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.

Thai Red Curry Soup

Back in November I made Pad Prig King (to accompany some Thai fish cakes.  I bought some red curry paste for the recipe but it only required a tablespoon.  The small pot of paste claimed to be enough for ten to twelve servings of curry. It also had a short shelf life once opened, so I needed to use it up fast. We had a good curry a few days later*, but that still left me with over half a tub.

One of my favourite tricks for the use and storage of leftovers is to turn them into soup and freeze them.  That is exactly what I did but not before seeking the advice of The Soup Witch**.  I was unsure about what to use as the base for the soup.  I didn't want to use traditional stocks as they are all very western in flavour.  Jo suggested using tins of tomatoes and coconut milk and that is exactly what I did.

After defrosting the soup for tonight, I added sliced peppers, carrots, spring onions, a handful of corriander and some rice noodles to make a meal out of a snack.  I'm not actually a fan of soup as a main meal.  To me it's a starter or lunch dish but the flavours of this rich, sweet and hot soup made all the difference.  There is still a portion left in the freezer.  I think that it will be receiving just a little bit more chilli and possibly some prawns.  I'll let you know.

*missing blog post.
** Jo from Thistlemist Farm

Tarragon Chicken

OK. I know it's been a while but we have been busy.  December was written off with every spare hour devoted to DIY in the run up to Christmas.  Then there was Christmas itself.  We had a house full for all of Christmas week, with both sets of R's grandparents wanting to share in his first proper Christmas.  I'm still, after over a year of blogging, uncomfortable photographing food when in a group of people.  I also didn't think it would be particularly polite to my guests to sit and type for the whole of the holidays.

Needless to say we ate well.  We kept Christmas day traditional with turkey* and all of the trimmings.  We also had; Chicken in Fig Sauce, Salmon in Champagne, Oxtail Ragu, Goat Curry and on New Years Eve we tucked into Steak and Chips.  Needless to say not every dish was to everyone's taste but cooking for six for a week, when you want every dish to be special, is tricky and not something I'm used to.

But that was then and this is now.  2013 is a new year and I was on the hunt for a new food challenge.  I've loved writing this blog but it was starting to feel a little forced.  What I needed was some focus and that has turned up in the shape of Everything But The Oink.  I'm going to attempt to eat everything that is edible from pigs over the course of the year.  I don't know how it will go but you can follow the results here.

However, man cannot live by pig alone** so there will still be room for other dishes and blog posts here on Tonight's Menu.  The first of the year is chicken in tarragon sauce.  I had bought a bunch of tarragon to make bearnaise sauce for our New Year's Eve steak and had lots left over.  This was such an easy and tasty meal to cook I'm amazed we haven't done it before. 

Onions are softened in the pan the the chicken was browned in, before a glass of wine is added.  Once that is reduced to about a couple of tablespoons you stir in a teaspoon of wholegrain mustard, double cream and the tarragon.  All that is left to do is return the chicken to the pan and sling the whole lot in the oven until the chicken is cooked.  You could serve this with rice or roasties and you can easily add the veg of your choosing.  After a couple of hectic weeks we kept it simple with boiled potatoes and steamed leeks.

*I know there are foodies out there who turn their nose up at turkey but I maintain that a good turkey is a thing of glory.  We also had enough leftover to line the freezer with goodies for the next few months.
**It is possible that man could live by pig alone but I'm NOT taking that challenge.

Happy 1st Birthday

A year ago today I made my first tentative steps into the world of blogging.  I had always thought of blogs as the domain of the self righteous and geeks but, I had been getting some very positive feedback from people about the food I had been cooking for my evening meals so a blog felt like the most logical step.  The thing that was stopping me was self doubt.  Would I be able to write something that people would read and more importantly, would anybody read the dashed thing?

My biggest fear was my mental block for written English.  I have always read a lot but whenever it came to putting pen to paper I froze.  I only ever scraped past written exams, even if I knew the subject inside out, so choosing to write for the sake of it was a scary proposition.  Fortunately Z has been on hand to proof read for me, because this would not be the blog it is if it hadn't been for her.

I decided from the outset that I didn't want to write a recipe blog, I felt that the story behind each dish would be more entertaining*.  I hope that I was right and that whether you've been reading all year or have only just stumbled across Tonight's Menu, you like what you have found.  Hopefully you have even been inspired to cook something, who knows?

As this is the first birthday of Tonight's menu I had thought about cooking a celebration meal, or looking back through a year of cookery to choose a favourite to cook again.  However, capricious fate has played me like a Mississippi Boat Whore and rather than rustling up a delicious meal I'll be spending the evening in the company of the Idiot B*stard Band.

To keep your culinary juices sated I have looked back over the last year to check on the most popular blog posts and present them here for your pleasure.  As tradition would dictate they are in reverse order.

10. Venison and Chocolate Casserole.  The antidote to Halloween and it's Americanisation was to cook something inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations.

9. Chorizo and Bean Stew with Gurnard.  Possibly my favourite dish in the top ten.  The lightness of the poached fish really worked with the earthy Spanish flavours from the bean stew.

8. Fish and Greens with Fufu. The only entry in the top ten from the Olympic Food Challenge, an undertaking that completely took over Tonight's Menu during the summer. The fish in question was Catfish which we had never eaten, or cooked with, before.  It was very good too, a strong meaty fish with no fiddly bones.

7. Cheese Club, Cheese with Added Stuff. From only last week and the first of three top ten hits from Homage 2 Fromage, Leeds' first and only cheese club.

6. Yorkshire Cheese. The second entry from Homage 2 Fromage, this time with a local twist.

5. Posh Fish and Chips. With three fish blog posts in the top ten I'm assuming that there is an apetite for seafood out there.  I'm still trying to eat fish that isn't cod or haddock whenever possible.  The posh fish in this meal was marlin and it was good.

4. Irish Cheese at Homage 2 Fromage. The higest ranked cheese club post is here at number four.  The Irish theamed night included a visit from the wonderful Cooleeney Farm.

3. Yorkshire Chicken Mole. I'm happy that highest ranked recipe for the year is this Yorkshire twist on a mexican classic.  Chicken and chocolate are a marriage made in Wakefield.

2. Leeds Pork Pie Challenge. The first self imposed challenge on Tonight's Menu was to try and find Leeds' best pork pie.  I like to think that I was thorough, although I am still willing to be proven wrong.

Which brings us to number one, top of the pops, the big cheese, the most read post in a year of writing almost 300 musings about the food we eat.

1. Johnny Fontane's. This is the only restaurant review I have written and, saddly, Johnny Fontane's did not make it to it's first birthday.  To my astonishment, even after it closed, this post is still being read a couple of times a week.  Perhaps I should do more reviews, but then we wouldn't want more restaurants going bust would we?

So there we have it, the ten most read posts from a year of blogging.  It has been a fun year that I have taken a lot from.  I think my writen English has improved and I know that my photography certainly has.   This list does not actually include my favourite meals of the last year, but I'll save them for a different post in a day or two**.

Thank you all for continuing to read and talk about food with me.  Finally I think we should all thank Z, without her this really wouldn't be Tonight's Menu, it would probably be Tonights' Menue.

*if not for you my loyal reader then for me.
**I'm allowed a couple of monatages, it's my birthday.

Zebra Burgers

It seems that every week there is a new wave of public, or celebrity, outrage at the social networking and micro blogging site Twitter.  Some of the tales of woe are reminiscent of playground rows, friends falling out over an opinion miraculously behaving like best friends by the end of the week.  There are tales of trolls* being so vile that people are deactivating their accounts altogether.  There are also the legal battles over jokes on twitter being taken seriously and for deformation of character.

It's not all doom and gloom though, in fact it's probably not even 10% doom and gloom, but as with all things it's the bad news that travels and sticks.  Tonight's Menu comes courtesy of the nice, friendly, cuddly side of Twitter.  Over the past year I have been fortunate enough to meet some of the people I follow on Twitter at various food (and non-food) events and it was through one of these that I had my first contact with zebra.

Back in November I noticed a picture, posted on twitter by Jo from Thistlemist Farm.  She had been selling her wonderful soup at Wentworth Farmers market and was tucking into a zebra burger.  I was immediately jealous but resigned myself to not driving the hour and a half round trip for a burger.  I set about my day and promptly forgot about stripy meat.  When I got home I found a message from Jo telling me that she'd bought me a packet of the burgers and that I could collect them next time she was at a more conveniently placed farmers market. 

Today was the Oakwood farmers market and I made the trip up to Roundhay to pick up my burgers.  Sadly Jo was ill, but I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Soup who had been sent to market with her wares to sell and the zebra to pass on to me.  It felt a bit odd, getting to the front of a queue of people buying soup and asking for zebra.  It was just as odd when an unmarked bag was passed over the stall counter, money exchanged hands and, like a Chicago gangster, I left the market making sure that I wasn't being followed.

To make sure that we could taste the zebra we decided not to garnish the meat patties with the usual ketchup, mustard, cheese etc.  We grilled the burgers and served them with dukkah coated potato wedges as a nod to their African heritage.  I'm not sure what I was expecting from zebra, I've never eaten horse** and I was sure it wasn't going to be beefy.  It didn't have that strong a flavour at all, gamey and sweet.  The burgers were also very juicy which surprised me as I thought that zebra would have been especially lean.

The burgers were from Oslinc, a Lincolnshire Ostrich farm who also specialise in exotic meat.  I love ostrich burgers, not that I've had them for a long time.  I only hope I am never made to choose between zebra and ostrich as they both taste fantastic.

*not the ones who live under bridges waiting for passing goats to eat, but evil spirited individuals who take delight in bullying people. 
**it's on the list