Dinner Diary - Wild Mushroom Bake

One of the things that differentiates how a forager cooks from how a chef does is the use of mushrooms. For us, its often the case that wild mushrooms aren't a luxury to be used in small volume for flavour or appearance, they're a bulk filler for other food.

How often have you seen some posh restaurant or television chef cook a mushroom dish and make sure all of the mushrooms are somehow visible? Its so often about display, about the expensive ingredient you're paying through the nose for, so you can see it and so those dining with you can see how much you're adding to the bill they're not looking forward to splitting with you. Its about display. But if you pick your own wild mushrooms you probably use them in much greater bulk, for flavour and texture. Yeah, I could have think slices of pretty mushroom on top of a dish - but who am I trying to impress? They're free, growing in a field. Why would anyone be impressed?

This dish really does exemplify the difference in attitude between a forager and a posh chef.

First, you've got to pick your mushrooms. This time I used horse, field and shaggy parasol mushrooms. I could pretend they were selected for the combination of almondy and mushroomy flavours and for the mix of soft and firmer textures, but I'd be lying.  I used them because I had a lot of them, I found a field full of mushrooms yesterday and the day before a patch under some trees covered with parasols. The trick to this dish is to cook the mushrooms first so they retain a better texture. Pack a pan load of mushrooms, drizzle some olive oil, salt and pepper on and put it in a hot oven for 20 minutes or so. While you're doing that wash and slice some potatoes, almost cover them in a pan with milk and simmer it. While thats happening the mushrooms should be ready to come out, they should have reduced in volume rather and they'll have a lovely smell and intensified flavour. 

Another optional step at this stage is to sautee some onion, carrot, celery and bacon in another pan ready to go into the sauce. You don't need this, but if you want to use the bacon as seasoning its a nice touch. Or if you want to keep the whole thing veggie leave out the bacon. I quite like this classic combination of stock vegetables. Somehow it makes this kind of dish more homely, more rounded. Less cheffy and more 'real' if that makes sense. Now, you've got your sauteed vegetables, pan of soft potatoes in milk, and your mushrooms. Its time to make your sauce. 

You all know how to make a white sauce, right? Take your musnrooms out of the skillet, put them aside. Put some butter in, melt it over a low heat and cook for just a minute or so before adding the milk you used for the spuds, slowly at first, stirring all the time to get rid of lumps. You can add some cream at this point if you really want it to be rich, but you don't need to. When the flour is cooked out, toss in a handfull of chopped parsley (if you have some) its time to assemble everything and put it in the oven.

Put a layer of about half of your spuds in the bottom of a casserole dish or big pan and season them. Put the sauteed veg (if you're including them) and mushrooms on top. Then put the rest of the spuds on, and pour the sauce on top. Now you can go and make your topping - drop a chunk of stale bread in the food processor or grate it, and make a bowl of breadcrumbs (always save some stale bread for crumbing). Put alternate layers of bread crumbs and grated cheese on top, with a final layer of cheese and a few knobs of butter at the end. You'll have something like this...

That goes into a hot oven for about 20 minutes, or until its crisp and browned. Dish it out piping hot with salad or whatever side vegetables you want, but I like something green with it.

This is another of those dishes thats more of a technique than a recipe. There's a thousand and one ways you can think of spuds, white sauce and a breadcrumb topping - you could put ham or chicken in it, you could have a layer of broccoli in the middle instead of mushrooms and cook it with a cheese sauce instead of a white one. Bluntly if its spuds, white sauce and cheesy breadcrumbs with something else in it, its likely to be delicious. But this is a really good way of using mushrooms, they're kind of meaty and intense in this dish, and you can really mix things up by using different kinds of mushroom. 

And best of all? This is cheap, substantial and filling. You won't be leaving the dinner table hungry. Enjoy.

Dinner Diary - The Inevitable Rabbit and Pumpkin Mulligatawny

So on Sunday things got weird when I roasted a whole pumpkin with a rabbit curry in it. That was absolutely delicious but rather more food that you need for one meal, so on Monday the remains were stripped off into a pan to make soup. It made a really nice and basically almost free dinner for a week day.

So the rabbit stripped from the bones, the curry sauce with mushrooms, nuts, raisins and everything else tipped in, and the pumpkin skinned (the skin comes off easily after baking) and crudely crushed in the hand and tipped into a stock pot. 

All you need to do then is add some stock (I cheated and used a chicken stock cube), some more spice (whatever you want - I added some ground coriander and some garam masala mix), boil it for a while, check the seasoning (I needed to add a little more salt and some lemon juice) and thats it. A fast, easy and ridiculously substantial week-day dinner. Is it a real mulligatawny? I have no idea, the original version of the dish is, I'm sure, delicious, but its something that has become so Anglicised and adapted over almost two centuries that it kind of doesn't matter. I do know that whenever you end up with too much curry, if it was good to begin with, you can probably turn it into a soup the next day.

Dinner Diary - Hot and Sour Dogfish Soup

I had a chat with the fishmonger in Ely on Saturday when I saw this. He said it was huss, until I gave him an inquisitive look. Then he said it was rock salmon. So I asked if he really meant spotted dogfish, and he smiled and said yes. Then he sold it to me good and cheap.

Huss is way too rare to eat. Its a beautiful little shark, and quite delicious but it gives birth to live young and doesn't breed fast at all. So don't eat it. Spotted dogfish are smaller and plentiful - and every bit as tasty. But it really does need to be very fresh - give it a sniff and make sure there's not the slightest whiff of anything resembling ammonia. 

You've got a few bits of cartilage sticking in to the meat but really just the one bit to cut out down the middle - other than that its meaty and boneless.

I selected this because I had a pan of fish stock to use up, the remnants of a gurnard were in the pressure cooker, cooked in water at high pressure to make the stock sterile but still, it needed using up. Into the strained stock went spring onions, soy sauce, thai seven spice mix (inauthentic I know but trust me) lime juice and zest, rice wine, red chili and lots of grated ginger, a splash of rice vinegar, and that was boiled while I cut up the dogfish. I also put a pile of wild mushrooms into the soup because, well, its autumn and I've got a lot of mushrooms to use. While that was cooking I also put some noodles on to cook.

The fish (sliced thin) went into some beaten egg and into a hot pan. Once browned on both sides its basically done. The rest of the egg, I pitched into the soup and stirred in.

And then its simple - noodles go into a bowl, then the soup, and then some dogfish pieces on top, and you're done. 

The principle of this kind of soup is really simple and you can make a whole family of dishes like it, either for a lunch or dinner. As long as you've got some decent stock, you've got the basis of a great soup. And with the nights drawing in, I do like something good and spicy like this.

Dinner Diary - Curried Rabbit Baked in a Pumpkin

Yeah, this is about to get weird...

Rabbit is one of the great under-used meats. Its plentiful, and killed as a pest species to protect vegetable crops all over the UK. Its low in fat, high in protein, and its ridiculously delicious. In some cities (I'm looking at you, Cambridge) its peculiarly expensive, but in others (yaay for Ely!) its very cheap. This one was one of two I got for a fiver, and from the looks of him its an older male. A few years ago you used to see rows of rabbits hanging in front of game butchers in the better market places in British cities, but thats a thing of the past now. The advantage of that was you could pick out your bunny for the purpose you had in mind. Gamey old buck for a stew, younger doe for frying or roasting. These days its a bit more pot-luck, but a trained nose will usually find the right bunny.

I often cook rabbit by making up a curry paste, rubbing it inside and out, and marinading it overnight before stuffing it with nuts and raisins, wrapping it tight, and baking that slowly. I thought I'd try something different this time, so I made up a curry paste by dropping everything (onions, lemon juice and zest, chili, ginger, garlic, some oil and lots of spices - coriander, cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, fennel, clove, pepper, salt, mace, cayenne) into a food processor before rubbing it all over the (jointed) rabbit. I left that to marinade all day.

Later on in the afternoon I cut open the pumpkin (and yes, this is a Haloween pumpkin, they're quite delicious!) in the garden and scooped its guts (fibres and seeds) out to throw to my hens, who love them. Then I filled it up with the rabbit (with the marinade still all over it), handfulls of nuts and raisins, some more spice (garam masala), curry leaves, lots of salt (because pumpkin eats salt), some coconut milk to go about half way up, more lemon juice, and to top it off some mushrooms (I used wild parasol mushrooms, because thats what I had). 

Then the lid went on and I roasted the whole thing at about 170C for three hours or so, until it was done, and then left it in a warm (100C) oven until we were hungry. And it was, I must say, spectacular.

So we had a couple of bits of rabbit each and and a scoop of mushroomy, coconuty curry sauce with fruit and nuts in it, with rice and a nice big slice of the pumpkin. 

I don't as a rule cost my dinners, because if you're cooking from scratch its never expensive. A pumkin costs you a quid at the supermarkets, the rabbit was £2.50, the mushrooms were wild so they're free, the fruit and nuts? I dunno, but less than a quid. And a few spices and dried coconut milk? Not 50p. I'll turn the remnants into a curry soup for tomorrow night, so its going to be at least four portions, for about four quid. 

So if you want an absolute  show-stopper of a dinner, I really would recommend this.

Dinner Diary - Partridges Roasted on Horse Mushrooms

We picked up a whole lot of partridges in Ely Market yesterday. They're often cheap if you find them at a farmers market at this time of year, and they're absolutely delicious. And on the way home we came across a whole lot of horse mushrooms - nice, big, fat ones too. And that rather dictated what we had to have for dinner.

Simple stuff really - I put some stock veg (leafy celery, quartered onion and carrots) in a skillet with two big mushrooms, and then rubbed butter and seasoning over the birds (with another bit of butter inside), then drizzled just a little oil, salt and pepper on the mushrooms and put them in the pan with the birds on top.

 You need big mushrooms for this of course, but if you can get them I do urge you to try partridge this way - the juices flow through the mushrooms and help for a rich gravy, while themselves picking up a flavour thats a superb accompaniment for the partridge. 

I poured about half a glass of blackberry wine in the pan, alongside a glass of water. This went into a hot oven (200C in my fan-assist, you'd want 210C or 220C without a fan) for half an hour. Thats long enough to cook the partridges (which were put aside to rest) and to get some flavour out of the vegetables for the gravy.

Speaking of which, the gravy! Thats about the most important component of any roasted dish, right? So after while resting the partridges (and microwaving some spuds for mash) I poured the juice out of the skillet and stirred some flour in around the stock veg, before slowly adding the juice back in over a low heat. Basically to cook more flavour out of the stock veg while thickening the sauce. And again, this is simple stuff but its worth spending a few minutes getting this right. I added just the tiniest dash of soy sauce too - there was enough flavour in the gravy but a tiny bit more umame sometimes doesn't hurt.

The whole thing was served up, with the partridges still resting on the mushrooms, with mashed spuds and steamed cabbage - a really old fashioned, simple way of serving up a roast. 

Trying to work out what this cost is, as ever when you're pricing up simple food, surprising - the partridges clock in at £1.67 each, a sack of spuds is so cheap that each serving is a few pennies, and if you're buying cabbage its probably the cheapest and tastiest green vegetable at the greengrocers. So the whole thing clocks up at under £2 per serving. And trust me, this is a dish fit for royalty. 

Dinner Diary - Chili Horse Mushrooms and Pasta

Had a nice little bonus find on the way home from shopping in Ely today. A bike basket full of horse mushrooms...

Now I was planning hot and sour soup for lunch but there's something almost sinfully good about gong straight home and eating the mushrooms you've picked, so as soon as we got in the door I put some pasta on to boil (yes, sometimes I'm lazy and use bought pasta) and chopped an onion up to sizzle in oil. While waiting for the onions to look like this, I grabbed some parsley from the garden and chopped up some chili.

Once the pasta was almost done I added the chopped chili, softened that for a while, and then added some sliced horse mushrooms and most of the parsley (and some salt and pepper). 

At the end that was all tossed in with the pasta, a little butter and olive oil, and dressed with some sliced cheese (I used some Lincolnshire Poacher) and the rest of the parsley. And it looked and tasted superb.

I wouldn't have said that by my standards this is dinner party amazing, but its the kind of thing you can rustle up if you've got unexpected guests and a few mushrooms in the fridge, and its an excellent quick lunch. Its great with horse mushrooms, indeed anything kind of firm-ish and tasty. If you're lucky enough to have any prince mushrooms (Agaricus augustus) they're probably the finest mushrooms for this dish, but more or less anything will work. And if you want to leave the chili out, or fry in some bacon at the start, that also works. Even add in a dollop of cream or soft cheese at the end and mix it in to form a thick sauce. 

But today this was just a good way of using up a few of a surprise haul of mushrooms on the way back from the Station after a visit to Ely market. I guess the hot and sour soup may have to be another day...

Dinner Diary - Gurnard and Rosti

So after having eaten a fab gurnard at the weekend I thought I might see if I could feed it to my other half too. She's really fussy about fish, and its always a challenge, but gurnard is a firm, tasty, white fish and it should be just down her alley. And I'm glad to say she loved it.

I came home from the fishmonger with Bernard here. Thats what I'm calling him, Bernard the Gurnard. Suits him, right?

So as well as being a firm, tasty white fish thats really plentiful and under no threat right now, another great thing about this fish is its cheap - this one was eight quid and it will do us four servings (well, two meaty servings and a soup for both of us too). So, out with the guts, and its he only fish I often get where you're better cutting a Y shape rather than a straight cut.

It always strikes me as weird that people would rather get the fishmonger to do this - if is a good, fresh fish it isn't an unpleasant job, and if there are roes in there you'll get another tasty snack out of it. Anyway, after you've got rid of its innards cut all the fins off (and its fleshy little feet - see those tendrils? those) and pitch them into your stock pot. Here they are.

After that (and giving it a run under the tap) its almost as simple as filleting any other fish - run a filleting knife down either side of the backbone, cut through the cavity, and down to the tail. Don't forget to go well under the head shield to get all the flesh off - and if you're really hungry pick out the meat from the cheeks underneath. I didn't, because thats all going in stock anyway. Then hold the fillet skin side down and work your knife along the inside of the skin, down against the board, from the tail end to the front. 

For this dish I then cut the fillets down the line in the middle of them, either side of the pin bones (which join the rest of the wreckage). And then I sliced them up into little cubes and put them into a dish with lemon juice, salt, zest, and a little dash of rice wine. That went into the fridge for an hour or so to marinade. 

Then the rest of Bernard the Gurnard - skin, bones, head, fins, little fleshy feet all goes into the pressure cooker for stock. Maybe for hot and sour soup on Saturday.

So on to the rosti. We all know this, right? Potato, shredded fine, spoon full of salt, left for 10 minutes or so then squeeze as much juice out as you can before pushing handfulls down onto a hot pan to fry it. Put a lid on it, turn it when it looks about right, and when it looks done it is. Nothing cheffy or dainty here, splodge it on, cook it until browned.

While it was cooking I sliced up a bunch of salad veg, and when it was nearly done I beat an egg white almost to soft peaks, folded in the yolk and about a dessert spoon full of cornflour, and a pinch of salt. Thats one of my favourite really light coatings for fish - it gets a lovely colour, keeps the fish moist and doesn't overpower the flavour. Drop the fish in it, and then into a hot pan with oil...

The fish only takes a couple of minutes to cook on either side, and being gurnard you can cook it quite hard, it stays moist and holds its form. Serve on the rosti, with salad, and a slice of lemon, and this is a lovely little dish even for a fish-skeptic. And for fresh fish, its dirt cheap. 

So I don't know whether my current gurnard obsession is going to continue, it depends on whether the fishmonger keeps getting good ones in. But I really also need to do something with this fridge full of mushrooms next...

Dinner Diary - Curried Lamb Necks and Pumpkin

I was feeding the mother in law on Saturday, and wanted something spicy but not TOO spicy. Thankfully I had a couple of lamb necks in, waiting to be used. Normally you get them already portioned into chops, but if you can get them whole from the butcher do so. You won't get any little shards of bone in the finished meal, and you get so much flavour out of them cooked whole.

So, I took plenty of spices (cardamon, pepper, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, turmeric, a little chilli) toasted them and ground them up. I put an onion, lemon juice, salt, pepper, oil, ginger and garlic into the food processor and added the ground spices, and rubbed them in to the lamb. I put a tea-towel over the bowl and went mushroom picking...

When we got back hours later, I scraped them clean (keeping all the goo) and browned them off before putting them into the pressure cooker with the goo I'd rubbed off, stock, a tin of tomatoes and fresh coriander. You can boil it in a normal pan but the pressure cooker makes short work of even the toughest cuts - I gave this 25 minutes at full pressure.

While that was cooking I softened off more of the same spices with the addition of some fennel seeds, and fresh ginger, sliced onion, and chilli and put in loads of peeled, chopped pumpkin and fresh coriander. Yes, the kind you get for Halloween, its delicious. When it was good and smelly, I covered it with water and dried coconut powder, added lime juice and salt, and cooked it until it was soft.

Thats a really easy way to cook punmpkin, and quite lovely. At the end I added in some shredded cabbage, garam masala and let it steam through.

The lamb necks stripped clean of meat really easily, and went back in to their sauce with bell peppers just to reduce for a minute or two, and the whole shebang was served with rice. 

Is this a stand out dinner? Well no, I wouldn't have said so. This is a simple, tasty, easy, every day kind of dish. You can rub the marinade on the lamb after dinner one night and cook it the next, or even freeze it in the marinade. Well worth a go, its a cracking dish.

Dinner Diary - Baked Gurnard and Wild Mushrooms

People often seem kind of surprised when they ask what we've been eating and I actually tell them. Its like you're not meant to eat this way. So I thought I might start blogging a few dishes that we eat, as we eat them. And tonight happened to be one where I was only cooking for myself so I could be a bit basic and just hurl some nice ingredients into the pan. 

I've always loved fish and while my other half will eat some fish dishes she's a lot fussier than I am, so anything like a whole cooked fish is a treat for a night on my own. 

I popped into town and picked up a grey gurnard. Its a really under-rated fish - firm, white, well flavoured and has a great structure that allows you to cook it quite hard without losing any structure. For some reason the gurnards (red and grey) have always been under-rated by the British public so if your fishmonger has them they're always cheap. I suppose its because they're fiddly to fillet and process, but thats fine because they're superb cooked whole. And best of all its very under-fished, there are loads of them in the ocean and its an ideal one from a sustainability perspective. 

I had the fish monger gut it (I'd usually not, because if there are roes I'd like to eat them!) but otherwise all I did was give it a wash and slash the sides.

On the way home I stopped off at one of my mushrooming spots and picked a few honey mushrooms (Armillarea mellea). Its not my favourite mushroom but its one to remember the spots where it grows because it does go well with fish. Usually you find it on dead wood, but often peoples first response to finding it is to cut the tree down and burn it (it being a terrible pest that can spread between trees and kill them), and what you find is a clump like this growing on the stump. I suppose button mushrooms would have done, but I wanted some of these...

Its only the caps of honey mushrooms I use, the stems are rather tough and fibrous. I used about a dozen (with a couple of wood mushrooms thrown in), which were sauteed with some parsley and shallot until they looked like this...

I seasoned the fish with salt and pepper, rubbed some butter in the slashed sides, and put it on top of the mushrooms. This was covered and baked at 180C for 25 minutes before uncovering and cooking for ten more minutes with the cover off. That gets all the juice from the fish and the mushrooms reduced down with the butter to make a rich sauce. The result was superb.

Alongside a bread bun from yesterdays bake, that was dinner. A really simple, superb treat of a dish for a night in alone.