Braised Lamb Italian Style

Well I've not blogged here for a while, though I've been cooking as much as ever. Finding the time to squeeze everything in is a pain! I will try and post something up here a bit more interesting soon, but in the meantime here in some more experimentation with the Flip HD video camera, filming a Sunday lunch. Lots of short videos of the various stages.

Been trying to do some Anglo/Italian hybrids recently, so here's a good example of one.

Good Old English Apples

Just sitting here at work enjoying my usual breakfast of whatever fresh fruit is in season, and I had to put up a quick post about the fab apples I picked up in the Tiverton Pannier market from Alister Strachan's stall last Saturday. It's ridiculously difficult to get anything but the usual suspects in most shops, Cox, Russet, Braeburn, etc., and whilst I have no problem with those varieties you'd think that in a country famous for it's apples, with hundreds upon hundreds of different types, we could perhaps do with a bit more choice!

Alister had the usual suspects, but also other more unusual varieties like Spartan and some I'd never heard about like Winter Gem and Fuji, which I've just been enjoying. It's a real pleasure to be eating apples that have their own unique flavour and texture, so much so that you can even choose your apple based on what mood you're in, so if you're anything like me get yourself to Tiuverton Pannier Market next Saturday and pick up a selection before they're all gone.

Winter Gem on the left and Spartan on the right

Roast Chicken with a Wild Mushroom 'stuffing'

Been a while since I posted anything up here - the blasted seasonal flu has struck our house, though not I think the pig variety thankfully - but was back up and running last weekend. And it's mushroom season again, yippee!

I started trying to understand wild mushrooms better a few years ago now, and have been slowly building my knowledge every season till I've now got to the point where I'm pretty confident in the field. There are several edible species which I'm very comfortable with and I know all the common deadly ones easily enough. Last Saturday we were up in one of our usual places and sure enough we found lots of dangerous ones, including Death Cap and Panther Cap, some of the most poisonous of the Amanita family. They certainly don't call it Death Cap for nothing.

Panther Cap just emerging - nasty bleeder

We also found a couple of small hedgehog mushrooms, which I've dried for future stews and soups, and luckily a load of Jersey Cow boletes on an old pine trunk that had been rotting away for some time. I say they're Jersey Cow now (and I'm sure they are) but they took some pondering I can tell you! There was one critical clue that gave them away (often the case with mushroom hunting) but more of that later.

Jersey Cow Boletes

Hedgehog Mushrooms

The Hedgehog is probably one of the easiest to identify, very tasty and often prolific, so is a great find. We know a few spots (mushrooms always tend to return year on year to the same place, provided you harvest them correctly) so we generally know we'll get something, but nonetheless it's always great so see them. They're unusual in that they have spines instead of the gills or pores of other mushrooms, and there are very few mushrooms that have spines, so you can be pretty confident what you've got.

But back to the Jersey Cow's. These were a real mystery for a bit, and although I keep a copy of the mushroom book in the car ("Mushrooms" by Roger Phillips) we still weren't sure. Back home I consulted a few more books (well you can't have too many foodie books in my opinion) and there was one thing that stood out which suddenly made everything clear - compound pores. I won't go into too much detail, mushrooming is not something you can cover in a paragraph after all, but suffice it to say that the pores on these mushrooms were not singular but made up of one big pore with lots of smaller ones inside. Unusual, and given all the other characteristics of the mushrooms that made a conclusive identification.

More pics of the mushrooms and identification:
http://picasaweb.google.com/r.m.osborne/JerseyCowBoletesPantherCap?authkey=Gv1sRgCJerkcngjsS-wQE

So, next question, what to do with them ...

We were headed to Ottery St Mary after lunch at a local pub, which is a typical Devon town a few miles away, and I knew it had a couple of good butchers so was quietly confident. I had in my mind a sort of braise with quail, partridge or something similar, the mushrooms chopped up into a sort of stuffing, but the only game on sale was overpriced in my opinion (the London lot can distort things a little) so I settled for a chicken instead. But that meant I had to be a bit more inventive for the stuffing, as putting it inside the bird would take too long to cook - so I decided to try a variation on the 'butter under the skin' trick I've been doing a fair bit of lately. First I made a classic duxelles, which is basically just mushrooms, onions & herbs chopped up and cooked together, and then left it to cool.

Duxelles Mixture with Thyme

I then added some butter to this mixture to thicken it and some small cubes of fresh mozzarella, which I hoped would melt in the oven sealing it together. This was then pushed under the skin of the chicken until it formed a thick layer above the breast. I was hoping that by doing this I would keep the meat moist, flavour it somewhat with the stuffing, and end up with a breast I could take of and slice through with two layers.

Chicken stuffed and ready for the oven. Note the cocktail stick - tore the skin a little, so needed to keep the end together!

This went into an oven at 180ºC for about 15 minutes per pound stuffed weight, which is what suits my fan oven, and then rested for about 20 minutes whilst I made a sauce in the roasting tray with a little white wine and some stock.

The chicken just out of the oven, ready to rest.

It actually came out really well, better than I expected, and it was a real pleasure to use freshly gathered wild mushrooms in a dish like this. The layering thing kind of worked, although I probably needed to use more stuffing if I'm honest.

Chicken breast on the plate

I served it with a simple baked potato (odd for a Sunday Roast maybe - but then again why not?), dressed with creme fraiche and chopped fresh chives from the garden.

The finished dish

I think there's a fair bit more experimentation to be done with 'under the skin' type stuffings, so will certainly be trying some other ideas out soon. Would love to hear if anyone else has been experimenting with this sort of thing, and what advice they can offer. Meanwhile it's back to the woods for me, in the hope for more fungi.

Roast Guinea Fowl with Lavender, Mint & Thyme

One of my most favourite cook books is one I don't actually use very much, because it's a bit specialised - it's called "Flavours of the World" by Paul Gayler. It's unusual because instead of organising itself the way many cookbooks do, either by type of course or type of meat/fish/veg etc., it's organised around different flavours. There are sections devoted to coffee, lemon, cinnamon, etc. covering a host of strong individual ingredients; and amongst them all is a section on lavender.

I've always been a big fan of lavender, but it's not exactly fashionable and still retains it's association with grandmas more than michelin stars. But there's a recipe in the book that I always wanted to try, and it's this one with guinea fowl. Trouble is I've never been unable to source all the right things at the right time in the past, but now I have a regular and reliable source for guinea fowl (a woman at Cullompton Farmer's market - apologies but I've forgotten your name!) I've finally got round to making it.

Well I've almost sourced everything - I should say that the recipe calls for Summer Savory, not mint and thyme, but I reckon they should make a good substitute so have adapted the recipe a bit to suit.

At it's heart the recipe is quite simple - you make a butter from the lavender and the herbs and push this under the skin of the bird before roasting. It's a trick I've done a few times since I first tried it at Christmas, and ensures the bird is moist whilst imparting whatever flavours are in the butter directly into the meat during the roast. There is a trick to the lavender though - you need to make what the author calls "lavender pollen" first.

Lavender Pollen

A very poetic name for something a little more prosaic, but easily made and stored. We have a lavender & rosemary hedge that I planted many years ago, and it's just in flower still so still time to make some. You just snip off the heads of as much lavender as you need, and then pop them into a very low oven (150ºC) for about an hour. They dry up very easily, and then it's a simple job to strip the flowers off the stems and then pound them up in a pestle and mortar until you have a fine powder.


The lavender ready to go into the oven for drying

Now back to the recipe ...

Once the guinea fowl has had the butter added (quick note - should have the rind of 1 lemon added as well), then squeeze the juice of 1 lemon over the bird (yep, that's the rest of the lemon!), and pour over a good amount of olive oil. Then into a moderate-hot oven for ½ an hour. Next in go a good handful of new potatoes - sliced in half in large - for another half an hour. Finally inch chunks of fennel, pepper (orange in my case) and aubergine in equal quantities.

Timing at this point gets tricky. The bird will need to come out in about 15 mins, and then rest for 15 mins, so you have about half an hour to play with to make sure all the veg is properly cooked. At some point though you'll need to get the bird off the roasting tray so you can deglaze all the juices and make the sauce - personally I often just move my veg into a clean roasting pan to let them finish, but this time around the veg was all really well cooked already so I moved it all off onto a serving platter to keep warm with the bird.

The sauce needs a bit of work. Once you've got your bird and the rest of the veg off the original roasting tray, deglaze with a small glass of sweet white wine, and then add about double the amount of stock. Cook this down into a coating sauce, pour over the bird and voila, you're done.


The finished dish, all ready for serving.

So how was it after all this? Pretty damn tasty. Unusual for sure, and I swear we actually spent the first 5 minutes battling the wasps for it who obviously thought this was some sort of wasp nirvana. Thank god for citronella candles ... and a badminton racket! I don't think I'll bother with all the veg next time, but will certainly be using lavender again in my cooking, and I fancy it'll make it's next appearance in a lamb dish. I have some left over lavender pollen ready. The bird was certainly very moist and tasty - better than last time I cooked guinea fowl - so the trick with the butter is worth it that's for sure.


Plated up and ready for munching.

'Open' Slow Pot Roast Lamb with Fennel & Radish

Feeling a bit experimental last Sunday, so decided to do another of my open pot roasts but with some ingredients that you wouldn't usually find together - Lamb & Fennel. As a seasonal cook I like to use what's around at the moment, so Fennel seemed like a good bet, plus I have a load of radishes in the back garden so thought I'd throw in some of those as well.


The bottom layer of vegetables in the pot, seasoned and tossed in olive oil and a glass of rose wine

This idea of 'open' pot roasts is working out quite well, so nice to try something different in it. The basic premise of this is that you have a pot which is just big enough for the joint you're cooking, and you put under the meat vegetables and other flavourings such as herbs which will steam underneath and flavour the meat, whilst on top you get very gentle browning. It's a slow roasting technique, so I put it in a standard oven at 150ºC for four hours - that's for a 5lb (2½ kg or so) shoulder of lamb.


The lamb shoulder on top of the vegetables. You often need to cut something off to squeeze it all in, in this case I took off the protruding leg and tucked it in the side.

It's a lazy man's lunch really, as you don't need to do much, but it is worth checking after a couple of hours just to make sure it's not burning underneath. It will depend how well covered the vegetables are, and what type of course, but if it's getting too dry just pour in some more liquid, anything from stock, wine or just plain old water will do. This one actually turned out very juicy, a quality of the lamb itself I guess as there wasn't much in the way of vegetables to speak of.


The meat out of the oven, nicely browned, but very tender and moist still.

One nice by product of this technique is that the fat runs off the meat into the pan, and can be strained off so you can just serve the juice and spare an artery or two as well.


Lamb has a reputation for being a bit fatty, especially shoulder, and you can see why here.

Served this with mash from the night before (I'm getting lazier by the minute!) and runner beans from the garden, which never seem to run out - thank god :-) The fennel worked quite well with the lamb, though the radishes were completely lost (one day I'll find something interesting to do with the things). Think I'll do this again, but next time I'm going to slice up some lemons to go with the fennel and not bother about the rose wine or the radishes.


The finished dish, served with a sauce made from the vegetables and ricotta, just to try ...


... and a fab nectarine cheesecake B made for dessert.

The leftover meat has a lovely soft flavour of anise still, which has already gone into some pittas for lunches and is very soon going to make a dry risotto type dish I do with some peppers and onions as well. Loads of meat left though - I think we'll be eating lamb all week in Silverton!