This is another great winter dinner, although it does take a bit of effort to make. It can be expensive or cheap, depending on which cut of beef you use.
Skirt steak (bavette) was awesome when I tried it on Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's advice (in the River Cottage Meat book), so if you can get it maybe try that, otherwise any stewing cut will do - long slow braising before the main bake is the key.
You also need some kidneys, lamb or calves is fine, but be very aware of the source as some calves liver will come from inhumanely treated veal calves, imported to the UK. There's a little bit more info about this in my earlier liver, onion & colcannon post.
I was feeding four fairly greedy people (including myself!) and used two 360g packs of beef skirt and six lamb's kidneys. This was enough to allow for two people coming back for seconds! Use scissors to snip them into bitesized chunks before rolling them in well seasoned flour and pan-frying in batches.
When all the meat has been browned, tip everything into a large pan, then fry up a large, thickly sliced onion in the juices, deglaze with red wine (a good, large glassful) and put this mixture into the casserole pan as well. Finally, add a couple of bay leaves, a dollop of English mustard, a dash of worcester sauce, a tablespoon of ketchup and a pint of really good beef stock.
You can now partially cover the pan and leave to simmer slowly for a good hour and a half. Add in a punnet of halved or whole mushrooms (chestnut are my favourite) for the last 15 minutes.Take the mixture off the heat and season it to taste.
Line your pie dish with puff pastry and pile the filling in. Cover with more puff pastry and any design you like on top, then brush all over with beaten egg. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and bake the pie for another hour.
Serve with mashed potatoes and green veg, such as kale.
Ragu is a hearty, happy dish with bags of flavour and is a lot less work than might be expected. I do feel that it needs a fresh egg pasta to do it justice, but that might just be me and my penchant for rich food! Tagliatelle is certainly a fabulous type of pasta for this sauce either way.
This is my made-up version of ragu, it isn't nearly as good as my Mum's but hers has a list of ingredients that fills a an A4 page and takes hours to cook... this one is a speedy little number which still manages a beautiful flavour and a great texture. The amount below serves two hungry people, with just enough left over for one of you to have lunch the next day.
So, dice an onion, a stick of celery and a couple of garlic cloves and set them to gently fry in a pan. When they're softened, add in half a pack of mince (about 250g) and give it a good stir. Once that's going brown, add in a tub's worth of chopped chicken livers and keep stirring to brown those as well.
Throw in a diced carrot and a couple of bay leaves, and a glass of red wine. Let that bubble for a bit before topping up with a tin of tomatoes, a squeeze of tomato puree and a large pinch of dried oregano. Add a little water to help form a sauce and leave to simmer for as long as you can manage - a good half hour at least.
Finally, season with salt and pepper before serving with hot pasta.
This ham is now a christmas tradition for our family (and some of our friends), enough so that I received complaints last year when I made a 4.5kg one - it was too small! This is a straightforward gift from Nigella and honestly it is worth every moment of time and scrap of effort involved in making it.
First, get hold of a cured, smoked gammon on the bone. You may need to phone your butcher a few days in advance if, like mine, they smoke their meats on premises. If you don't have a butcher, you could see if there's a stockist like mine near you, use their online delivery service (choose "gammon - smoked and bone in") or have a look around the internet for an ethical stockist in your area.
6.5kgs is basically a massive pig leg and will feed 10 greedy people a gigantic meal. If you aren't serving it as a main meal, but as a pick and nibble treat for sandwiches, ham-egg-n-chips and general snaffling, it will last you and your guests for a good week. You can make a smaller one though, just adjust the amounts of the other ingredients.
We had a bit of a problem finding a pot big enough for ours. In fact, this is an issue we usually have every year but yet never get around to buying a big enough pot in advance. I got my husband to deploy a hacksaw to remove a peice of it (ready to make a tasty soup after xmas), so that the ham would fit into the biggest vessel we have - one of those ceramic slow-cookers.
The ham goes into the pot with a large (250ml) glass of red wine, a large quartered onion, a quartered fennel bulb, a couple of fat cloves of garlic, a couple of star anise and a tablespoon each of coriander seed, fennel seed and peppercorns. Top it up with water as far as you can and then turn the heat on and leave for at least 3.5 hours (if on the stove) or about 5 hours in a slow cooker on high - especially if the lid doesn't fit tight! Keep checking on it, top up with more water if needed and turn it over halfway through cooking.
When ready, fish the ham out and pop it in a big baking tray. Cut the outer skin off and use a knife to lightly score criss-cross diamond shapes. Stick a clove in at every X.
Heat up a saucepan containing 4 tablespoons of redcurrant jelly, a teaspoon of smoked paprika and half a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and red wine vinegar. Give it a good old boil for a few minutes and then use a spoon or a pastry brush to coat the ham with the glaze.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and bake for 15 minutes or so, until the glaze has caramalised and the corners are going black.
Leave to cool before eating or you will burn your fingers!
This is properly entitled "big fat roast dinner for lazy, lardy layabouts". At the very least the trimmings deserve more of a mention: rosemary and pancetta wrapped pheasant with roast chestnuts, curly kale and roast potato cubes. That was a bit too long for the title though!
It sounds a bit complicated and lengthy to make but it really isn't, it didn't even take a full hour.
First of all take some pheasant breasts (1-2 per person depending on appetite; I had one, my husband had two) and pat clean with some kitchen roll. Lay a small sprig of rosemary on top of each one and wrap it in a couple of slices of pancetta. Place in a small roasting tray with some oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Cover with foil and leave to one side while the oven preheats to 200 degrees C.
Boil up some small potatoes until mostly cooked but still firm in the middle. Drain and cut them into little cubes. Add to another small baking tray that has been lined with greaseproof paper. Drizzle some oil over and season with salt and pepper. If you like (and I do) sprinkle some finely chopped pancetta in as well. Mix until the potato cubes are coated with the oil.
When the oven is hot bung both trays in together and leave be for 15-20 minutes.
In the meantime you can decant your chestnuts * onto a third small baking tray and tear up your kale into a saucepan. If you find any little green caterpillars you could pop them into the garden with a complementary kale dinner of their own, as we did - that was a very narrow escape for a cabbage white butterfly-to-be. If your garden is full of brassicas though you might not - it depends on your take of these things!
After the 15-odd minute roast, remove the foil off the pheasant breasts and pop the chestnuts in on the shelf below. Cook for a further few minutes until the pancetta has crisped up.
Turn the oven off, but leave the potatoes and chestnuts in there. Put the pheasant breasts onto a warm plate and re-cover with foil, leave to rest while you sort out the gravy and briefly cook the kale, with a sparing amount of hot water, until tender.
To make the gravy just pop the roasting tray the pheasants were in onto a medium heat with a slosh of red wine, a dollop of redcurrant jelly and a small amount of cornflour. Scrape and stir and let it bubble away until it tastes good and has the right consistency.
* You can get pre-cooked and peeled chestnuts from, as far as I'm aware, abel & cole, waitrose and sainsburys. The brands I know are Organico and Gourmet Merchant.
