Veg in in a cheese sauce is a classic. I don’t grow cauliflower but I do grow Kale and Broccoli. Both work brilliantly, and prior to Broccoli flowering you can use the leaves.
Cheesy heaven
So you may think it looks anaemic and if you do there’s lots you can do that I don’t. Adding some breadcrumbs to the top before baking, a few minutes under the grill at the end – stuff like that. Improves the look, but not the taste. If you want added crunch I’ve even had them with a sprinkling of croutons! So each to their own.
Prep: 10min Cook: 18min
Ingredients
250g broccoli/kale etc as florets and large bite size
250ml milk
20g parmesan grated
30g cheddar grated
2 slices Leerdammer chopped
1dstspn plain flour
25g butter
salt, pepper
1tsp english mustard (optional)
Method
Preheat the oven to 225c (fan)
Par-boil the veg then quench in cold water and drain well (broccoli 6-8min, kale 0min)
Make a roux with the butter and flour and slowly add the milk to make a creamy white sauce.
Add half the cheese, mustard, salt (if you must) and pepper.
Place the veg in an ovenproof dish, best to pat dry with kitchen towel. Cover with the sauce and then sprinkle on the remaining cheese.
Cook for 18min in the oven.
Sometimes a large luxurious veg-cheese with crusty bread and butter is the best meal in the world, for this I’d double everything but triple the milk so there is dipping sauce.
Sweet is one of the five tastes our tongue detects, it’s a fundamental part of the eating experience, and there are whole books dedicated to cooking with it. I’ve not got a sweet tooth, but still I keep and use several types of sweet things in my cupboard.
First a tiny bit of chemistry. Sugars are small organic compounds made as either a source of readily available energy or as building blocks for other things. They are called carbohydrates and there are loads of types – monosaccharides are the simplest: one sugar molecule like glucose, disaccharides are two sugar molecules (like lactose made of glucose and galactose, or sucrose which is glucose and fructose) these need to be split into mono saccharides by the body before being used. Then there are poly saccharides – long chains of sugars, starch is the most well known example, but so is cellulose. These more complex sugars need more processing (and time) to release their energy. Humans can’t digest every sugar, and so some passes through our gut (like fibre).
So for a quick hit use glucose, for a long burn use starch, for low calorie and filling use fibre. Simple.
This post is about the sweet stuff.
Unrefined (golden) sugar
This is my staple, I use it in tea (if someone wants it) and in cakes. It is my basic go to sugar for things I eat with sweetness in them, I prefer it to white, so I don’t use white – simple. This is the sugar I use for all my syrups and preserves.
Glucose (sugar from corn starch)
Glucose is cheap, and I use it in fermentation (cider, vinegar etc). It’s very sweet compared to soft brown and I use it for yeast cultures. So breads and brewing – that’s it. Oh and if I need a sugar syrup for crystallising leaves (like attar of roses) I’ll use this, just because it’s easy and doesn’t change the taste of the delicate preserves.
Malt
Malt is the sugary extract from germinating seeds. I use two types – wheat and barley. I wouldn’t have them in the house except for brewing, but having them here I use them to flavour breads, and cakes. They add a richness beyond unrefined sugar, and I use it as a substitute for soft brown sugar if needed.
Of course malt loaf isn’t possible without it and a wheat malt loaf (rather than the traditional barley malt) is a thing of loveliness.
Vanilla extract
Vanilla is naturally sweet and adding a little of this to muffins allows you to cut the sugar content quite a bit. The extracts are often in corn sugar syrup, so extra sweet.
Fruit
The last thing I use for adding sweetness is fruit. Fruit is naturally quite high in sugar, so a handful in a curry or couscous adds a sweetness to mellow the heat. Apples sliced in a pork hotpot do the same, as do figs served with venison, or quince with cheese.
When you look at recipes think about the flavours, see what sugars are there and that will allow you to think about substitutes. That can be to experiment, to lower calories or because it’s just what you have to hand.
A twist on a classic, and frankly one with oodles of online recipes telling you how. This one is mine.
That’s dinner sorted…
This is a recipe where you need to use fillet – venison fillet is much smaller than beef, so I use 12cm sections for individual wellingtons. This recipe is for 2 individual wellingtons.
Prep: 10-15min Cook: 18min
Ingredients
2 sections of venison fillet
175g puff pastry
4 slices Parma ham
175g mushrooms finely chopped
English mustard
Ground pepper
Egg whisked for an egg wash
Method
Dry fry the mushrooms to remove as much liquid as possible, do not let them brown, you want concentrated flavour, not fried flavour. Add a grind of pepper.
Pre-heat the oven to 225c (fan)
Seal the venison by searing each side for 15sec in a hot pan (with a tiny bit of smoking olive oil). Just enough to seal and colour. Make sure the pan is really hot.
Lay out some cling film, then 2 pieces of Parma ham as a sheet, spread half the mushrooms. Smear the venison with 1/2tsp mustard, places on the bed of mushrooms and wrap in the ham (using the cling film helps).
Roll out half the puff pastry and wrap the venison parcel (minus the cling film…) seal with egg wash, wash the parcel and gently score with a knife.
Cook for 18 min.
If you do this right the venison is rare but not at all bloody and cuts with a fork. No salt is needed – it all comes from the ham, and the other flavours add an earthy note, keeping the venison as the star.
The pastry is thin – on purpose, its to seal and support, you don’t want to cut in and just get pastry – well if you do use more.
Serve with luxury, Dauphinoise potatoes perhaps, maybe mushrooms in a brandy cream sauce – you get the picture.
Venison and pumpkin is a great combination. I use a hard squash (crown prince) so butternut is a good substitute.
waiting for the veg…
Prep: 10min Cook: 40min overall, 20 on the stove, 20 in the oven
Ingredients
200g venison (leg) as cubes
200g pumpkin cubed
1/2 onion chopped
175g puff pastry
50ml red wine
1 dstspn bisto gravy granules
1tsp Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper
Method
Pre-heat the oven to 225c (fan)
put the onions, pumpkin and venison in a hot pan and soften the onions, seal the venison and slightly colour the pumpkin.
mix the bisto with about 150ml water, add the wine and Worcestershire sauce, stir well and add to the pan.
cook for 15 min on a medium heat, either reducing the gravy or adding a little water to ensure a good thick consistency. Salt and pepper to taste.
Top with rolled puff pastry and is you like you can wash this with a little milk or egg white. Make sure you pierce it a few times.
Place in the oven for 18-20min until the pastry is risen and crispy.
You can see there is not masses of gravy when it’s cooked – that’s to stop the pastry going soggy. It also means the flavours are concentrated.
Pre-frying the pumpkin also intensifies the flavour, but if you use a softer squash it can make them break down more in the mix. I cook the filling on the stove in a cast iron pan so I can just lay the pastry on top and cook it without transfer – less washing up, but up to you.
You can play with the recipe. If you want to bulk it up and make it a one dish dinner you can add cubed potato. I wouldn’t recommend adding neep (swede), but mushrooms also work as an addition.
I love a roast ham, always unsmoked for me and weirdly now is a great time to buy them – just before Christmas and just after they tend to be really good value.
You can buy them pre-cooked, and on or off the bone. I tend to keep it simple, off the bone and to cook myself. It means that each one can be different. Yesterday I tried a new recipe and boy did it work!
Prep: 24hours Cook: 90min on the stove then 25min in the oven
Ingredients
1 good sized ham joint ~ 1.5kg
12 bletted medlar
1 lrg dspspn marmalade
1 dstspn maple syrup
olive oil
Prep
ham is salted to preserve it, so the first job it to get rid of some…
I swill the joint in cold water and soak for 24 to 36 hours before cooking, changing the water several times. I do this at room temperature. If you put it in the fridge it takes longer.
Method
With the joint in a large pan and submerged in fresh water, break the ripe medlars into two or three pieces and add them to the pot. Bring to the simmer and cook for 90min to 2 hours. A minimum of 20min per 500g plus 30min.
Pre-heat the oven to 200c (Fan)
Remove the joint (keep the water). Cut away most of the fat and score what is left in a pattern – be creative, or not – up to you.
Rescue the medlars from the water and press through a sieve – leave the skins and seeds behind. Take the pulp and mix it with the syrup, marmarlade and a ladle of the stock water.
Add a good glug (about 40ml) of olive oil to the mix and give it a really good shake/blitz. Thw hot stock should melt the marmalade and the shake should create an emulsion (much like a salad dressing).
With the joint in a roasting tin (fat side down) pour over the sauce. Cook in the oven for 25min basting every 5 min
Basting is really important. It thickens the coating with each basting and stops the outside of the joint from drying out. If you cook it hotter for less time you get the colour but not the thick sticky coating that adds a lot of flavour.
Oh and the water you have left from the cooking – use it for you’re veggies. It’s often too salty for soup or stock, but ideal for cooking potatoes so they take a little of the flavours.
The medlars aren’t essential. But I like the taste and cooking them with the ham gets the flavour through the meat. If you like you can replace these with an apple or just add apple sauce to the sauce – I like the contrasts between the marmalade, fruit and syrup.
More traditional recipes use things like cloves – I do that too sometimes, but I find the taste infusion can be quite uneven. Cooking a few cloves in the water works to even it out, but then I’d not use it for potatoes afterwards.
Tender herbs are a key part of my cooking. Unfortunately, not all herbs last all year, and I don’t like drying herbs from the garden (with the exception of fennel seed). I never like the taste of dried leaves – it always seems dusty. I know it’s not true but I just don’t like the flavour or texture.
So I make oils for the winter. I freeze the blitzed herbs in cubes too, using a little veg oil and store coriander, basil and tarragon that way. But tarragon in particular makes a fabulous oil.
So, how do you do it? easy. Pick the plant before it wilts and the leaves die pack, just before it goes. For basil I take the whole plant, stems and all. For tarragon when the leaves start to die I harvest 90% of whats there. The plant then just sits over winter and it you keep it frost free it will come back happily next spring.
In both cases I blitz in olive oil and steep in luke warm oil for a few hours or overnight. Avoid heating the oil too much as it changes the texture and taste – turning cis-unsaturated oil chains to trans. These trans fats are not as good for you, and do less to lower cholesterol. So cool steeping is best. When its good and smelly with the herb strain through a fine sieve and muslin.
If you only used the leaves you can still use the leaves in oil as a paste, for basil it’s ideal to make pesto, for tarragon I just freeze and note it’s in olive oil.
For the oil you’ve made leave it to stand for a day or three then decant it. The reason is that you will see a small amount of brownish water at the bottom – this will ferment over time and produce a vinegar that will ruin the flavour of the oil. So you want to decant the oil and leave the liquid. The oil then stores for months.
The only way to avoid this issue is to pasteurise the oil (heat it to at least 72c for 15 sec) – but this also changes the taste, and degrades the flavours of the herb and benefits of the oil. Up to you, but I prefer to fiddle a bit to keep the taste and avoid handling hot oil wherever possible.
When you use infused oils, add them at the end, as a drizzle or to coat the pasta before mixing in the sauce – less cooking means more flavour…
A lot of the recipes so far have been venison. In part it’s because it’s winter when I started the blog, and in part it’s because I cook it a lot. Each year I buy two or three whole carcasses and butcher then freeze the meat for the year.
I don’t buy venison because I’m a food snob, I do it to save money. That may seem bonkers when you see it priced in a supermarket, but it really depends on where you live. Before I moved here I’d only had venison in restaurants, often posh restaurants. And beef was my red meat of choice. But that’s changed. It helps that it’s local, and it helps that the deer need to be culled to protect the environment, so they are not bred for meat but free-range. I know it would be better to be veggie, but I like meat and bluntly I’m not going to waste what’s there.
Types of Deer
You can read all this elsewhere so I’ll keep it brief. There are several (six) types of deer in the UK, when you buy a beast round here it’s a Sika by default, you can get Red, and Red-Sika cross but the gamekeepers normally expect you’ll want Sika. Why? well it’s more tender and just as tasty. If you have Red it normally needs a couple of extra days hanging to be as tender, and most of the time you can’t tell between well prepared meat. It is noticeable in a side-by-side comparison. So I tend to have Sika.
The one thing I would recommend though is knowing the season. If you buy at the very beginning of the season you’ll get a male. That’s fine, but if they are in musk the meat will taste different – not to my taste, sorry. So I tend to buy when hinds are in season (21 Oct to 15 Feb around here). Keeps it simple, and I like simple.
Dealing with a beast
I buy whole animals, some come with the skin on, some skinned. All have their head and hooves removed, and are cleaned and inspected before sale. If you want the offal you can get it, the hearts are seen as a delicacy, the rest is less used. I like the tongue, but it’s all personal taste. If you want the offal you may be disappointed. Often older animals can have liver flukes and the inspection will throw them out. Often the heart is damaged by the shot – so again thrown out. A good gamekeeper with a licence to sell the meat won’t apologise for that, they will keep you right and only give you good quality produce.
Again there are great videos on butchering deer, so I’ll not labour the point. The value in butchering the beast yourself is that you control the cuts and the portions. You know what is going in the mincer, and if you would rather have chops or a saddle or the fillet.
The first time I butchered a beast it took me five hours. It still takes me two to three to get it all squared away, but that’s usually about 70-80 packs for the freezer, so it’s not so bad when you look at it like that.
Cuts and what to do with them
Sika Leg
This is the easy part – treat it like beef. The fillet, sirloin and rump are best cooked as little as you can stand. The blade is tender too, but the rest of the shoulder does better roasted or in a pie/stew. The hock love a long slow cook. The belly and brisket I typically mince. The ribs as racks or dried and spiced as jerky. The neck stewed. You get the idea.
Keep the bones too for stock – I bought a stainless steel pull saw to deal with the bones – worth it. And you can batch make the stock and freeze it it you like.
if you’re not sure what a cut will be good for cut it with a sharp knife – that will tell you everything. The easier it cuts the less you cook. If it’s got tendons and white connective tissues then it needs longer cooking or mincing. If it’s on the bone you need to cook and rest to get the flavour out. Another rule of thumb – the darker the meat the more tender and the less cooking.
A simple and quick curry, I use a courgette base for the sauce, but you can use tomatoes or lentils, both work really well. You can cook the whole thing while the rice is cooking…
Prep: 5min Cook: 12min
Ingredients
200g venison, cubed
200g pumpkin, cubed
1/2 onion chopped
250ml courgette puree (base)
2 chillies (chopped)
2 garlic cloves (crushed)
6 cumin seeds (husks discarded)
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp corriander
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 dstspn sour cream
salt & pepper
Method
in a hot frying pan with a little olive oil seal the venison, colouring the outside and reserve in a bowl.
Add the onions and pumpkin to the pan, fry until they just start to colour.
Add all the spices and fry for 20 sec until you can smell they have cooked.
Add the courgette and a pinch of salt, cook for 8min on a medium heat until the pumpkin is cooked.
Turn down low. Add the venison, cream and season with salt and pepper to taste.
Courgettes are incredibly productive plants. In the summer they are one of the first first veg to flower and fruit, and the flowers are awesome in pasta, battered and fried as tempura or as part of a ravioli filler. There are also substitutes for courgettes – tromboncino is a climbing squash which is a perfect alternative, slightly richer flavour and used exactly the same way.
I harvest courgettes small – much smaller than supermarket size, if they are more than 3cm diameter they are too big! But even harvesting small you occasionally miss one and you always end up with more than you can use fresh.
So, what to do? Well if the courgette you miss gets more than 5cm diameter then compost it. You can eat it, sure, but the smaller ones are tastier and you’ll have plenty. Larger courgettes are bland and watery, so make rubbish soup – hence the compost.
For the rest you can make a base soup with them to use in other recipes and store them as blocks in the freezer. If you like you can dehydrate them too – these can be used to thicken sauces, either as slices or (I prefer) crushed. Works well in couscous too or mixed with lentils in curry.
The soup base is simplicity itself – blitz the courgettes in a little water and cook to a thick paste. I don’t add salt or pepper – I do that when I’m using them later – just a basic courgette base. If you have other stock made up (e.g. chicken or partridge) you can use that instead of water and that makes an excellent starting point for a soup. Store them as 250-300ml blocks – it’s a good soup size portion for one or sauce portion for a meal.
When the hips start to colour on the bushes, and when there are enough, I make syrup. I’ll make several litres over the course of a few months because every last drop will be used.
Rosehip syrup is an amazing taste, add it to fizz for an instant cocktail, or cakes or cake-fillings. Use it on pancakes and drop scones, add it to herbal tea, use it as a cough syrup, or as a topping on ice-cream or poached fruit. As part of a salad dressing, to soak dried fruit before cooking in a couscous. I use it a lot.
Word of warning – I don’t use enough sugar for this to be a proper syrup – it won’t keep more than a few weeks in the fridge. I freeze it in batches then pour into sterile 250ml Kilner jars. Each jar is used inside a week.
Prep: 20min Cook: 10min Prep: 15min
Ingredients
Rosehips
Sugar
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Water
Time for a refill
This method is what you could call contingent – it depends on the amount of rosehips you’ve got.
Start by washing the rosehips, weigh them, then blitz them in enough water to make a thick soup.
Put them in a big pot and warm them to 60c, add 1/2tsp cinnamon and a pinch of fresh nutmeg per kg rosehips steeping them for 8min.
Drain and reserve the juice, add about 1/2 as much water again and steep the rosehips for another 8min at 60c.
Drain all the juice through muslin, and weight the juice. Divide this number by 7 then multiply by 3 – add that much sugar. I use golden sugar for a little bit of taste.
Gently warm the liquid until the sugar dissolves, then bottle or freeze.
Rosehips are a great source of vitamin C. But heating denatures it (it oxidises and becomes inactive), so lower temperatures help keep some of the vitamin C alive. If you steep at lower temperatures you keep even more, and you can even steep overnight at room temperature (make sure the bowl was sterilised beforehand. But the lower temperature and the lower sugar content means this is not pasteurised and will not act as a preserve (like jam). So be careful to use it quickly.
If you want a proper preserve then up the sugar content – at least 50:50 so equal weight of sugar to liquid. Adding a little citric acid will also help. But that’s way too sweet for me. I’d rather freeze it and use it quickly.
