Lamb ragù

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.

 

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 .

 

Disclaimer: the wine was sent to us for review

Gardiane de Boeuf AKA Beef Gardiane

On a recent visit to Avignon, flavours associated to my early childhood tickled my nose, once more. First meal, I ordered a Gardiane de Boeuf, a speciality of the area, now made with beef, yesterdays with bull meat.

Growing up in Nimes with a bullfighting aficionado for a dad, I had my fair share of bull meat. Gardiane was always on restaurant menus and always a family favourite.

Bull is now replaced by beef, as sourcing bull is complicated. Guardiane is a dish typical of Camargue, the Rhone delta, a wonderful swamp where flamingos, local horses and bulls live roam.

 

The dish called Gardiane as it was gardians' pack lunch. Gardians are horsemen who tended to bull herds, in another words a cow-boys and gardiane is a sophisticated boeuf bourguignon.

 

The meat needs to marinate over night. This is a dish with strong flavours which requires rice and/or wild rice to soak up the lovely juices.

 

Have a peep at the ingredients:

 

1 kg stewing beef -diced- serves 4 to 6 people
2  onions -peeled and chopped-
2 carrots- peeled and sliced
3 or 4 cloves garlic, left whole
3  anchovy fillets
green olives as many as you like
1/2 bottle of red wine

500ml beef stock
1 sprig rosemary
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
olive oil
Salt and pepper

 

Method

Peel and slice the onions. Peel the garlic cloves and leave them whole. Place in a bowl with herbs and a little olive oil. Marinate overnight.
 

The next day, Heat a pan with a little olive oil. Add beef pieces, mix and allow to color slightly, retrieve the meat and replace with  the onions and garlic for 5 minutes.
 

Meanwhile, rinse, peel and cut the carrots into thick slices. Add them to the pan, stir.
 

Add the anchovies, bouillon. Salt and pepper, add the olives and cover with red wine.
 

Simmer with a lead on for 2 hours.
 

When cooked, taste to check the seasoning. Increase heat to reduce the juices

Serve Camarguaise rice, a delicious French rice, firm and rather plain in flavour often mixed with black wild rice.

Inside the Palais des Papes in Avignon - Article soon on Trip Reporter

 

 

Beef Thai-Style

 

I don't know what other people do with their spice collection but with mine it's a constant battle. The number of little phials is growing every time I look and it seems impossible to keep it down. Not unlike books and music tracks which I suspect are reproducing when left alone.

 

You start with a few, next thing you know, you spend hours trying to organise them in a sensible (to you) manner, blink and there is thousands of them, of course each as important as the next.

 

When spice-blends appeared on the market, I wasn't too sure if they should be applauded or loaded. Take tandoori: that's not an every day dish, therefore having a little pot, all nicely labelled "tandoori", ready to use, with the correct proportion for each individual spice has to be an advantage, right?

Weeelll, may be, that's if you overlook the threat of an spice invasion.

For the following recipe, individual herbs and spices are listed however Bart does a blend called "Aromatic Thai" which fits perfectly

Beef Thai-Style

Ingredients

Serves 4
2 rib-eye steaks, about 400g
1 tsp sesame oil
3 red shallots, finely sliced
12 cherry tomatoes, halved
3 tbs lime juice
2 tbs Thai fish sauce or soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 lime quartered

Herbs & Spices:
2 lemongrass stalks
1 small red chilli, finely sliced  
3 tbs basil leaves
3 tbs coriander leaves

Method
Prepare the seasoning by trimming and slicing the lemon grass.
Chop the shallots and chilli
Tear the basil
Mince the mint and the coriander
Mix the lot in a medium bowl

On the other hand, use 3 tablespoon of Bart Aromatic Thai Blend

Smear the steaks with the spices, keep a quarter in the bowl

Use a grill or a non-stick pan brushed with sesame oil and fry the steaks to your liking. Slice the steaks. Transfer the slices to a serving plate

Add the tomatoes, lime juice, fish sauce and sauce to the bowl. Toss well and tip on the top of the steaks

 

Making Your Own Sausages

Last week-end we made sausages. Oh yes, there is no stopping the spirit of adventure is this house. When at the Hampton court foodie festival, he spotted a kit for sausages making. It's only after buying it that we realised a machine was needed to feed the meat into the casing.

For £7.99 the kit contained a mixture of spices/herbs and breadcrumbs, a plastic funnel "thingy", a serious long length of casing, probably collagen but not sure as the content description was scarce. The idea is to get fresh meat and here my trouble started, for some unknown reason I got 2/3 pork 1/3 beef which does not seem to be common place in sausages, mixed beef and pork sausages are somewhat a bit of an aberration.

In a bowl you mix the aromatic mixture with the meat and a little cold water once that is done you put the meat in the machine, if that is missing then you start feeding the plastic funnel, engage the casing in the end of the funnel and squeeze, squeeze as hard as you can.

Yes, the casing did split in occasion and it was really messy. On the enjoyment level we were divided 50/50 but ended up with 20 sausages which taste OK and cost £0.75p per.

The kit comes in several "flavours" Linconshire is the one we used, no I would not recommend it but there are far worse things to do and at times it was a giggle.