Using my Christmas presents: Slow cooked beef shin and mash.

Happy New Year! Hope you've all had a lovely one. I was in the Highlands. Can't lose really!

I don't really believe in New Year's resolutions. It's January, it's cold, and therefore it is not the time for diets. To be honest, I've never been on a diet in my life, I love food too much. I eat pretty healthily and don't have a sweet tooth (the recipes on here are the ones I make as a treat at the weekend). I admit, I could try and sort out my crisp and wine intake a bit more... but ah well. Life's too short. And now is the time of year for comfort food.

As well as this, I got some cracking Christmas presents which mean I absolutely have to make lovely stodgy food! We now own a Le Creuset casserole dish and I'm very excited! Plus I got a potato ricer, and they're supposed to make the best mash ever.

However, we are on a January budget... so it's time for cheap cuts of meat. I went to the butcher and bought a pound and a half of beef shin for a fiver. Brilliant. It does mean it has to cook for ages, but that's all the better as it left me with a lovely lazy Sunday afternoon.

Preheat your oven to 150 degrees.

First, get your butcher to cut your beef into casserole sized pieces (or do so yourself) and toss it in a little bit of seasoned flour. Get some oil nice and hot in your pan (either a big casserole dish that can go on your hob or a large saucepan) and fry the meat off a couple of pieces at a time. Don't do it all at once as it'll steam, you want lovely brown sticky bits at the bottom of the pan. 

You want it WELL browned. (Although not burned, obviously)

Put the meat to one side, then fry off a couple of sliced onions and some sliced celery. I also fried off a load of halved mushrooms, to make the cheap meat stretch even further, but this is optional. You could add root veg if you want? But I didn't want the sweetness of carrots or anything, I want this to be really rich and savoury. While it's frying use your wooden spoon to scrape up the brown stuff from the bottom of the pan – that's pure flavour.

Once everything has fried down nicely and picked up some of the colour from the bottom of the pan put the meat back in and stir in a couple of tablespoons of tomato puree. Whack up the heat and pour in as much red wine as you're willing to spare, about half a bottle for us! Then top up with some water or beef stock. You want the meat to be just about covered. Shove in a few bay leaves and some thyme, then season well. Put a lid on (or decant it into an oven proof dish, then put a lid on) then put in the oven for ages. I reckon about three hours should do the trick. Check it regularly to make sure it's not drying out, and add more water if you think it's getting low. You could also put some tin foil directly on top of the casserole underneath the lid to help contain the liquid if you're really worried about it drying out.

Mash: Peel your spuds and chop into fairly big chunks. (if they're too small they soak up more water; no one wants watery mash) Boil in salted water.

My latest trick with mashed potato (whether you have a ricer or standard masher) is to leave the potatoes sitting in the collander for five minutes after they're cooked. It stops them from being too watery as they drain more thoroughly, but more importantly give off loads of steam and dry out a bit. This isn't groundbreaking stuff, I probably saw it on the telly, but it really does make a difference.

While they're doing that, heat your butter and a little drop of milk over a low heat, and season it. Then either tip your spuds back in and get mashing, or send them through the ricer straight into the pan.

Serve with bloody great piles of veg. Delicious. The rest of this is going in a pie.

This weeks soup: Sort of potato and bacon. It's an interpretation of a Simon Hopkinson recipe which made me realise all my chives have died in the winter. It's cheap as chips and surprisingly tasty (even without the chives):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/potato_soup_with_soured_27576

Whilst making this I was mostly listening to: Lots of stuff. After all it was in the oven for three hours. But it included Laura Marling and Bon Iver.

Fish pie and egg poaching

So it’s the weekend before payday, and I spent five days in Scotland last week eating and drinking. This means I am absolutely skint, and trawling the freezer to see what we could eat this weekend! I realised we had basically all the ingredients for a fish pie, and even better might have enough to cook for some friends too…

I also have duck eggs, courtesy of a nice man at work who keeps ducks and hens and brings in the eggs. So the sort-of-dinner-party recipe is:

-          Poached duck egg salad with bacon bits and balsamic dressing

-          Fish pie

-          Loads of wine

Fish pie is a bit laborious, but worth it. It always feels to me a bit of a treat and very comforting. The key thing is to have a good variety of fish. In our freezer we had some pollock, a tiny bit of salmon, and some prawns.  I bought a piece of smoked haddock to go with it (smoked fish adds loads of flavour to fish pie, it’s a must).

Put some potatoes on for mash.

All the fish except the prawns goes in a big tub with a bay leaf and some peppercorns and gets covered with milk, then goes in the microwave for 4 minutes or so to poach lightly. It needs to be only just cooked, and pulling apart quite easily. 

Meanwhile, de-vein the prawns. Basically there’s a manky looking black line on prawns that is their intestinal tract or something (bleurgh). Thankfully, a quick scrape with the point of a sharp knife gets rid of it. 

Scatter your prawns into your pie dish, and pull the fish apart into chunks and distribute it fairly evenly. You don’t want any skin or anything. I also add some spinach leaves for a bit of extra veggie goodness, but you can leave it out if you’re not bothered.

Then make the sauce by stirring together some butter and flour over a medium heat, and gradually adding the milk you cooked the fish in. (Basically a classic white sauce, but it tastes all fishy and good). Add a load of chopped parsley and some chopped chives and the juice of half a lemon. Season with salt and pepper, then pour over the fish. Should look a bit like this:

 Mash the spuds with butter and milk then spread over the top. I tried something different with this pie, and blitzed up some bread with some herbs and salt and pepper to give it a nice crust on top. (Got the idea from a Nigel Slater article I think). It worked a treat!

(Not to blow my own trumpet but one slightly pissed guest said the fish pie was “awesome”)

Ready to go in the oven for about 30/40 minutes at 200 degrees. Should end up looking a bit like this (perhaps slightly less blurry. May have had a G and T by this point...):

For the starter, I fried off some bacon-y bits. I was going to buy pancetta or streaky bacon slices but my butcher gave me tail end bits of bacon for free, so I wasn’t about to complain! A salad of spinach, chives and radishes, then a lovely poached duck egg, and some bits of bacon. After the bacon has fried off, I put it on some kitchen paper to drain, and added some balsamic to the pan to deglaze it for the dressing with a bit of lemon juice.

Poaching eggs is a bit of a dark art, and it’s in the hands of the gods whether it works out or not. Lots of boiling hot water with a touch of vinegar in it is the key, break the egg into a cup or saucer so you can make sure it stays whole, swirl the water around and drop it in. Then hope for the best. They don’t take long, just a couple of minutes for a nice soft centre. Take out of the water with a slotted spoon and let them drain really well; no one wants vinegar-y water on their dinner. I’d never poached four eggs at once before, and decided just to go for it and see what happened. By some fluke it worked!

Awesome! I’ve been having a 6music and sunshine based weekend, hope you have too.

National Pie Week; a very rustic steak pie.

It’s national pie week. Apparently. I didn’t know that such a thing existed until Friday night when we saw an ad in the pub, but I’m not one to ignore a cookery based bandwagon I could jump on!

Now this is quite laborious, particularly in comparison to last night’s mussels and chips. This was a full on apron wearing, hours in the kitchen, job. It’s not very traditional, but check it out nonetheless:

I used shin of beef for this, because Delia reckons it’s the best for stews and things.  I didn’t follow her recipe, but did follow her advice on that, and it was dirt cheap (I got over a pound for about three quid!)

First, I took about a pound of beef and tossed it in some seasoned flour. I then browned it all off bit by bit in some hot oil. You want it to caramelise on the edges and go nice and brown, and try not to worry about the state of the bottom of your pan! So eventually you have a plateful of lovely browned meat, and a messy looking pan.

Add little more oil to the pan, then fry off two onions. I used one red and one white onion, but that wasn’t for any fancy reasons, just because I have red onions to use up.  Add a load of mushrooms and let it fry for a bit. Then put the meat back in, add some red wine (I had about a third of a bottle left over) and a dash of Worcestershire sauce (I had to google that to check how to spell it.) Top up with a bit of water, and stick in a bay leaf and let it bubble for about two hours. Take this opportunity to have a cup of tea/glass of wine/start writing your blog… I know that normally it would be ale or stout in this, but I didn’t have any.

It reduces down lots and lots:

I can’t claim to be a pastry expert, and I know that steak pie is the best ever when made with suet pastry, but I don’t have suet, and if I bought some it would sit in the cupboard forever more. So I’m just going for a bog standard short crust as per the BeRo cookbook: http://www.be-ro.com/index.asp I left it to rest for half an hour in the fridge.

I buttered and floured a pie dish.  I think ideally the filling should be allowed to completely cool so the pastry doesn’t go soggy, but I was running out of time! So I had to just go with it. I lined the pie dish with half the pastry, and filled it with the stew mixture. I used a slotted spoon so the gravy stayed in the pan, to stop it going soggy, and saved it for serving. Roll out the other half of the pastry, put it on the top, and mash down the edges a little bit with a fork. Put a hole in the middle so the steam can get out. And put in the oven at 180 degrees for about forty five minutes. It all looks a bit haphazard, but let's call it rustic:

I don’t have a rolling pin, but do have lots of empty wine bottles:

We had it with curly kale and lovely buttery mash, served the gravy at the table to pour over the top of this: 

 

Whilst making this I mostly listened to: Elbow, the Seldom Seen Kid. However, that ended when I was only about a third of the way through the process, so then I switched to 6music.

This weeks soup: “spring minestrone” At least that’s what I’m calling it. It used up all our leftover veg, had some bacon, a tin of borlotti beans and some home made chicken stock.