Chez Pebble Soup, we have a word to define leftovers thrown together mixed in with beans, usually serve on toast. The ultimate comfort food: a gù.
There is no amount of sophistication in the kitchen which will beat a good gù.
However to turn a gù into a recipe which can be replicated and photographed nicely, we might need at the very least to get rid of the toast, probably replace the baked beans by fresh vegetables, turn the dish into a casserole or to give it, its proper name a ragù serve with a good glass (or two) of wine.
However to turn a gù into a recipe which can be replicated and photographed nicely, we might need at the very least to get rid of the toast, probably replace the baked beans by fresh vegetables, turn the dish into a casserole or to give it, its proper name a ragù serve with a good glass (or two) of wine.
If you are still contemplating what to do with the lamb left over from Easter. Look no further, I found this recipe in Waitrose magazine. It needed adapting for pecuniary reasons.
Notes on adapting this recipe and red wine sauces
When I grew up, in France, wine was used a lot in cooking to produce rich red wine sauces, such as in this Beef Guardiane.
But in the UK cooking with wine is an expensive business. The common mistake, one I made when I first arrived was to use cheap wine, don't bother. When you cook with wine, it has to be a decent wine as the taste of the wine is the basic flavour. My solution is to forget about the wine and replace the light stock with a heavier, richer one.
Lamb ragù
Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
2 carrots, cut into 0.5cm pieces
2 leeks, trimmed and cut into 0.5cm pieces
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
½ x 20g pack rosemary, leaves finely chopped
½ x 15g pack oregano, leaves roughly chopped
3 bay leaves
or replace the three herbs above by a good dose of mixed herbs
2 tbsp tomato purée
500ml beef or lamb stock
400-500g leftover lamb cut into 0.5cm pieces, or raw lamb cubes if you don't have any leftvovers
Salt ( only a little if the stock is already salted), pepper to taste
Method
In a large sauce pan, add the olive oil, cook the leeks and carrots for 10 minutes, medium heat.
Add the herbs, the garlic, the lamb and let it sweat for a further 10 minutes.
Add the rest of the ingredients bring it to boil and slow the heat down, cook for a further hour.
This dish was paired with a Romanian Recas’s Sole Shiraz, it's a medium bodied wine, very fruity, a rare combination of Shiraz, Fetească Neagră. It's a rather complex wine, lighter than the Romanian wines we tend to get normally in supermarkets and well worth getting a bottle if you like smooth red wine or if you feel a little adventurous (retailed at Waitrose)
Though I liked Reca's Sole for its complexity, I was not impressed at all by my pairing. It's only a few days later whilst reading this very interesting piece in the Guardian about Bulgarian and Romanian wines that I understood why - I had just done a big faux pas .
Though I liked Reca's Sole for its complexity, I was not impressed at all by my pairing. It's only a few days later whilst reading this very interesting piece in the Guardian about Bulgarian and Romanian wines that I understood why - I had just done a big faux pas .
Disclaimer: the wine was sent to us for review
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