Venison Haggis Wellington

  Today is Burns' Day. Which is, of course, a good excuse to eat haggis. And drink lovely whisky. We actually had ours on Friday evening, because Friday is better for drinking whisky than Sunday.

This year, I decided to do something a bit different and put the haggis in a Wellington.

I had a venison haggis, MacSweens, of course, and a venison "steak" (the butcher who sliced it and called it a steak should be run out of the profession): it made sense to put them together. So I seasoned and seared the steak and let it cool completely.

Then I rolled out a sheet of butter puff pastry and topped it with the venison and the haggis (it was a tidy little one in a plastic casing, not a traditional one).

I'm not very good at the wrapping up and sealing side of making a Wellington. I tend to end up with a lot of tears and leaks, so this time I folded and crimped and squashed and showed it no mercy. It probably compromised the rising of the pastry layers, but at least it didn't fall apart... Then I glazed it with egg yolk and baked it.

The whisky we had with it was far too nice to cook with, and the haggis itself was seasoned with port, so I decided to stick with a fortified wine flavour for my sauce. I softened a shallot in a knob of butter, added 150ml chicken stock, 150ml madeira and 1tbs green peppercorns and simmered the sauce until it was reduced by half. Then I added a heaped tablespoon of sour cream, whisked it in and just brought it back to a simmer.

Because of the pastry, I didn't think we needed potatoes or swedes or anything starchy with it. But I had been fascinated by this article on "kalettes" or flower sprouts so I bought some to try. Very pretty, they cook in moments and taste more like a brussels sprout than kale, which is a good thing to my mind! I steamed them for a couple of minutes and tossed in a knob of butter.

The kalettes were the perfect thing with the rich, peppery wellington and creamy peppercorn sauce. And then of course delicious whisky was the icing on the cake. Sae let the Lord be thankit.

Full English bread pudding

This is one of those prepare-ahead dishes that the Americans tend to call casseroles, or strata. But really, it's a bread and butter pudding, made savoury with a layer of all the delicious elements of a full English breakfast. For a brunch or special breakfast where you don't want to be jumping up and down frying eggs for 6 people, make it the night before and refrigerate it. We had it for dinner over a couple of evenings - reheating it didn't totally destroy it, although it was nicer fresh, of course.

It's pretty adaptable, and I have said that the black pudding is optional, but I thought it was the best bit. So maybe this should be the first, non-threatening introduction to black pudding for the squeamish? Anyway, it's delicious and actually demands making in advance, so it needs a bit of pre-planning but once it is in the fridge you can suit yourself when you bake it.

Full English Bread Pudding (serves 6-8 for brunch, 4-6 large appetites for supper)

500g stale bread (I used a poppyseed bloomer)
olive oil
1 medium onion, finely diced
450g pork sausages, removed from their casings and rolled into walnut-size balls
100g bacon, cut into small pieces
200g mushrooms, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 spring onions, sliced
1 big handful parsley, finely chopped
150g black pudding, crumbled (optional, but really good)
handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
4 eggs
800ml milk
150g grated cheese (something that melts well. I used gruyere)
Black pepper
Nutmeg (optional - but I am almost incapable of seeing cheese without reaching for nutmeg)

The first bit is the most difficult - figuring out how many slices you need to cut your bread into in order to make two layers of bread slices. That will determine how thickly you need to cut it. Slice the bread and set aside.

Saute the onion in the olive oil until translucent, then add the balls of sausage meat and brown well. Add the bacon, mushrooms and garlic and saute for another few minutes or until the sausage balls are cooked through and the mushrooms have given off some of their liquid and reduced a bit. Stir in the spring onions and parsley, season with black pepper and allow to cool.

Place a layer of bread slices on the bottom of a deep-ish ovenproof dish (I used a pyrex lasagne dish). Spread the cooled mushroom and sausage mixture over the bread, then scatter with the black pudding and cherry tomatoes. Top with the second layer of bread.

Beat the eggs into the milk. If you have some on hand and you are making this for supper, you could add a slosh of vermouth at this point. It's a good addition but I didn't have any. Carefully (because it's going to want to skate off the top of the bread and make a mess) pour the eggy milk all over the bread. It should come up to the top of the sausage mixture.

Sprinkle with grated cheese, a grating more black pepper and a grating of nutmeg. Cover with clingfilm. Now, gently but firmly, press it down with both hands so that the top layer of bread gets pushed down into the custard mixture. Leave in the fridge for a bit - an hour, two hours, overnight, whatever suits you, but it does need a little rest to allow the custard to soak into the bread.

When you are ready to cook it, remove the cling film and bake it at 180 for 45 minutes or until it looks bubbly, golden and set. Serve hot.

Dirty Rice

I thought the next dish in my exploration of the food of the southern states of the USA would be grits. But it's turning out to be tricky to get grits. I could substitute polenta but apparently grits really are quite different, so until I can get it (without paying an arm and a leg on Amazon), I'll look at some other dishes.

Paul and I both like liver. But he likes it done to the point of abuse: leathery and bitter. It's worse than how he likes his eggs cooked. I feel so horrible treating food with such disrespect that I don't cook liver for him very often. I kept thinking about dirty rice as a way for us to eat liver without having to cook it to leather. It seemed like good end-of-the-week comfort food, requiring a bit of preparation but not a lot of effort in the cooking.

I looked at a few recipes before branching out on my own. I wanted a lot more bits to less rice because we were having it as a whole meal, not as a side dish. Also, even though most recipes used cooked rice, they also then added a lot of chicken broth, which I thought would make it wetter than I wanted. They also cooked the chicken livers much harder than I wanted to, although Paul would have approved of that.

So this is my version of a Southern classic. Hertfordshire dirty rice.

Dirty Rice (serves 3 as a main)

1 cup rice, dry weight
Vegetable oil
3 sticks celery, diced
2 large onions, diced
2 green peppers, diced
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
400g pork sausage meat
100g chorizo, diced
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dried marjoram
250g chicken livers, pulsed in a food processor until finely diced
Hot sauce, to serve

Cook the rice however you do. Spread out onto a plate to cool.

Saute the celery, onion and peppers in a bit of vegetable oil until starting to soften, then add the garlic, chorizo and sausage meat. Brown the sausage meat well and season with the paprika and herbs.

Stir the rice through the sausage mixture, then add the chicken livers and cook until it changes from an alarmingly bloody mass to a steaming hot brown mess. Taste for seasoning and serve with a good slurp of hot sauce.

Toad in the hole - a work in progress

 

I am going to get this right if it kills me. Toad in the hole is supposed to be a simple little dish of batter pudding, with sausages embedded in it. But try as I might if it rises it doesn't brown evenly, or it just doesn't rise, or my dish is too big so the batter doesn't fill it properly.

Still tastes good though. I use nice, meaty sausages, and embed chunks of black pudding and onion into it as well. Even dodgy batter soaks up gravy nicely.

Burns Night - a celebration of an old-school cookbook

As I've mentioned in years gone by, for us Burns Night doesn't have a lot to do with poetry and pageantry and everything to do with an excuse to eat haggis. Haggis suits my philosophy of trying to eat nose-to-tail (but not kidney, except in steak and kidney pudding, otherwise ick), it's inexpensive and it tastes delicious. It really does.

This year we kept the haggis element pretty simple. Just heated through in a roasting tin with a bit of water and covered in foil. We had it with rumbledethumps - partly because they are a bit more nutritious than straight neeps & tatties, partly because they are absolutely delicious and partly because the name is brilliant - and a mustard and whisky sauce.

I also made a dessert.

The Australian Women's Weekly Dinner Party Cookbook is a great cookbook. It's also a cracking historical document. It doesn't have a publication date in it, but it does have Publisher: Ita Buttrose, which means it must have come out between 1978-1981. Cookbooks don't really tell you what people were eating at any given time, but they do indicate what people were aspiring to eat.

This one suggests firstly that people were into giving dinner parties with multiple courses and fancy china and glassware. It also gives the impression that breadcrumbs were very popular (out of thirty-one menus fifteen feature a crumbed starter, main course or side dish) and that seafood pates were the order of the day (six of them, seven if you count taramosalata). But the big thing about it is that it indicates that Australians were ready to try some new things and explore some different cuisines. It features Austrian, French, Indian, Greek, Italian and Chinese-inspired menus, presented in a very accessible (i.e not strictly authentic or using exotic ingredients) way.

Not all of the dishes have stood the test of time. I won't be serving tinned asparagus in any guise, or making "caviar pate" from liverwurst, ketchup and salmon roe, or topping crumbed steaks with slices of avocado and mustard sauce. But this book probably has more recipes that I have actually made and made often than any other (except for the AWW Italian Cooking Class Cookbook). The korma curry is excellent (if not actually resembling any korma I've seen elsewhere), the chocolate ice cream balls are old favourites, the ginger gelato is the simplest possible ice cream and the apricot yoghurt slice is divine.

The whisky oranges with Atholl Brose cream, however, is probably the one single dessert I have made or eaten most often in my life (my mother started making it long before I was legally allowed to buy whisky). Orange segments, steeped in a whisky syrup and served with billows of whipped cream flavoured with more whisky and honey. The perfect combination of cool, zingy citrus, bland cream, booze and sweetness. Very hard to beat.

Of course, I am almost incapable of leaving well alone, so this time I tinkered with the recipe to make a sort of whisky orange parfait and used blood oranges. I made a ginger oatmeal brittle, following this recipe, but adding ground ginger instead of the cinnamon.

After a couple of hours macerating, I drained the juices from the oranges and warmed them up on the stove, adding a couple of sheets of soaked gelatine. I put the jelly in the bottom of the glasses, let it set a bit, then added the orange segments. I mixed the oatmeal brittle with half of the cream and put that in the glasses, then topped it with the rest of the cream and a couple of prettier chunks of oatmeal, then chilled it for a couple of hours to set.

It was delicious, but I can't honestly say it was an improvement on the original - just a nice variation.

There were some leftovers of both the haggis and the rumbledethumps. Which is a good thing because it means our portions were sensibly sized. It was also a good thing because it meant that we got to eat the leftovers for lunch the following day. Bubble and squeak is the traditional name for these sorts of leftovers, fried together, but I thought a better name for this is rumble and squeak. The leftovers were just mashed together roughly and fried in a pan in a little butter, then finished under the grill. If we'd been hungrier a fried egg on top would be good.

Pig's cheek two ways

Have you ever noticed that the names for meat change? So you have veal scallopini and calf's liver. Beef steak and ox tail. Pork loin and pig's cheek. It's veal, beef & pork because after the conquest, the Norman ruling class of England still spoke French, and would order veau, boeuf & porc which their English-speaking farmers produced from prime cuts of calf, cow and pig. But I reckon the other bits, the less-desirable bits, kept their English names because those were the parts, if anything, that were left over for the peasants.

As it happens, the less-desirable bits with the English names are actually very, very desirable. They tend to need a bit more care in the cooking, but then reward you with delicious flavour and melting texture.


Pig's cheeks are a new-ish discovery for me. We've had quite a lot of ox cheek and loved it, but the pig's cheeks have been harder to come by. Then I saw that ELSCo were stocking them and grabbed a kilo or so to experiment with.

Now, the thing to remember about pig's cheek, if you are used to cooking ox cheek, is that pigs aren't ruminants. Cattle are ruminants, so are goats, sheep and camels. Pigs aren't. So instead of getting all that work chewing the cud, a pig's cheek is not that tough a muscle. Which means that instead of having to slowly braise it for hours and hours to tenderness, about an hour of gentle cooking will reduce pig's cheek to gelatinous shreds. Very rewarding, not to mention more economical with the fuel.

My first pack of cheeks I did in a sort of Chinese braise, with yellow bean paste, ginger, garlic, shaoxing wine and soy. I left the cheeks whole and then sliced them when they were cooked to give more of a contrast between the outside and inside textures. Baby bok choi, halved and sauteed with garlic and a drip of sesame oil, rice and a garnish of spring onions finished the plate. It was delicious. The meat was so tender it was almost impossible to pick up with chopsticks.

Chinese-ish braised pig's cheeks with rice and baby bok choi

The second pack of cheeks I had more elaborate plans for. Since the Soho Food Feast, where I had a delicious crumbed pig's cheek bun from St John, I have been wondering how to make something similar.

What I ended up doing was browning the cheeks with a little mirepoix and just covering them with stock and a splash of sherry, and cooking them until they fell apart at the touch of a fork. I shredded the meat, added a little gelatine to the remaining cooking liquid and poured it over the meat in a plastic box, which I then put in the fridge over night. I remember seeing somewhere - can't remember where - a woman adding gelatine to her croquettes to make them more stable when you are cooking them, but then when they are hot you have a lovely runny filling.

So then I cut the firmly-set shredded meat in jelly into pieces, rolled each piece in flour, then did a triple coating of egg and breadcrumbs, letting it sit in the fridge to set for about an hour between coats. Time consuming, and a fiddle (and takes more eggs than you would imagine), but because of the liquid filling I wanted a really firm coating.

In between crumb coats, I made an apple and celeriac remoulade to go with the croquettes.

Then I deepfried the croquettes until a deep golden brown and drained them well on kitchen paper. They certainly couldn't have been sandwiched in a bun the way the St John ones were - as soon as the crust on these was broached the deliquesced juices ran out to form a delicious gravy.

The leftover croquettes, reheated in the oven the following day for lunch, were almost as good as the first time around.

The croquettes oozed gravy when they were sliced

Oxtail Pörkölt

I've been seeing a lot of goulash recipes around lately. I suppose it is the sort of chilly, damp weather where big pots of slow-cooked meats in richly flavoured sauces are appealing. I was particularly taken by James Ramsden's oxtail goulash recipe. There was just the teensiest problem though. I have a friend of Estonian heritage who has lived in Hungary and has always been quite adamant that what we call goulash is not goulash at all, but porkolt. Porkolt is thicker than the soupier goulash; it's a very simple slow-cooked stew with few ingredients.

Apparently it is quite important to the final flavour to cook the onions initially in lard. I didn't have any lard, so I used some beef dripping left from a rather good roast. The flavour of my porkolt really was exceptionally rich, so I will put that down to the dripping.

The word porkolt apparently means "roasted". The stew gets its character from the meat being well-browned in the onions and paprika before liquid is added.

My apologies to your Hungarian grandmother if this isn't how she did it. It tasted good and it had a very old-fashioned sort of flavour, so I am hoping it isn't too desperately inauthentic.

Oxtail Porkolt (makes about 3 portions)

2 tbs lard or beef dripping (or oil)

3 large onions, finely sliced

2 cloves of garlic, sliced

1 kg oxtail

2 tbs sweet paprika

1 tbs hot smoked paprika

1-2 red peppers, diced (I only had one but 2 would have been better)

1 can chopped tomatoes

500ml beef stock

Melt the beef dripping in a large oven-proof saucepan or casserole (I used my Le Creuset dutch oven, of course), then add the onions and cook gently until translucent. Increase the heat and add the garlic and the pieces of oxtail. When the oxtail starts to take colour, sprinkle over both paprikas and cook until the meat starts to get bit of a crust on it from the paprika. Add the diced peppers, tomatoes and beef stock, stirring well to scrape up the toasty bits from the bottom of the casserole. Bring to the boil, then put the lid on and cook in a low oven for about 4 hours, having a look about once an hour to make sure it isn't getting dry.

For about the last half hour, if there is still a lot of sauce, you might want to take the lid off to let it reduce to a really thick gravy.

Serve with buttered noodles or spatzle.

There was a little bit of intensely-flavoured, jellied sauce and a couple of bits of meat left after we'd stuffed ourselves silly, so I used it to fill some rounds of pastry for little fried empanadas for lunch.

Spaghetti con Fegatini di Pollo: Presto Pasta Nights

This is my first ever submission to the long-running Presto Pasta Nights. For 221 rounds Ruth at Once Upon A Feast and a bunch of guest hosts have been doing a summary of all that is great and good in the pasta blogosphere.

This week's is being hosted by Helen at Fuss Free Flavours, so I am sending my spaghetti con fegatini di pollo (chicken liver spaghetti) over to her for the round up tomorrow.

I used this Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recipe, although as it was a mid-week meal I didn't have time to make my own fettucini! And I don't know about serving 6-8 people - that quantity of sauce on 500g spaghetti (raw weight) served the two of us with two portions of leftovers for the following day. Anyway, it was thoroughly delicious. And a very easy way into offal if you are not sure about that sort of thing!

Chicken liver and potato salad

This substantial salad from Nigel Slater is very rich! The combination of the crisped new potatoes (I added a couple of cloves of garlic to the oil), tender chicken livers and sour cream dressing (I left out the dill) with the crunchy slices of pancetta was delicious. I piled it onto some salad leaves to make it salad-y-er but a green vegetable on the side, or perhaps a few steamed green beans added to the mix, would be good too. Still, it somehow tastes light enough to be a viable option in this warmer weather that has finally hit!

Foodekaat - Himmel un Äd

A while back, the well-travelled and linguistically-inclined Travelrat commented on my blog that Foodycat sounds like Foodekaat, which is the Kölsch (dialect of Cologne) for menu! I would love to say that it was deliberate, but it wasn't, it was a happy accident.

It did get me wondering about the food of Cologne, and thinking that, in honour of the happy accident, I should make something traditional to that part of Germany.

One dish that kept coming up in my searches was an unlikely sounding concoction called Himmel un Äd (in Kölsch, Himmel und Erde in German, Heaven and Earth in English) - a potato and apple puree most often served with blutwurst (black pudding) and fried onions. I decided to take the elements (potato, apple & black pudding) and make it into something a bit more refined.

Heaven and Earth (serves 2)

300g pink fir apple potatoes
bunch of flat leaf parsley
handful of lardons
1 tsp capers, drained
1 shallot, finely sliced
3 tbs white wine vinegar
2 thick slices of black pudding (I know a lot of people rate Bury, I prefer Stornoway) cut in half
1 Granny Smith apple, cored and cut into 8ths
2 pigeon breasts, cut in half
1 clove of garlic, minced
knob of butter
splash of oil
black pepper

Boil the spuds until tender, then drain and place in a salad bowl. Fry the lardons until crisp, then add to the potatoes, along with the capers, parsley and shallot. Deglaze the bacon pan with the vinegar and pour that over the potatoes. Add the butter and oil to the pan (the deglazing means you don't have to wash it up) and when the butter foams, add the apple slices, pigeon breasts and black pudding. Sprinkle the minced garlic over it. After about 3 minutes, turn the ingredients. After another 3 minutes season with black pepper and serve alongside the still-warm potato salad. A minimum effort supper dish that is really very delicious. If not precisely as they make it in Cologne!

A belated Burns Supper

Actually, our Burns Supper wasn't at all belated, just my posting about it is! While we don't do the poetry and toasts and pagentry, we do use the 25th of January as an excuse to eat haggis. Because it tastes good and contains about a million calories (or, in fact, 300/ 100g), so is an occasional treat and therefore needs an excuse.

Instead of buying a whole, traditional haggis, this time I bought a 200g section of a "haggis pudding", packed like a black pudding in a plastic skin. This suited my purposes perfectly. I divided the haggis in two, and pressed each portion into a big, flat portobello mushroom and roasted it in the oven until the mushroom juices were flowing and the edges of the haggis were crisp but not too dry.

I served it with bashed neeps (mashed turnips - which are what we Southerners call swedes) flavoured with a little butter and a lot of nutmeg, broccolini and a whiskey sauce. The whiskey sauce is a bit contentious; apparently only tourists would eat haggis with a whiskey sauce. Well, sometimes I am a tourist, and the sauce tasted good so I am not ashamed.

Whiskey Sauce for haggis (or steak or chicken)

1 tsp butter
1 shallot, finely diced
1/4 cup whiskey
1/2 tsp dijon mustard
2tbs double cream

Melt the butter and add the diced shallot. Saute until transparent. Add the whiskey and allow to reduce by half. Whisk in the mustard and cream. Do not allow to boil again.

Since we were already doing an "occasional treat" meal, I also made a dessert. Now, I found a couple of recipes for something called Edinburgh Fog - basically amaretti biscuits with boozy cream - and I decided to make it into a Scottish-influenced version of Eton Mess (broken meringues, strawberries and whipped cream) .

Fettes Mess (serves 2)

1/2 cup amaretti biscuits, broken into pieces
2 tbs whiskey
1 tbs honey
1 cup raspberries (fresh Scottish ones in summer - these were frozen)
1/2 cup double cream

Whip the cream to soft peaks, fold in the other ingredients and divide between 2 glasses. Allow to chill for a couple of hours before serving.

School holiday treat - St Johns

Yes, it is that time again. The school holidays. So Jude and I have been racking our brains for the last month or so on where to go for our treat lunch. We finally settled on St John. Allow me to suggest that the squeamish run away and play, and come back in a couple of days when I will have something non-confrontational for you.

St John does offal. It does game. It does unusual cuts of meat that you are not particularly likely to see in other places. And it does them really very well.

I tend to think that the condition of the loos tells you a lot about a restaurant. The loos at St John are immaculately clean and white tiled. The hand soap is from Cowshed (which I love) and the hand dryer is a Dyson Airblade (which is so good it has actually given me an opinion on hand drying). So what we are seeing is simplicity and minute attention to detail.

Best to get the downside out of the way fast. The lovely sourdough bread that Jude nibbled and I wolfed while we read the menus would have been much better served with side plates. I thought that was the only wrong note for the day. I hate buttering my bread on the table, and with slices of bread it isn't like rolls where it is easy enough to break off bits and hold them in your hand to butter them. Pet hate of mine.

Moving on...

The starter they are noted for is the bone marrow. Simply roasted, presented with beautifully grilled toast, parsley salad and damp grey salt, you are instructed to scoop the marrow onto the toast, sprinkle with the salt and top with a little of the salad. The little bite I had of that one was fatty, rich and delectable. Jude said that she would never eat another starter if it was on the menu.

I had quite a hard time choosing a starter. They had brown crab on toast, which I adore, and anywhere else it would have been a certainty, but I thought I should try something else. They had grilled razor clams, and I have always said I wanted to try razor clams, so I gave them a go. Having seen this footage of Rick Stein catching them, I somehow thought they would be a bit rubbery. They weren't. The texture was more like a scallop than a clam, sweet, meaty and yet delicate, set off very nicely by the salsa verde and the slight charring of the shells. I borrowed some of Jude's toast to mop up the juices.

I found it much easier to pick a main course. I thought the pigeon, cabbage and bacon sounded fabulous. And it was pretty good. The cabbage was slightly over salted, and the way it presented I was looking for the tang of sauerkraut which wasn't there. Not the fault of the dish, just my expectation when seeing finely shredded, slowly cooked white cabbage. It had the mouthfeel of sauerkraut, just not the flavour. The big lardons of tender bacon through it made up for that though! The pigeon breast meat was lovely and gamey, cooked just a bit more rare than medium, which is how I like it, but it meant the thighs and wings were just a bit too tough to be edible.

I think on the main courses Jude made the better choice. Her lamb sweetbreads with peas and mint were just lovely. I have had sweetbreads before - and not been particularly wowed by them. These were delicious. Tender and creamy, rich but not cloying with the mint, peas and onions.

We shared some tiny little potatoes, cooked in their jackets. I could have eaten those potatoes all day.

With our meals we shared a bottle of a very nice Minervois. A red wine, but quite light and (I thought) well suited to our food. Something I really liked was that the wine list is arranged in order of prices, so it was quite easy to draw my line in the sand of what I wanted to pay for a bottle. And there were quite a few bottles for less than £30, which was very pleasing!

The dessert menu was too hard to resist. Our plan to share half a dozen freshly baked madeleines came to nothing. I was very tempted by the raspberry ripple icecream. And then I was very tempted by the treacle tart. And then I thought it would be nice if there was someone willing to share the marmalade sponge for 2 with me. And then I thought eccles cakes with lancashire cheese would be good.

Jude was much more focussed. She spotted the lemon sorbet with Russian vodka and ordered it with a minimum of fuss or vacillation. It was a wonderful sorbet! Just nudging at the edge of being too sharp without going over it; perfectly smooth without a hint of icyness.

I opted for the buttermilk pudding with prunes: Jude thought you'd have to have a nursery food fetish to be interested in that. Which I do - but I was actually thinking more of my mother's sublime buttermilk pannacotta. This was a softer set than a pannacotta, closer to yoghurt really. I couldn't believe they managed to turn it out! It was vanilla-y and lemon-y and lactic-y and gorgeous. The prunes were good. They would have been better if they'd been plumped up in some Pedro Ximenez or armangac. The shortbread fingers showed just how short it can be. Just lovely.

The classiest moment of the meal came at the end. When Jude's starter was cleared, she'd asked if her marrowbones could be wrapped up to take home for her dog. At the end of the meal she was presented with a bag containing about 10 of the bones. He is going to be a very happy puppy!

Oh - and I forgot to say that Fergus Henderson was there, chatting to a couple of people and dealing with suppliers. That is very, very cool.

Haggis & bashed neeps

Last weekend I thought I would take advantage of it being St Andrews Day to cook a haggis. Any excuse really - I like haggis! And it seems that I am not alone. An increasing number of Sassenachs are eating haggis because it is cheap and nutritious.

As it happens we didn't have it on St Andrews Day because we'd had an enormous lunch. But when we did get around to it, it was delicious! Not the famous MacSweens, this one was from Blackface, one of the excellent on-line meat suppliers in the UK.

We cooked it really simply in a bain marie covered tightly in foil, so that the skin didn't split and it stayed moist. I made some "bashed neeps" - mashed turnips. Now, what the Scots consider a turnip is what I call a swede and (apparently) some people call a rutabaga. Boiled, mashed with a good dob of butter and a grating of nutmeg it is a very nice accompaniment to the spicy, meaty haggis. I made a little honey, mustard and whisky sauce, but the flavour was pretty much lost. Still, it was warm, comforting and very delicious. And it's only 6 weeks to Burns Night when I have my next good excuse to eat haggis!

Black pudding tour of Britain

OK, so I didn't actually take any pictures of black pudding while we were away, so here is an atmospheric, Lord of the Rings-y oak tree - the most British of trees - to illustrate my thoughts on the most British of smallgoods.

For a more technical look at black pudding (and some good-looking recipes), head over to the Big Black Pudding - a blog which is not about black pudding normally, but conveniently has a 10 page guide.

Having just spent some time travelling around Britain, I sampled quite a lot of black pudding. It was on the menu for breakfast in all of the places we stayed, and I had a taste of all of them. Now, the black puddings I tried may not actually have been representative of their regions, but they all called them "local" so I am taking them more or less as my benchmarks for each region.

Gwynedd, Wales: The black pudding was quite lightly seasoned and seemed to have quite a lot of rusk or filler in it. A mealier texture than I like, but still quite pleasant. The pork and leek sausage that also featured in my "Full Welsh" breakfast was excellent, so I am going to assume that this was also a premium product.

Cumbria, England: It was in Cumbria a couple of years ago that I had my first taste of black pudding, and realised that not all puddings are created equal. This was quite different to other black puddings I have had in the Lakes, less mealy, quite velvety, but with quite large pieces of pork fat in it. As the pudding had been very nicely cooked, the fat had crisped up and was more delicious than you would think, but I think it'd be quite greasy and unpleasant if it weren't really crispy.

Perthshire, Scotland: My preferred black pudding is Scottish, so I had quite high hopes for this one. And they were very nearly met. The pudding had a lovely, velvety, close texture, not too much other stuff breaking up the texture, and it grilled to a really good crispness. The only thing that made it not quite as good as the one I buy at Borough Market was the seasoning - not quite as much pepper as I like.

Wensleydale, England: The Wensleydale pudding served at breakfast in Yorkshire had a lot of barley in it, giving it a crumblier texture. It was well-seasoned and a very good breakfast black pudding, although I wouldn't want to try any of the more refined dishes (with scallops or apple) using it.

In short - I like black pudding. But I would really like to source the smoked black pudding one of my local pubs serves - Hertfordshire smoked black pudding would definitely beat all the variations I tried last week!

Scotland

After the lovely meal at the Drunken Duck, a good night's sleep and an excellent breakfast, we drove to Scotland. And from a culinary point of view things went downhill.

The hotel we stayed in had the most generic of menus. Burgers, fish & chips, steak. Nothing to indicate a sense of place. We were staying about 1/2 mile from a smokery, but they didn't have any of the local product available. Disappointing.

(By the way - I have no idea if these were edible mushrooms, but we were on a walk and I thought they were cute).

Fortunately on our last day we drove for 3 hours and finally found an internet cafe, which pointed us to a hotel about 20 miles from where we were staying that did seem to have an interest in local produce, so we booked a table.

A long drive across a moor, followed by a short run through midge-infested air got us into the Moor of Rannoch. Surely the most remote restaurant I have ever eaten at. It wasn't a bit fancy, but it was really what we had been hoping for.

We both started with big flat mushrooms stuffed with haggis and grilled until crispy. A very good use for haggis! I really like haggis, but being faced with a whole one can be a bit confronting.

Then I had delicious salmon, slowly cooked in the Aga with lots of butter and lemon and the best capers I have ever had. It was moist and succulent and so very lemony! Paul had roe venison, with what the menu called red currant sauce. We thought it was more like a Cumberland sauce because there was a distinct citrus edge and some shreds of zest in it.

It was so disappointing to spend time in Scotland at this time of year without even seeing grouse on the menu (saw loads of them running around though) but at least we did get one good meal.

The Drunken Duck, Ambleside

In the Lake District there is a wonderful gastropub called the Drunken Duck. In 4 visits to the Lakes we've only managed to get a table for dinner once, so I was really keen to get in this time. And when I went to the website to find the phone number I discovered that they have rooms as well! What serendipity. So I got a Courtyard View room and a table for dinner in the restaurant.

We checked in at about 3.30 to discover the most civilised thing in the world. The (quite reasonable) room rate included bed, breakfast AND afternoon tea! The lovely girl on reception said "Just call down when you want your tea", and 10 minutes after that a tray of fresh, hot scones, homemade mixed berry jam and a generous dish of clotted cream arrived. The tea was proper leaf tea with a strainer and everything. How absolutely perfect.

Paul went down to his favourite lake to fish, the sun came out and I lay on the bed and read. Brilliant afternoon. Although I should probably have had a good walk to prepare myself for the dinner to come.

The people sat on both sides of us in the restaurant were a bit dreadful. Paul has this hypothesis that people who are uncomfortable in restaurants behave badly and I think it is true. I suspect they thought they were coming to a pubby pub and to have white tablecloths and good glassware was a bit much for them.

The menu was very, very tempting. I started with a game terrine with pear and vanilla chutney. Unusual, but perfect. Shreds of slow cooked meat (I suspect venison shin) surrounded lean chunks of rare meat - pigeon, venison and pheasant, I think. The only way I can figure that they got the texture is to have cooked the bits separately, then pressed them into the terrine and weighted them while they cooled and the jelly from the slow-cooked meat glued it all together. Heaven.

Paul started with beef carpaccio. Which was good, but I won the first round.

As a main course, I had lamb with beans and sweetbreads. I'd never tried sweetbreads before and I figured that this was a good, non-threatening introduction to them. And if anyone is going to make something taste good, I back the Drunken Duck to do it. The lamb (fillet) was delicious. Herby and tender and lovely. The beans (a mixture of little white and green beans - maybe fresh navy beans and broadbeans?) were delicious, but the sweetbreads were a bit of a non-event. They were cut into very small pieces, so I just got fleeting tastes of something sort of creamy and fatty before they were gone. Can't really see why they are a gourmet treat. The only thing that let the dish down was the spinach. It hadn't been washed properly and was very gritty. That sensation of grit rubbing against your teeth is horrible. I did mention it to the waitress, but her English wasn't very good and I don't think she understood. And I am sure she didn't tell the kitchen.

Paul had venison for his main course. It was served with red cabbage and a sauce that involved chocolate. Also tender and delicious.

We couldn't face dessert or cheese, so we wandered outside to finish our wine while we looked across the valley at the twinkling lights of Ambleside.

Liver & onions

It's rainy and grim and despite all of the blossom on the trees (we think we have an apple tree in the bottom of the garden), it has been feeling wintry again.

So - a warming dish of liver and bacon. Served in a smaller portion than usual to fit the diet, with just a pile of greens instead of anything starchy. The asparagus is Spanish though... disappointingly, Waitrose had sold out of the British stuff by the time we got there.

Fry a sliced onion in a spot of olive oil until it is collapsing. Add some lardons of bacon and whole button mushrooms. When you have a good sizzle on, and the onions are really properly cooked but before they start to crisp, add your slices of liver. When they are almost cooked, add a splash of sherry or port or something. Swirl around the pan and onto the plates. Yum!

Offley good

I know it is not for everyone, but there is something about a dish of liver that is very comforting. I went to a funeral yesterday (lovely Pat Webb, rest in peace dear lady) and I just wanted something nourishing and comforting for tea last night. A hearty soup - pea and ham, mutton and barley, minestrone - would have done the job, but they all take quite a bit of time (and I end up eating them for a week).

So I decided that it was to be liver, bacon and onion gravy.

At my husband's insistance, I sliced an onion into fine half-moons. I would probably have diced it, but he was right. I cooked it very slowly in olive oil until it was entirely floppy and yellow and beginning to caramelise. Then I added some dried rosemary and cooked it a bit longer. Then I added dry-cured smoked bacon, cut into chunky lardons, and when that had browned and was about to crisp, I added 2cm pieces of lamb's liver. When that was cooked through (but before it could toughen) I added a slosh of dry sherry and some freshly ground white pepper. We had it with some M&S veg (asparagus, runner beans and broccoli; cauliflower cheese) and some extra onion gravy I'd had in the freezer. Perfect. A warming end to a sad day.

Gilpin Lodge II

After a ruddy awful night's sleep (lovely comfy bed, new silk nightie, FAR too hot) we staggered downstairs to breakfast, where I regretted that I had not brushed my hair. A cafetiere of the best coffee I've ever had in a hotel made me feel a bit better, and then a compote of winter fruits (or, in fact, plumped up dried apricots, figs and prunes) with lovely thick yoghurt improved things further. A main course of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs (a 2 course breakfast! Oh my!) made me want to crawl back into bed to sleep it all off, but we had work to do.

First, a fruitless expedition into Bowness to buy a frock since I was desperately underdressed in the restaurant (I think that they should clarify on the website that "casual but smart" means no jeans). Then we hired a boat at Esthwaite Water Trout Fishery for my husband to have a bit of a throw. He's fished there many times with no success but it is just so stunning that we keep going back. If I am to be bored by fishing it is going to be with a book in my hand and a lovely view.

When the light started to go, we headed back to Gilpin Lodge to dress for dinner. I put lipgloss on.

The previous night I'd seen a couple served with "bellini's" which were completely clear. I decided to have a go with one for my pre-dinner drink and it was lovely. The peach flavour must have been from a peach schnapps or similar liqueur, because it was very strong and more alcoholic than your average glass of bubbly. Paul succeeded in getting his Talisker served with 1 cube of ice. The canapes were tiny chicken samosas with raita, more olives and a lovely gazpacho with basil oil.

Our introductory taste at the dinner table was a pumpkin veloute with roasted pumpkin seeds. The soup was perfectly smooth and creamy and so on, but it had really lost the pumpkin character and natural velvetiness that makes it such a winner. The pumpkin seeds were wonderful though, and provided a much-needed textural contrast.

The restaurant has a pretty wide selection of half-bottles of wine - a good thing, because there was no way we were going to be able to share a bottle. My husband had chablis with his red mullet with peppers, courgettes, goats' cheese tortellini and red wine jus. I ordered some Chorey-les-Baume to go with my hare faggot wrapped in Savoy cabbage with beetroot puree and baby turnips, but I got to do an interesting comparison when the 1/3 bottle of zinfandel that we'd left the night before was brought out.

The faggot was very good - rich and livery, with the mineral flavour of the Savoy cabbage wrapping really cutting through nicely. I couldn't say which wine was better with it, they were equally good but very different, but as a wine I preferred the Chorey-les-Baumes.

We've got a really good Italian restaurant just near us, and we nearly always order the sole meuniere. So seeing a main course of poached and roasted lemon sole with confit shallots, capers, flat-leaf parsley and roast chicken jus, my husband decided he had to see how a properly posh place does sole. And he announced that poaching and then roasting and adding a sticky jus was a waste of a good fish. He even went so far as to say it lost the soul of sole, but I wish he hadn't.

I was tempted by the pot-roasted pig's head, because I just couldn't imagine how they would present it, but I went for an easy option and chose assiette of veal with wild mushrooms and Madeira sauce. The 3 cuts were poached fillet, slow-cooked shoulder and tongue. I've never had tongue before, but it was delicious. The meat was served with some of the most magnificent mash, quite heavily infused with rosemary. It was interesting having the mash provide seasoning to the dish, instead of being a bland, filling cop-out. I did think that having 3 cuts all cooked quite slowly with moisture didn't really show the versatility or different characters of the meat very well. I think a little piece of saltimbocca or a grilled cutlet would have been a better option than poached fillet.

The pre-dessert was lemon cream with a compote of forced rhubarb, which was gorgeous. The delicate, pale pink rhubarb was hidden under a blanket of cream speckled with candied lemon zest. I suspect there may have been some limoncello in there too.

I still had quite a lot of my red wines left, so I decided to have the cheese platter. There were 7 cheeses, which I think is too many. Bigger portions of 4 would have been less confusing to the palate. None of them really floated my boat. Even the Stichelton, which was the it cheese at Christmas, wasn't what I want in a stilton-style cheese.