A Beefy Leftover Special: From Roast Topside to Vitello Tonnato

I'm a sucker for Farmer's markets, rarely get my food from anywhere else, and last Saturday it was Killerton House's turn (third Saturday in the month, in case you're local). This market has only been running for a year or so, and has attracted a couple of new meat producers recently. A while back I tried some lamb from Peradon Organic farm (http://www.peradonorganicfarm.co.uk/), which I made into Spit Roast Lamb and Wild Garlic Mash - unfortunately never got a chance to blog about that one. However last week I decided to plump for Beef instead from West Kidland farm (http://www.westkidland.co.uk/)- what what a piece of beef it was!

Anyone who has read this blog before will know that I also have a weakness for Rib of Beef on the bone, so it's not really like me to choose Topside, but it looked like a lovely piece of meat and a bargain at £15 for 2kg. It was very well hung too. I won't go into the way I cooked it this time, suffice to say that it was a pretty standard roast, that I served with a rather large yorkshire pudding, carrots, peas (in their pods) and new potatoes. Lovely stuff, which you can see on my Picasa food site if you're interested.

But what I really want to talk about is not the roast beef, it's what I did with the leftovers - Vitello Tonnato.

Vitello Tonnato aka Veal in Tuna Sauce

OK, first things first, obviously I wasn't using veal. But you don't really need to, to be honest. We've done this before with not only beef, but also lamb and even chicken. What is it? Basically it's cold meat dressed with a tuna sauce. It's simplicity itself to make, but like all simple food if the right ingredients are combined in the correct way then a few simple things can be transformed into something much greater than the sum of their parts. It should also be done with mayonnaise to be truly original, but as we're expecting our first child at the moment raw eggs are off the menu, so we are tending to use creme fraiche instead and that works out pretty well.

Ingredients (for four hungry people)

Sauce:
Tuna, 170g (in olive oil), chopped finely
Capers, 2 tablespoons, chopped finely
Mayonnaise (or creme fraiche), 150g
Anchovies, if you like them - not something we're keen on

Beef (or other meat):
10-12 thin slices of beef

(doesn't really need seasoning)

Preparation

• Mix all the sauce ingredients together - easiest done in a blender if you have one.
• Layout beef on a serving platter, slightly overlapping.
• Dress with a thickish layer of the sauce, then leave to come to room temperature.
• Serve the platter in the centre of the table, and allow people to help themselves.

Accompaniments

Boiled potatoes work well, or saute (my preference) - again left over from the roast.
A fresh green salad with cucumbers and tomatoes works well.

It's a fab dish for a hot summers day, and a very tasty way of using up leftover beef. I must admit I was a bit suspicious when the Italian first suggested this dish many years ago, but have enjoyed it many times since. I do urge you to give it a try, hopefully you'll be pleasantly surprised.

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.