Venison Wellington with chopped livers and cauliflower cheese

Wellington has to be one of my favourite dishes of all time – the crackle of the breaking puff pastry shell followed by the steaming moist meat of the rare fillet inside. Comfy, cosy and filling – this dish has all the things you want when it’s soggy and grim outside.

Venison also has to be one of my favourite meats. A rich gamey fillet encased in golden pastry surely makes for the perfect dish. I first tried venison Wellington in a restaurant a few months ago – an experience that has undoubtedly made it into my top 10 meals of all time. Now however, it’s time to try and make my own!

Ingredients
- 500-600g venison loin
- 2 x tbsp juniper berries (crushed)
- Knob of butter
- Pinch of salt and pepper
- 1 x duck egg (beaten)
- 1 pack of ready-rolled puff pastry

For the livers
- Knob of butter
- 300g chicken livers
- 1 x shallot (finely chopped)
- 2 x garlic cloves (finely chopped)
- Pinch of salt and pepper

Cauliflower cheese
- 1 x cauliflower
- 120 ml double cream
- 100g parmesan cheese (grated)
- 1 x tbsp wholegrain mustard

Take the venison loin and season with the juniper berries, salt and pepper. Set aside for a few minutes – ten should do.

Melt one knob of butter in a large frying pan over a high heat and when foaming add the venison. Sear the meat on all sides until it is coloured but not cooked. Remove the loin from the pan and let the meat rest for another ten minutes.

While the meat is resting, melt the remaining butter in a small frying pan and add the chopped shallot and garlic. Sweat gently over a medium heat until the shallot is starting to colour. Add the chicken livers to the pan and turn up to a high heat. Cook the livers for a couple of minutes on each side or until cooked through. Blitz the livers, garlic and shallot with a food processor and set aside.

Take the pastry – I always use the ready rolled stuff as this prevents me making an utter mess – and cut to be large enough to wrap around the venison loin.

Spread a thin layer of the liver mixture evenly on the surface of the pastry and place the venison loin on top. Brush the edges of the pastry with the beaten egg mixture and fold the pastry over so the meat is snug and fully wrapped. Trim off any excess pastry and place the Wellington on a baking tray.

Brush the Wellington with more beaten egg mixture and cook in pre-heated oven for 20-25 minutes. The oven temperature should be 200⁰C/Gas 6.

Take the cauliflower and cut in half vertically. Cut two centimetre slices of cauliflower and blanch for 3 minutes in boiling salted water. Drain the cauliflower and sear both sides in a hot dry frying pan until golden.

Before serving place the cream, parmesan and wholegrain mustard in a small pan heat gently over a low heat, stirring until the cheese has fully melted. Spread a thick arch of cheesy sauce on a plate and place the cauliflower on top.

Chop a couple of thick slices of Wellington and add to the plate. Garnish with a few lush green pea tops and enjoy with a large glass of red. A Barossa Valley Syrah will probably do the trick!

The Future of Food, 3-4 February 2010

The Soil Association’s annual conference, The Future of Food, kicked off in Birmingham today.

The conference, which runs for the next two days, addresses the triple challenges of climate change, resource depletion and food security and the need to develop new models for food and farming systems for the 21st century.

Patrick Holden, Director, Soil Association will open the conference, speaking on the future of the food industry and is joined by many other key individuals from the agricultural sector, including: Monty Don, BBC presenter and Soil Association President; John Craven, a presenter on the BBC’s Countryfile; Roger Williams, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on Food and Farming; and Peter Kendall of the National Farmers Union.

A number of panel discussion and workshop sessions will debate whether a modified ‘business as usual’ strategy is enough to tackle the food and farming requirements of the future or whether future plans will require the most far reaching changes our food systems have seen for more than half a century.

Debates will focus around four key sectors: political, farming, civil society and public, with questions asked around whether organic farming can play a central role in sequestering atmospheric carbon, organic is now seen as expensive and elitist - have we been complicit in this positioning and how it can be challenged, and how can the Global North and the South work together in developing truly sustainable food and farming systems.

Despite the urgency of the need for radical overhaul of our food and farming systems many key players in the agricultural industry believe that the solution will be based on existing production systems high inputs, GM and global trade.

As the organizers of the conference, the Soil Association believes that our current globalised, and deeply unsustainable industrial approach, requires a national action programme on the scale of a war effort.

Everything but the Oink!

“It took four strong men, experts at this sort of thing, to restrain the pig, then drag and wrestle him up onto his side and onto a heavy wooden horse cart. It was not easy. With the weight of the two men pinning him down and another holding his hind legs, the main man with the knife, gripped him by the head, leaned over and plunged the knife all the way into the beasts thorax, just above the heart.

“I’ll remember the atmosphere of business as usual that hung over the whole process as the pigs chest rose and fell, his blood draining noisily into a metal pail. A woman cook came running for the blood, hurrying into the kitchen with it after it stopped draining freely. More women walked briskly to and from the kitchen with other receptacles. Food was being prepared. And I’ll never forget the look of pride on Jose’s face, as if he were saying, this is where it all starts. Now you know. This is where food comes from.”

Taken from Anthony Bourdain’s description of the annual pig slaughter in a Portuguese village this seemed like the perfect place to start when talking about butchery.

While for some this description might seem gruesome and slightly disturbing what must be remembered and celebrated is that with correct skill, care and attention (and a willing palate) every succulent and delicious morsel from the animal can be used – especially in the case of the versatile pig.

In the Portuguese farming community, as with other similar localities, the process of nurturing, fattening, killing and ultimately eating the animal is actioned with a dedication of almost religious proportions. Every inch of the animal is respected and used.


The animals belly is split and the heart, lungs, tripe, intestines, liver and kidneys removed from the cavity. The body is then portioned up: the flare fat removed; the fillet taken from inside the loin; the legs put aside for cured hams and prosciutto; the head removed for the cheeks and for brawn; the neck-end split into the neck and shoulder; the belly for roasting; and the hind quarters for ham. It is the embodiment of using everything but the Oink – a sentiment that is qualified in Nose to Tail Eating, Fergus Henderson’s cult celebration of all things meaty.

Butchering meat is not for the feint hearted – or so you might think – however, this week The Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog launched the first video in its four-part Italian pig butchery masterclass and the viewing is anything but horrific. Good butchering, as the video shows, allows for nothing to be wasted and pays the necessary respect to the animal that has met its fateful end.

The trend for home butchery is on the up and offers not only a great way to educate yourself about a particular animal but really makes you appreciate where your food has come from and be at one with each delicious mouthful.

Butchery training can take anything from one week to a number of years. A number of places in the UK however offer short-term courses lasting anywhere from an evening to 3-4 days and costing anything from £150-800. My hot-tips are below:

- The Ginger Pig (London)

- Andrew Sharp (London)

- Empire Farm (Somerset)

- River Cottage (Dorset)

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Kale and chestnut soup

As a result of a quick trip down to my local Waitrose this lunchtime I’ve returned to my office heavily-laden with kale (one of my favourite leafy greens) and with my arms full of chestnuts – an ingredient you don’t see often in the supermarkets so I thought I’d give it a go!

Judging by their bulging presence on the shelves, both kale and chestnuts are good at this time of the year and luckily for me my all-time favourite chef, small-holder and outdoors extraordinaire Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a recipe that will whip these little beauties into a taste frenzy.

February is upon us already which means that while the days are finally getting longer, the mornings are still frosty and the breezes still bitter so a hearty soup is definitely order of the day. While this recipe is for four people I like to give it a little twist – adding carrots for an extra vegetably treat and a nice contrast in colour. I also like to bulk up the amount of bacon in the recipe as the smoky, sweet meat is a perfect compliment to the tangy tasting kale.

Ingredients

- 500g chestnuts
- 500g kale
- 250g bacon
- 1ltr stock (vegetable or game)
- 4-5 medium carrots (roughly chopped)

Take the chestnuts and with a sharp knife make a small slit in the shell of each one. Be careful of those precious pinkies! Plunge the chestnuts into a pan of boiling water and once water has come back to the boil simmer for 3-4 minutes. Drain the chestnuts and leave to cool until they can be handled. Once cooled, peel off the skin, including the brown inner skin.

Chestnuts can sometimes be hard to come by but brands like Merchant Gourmet and Clement Faugier produce vacuum packed cooked and peeled chestnuts which can be a good alternative. These are widely available in most high-street supermarkets.

Wash and trim the kale, cutting away the tougher stalks, and shred coarsely.

Roughly dice the bacon and in a heavy-bottomed pan fry gently over a medium heat until slightly crisp. I prefer to use good quality back bacon with a thick layer of fat or leftover ham – both have enough fat around the meat to be fried without oil. If you can’t get these then fry the bacon in a little olive oil.

In a large pan bring a litre of stock to the boil. Simmer the peeled chestnuts until the chestnuts are tender. Lift the chestnuts out of the stock with a slotted spoon and add the carrots to the stock. Take about a quarter of the chestnuts and mash with a fork. Once mashed, stir back into the stock to thicken it. Roughly chop the remaining chestnuts and return these to the stock.

Add the kale and bacon to the stock (along with the bacon juices) and simmer over a medium heat for 3 minutes – ideally the kale should still be fresh and green, not stewed.

Season to taste and serve in a big bowl with crusty bread.

This soup is best enjoyed wearing your lounging-about clothes sitting in front of a warming fire!

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Miso cod with pickled ginger stem

January and February are fabulously good months for cod.

I absolutely love fish, but with this particular breed I have a somewhat love/hate relationship. I have cooked cod dishes on a number of occasions with varied and mostly disappointing results. My main problem has been getting the succulent little blighters to take on any flavour at all. In the main, dishes that promised mouthfuls with fresh yet distinctive characteristics have proved flat and uninspiring.

Cod, it would appear, is not like the loyal, no-nonsense, un-changing salmon. You know what you’re getting with salmon!

Now, these failures may have something to do with the sub-standard level of my cooking abilities but I would have expected at least a couple of knock-out dishes. And then I discovered miso cod…

I can remember eating this dish on a couple of occasions – as a special order in a back-street London sushi restaurant where the cod was gelatinous, watery and lacking in anything resembling flavour, and in Zuma in Hong Kong where the experience was like a troupe of angels tap-dancing delicately on my taste buds. It was beautiful. I had to have more.

Miso cod proved to be the only way to beat this fishy nemesis – learn to cook a recipe I knew had the desired outcome… and stick to it!

This Sunday a couple of people are coming over for supper and this dish will be making its first public appearance from my kitchen. I’m away for most of the weekend but this recipe is perfect, not only because of its seasonal nature but also because the cod ideally needs 24-48 hours to marinade – I can do minimal prep and bung it in the fridge for a day or two until I need it.



Ingredients

- 4 x 250g cod fillets (this dish also works extremely well with a good quality fillet of salmon)
- 225g white miso paste
- 100ml cooking sake
- 160ml mirin
- 175g granulated sugar
- 1 stalk hajikami (pickled ginger stem)

In a heavy based, medium saucepan combine the cooking sake and mirin and bring to the boil. Boil for 20-30 seconds to burn off the alcohol then reduce to a medium heat.

Add the white miso paste and stir until completely dissolved. Turn up the heat, add the sugar and stir. Once the sugar has completely dissolved remove the pan from the heat and leave the marinade to cool completely at room temperature.

Once cooled, in a separate bowl drench the cod fillets with the miso mixture until all of the white meat is covered. Cover with cling film and place in the fridge at least overnight but preferably for 48 hours.

When ready to cook the cod pre-heat your grill to high and your oven to 200⁰C/Gas 6.
Remove all excess marinade from the fillets and place on a baking tray. Grill the fillet until brown and then bake in the oven for a further 15 minutes.

Garnish with hajikami (which you can buy from some supermarkets and Asian grocers). Eat with chopsticks (also available from Asian grocers)!

Making your own miso cod can be a somewhat personal experience so play around with the quantities of sake, mirin and sugar to find the flavour balance you like best.

Asparagus and smashed egg - Dutch style

Asparagus is at its best from around mid-April to the end of June, depending on the weather, however due to its increasing popularity many supermarkets stock it all year round.

The great thing about this dish is that it not only involves eggs – one of Gods finer details when deciding to create chickens – but is also easy to throw together and can be gobbled down as either a light lunch or starter before supper.

Ingredients:

- Handful of fresh asparagus (6-7 stalks)
- One free range chicken egg
- 50g salted butter
- Pinch of salt
- Celery salt

For the asparagus:

Take a handful of lush, green asparagus stalks and trim away the hard end at the base of each stalk with a sharp knife.

Pour approximately an inch of boiling water from the kettle into a saucepan, season the water with a pinch of salt and keep the water gently simmering over a medium heat.

To cook the asparagus, lay the stalks in a steamer – a bamboo or ordinary metal steamer will do – and place the steamer in the saucepan. Steam the asparagus over the simmering water for 5-6 minutes, depending on the thickness of the stalks, or until they feel tender when pinched.

For the smashed egg:

A soft-boiled egg works best for smashing.

Place the whole egg into a pan of simmering, salted water and boil for six minutes. Drain off the water and run the egg under cold water for several minutes – this process prevents a dark yellow ring appearing round the yolk.

While the egg is cooling under water heat the butter in small, heavy bottomed saucepan until melted and take off the heat.Peel the egg, smash with a fork and stir through the melted butter. Spoon the eggy splodge over the asparagus stalks and eat with a big smile on your face!

Alternatively, poach an egg:

Pour approximately four inches of boiling water from the kettle into a saucepan, season the water with a pinch of salt and keep the water warm over a low heat – the water needs to be just off the boil otherwise the egg white will become frothy.

Some egg poachers like to stir the water to create a whirlpool into which they add the egg however I don’t find this method necessary and the lack of whirlpools gives a wholly more misshapen and rustic looking egg.

Crack the egg into the water and leave over a gentle heat for 4-5 minutes. The water should not boil. When the egg yolk has misted over, carefully lift the poached egg out of the water with a slotted spoon and place on top of the asparagus stalks.

I like my poached eggs soft, oozing and runny but if you prefer them a little harder then cook them for a further couple of minutes.

Sprinkle over a little celery salt and devour. Yum!

Pigeon Pie review: The East Hill

The gastropub trend is one that has grown from strength-to-strength over the last decade. Increasing numbers of pubs are being gentrified – whilst retaining their traditional English character – and serve moderately priced European dishes with a modern twist to a hip, foodie crowd that appreciates a good plate of grub at a much higher standard than you’d expect from your typical pub.

And these are the glory years for such types of establishment. The Duke of Cambridge in Islington opened in 1998 and, as far as I know, is still the UK’s first and only gastro-pub to be certified by the Soil Association for its use of organic produce. The Anchor & Hope in Waterloo opened in autumn 2003 and is another gastro-grouped public house that regularly nestles neatly at the top of yearly ‘Pub of the Year’ classifications.

Gastropubs have come a long way on their culinary journey from their humble London beginnings – this year no less than 10 gastropubs around the UK were awarded Michelin stars and everyone, it seems, wants to get in on the party.

Celebrity chefs, such as Anthony Worrall Thompson who owns The Lamb in Henley-on-Thames, have bolstered their empires with gastropub investments while the love for the cosy traditional boozer that serves good quality food has also broken English shores – The Spotted Pig, New York’s first gastropub opened back in 2004.

Gimmicky, individual and slightly quirky, gastropubs have traditionally been the domain of independent publicans striving for freedom over their choice of beverages, their dining menus and interior décor. They have been things of unique brand identity and their uniqueness has been part of their success.

Now however, the number of group-owned gastropubs in London has increased with players like Geronimo Inns trying to emulate that individuality by operating under the ethos that each of their pubs is uniquely tailored to the locality in which it is based. Where possible they use local butchers, bakers, garden designers and artists to make sure that their pubs retain the original character from the day they opened.

The East Hill pub is one particular Geronimo Inn that achieves this particularly well.

Sat in the heart of south west London, on the fringe of the fashionable Tonsleys, the East Hill invites a relaxed crowd with its distressed Chesterfield sofas, walls lined with bookcases, wooden scrubbed floors, cottage style tables with mismatched chairs and a rustic ‘chandelier’ fashioned from a suspended Sheila Maid and old tin watering cans.

The pub is a perfect location for lazy Sunday’s that involve hearty roast dinners, cuddles in deep armchairs and a wide selection of good wines and real ales to whet the whistle of the most particular punter. The pub even hosts is own quiz on a Sunday so arrive by mid-afternoon if you want a table!

The menu is inspired by true country farmhouse style with rustic dishes like hogget, leek & Cornish potato stew; and cold Ox tongue with pickled baby beets, mixed leaves & horseradish cream alongside more gamey and classic favourites such as salad of seared rabbit loin, confit leg with bacon & pine nuts; or pea, broad bean and asparagus risotto.

Slabs of steak are served thick on wooden chopping boards, pints of prawns are available in the summer months as well as golden breadcrumby Scotch eggs… oh, the scotch eggs! Traditional mustards, piccalillis and pork pies sit at the end of the bar as part of the chalkboard bar snacks menu – and did I mention the Scotch eggs…?!

Not only is the pub reasonably priced (a meal for two with a bottle of wine comes in at around £45) but the East Hill’s success lies in the clever straddling act it does between being a good ‘local’ pub for the Wandsworth locale and a gastro-treat for foodies from further afield.

Whilst occupying the same room, the dining area is loosely separated from the rest of the pub meaning that whether you are eating supper or just enjoying an evening pint none of the atmosphere around you is compromised. Local drinkers watch weekend rugby matches with seemingly unaffected diners enjoying the symphony of an occasional whoop or cheer mixed with the bustle of a busy kitchen.

It all very much feels like home.

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