New Year's Eve

So here it is - tonight's dinner. So it looks quite pleasant, but nothing to get excited about. It is, however a landmark meal. This, my dear readers is the last of the turkey, in a pie. I bought the smallest turkey crown I could find and that along with an equally small gammon that I roasted has seen us through the entire post Christmas period.
One of the joys of being on holiday for the last two weeks has been the fact that we could take lunch rather than grabbing it.
Many of those lunches have been built around cold cuts. This added to a chicken liver pate and the great joy that is cold, sliced stuffing has provided a wonderful middle of the day break from whatever we were doing.
My brother, "The Stockbroker" was here for lunch twice during the last week or so and I didn't have the heart to feed him with the same stuff twice so I looked to provide something different on his second visit.
With a collection of root vegetables which were not used on the day and a little inspiration from my new Abel and Cole calendar I came up with the recipe below.
Indian Root Cakes
Root vegetables ( I used a small swede, two parsnips, a little bit of celeriac and two carrots)
1 medium onion
2 garlic cloves
1tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp coriander
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp chilli powder
1tsp ground ginger
1 egg
1 slug of milk
2 or 3 mugs of breadcrumbs
Salt and pepper
Flour
Oil for cooking

Peel and boil the root vegetables until they are all mashable. While these are boiling, finely chop the onion and fry it in a little oil until it is just starting to colour. Add the garlic and all the dried spices and cook for a couple of minutes. Allow this to cool. Take the roots off the heat, drain and allow to steam off in a colander for a good half hour. Mash the roots and add the onion and spice mix. Season and pop in the fridge for a few hours or overnight. Make an egg wash of the egg and milk and make the vegetable mix into tennis ball sized balls and flatten into disks so the resemble an old fashioned fishcake. Coat these in the flour and the the egg; follow this with the breadcrumbs. These can now be fried in a little more oil than you would normally use (it needs to come half way up the sides of the cakes). The key here is to make sure that the oil is hot enough to fry the coating to a seal fast. pop a little bit of bread in first to give you an idea of how hot it is. Fry the cakes until they are golden brown and crispy, then pop in the oven to enable you to fry the others.

I served these with some griddled broccoli with chilli and garlic (a recipe I adapted from the wonderful Ottolenghi cook book) Blanched broccoli was mixed with a little oil and then griddles on a cast iron griddle. This was added to some garlic and sliced chilli which had been fried off to release its flavours. A dash of soy sauce added a little salt. A lunch which deserves to be sat down and sat up to.

Happy new year!

So Christmas is nearly here...

So its nearly here, the day that we've all been building up to for such a long time - I have but one thing to say to anyone who will listen - Please, please don't waste so much food this Christmas. If there is such a thing as a sin (and I'm no theologian) then the truely obscene amount of wasted food at this time of year is a sin. Lets take eggs we should be treating them like little pieces of gold! Just think about how hard you would have to work to grow and rear all your food this Christmas and be thankful! It is, however, the season to be joyful - and I'm just glad that 2011 is drawing to a close. For me and mine 2012 had better be a good one! Whatever you are doing, I hope you are with those that you love and love you back. It is a feast time and I hope your feast is up to muster.

Its not that difficult...

Listening to the radio earlier today and they were taking about food security and the threat that this brings to the UK. The truth is so simple that it is almost embarrassing that they wheeled out a professor to explain it. So here goes my explanation.
There is a growing middle class. I don't mean a few more people buying a second car in the UK, I am talking about billions of new consumers in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). These new middle class consumers want a "Western" style diet, high in meat and very expensive, both environmentally and financially. This creates the problem. Meat is very expensive to produce in terms of agricultural effort so there is a limited amount of meat available globally. This meat, as with all global commodities, will flow towards the money. For the first time in its history, China is importing pork.
So what does this mean? Here's the simple bit, we should eat less meat, demand higher quality meat and eat local - hold on a second isn't this what the slow food movement, the organic movement, the free range movement and any person with any common sense has been saying for ages?

Get stuffed!

Please tell me you've bought your chestnuts. You'll need them to make your stuffing which you are going to make this week and then freeze. You'll also need to keep some back to go with your sprouts on the big day.
First and foremost, a quick word about stuffing a bird to roast and the word is "DON'T." When you roast your festive bird just pop a half lemon, a half orange and an onion in the cavity with a handful of sage and roast the stuffing separately. So here's how to make your stuffing.
I am not going to give you my usual list of ingredients and method, it is far to personal a thing to be put down in exact details.
Take some sausage meat (I tend to dismantle my favourite sausage, discarding the skin), the meat should make up about half of the stuffing. mix in some breadcrumbs (about half as much by volume as the meat), an egg, the chestnuts (all blitzed up onto crumbs), the grated zest of an orange, lemon or lime, herbs - finely chopped (sage is a favourite, but anything with some punch), salt and pepper. Mix all this up with your hands (yes I mean it). Now, take a tiny piece, about the size of a £2 coin and fry it off in a pan. Taste this and adjust the seasoning as you like. Pop it into a shallow, oven proof dish, ridge the top with a fork and pop it in the freezer. Bring this out on the eve of the big day and allow to defrost in the fridge overnight. This will need cooking for 45-60 minutes in the oven. Serve slices with the meat.
Part of the joy of Christmas is the Boxing Day feast of cold cuts (I may actually enjoy this more than the meal itself), cold stuffing, if made well, is a thing of great beauty so making too much is no sin.
The beautiful wife and I have just got back from visiting my mother. She had purchased a superb piece of topside of beef which I roasted on Saturday night and served with Yorkshire puddings and veg. However, my mother, whose vocabulary is a little bit old fashioned burst into the kitchen and announced that she hadn't had a joint for ages! Having calmed ourselves after laughing ourselves silly, the Beautiful Wife and I explained that in today's world she needed to clarify that she meant a joint of meat.

...and the goose is getting fat....

Last year I started to write about how to organise the perfect Christmas without all the cheffy rubbish and was planning a gloriously simple Christmas feast for the Beautiful wife and I. Alas my Christmas fell apart and I was unable to finish blogging up to the big day. This year's Christmas will be a very quiet one and hopefully, one without any unpleasant issues.
My Father lost his battle with Leukemia early in November so there will not be wild celebrations this year. He was a truly great man in all the small but very important ways. He was, however, the hardest man on earth to feed. This was a man who "hated" ginger in anything yet his favourite tipple was Whisky and dry ginger! He hated fish, but loved salmon or prawns. He detested garlic but would steal a slice of garlic bread before it left the kitchen. We all miss him very much.
As I sit here on this chilly Sunday evening our little house is filled with the warm winter smell of braising red cabbage. Get this done now as it freezes perfectly well and its another job you don't have to do on the day. The cabbages came in the veg box we get from Abel and Cole - one of them came last week and was the size of a football. Four or five batches of cabbage will soon be in my freezer! (Recipe below)
Now I began to talk about this last year but is stands repeating - On the way home from work tomorrow you need (and I do mean "NEED") to buy your chestnuts - you will not feel at all full of Christmas cheer when on the eve of the big day you are charging round every shop and supermarket trying to find some.
The other thing I must nag about is ordering your meat. It doesn't really matter how many you are feeding on the 25th but it is important to make sure you have the meat you want. On this note why not try something different this year: A rib of beef perhaps, a roast goose might be nice (fine roasties here) or a loin of pork, maybe a leg of lamb, you could even go completely of script and poach a salmon! If you are having turkey please, please make sure it is Free Range and preferably raised to very high welfare and feed standards too. Yes, yes I know times are hard but this is a once a year meal - shouldn't we head towards 2012 with good intentions and actions.

Braised Red Cabbage
1 medium sized red cabbage, shredded
1 large white onion, sliced
1 large apple (Bramley ideal, but any really) peeled, cored and chopped
Glug of Cider vinegar
Wine glass of Dry cider
Butter
Salt and pepper
Melt a large knob of butter in a large casserole on the hob and add the onions and apple. As the apple is softening, add the cabbage and stir to give a fine coat of butter on everything. Pour in the vinegar and the cider and stir some more. Place the lid on and pop the dish into a pre-heated, medium oven for about 45 minutes. Take out the casserole carefully and give the cabbage a really good stir. Add more cider if needed; it doesn't need a swimming pool in the bottom but neither should it be dry. Pop it back in the oven for another 45 minutes. Remove and season to taste. Serve immediately or allow to cool and freeze in bags, portioned according to your family size. This dish happily re-heats in the oven or in the microwave, simply add a little butter to give a gloss before serving. If you want to be a bit or adventurous add some cloves or a stick of cinnamon during cooking.