Three Good Things - Three good meals

Since starting Tonight's Menu I have tried to steer clear of the weekly round up of meals style blog post.  The main reason behind this* is that it is "Tonight's Menu" not "This Week's Menu".  That aside, I have had good reason not to be writing this week, my Mum is visiting.  It may not sound like a good reason to you, but I like to spend time with my guests, especially family, rather than spending the evenings typing.

Luckily, a wonderful blog concept from the glorious Liz, who writes at Margot Barbara, may well have saved my blogging conundrum.  Three Good Things is a roundup of three things that Liz is grateful for over the space of a week.  As this blog is about my evening meals, here are the three best ones that I have cooked this week

Good Meal One - Harissa Baked Trout

The thing with Mum is that she is quite a fussy eater.  There are very few meals that are completely off the menu, apart from any form of cured pork.  Ham, gammon and bacon are all persona non grata when she visits**.  We are making progress with some of the other foibles, fish being one of them.  The problem with fish is the fiddly nature of them.  It is written that Mum will find a bone in every portion of fish she is served.  With this in mind, I took extra care to pinbone the trout fillets before applying some harissa paste and baking them in a tinfoil parcel.

I served the trout with couscous, roast peppers and cherry tomatoes.  By the time the fish had been flaked off the skin and mixed through the couscous Mum was more than happy.  As were Z and I as we love fish and don't eat it often enough.

Good Meal Two - Tuscan Bean Stew

With the drawing in of Autumn and the shortening of the days, I have already started thinking about comfort food.  One of my favourite and most comforting combinations is that of sausages and beans.  The combinations of flavours that you could use is only limited by your imagination and good taste.  We bought some Italian inspired sausages from Sainsbury's over the weekend and cooked those with onion, celery, borlotti and haricot beans in some pork stock for a couple of hours.  The stew was finished with green beans and spinach.

Good Meal Three - Gigot Chops

The third good meal was courtesy of Mum.  We had decided to have some lamb as Z, who can't stand the stuff, was out for the evening.  I pointed Mum in the direction of Kirkgate market, told her who my favourite butcher is, and left the rest to her.  I imagined a Barnsley chop or some shanks but Mum was on a mission.

Having found B & J Callard, she walked in and flummoxed the young butcher by asking for two Gigot Chops.  He didn't have a clue what she was after, but one of the more senior members of staff was there to help.  The Scottish gigot chop is what the English call a leg steak and although I will have eaten it in the past, years of living in England had let it pass from my memory.  It is easily my favourite cut of lamb.

So there we have it, three good things, three good meals, all completely different and all wonderfully tasty.

*other than my odd obsession with following unwritten rules that I have set myself.
**I have been known to smuggle bacon into dishes but once it is cooked down it acts more as a seasoning than an ingredient.

Berlin Baby!

One of the reasons that I have stopped posting on Tonight's Menu daily is our recent holiday in Berlin.  It's not Berlin's fault, I had a great time, but being away from the blog gave me time to think about how I was using it.  After almost a year I felt like I was in danger of repeating myself and that wouldn't be fun for me or you.  From now on I'll be posting less frequently and only if the meal deserves a mention*.  It seems only right however, that I tell you a little of what we got up to while on holiday, especially the week's worth of food that we consumed. 

If you haven't been to Berlin you really should give it a go.  We have a built-in reason for choosing Berlin as our destination as Z's brother lives there, but you don't need a family connection to justify a trip, especially now that Jet2 have opened up a route from Yeadon International Airport.  There are only three flights a week and they are quite late, so we ended up arriving just as R was ready to go to bed.  Luckily we were mob handed.  The three of us (Z, R and I) flew with my Mum (Granny), while Z's Mum (Nana) and Step-dad (Grand-Phil) had arrived the day before.  Getting R settled wasn't too tricky, even though he was giddy at the attention he was receiving.

As there were so many of us we hired a flat in the middle of the city to call home for the week, this meant we could come and go as we pleased and weren't beholden to hotel catering.  The flat was massive with the potential to sleep 18 people yet it only had a small kitchen, so most of the evening meals were prepared by me and Grand-Phil.  Other than space, our only other limitation when cooking was the lack of ingredients in the rather small and tightly packed "super" market in Friedrich Strasse U-Bahn station.

To say we didn't have a lot of choice, we still managed to eat well.  Pork chops with sage, meatballs, roast mixed vegetables and pasta with a fresh tomato sauce were all cooked by us at some point.  We also had sausages with sauerkraut as part of our final meal**.  Of course not all of out meals whilst on holiday were eaten in the flat. 

As we were doing the tourist thing we had lunch in a bar or cafe almost every day.  The first of these was in De Berliner Republic on the banks of the Spree.  They had some good traditional fare for us to choose from, along with around eighty different beers.  The grannies both had flammkuchen, Germany's answer to the pizza.  Z had pickled herring and Grand-Phil and I both went for blood and liver sausages.  Everybody's food was good but the sausages were a lot softer than either of us had anticipated, more like hot pate than black pudding.

blood and liver sausages

Later on in the week I managed to track down one of Berlin's most notorious food institutions, Currywurst.  Yes it's a sausage covered in curry sauce but not as you would find in the UK.  The sauce is more like a heavily seasoned ketchup, closer to the school dinner curries of my youth than the curries we eat at home, but it works.  I had mine sat outside Adebar, Mitte, in the pouring rain and it was perfect***.

Currywurst

It wasn't all sausages though.  For Z's birthday, her brother and sister-in-law took us to Kuchi, a Japanese/Oriental restaurant with a fantastic menu.  Everything from soup to sushi was on offer.  I had braised pork with rice, Z had a Thai Green Curry, while Z's sister-in-law had a great looking plate of sushi.  Z's brother outdid us all though by ordering Mr Duck's Special Plate. 

left: Sushi. Right: Mr Duck's Special plate

It almost needed to be ordered on the strength of its name alone.  I was like an over flowing bento box, filled to the gills with the best that the menu had to offer.  We finished the evening at Keyser Soze, a bar that would be well at home in Leeds.  Proudly shabby, selling all of the best German beers and with a sound track which was diverse enough to include NWA and Dolly Parton.

And that was that, a week in a fantastic city soaking up culture and over thirty different beers.  Our flights home were in the evening, so we had time for one last meal.  We wandered around looking for a likely restaurant and happened across Café Spreeblick in the Nikolaiviertel district.  The clientèle were all of a certain age and the food that was on offer was of the same vintage.  Wonderfully traditional food.  If we had been in Leeds there would have been Fish and Chips and Filled Giant Yorkshire Puddings.  I ordered stuffed rolled beef with potato dumplings.  It was a fantastic and fitting final meal for this trip, so good in fact that I'll be cooking the dumplings myself in the not too distant future.

Of course, we will be going back to Berlin so it was farewell not goodbye.  I really can recommend a visit although I wouldn't bother with the Checkpoint Charlie Museum if I were you.

*no more writing about leftover spag boll you'll be pleased to hear.
**when in Rome etc.
***one of the things that I have noticed having been to Berlin on a few occasions it that they do like to be outside.  Even in the depths of winter you can happily sit outside a cafe tucking into coffee and cake because they are set up for it.  They know that the temperature is going to plummet, so every chair has a blanket and every table is under an umbrella.  We should do this more in the UK rather than moan about how cold it is.

Paella

Normally, when you return from holiday, there are a couple of days when there isn't enough food in the house.  The initial run to the local shop for bread and milk sees you through breakfast and you can just about cobble something together from your cupboards for a couple of meals.  We got back from Berlin last Tuesday and although we have shopped, we still haven't carried out a "big shop" so our cupboards are starting to look pretty bare.

There are always somethings that can be relied upon.  We tend to have three or four types of rice on the go at any one time and there is usually a packet of sausages in the freezer.  The decision to make a paella style dish was made by the fact that the sausages that I found in the freezer were pork and chorizo.

Before anybody calls foul and starts asking about the lack of prawns and mussels, that would be a seafood paella.  The original dish from Valencia would have traditionally contained chicken, rabbit, pork and even snails but no seafood.  Don't get me wrong, I love a seafood paella but with the ingredients I had, a sausage paella it was.

Merguez Sausages

If you follow me on twitter* you may have noticed that I have a fairly unhealthy relationship with merguez sausages.  It runs close to an obsession and is fuelled by a lack of merguez in my life.  I'm sure that if I could find a reliable source for the spicy North African Sausages in Leeds, I could easily do without them but their absence makes me want them more.

Such is my desire for merguez that when I discovered a 'merguez inspired' sausage in Morrison's**, a packet was in my shopping basket faster than Usain Bolt doing up his shoe laces.  Never mind that I was shopping for the Olympic Food Challenge, or that the object of my desire was not indigenous to any of my countries, they had to be bought.

Now that the challenge is over*** and I can eat what I want, the merguez were first on the meal planner. Nothing could have made me happier than tucking into a plate of merguez with a pile of skinny chips and a mound of salad, so that is what we had.  I knocked up a yoghurt, lemon and mint dressing and wallowed in my obsession.  The sausages weren't bad but they were not 100% authentic.  My search goes on, but at least I now have a substitute for when the cravings get too bad.

*why not?
**other supermarkets are available.
***for now

Spetsofai - Sausage and Pepper Stew

We've all been there.  You buy a new cookery book, excitedly flick through the pages and get giddy about all of the new recipes you are about to try.  Then, through no fault of your own, the book makes its way onto the groaning bookshelf with all of the other books to gather dust.  For a change to tradition, Tonight's meal is the second recipe from the cookbook that Z bought me last week: Meze Cooking by Sarah Maxwell.

We cook sausage stews and casseroles quite often, usually cooking them with beans and flavouring them depending on the type of sausage.  This simple stew of slow cooked onions, peppers and sausages was wonderfully sweet and sticky.  As it was a nice evening we just had the sausages with a side salad and some garlic bread but some couscous would have been good too.

Toulouse Sausages with Sauteed Potatoes

I know I keep going on about Leeds Market and how we should all shop locally.  I know that I keep having a go at supermarkets for one reason or another.  I also know, that despite my best intentions, there are some things that I cannot buy locally, that my closest supermarkets sell.  I actually shop at two different supermarkets, depending on what is on the shopping list, as there are some items that are only sold by one of them and some by the other*. 

A few weeks ago I happened to be in a particular supermarket; one that used to have a J and still has an apostrophie, and I spotted a special offer on their Taste the Difference sausages.  I'm rather partial to a banger as one in eighteen blog posts will testify to.  These were Toulouse inspired pork sausages with bacon, garlic, parsley and red wine all starring in the ingredient list.  We'd had them before and enjoyed them so into the basket they went.

During the colder months there is seldom any decision to be made for what to have with sausages.  It's either mash or they are cooked in a stew.  Given the raging heat of summer** I decided some sautéed potatoes and a side salad would be a more fitting meal, and it was.

*my life is a giddy rollercoster ride at times!
**I know, it's been rubbish this year hasn't it.

Bank Holiday BBQ Boerewors

Finally, after yesterday's wash out, the sun has come out.  That, coupled with the fact that today is Bank Holiday Monday, can only mean one thing, a barbecue.  In a slight break with tradition we've barbecued for lunch rather than our evening meal so that our departing guests could partake in some of the finest sausages in Leeds.

One of the gems of Leeds Kirkgate Market is Capcan, the South African Butcher on Butcher's Row.  I had cooked some of their boerewors for Mr S last summer and they were of course on the menu this afternoon.  I also cooked some lambwors which, in my opinion, are the best bangers around.

To go with the sausages, I made coleslaw and Z knocked up a potato and avocado salad and a green salad.  Z isn't a fan of lamb but there is so much flavour in the lambwors that even she devoured them although she preferred the boerewors.  There are more varieties of South African sausage for me to try, from Capcan, but they will have to be pretty special to eclipse these two.

Pork and Nettle Sausages with Wild Rocket Lentils

Last year, on Father's Day, Z and R clubbed together and bought me the River Cottage Baby and Toddler Cookbook.  This was meant to not only inspire us but to also guide us through the potential trauma of weaning.  It started off well, we thumbed through the pages, realised that what we were doing wasn't that bad and moved on.  The book, as with most of our cookbooks, hit the shelves after a couple of weeks.

To give it its due, it is a well written book.  It's full of useful tips and moves through the seasons.  It also moves through the stages of a child's development into cooking for the family.  I suppose it was only a matter of time, as with all of the cookery books that we own, that we would open its pages again and this is precisely what Z did earlier this week.

What she found was a recipe for lentils with watercress and onions.  We currently have an over abundance of wild rocket so a substitution was instantly on the cards.  The lentils were cooked in pork stock, with a crushed clove of garlic mixed through it, until the stock had been absorbed into the lentils.  They were then finished off with fried onions and fresh chopped rocket from the garden.

R had a portion of the lentils for his tea* and we had the rest of them for our evening meal.  We had bought some pork and nettle sausages from Swillington Farm at the last Kirkstall Deli market out of curiosity.  We simply grilled these and served them alongside the lentils.  I don't know what I was expecting from sausages with nettles in.  Perhaps a little more bite but you could tell they were made from fantastic pork.  The one thing we will be taking from tonight's meal is, we will be cooking lentils much more often.

*well it is a baby and toddler cookbook recipe.

Bangers and Mash

Today has not been one of the better days on record.  I'm usually a happy-go-lucky kind of guy but today I've been wandering around work like a bear with a sore head.  Needless to say, the weather didn't help matters!  Luckily for me Z was on hand to save the day from complete ruination.

By the time I finally got home from work, Z had fed, bathed and read the boy his bedtime story and was already preparing tonight's meal.  Last week we took delivery of a meat box from Swillington Farm*. I won't regale you with a full list of its contents, but there were sausages.  They were rare breed, outdoor reared pork and herb sausages and very nice they were too.  Z also made some potato, swede and parsley mash and suddenly the day wasn't so bad after all.


*our first one since November last year!

Venison Sausages with Roast Potatoes

This is not a meteorological blog post, but the weather certainly plays a part in what we eat.  Big rib-sticking stews in winter, light salads in summer, you get the idea.  Having started Tonight's Menu in November I haven't written many salad posts but they will come soon enough.

This time last week I had spent the day on Portabello beach, Edinburgh, building sandcastles and eating ice cream.  It was like it was the middle of summer, only without the hoards of people.  I have never, in all my years of visiting Scotland, eaten ice cream, on a beach, in March.

Last night's meal was a light and summery pasta dish with a sauce made from my home grown rocket.  Tonight, due to the wintry conditions that we awoke to, we needed something a little bit more hearty to give us a big comforting hug and keep the chill out.

The venison, pork & red wine sausages were grilled, but the real treat was the roast potatoes.  Anya potatoes make the most fantastic roasties.  Each spud is almost like a single, huge, knobbly chip.  The flavour is superb, nutty and buttery.  To really set them off we roasted them in goose fat and served the lot alongside some steamed kale from the garden.  Summer is great but winter food can be so much more indulgent.

Toulouse Sausage and Bean Casserole

Sausage casserole is fast turning into a house standby.  The main reason for this is the huge variety in the meals that you end up eating due to the huge variety of sausages that are available to us.  At its heart, a sausage casserole is bangers, onions, beans and stock.  Whether you use chorizo or cumberland sausages is up to you, it's your imagination which makes the difference.

Possibly the most famous sausage casserole is the French Cassoulet and that is what I recreated for tonight's menu.  I bought a packet of Sainsbury's* Toulouse inspired pork sausages especially for this but you can use whatever you have.  They were cooked together with some bacon, onions, carrots, butter beans and stock for about an hour and served with a green salad.  Bon appetit.

*other supermarkets are available, as are local independent shops and markets.

Lambwors and chips

Z is having a well deserved pamper night at one of her friends' house.  This has given me carte blanche on what I'm eating this evening.  When we first met, way back in September 1995, Z was vegetarian.  Therefore my Z-not-at-home-meal was invariably steak and chips* just to redress the red meat balance.  These days, with Z's return to an omnivorous state, I can have steak whenever I like, within reason.

I now favour lamb when Z isn't around, or when I can find it on a decent restaurant menu.  This is because lamb is the last vestige of Z's vegetarianism, so we don't eat it that often.  In fact this is the first time I've eaten lamb since starting Tonight's Menu.

I bought the Lambwors on a recent trip to Leeds Kirkgate Market.  There is a cracking South African butcher on Butchers Row who I have bought boerewors from in the past.  I'm always intrigued by their ever increasing range so when I saw that they had started making a lamb version I was in.  Knowing that I'd be on eating them on my own I only bought a short length of sausage.  I then froze and forgot about them until today.

Being home alone for the evening I have let my foodie** pretensions slip.  There is something very satisfying about a huge pile of skinny chips, a large pile of dressed salad and some spicy meat.  To make sure I wasn't being a complete slob I knocked up a yoghurt and harissa dressing which was cooling and hot at the same time.

*assuming I had some cash, more often than not it would have been a shonky pasta dish but would have been craving steak.
**I really do not like the term foodie. I prefer the term "passionate about food" or "always hungry"

Welsh Dragon Sausages and Mash - Happy St David's Day

There are some things in life that it is perfectly acceptable to have favourites of.  Favourite football team: Leeds United.  Favourite graphic artist: Pete Fowler.  Favourite holiday destination: Barcelona.  There are other things where favouritism can be a bit more tricky.  You shouldn't really have a favourite child* and you certainly shouldn't have a favourite parent's nationality.

My Dad was Scottish and my Mum is Welsh.  The 5 Nations (now 6) always brought raised national pride especially between my Dad and Granddad.  I always felt torn between the two and see myself as half Scottish and half Welsh.  The only time I don't want either team to win is when they play each other.

My spilt-national-personality does come with its advantages.  I celebrate an extended number of national days.  Already this year we've toasted Robbie Burns with a haggis supper and today we're celebrating St David, the patron saint of Wales.

On a recent trip to an other one of my favourites, B&J Callard butchers on Leeds Kirkgate Market, I found Welsh Dragon Sausages**.  I duly bought half a dozen and put them aside for tonight.  Simply grilled and served with mashed potatoes they make a great mid week treat.  To make the meal that little bit more Welsh I added fried leeks to the mash. Mwynhewch eich bwyd!

*unless you only have one in which case it should be that one. 
**the sausages contain NO dragon.  There was a case in 2006 where Powys trading standards asked a butcher to re-label his Welsh Dragon Sausages, not because they didn't contain dragon but because it was too ambiguous that they contained meat.  The ingredients stated the per cent of pork that was in the sausage but that wasn't good enough for the man from the council. "I don't think anyone would imagine that dragon meat was being used but we would not want vegetarians to buy the sausages believing they were meat free."

Sausage and Bean Stew

I've been looking forward to tonight for ages.  I'm not an avid watcher/listener of The Proms when they are on, except for the last night which I watch religiously.  Last year, for one reason or another, I managed to watch a good five or six of the televised broadcasts from The Royal Albert Hall.  They tended to be the off-piste prom's (Dr Who and the Comedy Prom amongst them) but one really stood out. 

The Spaghetti Western Orchestra are a five piece troupe of excellent, multi talented musicians, who clearly adore the music of Ennio Morricone.  I have gone on record in the past to say that I didn't like Westerns but clearly this doesn't include the music.  Watching the Prom (on a night that I was baby sitting) I was giddy as a kipper.  Z got home late but the following morning I replayed the concert to her and we were both astounded by just how good the music sounded and by how good the musicians were.

If you weren't aware, we are currently in the middle of The Leeds International Concert Festival.  I'd seen posters about the events in the past but not really paid any attention, that was until a brochure for this year's line-up fell through my letter box.  In an idle moment I started to flick through and there, staring out at me from the pages, were The Spaghetti Western Orchestra.  There and then I knew we were going, there was only the small matter of a babysitter to sort.

Our first attempts to find a sitter were unfruitful and once we had found a willing friend* I attempted to buy the tickets.  They had all but sold out and we ended up on the back row of the balcony.  This, it turns out, is not a bad thing.  We had a cracking view and the acoustics were brilliant.  An added bonus was the fact that the Grand Pipe Organ of Leeds Town Hall was used during one of the renditions.  That organ has some serious pipes and the music flows into your heart and soul.

So what, if anything does this have to do with tonight's menu?  Well, due to the start time of the concert, and the imminent arrival of the baby sitter, we decided that we should eat early.  Nothing was more fitting than a cowboy-style sausage and bean stew.  A one pot, open fire, camp-site wonder to keep you warm whilst looking out for cattle rustlers.

I fried off bacon, onions and sausages before adding black-eye and pinto beans, onions and tinned tomatoes.  To give that camp fire aroma I added oregano and smoked paprika.  All that was missing was some fine gulping whisky, the stars above our heads and the unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake in the distance.

*Thank you Rebecca

Bangers and mash

Now we are in February and life has normalised itself, after Christmas and New Year, we have received a lovely delivery.  Our first meat box from Swillington Farm.  When we first ordered an organic, local, rare bread meat box from Swillingon we decided it would be a good test to see if we could go a month without buying meat.

I think it's fair to say we passed, but not with flying colours.  There was always an occasion, visitors or a desire for bacon when we had already had our months allowance.  We've loosened our strict meat embargo and now allow ourselves to buy extra without feeing guilty, but only if we fall on bargains, or really want steak.

In our experience, there are a couple of givens in the boxes.  Bacon, pork loin steaks and sausages.  The sausages, all be it ever present, have never been the same, two boxes in a row.  This month we received pure pork sausages.

Given the wonderfully seasonal weather we've been having it was no surprise that Z wanted sausages and mash.  I've not analysed why mashed potato is so comforting but I'm willing to accept that it is.

Middle-Eastern Sausage and Butternut Squash Casserole

Since taking on the allotment we have tried, with limited success, to grow a few varieties of squash.  Courgettes are no problem at all, they are too generous at times, but this isn't courgette season.  No matter how the shelves grown under their weight, I won't be eating any until my first harvest next year.

The winter squashes are still abundant and in season.  Each variety has a different texture and flavour and my favourite, Crown Prince, is huge and keeps well.  A decent one will happily provide four meals for a small family.   Despite this variety, our choices at the tills are less bountiful.  At least butternut squash is the one that has taken hold.  It is very versatile and has great flavour and texture unlike the harlequin squash which is sweet but granular.

For some reason the traditional "What are we having for dinner?" question was met with blank expressions all round this morning.  I wont bore you with the full inventory of the kitchen shelves, suffice to say a butternut squash* was in attendance.  We still have a surfeit of meat in the freezer from our last meat box delivery from Swillington Farm.  So in some stolen idle moments at work I trawled the internet for inspiration.

What I found was a shed-load of curry and soup** recipes.  Soup doesn't stand high in my evening meal charts and we've had curries lately.  I kept clicking my mouse until I found a recipe that I'll be returning to next summer, Middle-Eastern Broad Bean Stew.  It included butternut squash in the ingredient list.  A few tweaks later and tonight's menu emerged.  The Sausages from Swillington are Pork, Sage and Apple.  A savoury and sweet sausage that works well with the squash.  Sweet heat from harissa acted as a great foil for the two.

*in this house, also known as a pumpy-squash-fruit. Don't ask.
**check back next week for Today's Lunch if you are interested in soup.