Made some sausage casserole today, using roughly the recipe on the back of the sausage packet.

The casserole was tasty (it always pays to use good quality stock) but more noteworthy is that I cooked sausages well for perhaps the first time in my life. First they went into the oven at 160 degrees until they were cooked through. Then I browned them off on a rack (to stop them rolling about) under the grill, turning them every so often so that they coloured beautifully all round. They did lose a lot of juices but, since they were good quality sausages and they were going into casserole anyway, it didn’t matter. I cooked the casserole part separately and put the components together to be frozen in batches. It’s always good to have a ready meal or two in the freezer.

EDIT 10 Apr 2012: Best way to cook sausages for the casserole: after browning under grill as detailed above, put them into thr casserole and cook the whole thing at 150 degrees. This results in very tender sausages.

My mum has never made anything she called ‘pakora’. What she does do however, is coat certain thinly sliced vegetables in a batter made from gram flour, deep fry them and call them ‘bhajya’. As far as I can tell, pakora are the same as bhajya except that pakora are made with a mixture of different vegetables and end up bigger whereas bhajya are made with only one or possibly two types and end up smaller.

I made some potato bhajya based loosely on the pakora recipe in Veena Chopra’s Real Indian Cookery. The potatoes were peeled and sliced thinly before coating in batter and then deep fried. (Note for future: leaving the potato slices in the batter made the batter watery.) They had to be fried slowly so that they cooked through without the outside burning. The bhajya weren’t very spicy but they were made to be dipped into homemade chilli jam so they weren’t supposed to be. They are best eaten straight away; even reheating in the oven did not recapture the original crispiness.

The Atrium is Birmingham College of Food’s training restaurant. This means you can get near enough Michelin star food at a fraction of the price. We went there for a family meal last night. Splendid food, as usual.

I’ve been making lamb curry since 2003. I’ve tried a few different recipes and I sometimes make it up as I go along but I’ve never been able to get the lamb tender enough to melt in the mouth. Tonight I discovered the secret, almost by accident. It’s the cooking temperature – it needs to be low.

I preheated the oven to 150 degrees. I sliced up some lamb neck fillet into fairly large chunks as they shrink during cooking. I didn’t bother to marinade, I simply made a mixture of ground spices (cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander seeds, dried chillies, turmeric) then added to it some chopped garlic and ginger. I fried the mixture in a little oil in a large casserole dish, threw the lamb in with it and coated the meat pieces with the mixture. After a quick ‘stir fry’ I added enough coconut milk to cover and put the casserole dish into the oven with the lid on to cook for an hour. After that I removed the lid to allow sauce to concentrate down and returned it to the oven to cook for another half hour. The lamb was then beautifully tender. I added a little lemon juice at the end – I find that adding acid before this stage can dry meat out – and sprinkled over chopped fresh coriander to serve. There wasn’t much left after we’d finished:

25 Sept 2012
I also tried cooking this at 100 degrees covered for 2 hours. The lamb was cooked so I removed the meat from the sauce and poured the sauce into the OXO fat separator. After waiting for the fat to come to the top, I poured out the defatted sauce and reduced it before adding the meat pieces back in to warm through to serve. I didn’t add any lemon juice this time as I was serving it with (acidic) curried green beans in tomato sauce. Perfect.

I had a half shoulder of lamb languishing in the freezer and wanted to do something different rather than the usual garlic and rosemary. I found a Moroccan recipe online. I adapted it slightly, mainly by using fresh ginger and garlic, both chopped in the crust:

The kitchen smelled of wonderful spices all afternoon while it was cooking. The result was superb:

We didn’t have any couscous so I served it with rice cooked with onion fried in some of the rendered fat, chick peas, paprika and lemon:

I was quite pleased with it. The rice turned out a bit greasy so should have used less fat on the onions or could have missed out the fried onion entirely. Also it would have been good to put something under the lamb to make use of that strongly flavoured fat- maybe the onion should have gone there instead?

Meanwhile, Mr W made smoked beef jerky using his new smoker:

The jerky tasted fantastic but was extremely hot! Perhaps a tad less chilli next time…

We had our Christmas Day early as we’ll be working on the actual day. Here are some of my presents:

I used the mezzaluna and board to chop up sage to add to the gravy I made to go with our sausage and mash tonight. The gravy turned out very well. I sliced 2 shallots and fried them very slowly in olive oil. Towards the end I added 2 chopped cloves of garlic and continued the slow frying. When the garlic had just browned I drained off excess oil and added some plain flour, probably 3 heaped teaspoons in total. (Delia says not to use corn flour to thicken gravy as the gravy ends up with the wrong texture and I must say I agree.) Once the flour was fried, little by little I added a 500ml bag of Waitrose beef stock and boiled it all gently until the gravy was reduced by about half. There was no need to add salt. The result was a meaty, garlicky (but not too greasy or gelatinous) rich gravy.

I made these using a recipe from my Primrose Bakery book. They were a bit dry and not light. Also, I took them out of the oven when they were still ever so slightly undercooked. They’d cooled by the time I realised and put them back in the oven and when I took them out that second time, the tops of the cakes had browned more but the insides hadn’t cooked anymore. The lemon buttercream was very sweet, too sweet in fact.

I think one of the things I did wrong with this was not to beat it much by hand and try to do the majority of the mixing in the food processor (blade attachment). Also I usually put an extra half or one tsp baking powder to give more lift but this time I forgot.

The next time I fancy a lemony cake I’ll make the Nigel Slater lemon and thyme cake!

I love Waitrose. It’s God’s own supermarket. In the main I like Heston Blumenthal too. But WTF is this year’s Waitrose Christmas advert about? Are people really so lazy that they can’t measure out the ingredients for a cake? Worst of all, why is Heston kissing Mad Delia’s hand at the end? Makes me sick.

I’ll still shop at Waitrose after witnessing this monstrosity but I won’t be buying any of the Heston branded stuff, unless it’s on seriously special offer.

Made some potsticker dumplings and they turned out well although they were twice the size they were supposed to be:

The recipe came from my Ken Hom book:

EDIT 21 Jan 2012

I have been making these with twice the filling specified in the recipe but the same amount of dough. So whether this means I need to roll out the wrapping to half the thickness I have been I’m not sure. It would be very fiddly though. Also I substituted lamb mince instead of pork and it didn’t work as well.