Spring Lamb in pub loos

Last year Dan's Dad very generously gave us half a lamb. An unusual gift, I grant you, but a useful one nonetheless.


(Sorry if the photo's in poor taste, but y'know we have to acknowledge where meat comes from.)

The one cut I had been rather dreading was the Lamb belly. I had no idea what to do with it, and I feared inedibility due to the fattiness of it.

I put it off, and put it off, and then delayed some more. But it has now been sitting in our freezer for a year, so this weekend I decided it was time to stop being a scaredy-cat and tackle the belly.

I took the recipe from a pub toilet wall.

Yes you read that right.

We ate at the Kingham Plough a few months back (very good - I recommend it, but not too often or you'll be bankrupt). They had papered their loo walls with pages from old farmhouse recipe books. While washing my hands I noticed one for how to cook lamb belly and figured it was one to remember since I knew I'd have to tackle the lamb belly in the freezer sooner or later.

So, here's the loo method:

Lamb Belly (or breast of lamb, which somehow sounds more appetising) with Butterbeans
serves 3

approx 500g lamb belly - trim off as much fat as possible, then roll it up with some sprigs of rosemary and thyme and a crushed garlic clove in the middle. Tie with string or cotton. I did 3 separate rolls, but I imagine one large one would also work.

Place this into a pan of boiling water and simmer for 5 minutes, then fish out the meat and put it into a bowl of cold water. I left this in the fridge for a few hours until I was ready to cook dinner, but I would think you could move straight onto the next step.

Place 2 or 3 rashers of bacon in the bottom of a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Slice a lemon and lay the lemon slices on top. Put the lamb pieces on top of the lemon.
Cover with 2 or 3 more slices of bacon.

Finely chop an onion and scatter over the top. Sprinkle on some rosemary and thyme.
Season with salt and pepper (go easy on the salt though as the bacon is salty).

Slosh about a glass of white wine into the pan, add 300ml of stock (or a stock cube), then top up the pan with cold water until the water just covers all the meat.

Bring slowly to the boil, skim off any scum that rises to the top with a slotted spoon, then allow to simmer for about an hour and a half. Keep the water topped up during this time.

About 10 minutes from the end of the cooking time cook any other vegetables you fancy (we had purple sprouting broccoli). Drain a 400g can of butterbeans, add a ladle of the liquid from the lamb pan and gently heat through.
Serve.

The verdict:
I won't be buying lamb belly; its too greasy for me to really enjoy it. But if I get given some again I won't be horrified. It was tender and had a nice flavour, but I think roasting it might be more successful as it would give all that fat a bit more opportunity to run off into the pan rather than ending up in the finished meal. I liked the flavours though so I would roll it with herbs and place some lemon on top, and butterbeans made a nice change from potatoes.

Sicilian pasta

No great excitments on these week's recipe of the week. It was a quick and easy recipe from my Quick and Easy recipe book. It did exactly what it said on the tin and provided a speedy and tasty dinner.

I noticed a very similar recipe in the Jamie Oliver Jamie's Italy book, Pasta con acciughe e pomodoro (anchovies in tomato sauce with pasta).
Its a poor man's pasta sauce recipe with very minimal ingredients. Basically just a handful of toasted pinenuts, and handful of sultanas (soaked in warm water for a few minutes to soften them), 2 or 3 skinned chopped tomatoes, a couple of cloves of garlic, 4 anchovy fillets and a tablespoon of tomato puree.

Put your pasta on to cook.
Fry the garlic in olive oil to soften it. Add the anchovies and stir until 'melted', then add all the other ingredients and heat through. Season.
Drain thge pasta, toss the sauce and pasta together.
Serve.

Can't be exciting every week!

I love.....Risotto

A few weeks ago I made Jamie O's cauliflower risotto (twice in a week).
This week I made Silvana Franco's red onion and cannellini bean risotto. Find the recipe here.

Both were very satisfying dinners.
Creamy, vegetarian (I like to eat vegetarian once a week if I can), flavoursome, filling, and non-fattening. Also, they were both recipes that I didn't have particularly high expectations of but which turned out to be surprisingly lovely.

So now I'm having a love affair with risotto and am on the hunt for more flavour combinations to try.

I know its basically just a vehicle for using up odds and sods in the vegetable drawer and the fridge. But its a wonderful one!

In other weekend news...

Lemon curd



I spotted the recipe in Nigel Slater's Observer column and thought it looked worth a go. Very versatile, tangy and buttery. It was yummy with meringues, mixed berries and a small scoop of icecream as a pudding, and I'm looking forward to it on toast for breakfasts. Here it is.

Wild garlic pesto

My dad pointed out that we had wild garlic on the river bank at the bottom of our garden, so I picked some leaves to make a wild garlic, parsley and walnut pesto. It went really well on baked cod with some fresh vegetables and mashed potato. The walnuts gave it a earthyness that was appealing set against the lightness of cod and fresh vegetables.
A word of warning; please don't try this at home unless you're pretty confident on plant identification! I was lucky to have my Dad's expert eye to help out.

Walnut and Wild Garlic Pesto

25g wild garlic leaves
25g parsley
50g walnuts
1 tablespoon olive oil
A small squeeze of lemon juice
1 small garlic clove
Scrunch of salt.

Whizz everything together in a food processor. Spoon onto fish or chicken, or stir into a bowl of pasta. Easy peasy.

cherries two ways

On friday I had a strange craving for cherries. Who knows why, but something reminded me of some amazing cherries I bought last summer, and that was it. I HAD to have some.

Sainsbury's didn't have any. Nor did Tesco or the Co-op. I was getting desperate....Some people crave chocolate, some alcohol or crack. Apparently my drug of choice is fruit.

I finally found some in the garden centre (not as odd as it sounds - they have freezers of frozen fruit too). Hurrah! Not the ripe and ready to eat cherries I had originally wanted, but frankly by this stage I would take anything, so frozen cherries were an acceptable substitute.

I drove home dreaming of yummy desserts and consequently clafoutis found itself leap-frogged to the top of my 'to do' list.

I don't think I'd ever eaten clafoutis before, let alone made it, but it's the classic cherry recipe is it not?
Now, I realise that the picture below looks like a disaster, but they were just very dark cherries - not burnt. I promise.



I completely destroyed the pudding taking it out of the tin (time for a new non-stick pie dish - mine is antique), but it tasted lovely. So much so that Dan literally licked his plate clean.

Clearly I will be making this again.

Almost as successful was sunday's cherry recipe; a savoury one this time. Simon Rimmer's recipe for Duck with Cherry sauce. Find it here. I added a little thyme to the sauce, but that was the only change I made to the recipe.

I have to admit to feeling dubious about how likely this was to be edible, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I rolled up my sleeves and gave it a go.

I should have had faith. (Both in Mr Rimmer and also in the fact that duck and fruit go together wonderfully.) The dinner was good. Actually, very good.



So that's that. Cherry-craving satisfied.

Delegation is the name of the game

Last time I made chocolate cake it was a DISASTER.

More of it ended up on the bottom of the oven than in the cake tin, and it had to be turned into a trifle-style dessert instead of being proper cake. Having spent a morning scraping burnt choclate goo off the oven I haven't been too keen to try my hand at cake-baking again.

But for a birthday, chocolate cake is the law, so I delegated the task to my younger sister. And she really came up trumps with a chocolatey-jammy deliciously sinful concoction.

Apparently it was from the recipe book published by this bakery, which both makes me want to go to the bakery to over-indulge in cake, and makes me think that I might just have to buy the recipe book and try making cake again.

I'm tempted.

Party food

I love parties.

In the context of my cookery project they're a lovely excuse to try out all those recipes for nibbles that you would never make for just 2 people.

Also, its great to have a house and garden full of friends. Makes me feel all warm and fizzy.

Bank holiday monday was Dan's birthday, so we thought we'd throw a little garden/house birthday and (belated) housewarming party in the afternoon. Being horrifyingly grown-up these days, it didn't degenerate into a drunken mess, but stayed really very civilised right to the end. Lots of children and dogs running around begging for food, free flowing local beer (the Hook Norton Brewery is less than a mile from us), a lovely mixture of new and old friends, party nibbles. What's not to like?!

Also, the perfect excuse to make popcorn which I have never done before. Not just any old popcorn though...peanut caramel popcorn. Definitely the grown-up version. Yummy.



I noted the recipe down from another blog months ago, and have been on the look-out for an excuse to make it ever since. Its a perfect party popper.

Here it is (and here's the Seattle-based blog I found it on):

Peanut Caramel popcorn

100g unpopped popcorn
2 tablespoons vegetable/sunflower oil
225g soft light brown sugar
50g golden syrup
85g melted butter
pinch salt
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1-2 teaspoons vanilla extract
100g lightly salted roasted peanuts
*You will also need a sugar/jam thermometer for this recipe*

Preheat the oven to 130C.
Lightly oil a roasting tin with vegetable oil.
In a large saucepan heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil until very hot. Add the popcorn, slam on the saucepan lid and shake the pan back and forth over the heat until all of the corn has popped.
Transfer the popcorn to the roasting tin.
In a medium sized, heavy based saucepan whisk together the sugar, syrup, melted butter, salt and 2 tablespoons of water. Bring to a simmer over a medium heat, and continue to allow it to simmer, whisking frequently until the heat reaches 130C.
Immediately remove the pan from the heat when it reaches this temperature, whisk in the bicarbonate of soda and vanilla, then quickly pour it over the popcorn and fold it in.
Stir in the peanuts.
Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour, stirring every 20 minutes.
Remove from oven and allow to cool. This will keep in an airtight tub for about 5 days.

As a complete side note, I also had my parents up for a couple of days over the weekend and made a rhubarb and strawberry crumble for pudding on sunday night. Not a fruit combo I had eaten before, but one I would highly recommend; you don't need quite so much sugar on the rhubarb as the strawberries add an element of sweetness too.

OK, enough of my random ramblings! Hope you had a lovely long weekend.

PS The cheesecakes I made for the party a couple of weeks ago were a great success. Rhubarb and ginger cheesecake - its the future of cookery!