Tuesday 28 September
I had friends staying and decided to make a last homecooked breakfast before Em went off on her travels.
In keeping with my "buy nothing" challenge, I used up the fresh ricotta I bought at the Market last Saturday.
I'd brought home two, so one was used for the previous night's veggie pasta bake, and one for ricotta pancakes for the troops this morning.
I've made these before - they're adapted from a Bill Granger recipe. Pretty foolproof, thought I may be a little out of practice at pancake flipping, so they turned out a little misshapen. No pictures unfortunately as I was in a total rush to get these made and get to uni on time! This is the recipe I used.
For dinner we had braised goose. I'm always up for trying new things in the kitchen, and I have never cooked goose this way before. In fact, other than one incident with a roast goose, it's not a meat I'd cooked before at all.
Braised goose (serves 4-6)
4 goose legs
1 goose breast fillet
10 cloves garlic
3 medium onions
1 carrot
Half bottle red wine
Leftover gravy (optional)
Leftover veg (optional, but I used steamed red cabbage and purple cauliflower from Sunday dinner)
2 tins plum tomatoes
Chicken stock
Chop onions roughly and lay on the bottom of a large slow cooker or cast iron oven pot.
Make slits in the goose flesh and push garlic cloves into the holes. Place on the bed of onions. Season. Pour over the red wine and the two tins of tomatoes. Add in any leftover ingredients and maybe some extra veg.
Cook on low in the slow cooker for 24 hours. Alternatively you could stick it in the oven at about 75'C for the same amount if time.
We had this with mash, and I think the meal went a long way to line my stomach before we went out for drinks for Em's leaving night!
Showing posts with label famers market. Show all posts
Showing posts with label famers market. Show all posts
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Oh, for the love of a Scotch egg
I’ve been so busy at work the past week, not had time to post at all in between everything. Plus me and the boyfriend have had a few fallings out, probably down to stress (mine) and hunger (mine as well – I’ve been too busy to get in a proper lunch, and I am not someone to mess with whilst hungry!). We were living on “convenience foods” for awhile – not fast food necessarily, but we had a few takeaways from the Thai restaurant across the street and pasta and sauce a couple nights in a row. Totally unimaginative but hey, needs must. And if I’m not cooking, I think he just pulls shit out of the cupboards at random and hopes for the best. We had Chinese noodles with tomato and seaweed Italian pasta sauce last Thursday, and spelt tortellini with Thai red curry sauce, bamboo shoots and chorizo the day before. Fusion food, or just plain weird? I feel like I’m eating like a student already, and I don’t go back to higher ed until October.
My boyfriend just got back late last night. He’s had a stressful few days trying to sort out some money – he’s on Jobseekers just now, but there was a problem with his application and he’s not had his first lot of money just yet. He’s not signed on in a long time, but it’s such a hassle to get back into the system and he’s quite frustrated about it right now. To top that off he was at his mum’s and a whole load of fast-flying shit has been hitting the fan from all sides recently. He’s worried about his mum, his gran, his big sis, his brother-in-law…and to top it off we’ve just had to shell out an insane amount of money to get the animals sorted (dog’s been sick, cat needs some pretty expensive dental work).
This week we are back on track though. We had a lovely weekend, went to visit a friend out in rural Fife and spent Saturday evening spending some quality time with some good mates in his cottage. Well, I say “quality time”. What actually happened was I was so overtired from my week of doing my best headless chicken impression that I passed out on the couch about half an hour after we got there. We had to put on “Man on the Moon” three times so we could all watch it as pretty much everyone passed out at some point, so we’d all see about ¼ of the film each. I had the first ten minutes covered!
The boys woke me up at regular intervals to feed me – we had lamb leg steaks from Hugh Grierson Organics grilled very simply, with some sautéed mushrooms and steamed carrot batons. Mmm…healthy! I went back to sleep. About an hour later it was followed by “John’s pie”, named because our friend John decided to stare at the pie in the oven until it was ready. The pie was apple, and it had come from North Country Lass Saturday morning at the farmers market. We had it with some jersey double cream, and I polished the lot off in about two minutes then passed out again with the bowl inches from my head. Ah, food coma, how I have missed you!
I woke up quite early the next morning and put the film back on. I have to mention Jim Carrey really does a very good Andy Kaufman, and you can definitely notice how much Carrey was influenced by Kaufman. As my boyfriend says, if there had been no Andy Kaufman, there would have been no Jim Carrey! I managed to stay awake for the whole movie this time, and by the time it was finished everyone was pretty much up and about. I had a homemade Scotch egg from Piperfield Pork while I was waiting for the boys to wake, and it was absolutely amazing, and a perfectly buttery fruit scone from North Country lass. Oh my god, I have to talk about this Scotch egg now. Imagine all the Scotch eggs you have had in your life, remember their taste, texture, colour. Now forget it all – these were nothing like the bog standard eggs you might find in the supermarket filed under “picnic snacks”. I first sliced mine in half as there were five of us and only four eggs, but twenty seconds later went back for my second half before anyone got their grubby little mitts on it. The egg was cooked just right, hard boiled but without that slightly dry texture you get from the yolk if it’s been in the pot too long – not to mention the slightly repulsive greenish tinge eggs so often get. I like mine soft boiled for the most part, and this yolk was bright golden yellow, almost orange, light and fluffy. I don’t think I have ever seen a hard boiled egg so perfect in my life. I never knew I could have so much to say about a boiled egg! The meat the egg was wrapped in was melt-in-your-mouth, not over-seasoned. Nothing like the usual dried out coating Scotch eggs sometimes have. All in all, a quality egg. I’d spied them before at the market, but never bought one before – thought this would be a nice treat to take for the boys and I will definitely grab some next time Piperfield are at the market.
For lunch we had some chicken broth with veg from the Good Soup Company with some house seeded sourdough bread from Falko Konditoreimeister. Followed by a slice of North Country Lass’s pork and apple pie. Pork and apple have always been one of my favourite food combinations, ever since my mum let me make my own after school snacks and I laid out a plate of cold cut ham with Motts apple sauce as a dip. Mmm…
Speaking of food combos, a book arrived in the post for me the other day. I ordered it from Amazon a week ago but had completely forgotten about it – gotta love mail order shopping, feels like Christmas every other day. “The Flavour Thesaurus” (Niki Segnit) is a compendium of every possible food and flavour combination you can think of - some are quite bizarre. You have the basic list of foods, separated into categories like Meat and Fish, and then these are matched up with a variety of complementary flavours. There are some more obvious ones, like chilli and chocolate, and some particularly bizarre ones like blueberry and mushroom. I think it will be an interesting read, and my poor boyfriend will just have to put up with random trials over the next few weeks…
My boyfriend just got back late last night. He’s had a stressful few days trying to sort out some money – he’s on Jobseekers just now, but there was a problem with his application and he’s not had his first lot of money just yet. He’s not signed on in a long time, but it’s such a hassle to get back into the system and he’s quite frustrated about it right now. To top that off he was at his mum’s and a whole load of fast-flying shit has been hitting the fan from all sides recently. He’s worried about his mum, his gran, his big sis, his brother-in-law…and to top it off we’ve just had to shell out an insane amount of money to get the animals sorted (dog’s been sick, cat needs some pretty expensive dental work).
This week we are back on track though. We had a lovely weekend, went to visit a friend out in rural Fife and spent Saturday evening spending some quality time with some good mates in his cottage. Well, I say “quality time”. What actually happened was I was so overtired from my week of doing my best headless chicken impression that I passed out on the couch about half an hour after we got there. We had to put on “Man on the Moon” three times so we could all watch it as pretty much everyone passed out at some point, so we’d all see about ¼ of the film each. I had the first ten minutes covered!
The boys woke me up at regular intervals to feed me – we had lamb leg steaks from Hugh Grierson Organics grilled very simply, with some sautéed mushrooms and steamed carrot batons. Mmm…healthy! I went back to sleep. About an hour later it was followed by “John’s pie”, named because our friend John decided to stare at the pie in the oven until it was ready. The pie was apple, and it had come from North Country Lass Saturday morning at the farmers market. We had it with some jersey double cream, and I polished the lot off in about two minutes then passed out again with the bowl inches from my head. Ah, food coma, how I have missed you!
I woke up quite early the next morning and put the film back on. I have to mention Jim Carrey really does a very good Andy Kaufman, and you can definitely notice how much Carrey was influenced by Kaufman. As my boyfriend says, if there had been no Andy Kaufman, there would have been no Jim Carrey! I managed to stay awake for the whole movie this time, and by the time it was finished everyone was pretty much up and about. I had a homemade Scotch egg from Piperfield Pork while I was waiting for the boys to wake, and it was absolutely amazing, and a perfectly buttery fruit scone from North Country lass. Oh my god, I have to talk about this Scotch egg now. Imagine all the Scotch eggs you have had in your life, remember their taste, texture, colour. Now forget it all – these were nothing like the bog standard eggs you might find in the supermarket filed under “picnic snacks”. I first sliced mine in half as there were five of us and only four eggs, but twenty seconds later went back for my second half before anyone got their grubby little mitts on it. The egg was cooked just right, hard boiled but without that slightly dry texture you get from the yolk if it’s been in the pot too long – not to mention the slightly repulsive greenish tinge eggs so often get. I like mine soft boiled for the most part, and this yolk was bright golden yellow, almost orange, light and fluffy. I don’t think I have ever seen a hard boiled egg so perfect in my life. I never knew I could have so much to say about a boiled egg! The meat the egg was wrapped in was melt-in-your-mouth, not over-seasoned. Nothing like the usual dried out coating Scotch eggs sometimes have. All in all, a quality egg. I’d spied them before at the market, but never bought one before – thought this would be a nice treat to take for the boys and I will definitely grab some next time Piperfield are at the market.
For lunch we had some chicken broth with veg from the Good Soup Company with some house seeded sourdough bread from Falko Konditoreimeister. Followed by a slice of North Country Lass’s pork and apple pie. Pork and apple have always been one of my favourite food combinations, ever since my mum let me make my own after school snacks and I laid out a plate of cold cut ham with Motts apple sauce as a dip. Mmm…
Speaking of food combos, a book arrived in the post for me the other day. I ordered it from Amazon a week ago but had completely forgotten about it – gotta love mail order shopping, feels like Christmas every other day. “The Flavour Thesaurus” (Niki Segnit) is a compendium of every possible food and flavour combination you can think of - some are quite bizarre. You have the basic list of foods, separated into categories like Meat and Fish, and then these are matched up with a variety of complementary flavours. There are some more obvious ones, like chilli and chocolate, and some particularly bizarre ones like blueberry and mushroom. I think it will be an interesting read, and my poor boyfriend will just have to put up with random trials over the next few weeks…
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