Guinea Fowl Risotto

It's a tradition, or an old charter or something, that there are leftovers from your Sunday Lunch.  What you do with them is the interesting bit.  I love slices of roast beef reheated in gravy and served with mash.  I adore roast chicken, stuffing and salad sandwiches, with butter not margarine! 

The leftovers from this weeks Sunday lunch were destined to be a risotto.  There is something about risotto that manages to centre me.  I've cooked so many of them that I can relax into the process and, without much thought, turn out a great dish.

Because the star of tonight's risotto was a real star, roast guinea fowl, I kept the rest of the dish quite simple.  Onions and celery formed the base of the risotto with a glass of white wine and plenty of stock.  To add a bit of colour and freshness I also added frozen peas.  Z had lunch at Dock Street Market today and, luckily for me, brought home one of the Riverside Sourdough Bakeries loaves.  The bread and a glass of wine really made the dish a meal.

Roast Guinea Fowl

When we woke up this morning we already knew what we were cooking for this evening's meal.  The ingredients had been sourced and bought.  We had even considered the timings so that everything was ready at the same time*.  We then realised that we had got the date wrong and promptly shelved our plans for another week.

This left us with a bit of a dilemma and me with a fun chore on my hands; what to have for tea?  I already needed to go to the supermarket for the weekly "big shop" so an additional item was added to the list, a question mark.

Wandering up and down the brightly lit aisles of goodies is one of my guilty little pleasures.  I know I bang on about my dislike of the supermarkets and the strangle hold they have over independent shops, but my desire to shop for fun ingredients, the chance of food bargains and the convenience, keeps me coming back.

The one thing I knew was that we had some carrots in the fridge that needed to form part of the meal.  I decided there and then that they would be a side dish for a roast of some kind but I wasn't sure what bit of what animal would be the centre piece.  Looking for a flash of inspiration I perused the butchers counter.  I may as well have stuck my head in a cardboard box.  It was lunchtime on a Sunday and all that was left was a couple of small chops and some sausages that were looking rather sorry for themselves.

I headed down the meat aisle to be met by more disappointment, clearly this was the wrong time to be buying meat.  Then I remembered that at the far end of the aisle was the game section.  There is always an abundance of meat here.  I don't know if it's the price that puts people off buying game, or whether people are just not sure about eating meat that isn't chicken, beef, pork or lamb.

Either way, I found and bought a whole Guinea Fowl, took it home and got to cooking.  I did nothing fancy with the Guinea Fowl, other than resting it on a bed of onions before roasting it.  The juices from the bird mingled with the onions to make a lovely gravy.  I served it with some boiled potatoes, steamed greens and the carrots, which were mashed together with swede as the second veg.  For the record the bird only cost £5.  There was plenty for all three of us and we have leftovers for later on in the week.  It was as easy to cook as a chicken so I'm still no clearer as to why people don't eat more game.

*this is one of the true tricks of looking like you know what you are doing in the kitchen.