Braised Oxtail
I’m not sure if I’ve eaten oxtail before (apart from the famous Heinz soup) and neither of us have ever cooked it, so when I spotted some at the butcher last week I thought I should rectify that.
We did some research and came across Nigel Slater’s recipe which we used today. Of course, we missed the part that said we were supposed to cook it the day before we ate it so just skipped that and left it to cool for a couple of hours instead.
It was a good dish, rich in taste and velvety in texture. It did prove a little tricky to eat mind you but I’m sure that’s something we could rectify with practice.
Lentil Ragu
It’s been a busy few days with not a lot of cooking going on and not much time to post. We ate this on Thursday night from the freezer, based on this recipe. There were some changes but I can’t remember what they were now – that will teach me to leave so long between eating and posting.
This is a great dish to have in the freezer as it reheats well and is very versatile, we ate it with spaghetti this time but have had it on it’s own too. We still haven’t got round to making it into a lasagne though but there’s plenty left so perhaps we will do next time.
Duck Breast, Parsnip and Parmesan Rosti with Cranberry and Port Sauce and
Well, that’s a catchy heading isn’t it. Despite sounding ridiculously complicated, this was actually fairly easy to put together and not too bad in the taste department either. The sauce needs a little work (too sharp) and I’m still not completely happy with the rosti (higher temperature and finish in the oven maybe) but it’s certainly got potential.
Sausage Casserole
Inevitably, the colder weather has led to lots of talk about warming winter dishes. We’ve been trying to keep it as healthy as possible recently but today I gave in and braved the weather in search of sausages. I found some lovely looking Cumberland sausages at the butcher and decided to give sausage casserole another go.
As you can see from this post, this is not a dish we’ve had a lot of success with in the past but it’s something I’ve remained determined to master. It’s been on the Things To Cook Soon page for what seems like years (it probably is years!) but, inspired by Antonia’s recent success, I hit the kitchen and began to chop and peel.
I started by browning the sausages and then removing them from the pan. Next I sauteed a couple of diced shallots, a stick of celery, a carrot and two cloves of crushed garlic. Then I added the leaves of one stem of rosemary and the same of thyme and returned the sausages to the pan.
Next in was a large glass of red wine, some vegetable stock, seasoning and a splash of Worcester sauce. The dish was then transferred to the oven for 45 minutes on 140 degrees.
The sauce had reduced quite a lot but was still too thin so we removed the sausages and reduced the liquid on the hob. It was at this point that I realised I had forgotten to add the tinned tomatoes so we improvised and added some tomato puree instead.
This was a much better dish than the previous attempt but it still needs some refinement: tomatoes and some extra vegetable stock would help to balance the sauce and remove the slightly bitter edge.
Cheesecake
We went to lunch at a friend’s yesterday and took along a cheesecake that we made on Saturday. It’s a recipe we’ve cooked a few times before and one which has always been well received. Crucially, it’s pretty foolproof and easy to transport. The original recipe comes from another food blogger who no longer posts, I’ve reproduced the recipe below in case it gets lost.
15 ginger biscuits
50g flaked almonds, chopped
50g melted unsalted butter
225g golden caster sugar
3 tablespoons cornflour, sifted
Seeds of 1 vanilla pod
5 drops vanilla essence
740g full fat cream cheese
2 large free-range eggs, lightly beaten
284ml carton double cream
Crushed Amaretti biscuits
Chop the biscuits into fine crumbs and add the melted butter and chopped almonds. Blend together and press firmly on to the base of the cake tin.
Combine the sugar, cornflour, vanilla seeds and essence; mix in the cream cheese and beat until smooth. Slowly add the eggs and then the cream and mix until smooth and thick. Pour the mixture on to the crushed biscuits.
Add the crushed Amaretti bisscuits.
Bake at 200 for 45 minutes.
Note for next time: I don’t think it really needs the Amaretti biscuits, I’d also like to try and reduce the sweetness.
Slow Roast Lamb Shanks with Butterbeans
While investigating how to cook butterbeans earlier this week, Stephen came across this recipe for lamb shanks. Although we didn’t use it at the time, we bookmarked it and used it today. The recipe calls for a leg of lamb but we used lamb shanks instead, halved the quantities of everything else and reduced the cooking time to two hours.
It was delicious, the meat fell off the bone and the liquid reduced to a lovely, sticky sauce. We served it with curly kale, the slight bitterness contrasted perfectly with the slightly sweet sauce.
Crunchy Chicken Breasts
I’ve been wanting to make these for a while as the crunchy pork chops we make are so good. I’m glad we finally got round to it because these were equally good.
Instead of frying these we browned them on both sides in the frying pan and then transferred them to the oven for the final cooking. This worked well as they stayed nicely coloured and cooked right through without burning.
Whisk one egg with a large teaspoon of dijon mustard, some salt and pepper and a large pinch of oregano.
In a separate bowl, combine the crumbs of two slices of bread with a generous grating of parmesan.
Flatten two chicken breasts and then dip in to the egg mixture. Take these and coat in the breadcrumbs.
Brown on either side in plenty of oil and then transfer to the oven for 15 minutes.
Lamb Chops with Tomatoey Butterbeans
As regular readers may have noticed, we don’t use a lot of beans in our cooking. You would find that hard to believe if you were to peer into our cupboards though as we’re fairly well stocked in the bean and pulse area.
In order to make some room for the inevitable over-stocking of cupboards that happens around December, we decided to use up some of the butterbeans in a sort of casserole-type dish. This kind of thing seems to appear on restaurant menus quite a lot and I’ve always enjoyed it when I’ve eaten it before but haven’t got round to cooking it myself.
Luckily, we decided this last night which meant we remembered to soak the beans overnight. When it came to cooking tonight, I started off by sweating some chopped onion and then adding some (well, I say some, what I actually mean is three cloves) garlic. When this was cooked through, I seasoned, added the butterbeans, some rosemary, a tin of tomatoes and some vegetable stock. Once it had come to the boil, I reduced the heat and simmered it for about an hour and a half. The tomatoes had reduced by this point and the beans had cooked through but weren’t soggy.
While all of this was happening, I fried the lamb chops and then served them on top of the beans. We’d ordered the chops online and while they tasted good, they were very unevenly sized and irregular in shape.
There’s been lots of talk lately about “credit crunch cooking” or “frugal eating” and this dish fits pretty neatly in to both categories I think. While lamb is never the cheapest option, these were leg steaks and cost £3. Combined with the beans and other ingredients, I think this would probably work out about £2 a head which is pretty good going. We both really enjoyed it, the beans were hearty and warming but not too heavy which I think is partly to do with the fact that the lamb was cooked separately. Next time, I think the beans could take more herbs and seasoning. Some green vegetables would make a welcome accompaniment too.
Oh, and please excuse my poor flower arranging skills. I didn’t realise they were going to feature in a post and absent-mindedly threw them in a vase this morning without paying much attention to how they looked 🙂
Minimalist Thin Crust Pizza
We often cook pizza on a Friday night, but this weekend we ended up cooking it for lunch on Saturday. We had bought some “Tipo OO” flour which we were keen to use, as it should result in a better crust. We used the same recipe that we’ve used a few times recently – Jamie Oliver’s pizza dough recipe. We left the yeast to rise for about 20 minutes though, rather than just the few minutes that the recipe states. And we left it in the oven on a very low temperature to keep it warm, rather than at “room temperature” because “room temperature” was rather chilly yesterday.
Using our hand mixer with dough hooks worked rather well last time and shortened the kneading time, as well as giving a better result than my not very well honed kneading skills. This time however, I had the hooks on the wrong way round. This isn’t as stupid as it sounds… there is a little plastic thing on one of them to ensure that you put them in the right way, but this had fallen off so I just put it on one of them randomly. But I put it on the wrong one. With the result that it sucked up the dough upwards all the time.
Which worked okay actually, because the dough would rise up the hooks and then flop down again, to be sucked up again, etc. Only after several minutes of this did I realise that the mixer had slowly been committing suicide by sucking dough up into itself (through the holes that the hooks fit into) while doing this and it finally ground to a halt. I tried to get the dough back out through the holes that it had gone into, but was getting nowhere as it was sticky and just clogging everything up. So clearly I needed to take the mixer apart. But the screw holes had been covered over with little plastic plugs to prevent me from doing so.
I ranted for a while about how rubbish this was because clearly they expected us to give up and just buy a new mixer when the old one sucks dough into itself and asphyxiates itself. (“They” being Wahl the manufacturers and also James Martin whose face was all over the packaging; I generally avoid celebrity-endorsed products like the plague, but this one actually looked pretty good for the price against its competitors and in my opinion James Martin is certainly one of the lesser evils in this area.) Then I got a chisel out and scraped enough of the plugs away to allow me to get a screw into them and pull them out. Hooray, I could actually see the screws now. But we didn’t have a screw driver that was long enough to reach them, so need to buy one of those before we can resuscitate the mixer. Will let you know how that goes.
Anyway, back to the pizza itself rather than the mixer-related rant. Despite the drama with the mixer, it had actually done a really good job of kneading the dough and it was very smooth and very elastic. After letting it rise for a while, we made it into a couple of pizza bases. Then I decided to try spinning one of them around in my hands, which I had expected to go horribly wrong, but actually it was a remarkable success. The stretchy dough stayed together and didn’t break and stretched out really, really thin. Thin and large. So large that it was too big to fit onto our pizza stone, so we trimmed the edges off and turned these into crispy garlic bread fingers (yum!).
We laid the base onto our pizza stone, covered it with some of Kerri’s special cherry tomato pizza topping (described in this post), some mushrooms that we had sliced, seasoned and fried, some very tasty buffalo mozzarella and a sprinkling of truffle oil. There weren’t quite enough mushrooms, with the result that the pizza looked rather minimalist, especially when combined with the very thin base. It was good though, and from now on I think we’ll always be making our pizza bases as thin as possible as it gives a lovely crunch and helps prevent them from going soggy which is something that ours tend to suffer from when being cooked in our not-really-hot-enough oven.
Spaghetti Bolognaise
I don’t have a definitive recipe for this, the ingredients change each time I make it depending on what’s available. It’s a very forgiving dish though and very difficult to get wrong.
I start by browning off some pancetta or lardons until the fat has rendered. Remove from the pan and drain on some kitchen paper.
Next, sautee some onion. I do this very slowly on a low heat so they don’t brown and until they are very well cooked as I don’t like large pieces of onions. When they’re about 3/4 of the way cooked, add one or two stalks of finely chopped celery and continue cooking. A minute or so before that’s cooked, add some garlic. I usually use two cloves but have used three today as it seemed silly to put one clove back in the vegetable box. Remove this from the pan and add to the bacon.
Now add the minced beef. Lots of people say you should throw it into the pan and not move it around until a brown crust has formed, I’ve tried this and haven’t noticed any discernible difference so I start to break down the meat with two wooden spoons. As with the onion, I don’t like large chunks of meat. When this is cooked through, return the bacon and onions to the pan.
At this point, I start to add the dry ingredients. If I have fresh herbs then I’ll use those but today I didn’t so I used some dried oregano and thyme and a bay leaf. Be generous. A generous grating of nutmeg next. And season well at this point too.
Next I start to add the liquid beginning with a liberal squirt of tomato puree, some beef stock, some red wine and a generous glug of Worcester sauce. I’ve recently started using milk and I think it makes a big difference to the texture of the meat, just as long as you’re prepared to cook the sauce for a long time, on a slow heat. I’d say a couple of hours. Finally, add a tin of tomatoes.
Bring to the boil and then reduce the heat to a simmer and leave for those couple of hours. Make sure you keep checking so that it doesn’t stick on the bottom. If it’s looking a little dry then top up with some boiling water. Taste as you go along too, if it’s lacking in flavour then try adding a little more beef stock, some more Worcester sauce or even some Marmite.
