Nigerian Trotter Stew – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 2

The first thing to understand is that a stew is Nigeria is what we would call a sauce. Understand? Good.

In working my way along the animal, after the tail, the toes seemed like the next appropriate spot to move to. There’s recently been some good trotter chat on twitter, so if you want to keep abreast of that, you’d better give me a follow! Acting on the advice of Luke from the restaurant Dough, then disregarding it somewhat (sorry), I slow cooked my trotters in water with four cloves for six hours on high. This makes the most amazing stock. However, I made a beginnners mistake and realised after I’d removed the elbows that what I had were not chunky back trotters, but slimline fore trotters – that equals less meat.

Another thing to note. Always buy your trotters from the back end of the pig. Not the front. No joke.

Then I had a massive bowl of stock with lots of bones and bits of pig in it. I went through the bowl, removing the bones and breaking the skin up and removing any bits of cartilage that I didn’t think would be good to eat. I then had a smaller bowl of meat (included skin and tendons and all the bits, because of the slow cooking they are ALL GREAT TON EAT) and a bigger bowl of stock.

Now, time to make my sauce. I got the recipe from my first foodie penpal Jen who runs the Sharing Supper Club. I read it and then did it slightly differently. I must learn to concentrate whilst cooking.

So for a Nigerian stew – which means what? You need:

1 onion chopped, 1 can chopped tomatoes, quarter teaspoon cameroon pepper, half a can of stock, fresh thyme

I cooked the onion tomatoes and spice together for about fifteen minutes, then blended them to smooth and returned to the pan and added some of the bowl of pork trotter stock.

Then I had Nigerian stew. The thyme goes on top as you serve it.

It is very easy. I got the spice from Jen, but if you live in Leeds you could get it from one of the African shops in the market. I almost bought some dried smoked shrimps today – any ideas for them?

I then added my bowl of trotter meat and stirred it all together.

It goes to a really lip-smakcing sauce. We had a few spoons of it with some rice (cooked in the rest of the pork stock) and a couple of tortillas.

Lip-smacking is the word. Even Daz’s friend Bill who shuddered when Daz showed him a picture of the trotter in our fridge, liked it.

Testicles tomorrow! I’d better not balls them up! ho ho *crawls into a corner*

Veal Tail Risotto – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 1

So if you read this previous post, you’ll know I’m eating my way along the animal this fortnight, beginning at the tail.

Day 1 began with tail, rather than head, because I didn’t plan very well, so had to get some veal tail out the freezer. (Offal drawer is not big enough to accommodate a whole head at the moment.) This veal tail I purchased a few weeks ago from the Alternative Meat Company along with my hearts, hanger steaks and tongues. Veal does have a beefy taste, but quite a light one. It tastes pretty sweet too. I wanted to use some flavours that wouldn’t cover the veal taste. With ox tail, recipes tend to use quite a lot of heavy flavours like star anise and chilli and I wanted to avoid that.

Veal tails are smaller than oxtails, so I used two. I was cooking for three people.

To begin with I decided to poach the tails in water for a few hours to separate the meat from the bones and to make a veal stock.

The water looks a bit pink because I added the defrosted blood from the cellophane packets to the water. It;s all good. I let the bones simmer all afternoon, so for maybe four hours. Keep topping up the water so it doesn’t boil dry. When the meat is separating itself from the bones, take the pieces out, pull the meat off and put to one side. Bones, gristle and cartilage to the bin. You should now have a bowl of poached veal and a jug of veal stock!

ooh look at all the goodness in there

The stock should look cloudy. This will be the base stock for your risotto, it should smell a little beefy and a little chickeny.

Then, to the risotto making.

Finely chop 1 onion, 3 cloves of smoked garlic and 2 sticks of celery. Heat a tablespoon of oil in your risotto pan, add the finely chopped ingredients and sweat them down gently so its all softened and lovely. Add 1 tsp dried parsley, half tsp dried rosemary and quarter tsp ground nutmeg. Stir it all together. Add the risotto rice -enough for 3 people – about 350g I think? I judged it by shakes from the packet though … Stir again. Add the veal bits and stir around.

The you’re at the point where you can add your stock –  a little at a time so the rice swells with the fluid, then add a bit more and so on. I’ve assumed that most people reading have made a risotto before – if you haven’t then please get in touch and I can give you more deets.

When you’re happy that your rice is cooked and lovely, take the pan off the heat and stir in about 500g of fresh spinach. The heat from the rosotto will wilt it down fast, but you loose very few of the nutrients from it.

Serve with grated cheese (parmesan for authenticity, cheddar for convenience if you’re me).

I understand, mostly what you can see is a pile of cheese.

To sum up, the ingredients you need are:

1 kg veal tail, several pints of water, 1 onion, 3 cloves garlic, 2 sticks celery, 1 tsp parsley, 1/2 tsp rosemary, 1/4 nutmeg, 350g risotto rice, 500g spinach, cheese for grating.

I hope you like the freshness of the ingredients. I think this was a good start to Nose to Tail Fortnight! I’m going to try and blog each day moving my way along the animal – here’s where we are now:

Doing things properly!

I was delighted when I found this little volume it a second-hand shop in Fakenham in Norfolk. I’m not sure what it was called, but I know it had moved some distance to its new premises there. It sold some books, some furniture, records, coins and miscelleany. The man was valuing a home-made exploding warship when I was in there. The explosion was caused by a mousetrap! But I digress …

I really love cookery books from the 1970s and 1980s. This gem was published in 1984, fulfilling the niche in the cookery bookmarket. It was designed “for those who are buying (or thinking of buying) their first slow cooker, as well as the expert” – something for everyone you may say. In the introduction, it’s still women who do cooking. Men can’t. Wrong sized hands. My favourite section is about Who uses a slow cooker? and it lists Students, People out at Work, Mothers and Old Folks. So most people, right? Not fathers though. You couldn’t say that EVERYONE uses a slow cooker. Not yet, anyway.

The other reason apart from the sexism that I love these books is because they often have several offal recipes. Some of which have a continental influence! *Gasps*

So to dip my toes into the “Properly Explained” world of Slow Cookery, I started with a liver recipe.

I’m still working out my relationship with liver. I really like it, in all the species, but it is very much an offal you have to treat with respect. Ox-tail you can do what you want with and as long as you cook it long enough, it’ll be lovely. Liver, I believe, could turn against you if you’re not kind to it.

So I gently stroked my lamb’s liver and whispered to it: “If you could become one of the recipes from Slow Cooking Properly Explained, which one would you like to be?” And the liver said “I would like to be Liver Austrian Style”. Who am I to refuse a dead organ’s last wishes?

Liver Austrian Style

LOW 3 – 10 hours

1 lb sliced lamb/pork liver, 300ml milk, 25g butter, 1 finely chopped onion, 100g sliced chestnut mushrooms, 1 tbsp flour, 1 tsp salt, black pepper, bouquet garni, 300ml stock, 3 tbsp cream

If your liver isn’t fresh or you are worried about the quality of it then you’ll need to soak it in the milk for 8 hours before cooking it. Put it in a bowl, cover with the milk and refrigrate for 8 hours. When you’re ready to use it, drain it, discard the milk and pat the liver dry with kitchen roll.

To make the dish: in a large pan gently fry the onion in the butter until softened but not browned. Add the mushrooms and cook for a further minute on a low heat. Toss the liver in the flour and brown it quickly on both sides, stirring to keep the meat separate. Add the seasoning, bouquet garni and stock. Bring to the boil, stirring consistently until sauce has thickened. Transfer to the slow cooker and cook for the recommended time (above). Just before serving remove the bouquet garni, stir in the cream and serve with wither buttered noodles (?) or rice! I served ours with kale not carbs.

What you can also do is just throw everything in the slow cooker (apart from the cream) and it all cooks fine. I did this because there were no clean pans and I was too tired to wash one.

As a note on liver, if you look carefully in the picture above, you can see holes where the veins ran through the organ, They need removing before cooking. Here I am putting my left index finger through one. This was lamb’s liver that we used. Just saying. That means their veins are the size of our fingers. GIANT LAMBS roaming Wensleydale, bleating that not enough people eat their organs after they die. I did my duty. It was good.

 

This old of heart of mine …

After Valentine’s Day Heart Steak, the heart steak was casseroled. I am a big fan of the slow cooker. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that if you can’t slow cook it, I’m not interested, but sometimes I feel pretty close to that.

Another part of my cookery love is using aromatherapy essential oils in baking (and other recipes). You need to be careful to only add really small amounts, else the taste is super strong, but I’ve made a lot of very successful shortbread – frankincense and lavender were both pretty well received! Cakes also benefit, and rose absolute though very expensive gets that rose deliciousness spot on. In England, we get the therapeutic benefits from using the oils on the skin, whereas in France the benefits are gained from ingestion. I’ve not done this, and I don’t think anyone should without proper advice and guidance. Highly diluted, I’ve found they work well, however I’ve not experimented beyond tiny* amounts of fennel oil in curries. Continuing on with my romantic theme I used vetiver and jasmine oil. These are both relaxing scents and can act as aphrodisiacs. Ooh errr … For more on the essential oil, see good old Neals Yard.

So, in a classic Lucy fashion, chuck all these ingredients into a slow cooker:

2tsp paprika, 1 tsp crushed juniper, 1 drop jasmine oil, 1 drop vetiver oil, 2tbsp jasmine flowers, half pint pale ale, 250g sliced chestnut mushrooms, 1 diced turnip, 600g sliced veal heart (approx)

Cook on high from morning til evening.

Devour. Maybe with some rice. Or mash.

If you don’t have a slow cooker, treat the ingredients like a normal casserole. The strips of heart will need a good four hours of solid casseroling.

There was so much heart casserole, that my beloved and I had to come up with new ways of eating the casseroled heart. One was to make lunchtime tortilla wraps sometimes in a burrito style. Take a wrap, add some salad and some sour cream, maybe some green tabasco, add the heart strips, wrap and nom. Delicious.

I am going to experiment further with cold offal. I’m all over the cooked tongue, but have always disliked pate (bleurgh), do you think a solitary cold kidney would be nice? Do you have any cold offal recipes?

*Tiny means dipping a cocktail stick in, taking it out, then stirring it through the sauce, then discarding. Much much less than a single drop. See Aroma-essence, Gritman and  Essential Oil Cookbook. You can make mean flavoured shortbreads by adding one drop of whatever oil to the creamed butter and sugar part of the mix. Do be careful. The essential oil cooking tips have been fine for me and my friends, but our stomachs aren’t sensitive. So you watch out. Or get in touch if you have any questions.

Tagine of Veal Tongue

I was trying to look bovine, but cows don't wear towells.

This is a recipe unashamedly taken from ‘The Fifth Quarter’ by Anissa Helou. This is a brilliant book for anyone thinking of getting down with the offal. The recipe in the book is ‘Tagine of Ox Tongue’ (page 95). However, Daz and I forgot to check we had all the right ingredients. So, therefore, it was inevitable that we didn’t use all the same things. That is a bit of a shame, as I was for once intending on just copying someone’s recipe and not ending up with a different thing all together. Maybe I’m just too creative for my own good *coughs*

Here is the version we ended up with. But I would buy the book. Or don’t as it may give away some of the things I intend to serve at my offal banquet at the end of the year, and if you intend on coming, it might be a spoiler.

• 1 veal tongue, weighing about 1 kg, well cleaned
• 2 x 400g tins cannellini beans, drained
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp paprika
• 2 tsp ras el hanout spice mix
• salt
• 6-8 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar

So, you need to first of all boil the ox tongue for 10-15 minutes, according to Anissa. I would probably boil it for 30 minutes so that the skin is just a bit easier to peel off. After the 30 mins, remove tongue from heat and peel it, using fingers and/or a knife.

Cut the tongue into 1 cm wide slices and put in a pan. Add all the herbs and spices and a litre and a half of water and boil for 45 mins. Now add the cans of beans and boil for a further 30mins. Make sure then you add the beans that the sauce isn’t too dry. You can add a bit more water. At the end of the cooking you want tender tongue and tender beans. If you’ve got too much water, you can then boil that off.

When you’re satisfied with the consistency, transfer to a serving dish and add vinegar. Ours was quite thick, almost risotto like, but you could have it any way you fancy. a nice crisp salad would be good on the side.

A super simple dish that really is a taste explosion. Tongue is delicious and I’m really enjoying cooking with it. Definitely try it. If you don’t fancy wrestling a whole one, just pick up some cooked tongue from the supermarket instead of ham. it really is the SHIZ!

Lincolnshire Pig’s Fry

This, in case you were wondering, is a pack of Fry. Or Pig’s Fry. Or Bag of Deliciousness. What you can see, going left to right is some pork offcut, some fat, some liver and hiding underneath is some sliced kidney. These are the raw ingredients for Lincolnshire’s Fourth Most Famous Pork Dish (Sausages, Haselet and Chine come further up the Walk of Fame) – Lincolnshire Pig’s Fry. A lot of the cuisine I grew up with can be summed up in two words. PORK and SAGE. Pigs are very cunning, George Orwell would have us believe. Sage is used as a medicinal herb to aid alertness and concentration and also helps the body to digest fat. Clearly Lincolnshire’s sons and daughters should be taking over the world on this diet … *embarrassed cough* Margaret Thatcher …

Being the well-behaved yellowbelly that I am, I did feel quite sad when I realised it had taken me til my 27th year to cook and make it myself. Unsure of how to procede, Google came to my aid with a recipe from this website. I’m not sure if it’s a blog, or something else, but thank you for putting it online as it gave me an outline for my Fry Making!

What you need is:

1kg pig’s fry – I bought this from Hargreaves Butchers in Pinchbeck (“Now then Mrs Moore, nice bit of beef *whispers* on the bone?” a quick nod, then “See you round the side” where you collected your then illegal beef on the bone from a secret door near the bins … I kid you not so many moments of my adolescence were pretty much copied by League of Gentlemen) – if you don’t visit backwaters very often then you’d need to either ask your own butcher for a fry, or get a pig liver, couple of kidneys and some meat. So it all adds up to a kilo of weight.

Potatoes, washed and peeled, then sliced

2 large onions sliced in rounds, 2 large carrots sliced in rounds, 2 pints of stock, 2 tbsp dried sage, 2 tbsp flour, salt and pepper, a knob of butter.

First of all you need to tackle your offal:

From left to right you’ll find a slice of liver, a slice of kidney and some fat from around the organs. In the background of the third picture, you can see the pork meat. No idea of the cut – I kept meaning to telephone and ask, but also kept forgetting.Possibly belly, but it didn’t seem fatty enough. Anyway, I’ll take order for when I’m next down in the Shire …

Everything needs to be cut into similar sized pieces. You need to check the liver is de-veined – if it isn’t they come out quite easily if you just pull them. The veins look like white tubes. You only need to pull the biggest ones out. The kidney needs to have the white core removed and then cut to chunks. I like to say “WHITE CORE” in a Star Trek voice because I think it sounds like either space engineering, or astronomical stellar gumpus! “We can’t save the white core, captain! We just don’t have the power!” The fat also needs to be cut to chunks, as does the meat.

Add the flour to a bowl, season it with salt and pepper, then roll each chunk in it so they are all generously covered. If you run out of flour, just use a bit more.

Heat the butter in the bottom of the casserole you’re going to use and add the onion. Cook until soft. Now add the floured meat chunks and brown them all off.

Add the carrot, the sage and lots of black pepper. Add the stock. Boil, then reduce to a simmer.

Lay the slices of potato on top of the casserole, the layer can be as thick as you like, mine was of 2 or 3 slices thick. Put lid on the casserole and either heat in oven for a few hours, simmer on hob for few hours or if you’re using a slow cooker, cook on High for four hours.

Basically you get a really sagey stew – think Lincolnshire sausage seasonings – with a potato top that is basically steamed because the lid is kept on the casserole. Different to Hotpot, because the potatoes aren’t crisp. It is well delicious and stands up to re-heating very well.

We had at least six really large meals out of it, but what I think I’d do next time is to cut it all up, but cook half and freeze half. I think two smaller frys are better than one big one.

Also, don’t be concerned about the lump of fat, I’m sure it’s really nice fat and even though it looks massive in my hand a) I have tiny mouse hands and b) it’s very thin. It does add a lovely taste and because the sauce goes floury and potatoey it sort of melts into a suspension. You wouldn’t know it was there, if you hadn’t seen this picture.

I can’t wait to go back to the Shire to get me some more fry!

If you’re interested in the cuisine of Lincolnshire you can visit the Lincolnshire Sausage Assocation website – I’m already planning an October Sausage Festival trip – maybe to tie in with Mum’s birthday? Nothing says “I love you, thank you for nurturing me” than a superfluity of sausages!

Sour Lamb Neck (deliciousness, but could be sourer)

Neck of lamb isn’t strictly speaking an offal, but it is definitely an underused cut of meat with bone in it, so I picked some up from my Mum’s butcher in Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire, and froze it until a occassion where I was skint. That occasion came and haunted by a delicious dish of lime lamb neck at a Lebanese restaurant in Leeds called Fairuz, I wanted to make something similarly SOUR. So the other name for this dish would be Lamb and Grapefruit Casserole.

There are no pictures of this gem, because it was another brown dish and you’ve probably seen lots of brown casseroles in your time. So, PAUSE, and IMAGINE a dish of brown …. like a nice dark brown, the colour of chesnuts exposed to the air for about an hour and a half*.

This recipe is different to my others, in that it seems to me to have an inordinate amount of ingredients, but essentially was made from what Daz and I had on the kitchen side. I’m not sure either if I’m writing the recipes out in a way that you can follow, so if it doesn’t make any sense, please let me know.

The ingredients fall into four groups:

1. 4 tablespoons plain flour, 1 teaspoon chilli flakes, 1 teaspoon smoked paprika, 1 teaspoon fennel seeds, 1 neck of a lamb cut into four by your butcher
2. half a large aubergine, half a very large courgette, 1 whole turnip
3. zest and juice of 2 limes, zest and juice of one yellow grapefruit, 2 teaspoon dried rosemary, 1 teaspoon hot paprika, half teaspoon ground coriander, 1 teaspoon ground allspice, 1 and a half teaspoon ground cumin
4. 2 vegetable stock cubes, enough hot water to cover all ingredients, 4 dashes Magi liquid seasoning

What I did was to mix on a teaplate all the dry ingredients from 1, then coat lamb neck in mixture and fry off till browned. I put the neck in the slow cooker with the rest of the flour-spice mix. Then add 2 to the slow cooker and jumble them all together with your (washed) hands. Add all of 3, jumble once more. Add 4, stirring to melt the cubes of stock. If of course, you make/use real veg stock then reduce the additional water, please.

I left everything to marinate over night in the slow cooker and then switched it to high at about 8am the following morning. We ate at 7 that night. (If you don’t have a slow cooker a) buy one because they are ace and b) you can just do a normal casserole at 180 for 3 hours or so, the gravy might not be as thick but you can always add cornflour.) It was scrumblelicious, but didn’t have the sour sour tang that I’d been after. I blame the Asda grapefruit. Maybe it had lost its sour by sitting in my kitchen when it was already reduced to sell-by-fresh for two weeks.

Ideas for different things to make it sour are welcome – tamarind might work? preserved lemons? those gobstoppers I remember from being 7 which had SKULL GROWLING on them? I found this blog which is all about Cambodian food and how they love it sour. The rest of the blog is pretty good too. My friend Paul lives in Cambodia and he hasn’t mentioned the sour factor but has mentioned how they love to eat all the bits of the animals, perhaps a Cambodian special one week, prehaps I’ll cook some brains in a Pol Pot? *comedy trombone noise and muttered apologies*

*At primary school we did a day where we got a conker, broke it out and drew the changing shapes and colours of the darkening brown pigment. There are only so many times you can draw the same conker in one day.