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Beef casserole with carrots
This is a winter favorite, slow cooking in the oven is essential.
method:
– fry chopped onions and bite-sized chunks of stewing beef
– add hot paprika, cinnamon and ground cumin, fry for a minute or so until the spices coat the meat
– add chopped carrots, red wine stock, some orange zest, salt and water to cover
– place in a covered casserole dish and cook in the oven at 150 degrees for two hours or so. Make sure it doesnt get too dry.
– (optional) 15 minutes before serving add chopped mushrooms
– Serve with rice -
Geo-biology (more)
We had an earthquake, quite strange really, like driving the car off a steep curb but the whole house went “CLUNK!”. The funny thing was the animals in the roof and the cats and birds, they were all rushing/flitting around like mad for two of three seconds before the quake, as if they sensed it coming. No damage although some chimneys fell down near the epicentre where, apparently, the earth made a great rumbling noise.
My last earthquake was in Greece twenty years ago, I slept through the whole thing (or maybe we were just in the process of conceiving firstborn).
Night comes in
Like some cool river
I never knew
There’d be another day -
Lamb and vegetable Tajine with saffron
To keep the stones alive, you should soak them in a saline solution for 24 hours before the full moon and put them out to dry in the full moonlight. These stones have great power but we have to give them back their energy.
This is the great lesson of this last weekend and a wonderful Sunday lunch where so much was left unsaid but so much accomplished and even more understood. The menu, exotic as ever, was lamb tajine with couscous.method:
– chop dried apricots and dates and put to soak in lime juice with some raisins
– fry onion in a little hot oil
– add chunks of lean lamb and brown, add ground cumin, coriander seeds and chilli pepper and fry for two minutes to incorporate all the ingredients
– place in a tajine (earthenware dish with a cone cover) with large chunks of parsnip or turnip, potato, some whole carrots, chopped fennel, whole garlic cloves, courgette….. in fact almost any vegetables will do
– add vegetable or meat stock to cover with a lot of saffron (stems dissolved in warm water or crushed) and salt
– cover with tajine cone and cook at low heat in the oven or on the stove for two hours
– fifteen minutes before serving add the dried fruit that has been soaking in the lime juice, mix well
– serve with couscous and fresh coriander -
So you thought “Condom” is a silly name for a town
The very day I was galavanting around Gascony and visiting Condom I received this photo from a friend, who probably prefers to remain anonymous (for the francophiles among us, his name is Grisjambon).Much like Condom, where the Mayor got so fed up with his town signs being stolen by English tourists he created the world first (and possibly only) condom museum, there is apparently a little town in Austria (where else..) called “Fucking”.
The newspaper article, which accompanied the photo of the town sign, contained some absolute gems:
– “Police chief Kommandant Schmidtbrger said ‘We will not stand for the Fucking signs being removed.'”
He continues:
– “It may be amusing for you British, but Fucking is simply Fucking to us. What is this big Fucking joke?”
It gets worse:
– “German tourists want to see Mozart’s house in Salzburg, Americans seem only to care about The Sound of Music film, the occasional Japanese tourist wants to visit Hitler’s birthplace, but for the British it’s all about Fucking…….” -
Vegetarian gratin supplementary touch
I made the vegetarian gratin recipe last night adding a layer of sliced goats cheese. This transforms the dish completely and raises it to new levels of deliciousness
Orignal recipe can be found herebelow on 23rd October or on this link.
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Zapper
The first frosts came here in the South West. We started by lighting a fire in the wood stove but we soon succumbed to putting the central heating on, despite the exhorbitant price of gas.
Great trip around Gascony in the glorious autumn sunlight. Absolutely EPIC time in Condom (no pun intended) at the Hotel les Trois Lys . The tajine of confit de canard was especially memorable, as was the Mascarpone mousse with white armagnac. Such a pleasure to find adventurous cooks who dare to use spices and oriental cooking methods with traditional French ingredients. The full menu in English can be found by clicking here
Great hotel actually, although I didn’t sleep very well as there was a mosquito in the room, she kept biting me … although it might have been in a dream because I couldn’t see any bites in the morning and maybe she was just a very nice mosquito.
But this reminded me of Jacques, the owner of the café in Paris where I used to live. He had a country house somewhere in the middle of no-where and he refused to have a TV set. Instead he took a long extension lead down to the bottom of his garden where he would plug in an ultra-violet insect zapper, the ones that electrocute and even set fire to insects attracted to the light. He would sit with his neighbours having a drink after dark sitting around this contraption and watch the local insect wildlife being zapped, “much better than TV” he used to say, “it’s live”. -
Porc au caramel (Caramelised pork)
ingredients:
diced pork fillet
chopped fresh ginger
chopped onion
half glass chicken stock
two large spoons brown sugar
two soup spoons soy sauce
half glass madere, xeres, sherry, etc.method:
– fry onion in a little hot oil
– add pork and ginger
– once the meat is browned add all the other ingredients except the soy sauce
– reduce sauce over high heat until it thickens
– add soy sauce and serve with white rice.