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A few times a year my beloved Slow Cooker is dragged from its hiding place on top of the fridge and its normally to slowly cook lamb. This month I've committed myself to finally empty out our freezer, and fell upon a pack of rump steak lamb. I faltered slightly - not sure if I needed to slow roast rump of lamb (my recipe stated neck chops) the interweb offered little guidance, but going o the assumption that surely any lamb will be tasty after a good 8 hours in a trusty slow cooker I went ahead.
I inherited this recipe from my mother (as I did the Slow Cooker - which is probably at least 30 years old, vintage as they say on ebay) and it's probably one of the best I own, the simplicity of the ingredients and of the laissez faire method allowed me to spend the day getting to grips with my Java Open University course, an ongoing hindrance to my weekend fun having.
Ingredients:
2 x lamb rump steaks
1 tin Tomatoes
mushrooms
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1. Prepare your vegetables, slice the onions, finely chop the garlic and slice the mushrooms.
2. Add a small amount of olive oil to a frying pan and brown the meat. Add the meat to the small cooker.
3. Lightly 'brown' the onions, garlic and mushrooms in the same pan.
4. Add the veg and the tine of tomatoes to the slow cooker, put the lid on, and leave for around eight hours (perhaps
less if you have a slightly nicer model!)
And we're done :) Giving me six and a half hours before worrying about my roast potatoes and my runner beans.
A few weeks ago I opened a tin of confit de canard and made a cassoulet. As a result I now have a lovely tub full of duck fat sitting in the fridge, so, my method for some of the crunchiest roasties is here:
Unpeeled Potatoes (mine were a bit long in the tooth)
Duck Fat (substitute with goose fat, or lard, or olive oil for a healthy option)
1. Parboil the potatoes, five to ten mins, until the potatoes are just soft when pricked with a fork.
2. Drain the potatoes and return to the pan over the heat, the potatoes need to dry for a few seconds. Take the pan off
the heat.
3. Add around 2 dessert spoons of plain flour to the pan with the potatoes, then jiggle the pan around, allowing the flour
to stick to the potatoes and the edges to rough up slightly.
4. Set the oven to the maximum setting, put a few dessert spoons of duck fat in a roasting tray and stick in the oven to
get hot. The melted fat needs to be very hot, almost to smoking point.
5. Removed the roasting tin and add the potatoes to the roasting tin and roll around allowing the potatoes to fry lightly
on each side in the hot fat.
6. Add the potatoes to the oven, and set the timer for an hour, turn the potatoes every 20 mins.
Now for the runner beans, not too much a story to tell, apart from to let you marvel at my new lakeland steamer. It's a metal flower looking device which fits any size pan, and should be versatile enough to let me steam fish in a wok and steam any vegetable in any sized pan, It's fab, buy one!
And eight hours later we're done , the finished article:
Dessert was the ever-giving cheesecake, tasting even nicer by dinner time :]
Well to begin my blog it seems suitable to detail the baking of my first cheesecake, a momentous event which filled my Saturday afternoon quite comfortably (I had a quick breather to sit on the village green in a brief spell of sunshine and get the latest Ottelenghi recipes from the Guardian, an integral Saturday activity (more on him later.. i appear to be in a double bracket quandary, best get closure)).
Despite not really being a pudding kind of girl (a bag of cherries seems to fit the bill for my less than sweet tooth), I've had the niggling feeling that perhaps Cheesecake is the kind of dessert I should probably be able to make/ kind of dessert I most definitely like eating. After having the most fantastically caramel/cheesecake dessert in Seville in February, followed by a white chocolate cheesecake to die for in Cambridge's lovely D'arrays a few weeks ago (this was coupled with a big win of £50 on the bingo, some girls are born lucky I guess...), around two weeks later D'arrays had a big fire, so I can't go back for the next few months, it also seems unlikely I'll be whisked back to Seville. Thus, here I am, at home and trying to bake the next best cheesecake of my life.
Alas, I cannot take full responsibility for the recipe (for a first attempt penning my own recipe would indeed be a fairly heroic act). Instead I direct you to the saviour of many of our mealtimes, the BBC Good Food website, where the Bake Raspberry cheesecake recipe did sound foolproof. I substituted the raspberries for some frozen mixed berries, but kept in the tons of cream cheese, sour cream and everything else basically, and also used 10 digestives rather than 8 to allow for inevitable eating of biscuit/butter mix (too tasty by far). As the recipe directed I made my base and stuck it into the oven to crisp us, then 'beat' together the remaining ingredients. I say 'beat' because the mixture didn't allow for the sort of beating my mother used to show me, instead I seemed to go from sludge to liquidy lumps in seconds, and after about half an hour of attempts at beating, the lumps did go (I never got anywhere near light and fluffy, if only i had a swanky pants kitchenaid, or even a kitchen big enough to store one). My lower arms still ache today, which proves that making cheesecake reaches parts that my dumbbells have never reached, so its health food really. A definite result!
Now I'm not sure on blogging protocol (it's my first time, you see) but I don't think i need to include the recipe again (as its online at the link above), please advise if I should, or definitely shouldn't - not sure about copyright ?!! Anyways, stuck ye olde cheesecake in the oven for 40 mins and fished it out, allowing it to sit, cool and crack in the most delightful way. A few hours later, after a successful Jambalaya (ooo recipe later, i promise!), I stuck on the sauce and go down to some cheesecake tasting...
Et Voila! We eat the cheesecake that tasted ok, but was nothing to write home about, and after a few gins its felt a bit sickly and i felt cross with myself for attempting to foray into the world of puddings. Thankfully we watched 'In Bruges' which is quite possibly the best film I've watched all year, and cheered me up no end.
This morning I stuck my head in the fridge and saw the offending cheesecake, and thought it might be worth another try, just to make sure it was such an absolute failure, and do you know what said ugly duckling had turned into? A Magnificent Swan! It's lovely, it tastes sweet and cheesy and generally like a cheesecake, and yes it may not be the best cheesecake ever, but we've all got to start somewhere haven't we? Unfortunately this meant I was eating a slice of cheesecake at 11 this morning, which isn't the healthiest way to start a Sunday.. hey ho!
Right now, I have a lamb provencale sitting in the slow cooker, which has about four hours left to go, so I'll hopefully be back with that recipe asap. Gosh, this has been fun, how cathartic a blog is :)
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