ramtops

Started with Sunday breakfast – put a stack of chopped mushrooms, black pudding and bacon in the shallow Remoska pan and turned it on; to be frank, I had little expectation of it working well, but I beat some eggs and cream for scrambly egg and hoped for the best.

And in fifteen minutes, we had … perfectly cooked bacon, black pudding and mushrooms! No grease all over the kitchen, no smell through the house. I quickly scrambled the eggs, and we thought “we’ll do that again!’. And we will.

Flushed with success, I prepared a casserole. I peeled lots and lots of tiny onions (if you’re doing this, soak them in boiling water for a bit – makes the peeling much easier, and gives you oniony water, which I have saved for the soup pot!), chopped some carrots into batons, and hurled them into the breakfast Remoska pan – no need to waste that nice bacon flavour, I thought! They sat in there to start cooking while I cut up the shin of beef, and browned it off in a big wok. Into the big Remoska pan it went, along with some white beans which I soaked and boiled the day before, and I added ginger wine, all spice, juniper berries, seasoning, and two tangerines which were boiled for about 10 minutes then whizzed up in the food processor, skin and all.

Everything was put in the big Remoska pan and set to cook. Oh dear. I don’t quite know what I did wrong, but it started to burn on the top rather too quickly. I put a layer of foil between lid and contents, and I think I should have done that a lot sooner. After about another half hour, I got cold feet, and transferred everything to a big cast iron casserole, and set it on a diffuser over a low gas setting for a couple more hours.

Must do some more reading up on Remoska cooking!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

How to turn 500g of stewing beef into six portions? Add 100g of bacon bits, a stack of butter (lima) beans, and a load of veg, thus.

I used shallots in this – if you’re going to do this, they are much easier to peel if you soak them in boiling water for 10 minutes, and you get lovely shallotty water to add either to your casserole, or to your soup pot (the latter for me yesterday).

Cooked off the bacon bits, put them in the slow cooker. Browned the beef in batches, added them too. Fried off the whole shallots until they were caramelising a bit, the into the pan went four chopped carrots, half a courgette and some garlic. They were lobbed into the slow cooker, and then the pan was deglazed with …

Horror! No Stones Ginger Wine! And only 9 in the morning, so offy not open, and I bet the local mini Sainsburys wouldn’t have it, and besides – it was pouring with rain. I improvised.

Deglazed the pan with about 3/4 pint of fiery ginger beer. Added a slosh of brandy for good measure, and the zest and juice of an orange. Added a teaspoon of grain mustard and some season. Brought to the boil, bung in the slow cooker, switched it on. Went back and added the beans (which had been soaked and boiled the day before), and some herbs from the garden.* Waited for six hours while the smell drove us crazy.

We are having some for tonight’s supper, with dumplings, and the rest will go into the freezer.

* Somewhere – no idea where – I found some reuseable cloth bouquet garni bags, which are dead handy for such occasions, because you don’t have to bother stripping the leaves from woody herbs, or finding the bay leaves afterwards. But do remember to fish it out before someone accidentally tries to eat it.

I also made the Christmas cake yesterday – 1 kg of random assorted dried fruits and a load of Cointreau. I always base it on this Nigel Slater recipe. What with that, the stew, and the soda bread, the kitchen was an olfactory no-go area yesterday!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We had friends coming for supper on Sunday evening – lovely, as I love cooking for people, and don’t do nearly enough of it since we moved! I wasn’t sure what I wanted to cook, but I went to the butcher and bought some beautiful lean pork, and there was a big bag of mixed peppers in the fridge, so that was a start. I wanted to use some beans too, to pad it out, so found some dried butter beans on the pantry shelf on Saturday morning, stuck them in to soak, then cooked them in the slow cooker overnight.

I started off by deseeding and slicing thinly four peppers, red and yellow, and a huge spanish onion, and cooking them down in some olive oil. I added some cumin seeds and a splash of honey and some garlic, and it was heading towards Middle Eastern. Then in went some paprika, and we were off with goulash. More paprika followed, some fennel seeds, some caraway and then a jar of roasted peppers, sliced up. These give a lovely depth to a dish, and when cooked in the slow cooker, they sort of melt into the sauce. A carton of chopped tomatoes, some rosemary, thyme, bay leaves and seasoning, and the sauce was done.

This all went in the slow cooker (now devoid of its butter beans), and I diced and browned the pork, hurled it in the cooker, and then we just left it completely alone apart from the odd stir for about seven hours. The butter beans must have been very old – I know they accompanied us from Somerset – because they needed another 40 minutes on the boil, so they were added a bit later.

The dish was gorgeous – it made six servings, and four have gone in the freezer, as unfortunately our friends had to cry off due to illness.

We followed it with Molten chocolate cakes with raspberries and cream. There’s two of them left too. <parp>.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

I found a pound of chopped venison in the freezer, and decided to cook it up for Sunday lunch.

I cut two large carrots in batons, and fried them off with a dozen peeled shallots, in olive oil with a splash of maple syrup, using my wonderful decades old Le Creuset cast iron pot. I added a pack of cubed pancetta part way through.

Set these aside, put a tablespoon or so of flour in the pan, and hurled in the venison and stirred it about. Then in a fit of experimentation, I added about 1/2 pint of banana beer (well, it was all we had), together with juniper berries, peppercorns, a tablespoon each of grain mustard and redcurrant jelly, and some salt.

Returned the veg and pancetta to the casserole, and put it in a very low oven for 3 hours. Will finish it off today, and eat with dumplings and red cabbage.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

There was a 3.75lb hunk of silverside in the freezer, and a tub of clementine mush (clementines that have been boiled and liquidised – I normally use them to make a cake with ground almonds).

So diced and sautéed two big carrots, a courgette and two sticks of celery, together with a red onion cut into big chunks. Chopped up the silverside and browned it off. Sliced some mushrooms and fried them gently. About four cloves of garlic were finely chopped and softened in some olive oil, then I added the clementines and about the same again in cold water, stirred it round until it came to the boil, then added a good sloosh of ginger wine.

Dumped everything in the slow cooker and left it on low overnight – it made 8 portions, and we consumed two last night with dumplings, accompanied by broccoli and cauliflower. Fit for a king.