Category Archives: Recipe

Frugal Food – stuffed breast of lamb, roast dinner on a budget

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Breast of lamb is a rather unfashionable cut these days.  In my household it’s usually known as ‘lamb belly’ by analogy with the matching cut of pork.  It’s made up of the abdominal body wall, starting with some ribs just in front of the diaphragm and extending backwards. Folded in three and wrapped in cling-film, it’s a rather uninspiring looking cut. You won’t get it at the supermarket, and it won’t be on display at the butchers, but if you ask it’s likely you’ll get a whole one for not much more than £1.  With a very little bit of effort, you have one of the most cost effective (and tasty!) roast dinners you can buy.

We first discovered breast of lamb when we started buying half-lambs from local smallholders.  I wish I’d discovered it when I was a student, I could have had some fantastic roast Sunday dinners on a budget!

This is a great meal made almost entirely from the store cupboard.  You will need:

  • One breast of lamb
  • Some breadcrumbs
  • An onion (red or white)
  • Garlic, several cloves
  • Rosemary, thyme, sage (fresh or dried)
  • One egg
  • Kitchen / butchers string
  • Potatoes / parsnips / sweet potatoes / swede
  • Some green veg (I had some frozen peas, but anything will do)
Deboned breast of lamb

Deboned breast of lamb

First of all you have a little bit of butchery to do.  It’s unlikely the ribs will have been trimmed out, so you’ll have to do this yourself.  Be careful, and patiently cut around and along each rib with a paring knife and lift it out from the ‘inside’ of the breast.  With practice this is no more than a five minute job, though it might take a bit longer to start with.  It’s likely your breast has been in the fridge, so the meat will be cold.  Stop if you notice your fingertips getting numb, and rinse them under warm water to warm them up again – you’ll have less sensory feedback from cold fingertips and you’re much more likely to make a mistake and cut yourself – which is not the aim of the exercise!

Stuffing ingredients

Try to preserve as much meat as you can attached to the breast – but if you accidentally cut a piece off (and there are some annoying bits of diaphragm which are quite tricky to keep attached) just put it back as you’ll be rolling and tying the ‘joint’ later.

Stuffing on the breast of lamb

Now make the stuffing.  Mix the finely chopped onion, crushed / minced garlic, breadcrumbs, herbs and egg together.  Season with a bit of salt and pepper.  Then spread this across the inside of the breast and roll it up, starting at the narrow end (where the ribs weren’t).

Tied rolled breast of lamb

Tie the rolled joint up with string using a butchers knot.  This involves making a series of linked  loops and tying off at both ends, and is a useful knack to learn.  It’s also not dissimilar to the knotting technique used for casting a cow!  Put the rolled join in a roasting dish, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with pepper and dried rosemary, and put into a low oven (about 160C) for two and a half hours.

Roasted breast of lambPrepare whatever roast veggies you prefer (I did spuds and sweet potato) and start these at the appropriate time.  You could even have yorkshire puddings (we did!).

Carved roasted stuffed breast of lambThen in due course get the joint out to rest, prepare your green veg and gravy, and dish up.  Add some nice fruit jelly, if you have some.  Crab apple and chilli jelly was a perfect accompaniment.

This is a fabulous roast dinner, and will serve three or four for nearly nothing – we’re greedy so it fed two hungry adults!  Serve with a nice beer or a glass of red wine, and enjoy!

Roast breast of lamb with all the trimmings, served and ready to enjoy

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Last Minute Christmas – perfect giblet stock

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If you’ve bought a bird for roasting today, there’s a good chance it’s come with a little plastic packet of ‘bits’.  Whatever you do, don’t throw them away!

These bits are the giblets – the offal – usually the neck (in one or two pieces), the heart, the liver, and the gizzard.  The gizzard is thick, muscular structure with two hard abrasive grinding plates that the bird uses to crush up corn and other food items to make them digestible.  Giblet stock is quick, simple, and makes the most wonderful Christmas gravy.

I have a goose this year, but the following applies just as well if you have a chicken or turkey.  Personally, I use the goose heart and liver in one of my stuffings, so only the neck and gizzard are available for the stock.

In addition to the giblets, you need the following:

  • Stock vegetables.  I use one onion (red or white) and a couple of carrots, I don’t like celery so I don’t use it, even though it’s the often-quoted third member of the stock vegetable trinity.
  • A bouquet garni.  This is just a posh culinary term for some herbs. I use some bay leaves, rosemary, thyme and sage, along with some whole pepercorns and a few juniper berries.  Dried is fine.
  • Water.  Glug of white wine (optional).
  • A splash of olive oil.

Prepare your gizzard by cutting away and discarding the hard plates (use a small sharp knife inserted below and parallel to the plates) and chopping the rest of the meat roughly

Put the splash of olive oil into a nice big saucepan, and brown the neck and gizzard meat, and then add the roughly chopped onion and carrots and sautee for a couple of minutes.  Now add about a litre of water (and the splash of white wine if you want) and the bouquet garni, bring to the boil and simmer for about an hour.  Strain, discard the solids, and return the stock to the pot and boil again until reduced in volume by half.  That’s it.  Set aside in the refrigerator until you make your gravy later. You won’t regret it!

In Fermentation We Trust – apple juice turns into cider

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On a lovely bright November weekend, I pressed a load of apples for cider-making.

For the next part of the process, you need to put together the following bits and bobs:

  • Your apple juice (which is already in a fermenting bucket with any luck – you’ll need the lid, if it’s one with a hole for an airlock, so much the better – if so, you’ll also need an airlock)
  • Wine or cider yeast, and yeast nutrient
  • A nice warm location at about 18 – 21 degrees celsius
  • Enough demijohns (plus stoppers and airlocks) to contain the volume of apple juice you’ve collected.  All my demijohns have come from Freecycle, so it’s worth keeping your eyes open.  For recommendations of UK homebewing equipment suppliers, see the suppliers list.
  • A syphon
  • Homebrewing steriliser solution

Now, time to turn your wonderful juice into cider (for any Americans who might be reading, we mean hard cider – the traditional alcoholic sort).  Traditional ‘real cider’ makers would do nothing with it at this stage, and wait for the natural yeasts which you hope are already present on the apples to do their job and get fermenting.  There is an alternative approach which involves using campden (sulphite) tablets to kill off the wild yeasts and then adding some wine or cider yeast of your own, which with any luck should guaranteed a ‘clean’ culture of your chosen yeast strain.  I decided to go a third route, didn’t use any campden, but did add wine yeast and yeast nutrient to give the process a ‘kick-start’ and make sure that an appropriate culture was at least in there with a fighting chance!

Apple juice before fermentation

You should probably take the specific gravity of your apple juice before you start fermenting, as this will tell you something quite important – with a bit of arithmetic (or there are online SG to ABV calculators out there you could avail yourself of) you should be able to work out how alcoholic your cider ends up.  This is relevant both for keeping your driving licence, and for making sure your cider contains enough sugar, and therefore after fermentation, enough alcohol, to keep well.  You’re aiming for a minimum of about 3.5% ABV, real ciders can easily get up to about 8%.

I didn’t test my juice (do as I say not as I do, right?), but it tasted nice and sweet so I think it’s likely my cider is about the 6% mark. Invest in a glass hydrometer (they’re cheap, easy to use with a bit of practice, and ever such pretty bits of old-fashioned looking laboratory glassware), you won’t regret it!

Fermenting by the fireThere is lots of advice that you should ferment your cider under lock.  I didn’t have an airlock capable bucket available so just kept the lid loosely on.  My experience from beer brewing is that the CO2 produced during fermentation will give a good blanket over the brewing liquor, being heavier than air, and oxidation shouldn’t be a problem at this stage as long as you don’t disturb the fermenting juice.  If your bucket does have an airlock, after adding the yeast and nutrient close the lid tightly and set up the airlock.  If it doesn’t, just fit the lid loosely so that the gas produced during fermentation will be able to escape without blowing the lid off!  Put your bucket in a nice warm place and try to avoid peeping.  Mine went by the fire in the living room for the first few days, as we were having a bit of a cold-snap.

Ready for rackingYou’ll be able to tell fermentation has started when you see bubbles through your airlock, or when a nice loose foam starts to form on top of your apple juice (because you’re not peeping, right?).  During fermentation, the dead yeast and quite a bit of the solids from the apple juice will settle out in the bottom of the bucket, and the colour of the juice changes from brown to a yellow-orange.  In general, the cider will not clear completely, but it will be brighter than it was before.

Top fermenting yeastOnce fermentation seems to have stopped (I gave mine a generous month), you’ll have a nice thick layer of debris on the bottom of the bucket with cider above it.  Now it’s time to ‘rack’ the cider into demijohns for bulk conditioning.  When I opened the bucket, I found rather an alarming-looking layer of yeast floating on the surface of the cider.  I can only assume that this was a wild, top-fermenting yeast strain, as it seems to have done nothing awful to the cider so far!

Clean and sterilise your equipment (demijohns, syphon, stoppers & airlocks) carefully this time, following the directions on your steriliser.  Now the cider has fermented you risk accidentally making cider vinegar if acetobacter bacteria were to get in.  It’s also important to avoid introducing oxygen into the cider at this stage – acetobacter need oxygen to make vinegar from alcohol, so even if there’s some contamination they’ll struggle to get going if the cider stays free of air.  Syphon carefully, keeping the outlet of the syphon below the level of the liquid and avoiding introducing bubbles.  Then fit your stoppers and airlocks and put the cider in a cool dark place to mature for a few months before bottling. Keep an occasional eye on your airlocks to make sure they’re not drying out.  I expect to leave mine in the demijohns until spring, and will then bottle into champagne bottles with a bit of priming sugar to make sparkling cider.

Filled demijohnsWe had a couple of pints more cider than fitted in the demijohns, and it would have been inconceivable to waste it – I can report that it is, already at this stage, definitely cider.  It’s a bit rough around the edges with quite a hard tannin that hopefully will mellow a bit with maturation, but has a lovely fresh apple aroma and definitely shows promise!

If you’re going to try it, I would recommend having a bit more of a read about the process before you start.  Some of my favourite books on home-brewing are listed in the library.

And if all that seems a bit complicated and labour-intensive, I’ll give you my directions for the quickest and easiest (and remarkably tasty!) home-brewed cider in the world very soon!

Scaling Up – second attempt at smoked salmon

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Buoyed up by the success of my first attempt at curing and smoking a very small salmon tail fillet, and tempted by the whole sides of salmon that appear in the shops at this time of year, I thought ‘hey, why not?’ and asked my husband to pick one up when he was shopping.  Having got it home and looked at it, in all it’s 1.75kg glory, and about an inch and a half thick at it’s thickest point, I did wonder if I hadn’t perhaps bitten off a bit more than I could chew…  so like any sensible experimental cook, I put the thought firmly to the back of my mind and got on with it anyway.

Before curing I decided to add a bit of flavour to the fillet in the form of a bit of a whisky infusion, so a tot of Laphroaig went into the bag with the fillet for an hour or two.  In retrospect I should have got the fillet out, washed and dried it and deprived it of its pin bones before doing anything with whisky, as I’m pretty sure that most of the flavour I added got washed away at this slightly later preparation stage.   Lesson learned!

After that, I cut the fillet in half (none of my oven dishes is anything like long enough to take a whole fillet in one go, and my fish kettle is metal and not really suitable for curing) and rubbed it generously with the cure mix which, as last time, is 2/3rds table salt and 1/3rd golden caster sugar.  In aiming for a very short cure period (about 6 hours) I’m keen to make sure the pickle doesn’t become unsaturated, so I use a lot more cure mix than I probably need to in order to get maximum water extraction during the short contact time.  I made up about a pound of cure mix, though I didn’t use it all.

Cured salmon skinOnce rubbed in the cure, with a thin layer in the dish beneath the fish, I covered the fillet pieces with cling film and weighed them down with most of the canned goods in my larder!  I turned them every couple of hours.  At the end of the six hours a really quite striking amount of liquid had been drawn out of the fillet by the osmotic action of the salt and sugar.  More striking than that was the effect of the curing process on the salmon skin, which had reverted from the rather soft pliable texture you expect, to a firm, almost cardboard-like texture with the beautiful blue iridescence you would normally see only in the skin of a freshly caught fish.  More culinary alchemy, and quite beautiful!

Cured salmon before smokingAfter washing and drying, the salmon pieces went into my fridge on open racks overnight.

The next morning, they were part of the second smoker run, and smoked for 10 hours over a mix of oak and apple wood.

After smoking I portionned the fish for freezing, which also gave me a good chance to examine it in cross-section.  The thinner tail piece is perfect, I think.  I cut some slivers from the surface and tasted them fresh from the smoker, it’s some of the best smoked salmon I have ever tasted – a gentle saltiness and sweetness, the oiliness of the fish mixing with a soft smoky flavour and perhaps, with a little faith, even the faint bite of the whisky in the background.  In cross section it is an even translucent orange-pink all the way through and a nice firm texture.

The thicker head-end half of the fillet is not quite such an unmitigated success.  There is a clear visual and textural distinction between the skin 1/3rd of the piece and the rest, with the flesh nearest the skin softer, pinker, and with more distinct fat-lines visible.  In all respects, this part of the fish is much closer in appearance to a fresh fillet than to a cured and smoked one.  I can only assume that the cure mix was not able to penetrate well through the skin (which in retrospect I should have checked was properly scaled) and had not had the time in the cure to be reached from the other side.   It’s not a terrible disaster as these pieces are now frozen and will be perfect to use in dishes like the creamy smoked-salmon pasta, but I don’t think they’re suitable for eating raw.

The options for addressing this, as far as I can tell are –

  1. Skin the fillet – not appealing as a plan, as it will reduce the structural integrity of the fillet and make it harder to slice thinly as smoked salmon later, also I think skinned fillets are a lot less visually appealing!
  2. Cure the salmon for longer, perhaps 8 – 10 hours – also not very appealing, as the flavour of the salmon is, in my opinion, perfect as it is, and I would not like it any saltier
  3. Do something to the skin side to help it absorb the cure better – certainly making sure the skin is fully scaled may well help here, but I’m also tempted to do something in the way of shallow piercing / scarifying of the skin to help the cure penetrating.  I have ordered (Amazon to the rescue again) a device called a blade tenderiser, intended for making lots of stab incisions in steaks before cooking, which I think with some minor modification to control the stabbing-depth may well do exactly what I want to the skin on the thick end of the fillet without too much faff.

Watch this space for the third effort – I’m running out of time before Christmas now so the third time had better be the charm!

Aromatics – experimenting with flavoured bacon cures

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I’ve now made a couple of flavoured bacons, which I’ve then smoked in my DIY cold smoker.

Black pepper bacon – 

  • 770g piece of pork belly
  • Dry cure made up from 65g Supracure, 15g dark brown soft sugar (~10% total weight of the bacon in cure)
  • 3g of cracked black pepper added to the salt & sugar cure mix
  • Cured according to the Bringing Home the Bacon general instructions
  • Smoked for 10 hours using oak dust

This is a lovely eating bacon, and is likely to become one of our house staples.  The pepper adds mostly flavour, very little heat.  The sweet flavour from the sugar is subtle, but present, and adds nice balance.  It cooks well, too.  Highly recommended.  I think it would also be very nice unsmoked.

Christmas cure spicesChristmas bacon – first attempt

  • 530g piece of pork belly
  • 10% cure mix made up of 36g of Supracure and 17g of molasses sugar
  • One bay leaf, 10 allspice berries, 4 juniper berries, and the berry of one clove (the small ball bit on top of the stem), ground in a spice grinder and mixed well with the sugar & salt
  • Cured in the usual way and then cold smoked for 10 hours in a mix of oak and apple smoke

While the cure did smell a bit medicinal, with a dominant smell of clove, despite the tiny quantity of clove added, it did at least smell convincingly of Christmas.  The molasses sugar gives the cured bacon a really distinctive dark colour to the flesh and to the rind.  Smoked over apple and oak wood dust, it has a lovely sweet complex slightly spiced flavour, and is almost exactly what I was looking for in a Christmas bacon.  It is probably more suited to a cooking bacon (and would make awesome ‘pigs in blankets’ for Christmas dinner) but does also eat very well, caramelising beautifully, if my lunch today was anything to go by!

Almost-All-Purpose Any-Fruit Jelly

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Time: about an hour – Patience: 4 or 5 hours – Difficulty: easy

Until this year I had never made fruit jellies, out of a misguided belief that the process was needlessly tedious and fiddly – but a bumper crop of crab apples scrumped from a hedge finally forced me to give it a go.  While there’s no escaping that it is a two-stage process – stewing fruit followed by straining and re-boiling with sugar – as hassle goes it’s certainly less trouble than taking stones out of plums for jam! Only the final boil and bottling requires your full attention, otherwise you can be getting on with other things – or putting your feet up with a well deserved cuppa!

Medlar jellies

You will require –

  • Fruit – single or mixed varieties – apples are a popular ‘base’ fruit with additions. A couple of kilos is a sensible quantity to try first time out and will probably make 6 jars or so.
  • Fresh herbs, chillies, spices… the only limit is your imagination
  • Juice of a lemon or orange, if you like
  • Sugar – I usually use preserving sugar for the additional pectin – this is particularly important for soft fruit which contain very little of their own pectins, apples and plums have quite a bit of their own and probably don’t really need supplementing. Still, it can’t hurt, right?
  • A saucepan with a bigger capacity than the volume of your fruit
  • A jelly bag / muslin strainer
  • Jam jars with lids, clean and dry. I like to re-use jam jars if I can, and save small pretty ones for jellies, to the eternal irritation of my husband who keeps finding empty jars all over the house. Jellies often have quite a delicate flavour, so do be careful the jars haven’t previously been used for pickles or curry sauce (give them a good suspicious sniff if in any doubt, and check the lids for staining – if so send them for recycling or use them for chutneys), as this could very easily taint your lovely jelly!

And this is how it’s done –

  • Stewing medlarsRoughly cut your fruit into pieces no more than about an inch square, removing any damaged / rotten areas (ignore this last detail in the case of bletted medlars, or you’ll have no fruit!)
  • Place the fruit in the saucepan and just cover with tap water. Add the citrus juice at this stage if desired.
  • Bring to the boil and then cover and simmer gently for an hour or so, stir from time to time but don’t mash.
  • Straining in the jelly bagSuspend your jelly bag over a bowl and spoon in your stewed fruit. A soup ladle is quite helpful here. A jelly bag is a really useful thing to have if you’re making jellies (who knew?) but can be a bit expensive. You can bodge your own with a tied muslin. Many jelly bags have stands, but I just tie mine to the handles of the eye-level kitchen cabinets.
  • The liquor that drains into the bowl will probably be cloudy. Don’t worry about this too much. You’ll see why in a bit.  Leave it to strain for at least a couple of hours.
  • When the flow of liquor from the jelly bag is almost exhausted, put the clean jam jars and lids in a cold oven and set the temperature to 150.
  • Now, when the dripping is essentially stopped, measure the volume of liquor you have, preferably in pints (please note this recipe uses UK Imperial weights and measures, not US ones).
  • Then weigh out the sugar you need, following the rule of thumb of one pound of sugar to one pint of liquid.
  • Return the liquor and the sugar to the (washed) pan, add any finely shredded herbs or spices (if you just want the flavour but not the pieces of herb or chilli etc in the jelly, you should have added them at the stewing stage so the pieces are filtered out – personally, I rather like the look of little nuggets of flavour in the final product), and bring gently up to the boil, stirring continuously.
  • You now have a pan of quite concentrated boiling sugar syrup, which you should under no circumstances leave unattended. It will probably froth a little and some scum may well rise to the surface. I’ve seen recommendations to skim this but I never bother.
  • At some point during the boiling process, with a bit of luck, the cloudiness will disappear entirely. No, I don’t know why, either. I think it’s that culinary alchemy again!
  • Keep stirring, and check for setting periodically. I put a couple of small saucers in the freezer ahead of time, then put a drop of the boiling syrup on the saucer, it will cool quickly and allow you to check the consistency. It’s ready when the cold jelly wrinkles when you push it with your finger.
  • Different jellies seem to reach setting point at very different rates, some will take as little as 10 minutes, so keep checking regularly. And tasting, of course.
  • Once your jelly has reached setting point, carefully get the hot sterilised jam jars out of the oven, fill with the hot jelly and tighten the lids fully. If you have any pieces in the jelly, watch to see if they’re trying to sink or float in the jars – if they are, then invert the jars every so often as they cool to mix the contents.
  • If you find, once they’re cold, that the jelly isn’t as set as you’d like, it’s perfectly alright to tip it back into the pan the next day, clean and re-sterilise the jars, and boil the jelly for a while longer. But assuming it’s mostly set, why would you bother unless you were planning an attempt on the local flower and produce show with it?
  • That’s it! Label, store, and enjoy at your leisure. They should keep at least a year in a cool dark place, but best to refrigerate after opening.

Doesn’t seem so hard, does it?  Now, don’t you want to know what happened to those medlars..?

Creamy home-smoked salmon pasta

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Time: 10 minutes – Patience: 10 minutes – Difficulty: Simple – Knackyness: Low

Yesterday, I had a first experiment at curing and smoking salmon at home.  Tonight, I made a creamy smoked salmon pasta with the cold smoked fillet I’d produced.

Smoked salmon pasta - some ingredientsIngredients –

  • One tail fillet of home-smoked salmon, around 100g
  • Two home-reared pullet’s eggs
  • One clove of home-smoked garlic, crushed
  • A small handful of grated parmesan or pecorino
  • A glug of double cream
  • Pasta of your choice, sufficient for two portions

Method –

  • In a dry frying pan, start to cook your whole smoked salmon fillet
  • In a large saucepan, bring some salted water to the boil
  • Add the pasta to the boiling water, along with a pinch of salt and a glug of olive oil
  • Once the salmon fillet is cooked, break it up into flakes in the pan, then add the crushed garlic clove and continue to fry gently for a couple more minutes
  • Meanwhile, in a bowl or jug, beat the eggs with a fork, add the glug of double cream and 2/3rds of the grated parmesan, along with a generous pinch of cracked black pepper
  • Once the pasta is cooked, drain and return to the saucepan.
  • Add the liquid ingredients to the frying pan with the salmon and garlic, and almost immediately transfer all of these into the drained pasta
  • Mix swiftly, the heat from the pasta will cook the egg, and the texture should end up thick and glossy.  But don’t worry if it looks a bit like scrambled egg with salmon in it, it will still taste marvellous
  • Serve into two bowls, topped with the rest of the grated parmesan

Simple, tasty, and all the key ingredients home-produced. And done in the ten minutes it takes to cook the pasta. What could be better?

Verdict on the smoked salmon? Undoubted success. Cooked in this dish it is distinctively and recognisably smoked salmon, has a good firm texture and slightly salty flavour and lovely smokey aroma.  Result!

I have an apology to make, however – it was a long day at work, and I was hungry… so I didn’t stop to take photos of the cooked dish, I just ate it!