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!

Oh Pancake Day… Oh Pancake Day

I went back to uni on Monday. This semester, I've cunningly arranged my timetable so that I only have 2 days of classes a week. This gives me more time to work, to go to the gym, and most importantly, to cook and to blog! The downside of this, though, is that I have super-long days. Think 9:30am - 7:15 pm on Monday, and 11:00am - 7:30pm on Tuesday. Eek!

Last night, Monday night, just as I was about to doze off, I remembered that today was Pancake Day. I decided to set my alarm an hour early so that I could make pancakes for breakfast. I have made the delicious basic crêpes-style pancakes once before, but luckily for me there was a variation suggested in that recipe which was perfect for a Pancake Day breakfast.

285. American Breakfast Pancakes (Basic etc.)

The method for these is exactly the same as for the crêpes, but with an extra egg, double the amount of flour, some sugar and a bit of baking powder. I’m pretty sure these are the same as the breakfast pancakes in Nigella Bites that she makes in a KitchenAid blender, but they’re not difficult to make in a bowl with a wooden spoon. And there’s less fiddly washing up.

While the batter had its 30 minutes obligatory resting time, I thought about how I should serve them. Nigella suggests eating them with maple syrup and crispy bacon, but we didn’t have either in the house, and I didn’t exactly feel like walking up to the shops to get some. Furthermore, didn’t think I could handle such a heavy breakfast. I was reminded me of the episode of I’m Alan Partridge, Season 2, where Alan’s 33 year old Ukrainian girlfriend Sonja makes him a full English breakfast…

Alan: That… that was the best full English breakfast I've had since Gary Wilmott's wedding.
Sonja: It was bloody superb?
Alan: Oh yeah... I would have that three times a day if I could… but… I’d be dead!
Sonja: It kill you?
Alan: Yeah… it’s cholesterol. Scottish people eat it. Few of them reach 60.

And if Alan says it, it must be true! My first idea was that bananas and alternative sweet syrup would be the go. However, as I was looking through the pantry for the alternative toppings, I realized that golden syrup or honey just wouldn’t cut it. I hurriedly changed, and ran to the corner store to get a bottle of proper Canadian maple syrup. And while I was up at the store, I thought, "Fuck it, I'm already up here, so I may as well go the whole hog", (so to speak). I bought some bacon rashers from Rendinas.

I came home, fried up the pancakes, and then fried one rasher of bacon each. (For my mother and I).


Pan

Rendinas butchery bacon is very meaty and tasty, but not very fatty at all, so it doesn’t go crisp that easily. For whatever reason, apparently most of their customers prefer lean bacon. (I've asked them for fatty fatty bacon before, they don't do it). Their bacon still tastes awesome though.


breakfast - coffee in silver pot


closeup of plate


my plate

Yum, yum, yum! Mum loved it too, even though she'd never tried the bacon-maple syrup combo before. Because I was quite restrained with the bacon (or was it that I was generous with the pancakes?), we still had pancakes left once we'd eaten all the bacon, so I whipped out a banana to go with the rest of them.


Look, it's a healthy breakfast!

Happy Pancake Day!

A Very Nigella Dinner

I was hungry at about 7 o'clock tonight, and decided to make linguine carbonara for my dinner. This has become a useful last-minute dinner, now that my culinary repertoire has been so vastly expanded by How to Eat. I used the linguine that I have stockpiled in my storecupboard, a couple of pieces of bacon that were glad-bagged in my freezer, and some leftover cream which was sitting in the fridge.

Read the "Storecupboard", "Freezer" and "Fridge" sections at the end of the Basics etc. chapter, and you will understand why I am so proud of myself. An "efficient domestic angel", I am. For tonight, at least.

I guess this meal goes to show how much I've changed as a result of this project. When I first made carbonara, I didn't eat it (me eating pork? Never!) but according to my brother, the bacon was too chewy. And the second time I made it, it was disgustingly eggy.

But tonight, it was good, fantastic even. A perfect, gratifying, peaceful dinner.


Pasta.

I am so glad I started this project.

A Good Jewish Lunch (not)

I heard somewhere that Nigella is Jewish, a fact I was reminded of as I stared into the huge pile of bacon and scallops I made for lunch today.

This then reminded me of this one time, when I had a really random encounter with a guy at a book shop. I went into the store to sell some textbooks, and gave the guy behind the counter my books and my details. He then looked me up and down and said "Sarah, huh? That's a Good Jewish name!" Er... ok? Do I look Jewish to you? My Jewish friends thought the story was hilarious.

And also, once I went to a Bed & Breakfast with my mate Al - he's Jewish but not Kosher, and occasionally eats bacon. For breakfast, he had some bacon and a glass of milk. "Aah...", he proclaimed proudly before digging in, "A Good Jewish Breakfast". Haha!

167. Scallops and Bacon (One & Two)
168. Roast-Sugar Sprinkled Peaches (Fast Food)

Today's lunch was based totally on the availability of ingredients at Box Hill market. I'd wanted to do red mullet, but there was no mullet... why is it that seafood that I see all the frikkin time suddenly disappears just when I want to cook with it? Grrr! Scallops and bacon, however, seem to be perenially available, thank goodness. But on a happier note, peaches are starting to appear back in the shops! They're still too sour to be eaten plain, so this was a perfect opportunity to try them cooked.

The peaches are halved, stoned and baked with butter and sugar (I used vanilla sugar). I think I ended up going a bit OTT on the butter, but it still tasted fine in the end.


Not yet roast peaches

I increased the quantities of scallops and bacon for three of us. They are simple to make - fry the bacon, then remove to a plate. Then in the same pan, fry floured scallops with some butter.


Floured Scallops - I chucked scallops and flour into a plastic bag, shook it up, and then shook off the excess flour in a sieve.

Then fry the corals for a very short while, and deglaze the pan with sherry.


Scallops and Bacon - lots of


Scallops and Bacon - one plate.

I had mine just with salad, but my parents chose to have bread with theirs. Either way, it is a very tasty meal! Thumbs up!


Roast Peaches

Peaches and Ice-cream

The peaches were nice as well. The soft texture is wonderful, and they were heaps sour, so the addition of sugar was welcome. But like I said before, I could have done with a lot less butter. Vanilla ice-cream from a tub is fabulous (just ordinary Peters in a 4L tub) - all melting and pristinely white and aerated and stabilised and xanthan gummed, I love it. As you will have noticed, I have recently been eating a lot of it.

Back to Bacon

This is going to be a long post. So get a cup of tea, and make yourself comfortable before you start reading. Alternatively, you could just scroll down to the pictures of the pudding and start drooling.

Today’s lunch was the “Welcoming January Lunch for 6”, from the Weekend Lunch chapter. Now that I’m not working at the restaurant anymore, my weekend lunches can actually be made on the weekend!

79. Braised Pheasant with Mushroom and Bacon (Cooking in Advance)
80. Pig’s Bum (Weekend Lunch)
81. Real Custard (Basics etc.)

Friday

Yesterday we had a fab day shopping at the Prahran Market, where I actually managed to find pheasant! It was a whopping $21 a kilo, so for three birds it came up to $75. YIKES. I also bought baby onions at the market. I got my bacon from Rendinas Butchery, and the rest of the stuff from Safeway. And yesterday afternoon, I got cooking!


Ingredients - bacon, flour, bouquet garni, pheassant pieces, red wine, chicken stock, mushrooms, garlic and baby onions.

Making this stew is nothing too taxing; it’s similar to all the other stews in the book. Brown the meat, cook the mushrooms, then the onions, then the bacon. Add some flour, then wine and stock, before piling all the ingredients back into the pot, and baking for an hour or so. I had some issues getting everything to fit in the pot, and not all the bird was covered with liquid – which I think is why it turned out a bit tough.

After it cooked, I had a look at it, and I could barely see any sauce because it was covered in a thick layer of oil. So I stashed it in the fridge overnight, with the aim of scraping it off the next day.


Saturday

This morning, when I started cooking, the first thing I did was start on the pudding. Nigella made up the recipe from a description that this Antony Worral Thompson bloke gave a steamed pudding he’d had at school, which he’d nicknamed Pig’s Bum. It is a rhubarb pudding, one of those traditional steamed English pudding-type things that you keep hearing about from Delia, and in Harry Potter and Malory Towers, but never actually bother making. (Well, I’ve never made one before). You make the batter in a processor, with the ingredients and proportions the same as a Victoria Sponge, and add 5 tablespoons of rhubarb puree (3 sticks, boiled in water and sugar for about 5 minutes). It turns this bizarre pallid purple shade. But Nigella’s right, the raw mixture does taste GOOD.


Mixture in pudding basin.

I actually didn’t have to go out and buy a pudding basin – I bought a Baker’s Secret 2L pudding basin a couple of years ago, with the intention of making Christmas pudding. The Christmas pudding never materialized, and the basin’s been sitting sadly in my drawer since then. It’s non-stick, and has this fab tight-fitting lid, so there’s no need to faff around with foil or string or such stuff. (I did butter the tin though, as I definitely did not want it to stick).


Pudding Basin in pot

It needs to boil for two and a half hours. In the meantime, I had a shower and then got on with the rest of lunch.

Back to the pheasant. Here’s what it looked like when I took it out of the fridge and opened it…



Me: Aw yes! Solid Fat!

A weird thing to yell out, don’t you think? Anyway, I scraped as much as I could off and into a bowl. Have a look.


Feral!

Then it went in the oven to reheat, at 180C, for half an hour. In this time, I made some burghal to go with. It just needs to be cooked like rice, that is to say, the absorption method. You stir the wheat through some melted butter in a pan, pour over an equal volume of water, let it boil, cover it tightly and let it cook on a low heat for 30 minutes. Or in my case, until I could smell it burning on the bottom of the pan, at which point I turned off the heat.

So, whilst the pudding was in the steamer, the pheasant was in the oven, and the burghal was on the hob, I made the custard! (Yes, three pans on the hob at once – I am crazy). I did get a nice steam-facial from the pudding pot, though. Ah, I love making custard now – I’ve got the hang of it! I don’t even need to consult the recipe (Real Custard from the Basics etc. chapter) any more. I scaled down the quantities – 300ml cream instead of 500ml. In the wide pot that I used, it thickened quickly and easily, and got even more voluptuously creamy as it cooled in the sink. FYI, you get 300ml custard from 300ml cream. I know because I poured my custard into a measuring jug to serve it.

Lunch! The pheasant – tasted OK. We wouldn’t rave about it. In fact, we were all surprisingly silent eating it. The taste of the gravy was nice, but the birds were a bit dry. Also, the gravy was well thin. The bulghar was a great touch though, a good change from rice or mashed potatoes, and not as stodgy.


Braised Pheasant - Bulgar in the background


One plate

Daniel: I might have some of this for dinner. This stuff’s good…pointing at bulghar. And thanks for breaking the no-bacon thing.

By the way, I was a bit nonplussed by the bacon. It’s been over six years since I’ve knowingly eaten any pork product. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t crap. No big deal. But actually, I did feel slightly nauseous straight after the meal as we were cleaning up together and waiting for the pudding to cook, but I danced it off listening to Junior Senior. I can’t say that I’d be desperate for a ham sandwich or some crackling anytime soon.

Now we get to the good part – PUDDING!


Cooked


Pig's Bum and Custard - I actually thought about serving it with the Rhubarb Ice-cream I made last night, but I was informed by my friend in England that it would be a crime to have a steamed pudding without custard.

This pudding is absolutely amazing! The silence that descended during lunch suddenly lifted…

Daniel: This smells great! I want to eat it. Hurry up with the photos.
Me: This doesn’t really look like a pig’s bum
Daniel: Yes it does, look at the shape. Pat it.


Pig's Bum


One portion of Pig's Bum

I can't tell you how lovely this pudding was. Whilst it was cooking, all steamy and clattery, I couldn't help but think, "Oh god, really, who could be arsed to make puddings like this?", but once you take a bite of the hot and fragrant pudding, drowned in the cold custard, it all makes perfect, delicious sense.

Daniel: This is fantastic. This is the shit. You should sell this.

Mum and Dad also agreed. Whilst we were eating, my dad's friend Bill popped by, and we gave him a piece. "No custard thanks, I'm not a custard fan". Despite the protestations of my family, "But she made it from scratch! It's good!", he still declined. He ate his first piece of pudding, and loved it so much that he asked for another piece. "You know what, that piece was so good I might have some custard with my second piece." Score!


Look at that custard! Damn straight I can make custard now!

This is a seriously good recipe.

Cooking on a Friday Night...

Look, I know that I'm only 21 years old, and probably shouldn't be settling so happily into domesticity just yet. Perhaps it would be more normal for someone my age to be out drinking or clubbing on a Friday night (and I do love to dance), but sometimes the lure of the kitchen is just too strong.

I did a lot of cooking tonight. So much, in fact, that I didn’t have time to make dinner. My brother ended up having 2-minute noodles before leaving for work, whilst Mum made the rest of us some proper noodles later on out of leftover chicken and random vegetables.

This afternoon, I made the braised pheasant with mushrooms and bacon from Cooking in Advance for tomorrow’s lunch. Yes, with the bacon in it – and I’ve decided that I’m even going to eat it! Gasp! (More on this tomorrow, though).


Pheasant ready to go in oven.

We ate dinner after the pheasant was cooked. Then I made some den miso…



…and marinated some salmon fillets. This needs 2-3 days sitting in the fridge before grilling it. (I'll explain the process of making both the pheasant and the salmon when we eat them.)


Salmon marinating in den miso (Low Fat)

After this, I went to the gym (yay!), came home and made rhubarb ice-cream and a chocolate malteaser cake simultaneously. The chocolate malteaser cake cake comes from Feast, not How to Eat, but I’m making it for my friend Adriana’s graduation dinner tomorrow night – it’s her favourite out of all the chocolate cakes I’ve made, you see.

78. Rhubarb Ice-Cream

The ice-cream is for an unspecified future date; I just thought I should make it whilst I have the time and whilst rhubarb is still in season, gorgeous and intensely scarlet-hued.

You start off the ice-cream much like the vagina jelly (aka Rhubarb and Muscat Jelly), that is to say, poaching some rhubarb with vanilla sugar in the oven for an hour.


Poached rhubarb on the right, liquids for the Chocolate Malteaser Cake on the left.

After draining the rhubarb, you beat it with a fork to form a pulp. Then you make a custard (with 3 egg yolks, 45 grams of castor sugar and 300ml single cream). I really think now that I've overcome my custard problem, as this is the second custard I've made successfully. (The first was vanilla ice-cream). This one thickened surprisingly quickly and didn't turn feral or grainy at all. I've concluded that this is due to two factors - firstly the pan that I'm using, and secondly, my new-found confidence.


Yellow and Pink

Anyway, you then let the custard cool, and beat in the rhubarb pulp, followed by 300ml of whipped double cream. However, the double cream I buy (Gippsland brand), is basically solid, so I don't bother whipping it. Then you churn it in an ice-cream maker.


Rhubarb Ice-cream (pre-churning) on the left, chocolate malteaser layers on the right.

Look, I did make them at the same time! I am super-woman, hear me roar!

Ooh, another thing I have to report – Low-Fat August took a serious beating tonight, whilst I was making the ice-cream. I tasted a teensy spoonful for sweetness, and it was so gorgeous I couldn’t help myself and after churning it, obsessively licked the pot, bowl, and every utensil clean. Well, I guess it’s ok… I went to the gym today, I’ve been eating very healthily this week… but really, what justification do you need apart from the taste?