Roast Veal Heart, stuffed with Spring, wrapped in Vine Leaves – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 7

Yesterday we had quick-cooked veal heart. Today we had slow cooked veal heart. Me and Mr Stupendous Snooker think that this is the best veal heart recipe we’ve done yet.

For me it was a couple of firsts. I’d never roasted a heart before. I’d never made stuffing from scratch before either. Neither had I put a bin bag on the floor to do cooking and baking on so I didn’t miss very much of the snooker.So this was my set-up:

What you can see on the floor is a bowl of Spring stuffing, a crock pot, a heart , a lemon, a packet of breadcrumbs (I am bad), a grater, tomato puree and the round things to the back are raw cookies, waiting to go in the oven. I thought the bin bag idea was GENIUS.

To the recipe – if you don’t have a heart that you’ve already taken the chamber walls out of, then do so. Or get your butcher to do it. If you haven’t and don’t want to do it yourself. Don’t worry, you can put the stuffing in each chamber and have a multi-chambered heart. Like a tomb. If you need to trim any tubes or gristle from your heart, do so now.

Next make the stuffing. I called it Spring stuffing because I wanted really fresh and zingy flavours to go with the taste of the veal.

You want to mix together:

• 100g breadcrumbs
• zest of 1 massive lemon and its juice
• 1tbsp tomato puree
• a few shakes of Magi seasoning (or Worcester or soy sauce)
• 1 heaped tsp dried parsley
• torn leaves of most of a supermarket basil plant
• one large mushroom (grated on the zester)
• one stick celery (ditto)

Mix it all together, it will go a bit sticky. If you don’t think your lemon is large enough (look at the corker in the picture), then use two.

You will now need a packet of vine leaves and string.

First stuff the cavity/ies of your heart. Hold it together in your hands and then gradually wrap vine leaves around it. If you’re having trouble holding it together, tie it up with string. Then wrap the vine leaves around it. The vine leaves will help to keep the heart moist while it is roasting in the oven. If you don’t want to include them, wrap the heart in bacon and make sure it is covered with foil.

So wrap the vine leaves around the heart. I used most of the packet, you want the layer to be quite think so the leaves closest to the heart impart all their flavour to the meat. We’ve done this vine leaf trick before on pheasants and it really does make them lovely. You could do it on a chicken!

Then tie everything together with string again. I went for the three strands approach, you can use as much as you like.

Pop it in your pan and roast in the oven for 2 half to 3 hours. The temperature should be a Gas Mark 4 (190C).

And that’s what you end up with. I carved it laterally, so the slices had stuffing in the middle. YUM! We ate some with kale and broccoli in the evening and there was enough left for both of us to have cold for lunch the following day.

Six meals. One heart. True Love.

Or something.

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*