I always find it works out cheaper to buy a whole Gressingham duck. Supermarkets seem to go through phases of selling them at a reduced price, so you can get one for £7.50 at various times. I roast it and there is enough for me to be eating it for a week.
These days, because the weather is so hot, I am generally eating salads, and baguette with cheese and grapes, and peanuts with banana.
I got a whole large duck in Lidl at Easter, and even spread over several meals, it was too much for the two of us. I’m not all that fired up on it tbh. Chicken likewise I find boring. Steak I could live without. About the only meat I would really miss is lamb. And belly pork.
Tonight's comestible is slow cooker beef brisket ragù. Per standard operating procedure, I've topped up the liquid level with extra red (and a dash of brandy). It's slow cooking now. I'll serve it over pappardelle with roasted broccoli florets. To think that only a few years ago, my culinary horizon was beans on toast.
It is that special time of year here. The fresh garlic and fresh basil are out and incredibly, are cheaper and better than last year, thanks to excessive heat and rain. Even the pine nuts cost less that last year. It is the time for making a year's supply of pesto, while getting high inhaling both the basil and garlic.
Dinner last night was brown rice with chorizo and soft-boiled eggs. It included cherry tomatoes, green beans and dill, all from the garden. Such a nice feeling (and taste!)
My son is practically living on home-made pesto at the moment.
Tonight's comestible is slow cooking . 1/2 cup of 🍷 becomes 3/4 of a cup, 2/3 cup of 🐂 stock becomes 250ml, otherwise pretty canonical.
Ausmerican to English dictionary, eggplant is aubergine, zucchini is courgette. Don't do what I did, take a long green vegetable to checkout and ask the Coles lady, "Is this a courgette?" "Dunno what one of them is mate, but that's a cucumber".
Planning and shopping for Saturday evening's comestible, Lamb Banana Curry. North Queensland is a banana growing area, there are roadside stalls every km or so.
¼ cup sweet yellow curry powder
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup finely chopped yellow onion (about 1 medium onion)
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh ginger (about 4cm piece of ginger)
4 cloves finely chopped garlic
1kg lamb shoulder or leg, cut into 3cm cubes
2 bananas, peeled and cut into 2cm slices
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 cup dry red wine
1.5L chicken stock
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 cups cooked jasmine rice, for serving
Preheat the oven to 230°. Place a small skillet over medium heat and add the curry powder. Toast for 1½ minutes, stirring frequently. Remove the curry powder from the heat and set aside.
Place the Le Creuset over high heat and add the olive oil, moving the pan around so the oil coats the bottom of the pan. Add the onion and stir for 3 minutes, then lower the flame to medium and add the garlic and ginger, stirring until the garlic begins to brown, another 3 minutes. Add the lamb and the banana slices and stir to combine. Add the cumin, coriander and toasted curry powder and stir until the pan's contents are aromatic, about 4 minutes.
Increase the temperature under the braising pan to high heat; add the red wine and cook for 5 minutes. Stir in the chicken stock, cover and remove from the stovetop. Place the pan in the oven and bake for 2 hours and 15 minutes, until the lamb is tender. Season with salt and pepper and serve hot over the jasmine rice.
Sweet bananas are no good in savoury dishes imo but cooking bananas (not the same as plantain but similar) are quite good, similar to a white-fleshed sweet potato in some ways. I prefer plantain though as the texture is firmer.
A thing I loved but don't eat now (because calories) was well-fried bacon with banana sliced lengthwise and cooked in the fat until it begins to caramelise.
I would still do gammon and pineapple (which is just a refined version). I'd also put pineapple in sweet'n'sour pork or chicken (but never on pizza). Apple of course goes in anything Normandy, and in keema curries, along with sultanas. Which in turn go into bobotie, along with dried apricots. Apricots and dates and you're moving into the Middle East.
Hard to think of a developed cuisine which doesn't match fruit and savoury.
I have never had keema curries with apple and sultanas - sounds very 70s! I'm used to keema curries having potatoes or peas or both, but no sweet elements.
Pineapple is good on pizza with pepperoni or smoked bacon, better than with ham.
I have never had keema curries with apple and sultanas - sounds very 70s!
Yes, it was the 70s (or as I think of them, my youth). I believe you can still get Vesta Curries - at the time they were cutting-edge exotica, along with Findus frozen pancakes and Campbell's Condensed Mushroom as a sauce for chicken casserole.
I'm not making this, not in the immediate future, anyway, but I came across a classic recipe for aïoli, which I shall keep for posterity (it wouldn't do my posterior much good 😉).
For eight people, you will need sixteen cloves of garlic, the yolks of three eggs, and nearly half a litre of the best olive oil. Peel the garlic, put the cloves in a mortar, and crush them to pulp. Add the egg yolks and a pinch of salt, and stir until the yolks and garlic are thoroughly blended. Then, drop by drop, start adding the oil, stirring (and never stopping) as you go. By the time you've used about half the oil, the aïoli should have thickened into a dense mass. The rest of the oil can now be added (and stirred) in a continuous and steady flow. The aioli becomes thicker and thicker, almost solid. This is how it should be. Add a few drops of lemon juice and serve with potatoes, boiled salt cod, peppers, carrots, beetroot, hard-boiled eggs, and maybe some Provençal snails, les petits gris.
As I hinted in my preamble, a plateful of this poses a significant challenge to the digestion, and you may wish to follow the advice of one writer who recommends a trou provençal in the middle of the meal. This is a small glass of marc, what Italians call grappa, that has the effect of cutting through the pungent ointment of eggs and oil to form a hole, or trou, through which the rest of the meal can pass.
I need to find an occasion for that - it sounds heavenly apart from the fish, which is absolutely forbidden here.. My Danish friend recommends akvavit for that kind of digestif, and experience says he is right.
1½ tablespoons vegetable oil
8 thick pork sausages
1 brown onion, finely chopped
1 x 375g Passage to India Butter Chicken Simmer Sauce
½ cup coconut cream
2 large carrots, halved lengthways and chopped into 1cm pieces
1 cup frozen peas, just thawed
60g baby spinach leaves
Warmed naan bread, to serve
1. Combine Passage to India Butter Chicken Simmer Sauce, coconut cream and carrots in a slow cooker.
2. Fry the onion in a frying pan and add to the slow cooker.
3. Brown sausages in the frying pan and add to the slow cooker. Stir to combine. Cook on high for 4 hours.
4. Stir through peas and spinach. Cover and stand for 5 minutes. Serve.
Apples. I have a bag of Blood of the Boyne (small, scarlet, early-ripening eater) in the kitchen (and a lot more on the tree). I will make apple sauce to go with tonight's roast pork, and add them to tomorrow's breakfast smoothie.
But if anyone has any apple-deploying recipes - I don't mean desserts, those will come on when the Hawthornden comes on stream in September - but more savoury ones.
Apples. I have a bag of Blood of the Boyne (small, scarlet, early-ripening eater) in the kitchen (and a lot more on the tree). I will make apple sauce to go with tonight's roast pork, and add them to tomorrow's breakfast smoothie.
But if anyone has any apple-deploying recipes - I don't mean desserts, those will come on when the Hawthornden comes on stream in September - but more savoury ones.
Here's one which I've had my eye on (the apple of my eye, if you like), but haven't tried yet.
Exchanges above about apples in curry (very 70s apparently).
It's not just the weather here yet for curries and casseroles. Sadly there doesn't seem to be much in the way of fish+apple recipes. Wonder if I could invent Trout and Apple Surprise for Sunday? I'm thinking some sort of relish perhaps?
Just searched for fish & apple recipes online, and there seem to be quite a few out there, including a rather startling one for preparing apple to be indistinguishable from raw tuna.
Not that the apple-fish one includes any actual fish.
Understandable. @Clarence and I love it, but a recent beetroot-heavy dish resulted in us both thinking that we had developed a dread disease. Neither of us told the other at the time, but (switch to another channel if this is TMI) our respective pink wees and poos seemed to confirm our lay diagnoses.
Comments
These days, because the weather is so hot, I am generally eating salads, and baguette with cheese and grapes, and peanuts with banana.
My son is practically living on home-made pesto at the moment.
Ausmerican to English dictionary, eggplant is aubergine, zucchini is courgette. Don't do what I did, take a long green vegetable to checkout and ask the Coles lady, "Is this a courgette?" "Dunno what one of them is mate, but that's a cucumber".
¼ cup sweet yellow curry powder
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup finely chopped yellow onion (about 1 medium onion)
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh ginger (about 4cm piece of ginger)
4 cloves finely chopped garlic
1kg lamb shoulder or leg, cut into 3cm cubes
2 bananas, peeled and cut into 2cm slices
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 cup dry red wine
1.5L chicken stock
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 cups cooked jasmine rice, for serving
Preheat the oven to 230°. Place a small skillet over medium heat and add the curry powder. Toast for 1½ minutes, stirring frequently. Remove the curry powder from the heat and set aside.
Place the Le Creuset over high heat and add the olive oil, moving the pan around so the oil coats the bottom of the pan. Add the onion and stir for 3 minutes, then lower the flame to medium and add the garlic and ginger, stirring until the garlic begins to brown, another 3 minutes. Add the lamb and the banana slices and stir to combine. Add the cumin, coriander and toasted curry powder and stir until the pan's contents are aromatic, about 4 minutes.
Increase the temperature under the braising pan to high heat; add the red wine and cook for 5 minutes. Stir in the chicken stock, cover and remove from the stovetop. Place the pan in the oven and bake for 2 hours and 15 minutes, until the lamb is tender. Season with salt and pepper and serve hot over the jasmine rice.
I would still do gammon and pineapple (which is just a refined version). I'd also put pineapple in sweet'n'sour pork or chicken (but never on pizza). Apple of course goes in anything Normandy, and in keema curries, along with sultanas. Which in turn go into bobotie, along with dried apricots. Apricots and dates and you're moving into the Middle East.
Hard to think of a developed cuisine which doesn't match fruit and savoury.
Pineapple is good on pizza with pepperoni or smoked bacon, better than with ham.
Yes, it was the 70s (or as I think of them, my youth). I believe you can still get Vesta Curries - at the time they were cutting-edge exotica, along with Findus frozen pancakes and Campbell's Condensed Mushroom as a sauce for chicken casserole.
For eight people, you will need sixteen cloves of garlic, the yolks of three eggs, and nearly half a litre of the best olive oil. Peel the garlic, put the cloves in a mortar, and crush them to pulp. Add the egg yolks and a pinch of salt, and stir until the yolks and garlic are thoroughly blended. Then, drop by drop, start adding the oil, stirring (and never stopping) as you go. By the time you've used about half the oil, the aïoli should have thickened into a dense mass. The rest of the oil can now be added (and stirred) in a continuous and steady flow. The aioli becomes thicker and thicker, almost solid. This is how it should be. Add a few drops of lemon juice and serve with potatoes, boiled salt cod, peppers, carrots, beetroot, hard-boiled eggs, and maybe some Provençal snails, les petits gris.
As I hinted in my preamble, a plateful of this poses a significant challenge to the digestion, and you may wish to follow the advice of one writer who recommends a trou provençal in the middle of the meal. This is a small glass of marc, what Italians call grappa, that has the effect of cutting through the pungent ointment of eggs and oil to form a hole, or trou, through which the rest of the meal can pass.
Serves 4
1½ tablespoons vegetable oil
8 thick pork sausages
1 brown onion, finely chopped
1 x 375g Passage to India Butter Chicken Simmer Sauce
½ cup coconut cream
2 large carrots, halved lengthways and chopped into 1cm pieces
1 cup frozen peas, just thawed
60g baby spinach leaves
Warmed naan bread, to serve
1. Combine Passage to India Butter Chicken Simmer Sauce, coconut cream and carrots in a slow cooker.
2. Fry the onion in a frying pan and add to the slow cooker.
3. Brown sausages in the frying pan and add to the slow cooker. Stir to combine. Cook on high for 4 hours.
4. Stir through peas and spinach. Cover and stand for 5 minutes. Serve.
But if anyone has any apple-deploying recipes - I don't mean desserts, those will come on when the Hawthornden comes on stream in September - but more savoury ones.
Here's one which I've had my eye on (the apple of my eye, if you like), but haven't tried yet.
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/user/757676/recipe/sweet-beef-curry
It's not just the weather here yet for curries and casseroles. Sadly there doesn't seem to be much in the way of fish+apple recipes. Wonder if I could invent Trout and Apple Surprise for Sunday? I'm thinking some sort of relish perhaps?
Not that the apple-fish one includes any actual fish.
Yes, I think side/accompaniment is the way to go. I don't though have any fennel and Mr F dislikes beetroot.