Venison Stroganoff

I know that I shouldn't, but I really can't help myself.  To save money and to avoid food waste I really ought to stick to my shopping list.  However, I am a slave to bargains and interesting ingredients.  More often or not I end up having to rewrite the weeks meal plan to accommodate items that I have bought which are out of date.  The more exciting finds usually end up in the freezer, saved for a special occasion.  Tonight is one such special occasion.  The visit of the Mother in Law.

I get on well with the Mother in Law, so I will leave all of the traditional jokes to somebody else.  In fact I get on so well with her that I was happy to defrost some venison loin that had leapt off the shelves and into my basket, without consulting my shopping list, a couple of months ago.

Stroganoff was the obvious choice, as we already had sour cream and mushrooms in the fridge that needed using up*.  The meat is fried first then rested while onions are fried in the same pan with a heaped teaspoon of smoked paprika.  Sliced mushrooms are added next followed by the cooked venison and the sour cream.  Served with wild rice and some broccoli, special meals don't get much simpler to cook.

*I'm not above using leftovers for my guests.

Friday Night Take-away - The Cheese Burger

The reality of being a parent really struck home this week.  R woke up last Thursday covered in Chicken Pox and our plans for the week were chucked out of the window.  We have been in self-imposed quarantine ever since.  My planned Birthday meal was cancelled and both Z and I had to re-arrange work as we had to keep him out of nursery.

Every cloud has a silver lining and ours has been more meals as a family.  In a normal week R has his meals at nursery and we eat our tea after R has had his bath and gone to bed.  This week we've been making sure dinner was on the table by the time the worker of the day got home.  We have even given R his first taste of Chinese food with a Chicken and Oyster Sauce stir-fry with noodles.

Tonight though, we are back to normal routine.  I don't finish work until six o'clock on Friday so R had cottage pie before I got home.  Once he was nicely tucked up in bed we cracked on with our take-away style meal of cheese burger and chips.

Even before the horse meat scandal broke we tended to make our burgers from scratch.  I have heard of people adding breadcrumbs, egg and even tomato ketchup to the meat as seasonings or binding agents for their burgers.  All we ever add is finely chopped and fried onion, salt and pepper.  By the time the mince and onions are mixed by hand I find the burgers hold their shape pretty well.  I fried the burgers for a couple of minutes on each side before letting them rest while I got on with some garnishes.

People smother their burgers with all sorts of toppings.  A recent take-away menu that fell through our letter box had fifteen different beefburger options*.  I'm not going to tell you how to top your burger but I went with Jarlsberg, dijon mustard, tomato ketchup and some crunchy gem lettuce leaves.

There is only one thing that I will change the next time I make burgers.  I own, and have never used, a mincer.  I am determined to dust it off and start experimenting with different cuts of meat to make the best burger.  I have even seen ox heart burgers on display in butchers' shops and having recently tried pig heart I'd love to give that a try.

*there was no pulled pork on offer although I'm sure it won't be long before it appears on the standard take-away menus alongside doner kebab meat.

Kedgeree at the end of Easter Weekend

Easter bank holiday weekend 2013 will go down as one of those bank holidays when little is achieved and you feel good about it.  Normally, a bank holiday is the perfect excuse for a food blow-out, plenty of shopping and cooking, but my one plan for the weekend got in the way.  Rather than mooching around markets and food fairs I went to Manchester for a stag do.

The details of the stag will remain the knowledge* of the attendees.  Suffice to say, by the time I got back to Leeds I was starving and probably still a little drunk.  A hot cross bun had been saved for my return but I had longer to wait for the meal of the day.  It's not a Celebration without a roast and we had bought a rolled pork shoulder joint to celebrate Easter.  If you want to read more about cooking pork please feel free to venture over to Everything But The Oink where I am eating every edible part of a pig over the course of the year.

Today I woke up relatively hangover-free and set about the order of the day.  Firstly, meal planning for the week ahead and writing a suitable shopping list, followed by a trip to Temple Newsam.  More specifically a trip to Home Farm to show R the lambs**.  The sun was shining when we set out but the clouds quickly gathered and cut off the little warmth that the sun was providing.

After a couple of cold and enjoyable hours at the farm we decamped back to Leeds for a warming pub lunch.  We found ourselves in The Adelphi.  We'd been to The Adelphi a couple of months ago for Sunday lunch and were so impressed with the food and the service that we were keen to go back.  By the time we arrived a brief twitter conversation had resulted in a reserved table.  It wasn't needed because we had the run of the place when we arrived, but within half an hour the pub was really filling up and we would have struggled to get in.

I ordered bangers and mash and Z chose chicken and leek pie.  We knew that the staff wouldn't bat an eyelid at us letting R share our food which makes life very easy indeed.  R isn't a fussy eater for a two year old, but occasionally he still picks at food that I know he loves.  Not ordering him his own food might seem a bit tight but I'd rather share than waste money.

While we waited for our food I had a pint of the wonderfully named Hoptimus Prime, Z had a hot chocolate and R had a glass of milk which was served in the cutest flip-top Kilner bottle.  When the food arrived R had more than his fair share of my bangers and mash and wasn't interested in Z's chicken pie.  He's a harsh critic as both meals were superb!  That said, I do have ongoing issues with pies that are actually a stew with a pastry lid.

With lunch out of the way we cracked on with the shopping and I re-thought our evening meal.  Originally we were going to have smoked mackerel fish cakes, using up a packet of cooked peppered mackerel that had been destined for Z's lunch last week.  After a hefty pub lunch I fancied something lighter but was determined to use the fish and not waste food.  That was when kedgeree struck me.  I have only eaten kedgeree a couple of times and I had never cooked it before, but how hard could it be? 

Cooked rice and smoked fish stirred into fried onions and curry spices.  I always have some home ground garam masala in the store cupboard so there was no need for curry powder.  The finished dish is garnished with a hard boiled egg.  It really is that simple.  I know that it is traditionally eaten at breakfast time, but in a society that worships the All Day Breakfast, why can't we eat what we want when we want it.  I'm hereby reclaiming kedgeree as a supper dish.

*drunken miss-rememberings
**he's currently obsessed with Timmy Time and Shawn the Sheep.

Meat Free March - Dirty John Quinoa

Over the course of writing Tonight's Menu, I have managed to coerce quite a few people to give up their time and blogs, to take part in my hair-brained schemes and challenges.  When the opportunity to help a fellow food-blogger by taking part in their challenge arose I felt honour bound to offer my time and blog.

Meat Free March is exactly as it sounds, a whole month without a meaty morsel passing your lips.  I'm a card carrying carnivore and quite often sneak extra meat into vegetarian recipes* so I couldn't have signed up for the whole month. I don't know if it was Becs, from Bits and Bobs Becs, or Fay, from Food Fables, who came up with the idea of not eating meat, but I think I'm right** in saying that as we get towards the end of March their resistance to the call of bacon has stated to wane.

The Meat Free March Recipe Swap is not only a way for bloggers to come together and share ideas, it is also a good chance for Becs and Fay to get inspiration for the final push towards April and the promise of a juicy steak.  I am of course assuming that neither of them are have been converted to a life of vegetables.

Last week I spent hours trawling the internet and thumbing through cookery books to find that one elusive meat free recipe I wanted to share, and could act as inspiration to Becs and Fay.  I even went back through my blog posts on here to see if there was anything in particular that I thought somebody might want to cook.  That was when I received the email with my recipe swap partner's details.  I had another challenge, my swapee was vegan.

I went back through the books and bookmarked websites and, without fail, every recipe I had chosen had cheese, cream or eggs as an ingredient.  A second, more directed search and I was back on track.  As per the rules of engagement I posted my chosen recipe along with a couple of choice ingredients and sat back to await the arrival of my mystery package.

I didn't have to wait for long.  The recipe I received was for Dirty John Quinoa which was an adapted recipe from Fresh from the Vegan Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson.  It was written out inside a cute owl greetings card and came complete with a bag of quinoa.  I've had quinoa in the past but had decided that it was just another grain and quite pricey, so I didn't get into the habit of buying it.  It is known as a super grain as it packs more protein than any other pulse which is why vegans love it.

My initial response to the recipe was not one filled with joy.  Firstly, I don't own a slow cooker.  I do however have a decent conventional cooker and some good pans.  Secondly the list of ingredients felt a bit miss-matched, but who am I to argue with Robin, she's written more vegetarian and vegan cookery books than I've had vegan meals.

Onions and garlic were fried off before a yellow pepper, 180g of quinoa, a pack of mushrooms, two tins of black eye beans, a tin of tomatoes, a dried chilli, smoked paprika, thyme and veg stock were all added to the pan to cook for a couple of hours.  Half way through cooking this was still not looking promising.  The earthy smells of the mushrooms and the beans were fighting against the smoked paprika and thyme.

There was no turning back however, we had nothing else in and had invested too long on the meal.  I needn't have worried.  Through some bizarre alchemy the casserole came together and the flavours married.  Quinoa has a peculiar texture, still crunchy after two and a half hours cooking, but that worked against the softness of the rest of the vegetables.  There was also a pleasant heat from the chilli and paprika that even R didn't find too spicy.

I won't go into the mechanics of the recipe swap as you can find the full details on either of Becs' and Fay's blogs.  These two need applauding for their efforts in exploring vegetarian food and encouraging others to drop meat every now and then.  I hope my swap partner enjoyed the recipe that I sent to them.  I liked Dirty John but I don't think I'll be adding it to my repertoire any time soon.

*not if I'm serving the meal to vegetarians, I'm not that nasty.
**I have been known to be wrong and this could be one of those occasions.

Lasagne

Perhaps I am the type of person who is easily led, there is every chance that I am the kind of person that subliminal advertising works on.  I say this because ever since the horse meat scandal broke, I have been craving lasagne.  It doesn't take much for me to want a lasagne but when every news story on television and radio is leading with a dish of layered meat and pasta I was eventually going to cave in.

The horse meat scandal has got a lot of people very hot under the collar.  I'm not going to stand here and take any moral stance about cooking from scratch rather than eating ready meals.  We all make choices about how and where to spend our money.  I choose to buy ingredients and cook with them, it's how I relax and I find the process enjoyable.  Others don't have the same relationship with food as I do, each to their own.  I do have a slight problem with the way the focus of this particular food scare is running.

In the past* we have been quite rightly worried about food that could kill us.  The Salmonella scare of the 80s had us boiling eggs until you could play squash with them and roasting chicken until the bones had melted.  In the 90s, the threat of Mad Cow Disease turned a lot of my class mates vegetarian.  My family ate more beef as the prices dropped and it didn't do me any harm.  The current wave of worry about what's on your plate does not compare.  Horse (unless it contains the drug bute) is not harmful.  I've never tried it myself but I have eaten Zebra. 

The problem this time is that we haven't been given the choice to eat horse or not.  If I ever happen across horse on a restaurant menu then I'm sure that will be the dish I choose**.  Having eaten horse I may discover that I like it and then look for it on the supermarket shelves and ask my butcher if he can get any in.  But we live in Britain, a country where horses like Toy Town win Olympic medals, and Frankel is put out to stud at £125,000 per cover.  There is not an appetite for eating horse, I don't have a problem with that but I do wish we weren't so squeamish about the food that we eat.  Meat does not come shrink-wrapped on a blue polystyrene tray, it is a part of an animal.  If you can't cope with that small nugget of information then perhaps your lasagne should contain quorn not horse.

Aside from the labelling, I do have an other problem with horsegate.  The media*** keep referring to horse meat in the food chain.  Now given that horse is being eaten this is technically correct, however, the story is about horse in the distribution chain.  A food chain is a linear sequence of links showing species being eaten by the next species in the chain.  It's quite simple. 

At the bottom of any food chain is something that eats nothing else, take a plant for example.  Getting all the nutrients it needs from the soil, air and sun the plant doesn't want for much.  Minding it's own business the plant is harvested and devoured by passing insects.  A larger insect, the dragonfly, eats the small insects and takes their carcases back to the dragonfly hive where the small insect bodies are laid down in octagonal cells where over a number of months they become Marmite****.  The wayward dragonfly is the prey of many a small hunting bird, such as the robin or spotted fly catcher.  Neither of these birds are lovers of Marmite but they do love dragonflies.  The chain does not end here, there is always a larger bird.  The sparrow hawk is designed by boffins to swoop out of the sky picking off small birds while they are still wiping insect extract from their beaks after a slap-up three course dragonfly meal.  Nothing eats the sparrow hawk so it is the top of this particular food chain.

One of the saddest things I have seen on the telly is the constant footage of sparrow hawks that have been cruelly struck down by long distance lorries cutting through the countryside following dodgy instructions from satnavs.  Nothing deserves to be struck down by a lost lorry but this starts another food chain.  Tyranosaurus-Rexs are actually scavengers not hunters.  They live on carrion (road kill if you will) so are constantly roaming the countryside looking out for sparrow hawks knocked down in their prime.  The T-Rex population cannot be allowed to grow unchecked so their numbers are monitored by trained game keepers who, under licence, can shoot adult T-Rex and sell their meat at market.  Now imagine just for one second that the next time you bite into a T-rex pie, some unscrupulous game keeper has cut the t-rex meat with Brachiosaurus.  I don't mind a bit of brachiosaur every now and then, but the only way that it should enter this food chain is if the t-rex ate it.  The brachiosaur has entered the delivery chain between the game keeper, the pie shop and your plate.

Cows eating what they shouldn't is how we got to the mad cow disease problem in the first place.  No cow has ever leapt out at and tucked into a horse, therefore horse is not part of the food chain.  Neither, I'm pleased to say, is brachiosaur.

Rest assured for my lasagne I did not hot foot it to my local supermarket looking for a lump of prime dinosaur.  Far from it.  The mince I used for the bolognese was minced beef from my favourite butcher***** on Leeds market.  I could have gone the whole hog and made fresh pasta but I am still wary of home made pasta after one too many disasters.

I do love a good lasagne.  If I'm honest this was not one of the best I've ever made but it was still a good plate of food.  Yes, meals like this can take a long time to cook but while they are cooking you are free to do other things, you could plan your next week's meals or fantasize about dinosaurs.  There is a lot of unravelling still to be done regarding horse DNA turning up where it shouldn't.  In the meantime, if you are worried about what you are eating, support your local butcher and cook from scratch, you never know, you might enjoy it.

*now is the ideal time to put on your free rose tinted glasses.
**this is why I have eaten escargot, I didn't go on a mission to find and eat snails but the opportunity arose and I took my chance.  For the record, if you like garlic butter there is no real reason why you wouldn't like snails, just so long as you have a strong jaw, they are quite chewy.
***this is not an exercise in media bashing
****this is a lie I have made up and that I am continuing to peddle to my son, parents can be so cruel can't they!
****he likes us because we buy his steak mince and not his extra lean steak mince.  He doesn't really want to sell extra lean mince but he has to provide to those who don't like flavour in their food.

Carrot and Sweet Potato Curry

An unintentional and not all together unwelcome side effect of this year's food challenge, is that when I'm not thinking about pig I'm thinking a lot more about vegetables.  This is possibly down to the amount of time I am spending on Leeds Kirkgate market.  You can find me most Saturday mornings wandering around Butchers Row mulling over the porky possibilities.  Afterwards, meat in hand,  I like to fill my shopping bags with as much fruit and veg as I can carry home*.

I still find myself buying additional veg in the supermarket.  A couple of weeks ago I went green veg mad and bought pak choi, kale and spinach.  I must have been feeling run down and lacking in iron.  We managed to plough our way through the greens but that was at the expense of the carrots I had already bought on the market.

My initial thought, whenever I have any leftover vegetables, is soup.  However this wasn't a handful of carrots left over from a meal, this was a full bag of carrots whose potential had never been met.  I felt that it was only fitting to make them the star of a meal but I couldn't get soup out of my head.  It was the classic Carrot and Coriander that was haunting me.  I just couldn't shift the idea of the sweet earthy and fragrant dish from my mind.  I then realised that it wouldn't take much to convert the ingredients for a good soup into a great curry.

The base of the curry was onion, garlic and ginger, fried in ghee with mustard seeds, curry leaves, cumin, coriander, fresh chilies and turmeric.  Once the onion had softened and the spices were toasted I added the carrot, sweet potato and a little red pepper, along with just enough stock to cover the veg.  By the time the carrots were tender the sweet potatoes had broken down into the stock to thicken the sauce.  All that was left to do was to stir in some fresh coriander and serve with naan bread.  I doubt that this is in any way authentic, but the flavour combination is so good it shouldn't be reserved just for soup.

*I'm going to start cycling to the market so the limit to my spend will be the capacity of my rucksack!

Duck with Port and Cranberry Sauce

Who would have thought that deep into January we would still be hoovering up the Christmas leftovers?  We have made stocks of soup and pies out of the leftover turkey and vegetables.  All of the cheese has been consumed and the last of the chocolate pennies have been melted in R's hands and smeared across the furniture.

The final reminder of the festivities was the last of the cranberry sauce that Z made this time last month.  In Christmases gone by we have bought a jar of cranberry sauce and thrown it out in mid June, but because this was home-made we felt duty bound to use it.  A pack of duck breasts in the freezer seamed the perfect foil for the sharp sweet sauce.

I gently fried the duck skin side down to render off the fat*.  After ten minutes I flipped the breasts over, turned off the heat and let the duck sit in the pan for ten minutes more.  Finally I removed the duck from the pan, cranked up the heat again and fried off some onions.  I added half a pint of port** and let that reduce before stirring in the cranberry sauce.  I'm not a fan of slicing bits of meat to serve them but there was a marked size difference between the two breast so the whole thing went a bit cheffy.  It will be around a year before we do this again, but it will be worth the wait!

*which is now sat in a jar in the fridge waiting for the next time we do roast potatoes.
**technically a Christmas leftover but booze doesn't count.