Cheese & Onion Pasties (if you'd rather not shop at Gregg's...)

Ok, so I'm going to be completely honest. Last Sunday, coming home from my friend's house, I had the most almighty hangover. 
I took the bus back to my local high street where my husband met me. Please bear in mind, before you judge me too harshly, that I was truly suffering! As I alighted from the bus I noticed that there was a greggs opposite.
The ghost of my teenage self spoke to me: "A pasty! That will sort you right out..."

MY TEENAGE SELF LIED. I bought cheese and onion pasties for both of us and eagerly took my first bite... of lukewarm, flavourless, textureless, over-seasoned, floury mush. Yuk. As we walked home I said that I could come up with a better pasty than that! So I did. Here it is, enjoy... with or without the hangover.

Cut three new potatoes into quarters and put on to boil until tender. I had the bleu d'auvergne variety, so that's why they are purple! Preheat the oven to 200°C and line a flat baking tray with oiled greaseproof paper.

Finely chop a large onion and a big stick of celery. Heat up a little oil in a frying pan and, if you like, snip in a slice of bacon (seriously one is more than enough) and cook until opaque before adding the onion and celery. Cook on a low heat to soften without browning.

After the onion and celery has softened add in a big handful of thinly sliced mushrooms and continue to cook on a low heat. On the side, grate a nice big pile of mature cheddar and a slightly smaller pile of parmesan. Then drain the potatoes, wait for the water to evaporate, and chop them into little tiny cubes before adding them to the vegetable mixture in the frying pan.

Once everything is cooked through, remove the pan from the heat and sprinkle over all the cheese then mix it in well, grind in lots of fresh black pepper and season to taste.
Cut a sheet of puff pastry into two rectangles, and place on the prepared baking tray. Divide the filling between the two sections, then fold the pastry over and press the seams together with a little beaten egg. Gently score the tops of the pasties and glaze with the rest of the egg.

Bake for about 20 minutes, until they are crisp and browned, and serve with a little salad and some really good ketchup (I like Mr Organic's version).

Don't be afraid to mess about with the ingredients - use what you have, that's what I did. I have plans to try doing another batch with mashed potato, onion and cheesy bechamel, which would result in a more traditional high street version.    
 

Kinda Carbonara

This isn't really carbonara in the truest sense, it's a carbonara inspired leftover-ham-dinner, it was pretty tasty though.

The sauce is dead simple, you just need some kind of cured pork like ham or bacon for the main flavour. I used a few slices from the Christmas ham, which is still good for the moment but is probably on its last legs so it needs using up.

Fry up a little garlic and thinly sliced purple onion with a finely diced red chilli. When soft add in thickly sliced mushrooms and the pork, let them cook through.

 
Add the juice of half a lemon and a good sized slosh of single cream. Season with lots of black pepper and chopped parsley then serve mixed in with some lovely fresh pasta. Doddle.

 

Buying and Roasting Wild Grouse

From the 12th of August, grouse season begins and greedy game-lovers like myself start to think about the wonderful juicy birds who will shortly grace our kitchens. Grouse usually gets cheaper as the season goes on and, by October, it's possible to get a brace from well-managed suppliers for around £16.

There is a dark side to gamebird production and the larger the shoot that produced your bird, it certainly sounds as though it will be less likely to have been managed ethically. Still, it is a good thing that you are able to buy it - historically, some estates have been known to avoid the hassle of selling the hundreds of poor creatures that their wealthy clients have killed in a shoot, instead ploughing them into the ground like so much landfill - a despicable practice and one that, hopefully, is now in decline.

There is also a wide gap between the rearing methods of estates: some hens are kept, and chicks raised, in little better than battery conditions and enjoy only the briefest weeks as outdoor birds. Some though, are luckier, and get to live a relatively long and completely natural life with as quick and skilled an end as can be given them. There are decent gamekeepers out there, who strive to be both conservationists and welfare champions, it's just worth asking a few questions before you buy.

Some questions to ask a game supplier:

• Are all of your birds from the UK or do you deal in imports?
• Under what conditions are laying hens kept, if not in the wild? 
• What is the survival rate in the hatchery where birds are kept after hatching? How much space per bird is given? Are "bits" (masks over the beaks) used?
• How shortly after hatching are the birds released into the wild, if they are not born in the wild?
• Are the bird's diets supplemented? If so, by how much and are soya pellets used?
• Are the birds killed in large-scale commercial shoots?
• Is every bird shot carefully collected and offered for sale or eaten?
• How are predators (such as foxes, badgers, otters, weasels and birds of prey) and competitors (such as deer, rabbits and hares) managed?

I get mine from Hampshire Game, via Abel & Cole. I asked them about their birds and they replied that their birds are "not reared or released by the gamekeepers but grow up in their natural environment on the moors", making some of the questions above automatically inapplicable to their business. The grouse eat "young heather as a food source, they are supplemented with natural grit by gamekeepers". All of the birds shot on their estate are collected and sold as game. 
They believe that "the wild game population benefit the eco-system in their own way for example the deer population eating the heather allows young heather shoots which all wild birds will then thrive off.  All [of their] gamekeepers are aware of these things so do not allow a population of one species to grow too big or too small."
Anyone can visit the estate, whether on business or for pleasure, due to the "Right to Roam" Act (UK legislation), which applies to moorland.

So, assuming you have managed to procure a couple of tasty birds, here is a really good way of serving them!

Bacon-wrapped Roast Grouse with Bread Sauce, Recurrant Gravy & Buttered Savoy Cabbage

Heat up the oven to 200 degrees and take the birds out of the fridge to come up to room temperature. When the oven is hot put a baking tray in with some oil to heat up.

Slice up half a small onion and put to one side. Pat down the birds with kitchen paper and rub them inside and out with a mixture of butter, thyme, salt and pepper and lay bacon over the top.
Take the tray out of the oven and put the onions in to form a layer between the birds and the tray. Pop the birds on top and put back in the oven for 20-40 minutes, depending on their size.
Grouse is traditionally served a bit rare and we didn't wait for the juices to run clear. Instead we did the same test as for steak, pressing the breast with a finger to judge how firm it was.

To make the bread sauce put half a pint of milk in a saucepan with a couple of bay leaves, the other half of the onion studded with a couple of cloves, a few peppercorns and a peice of mace. Warm up to almost boiling, but don't actually bring it to the boil. Take off the heat and leave to cool down.
Slice the crusts off a few slices of stale white bread and cut into small cubes. Pour the cooled milk liquid over, straining it as you do. Mix and mash with a fork. Put this mixture to one side until the grouse are cooked.

When ready, get the grouse out of the oven and leave to rest for at least 15 minutes. Get some sliced savoy cabbage on to steam.

Put the bread sauce mixture back into a saucepan and add a few knobs of butter and a good grating of nutmeg. Heat up on a low heat.

Put the, now empty, baking tray over a low heat and add a glug of red wine and a splash of hot water to the juices. Scuff the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to lift all of the grousy residues and caramelised onions. Add a tablespoon of redcurrant jelly and stir until melted into the gravy.

Serve up a heap of bread sauce and cabbage with each grouse, melting some butter into the cabbage and topping with ground pepper. Pour the gravy over the cabbage and around the plate. Enjoy!

Singapore Noodles

Singapore noodles are an old family favourite but they are a bit hit-and-miss from takeaways. The ones I've made contain fairly average veg that a Uk fridge is likely to contain, rather than any specialist (expensive) ones, so they aren't exactly like ones from a good Chinese but they are tasty.

The guideline recipe I used is from "Chinese Food Made Easy" by Ching He Huang - a great book if you love a Chinese takeaway, but hate the heart-thumping, water gulping after effects.

I like to pre-prepare all of the spices and veg, so that the last thing to touch the chopping board is the raw meat. For the spices, you need a chopped red chilli, a few cloves of chopped garlic and a couple of generous tablespoons of turmeric. The garnish is chopped spring onion and a sprinkle of dried chillies. In addition to the veg, you're also going to need 2 tbsp light soy sauce, 2 tbsp oyster sauce, 1 tbsp of rice vinegar, some chicken and some bacon. Or use prawns if you have / like them.

The veg I used (and by no means feel bound by these, because I certainly didn't choose these ones based on any recipe!) were: one green and one red pepper, spinach, a cob's worth of sweetcorn and a carrot sliced into thin batons. I also had a jar of mushrooms preserved in olive oil which needed using up, these were really good in it.

Then you can chop up your chicken - this was the meat off two legs, as they are cheaper than buying a pack of four thighs or two breasts, and I always feel the breast is less tender anyway. The sad water-injected legs you'd get off a battery/poorly treated chicken won't cover this, at the very least a free range bird is needed, but I'd recommend organic for too many reasons to cover here. There are some notes on choosing chicken in this earlier post.

Pre-cook the chicken with nothing more than a little seasoning and some oil, then put the peices to one side. You also need to soak your rice noodles, hot water from the tap will do, for about 5-10 minutes depending on what the packet says.

In the same frying pan, heat up a little more oil and add the garlic, fresh chilli and turmeric (and mushrooms if using). Cook for at most a minute, then add the bacon and cook for a minute more. Tip all of the veg in and cook until tender, then add the soaked noodles, light soy, oyster sauce and vinegar.

Mix it all up, add the dried chilli and spring onions, and serve.

Spaghetti with Mushroom & Bacon Sauce

I make my own pasta fairly regularly these days, the general method I use can be found here. 

A quick refresher though: 100g flour and 1 egg per portion, mixed together with a pinch of salt, kneaded for 10 minutes and rested in the fridge for about half an hour. Roll it out really flat and cut into the shape you want, using a pasta machine if you have one. I started using semolina flour to coat the pasta to stop it sticking together and it works much better than ordinary flour does.

So, assuming you've made (or bought) your spaghetti you can turn your attention to the sauce, which is really simple but very tasty. If you don't fancy this sauce, you can find other recipes by doing a search for "pasta sauce" (which shows a list of links) or clicking here to display posts in chronological order.

First of all fry up a sliced purple onion and some garlic, then add in some thick cut bacon or lardons. When the bacon is pretty much cooked add in the mushrooms and cook through. Right at the end, stir in a little cream, the juice of half a lemon, lots grated parmesan and finely chopped parsley. Season with lots of pepper and a pinch of salt. Easy peasy!

Warm Crispy Chicken Salad with Bacon & Garlic Croutons

This is one of those dinners that is made up of very simple ingredients but which, when put together, becomes much more than the sum of its parts. It's just crispy chicken, bacon, garlic croutons, sesame seeds, raspberry dressing and mixed herb and flower salad. It's soooo good though. Yum, yum, yum.

Season some boneless chicken thighs and brush them with oil. Pop them onto a skillet or heavy based frying pan, skin side first to get crispy before turning them over to do the other side. We've got one of those non-stick grilling machines which makes this pretty fast and easy. Once the chicken is cooked, put it to one side to rest, while you cook some thick-cut bacon peices (sometimes called lardons in the shops). When the chicken has had 5 mins or so to rest, slice it up ready to serve.


To make the croutons, take a couple of thick slices of bread, preferably a day or two old, slice off the crusts and cut it into cubes. Arrange on a shallow tray, drizzle with garlic oil and put under the grill until toasted.

For the salad I used raw courgette slices, cooked chioggia beetroot, cherry tomatoes, nasturtium leaves, sorrel, parsley, marjoram, chives, rocket, spinach, looseleaf lettuce and mixed edible flowers.


The dressing is a mix of extra virgin and light olive oils, raspberry vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked until they combined. If you haven't had raspberry vinegar before, give it a go, it's fabulous stuff.

Finally, toast some sesame seeds to be sprinkled on the top. I served all of the items separately, as they looked really appealing like that, but they combine on the plate perfectly.