Thursday 11 April 2019

Dinner Diary - Pigeon Breast Salad, Sea Bass and Couscous

Bit of an odd dinner yesterday but no less delicious for it. On Sunday I found a wood pigeon on the grass verge, just at the end of the street. It didn't look like it had been hit by a car, but was cold and post-rigor mortis, with just a single neck wound. Odd thing for a cat to do, but I couldn't place what predator had got it and just left it. Probably whatever had got it had been disturbed, but never mind I thought, its loss is our gain. I took off the two nice, plump breasts and put them in the fridge.

Just before I was about to cook dinner there was a knock on the door, and three of the neighbourhood kids were there. The oldest is about 9, the youngest about 6, and they were playing outside in the alley by the house where they'd found a dead bird. One of them had clearly been crying about it, so I thought I'd better have a look. I should add that you can't go out of our front door without the kids playing out in the court talking to you, its great really but you also have to be ready to answer whatever questions they have. I'm the weirdo with the front garden full of berries that they nick and chickens in the back garden, so its entirely natural for them to consult me about the dead bird. Anyway, it was another wood pigeon, and it was obvious how this one had died - its neck was ripped and it had a three pronged wound in one breast made by the talons of a small bird of prey. A sparrowhawk had got it, but as the kids were going to be playing out for another hour at least (having had their tea and it still being light) there wasn't any point leaving the pigeon there, the sparrowhawk wouldn't be able to come back for it. Talked to the children who were horrified I'd picked up a dead bird, asked why its different to eating chicken (which they all do), gave them some pretty tail feathers, and took the bird in for disposal rather than leaving it there. And, of course, thanked them for telling me, I don't really want dead animals lying on the ground next to my house! So suddenly we were up to two pigeon breasts each. 

The plan was a light pigeon breast salad with a mix of other tasty salads. When I went past the fishmongers stall at lunchtime I spotted he had some nice little bass, so I snaffled one of those too, took it home, filleted and skinned it, and left it marinating in a little lemon juice and salt.

We had a lentil and seed salad yesterday and it was delicious, so I took the leftovers (brown lentils cooked until nearly soft, with toasted quinoa, sesame, sunflower and pumpkin seeds tossed in with a little salt and pepper, lemon juice and olive oil) and added in some couscous and more lemon juice.  Thats great with fish. We also had plenty of greens left over (chard, Alexanders, rocket and three cornered leek) so I put that aside to go with the pigeon breast salad. 

I also made another couple of salads. I grilled some halved peppers for 25 minutes or so in the skillet, and added sliced tomatoes, olive oil, seasoning and oregano, and left it to cool and for the flavours to infuse. A really simple and rich dish. And as I've also got the last of my beetroot crop from last year in (red, white, some yellow, a mix of the remnants from last years crop) I microwaved those beets whole until tender, and after cooling peeled them, diced them and added some to a bowl with feta cheese, three cornered leek (a delicious oniony wild green), and a dash of oil. Thats a salad thats always good whichever green you add - its especially good with rocket in it, but I fancied something sharp. 


So when the couscous was almost cool I seasoned (you want lots of salt and pepper for this) and cooked the pigeon breasts very briefly on either side in a skillet as hot as I could get it, before letting it rest while deglazing the pan with wine and butter to make a hot dressing for the green salad, and then cooked the sliced up and marinated bass in a cornflour coating. The sliced pigeon breast was served on the green salad and the fish on top of the couscous. 

And that was it. One of those dinners that looks absurdly complex but really isn't, made up of a mix of randomly obtained freebies (wild greens, pigeons a sparrowhawk didn't get to chow down on), easy salads, and essentially almost free ingredients cooked very simply indeed. Delicious Spring cooking.

Wednesday 10 April 2019

Dinner diary - First proper wild mushroom dish of the season

One of the great joys of Spring is going out and finding my first decent haul of wild mushrooms. That's a movable feast here in Cambridge, its such a dry city that we can end up missing the whole Spring season for mushrooms sometimes which is a real shame because there are some unsurpassed flavours and textures to be found among them.


Yesterday, despite it being surprisingly dry here already, I was fortunate enough to find this little haul. Top left there are two little thimble mushrooms (Verpa conica) which I left out in the end because they're really not great eating, top right we have a small stand of oyster murhrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), the white ones in the middle are St. Georges mushrooms (Calocybe gambosa) and the ones that look like brains on sticks are morels, the highly prized yellow morel Morchella esculenta to be precise. Not by any means a huge haul, but more than sufficient for a slap up meal for the two of us. 

Oyster mushrooms you already know, they're very like the cultivated ones but a little firmer, meatier and more flavourful.

Now I'm going to say something heretical. I don't really rate morels. They're one of the big, chefs choice species and command an absurd price to buy (this link shows the rather less prized Morchella elata and they're flogging them for £80 per kg) but for me they're more fun to find than to eat, looking like alien sponges on the forest floor. Typically you get them on ground that was disturbed or burned at some point years ago, and while they're not that common here I know from another picker that there's at least one other patch in the city somewhere that I haven't found. The flavour is okayish, and the texture is at least firm. They are quite charming in their habitats.


For me the real prize of the day was the St. Georges mushrooms. Its a little early for them still, you get the odd one before St. Georges day (April 23rd) but they fruit more prolifically afterwards, as long as we get some rain. They're a marvellous mushroom, as I've gone into before. I'll leave this video describing them here...



This made dinner last night remarkably simple. The mushrooms were sliced, sweated down with a drop of oil and a splash of water (I'll go into why and how it is best to cook mushrooms simply to keep their texture and get an intense flavour another time), salt and pepper, and folded into the middle of omelettes (we've plenty of eggs from the hens in the garden at this time of year), and finished with wild garlic and a knob of butter, served alongside a nutty brown lentil and toasted seed salad and fresh wild salad from the allotment with a few wild leaves thrown in for good luck.

And that, for me, is Spring cooking at its best. Simple, easy, seasonal ingredients with fresh and intense flavours, and healthy.