ramtops

Well, we couldn’t call it “toad”, as we used some of those teeny tiny cocktail sausages that needed eating up after the holiday.

Put the sausages in the oven at gas 6, in my ancient and beloved white enamel gratin pan which cooks Yorkshire Pudding like a dream, although it is a horror to wash up, especially now we have no dishwasher … I added a dollop of beef dripping, but you could use olive oil.

Made a batter by putting 3oz of plain flour and a pinch of salt – oh, and some ground black pepper – in a bowl, making a well in the centre, and beating in a whole egg. Then should have added 3oz of milk and 2oz of water, but the scales ran amok, so I’ve no idea what exactly I added – I just did the consistency by eyeball.

Once the sossies looked reasonably on the way to being cooked, about 20 minutes, probably, I ramped up the oven to the dizzy heights of gas 7, then poured the batter into the dish and bunged it back in for another 20 minutes or so.

We had this with the very last of the brussels sprouts I bought on Christmas Eve and HP sauce (in my case) and the last of the red cabbage (in Pete’s). Fab on a cold snowy night.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We got three tubs full of goose meat into the freezer leftover from this year’s festive bird, and decided to stir fry the contents of one tonight. We had no ginger or chillis in the house, astonishingly, so trudged out in the snow to obtain some, and had a lovely walk around Pearson Park in Hull to boot. The joys of working from home!

We set the goose to marinade in some sesame oil, arrowroot, a splash of lime juice, some rice wine, and a slosh of some really nice Japanese plum vinegar – I have no idea where I got it, except that it was before we moved, so we’ll probably never see its like again here in the East Riding, but never mind.

Whizzed up garlic, ginger and lemon grass, chopped a red chilli, a big flat mushroom, three spring onions and a Romano red pepper, and wokked them until done. Added goose and its marinade, and then some coconut milk.

Handy tip: get coconut powder; a whole tin of coconut milk can be way too much for a stir fry, and then it’s hard to know what to do with the rest (although it works amazingly well in risotto). You can get the powder in an Indian/Asian grocer, and just mix up what you need.

Chopped up some of the rather tired coriander and bunged that in at the end. Worked really well.