ramtops

This is a classic Irish recipe – we used to eat them a lot, but sort of forgot about them; I made some for breakfast this morning, and thought I’d share. It’s an ideal way to use up leftover boiled potato, too!

In a food processor, blitz 6oz cold cooked potato, 4oz flour (I always use plain, but self raising would do), and 2oz of butter or marg. Once you have a dough, remove it from the processor and knead a little on a floured work surface.

Now, you can be diligent, roll it out with a rolling pin, and cut the dough into rounds – or you can do what I do, which is to divide the dough into 8, and pat it into rough roundish shapes.

Also, the recipe recommends frying in a little butter on a griddle, but I’m afraid I stick them on a greased baking tray at gas 6 for 15 minutes. And I don’t peel the spuds either :)

These are just utterly delicious straight out of the oven, spread with butter, and also work really well as part of a great British fry up.

If you don’t have a food process, mash the potatoes as is (no milk or butter), rub the fat into the flour and add the spud, then continue with the rolling (or not).

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

bottle of beer I knew there were two rump steaks in the freezer that we brought with us from Somerset – the very last of the Dexter beef. There’s no way we’d ever eat a whole steak nowadays – it’s just not the sort of meal we have – so I decided, that in light of the chilly weather, we might have a steak pudding tomorrow. (Pete is not offally fond (sorry) of kidney, so we never have that in a pud).

I want to make the pudding in the slow cooker; it’s much easier, never boils dry, and can be left while we go out, but in my experience they work better if the filling is pre-cooked, so that’s what I did this morning.

I normally make a base of carrot and celery for a beef casserole, but there was a head of fennel in the fridge (and, indeed, no celery), so I used that, and three carrots. Chopped into small cubes, and sauteed down in olive oil till softened. Then chopped a large onion and a few cloves of garlic, and some fresh sage leaves, and they got the same treatment.

The steaks were cut into chunks, and browned off – the cats got the trimmings, so they were happy. All of this was put into the slow cooker, and Pete was despatched to buy a bottle of beer; he returned with a bottle of Fursty Ferret from Badger Beers, which seemed appropriate. I deglazed the meat frying pan with the beer, added a teaspoonful of grain mustard, and a tablespoon of flour, decanted that into the slow cooker, and added salt and black pepper.

I’ll leave it cooking for about six hours – it’s smelling good!