Pheasant Fun #3 - [Eating]

I butchered the pheasant on Sunday night, cooked it on Monday, and we ate it for dinner on Wednesday!

I was working all day, and got home around 6:30. I'd cleverly already asked my mum to heat up the stew and make mashed potato so that dinner was ready when I came home.























Mmm... check it out! How good does that look! It's so cold outside, and this was so warm and comforting. It was miles better than the braised pheasant with mushroom and bacon - I think it's partly because this recipe has much more detailed instructions, so it's harder to screw up. For instance, in this one Nigella instructs you to reduce the sauce to make it thicker. In the original braised pheasant recipe, she doesn't say to do so, and I remember that stew being distinctly unpleasantly watery. Also, marinating the pheasant makes it less tough. Ooh, and the braised pheasant with mushroom and bacon has red wine in it, which I think is gross in stews (e.g. coq au vin, and any other stew... it just makes everything soddenly purple and smelly). This stew has delicious gin and Martini Rosso in it. Here, the sauce is rich and thick and tasty, and just generally gorgeous.

Hurrah for pheasant!

Pheasant Fun #2

The day after you marinate the pheasant pieces, you can get on with the cooking.

What you do is wipe the marinade off the pheasant, and brown them in a pan with butter. Then you set them aside and cook mushrooms in the buttery-pheasanty oil before again removing these to a plate. Next you brown some baby onions and remove them to yet another plate. (The "baby" onions I got at Coles were suspiciously large, so I used half the number of onions the recipe says to, and cut them into quarters).















Ready to be cooked

At this stage, you chuck some cubed pancetta into the pan, and let it cook until crisp, at which point you add flour, stirring until incorporated into the liquid in the pan. Then you slowly add Martini Rosso (AKA red vermouth), game stock (I used chicken, but don't tell anyone), and the strained marinade liquid, stirring well to make sure it's all incorporated.

Then you return the pheasant, mushrooms and onions to the pan, and cook in the oven slowly for 2 hours. I found, that with my very reduced quantities, the pan was so large that the pheasant pieces were not submerged in the liquid. So, I carefully transferred everything to a smaller ceramic dish, and covered it with foil to cook.

Out of the oven, it looked like this...

Here, you strain the liquid off, and reduce it in a pan until slightly thickened and no longer watery. Then you put the liquid back in the dish, and you can leave it in the fridge for a couple of days until ready to eat.

Pheasant Fun

What seems like eons ago, I made the fateful dish, braised pheasant with mushrooms and bacon, which I hated. So much so that it took me 9 months to work up the courage to make Nigella's 2nd pheasant stew, the "pheasant with gin and IT". The last time I made pheasant stew, I made it in full quantities (i.e., THREE whole freakin' pheasants), which, at $25/kilo, cost an absolute bomb. This time, wary from my first pheasant experience, I did it in vastly reduced quantities (i.e. only 1 pheasant), and was much more careful about following the recipe to the letter.

363. Pheasant with Gin and IT (Dinner)

This one is, in fact, pretty much the same as the hideous braised pheasant, with a couple of differences - notably, the pheasant is marinated before being cooked, and gin and red vermouth are used instead of red wine.

This is a stew to be made in stages, over a few days. The first step is to joint the pheasant, and put it in its marinade. I probably could have got the butcher (from Prahran Market) to do it for me, but I was tired that day, and I do love a challenge.

WARNING: This process is quite disgusting. Don't look at the photos if you're not comfortable with pheasant carnage.

I used a combination of kitchen scissors, a sharp knife, and my mum's biggest meat cleaver. I must admit, throughout the whole process I felt very badass - like Lucy Liu in Kill Bill, including, disgustingly enough, a delightful incident of pheasant blood splattering across my face.

But back to the task at hand. I took the pheasant out of its bag, only to discover that its head was still attached!! GROSS.


whole pheasant

The first thing I had to do was cut the head off. Then, remembering Nigella's instructions for spatchcocking poultry (haha, "spatchCOCKing"), I cut down either side of the backbone.

Then, I slowly worked the bones away from the meat, to loosen what I would describe as a maryland piece from one side. Then I did the other side.

Next I cut the 2 breast pieces away. And there it was, 4 pieces of pheasant!


neat pieces

Here are the guts. I admit that there are a lot of guts and offcuts. I assume that with skill and experience, I'll be able to do this much faster, and with a lot less wastage, like a real butcher would.
















I washed the pheasant pieces, and submerged them in the marinade - gin, Martini Rosso, an orange, peppercorns, juniper berries, an onion, bay leaves and oil.



You have to leave this for 24 hours before cooking it.

I stashed the clingfilmed bowl in the fridge, and set about cleaning my (now very messy) kitchen. And you know, after 15 minutes of concerted dishwashing and bench-scrubbing, it was eerily quiet. You'd have never known about the carnage that had taken place only minutes before...





Check back tomorrow for the remainder of the cooking and eating!

“Serves 4 fat bastards”

The choucroute garnie and syllabub form Nigella’s SERIOUS SATURDAY LUNCH FOR 8 – NO HOSTAGES. I added the crostini to the menu because I wanted to use up some gorgonzola which I had lying around.

338. Gorgonzola, Marsala and Mascarpone Crostini (Dinner)
339. Choucroute Garnie (Weekend Lunch)
340. Quince Syllabub (Cooking in Advance)

I have to admit, choucroute garnie, (AKA a big fat German stew), counts as one of those recipes which I’ve been avoiding due to, well, everything. I mean, it’s the pig-heavy ingredients (frankfurters, bratwurst, gammon knuckles), the fact that I’d have to do some special shopping to find them all, and simply because I couldn’t imagine what it would look like or taste like at all. Anthony Bourdain has a recipe (and photo!) of it in his fabulous Les Halles Cookbook, which gave me an idea of what it should be like, and eased my nerves a little bit. However, his recipe is different from Nigella's in that it's more cheffy (naturally) - he tells you to plate it up prettily, specifies smoked pork loin, salted pork belly and boudins blancs, and includes a duck confit and foie gras variation. Ahem. His recipe also has a lot more swearing in it. For instance, the Anthony Bourdain choucroute garnie "serves 4 fat bastards".

I finally made it last night, and served it up to some family friends who I knew would appreciate the effort, even if the food sucked.

We had Uncle Mike and Aunty Helen over, (who have had roast goose, Blakean fish pie, rhubarb crumble, steak & kidney pie and banana custard with us before), as well as Uncle Francis and Aunty Wendy. I haven’t cooked for them before, but they’re really, really cool. In fact, it was Uncle Francis who bought me How to Eat for my 21st birthday last year!

Ok, so here’s the meat. We got it all at Prahran market on Saturday. There’s bratwurst, frankfurters and some ham knuckles. I used less meat than Nigella suggests – she says it doesn’t matter how many sausages you use, as long as everyone can get a piece of each sausage. So you can use less and cut them into smaller pieces.


pile of meat

The choucroute garnie sounds fiddly, but doesn’t really involve that much effort. To start, I softened finely chopped onion in goosefat, then added carrots, the ham knuckles and a bouquet garni. Nigella says to use a popsock to make it, but I only have very very dark ones, and didn’t want a Bridget “dickhead” Jones blue soup happening. I just used a tea strainer.


bouquet garni

So you chuck the bouquet garni in the pot, then add sauerkraut, stir it up, top it with more goosefat, and let it simmer slowly for 2.5 hours.


Pot

While that was simmering, I made the syllabub. You’re supposed to make it a couple of days in advance, but I was short on time and did it all today. The recipe says to steep lemon zest and juice in the alcohol for a day, then strain it, before mixing it with cream and sugar and whipping it up. Once you’ve spooned the mixture into individual glasses, you can leave it in the fridge for 2-3 days. What I did was steep the lemon zest in the morning, and finish it off while the choucroute garnie was cooking. I used a mixture of rosé and quince liquer, which resulted in a lovely dusky pink mixture.


syllabub table

Next, I did the crostini topping, which just involves mixing gorgonzola, marsala and mascarpone (I actually used crème fraîche, because I already had some). This can be stashed in the fridge until it is needed. For the bread part of the crostini, you need to slice up a baguette, brush the little slices with olive oil, and toast them in the oven. They need to be cool before putting the topping on.

So all that was left to do was to boil some potatoes as an accompaniment, and to finish the choucroute garnie. In the recipe, Nigella says that you have to remove the ham knuckles and slice the meat off, but I found that after the 2.5 hours simmering, a gentle prod with a wooden spoon was all that was needed to remove the meat. Then I had to grill the bratwurst and add them to the chourcroute garnie with the frankfurters. 30 minutes gentle simmering later, and the sausages are all heated through and the choucroute garnie is done.

And it was dinner time!


Gorgonzola, Marsala and crème fraîche crostini

These were pretty good. Even my dad liked them, despite the includion of blue cheese.


choucroute garnie

Mmm... it smelled great, and tasted good too. It was pretty salty and sour, but not inedibly so. I think I was supposed to rinse the sauerkraut before adding it (well, Anthony Bourdain says to), but Nigella's recipe doesn't say to do so, so I didn't. If I were to make this again, I'd definitely rinse the sauerkraut. The stew was really rich and tasty - those frankfurters were delicious! I now understand why the German woman at the deli recommended them to me so enthusiastically.

As I said, the stew was really salty, but it went well with the bland potatoes - unbuttered boiled potatoes sprinkled with crushed juniper berries.


Potatoes

Uncle Mike: The potatoes are delicious!

We all ate 1-2 potatoes each, but Uncle Mike greedily ate at least 5 of them. Tsk tsk.


Plate

I brought out the syllabubs (or should that be syllabi?), after dinner, and they looked suitably impressive.


quince syllabi


Quince syllabub - check out the lovely pink colour!

It tasted good, despite the short steeping time. And they're good for dinner parties as they're easy, impressive, tasty, and can be made in advance.



After dinner, Uncle Francis had a flick through my How to Eat book...

Uncle Francis: I think we're going to have to book ourselves in for this "Deeply Autumnal Dinner for 8"... it sounds good... chestnut and pancetta salad, roast venison fillet...

Usually when I have my friends over, we watch DVDs after dinner, but tonight they pulled out a guitar and started playing. Aah, those wacky adults!


guitar time

Autumn Lunch for 3

A quick note: on Friday morning last week, my brother Daniel left on a trip to Japan. It's going to be very quiet around my house for the next 9 weeks. Not to mention the mountains of leftovers that are inevitably going to pile up. Aaah...

Anyway, today for lunch my parents and I had Nigella's AUTUMN LUNCH FOR 6, in halved quantities.

323. Ragoût of wild mushrooms
324. Oven-cooked polenta
325. Cheeses with bitter salad
326. Stewed apples with cinnamon crème fraîche

In my most recent progress report, I mentioned that unusual ingredients will be featuring strongly in the next couple of months. For today's lunch, we needed a few: crème fraîche, gorgonzola, assorted mushrooms and chicory. I had initially planned to get up early on Saturday morning and go to Prahran Market with my dad, but I kinda stayed out late on Friday night and ended up sleeping in… whoops. (In retrospect, I have no idea what part of my brain thought it would be conceivable for me to get up early on a Saturday morning).

So Dad, with all his quick-thinking intelligence and endless patience, suggested we go to Leo’s supermarket, a mere 5 minute drive away from home. We used to go there quite a bit when I was younger, but not so much recently for some reason.

And oh my god, Leo’s was awesome! They had all the best ingredients, in the one convenient supermarket. They’re a bit pricier than Coles or Safeway, but so much better!

We got chicory, gorgonzola dolce, proper French crème fraîche, interesting mushrooms (photo below), quinces, chicory, radicchio, marinated octopus, dolmades, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. Leo’s rocks! And because it’s so conveniently located, we managed to get back home in time for me to cook lunch.

This recipe for polenta doesn’t involve much work at all. All you have to do is heat up some stock, gradually whisk in the polenta, then stir it over heat until it boils and thickens.


Polenta

Then you spread it into a buttered dish, cover with foil, and shunt it in the oven for an hour.


Polenta

Now, the mushrooms. These are the ones I got from Leo's - button mushrooms, swiss brown, and a "3-in-1 gourmet pack" with enoki, shiitake and pink oyster mushrooms.


Mushrooms


Chopped Mushrooms

To transform these mushrooms into ragoût you need to cook onion, garlic and celery until softened, then add red wine, marsala, a bay leaf and some thyme. In a separate pan, you cook the mushrooms in lots of butter and oil until softened, before adding more wine and marsala and letting it simmer. Once the wine in both pans has simmered away, you add the onions to the mushrooms. Then you add flour and hot stock to the now empty onion-pan, cook it until it's a bit thicker, and then pour that into the mushrooms before letting the whole thing simmer for 10 minutes.

And if you think that sounds confusing - it was. I was extremely glad when I got to the "simmer for 10 minutes" stage, after having used at least half my pots, pans and utensils.

While it was simmering, I made the salad. Very simple and delicious it was too. It's just chicory leaves tossed with gorgonzola cheese, and a strong dressing (oil, vinegar and a couple of anchovy fillets). Actually, Nigella says to use lemon juice, but I had none, so white wine vinegar it was.


Chicory - not available at all supermarkets, but conveniently packaged and sold at Leo's!


Gorgonzola dolce - Oh my god DROOL.

I have to admit, all the time I was making lunch, I kept picking at that gorgonzola - cutting off little pieces, putting them on a chicory leaf and eating it. Amazing. Actually, it was so compulsive that I think it's amazing we had any left for the actual lunch.


mushroom ragout


Polenta


chicory salad


Plate

Mmm'hmm... this was an absolutely gorgeous lunch! I never really liked polenta before, but this version, strongly flavoured with vegetable stock, was delicious. I'm always a big fan of mushrooms, and I loved the different textures and mushroom flavours in it. Obviously, I adored the salad, but not my parents - they get spooked by blue cheese and don't like the strong flavour. Such a shame, I had to eat most of the salad by myself. Sigh.

We cleaned up the kitchen while I prepared the dessert. This one's very quick and simple. The apples are peeled, cored and cut into pieces, and then stewed with sugar, a cinnamon stick and orange juice. You only need to cook them for a couple of minutes until slightly softened. As for the crème fraîche, all you need to do is stir in some calvados and cinnamon.


apples and crème fraîche

It was a very light, non-stodgy dessert. The perfect way to finish off a lovely lunch.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I trust that by now you're all nursing your post-post-St. Patrick's Day hangovers. And here is, in this author's humble opinion, the perfect, hangover-salving meal.

306. The Irish Club's Irish Stew (Dinner)
307. Birthday Cake (Basics etc.)

The choice of Irish stew is a pretty obvious one, I must admit. But the birthday cake is more of a stretch. You see, in the run-up to St. Paddy's day, my friend DG made a dreamy-looking version of Nigella's Chocolate Guinness Cake. Ever since she showed me the gorgeous photo, I'd been craving it. Bad. I didn't have any chocolate cake. And unfortunately for me, the Chocolate Guinness Cake is in Feast, not How to Eat. Help was at hand though, with Nigella's chocolate birthday cake, in the Basics etc. chapter of How to Eat. Phew!

The birthday cake is a pretty basic double-layered chocolate cake, covered in a ganache. To make the cake, you melt butter, chocolate, sugar and condensed milk together, and then stir it into sifted flour and cocoa together, followed by 100ml recently-boiled water and 2 eggs.


cake mix

I put the cake into 2 sandwich tins, and baked it at 180C for 25 minutes. While it was baking, I got on with the stew.

Nigella's Irish stew consists of layers of ingredients. Firstly browned lamb chops, then vegetables (carrots, onions, parsnips), then par-boiled pearl barley. Between the layers you sprinkle a mixture of parsley, sage and rosemary.


pre-potatoed stew

Then you pour some warm stock over, and cover the whole lot with thinly sliced potatoes.


potatoed stew

It only take 1.5 hours in a 160C oven,which is a lot less than some of the other stews I've made. After it's cooked, there's the option of browning the potatoes under the grill, which I chose to do. Nigella says that the whole point of the stew is that it needs no accompaniment, except for a lot of bread and butter.


Lunch


Cooked


Open

Oh my goodness, I cannot even begin to tell you how much I loved this stew! I love a stew at any time, but this one was especially divine. The meat had softened during cooking, and all the flavours melded together fantastically. Even the parsnips, which I normally don't like, tasted good in this context. Both my mother and I ate heroic quantities, and went back to dunk our bread in the delicious sauce. There's just something about the richly flavoured, fattily gelatinous sauce coating the pearly grains of barley which keeps you going back for more.


one plate

Fortunately, the dessert was just as good, although I didn't end up eating it until much later at night. I iced the cake while the stew was in the oven, and left it sitting, majestically, on our kitchen bench. The icing is a chocolate ganache - equal quantities of chocolate (half dark, half milk) and cream. You chop up the chocolate into fine rubble, then heat up the cream and pour it over. Let it sit for 5 minutes, and then beat it with an electric mixer until thick and smooth. Ideally, I imagine that you would start by slicing the cakes flat, leaving you with a perfectly flat surface upon which to pour your ganache, letting it set glossily with minimum interference from a spatula. In this way, the finished product would be a hat-box shaped, "sachertorte shiny" affair.

However, I never bother to slice the domed top of my cakes flat. (That's laziness and greed in equal measure). And putting two domed cakes together results in some excess space which needs to be filled. I poured most of the ganache on top of the cakes, and then whipped up the rest quite stiff before spreading it around the sides to fill in the gaps.

So as you can see, the result isn't a perfect one, but I hardly think that you'd turn your nose up at it. In fact, when you really, really need chocolate, any old thing will do.


Cake

As I said previously, I didn't get to eat any cake until a bit later that evening. As soon as lunch was over, I had to dash to the train station to get to work. I cut a couple of slices, stashed them in an old tofu container, and took them to work to eat on my break. One for me, one for my friend-slash-workmate Daniel (emphatically NOT my brother), who just loves to eat chocolate cake. We ate them out the back, on nice serving plates, sprinkled with cocoa from the cocoa duster we use for cappuccinos. Rocking.


sliced cake

Daniel: That is an amazingly chocolatey cake.

Too right. I'm taking the cake around to share with other friends and family, so stay tuned for another post on the verdict of the cake!

WELCOME BACK FRANCES! (AGAIN)

Just 1 short hour after my friend Frances and I had recovered from lunch, I started on dinner.

ONE MORE BEEF, STEWED, FOR 6-8

288. Beef Stew with Anchovies and Thyme
289. Fresh Horseradish Sauce
290. Treacle Tart

I chose to make this stew for dinner because it includes thyme, and there always seems to be a supermarket packet of thyme in my fridge which is going borderline feral. I wanted to make use of it before it crossed over.

The method for the stew is the standard one – brown the beef shin cubes (Frances chopped it up, thank-you very much), fry up vegetables and herbs, re-add the meat to the pan, then add stock and wine, and cook in a low oven for a few hours.

Frances had to leave around 6:30pm to go visit some family friends, by which stage the kitchen was (relatively) clean, and the beef stew was in the oven. I then put potatoes on to boil and made up the horseradish sauce. The sauce is meant to have fromage frais in it (whatever that is), but we don’t have it in Australia, so I took Nigella’s substitution of half crème fraiche, half yogurt. And to this crème-yogurt mixture, I added creamed horseradish (again, I couldn’t find fresh), and chives.

The next stage was to make the treacle tart. I’d never had treacle tart before, but much like Niki, had read all about them in Enid Blyton’s books. The filling for treacle tart is golden syrup, breadcrumbs, lemon juice and cream.


treacle tart – raw

Nigella says to eat it hot, so I assembled the pie and put it in the oven as we were sitting down to dinner.


beef stew


mash, raita

The stew was very delicious, and mash is always good. The most memorable part of the dinner, however, was the horseradish sauce. Nigella was right, it is “staggeringly good”, and a refreshing contrast to the warm and heavy stew.

While we were eating dinner, I got a phone call from Frances again, saying that she’d accidentally left her cardigan at my house and could she come over to pick it up? Of course, as the good Doctor Freud says, there are no “accidents”, and I chose to interpret Frances’ “forgetting” of her cardigan as a subconscious desire to return and sample some of the beef stew. And this time, she brought her lovely mother with her.

Frances did indeed try some beef stew, as did her mother. Her mum really, really liked the horseradish sauce. She’s Polish, you see, and apparently horseradish is really big over there.

And then we all (Mum, Dad, Daniel, Frances, Frances’ mother and myself), shared the treacle tart. It was very, very sweet, crisp on top and chewy within. I thought it was only ok, but everyone else seemed to love it.


treacle tart on rack


pie slice

Happy Birthday Allstar, Part II [The Cooking]

Wednesday

Ok, so I started off by making the chocolate version of the birthday biscuits, with which I wanted to decorate Al's birthday cake. These are the same as the birthday biscuits which I made for DG last year, but with the addition of 1 tablespoon of cocoa.


Biscuits


tray of bix

There’s really nothing too complicated about these biscuits, so there's nothing much to say about them. Apart from the fact that they taste good, they’re easy, and I absolutely LOVE using my Living Kitchen cookie cutters!


Friday

274. Greek Lamb Stew (Cooking in Advance)

On Friday morning, I made the Greek lamb stew, in full quantities. With Nigella’s advice that “this should be plenty for about 10”, I knew that a full batch of this stuff would be enough to feed my mother and I that night, with enough left to tide me over for the weekend, and to keep my parents satisfied back home.

The method of making this stew is the normal one – brown bits of meat in a pan and set aside, cook vegetables and herbs in the same pan, re-add the meat to the pan along with a lot of liquid, and let simmer until tender. The meat in question was lamb shoulder, the vegetables were carrot, onion, garlic, the herbs were thyme and oregano, and the liquid was water and white wine. But actually, I didn’t use white wine. It was 30 degrees that day, too hot to walk to the bottle shop, and the only white wine I had in the house was my dad’s Cloudy Bay. Hah! No way I’d use a bottle of that just for a stew! So, out of laziness, I threw caution to the wind and decided to use a cheap bottle of sparkling wine which I had sitting around.


champagne and tomato stew

While this was simmering, I got on with the proper party food.

275. Birthday Cake (Feeding Babies and Small Children)

The birthday cake. It is an ordinary sponge, which Nigella suggests making in a food processor for ease and stress reduction, at the expense of the cake not getting very high. I had the luxury of time, so I made it using the traditional creaming method, which results in a higher cake. It’s a pretty big one too – 275g each of butter, sugar and 5 eggs – which you cook in a 25cm tin. I used my 25cm Living Kitchen springform tin, which I also received as a gift last year.


cake mix in tin

It takes about an hour in the oven, during which time I iced the chocolate cookies with a mixture of icing sugar, cocoa and water.


cooked and iced – cookies

This is what the cake looks like when it comes out of the oven.


baked cake

276. Cheese Stars (Feeding Babies and Small Children)
As it was cooling, I made a double batch of cheese stars, which are fabulously easy to make. Simply stir together grated red Leicester cheese (being Australian, I had to resort to “red Leicester-style” cheddar), parmesan, flour, cayenne and butter and roll it out. The mixture is quite dry, but it comes together easily if you clump it with your hands.


cheese star mixture

They take about 8 minutes to cook. Nigella says that you’ll get 25 4-cm stars out of a single batch. With a double batch, and using the small star cutter from the Living Kitchen set of cutters, I got about 90. (Warning: No matter how many you make, it will never be enough. These cheese stars are addictive, compulsive, and amazing. See the next post for the verdict from my friends).


baked v non baked - check out my cheap champagne in the background

To ice the cake, I made a buttercream icing (butter, icing sugar, food colouring), because marzipan, roll-out icing, and all other packet icings are evil. (I’m also not mad on water-based icings for sponge cakes). I dyed my icing a lovely shade of feel-good blue.


cake w icing


finished cake

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had been planning on making jam tarts and periwinkles as well, but by this stage, I could not be fucked. Besides, it was time for a much-needed shower and then dinner.


stew bubbling

The last stage of cooking the stew is to add a packet of macaroni and let it cook in there. I absolutely adore stews in which pasta is cooked – they just taste sooo fabulous. Incidentally, they’re wonderful served with chili oil and are perfect salvation from hangovers. Nigella suggests serving this one sprinkled with a mixture of feta and fresh oregano. Again, I must admit to laziness – I didn’t feel like going to the shops, so I didn’t bother with fresh oregano.

I was afraid that substituting sparkling wine for white wine would make the stew taste munting, but luckily, it did not munt at all. In fact, it rocked!


stew w feta

Just as expected, I totally loved this stew, as did my mum. In honesty, I could have done without the feta, as it made the dish very rich, but the sharp saltiness was more than welcome.

And check it out… here’s my food, packed up and ready to go…


ready to go