Focaccia

Thought I'd write a quick post about the joys of Focaccia, which is an Italian flat bread for those of you not familiar with it. I first tasted Focaccia when I was an exchange student at the Italian University of Padova, and have loved it ever since. It has a light yet doughy texture, with a subtle chew, and is very often cooked with crusty salt and herbs - my favourite way of preparing it.

Two shallow Focaccia ready to go in the oven

The best thing about Focaccia as far as I'm concerned is that it can be prepared so easily - that is if you have a bread machine at least. Not that I bake bread in a bread machine, that really wouldn't be possible with Focaccia. It's the kneading and rising side of things that I use it for. Some people love to knead I know, they see it as a source of relaxation, but to me it's simply a pain in the hands!

My bread machine is an old Panasonic model, well over ten years of service but never misses a beat. It has a good selection of different settings, but only one is much used in my household, 'Pizza'. This is only a 45 minute cycle, but provided you give your dough a good hour or two once the bread machine cycle has run then, it works well for a whole range of different Italian style flat breads, not least of which is Focaccia.

Here's the recipe I use. This amount will do for a large lasagne style deep dish, or for two regular flan dishes as shown in the pictures.

• 1 tsp dried yeast
• 450g Bread Flour
• 1½ tsp salt
• 2 tsp sugar
• 275ml water
• 2 tbsp olive oil (plus extra for coating the pan and for drizzling)

The method is quite simple:

1. Empty the yeast into the bottom of the bread machine bucket, add the flour on top, then sprinkle with the salt and the sugar, pour on the water, and finally add the olive oil.
2. Let the machine run the Pizza cycle or similar, then leave the dough undisturbed for an hour or so.
3. After the hour is up, pour a generous amount of olive oil into a deep baking dish and empty the dough out into it. Turn the dough in the olive oil to coat it, knocking it back and pushing firmly into all the corners so that it fits the rectangle. Leave for another hour or so somewhere warm, covered in a tea towel.
4. After the second hour is up your dough should be quite risen. Now push your finger deep down into the dough, but not quite to the bottom, to make the characteristic holes. Scatter generously with rosemary leaves and sea salt, and drizzle with more olive oil.
5. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200ºC for 15-20 minutes until as brown as you prefer.
6. Leave to cool briefly, for as long as you can resist that gorgeous, soft, herby and salty delight ...

Topping and other flavours can be added according to season and taste, this year my wild garlic with caramelised lemon zest worked particularly well.

Wild garlic and caramelised lemon zest at the front, plain wild garlic at the back.

If you'd like to see more pictures of my Focaccia's being prepared, head over to my Focaccia pictures in Picasa Web Albums.

Brasato di Cervo (Braised Venison)

Well that's Christmas over for another year, and for the first time in many years we've not been able to get to Italy to see the other side of the family and celebrate with them. There's a very good reason we've not been keen to travel far, the arrival of our Son, Max, but that doesn't mean we're not disappointed and feeling a bit low about it. The Italian trip has become something of an institution and it feels like something is missing somehow.

Luckily Nonna did manage to visit before Christmas and meet her grandson briefly in December, and she also brought practically an entire suitcase full of food for us, mostly local from the region. I swear she thinks I starve her daughter back here in England, and the food here is desperately in need of some hearty Italian additions! I have to admit I struggle to disagree given what she brought, the small crunchy breads called Bibanesi for example which I love and can't find in this country. There's also the wonderful Cotechino, a form of pork sausage that's probably quite bad for you but tastes delicious, especially when served with puy lentils cooked with vegetables and butter. There's also the truly local food, venison shot in the Italian alps by the Italians father or one of his friends - it's never entirely clear who shot what it seems. This time around we had mince and something labelled "Rosbeaf Cervo", which I think was some sort of topside joint. Either way I decided to do it in Nonna's style, something I've had many times when visiting the in-laws, a braised dish with root vegetables and wine.

Brasato di Cervo

The trouble with wild food is that you're never entirely sure what you're getting. Farmed food has the reliability of mass production at least, if not the flavour of wild, but it does mean that when a cut ends up on your kitchen sideboard you can't be 100% sure how best to cook it. Braising is something of a fallback in this respect, as there are very few cuts that won't be delicious after slow cooking in a moist flavour rich environment. This dish is something I've seen made a lot in Italy by the Italians mother as well, so I did have something of a head start on it, plus a handy recipe check just a phone call away.

The meat as it arrived - just what is this?!

Nonna is actually a fabulous cook, but in that home style way that is so often overlooked. She cooks simple food incredibly well, something which perhaps could be said is a hallmark of all great Italian cuisine, but something that can be tricky to replicate back home. I find the tendency is to overdo the frippary and miss  the more basic - but critical - aspects of the cooking, which is why proper Italian food is so hard to find outside of Italy. By that I mean the underlying aspects such as how long to cook each part of the recipe, and the correct quantities of each of the ingredients.

This brasato recipe is a case in point, deceptively simple, easy to make, but hard to master. You start with a quick sofritto, then spend some time browning the meat exceptionally well, next deglaze with white wine and then very slow cook until tender.

Step 1: Sofritto

Sofritto is the Italian word for what the French call a mirepoix, a combination of onion, carrot and celery chopped into small dice that is slowly fried in oil or butter to form the base of other dishes. Here is is used as the base flavour for the braise, and also as the sauce used to dress some pasta for the primo.

Often when I cook onions I prefer to do them long and slow, creating an underlying sweetness and mellow onion flavour, but seeing as this is a slow braise anyway there's not so much need. One thing that is important though is to add the ingredients one by one, not all together. This means you can more accurately judge different lengths of cooking for different vegetables, and also that you won't overload the pan cooling it down. The golden rule is:

• Onion first, 5 minutes or do
• Carrots next, another 5 minutes or maybe a few more
• Celerey, for just 3 minutes or even less

Now I should be using celery here, but a trick I've used a few times in the past is to swap this for celeriac leaves instead. I first started to do this as I had some celeriac leaves left over and didn't want to throw them away, but have found that they flavour just as well as celery and in some ways add more interesting notes and texture to a dish. I love the way the leaves end up as speckled flecks of green through the sauce.

Onions in first

Then the carrots after 5 minutes

Next some rosemary and bay

Now for the roughly chopped celeriac leaves

The finished sofritto

I also used a little garlic in this recipe, sliced thickly and added after the celeriac leaves. No need to cook it out, it will soften and flavour the sauce in the long slow braising. There's also some rosemary and bay, but you can add whatever herbs you like really or have available. I wouldn't bother adding dried though, there won't be much flavour left from them by the end.

Thickly sliced garlic

Step 2: Frying the Meat

Once the vegetables have been cooked till just softening it's the meat's turn. Simply turn the sofritto out into a dish on the side, and a little more oil into your pan and then get the meat frying.

Sofritto left on the side. Doesn't matter if it cools down a little, it'll soon be hot again.

Meat is often browned before cooking, and this was once thought to 'seal the meat', keeping it juicy by creating a crust on the outside that keeps moisture in. It's now pretty well known though that this simply isn't true, moisture can escape just as easily from browned meat, what keeps it moist is the cooking technique. What browning does do though is create the Maillard reaction, that wonderful rich dark brown colour imparts all sorts of delicious flavours to the dish.

As usual in many recipes the meat is first tossed in seasoned flour, which will act as a thickener for the sauce. Unusually though the meat is browned for a very long time, 15 minutes or longer. This is something that I've learned from Nonna, and is an absolutely critical part of this dish. It imparts such a deep an rich flavour to the finished brasato it has to be tasted to be be believed!

The meat tossed in seasoned flour

The very well browned meat

The wine has just been added, but the pan not yet deglazed.

Sofritto and meat together, ready for braising.

Once the meat has had it's 15-20 minute browning, delgaze with a generous glass of white wine, and then add the sofritto back in and it's ready for the long slow braise.

Interesting point here - the addition of white wine rather than red wine is another hall mark of Italian cooking that I've discovered. More often than not I'd have used red wine before I met the Italian, but have since learned that it is much more usual to use white wine even in red meat dishes, and I think it does produce a finer result.

Step 3: The long slow braise

Finally, time to do nothing! All you need do now is get the meat on a very slow heat, cover it and leave it alone. When I say very slow, you should be able to see the odd bubble coming up from the bottom of the dish but nothing more than that. The very worst thing you can do to a braise is cook it fast, nothing will toughen meat up quicker. As for timing, you should be aiming for at least 2 hours for a piece this size I would say, longer for larger. If it starts to dry out at all just add a tablespoon or two of water.

The finished dish, a couple of hours later.

Serving: Primo and Secondo

Back home in Italy this would probably be served in the traditional way, primo first then secondo, with the same dish providing the sauce for both. Pasta and rice are usually only served as a 'primo' course, not as a main, with meat and vegetables or salad as a 'secondo' course. A braise like this is perfect as you have a sauce for both.

First take out the meat and leave it to rest as usual - this will help the meat to become even more tender as it relaxes. For this dish I then blitzed some of the sauce in a food processor to make a smoother sauce for some fresh pasta, keeping about half the sauce in the pan with the resting meat.

Sauce on the left for meat, water boiling for pasta, and blitzed pasta sauce warming.

Fresh egg tagliatelle. Hand cut rather than machine cut this time, so a bit rough!

Fresh pasta like this really only needs a minute or so cooking, depending how thinly you've rolled it. I served the braise with some dauphinois potatoes left over from New Year's Eve's dish, so pretty easy food all in.

The primo, fresh egg tagliatelle with the sauce slightly blitzed.

Secondo, slices of braised meat and dauphinois, dressed with the braising sauce.

Hopefully this dish doesn't look too complex, and I hope you'll find time to try it. The flavours really are wonderful, and of course you get leftovers so you only have to cook it once and you can get several meals out of it.

P.S. There's a full library of images from this dish on my Picasa Web Album, Brasato di Cervo. This also includes pictures of making beef, red wine and wild mushroom ravioli - more left overs from New Year. When making pasta it's always a good idea to make a fair bit as you can either freeze it or dry it for another time. Making ravioli like this is a great way of using up leftovers too.

Roast Duck with Lavender & Herbs ... and Three Tricks for Leftovers

Sunday Roasts are in my blood. A traditional middle class English background means that I've spent so many Sunday's enjoying a roast joint with the family that that's an inescapable fact, so I guess I'd be bound to continue this tradition. But as much as I enjoy the pleasure of cooking and eating a Sunday roast, it's perhaps the leftovers that I enjoy more than anything. This duck was no exception, and it did such a great job feeding us through the week, I thought I'd make a bit of a special post about leftovers. But first, the main event.

Roast Duck with Lavender & Herbs

Duck is a bit of novelty for me, and once again was I was inspired to cook it by "a woman at Cullompton Farmer's market". I forgot her name last time I bought something from her (Roast Guinea Fowl with Lavender, Mint & Thyme) and now I've gone and done it again! Next time I really must make more effort. She doesn't half deserve the credit as well - not only does she sell great meat, but she makes some of the best pies to be had in Devon I reckon.

Just like that Guinea Fowl, I decided to follow a recipe (well, mostly follow a recipe, I was kind of following several) for the Duck, and from the same "Flavours of the World" book. I've becoming quite fond of Lavender and meat, and this was done with fresh thyme from the garden as well, made into a kind of salty rub that's pressed all over the lightly scored meat before cooking. Wonderful stuff.

The Lavender and Thyme salty mix

Scored and dusted duck ready for the oven

Close up on the dry mix on the bird

The duck itself has been lightly scored to let the fat run, and I'm using a support in my roasting tray as well so that it won't sit in the fat as it's running. This was cooked fast then slow, pretty normal cooking style for me, but longer than I usually do for poultry as I prefer duck either pink or well done, kind of how I like my lamb. It's quite a complex recipe, involving making stocks, reducing them, etc., so I won't go into it all now, but fun to do and not at all challenging, just time consuming.

Duck out of the oven, ready to rest. Lovely crispy skin

Came out pretty tasty, with a wonderful sticky sauce. Lavender's not something to use often in the kitchen perhaps, but now and again it does add a welcome and interesting variation to dishes.

The Roast Duck finished dish, minus vegetables

But then what to do with lots of leftover duck? Duck's often not a huge bird, true, and we had a female this time around which is much smaller than a drake, but you still get a fair bit of meat off it. First things first, it was time for stock.

Duck Stock

The first thing we tend to do with any roast is get the meat off the bones and make a stock. That's one of the great things about always going for meat on the bone, you've not only get a better roast but also bones for stock. I'm not really someone who bothers much with trying to create elaborate stocks, honestly it's usually just bones and water for me cooked for an hour or two, but this time I added the usual suspects of carrot, celery, onion and bay leaf.

Stock being made

To be fair it does add extra depth to a stock to do this, but I had an ulterior motive as well - I'd worked out what to do for my first proper left over dish - duck & noodle soup.

Duck & Noodle Soup

As ever with these things, my leftover cooking is largely driven by what's in the fridge. The meat may be the core of any dish, but it needs other things to make it into a complete meal. This time around it was cabbage & spring onions that needed eating, so I decided to plump for an oriental style soup.

Ingredients for soup ready to go

By taking the remaining breast off the bird and slicing it into delicate thin discs I intended to make a simple spiced soup, with noodles cooked in stock at the bottom, and cabbage, spring onion and slices of duck on the top. Simple as anything to make. I strained some of the stock off and added some Chinese five spice and soy sauce to taste, and then added each ingredient according to how long it would take to cook.

The stock strained and enriched with soy sauce

Cabbage was first for about 10 minutes till it was getting really tender, then in went the spring onions and noodles for 3 minutes, some very finely sliced fresh ginger (done in inch long extra thin match sticks, to add texture and interest) and some very finely chopped red chili, and finely the duck back in for just a minute at the end to warm it through. Lovely stuff.

Duck & Noodle Soup in the office

This is one of my first trick to leftover cooking - you have to ignore the 'rules' of cooking fresh meat if you want to make the most of leftover meat. If I'd put the duck in earlier it would have got tough and dry, but by reversing things and just adding it at the end you get the opposite effect. By using the stock as well you still get full flavours, without needing any long cooking.

We got four large portions out of this, soup always goes a long way I find. Well, unless the Italian gets hold of it, she's a fiend for soup! Still had lots of duck left though, so next up ...

Roast Duck Ragu

The English are pretty keen on Italian food generally, and in a mixed Italian/English house like hours that's even more pronounced. Ragu or sugo is therefore a bit of a staple way of using up leftovers. Just to clarify, the term sugo generally means a slightly more smooth sauce than ragu, which usually has larger pieces of meat and a rougher texture.

And here the second of my tricks with leftovers. When it comes to well cooked meat you can't really mince it up and re-fry it, that just dries it out or makes a mush - not pleasant. The technique I use these days is to flake the meat, creating texture while preserving the moisture within it.

The flaked duck meat

You still need to cook a ragu long and slow, as tinned tomatoes need time for their flavour to develop, but by flaking in this way and cooking slowly in a liquid environment the meat will enrich the dish and not get tough or dry.

I always do my ragu's the same way, the usual sofrito of onion, carrot and celery is cooked till golden and tender, then in with the meat, deglaze with wine if you like, and in with the tomatoes and herbs.

That leads me to my third trick with using leftovers, adding something from the original dish so that you always get a different result, that way your food never gets too samey. For this one, for example, I chopped up the leftover skin really finely and added that to the sauce with all it's flavours of lavender and thyme. Once that's blended with the rest you don't really pick up the individual notes of flavour anymore, but it does add a subtle distinctness which makes all my ragus or sugos different, no matter what they're based on. Whether it's a lamb cooked with lemon balm, or chicken cooked with basil, I think your main roast always ends up adding something special to a leftover dish, which you'd otherwise be hard pressed to create. Sometimes it may be that the meat itself is simply infused with interesting and different flavours, other times there may be something leftover you can add, but either way it keeps you from getting bored with your food.

Ready for deglazing, white wine this time (usually what Italians use)

Now with the tomatoes added, ready for long slow cooking

One note on ragus and sugos - don't skimp on the tomatoes, or the herbs for that matter. I used six tins of tomatoes I think, plus a large bundle of marjoram, thyme, bay and rosemary. Your sauce will be very wet to start with, but the long, slow cooking will slowly reduce it down, concentrating the flavours. I think I must have done this one for about two hours at least, maybe three. Served it with a good thick pasta, and that made supper for the two of us and then lunch the next day as well. Then it was off to the freezer with the rest of the ragus for other days.

Ragus ready for the freezer

These old cheese pots are fabulous for this - they just about contain two portions per pot, and not skimpy ones either. Let me put it this way, I'm not exactly losing weight eating portions of this size! "DS" stands for Duck Sugo here. Our freezer is usually full of BS, RS, VS, LS - you get the drift I'm sure :-) The labels are for ever getting rubbed off, and we end up playing the mystery sugo game - still, it's all good.

So that's my leftover odyssey. I hope it might inspire others to make more of their Sunday roasts. Duck is an expensive meat compared to others, this one cost about £15, for example, but if you consider that I managed to make twenty four meal portions from it, suddenly it doesn't seem so expensive at all. All the other main ingredients, i.e. pasta, noodles, carrot, onions, etc, are very cheap - and the lavender and herbs free - so it's relatively simple to turn out pretty good quality food like this for less than £1 per meal. Personally I'm amazed people think they're getting a good deal from places like McDonalds, I find it a bit galling to see people chucking tens of pounds at those places, and then claiming they don't have any cash. Still, different folks, different strokes I guess.

All comments welcome, as ever!

Traditional Roast Lamb with Roast Potatoes & Leeks in White Sauce

Lamb is not exactly a stranger to my table, but more often than not it'll be a shoulder that ends up gracing it rather than other cuts. There's something about a shoulder's combination of flavour, price and overall ease of cooking that hits the spot for me. But the other day at the butchers the legs of lamb looked too good to overlook, so I had to give one of them a try.

I usually like my lamb well done, and that's great for shoulder, but it's not really a great way to cook leg in my opinion. Leg doesn't have the fat content of the shoulder, so it's all too easy to create something dry and not so palatable when roasting a leg for a long time - generally speaking you're better off aiming for something pinker. That was my plan this Sunday, so after consulting the usual battery of cookbooks I decided on half an hour hot (220ºC) and then 15 mins per pound cool (160ºC)  for my 5 lb leg of (very well hung) Lamb. Nothing too special about this one - just coated in a very light layer of olive oil, well seasoned with salt & pepper and resting on 3 good sprigs of rosemary and a few cloves of garlic.

The meat out of the wrapping

The meat ready for the oven

As I was aiming for something very traditional this time around I decided to serve this with really crunchy roast potatoes and leeks in white sauce, and old favourite that I've grown up with. This time around I even got to use some of my Dad's leeks from Essex, as I managed to bring some back from there after Christmas. I braise the leeks just in butter for a good hour or so on a very low heat to get them really tender. Then I sprinkle in some flour and let that cook a little, before adding milk, salt & black pepper, and cooking until it thickens up - probably another 15 mins or so. This time around a little left over double cream went in as well, just to give that extra special something.

For the potatoes I reckon the secret it to get them really dry before they go in the hot oil/fat. I always parboil when I'm doing 'proper' roast potatoes, and do this well ahead of when they need to go in so that they can steam and dry out. A good shake in the colander is enough to give you a rough texture to pick up the fat - I normally use beef dripping, but didn't have any today, so used some of the fat from the lamb pan which was lightly flavoured with the rosemary and garlic from there. Ten minutes in the hot oven first gets the oil good and hot, then in go the potatoes (carefully!), a few turns to cover and then in for about an hour, depending how well browned you like them.

Parboiling potatoes

Finally there's the gravy to make. I rested this leg for half an hour in the end, to ensure it would be nice and juicy, and whilst it was sitting resting deglazed the pan with some wine and stock and cooked down the juices with a little flour to thicken.

Making gravy

Preparing the plates

All in all pretty happy with how this turned out. The potatoes & lamb were probably a little over done for my tastes, but lovely all the same. That's the price you have to pay, though, for nipping down the pub for a swift pint whilst your Sunday roast cooks :-)

Finished dish

P.S. These videos were all shot with my new Nexus One phone from Google - not bad I think, better quality than my previous phone that's for sure.

Sunday Doubles: 'Open' Pot Slow Roast Lamb Shoulder with Leeks & Lemon Balm + Fast Roast Rack of Lamb with Rosemary

Sunday roasts can start to feel a bit samey eventually, and though I try and be experimental I often fall back to the old favourites. This Sunday though I was definitely feeling a bit more experimental, so not only decided to try some new ideas out but also to do a double roast with lamb both fast and slow.

I first had this at River Cottage, and loved the idea of tender slow roast lamb falling off the bone at the same time as tender pink juicy lamb with crispy fat. Sure it's a bit more work to do, but the slow roast pretty much takes care of itself once it's in the oven so you're not slaving in the kitchen all morning.

I've been experimenting with slow roasts in particular at the moment, and am working in an idea where the meat is pushed into a deep roasting container (I use a big Creuset pot) on top of various vegetable and herb flavourings. This keeps the more tender ingredients from burning, and helps the meat steam and roast at the same time keeping it really moist without losing that lovely crispy fat. I've done a fair bit of this with lamb recently, so was looking for something unusual, and as I gazed out my kitchen window my eyes came to rest on the Lemon Balm ...


The ingredients for the slow roast

Lemon and lamb are good bed fellows, but the lemon balm would be too light by itself, so I went for that other stalwart with lamb, leeks. The method's quite simple:

• slice 2 leeks an average thickness, put them in the bottom of a deep Creuset pan or similar, add a little olive oil, salt & pepper, and toss together.


• add a very generous bundle of lemon balm, criss crossing the leeks to cover.


• rub the shoulder of lamb with a little more olive oil, season well, and then squeeze it on top. It must be a tight fit, so if necessary take a cleaver to any tricky edges, and then tuck whatever has been cut off in any holes.

Lamb tucked into the pot over the other ingredients


This then went into a normal oven at 150ºC for 4 hours. I did need to add a generous splash of lamb stock (water would have done) after about and hour and a half, as it was getting a little dry by then. You do need to keep a vague eye on it, but if you don't have the time just add the stock at the beginning of cooking instead.

Then there was the fast lamb. For this I managed to find a small rack, which to my mind is the best lamb for fast roasting like this. The butcher had chined the back, making it easy to carve later, so I squeezed a rosemary sprig in there, criss crossed the fat with a sharp knife to speed up the crisping, and seasoned well. Then into a very hot oven, I did it as hot as I could in mine, for only 20 minutes, plus about 10-20 minutes resting after.


The rack of lamb once cooked


Our broad beans, which we overwintered this year very successfully, are being very prolific, so we'd purposefully left some to get large with the idea to make minted broad bean puree. Didn't come out quite the way we wanted, a bit too loose I think, but tasty all the same. Also served this with buttered thyme potatoes, nice combination that.


The finished dish. You can make out what's left of the leeks on the left of the plate, they caramelised wonderfully. I didn't serve the lemon balm, that was just for flavour

The end result was a lovely combination of flavours and textures, and there's not much I'd change. Oddly enough I thought the lemon balm might have made it a little antiseptic, but in the end the flavour wasn't strong enough, so next time I'll add more I think. The leeks had caramelised so much they were delicious but powerful, so probably dominated the lemon balm a little - though not the lamb. That's a tricky meat to dominate!

Home Made Passata: How to make a cheap, delicious and versatile tomato sauce

We use a lot of passata at home, in various sugos, for pizzas, topping meatballs and meatloaf, that sort of thing. We do often buy it but it's also a doddle to make your own, and you can make a huge amount and then just freeze it in small pots for whenever you need it. We have a big stack of little pots that used to hold mushy peas from the fish and chip van, for example, although I guess that just shows we eat far too much fish and chips :-)

I always use Napolina whole peeled plum tomatoes, creature of habit perhaps, but they are a good product and are often half price at all the major supermarkets so buying a load when they're cheap means you're saving money and enjoying great home made food.

I'm trying some new with this sort of thing, and videoing bits here and there as I think it gives a better idea of timing, textures, quantities, etc. than a written account. I've split the passata one up into three as it does take a good couple of hours or so to cook down into the finished product.

As you can probably tell, the director needs some practice, as does the cameraman!

The rabbit sauce was left over from a spit roast rabbit dish the Sunday before, more of that whenever I get around to blogging about it ...

Roast Chicken with Goats Cheese & Wild Garlic

Well it's been an interesting few weeks roasting and boiling things. Top of the list has to be the famed Italian Bollito Misto which I've been itching to try for ages, and finally got round to the other week when my bro came down with his family. To be honest it wasn't all I had hoped for though, although I wasn't in the best of health and it's never a good idea to try and cook when you're not feeling great. I think I might have to revisit it another time though - ever since I actually had it in Italy I've been captured by how wonderful something so simple can be.

But back to last weekend and the title of this blog post. Ever since I did the turkey at Christmas, pushing butter and the skin to keep the bird moist, I've been eager to repeat the process and to try some more experiments. Thinking of what to cook this Sunday I decided to have a try with some goats cheese that needed eating, a free range chicken, and the now almost obligatory wild garlic.


The ingredients lined up ready to go


Getting your fingers between the breasts of the bird and it's skin is a doddle really, although maybe once you've done a turkey a chicken isn't a challenge! I decided the goats cheese wasn't enough by itself though (I used a crumbly Vulscombe with herbs) so mixed it ahead of time with some soft cheese and salt & pepper just to increase the fat content. It was going to get pretty hot after all. This went under the skin and then a good handful of wild garlic and about a quarter of a lemon inside the cavity.


The bird with the cheese mixture under the skin, seasoned and stuffed.

Then into a fan oven at 180°C for 15 mins per pound plus 15 mins (timing that I've worked out is good my oven, but as ever for this sort of thing your oven might be different).


Roasting away - about half-way through now.



And finally out of the oven, ready to rest for 20 minutes or so.

I served this with oven baked rosemary & garlic potato wedges and purple sprouting broccoli with a hot red wine vinaigrette. The broccoli was a little overcooked, but the vinaigrette came out really well, which I'd lightly spiced with cayenne pepper. Saw something vaguely similar on Saturday kitchen the morning before so thought I'd give it a whirl myself.


All plated up and ready for munching.


So how did it work out? Pretty good really. I thought the residue from the chicken pan was going to be too burnt at first to use for gravy, but it was actually really delicious, and the everything worked very well together. Opened a bottle of Beaujolais to drink and then was great too, in fact everything was kind of just right for the season, a real taste of spring. This whole "let's shove something under the skin of the bird and see what happens" lark could become a minor obsession with me I think!

Chicken stuffed with Soft Cheese, Pesto & Asparagus wrapped in Prosciutto

Now I don't usually blog about anything other than Sunday Roasts, but this seemed too good to miss out on. After a bit of a disappointing experience at a place called Landewednack House in Cornwall (read more on Trip Advisor if you're interested) we came home looking for something really tasty but simple to throw together. What I turned out was a twist on an old Good Housekeeping recipe (no sniggering in the back please!) that always works well which combines simple ingredients in an oven baked dish.

Basically you take a chicken breast, slice it through the thickest part and then stuff with a blend of soft cheese and pesto. Then wrap it in the ham, add a little more pesto mix on top, wrap in foil and then bake for 25 minutes or so in a moderate oven. It comes out lovely and tender and all the juices mix together to form a (very watery) sauce which you can then dip into.



I served this with a twist on my usual rosemary roasties in that here I'm using pink fir apples cut a little differently, but of course the beauty of this is that you can cook the potatoes at the same time and so go off and read the paper in the meantime.

The chicken is free range from the local farm, stuffed with pesto we make as and when we need it from our own basil plants and a local cream cheese. I also added a little white wine to add flavour and increase the steam as I decided this time to include four asparagus sprigs in each of the chicken bundles as well. They turned out brilliantly, and I think may well become a regular feature when the season is right.



All in all a welcome return to Devon, and also a welcome confirmation that whatever over priced B&B's in the Lizard might think we can easily turn out food far superior to their offerings!

The Best of Both Worlds: Lamb Fast & Slow

Spring lamb is here and whilst I love older meat there is something enticing about it. This Easter I decided to try and emulate a dish I had at River Cottage with it - lamb cooked slow and lamb cooked fast.

I bought two pieces from my local butcher (Dave Haggett of Silverton - fab place, as recommended by Rick Stein on his Food Heroes programmes) both about a kilo - a half shoulder and half leg. The shoulder was set on red onion slices and rosemary and done in a low over for over 2 hours. The leg was with lemon and olive oil and roast hot and fast. Whilst both were resting I then took juices from both pans, deglazed, passed through a sieve to get all that onion & rosemary flavour out and on the plate.

The result was pretty special, and I think will become a regular on the table. The addition of lots of rosemary and onion to the shoulder really penetrated the meat after all that long slow cooking (I did use four quite large rosemary sprigs, but then I love the stuff). The lemon on the leg just started to burn a bit and gave that lovely charcoal effect here and there. On the plate these two ways of cooking lamb worked really well together, and whilst either would be nice by themselves the contrast was a real pleasure. Nobody could decide which they liked better in the end!

You might think it would be much more work to do this, but in actual fact because both roasts were so simple it didn't take much. I think I spent most time reading the paper, not cooking. I did serve this with wild garlic dauphinois, which went well but also meant that they could be prepared early too and just sit alongside the slow shoulder in the same oven - nice and easy. For vegetables it was spinach again with wild garlic - well there's just do much wild garlic around right now and it tastes so good why not use it I reckon.

On that note we have wild garlic pesto in the fridge again - if you haven't tried it you're missing a trick. It's fab stuff, just take a standard pesto recipe and swap the basil for the garlic and don't bother with any garlic cloves - you might need a bit more parmesan/pecorino than usual though to offset the sharpness, and perhaps even a little cream to add sweetness. It can be a bit metallic. It's lovely on fresh pasta for a quick lunch or perhaps on the side of some simply grilled fish.

No pictures today I'm afraid as no camera!

Bakers Oven Shoulder of Lamb

Now this should really be done with Mutton, but that's hard to come by so I always use shoulder of Lamb instead, and always on the bone. So much better to cook meat on the bone, plus of course you can make wonderful stock with them after.

The trick with this one is the long slow cooking. It's basically a Hugh F-W recipe which I've tweaked for me - he has wine in his and tends to cover it with foil when roasting, but I prefer adding rosemary and leaving it uncovered (provided it's in a normal, i.e. not fan, oven). It's also a one pot dish so the sort of thing you can prepare in the morning and then leave for four hours or so why you go off and do something more interesting instead.

The Lamb before going in the oven. It's surrounded by potato and onion layers, some garlic cloves and lying on abed of rosemary, lightly seasoned with salt, pepper and a little olive oil.

It can be a little fatty when it comes out again, but you don't of course have to eat the fat, just spoon out the potatoes and onions and leave the rest behind. I tend to leave whatever I don't want to cool and then throw the hardened fat away then as it's easier to separate when cold.

The potatoes come out both soft and crunchy at the same time, and wonderfully flavoured.

The Lamb itself is taken off earlier and left to rest for at least 20 minutes in foil, as normal.

Altogether an incredibly satisfying dish especially on a cold winter's Sunday. I served this one with leeks in white sauce, and as the gravy and leeks run in together you get some lovely combinations. Lamb and leeks were just made for each other!

Moroccan Lamb

Just looking back through some old photos (at some point in the past I thought I would start keeping a photo record of what I cooked, but that didn't last for long) and found some nice shots of a Moroccan lamb recipe that I did some time ago. For once I actually remembered to do before and after pictures:

(you can see the chef has had a sneaky glass of wine already)

This leg of lamb was marinated overnight in lemon and saffron, plus others spices and oils, and I served it with spinach:

I'm a sucker for dishes like this - more or less one pot cooking, with everything pretty much ready in one dish, and loads of great flavours melding together into one. That lamb may look a little dry but believe me it wasn't, and the juices from the cooking made for an instant gravy.

A lot of recipes with legs of lamb suggest puncturing the meat and inserting slices or garlic or rosemary, which I've never been happy about doing and have stopped now, especially after one particularly dry result. I can't think of a better way to dry out a piece of meat than stick a knife all over it, and fail to see the point - you can get plenty of flavour on your plate without this technique. And why just lamb? You don't see anyone recommending it for beef, chicken or pork now. I think it's just become a habit, and to my mind can easily make a nice piece of meat far too garlic and herb ridden. OK, rant over!

Another recipe very similar to this one is the old English way of taking a leg of mutton to the butchers of a Sunday morning, and there's an Italian variant too - but more of them another time.