Rabbit and Leek Pie
Apparently, this week is British Pie Week. I don’t usually pay much attention to this kind of thing but, stuck for something to eat tonight, it was a welcome suggestion. I had it all worked out and had researched my recipe idea thoroughly but, when I got to the shop, they didn’t have the ingredients I needed. I find my mind tends to go blank in these situations and I end up wandering around aimlessly, I managed to avoid this today though when I spotted some some rabbit.
We’ve cooked with rabbit a couple of times and had mixed resutls, the rabbit pappardelle was one of my favourites of my last year though and it definitely benefitted from a long, slow cooking. Perfect for pie filling then!
I cooked the rabbit in a pretty similar way to chicken casserole, with just a few tweaks, and then let the filling reduce right down before adding it to the pie dish and topping it with puff pastry. It turned out brilliantly: the meat was tender and moist and the tangy mustard leant itself well to the sweetness of the rabbit and sherry. Served with more mustard in the shape of mustardy mashed potatoes and some crunchy, green cabbage.
Ingredients:
Flour
Salt and pepper
1 rabbit, boned and diced
125g lardons
2 leeks, chopped
1 carrot, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
125ml sherry
Heaped tablespoon Dijon mustard
250ml chicken stock
20 thyme leaves
1 bay leaf
Pastry (I cheated and used ready-rolled)
black onion seeds (optional)
Start by tossing the rabbit pieces in the seasoned flour and then browning in batches. Remove browned rabbit to a plate and set aside.
In the same pan, fry off the lardons until the fat has rendered and add to the browned rabbit.
Next, soften the leek, carrot and celery for about 10 minutes. Then add the garlic and cook for a further two minutes.
Add the rabbit and lardons back to the pan, deglaze with the sherry and then add the rest of the ingredients. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 2 hours (longer if you have time).
Once the rabbit has cooked through, the sauce should have reduced to a thick, syrupy liquid. If it hasn’t then turn up the heat and allow the liquid to bubble until it has thickened.
Add the contents of the saucepan to your pie dish, top with the pastry, brush with an egg (and sprinkle with the onion seeds if using) and then cook until the pastry has browned (about 25 minutes).
Serve!
Fish and Prawn Soup with Haricot Beans and Paprika
I’m finding it really difficult to get excited about fish at the moment, I don’t know if it’s because it’s been cold lately but when I’m trying to think of something for dinner, fish just doesn’t seem to appeal. I’m hoping that will change as the weather warms up and, with a slight nod in that direction, today we came up with this. It was very easy, the only difficult thing being remembering to soak the beans which, as usual, I forgot until this morning. They managed about seven hours of soaking before I boiled them rapidly for half an hour and then transferred them into the main dish and simmered for a further hour and a half. Not a bad workaround.
For something relatively simple and easy to put together, it was a pretty good dish. We used cod but both felt that something firmer like monkfish would have been better. The prawns were a good addition though, the sweet flesh working well with the heat of the paprika…quite a lot of paprika as it turns out, since my hand slipped!
1 onion, sliced
1 red pepper, sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
Tablespoon paprika
100ml dry sherry
100g haricot beans
250ml chicken stock
Salt and pepper
Tablespoon sundried tomato paste
250g white fish
2 large prawns
Tablespoon chopped parsley
Gently soften the onion in some olive oil and some salt for about five minutes before adding the pepper. Contine to sautee for another five minutes and then add the garlic. Cook for another five minutes. Stir in the paprika.
Deglaze the pan with the sherry and let it bubble for a couple of minutes until it’s almost evaporated. Stir in the beans, add the stock and the tomato puree and then season with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, reduce and simmer until the beans are tender (this took 1.5 hours for us but we used fresh beans, timings would vary if you used tinned).
Once the beans are cooked through, add the fish and cook for about four minutes (dependant on size, of course). Stir in the chopped parsley and serve.
We ate it on it’s own but it was crying out for some crusty bread. Chorizo would have been a brilliant addition too.
Khmer Chicken Samla with Coconut Milk
This is one of the first Thai dishes I ever ate, cooked by Stephen’s sister. I really enjoyed it and they subsequently bought us the book they found the recipe in: Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet by Jeremy Alford and Naomi Dugold. We’ve cooked it ourselves but neither of us remembered that until we started cooking.
Friday’s chicken kiev left us with two thighs and two legs; this coincided with the opening of a new, local Thai supermarket which we were both keen to visit. We bought the rest of the ingredients yesterday morning and Stephen spent a lot of time with the mortar and pestle when we got home!
I still like it as much as I did when I first had it, it’s described as being somewhere between a curry and a soup and I’d say that was a fairly accurate description. Making the paste is time consuming but the end result definitely benefits from it, I haven’t seen this kind of paste ready-made anyway.
Curry Paste
6-10 stalks lemongrass
2 small wedges wild lime, mostly peel
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh turmeric
Several pinches salt
3 tablespoons minced galangal
10-12 tiny mauve Asian shallots
10 medium to large cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
4 Thai dried red chillies, soaked in warm water until softened
2 tablespoons shrimp paste
2 whole chicken legs, chopped into 3 pieces each
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 cups coconut milk, divided into 1 1/2 cups thinner milk and 1 1/2 cups thicker milk
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon sugar
Remove tough outer skin from lemongrass and discard, slice lemongrass finely.
Place the lime and turmeric into a mortar and pestle with a pinch of salt and pound to a paste.
Add a third of the lemongrass and contuinue pounding. Gradually add the rest of the lemongrass and continue to pound.
Add the shallots and garlic and continue to pound to a smooth paste.
Remove to a bowl.
Cut the chillies open, remove the seeds and pound in the mortar and pestle. Add to the lemongrass paste.
Spread the shrimp paste onto foil, fold into a parcel and place in a hot frying pan for 3-4 minutes. Add the toasted paste to the curry paste.
Heat up the wok, add oil and stir in the curry paste. Cook until fragrant and aromatic. Add the chicken pieces, coat in the paste and cook for 7-10 minutes. Add the thinner coconut milk, salt and sugar and bring to the boil. Boil gently for 10 minutes.
Add half of the thicker coconut milk, bring to the boil, simmer for 20 minutes half-covered. Add the remaining coconut milk and simmer for a further 10-15 minutes until the chicken is tender.
Serve with rice.
Dulce de Leche Brownies
After Tuesday night’s pancakes, we were left with rather a lot of leftover Dulce de Leche. As nice as it is to eat straight from the fridge with a spoon, we both felt it deserved a more fitting end so we decided to use it to make chocolate brownies. I first came across this recipe last summer when we had our Mexican barbecue and it’s been filed away in the dessert category of my head ever since.
It was a very easy recipe to follow and the results were good: crunchy outsides with a dense, sticky middle which was intensified by the sticky, caramel like texture of the Dulce de Leche. Just as brownies should be.
Chicken Kiev
Chicken Kiev has become something of a byword for outdated, retro-but-not-cool food along with prawn cocktail and similar dishes that were once considered the height of fashion but have since fallen from grace. It’s a shame really, as when they are done well, they can be very good. I used to like chicken kiev when I was younger, but I’m sure that most of the ones that I ate were frozen, reconstituted-chicken versions that I shudder at the thought of eating now.
However all is not lost, since with a decent recipe, some good ingredients and a measure of determination, it is of course perfectly possible to create a really good chicken kiev the way it should be. (After all that ranting, for those who don’t know what chicken kiev is, it is a breaded chicken breast stuffed with a herb-and-garlic butter.)
This is a somewhat adapted recipe… the one that we originally found specified tarragon but we didn’t have that so we used parsely instead.
Ingredients:
2 large chicken breasts (you need to cut a pocket into them, which is difficult if they are small)
1 egg, beaten
plain flour
bread crumbs
oil for frying
salt and pepper
For the butter:
2 small to medium garlic cloves, crushed
juice of half a lemon
a tablespoon of so of finely chopped parsely (if you are using tarragon which is stronger, use less)
125g butter
salt and pepper
Method:
Pre-heat your oven to 180C. Leave the butter to soften a bit if it has been in the fridge. I put ours in the oven for a bit and left it in for too long and it started to melt and then had to cool it down for it to harden up again. So don’t do that. Mix in the garlic, parsely, lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Stir it together well.
If your chicken breasts have skin on them, remove it. Carefully cut a slit into the side of the chicken breasts and create a little pocket inside them. Stuff these pockets with as much of the butter as you can. Fold the skin back over and if it’s not quite holding together, secure with a toothpick.
Season the flour with salt and pepper, then coat the stuffed chicken breasts in it. Then coat them in the beaten egg mixture and finally coat them with the breadcrumbs. Heat up a little oil in a frying pan and brown the breaded chicken breasts on both sides. If the frying pan is oven-proof them pop it straight into the oven. If not, then put them onto a baking tray (make sure it has highish sides though as butter may melt out and spill otherwise).
After 20 to 25 minutes, they should be golden on the outside, cooked through and lovely and buttery and garlicky on the inside. A lot of the butter cooked out of ours; we’re coming up with ways to prevent that happening in the future.  And of course beware of the toothpicks when eating!
We served ours with some mashed potato and broccoli and it didn’t matter whether or not they were cool or contemporary because they were delicious.
Lamb Chops Provencale with Ratatouille
After a brief Messenger conversation this afternoon we decided on lamb chops provencale, mainly because we had lamb chops in the fridge and we have enjoyed cooking crumbed cuts of meat in the past. Ratatouille sounded like a very good accompaniment to lamb chops provencale, as did sautéed potatoes, so we cooked both.
For the lamb chops, we used this recipe. It worked quite well, except we should have trimmed the chops a bit better before coating them as it’s difficult to avoid the fatty bits when they’re all covered in crumbs and you can’t see them. For the ratatouille, we followed Delia’s recipe. Kerri was cooking this when I arrived home and the aroma was very welcoming when I walked in the door. We did our usual style of sautéed potatoes.
Pancakes!
Last year, a friend of Stephen’s brought us back a tin of Dulce de Leche from Argentina and it’s been sitting in our cupboard ever since, very much like those bottles of wine that are given to you as gifts and are too good for every day drinking. Tonight felt like the perfect time to crack open the tin and
As good as we knew it would be, we realised we weren’t going to be able to eat the whole tin so decided on some other flavours:
– Lemon and vanilla sugar (this was more by luck than anything, I went all Jamie Oliver at some point and stuck some old vanilla pods in a jar of sugar)
– Rosewater and orange syrup (the orange syrup has been in the fridge since we made candied orange peel from the leftover marmalade peels)
– Orange syrup and ice-cream (this is taking up valuable space in the freezer and isn’t all that good)
All the combinations worked well, the Dulce de Leche was just as good as we knew it would be, but I think the traditional lemon and sugar was the winner.
Leek, Pancetta and Yellow Pea Soup
Neither of us really put much thought into tonight’s dinner because it was really just a prelude to the real point of the evening: pancakes. As I wandered around Waitrose earlier though I realised that I should make some kind of effort to feed us with something other than sugar and decided on leek soup.
Leek soup would of course be vegetarian though and that really wouldn’t do, luckily the fridge was well stocked with bacon products so in went some pancetta too. As with most soup recipes, I mostly made it up as I went along but it went something like this:
One small packet pancetta
2 leeks, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
200g split peas (or any kind of lentils)
300ml vegetable stock (chicken would probably be better)
Salt and pepper
Parsley, finely chopped
Single cream
Brown pancetta and remove from the pan.
Sautee sliced leeks until soft, add garlic and cook for another couple of minutes.
Add the pancetta back to the pan, throw in the lentils and make sure they are well coated.
Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil and then simmer for 45 minutes.
Add parsley (I forgot) and cream (I forgot) and serve.
Stephen really enjoyed it, I thought it needed some work. The parsley, chicken stock and cream would be a start.
Spicy Lentils with Chorizo
I spotted some Brindisa cooking chorizo in my local deli last week and picked it up without having a definite plan for it. It’s been calling to me every time I open the fridge and today, with nothing else planned for dinner, it was a welcome addition to the fridge. I started wondering how it would work with lentils but a quick search online didn’t throw up anything interesting. A friend came to the rescue with a recipe not unlike the lentil ragu we’ve cooked before so I took some elements from both.
6 mini cooking chorizo, sliced (next time I’ll crumble these instead)
1 onion, chopped
1 red chilli, finely chopped (not necessary)
Tablespoon paprika (increase to two tablespoons if not using chilli)
200g lentils (increase to 250g)
200ml beef stock
Splash dry sherry
Small tin tomatoes
Squirt tomato puree
Gently fry off the chorizo until browned and remove from the pan.
In the same pan, sweat the onions with some salt until soft, add the garlic and chilli and cook for a further minute.
Next, stir in the paprika and the lentils and make sure everything is well coated.
Deglaze with the sherry.
Add the rest of the ingredients (including the reserved chorizo), bring to the boil, reduce heat and cook for 45 minutes.
We ate this with toast which worked well but wasn’t entirely necessary. We both enjoyed it but I think the amendments I’ve noted above would definitely improve the dish.
Toad In the Hole
We spent the weekend at my mum’s and she had planned sausages and mashed potatoes for dinner last night, it turned out to be a busy day though so we opted for fish and chips instead. That left us with a surplus of sausages which Stephen and I brought home with us and turned into toad in the hole.
It was really good, we browned the sausages before adding them to the hot batter and then cooked the whole thing for about 40 minutes. Served with onion and madeira gravy. Mashed potatoes would have been brilliant but we settled for some cauliflower and brocolli instead.
Batter
170g plain flour
1 tsp salt
300ml cold milk
150ml cold water
3 eggs, beaten
Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl (do it a couple of times). In another large bowl, mix together all the other ingredients and then slowly add to the flour while whisking.
Brown the sausages in a frying pan. Put a few tablespoons of oil into a large roasting dish and put it into a pre-heated oven to as high a temperature as your oven will allow. When the oil is hot, add the sausages and the batter and cook until the batter has risen and is brown and crispy. Our oven only goes up to 200 so we cooked ours for about 45 minutes.
Onion and Madeira Gravy:
1 medium onion, finely sliced
150ml rich madeira (or cream sherry)
150ml dry red wine
250ml beef stock
1tbsp vegetable oil
1tbsp flour
red wine vinegar (or white wine vinegar or cider vinegar or any other vinegar that you have to hand)
Add the vegetable oil to a saucepan on medium heat. When it has heated up, add the onions. Stir occasionally until they have softened and are starting to brown around the edges – usually about 5 minutes. Then turn down the heat and let them fry slowly to soften further and caramelise – about abother 15 minutes. Then stir in the flour, cooking it for a couple of minutes before adding the madeira and wine. Stir thoroughly so that the flour is incorporated and leave to simmer for another few minutes. Then add the stock, stir and leave for 15 minutes to simmer. When it is almost ready, add about 1/4 teaspoon vinegar and check to see if it needs salt and pepper or more vinegar and add anything it needs to balance it out. Stir well, leave it to simmer for a minute or so, then serve.
