up, we get back over a Pound (mostly from the butter) and I’m sure that could buy us a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to put onto our spaghetti.  Maybe even a dusting of Parmesan.  Or some nicer spaghetti.

We really enjoyed doing this.  Probably went a bit overboard trying to make the courgette soup interesting with croutons, etc, within budget, but it was fun.

Sagey Roast Chicken

We’re growing some herbs in our little garden and the sage plant is threatening to strangle the poor parsley and thyme bush so we decided we ought to use some up. After the excesses of last week (particularly eating the cuisine of two different countries in one day), we were both in the mood for something simple and fairly plain. It’s Sunday and it’s raining (again) which really only left us with one option: roast chicken. We’ve not had this for a while so were both excited, particularly as we decided to try a new chicken, a Duchy Original organic chicken since we’ve been rather disappointed with the Sainsbury’s “Taste the Difference” offerings lately.

The chicken turned out well; liberally seasoned with sea-salt and pepper, loosely stuffed with garlic, lemon and sage with more sagey butter stuffed under the skin. The aromatics leant a herby note without taking over the flavour of the chicken itself.

What didn’t turn out so well was the accompanying roast potatoes, I’m not sure if this was our fault for choosing the wrong variety or whether potatoes just aren’t any good at the moment (we’ve had a lot of disappointing ones recently) but they were incredibly sweet and didn’t crisp up at all. The sagey breadcrumb stuffing wasn’t a bad replacement though and the leeks and curly kale helped to soak up the delicious gravy (this chicken came with the giblets inside which we roasted in the chicken dish with some carrots, celery and onion to give us a tasty base for the gravy).

Squid Ink Pasta with Mussels

A few days ago, my sister kindly gave us some squid ink pasta. We thought that this definitely needed to be paired with something else related to the sea. Initially we planned to have it with actual squid, but were defeated at the last hurdle in our search and ended up with mussels instead.

We followed a moules mariniere approach for the mussels and then mixed them into the pasta and served with a dollop of sour cream. The pasta was fresh tagliatelle and cooked very quickly, giving a lovely texture that was at once both firm and yielding. Every time we have fresh pasta, we love it but don’t have it very often; clearly we need to practice making it ourselves.

The squid ink gives a lovely deep, (ironically) earthy flavour to the dish. I was trying to think of a wine that would pair with this and thought that a Cava with a lot of Xarel-lo in it would be good; light and fresh tasting but with an earthy body. Unfortunately we didn’t have any and made do with a light, South African sparkling wine which turned out to be a reasonable substitute.

Eating Eurovision – Greece and Ukraine

A few weeks ago, following a very successful bloggers visit to Tayabb’s, the idea of Eating Eurovision was born. The premise was simple: could 25 food bloggers eat the cuisine of the 25 partaking countries, all within the M25, within 25 hours? This was not to be an exercise in Googling recipes and cooking the dish of your country in the comfort of your own home but an opportunity to investigate the community and converse with the locals.

So, on Thursday night, we trooped en masse to the BBC Television Centre where we sat down to watch the last semi-final and conduct the big draw. After an entertaining (although sometimes painful) couple of hours, the final nine names were announced and we got on with the business of drawing names (ping-pong balls) from a hat (trendy cotton shopping bag). We drew Greece and the Ukraine.

In Greece, we were fairly confident and our research showed us that Palmers Green was were it was at. On arrival, we were lucky enough to meet Sue at the Lefteris Bakery who told us that the bakery had been under current management for 15 years. She doesn’t live in the area anymore, having moved out to Cockfosters but confirmed that there were still a great many Greek families living locally, mostly because there were so many facilities available to them locally (we spotted a bakery, butcher, patisserie, social club and many restaurants, all within a few minutes walk of each other). After purchasing some baklava we asked Sue where she ate with her family, she recommended Spitiko which was just down the road.

On entering Spitiko, we were greeted by Andy and Stellios who, while slightly bemused, were both happy to answer our stream of questions. Stellios has been running Spitiko for nine years but has been living in the area for the last 40, having originally arrived in London to study. He explained that many Greeks have now moved away from the area; some, like Sue, moving further out to Cockfosters and Southgate but many returning to Greece. He was very proud of the restaurant and the food they served which he told us was nothing like the new stream of Greek restaurants that have opened up recently. These, according to Stellios, are all run by Greek wives who are not chefs and believe that making kebabs is all there is to Greek food. His language started to get more colourful at this point but I’ll gloss over that and tell you about the food.

Conscious of the crossover between Greek and Cypriot food, we were keen to make sure we really were eating the cuisine of our Eurovision country. Andy told us that there wasn’t really much difference between the two and that back in Greece, the cuisine was pretty similar all over the country. Not wanting to disagree, we decided on a selection of mezze, followed by one main course to share. We bravely ordered some Greek wine too which was actually fairly drinkable. We started with a familiar selection of hummus, halloumi, calamari and dolmades which was all very fresh and well cooked. The main course of lamb souvla was interesting, spit roasted lamb ribs served with roast potatoes. The meat was tenderand had taken on a wonderful smokiness from the charcoal grill.

After our big fat Greek lunch we were feeling rather sleepy, which threw our Ukrainian exploits off course a little. Conveniently, one of Stephen’s cousins has a Ukrainian girlfriend, Nataliia, who we interrogated briefly. She assured us that the “most common and best” Ukrainian food is golubtsi… more on that later.

We managed to get a bus to East Finchley on the way back from Palmers Green where we visited Dacha, which calls itself a “Russian and Ukrainian Delicatessen Shop”. We wandered in and were greeted in Russian by the lady running the shop. We smiled and nodded and said “hello”, which made her look rather surprised; it was obvious that we were the foreigners in this particular context. We started browsing, without really knowing what we were looking for, but were hoping that it would jump out at us when we found it.

There were quite a variety of foods, including frozen dumplings of various sorts, biscuits, lots of pickles and relishes and other jars, along with some freshly made, refrigerated dishes. After a few minutes of browsing, we were having trouble identifying which were Ukrainian rather than Russian (or Lithuanian or Estonian, which were mentioned on a lot of labels and would have been easier) so clearly we needed to ask the lady for some help. Or so we thought. She replied, saying “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English” in perfect English. If you don’t speak English then you probably get quite practiced at saying that particular phrase, but it can be rather odd to hear it pronounced so well. She did try to help, but we completely failed to to make ourselves understood – no amount of pointing and saying “Ukraine” was met with anything other than shrugs of incomprehension.

Luckily at this point another customer arrived and spoke Russian to the lady running the shop, so we asked her if she spoke English (which she did, thankfully) and asked if she minded translating a few things for us (which she didn’t, thankfully). Having broken through the communication barrier, we were eventually shown to several Ukrainian foods, including chocolates, biscuits on a string, and a couple of the pre-prepared, refrigerated dishes which looked promising. One of which was the golubtsi that we’d been told was the “best” Ukrainian food, so that was a breakthrough at least. Another was a very mayonnaisey olivje salad. We decided to buy some chocolates and biscuits and also ingredients to make up the olivje and golubtsi ourselves. There were a couple of curious bottles of Ukrainian dessert wine on display, but weren’t priced and we didn’t think we particularly needed it anyway, but should at least have taken a picture of them, which we didn’t.

We had planned to visit the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (located in Notting Hill) on the way home, but time had been getting away from us and the Greek food and wine was taking its toll, making us nod off on the Tube on the way. Luckily we were awake at the important changing points, so we did eventually make it home. We called the AUGB and asked them a few questions – we were put through to The Librarian who suggested that we come down to The Library and have a look at the books there for information. But we couldn’t fit that in, so not a lot of background history, sorry.

So, back to the food. For both of the dishes, recipes vary from place to place and family to family of course. The general recipe for olivje salad is fairly simple: Take cooked potato, cooked carrot, boiled egg and cooked sausage and chop these up into similarly sized pieces, roughly centimetre cubes. Add some cooked peas, mayonnaise and salt to taste. Mix together. Eat. This is similar to the Russian Salad that is always to be found on the menu in tapas bars; I’ve ordered it several times and always enjoy the first mouthful but after that find the overbearing mayonnaiseyness too much to handle. The olivje in the Russian and Ukrainian Delicatessen Shop had also been heavy on the mayonnaise, so our version probably wasn’t authentic, but I did eat the lot and rather enjoyed it.

Making golubtsi involves making a meat and rice filling, then wrapping this in cabbage leaves and stewing / steaming this in stock or tomato juice. The similarity between this and the dolmades that we’d had for lunch was not lost on us. We mixed pork mince with rice, onion, tomato paste and parsely and then wrapped this mixture in blanched cabbage leaves, cooking them in a mixture of beef stock and tomato puree. The tomato left strange-looking red lines around the golubtsi , but at least our rolling skills were just good enough for them to hold together during cooking. We were completely stuffed by this point, but just tasted a couple – they were nice but needed a bit more seasoning. And probably various accompaniments that Nataliia had told us about, e.g. sour cream, parsley and mixed salad.

We both knew a little about Greek cuisine before we embarked on Eating Eurovision but knew nothing about the Ukrainian community or their cuisine. While we didn’t manage to find out too much about how Ukranians live in the UK, we did at least learn that their food is similar to that of Russia and Latvia. Chatting to the Greek community in Palmers Green was really enjoyable and eating authentic food cooked by someone who cares is always a good thing. I’m glad we decided not to go to the Real Greek now.

One down side of all of this is that we really loved the hummus at the Greek restaurant. That doesn’t sound like a down side I know, but we tend to eat a fair amount of hummus at home and the lovely freshly made restaurant hummus was streets ahead of the supermarket hummus that we usually eat, thus effectively devaluing the pleasure from any at-home hummus-eating that we indulge in from now on. We’ll just have to start trying to make it ourselves until we can make it that well.

Wine and Cheese Tasting with Catavino

On Wednesday night, Stephen and I made the short trip to the Westbridge in Battersea for a complimentary evening of wine and cheese hosted by Charlie McVeigh (Westbridge owner and cheese provider) and Catavino (wine supplier).

It was a very informal evening and a great opportunity to meet new food and wine bloggers, the wine and cheese was pretty good too. There was a huge selection of wine on offer and, while we both made a valiant attempt at tasting all of it, we didn’t get through it all. Of those we did try, the ones that really stood out were the Chozas Carrascal sparkling wine and the Castro Martin Family Estate Albarino.  Stephen’s notes are quite detailed on the cava detailing the toast, peach and vanilla nose and the earthy, lemon and green flavours in the mouth.  My memory is less detailed but I remember the bubbles being long-lasting and there not being too much acidity (note to self: remember to leave wine write-ups to Stephen in future).

There were also a great number of cheeses but we didn’t manage to photograph them all, possibly because some arrived later in the evening after we had “tasted” a fair amount of wine. I’m certain we managed to try them all though and our favourites were the Tomette Agour Brebis du Pays (a hard sheep’s cheese from the Pays Basque) and the Tête de Moines (from the Bernese Jura), not least because of the Girole which was created especially to use with that particular cheese.

Alongside the cheese and wine, there was also some tea provided by The Rare Tea Company which I learnt was very useful in cleansing the palate in between wines. I have to admit to being a bit rubbish about tea, strong builders tea is all I really drink but it would never have occured to me that tea could be useful for anything other than being a great accompinament to toast before so this was a great lesson.

Sadly, we didn’t get the chance to eat any food from the Westbridge kitchen which might have explained the sore head the following day (as evidenced by the state of Stephen’s shirt in the first picture!). No such sore heads for the wine bloggers though who spent most of the next morning on Twitter teasing the food people for not utilising the spittoon.

Kastner and Ovens

Covent Garden isn’t particularly well known for it’s sandwich shops. I spent many a frustrated lunch time pounding the cobbled streets looking for something that wasn’t freezing cold (I’m looking at you, Pret) or covered in mayonnaise (I see you there, Marks and Spencer) until I realised that bringing in my own lunch was the only way to guarantee getting what I wanted. Until I stumbled upon Kastner and Ovens, that is.

Although better known locally for it’s hot food and fabulous cakes, they also carry a small range of sandwiches, bagels and rolls to take away which are freshly made just before the shop opens (there is one table where hungry customers can dine in but I’ve no idea how you bag that prized spot).

I used to subscribe to their daily email alert which would arrive around 10am telling me what was available for lunch that day. It was both a pleasure and a chore to read about their tagine, fish pie and casserole when all I had to look forward to was last night’s leftovers. Lasagne day was always the most challenging whereby I’d spend hours deliberating on whether to throw my planned lunch away and join the queue at 12pm sharp to guarantee my serving of meaty, cheesey goodness. There’s always a queue, even when it’s raining.

So, when Jonathan asked me if I wanted to take part in British Sandwich Week, I jumped at the chance and immediately thought of K&O, even though I don’t work in the area any more.

I’m a big fan of sandwiches but I’m also very fussy about them. The bread needs to be crusty, I like butter not margarine, a little salad is good, mayonnaise is very bad. I don’t like too many things happening in the sandwich and the bread to filling ratio is important.

Making my choice today was difficult, not because I wasn’t keen on the options but because I couldn’t make up my mind. I knew I was looking for a typically British sandwich which quickly ruled out the salami but should I go for beef or salmon? I went with the salmon in the end because the bread looked crunchier and I wasn’t disappointed. The bread was indeed crunchy and there was plenty of sweet, smoked salmon, just enough cream cheese and exactly the right amount of crunchy cucumber. For £3, it seemed like good value and it was definitely very fresh and much more exciting than anything else that was on offer nearby.

The Ultimate Chilli Con Carne

We’ve been using a variation of the same recipe for a long time, it’s a good dish but I always end up thinking it could be improved. Talking with a friend last week about the very same thing led to a huge chilli craving so, after some research, I thought I’d try some new ingredients and a different method.

4 tbsp olive oil
1 large habanero chilli, roasted, deseeded and pulped
4 garlic cloves, roasted and then pulped
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp chipotle chilli powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp smoked paprika
Glass red wine
1 large onion, finely chopped
500g lean minced beef
600ml beef stock
400g tin chopped tomatoes
2 tbsp tomato purée
Salt and pepper
Bay leaf
500g mixed beans
1 tsp cocoa powder

I started off by roasting the chilli and garlic in the over for about 30 minutes, on 190 degrees, before leaving them to cool down. Remove the seeds from the chilli and squash together with the garlic (I picked up this tip from Helen, thanks!.

At the same time, I roasted the coriander and cumin in a frying pan on a low heat, for about 10 minutes. Once they had cooled, I ground them up in the mortar and pestle and transferred them to a bowl where I mixed them with the other powdered spices.

While both these things were happening, I was also cooking the beans (soaked overnight) for 20 minutes, softening the onions with some salt and browning the seasoned meat. Lots of multi-tasking and many pots!

Once all the preperation was done, I started to put the dish together. So, I added the garlic and chilli pulp to the softened onions and let it cook together for a couple of minutes. Into this mixture went the powdered spiced which also cooked for a couple of minutes. I deglazed this mixture with some red wine and cooked for, yes, another couple of minutes.

Next, in went the browned meat, followed by the stock, tomatoes, tomato puree, more seasoning, the bay leaf, more seasoning and the beans. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for three hours. After two and a half hours, add the cocoa powder. Cool, refrigerate and serve the next day.

We were both impressed with the way this turned out, it was hot but not so hot that the flavours didn’t all come through. It’s hard to tell exactly what made such a difference, since I’d used both different ingredients and a different method but I’ll definitely stick to this recipe in future. There was a strong, smoky flavour throughout the dish which is something that had been missing previously, adding the cocoa powder just before the end really seemed to help with the richness too. It didn’t add a sweetness which I would have liked, perhaps upping the cinammon would help next time.

Slow Roasted Shoulder of Mutton

On a recent trip to the Real Food Festival at Earl’s Court, we did manage to find a few interesting things in between pushing through crowds, avoiding random things in jars and being irritated by argumentative ladies selling wine. One of these interesting things was a rolled shoulder of mutton, which we bought as we had been talking about cooking mutton for a quite a while but hadn’t happened across any. The mutton was from Elan Valley in Wales and they also had a few other cuts, along with some “mutton ham” which I was keen to taste, but we had to evacuate the area before I managed to do so due to a stampede of baby strollers heading our way.

We had a quick look around the interwebs for a recipe and found this one by Mark Hix. Mark Hix is a decent chef and specialises in British food, both traditional and modern, so we figured he probably knows what he’s talking about when it comes to mutton. Something in this recipe must have been lost in translation (from English to English?) or we just got it completely wrong, because it turned out a bit strangely.

We started off by browning the meat as specified; that was easy. Then chopped the specified huge amount of onions and made up the specified huge amount of chicken stock, which are thickened with butter and flour to make a sauce. The meat goes into a casserole dish and this sauce is poured over it. I don’t know if we had the shoulder of a particularly diminutive sheep, but it just looked like it was swimming in chicken soup when we did this.

Anyway, into the oven it went for two hours. The recipe said to turn the meat every half hour, which we did, but I don’t think we really needed to as it was almost completely submerged the whole time. After the two hours, we took the meat out and let it rest while we reduced the sauce down a bit and seasoned and added the chopped chives to it. We sliced the mutton and served it with mashed potato and spring greens.

Now I rather liked the taste and texture of the mutton and thought that part worked pretty well. However, it you had any of the sauce with it then it tasted exactly like mutton that had accidentally fallen into a chicken casserole and there were no two ways about this. Which I’m sure wasn’t the intention of the recipe. So I’m not sure where we went wrong and I’ve gone over the recipe again to see if we got any ingredients and/or quantities wrong, but it all seems to be in order. Needless to say, next time we happen across some mutton (hopefully under less harried circumstances), we’ll cook it differently.

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