A Rich Cabinet

Note to self: Tomorrow’s dinner, maybe. There’s wet garlic in the shop at the moment: could work really well.

Update: And so it did. I cheated though, and turned it into a meat dish by adding the chopped up meat from a chicken drumstick, roasted in the oven with the garlic. (And I deglazed the juicy gunk from the bottom of the roasting tin and added that to the risotto as well.)

Adapted this BBC Food recipe - I used drumsticks and wings ‘cos that’s what I had (instead of breasts). Plus I didn’t have any redcurrant jelly, but the meat had been marinaded in a plum jam mixture, and then I added just a little honey. So it probably came out quite a bit sweeter than the original recipe would be. But the sweet sauce went really well with the potato and celeriac mash, which was the point of the exercise.

This was a special treat: organic duck breast (skin on) from the farmers market (where else?). So I wanted something really tasty with it.

Cooking the breast:
Heat the oven to 200C (400F).
Score the skin of the breast several times with a sharp knife. (You need to cut right through the skin but not into the flesh.)
Heat a little oil on the top of the stove in an oven proof dish or pan. Fry the breast skin down until the skin is dark and crisp (10 minutes or so). Then turn the breast over and transfer it to the oven. Cook for about 8-12 minutes depending on the size. Then take out of the pan and leave to rest for 5-10 minutes.

Time to make the sauce:
There should be plenty of dark crusty gunk on the bottom of the pan, as well as a lot of duck fat. Spoon out most of the fat. Put the pan back on the heat on the stove. Pour in a generous glug of marsala to deglaze the pan - i.e, it’ll loosen the gunk (which is full of flavour) so you can scrape it up with a wooden spoon, and stir until it dissolves into the liquid. Then add the juice of half (large) to one (small) orange once the alcohol has reduced (and that should finish off the deglazing job if the wine hasn’t quite got it all). Let it cook for a minute or so and then add a few tablespoons of water - use your own judgement as to how much; you want to get a consistency and intensity of flavour to suit you and to have enough sauce to pour over the dish. Season with a little salt & pepper to suit your taste.

To serve with this, I made some parsnip puree (OK, parsnip mash really): just peel, chop and boil parsnips then mash with butter. (To make it a real puree, put it through a sieve to make it nice and smooth; I couldn’t be bothered.) And because the oven was on anyway I did a few baked potato wedges. Finally, I also boiled a handful of green beans that were lurking in the fridge to be used up. (Something light and green on the side of all that richness isn’t a bad idea. Broccoli, peas, beans, whatever.)

The nights are drawing in and the gales are a-blowing: it’s time to get down to comfort food.

And goulash is really easy, and you can make it with cheap cuts of meat and cook slowly. I did it today with beef.

Approximate quantities, just for 1 person…
4-50z meat
1 small onion
1 clove of garlic
1 largeish tomato
1 tsp paprika
1 splodge of tomato puree
1 tsp sugar
1 pint of beef stock (or vegetable stock + soy sauce if like me that’s all you’ve got in the house).

You’ll need to scale up for more people. You can’t really make too much. It’ll keep in the fridge for a day or two to reheat, or you can freeze it.

Heat oil in a casserole dish or something similar (it must have a lid). Cube the beef and brown it in the oil. Slice the onion fairly finely, add to the beef. Let them cook together for 5-10 minutes or so. Then it’s time for crushed garlic and sliced tomato, stir and give it a couple of minutes.

Then add the paprika (smoked paprika is even better), tomato puree, sugar and finally the stock, bring to the boil. Since you’re using stewing beef, you want it to simmer very gently with the lid on for at least an hour and a half.

And of course, you should finish it off with some sour cream or yogurt. Except that I forgot to get any today. Ah, well. It was delicious anyway.

It goes well with mashed potatoes or rice, in my experience.

Spicy Goan-style recipe from Madhur Jaffrey.

Can be simplified by cutting down the initial marinading (as usual I was too disorganised to get this done…) and/or using ready ground spices so you don’t need a blender. I simply mixed the dry spices together and coated the meat cubes with the mix before putting them in the pan, followed soon after by the garlic, ginger and chilli. The lime juice can be added to the pan just before or after the tomatoes. It probably didn’t taste quite like Madhur’s version but it was still very good.

I had forgotten just how good fried chicken is. But I had some boned chicken thighs and I wanted to do something slightly different from usual with them.

In the end, I cheated a bit. Once the thighs had been well cooked and crispy on the skin side and turned over and were close to done, I added some chopped tomatoes, just a little water, lemon and honey to make a sauce and not waste any of the juices. Once the chicken was done I took it out of the pan and let it rest for a few minutes while the sauce finished cooking. I served it all on aromatic rice and vegetable pilaf.

Fried chicken thigh recipes

Merrilees’ chicken thighs with parsley salad
Warm salad of crispy chicken thighs

Rice pilaf/pilau dishes

Fragrant pilau rice
Vegetable pullao

I love chicken livers. It’s absurdly cheap, because it’s so un-trendy. (Like offal, generally. Fools.) It’s strange, in a way, because it’s got a lot going for it: very tasty and very simple and quick to cook.

A proper bolognese should really have chicken livers, of course. Or you can make paté (which I’ve never tried making). Basically, most recipes involve sautéing them so they are brown and crispy outside but still pink on the inside - this only takes a few minutes. (I usually cut them in half to make single-bite-size morsels.) You can roll them in flour, and if you want just mix a little cayenne pepper or paprika into the flour, before sautéing them. Then just decide what to serve them with. Most often I have them with a rich spicy tomato sauce (flavoured with paprika and chilli or hot pepper sauce, that kind of thing) and couscous (or rice). It just works somehow. Or rice and vegetables (pilaf-style) perhaps.

And I’ve just come across a recipe for warm chicken liver salad that I’m just going to have to try. I don’t have perry vinegar, but I do have cider vinegar for the dressing instead.

I have a duck leg from the freezer, which I’ll simply roast in the oven (first 35 minutes or so wrapped in foil, then open to crisp up the the skin). Probably roast some vegetables at the same time to go with it. And I have some local (”Air Miles = 0″!) green beans.

But I want a tasty sauce too. I very much like the sound of this sweet and sour apricot sauce, which I can make pretty much from the store cupboard. Except that I don’t have an orange, though I could try lemon zest instead.

Couple of recipe choices:

BBC
Times

I’ve got a couple of pork steaks, more than I need for one meal, so I’ll set aside some of the meat to put in a mixed veg stirfry with noodles tomorrow night. (Like this.)

That is to say, venison curry. From Sophie Grigson’s Meat Course (out of print, I think. I noted down some of my favourites from a friend’s copy, which means I didn’t bother to get metric measures).

It’s one of those cookery books that tends to do things in large quantities, so be prepared to scale it down.

For 6
2-3 tbsp sunflower oil
3 lb tender venison steak cut into 1″ cubes (you know, half a pound of meat per person seems a lot of meat to me these days: I’d only want about half that much, and I’d do more onion and add some red pepper or some other veg)
2 onions, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2″ piece of fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 1/2 tbsp mild curry powder
5 curry leaves (if available)
2 sprigs of thyme (I just use a pinch of dried)
2 tbsp chopped parsley
12 oz tomatoes, skinned, seeded, roughly chopped (I generally use tinned; but if I do use fresh, I don’t bother with skinning or de-seeding them)
2 tbsp chopped coriander leaves
salt & pepper

Heat oil in a wok over a high heat. Brown the venison in small batches and set aside.

Saute onions in the same oil till golden brown. Add garlic and ginger, sprinkle over the curry powder, stir and fry for 3 minutes.

Add the curry leaves, thyme, parsley, tomatoes, salt & pepper, continue cooking for a couple of minutes.

Add 5 fl oz water, bring to the boil. Return the meat to the pan and simmer for 10-15 minutes until the meat is just cooked.

Adjust the seasoning and serve sprinkled with the coriander.

(A wok isn’t essential. A saucepan or casserole pot will do fine.)

……

Or if I want something simpler with my venison steak, I just fry it, put it to one side and then make a quick creamy sauce in the same pan, which has the added bonus of not wasting any of the juices and flavour: deglaze with some red wine, add some water and probably a little soy sauce or stock concentrate (but taste first and see whether it really needs extra flavouring), and and make it creamy with a dollop of creme fraiche or cream (it’s best to take the pan off the heat for a few seconds while you stir in the creme fraiche, in case it curdles, and then cook it just enough to heat it through). It only takes a couple of minutes to cook, and it works well for any kind of quick-cooking steaks or chops. And it goes well with very simple boiled new potatoes and mixed veg.