Coconut, Lentil and Spinach Stew

I've been hen doo-ing in the Lake District, a beautiful house full of over excited girls in food fancy dress... My costume was a piece of streaky bacon, a giant one made of foam that made me laugh every time I looked in the mirror, until the early hours when I couldn’t really see in the mirror... There was a fried egg, a giant pea pod, a lobster, a pig (organic obvs) jelly beans, diet coke, a can of Spam, the list goes on... It made for a very entertaining evening fuelled by much wine and a big house to bash around in...  

I had an excellent time, although I still feel tired and a bit emotional, staying up till the early hours doesn't seem to agree with me as well as it used to. I need comfort food in quiet rooms with blankets and nice people....  

I found this recipe on The Traveller's Lunchbox blog originally, I think they adapted it from someone else and I changed it a bit from theirs, so it's origins have changed along the way, but I imagine it has been delicious in every form. They call it a soup, mine is more of a stewy dal type thing I think... A delicious spiced coconut stew full of lentils and soft spinach.

 

Start with the lentils, 275g of green or puy lentils, rinse them, then add to a pan with 1 litre of chicken stock, a big sprig of thyme and 1½ teaspoons of turmeric. Bring it to the boil and simmer gently with a lid on till the lentils are soft, about 20 minutes, add more stock if needs be...

 

While the lentils are cooking heat a big knob of butter in a frying pan and sauté 1 large diced onion with a big pinch of salt until it is very soft, for about 12 minutes. Then add 2 cloves of finely chopped garlic, ½ teaspoon of ground cardamom seeds, ¼ teaspoon ground cloves, ¼ teaspoon of ground cinnamon, a pinch of ground nutmeg and fry for another 30 seconds. Then scrape this spicy onion mix into the lentils.

Finally add a whole tin of coconut milk and a small bag of spinach, stirring till it wilts into the warm stew. Simmer for another 10 minutes or so and check if you need salt and pepper as it is cooking.

This will sort you out if you find yourself deep in winter at the end of March or a delicate hen do patient, both of which I am currently inflicted with...

 

Fish Stew with Clams, Red Peppers, Almonds and Saffron

This is a Catalan fish stew from the Moro cookbook, it is called Romesco de peix. Romesco after the famous nut sauce from the region. Different types of fish can be used, Moro use monkfish and clams, you can also use mussels, prawns and other white fish. I'd be pretty happy sat in a little Catalonian restaurant with a bowl of this, some fresh bread, a salad and a crisp cold white wine, it would be delightful actually...

We picked up some very pretty clams from the Grainger Market and two little gurnard. I got a bit I got a bit carried away taking photos of the clams, and the gurnard are quite cute in an odd ugly fish way...

To start you need to heat 6 tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan and add a large chopped onion with a pinch of salt. Cook the onion slowly for about 15-20 minutes until it is soft, sweet and golden. Then add 2 cloves of garlic sliced thinly, a couple of large sprigs of rosemary finely chopped, 3 bay leaves and 2 red peppers thinly sliced. Soften the pepper for about 10 minutes then add half a teaspoon of sweet smoked paprika and a tin of chopped tomatoes. These amounts will serve four people.

Simmer everything for another 10 minutes then add 150ml of white wine, let the alcohol bubble off for a couple of minutes then add 100ml of fish stock and about 50 strands of saffron that have been infused in 4 tablespoons of hot water, add the saffron and the water. Then add about 100g of ground almonds, Moro say 150g, which seems an awful lot, I may have added less than 100g, just until you have a thick-ish sauce. Add a pinch of salt and pepper to taste.

Finally add the fish, we left the gurnards whole, with their heads removed. If you're using monkfish cut it into chunks, about 650g. Add the fish and the clams, about 500g to the pot of sauce. Put the lid on and simmer until the fish is cooked through and the clams have steamed open, about 5 minutes. The sauce is deliciously smoky and sweet with paprika, tomato, nuttiness; with bites of sweet red peppers and fresh white fish and sweet little clams.

Pot Roast Brisket

So I'm sat in my house wearing five layers, I also have gloves on, and a scarf, I would put a hat on but people can see me from the street and I think I look odd enough. My boiler isn't working, just in time for the first frosts we've had all winter. I have a coffee and a relatively ineffective gas fire to huddle by. I also have some ox tail in the fridge which we are going to stew for supper with wild mushrooms, and perhaps we'll open a nice bottle of red and it won't seem quite so cold... A man called Ted is coming to fix it after the weekend, well at least I hope he's going to fix it or it's going to be a pretty cold winter here is my little leaky house...

I bought the ox tail and this piece of brisket from a new butchers in Jesmond called The Meat Merchant. I was impressed, they have a wide range of meat, it wasn't expensive, and they have everything from rabbit, to proper pancetta and metre long sirloin steaks if that's what you are after?

This isn't a very complicated recipe, just some chopped vegetables and herbs, red wine and three hours in the oven. The brisket is a cut from the front of the cow, just above their front legs, it takes all the weight of the animal most of the time, so is pretty fibrous and strong... and as a result it needs some long slow cooking to loosen it up, for those fibres to begin to fall apart and become all soft and tasty... It is also brilliant for leftovers, we had warmed through soft slices on chunky hunks of bread with loads of horseradish and watercress, and then had the leftover juices and vegetables as a stew slash soup with a bit of crusty bread.

Chop 2 leeks, 2 carrots and 2 onions and put them in the bottom of a big casserole dish, one that is about the same size as your piece of meat. These amounts would have fed four people easily. Add 2 whole heads of garlic, ten peppercorns and a bundle of herbs tied up, parsley, thyme, bay... Lay the piece of brisket over everything and pour over 1 litre of chicken stock and 2 glasses of red wine. You want the brisket to be still poking out of the top, not submerged entirely. Cover with tinfoil and put it in the oven for 3 hours on a medium heat. You want it to be soft and delicious, not falling apart totally, it still needs to be sliced, but only gently.

I served it with a little scoop of mash, lots of horseradish, some of the juices and vegetables spooned over the top, a pile of buttery cabbage, a glass of red wine and the heating on full... those were the days...

Chicken Tagine with Caramelised Baby Onions and Honey

The Lake District was beautiful and sunny on Friday evening, sitting in the quiet of the valley watching the deer with their new bambi's was a lovely end to the week. It did rain pretty much continuously from then on in, but it was still a lovely weekend. It stopped long enough to light the bbq for supper, but also managed to soak us thoroughly while out for a walk. The mist was rolling down the hills dramatically as we left but even in bad weather it is still such a beautiful and relaxing place.

So it may be August, British Summer Time, in case you had forgotten, but I think this rainy windy day calls for something a little bit warming... I have mentioned Claudia Roden before, her book Arabesque is never far from hand in my kitchen. A taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, full of spice and flavour. My favourite section is full of Moroccon tagines, spiced with ginger and cinnamon, sweet with honey and perfumed with saffron...

Claudia uses a whole jointed chicken for her version of this tagine, but as I was only cooking for two I used boned chicken thighs. I find chicken thighs much tastier than breast meat, and for longer cooking times like this tagine, thigh meat is much less likely to dry out.

Start with 150g of shallots or baby onions. Pour hot water over them, in a bowl, and leave for five minutes to blanch. This makes removing the skin whilst keeping the onions or shallots whole much easier. While they are bobbing around in hot water finely chop a small onion and then cook slowly in a tablespoons of olive oil. Cook until soft, for about 5 minutes, and then add half a teaspoon of ginger, half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a pinch of saffron. Continue to cook the onion and spices for a few minutes longer.

Chop about 300g of boned and skinned chicken thighs into bite size pieces, perhaps a bit more if you're really hungry. Add the chicken to the pan with the onions and spices, and when it is sealed all over add 150ml of water, the blanched onions with their skins removed and a pinch of salt and pepper. Leave the tagine to cook, on a medium heat, uncovered for about 20 minutes.

While the tagine is cooking you can prepare the couscous. It needs to be in a pan that can go in the oven. Use 100g per person, pour it into the pan and add the same amount of salted water to the couscous, cover and leave for 10 minutes. I used 200g of couscous to 200ml of boiling water with a teaspoon of salt in it. Fluff up the couscous after it has absorbed all of the water, it may have become quite a hard mass, but just break it apart with a fork until it is light and fluffy. Add a glug of olive oil and work it all through the couscous with your hands, getting lots of air into it as you do. Finally put the dish into a pre heated oven at 200°C for 15 minutes. Before serving stir a knob of butter through the piping hot couscous and fluff it up again. Claudia uses 20g of butter, but I think you can get away with a lot less, but just to your own tastes.

To finish the final stage of the tagine remove the chicken pieces from the sauce and set them aside, leave the onions in the pan to continue to soften. The sauce now needs to reduce and thicken up a bit. Add 2 tablespoons of honey and lots more black pepper, you need quite a lot to balance the sweetness of the honey. Just keep tasting it until it suits your taste. Turn the heat up a little and allow the sauce to bubble away and reduce by about half. Finally return the chicken to the pan to heat through for a few minutes.

Fill a bowl with a large scoop of buttery couscous and top with the chicken, sauce and onions. I sprinkled the top with some toasted sesame seeds, you could also use some toasted almonds roughly chopped. The gingery, cinnamon spice is lovely with sweet honey, spicy black pepper and soft onions. It is making me want to cook it again just writing this, I might have to wait until tomorrow...

Slow venison stew

There was some nice dark red tasty looking venison for sale in Stewart and Co. on Saturday afternoon which we took home and looked for something interesting to make with it. The idea of a daube came from 'Elizabeth David Classic's', one of my favourite cookery books...

This recipe is a type of daube with venison. A daube is a classic French stew made with beef, that is slow cooked with wine and vegetables and is often flavoured with duck fat, vinegar, brandy, lavender, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, juniper berries, or orange peel. They used to be left cooking on the hearth for the whole day and are often better made the day before. This is my venison version.

The venison should be in stew sized type pieces, about 500g for 2 people. Toss the venison in some flour seasoned with a pinch of salt and pepper. Then brown it off in a hot pan with some olive oil, you might have to do it a few bits at a time. If you add too many it will start to stew in the juices of the meat rather than brown nicely. When it is browned all over put it into a large casserole dish.

Chop about 100g of smoked bacon, about 4 slices into small pieces and fry these off in the venison pan until brown. Add them to your venison in the casserole dish. Finally slice an onion into thin rounds, or a couple of tiny onions, which is what I used. Fry these in the same pan again, you might have to add a bit more oil, until it is soft and golden, about 5 minutes. Transfer it to the casserole also when it is done.

Keep the pan on high that you have been cooking everything in and add about a glass of red white to de glaze it. You want to scrape up all of the flavour and bits that have stuck to the pan and mix them up into the wine as it bubbles away furiously. Pour this into the casserole after a few minutes.

Put the casserole dish onto a low heat and mix up the venison, bacon, onions and wine, and add more wine again, I think I ended up putting over half a bottle in, you can use anything you have left over. I collect anything that doesn’t get drank, or has been left a little bit too long to enjoy...

Add to this a sliced carrot, some thyme, a bay leaf, some juniper berries, a sliced clove of garlic and a large piece of orange peel. Leave it to simmer, with a lid on, for a couple of hours, longer if you can. Keep it on low and give it a stir every now and again.

When it is done the flavours are really lovely, the carrots tasted so much of orange, with rich red wine gravy that still tastes of delicate herbs, the venison was soft and falling apart with smoky bacon and soft onions. I served some creamy mashed potato on the side to mix into the rich sauce. It's not very photogenic but tastes delicious...