Cooking With Richard

Inspired by my previous efforts to make sausages with a fruit gravy, today I made “expert” bangers and mash. There are just three ingredients, but each is key: Sausages have to be from happy pigs and excellently produced. Mash must be made by baking potatoes for 90+ minutes in the oven, as here. And finally the gravy which in this case was made with the cooking fats plus some chicken stock, lots of red wine, redcurrent jelly, sage, oregano, marjoram, flour [to thicken], peppercorns and a little salt.

The result is bangers and mash, drenched in a delicious and rich, sweet red wine sauce:

The Great Vegetable Massacre (thanks to b3ta)

Where’s miki-chan?!

One of my colleagues lives in Warwick and they have 1 inch of snow already.

Some interesting variations in Jamie Oliver’s recipe, including adding cheddar cheese.

This is pretty interesting: a mushroom book recycler.

You will need a 250-300 page paperback book, and a packet of “spawn” from the link above.

After 2 or 3 weeks, oyster mushrooms will magically sprout from the book.

Now all I need is some Jeffrey Archer.

Growing shiitake mushrooms on logs also seems to be popular.

Previously I made caldo verde which was pretty good. Well I made it again, this time using really expensive Polish sausage from Sainsbury (£5 versus ~£1.50 from the local shop), kale, paprika, etc.

It really wasn’t as good as the “cheap” version.

This is how the expensive version looked:

Update to this I found a photo of the delicious fig cake that Ben and/or Wako-san made:

Interesting BBC news article about more evil invaders from the continent and beyond. Including our least favorite, the Harlequin ladybird, and a new one: a beetle that eats rosemary and lavender plants.

We had dinner last night with Lady E’s friends Ben-san & Wako-san.

Unfortunately all my photos were a bit rubbish, which is a shame because they cooked an astonishing meal of about 10 courses! I’d like to show them, maybe LE’s photos will come out better. I don’t think I can cook anything like that which makes it tricky to invite them back …

OK, here’s a photo which is slightly less rubbish than the others:

and also N-sama had this one this morning:

Remember my rubbish attempts at tilt-shift photography a few years ago? Here’s someone who has done some brilliant timelapse tilt-shift movies:

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

(c/o Boingboing)

I made this caldo verde special Portuguese soup using a combination of this recipe and this one.

This is how it turned out … very tasty … with polish sausages from the local conbini:

For Aya …

All of the good photos of the meat seemed to have Mito smiling away in one corner. This is the only photo showing the meat being carved. The beef was very good indeed, G Gibson done us proud!

My Yorkshire puds came out perfectly:

Elberberries, brambles and apples cooking for the crumble:

Thanks for coming everyone!

After 4 months of stress and the house being upside down, we’re preparing a “back to normal” party tomorrow. Many close friends are coming round (London-Midland trains permitting …). I bought some meat from Gibson’s butchers in Watford today:

At 6.6 lb (3 kg), N-sama helpfully pointed out that this is the same size as a newborn baby.

However, M-kun is only allowed to eat vegetables until he gets a job …

My brain is dribbling out of my nose watching The Core (2003). Best (worst) quote: “That’s all Science is, best guess.”

Quite by chance when I was cooking butternut squash the other day, instead of throwing away the seeds I planted four of them in a plant pot…

Much to my surprise, all four turned out to be hardly little blighters and they’ve all grown up like mad in spite of my best efforts to kill them. For a while they were growing about 1 inch a day:

Second up is a delicious lamb recipe that I just made up, based very roughly on this:

And last but not least, onion soup: