Dinners Blog

Venison, Port & Mushroom Suet Pudding

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:54:03 +0000

I like Venison, but find it usually disappoints me in terms of flavour. I consider it an exotic meat, certainly not a staple one, so maybe that’s why I expect more than gets delivered? Anyway, I found a recipe which involved marinading the meat in port for 2-3 days, which I quite fancied the idea of. In addition, the recipe had pickled walnuts in it, which I’m not sure I’ve ever used before, but again, liked the idea of using a very different ingredient.

The original recipe is here, although I tampered around with it in terms of only using Venison meat, instead of half Venison and half Beef. I also made my own venison stock, from the bones of the haunch I bought, rather than using beef stock. Last but not least, I obviously turned the recipe into a suet pudding from puff pastry used in the recipe. The suet pastry recipe and method of cooking is the same as the one used for the Steak, Oyster & Stout pudding.

The end result was enjoyable, but I’m not sure how much the pickled walnut added. I also thought the meat would have had more taste after marinading for 3 days, but the mushroom wedges worked really well in terms of adding some real juiciness to the naturally less moist venison meat. Whilst I did enjoy it, I’m leaning towards the fact I’m just not a huge venison fan.

Steak, Oyster & Stout Suet Pudding

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:49:54 +0000

I’d been thinking about making this pudding for quite a number of months. In fact, I’ve been thinking of making a Beef & Oyster Pie of some variety after having a rather good one at Mark Hix’s gaff, in July ’08. The problem with making it was not only a bit of an aversion to shucking oysters by myself, but also finding a dinner guest(s) willing enough to eat oysters.

My opportunity came when I invited several of my fellow food bloggers to dinner. I thought there’s no way that an oyster will go uneaten in their presence!

I took the recipe for the filling from a Rick Stein recipe, but made a couple of changes, not least of which was turning the pie into a pudding. My recipe for the huge pudding I made is as below, but it’s easily scaled down if you want to cook a much smaller one.

Steak, Oyster & Stout Suet Pudding (Serves 10-12):

For the filling:
1.4kg braising steak, cut into 1-2 inch chunks
Few Tbps vegetable/groundnut oil
Some butter, about 25g - ish
1-2 Tbps plain flour
450g button mushrooms
4 onions, thinly sliced
400ml stout
500ml beef stock
1 Tbps sugar (I used golden caster sugar)
5 sprigs thyme
Few bay leaves
4 Tbps Worcestershire sauce
18 size 4 oysters

For the suet pastry:
500g self-raising flour
250g beef suet
salt & pepper
350ml cold water

Season the steak and then brown in the oil. Unless you have a huge pan, you’ll probably need to do this in several batches. Using the same pan, melt half the butter and cook the button mushrooms, whole, for a few minutes. Set these aside with the browned beef, then, still using the same pan, add a bit more oil and the rest of the butter, before adding the onions & sugar. Cook on a low heat for about 20 mins, stirring occasionally, until the onions are mostly brown.

Stir the flour into the onions, then add the stock & stout and bring to the boil, before adding the beef, mushrooms, worcestershire sauce, thyme & bay leaves. Cover, reduce the heat to low and cook for 1.5 to 2 hours, until the beef is very tender.

Whilst the beef is cooking, you can shuck the oysters and make the pastry. There are a number of sites giving instructions on how to shuck an oyster, including a few video clips, so I’d advise watching them if you haven’t done it before. It’s not as scary as it looks, but it’s a lot easier with an oyster knife than with a flathead screwdriver! It’s also fairly messy. After shucking reserve the juice, as well as the oyster itself, as both are going in the pie.

Anyway, mix the suet and flour in a big bowl, seasoning along the way. Add the cold water, bit by bit, stirring with a palate knife or metal spoon, until you get a soft dough. This should take 5 -10 minutes. Roll the dough into a ball, cut a quarter off and put to the side, for the lid. Roll the remains of the dough into a ball, again, and then roll on a lightly floured surface into a big circle of about 0.5cm thick.

Line a well greased (with butter) pyrex pudding basin, I used a 24cm/3l sized one, with the pastry. There will be folds in the pastry, as I don’t know what shape you need to roll out pastry to in order to fit a pudding basin perfectly. That’s something I didn’t learn in my Civil Engineering degree. Anyway, trim the pastry about 1cm below the lip of the bowl.

Once the beef is cooked, add the oysters plus juice and mix in, gently. Using a slotted spoon, carefully fill the pastry lined pyrex bowl with the beef & mushrooms. Then add the liquid to the bowl, about 2 thirds of the way to the top of the meat.

Roll out the remaining pastry into a circle, again about 0.5cm thick, and as big as the top of the bowl. Fit the lid onto the top of the meat and join to the pastry already in the bowl by pinching it together with your fingers.

Cover the bowl with two layers of foil, tying in place with some string if you have any (I didn’t).

Place a plate into the biggest, deepest pan you have, before placing the bowl onto the plate. Pour some boiled water into the pan, about halfway up the side of the bowl. Put a lid on the pan, which is hopefully big enough and deep enough to have the lid still fit properly, despite the size of the bowl. I don’t have a pan big enough to do this, so put more foil over the top of the bowl and around the lip of the pan to ensure the steam could do it’s job on the pudding.

Cook for an hour, ensuring the water doesn’t boil dry in the process. To extract the pudding, first get the bowl out of the pan and remove all the foil. Then put the plate you are going to serve it on, on top of the bowl. Hold together and flip over. If you greased the bowl well enough, the pudding should easily come out.

Serve with some kind of mash & peas, if you are so inclined, but it’s pretty good on it’s own, just as it is!

Food Blogger’s Dinner Party

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:34:49 +0000

A conversation on Twitter between some fellow food bloggers spurred me into an action I’d been contemplating for a while. The conversation was around dinner parties and what seems to be a common excuse employed for not reciprocating a dinner party invitation to a food blogger being ‘I can’t cook as well as you and I’m too scared of cooking something rubbish for someone so discerning’ or words to that effect. It’s an excuse I’ve heard before and one which is pretty poor, in my eyes. I’m as happy eating a home cooked chilli as I am a Michelin star dish. I eat take aways and junk food. I eat pretty much anything and probably wouldn’t even turn my nose up a roadkill as long as it wasn’t going to poison me. In fact, if I was on a plane that crashed in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing else to eat, I don’t think I’d have any qualms in getting stuck into a piece of chargrilled buttock, should the circumstances require it.

So, this spurred me into inviting a Gulp (official collective term) of food bloggers over for dinner, before I thought too hard about what that actually entailed. I got a bit of a reality check when my Sister commented ‘So, basically, you’ve invited a load of food critics around your house for dinner?’. In other words ‘Cooking doesn’t get tuffa than this’!

So, the final and honoured list of victims guests were Chris from Cheese and Biscuits, Lizzie from Hollow Legs, Mathilde + hubby David (@dewilded on Twitter) from Mathilde’s Cuisine, Dan from Essex Eating, Krista from Londelicious, Kavey from Kavey Eats and Helen from Food Stories.

So what did my guests travel from the depths of wildest Essex, the far reaches of the Northern line and every corner of London, for? Well, I had to put quite a bit of thought into the menu because whilst I expected similar attitudes to food as me (see above), I still wanted to impress and cook something a bit different, but as seasonal and local as possible.

The final menu was:

Canapes
Truffled Foie Gras on Toasted Sourdough & Rye
Mushroom Pate on Toasted Sourdough & Rye

Starter
Winter Crunch Salad (was almost pear, blue cheese and spiced walnut salad, but this was less seasonal and more faffy to put together)

Wine - Chateau Bouscasse Pacherenc (dry) 2006

Mains
Steak, Stout & Oyster Suet Pudding
Venison, Port & Mushroom Suet Pudding
Moroccan Filo Pie
All served with a celeriac, potato & leek mash

Wine - Domaine Des Escaravailles le Ventabren Cairanne 2007

Dessert
Caramel Banana Blondies with homemade bitter chocolate ice cream

Wine - Brown Brothers Orange Muscat & Flora

Cheese Course
A (very) ripe Epoisse
Comte
Rich & Creamy Gorgonzola

I have to say that I did cause a bit of a stir by insisting on serving the cheese course last, not to mention the fuss caused by the exceptionally ripe Epoisse (“it smells of corpse”), but apart from that, the evening seemed to go pretty well. So, thanks to Chris, Krista, Lizzie, Helen, Mathilde, David, Kavey & Dan for making the effort of coming to a stranger’s house in SE London for dinner.

I’d also have to say thanks to Paul at Theatre of Wine, who made the wine recommendations, based on what I was cooking.

Finally, as much as I’d like to, I can’t take all the credit, seeing as Ms R made a cracking banana blondie, not to mention enduring being a Sous Chef under my command for the day! Dank je wel, Poffertje.

Next Week: Biggest Jim hosts an Ostentation (official collective term) of Michelin Starred Chefs.

Bitter Chocolate Ice Cream

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:55:37 +0000

Whilst planning a dinner party for my fellow food bloggers, I wanted to make something to offset the sweetness of the Salted Caramel Banana Blondie I’d planned for dessert. At the same time, we had a glut of full fat milk in the fridge and I’d wanted to make homemade ice-cream for sometime. It was then a case of finding a slightly bitter ice-cream and a recipe that wasn’t too faffy.

My limited research on ice-cream recipes seemed to identify two main ways of making ice-cream. One is using the custard method, gently heating a mixture of milk or cream with egg yolks (with whatever flavour ice-cream you are making) and the other involving whipping cream (plus main flavour) before going through the churning, freezing process (for which I used an ice-cream maker). I did, however, manage to find a recipe that didn’t use eggs (the banana blondies had eggs in them, so I didn’t want to have the dessert too eggy) and looked to be very straight forward. Not only that, but the recipe was from a chef whose food I’ve really enjoyed, Mark Hix. The full recipe is here.

I couldn’t, however, get hold of the glucose syrup, so was quite happy to come across a light Agave syrup in the supermarket, to use as a substitute (happy as it was from the same plant that’s used to make tequila).

After a couple of attempts of making fairly good looking ice-cream, I couldn’t quite get the bitterness I wanted and the final product was also a bit sweeter than I was looking for. The ice-cream is incredibly rich and chocolatey, but the chocolate I used was probably not bitter enough (70% Valhrona Cao Grande Noir), not to mention the first batch contained double the sugar, due to my inability to break up a rock hard clump of muscovado!

Winter Crunch Salad

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:48:13 +0000

I’m not normally a style over substance or presentation over taste kind of person, but this salad really caught my eye before seeing the recipe (which is here). On reading the ingredients, I was torn between two places. On the one hand, I had a bunch of beetroots I wanted to use and was intrigued with the use of raw Jerusalem Artichoke. On the other hand, my old nemesis, pickled red cabbage, was in the mix (I’m not sure I’ve ever fully recovered from eating pretty much a jar of Hayward’s Pickled Red Cabbage as a kid, particularly as the subsequent consequence was a rather vivid technicolour yawn).

Obviously, I managed to overcome any doubts I had, as per the above photo. Perhaps surprisingly, the lightly pickled red cabbage was one of the nicest parts of the dish, along with the beetroot mixed with yoghurt. I wasn’t sure about the artichoke and thought that slicing it thinner might remove some of the starchiness that I felt tainted the overall taste. However, on making it a second time, the thinner slicing didn’t seem to have that much impact on improving it. I think that probably, adding a bit of oil & lemon juice between layers as well as on top would raise the taste & texture to match the rather beautiful look.

Pork Chops & Sausages Cooked with Apples & Cider

Thu, 3 Dec 2009 19:30:46 +0000

A rare night without Ms R enabled me to have a relatively free rein (edible for a 13 month old, albeit from my point of view) on choosing what to have for dinner, so, red meat was obviously high on the agenda. I kind of fancied pork or lamb chops, but wanted something a bit more interesting than just plain cooked versions, but then found a recipe with Pork Chops & Cider, using Juniper Berries, which having never cooked with them before, decided the matter of what was for dinner pretty quick.

My concession to cooking chops for a 13 month old with only 6 teeth, was to add some sausages into the mix, which I know he’s partial to.

The original recipe is here, and pretty much the only changes I made were to cook the sausages with the chops before continuing with the recipe as is.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the little one wasn’t too keen on the chops, being a bit hard to chew, but loved both the apple and sausage cooked in the cider (and before you report me to the NSPCC/Social Services/Dark Lord Sauron, the alcohol evaporates during the cooking process). My personal view agreed with little Biggest Jim, as I thought the Pork chops were a bit too overdone, but loved the taste of the apples & cider sauce. The juniper berries were also a really good addition to the recipe, as they added another layer of flavour which was quite different to other spices I’ve tasted. If I cook this again, maybe I’ll do the sauce & chops separately, only joining together in matrimony when serving.