Cooking With Richard

I basically made this up. The sauce is cooking sake, oranges, sugar, a little cream, salt and pepper. It’s rather tasty!

Thanks to morisobako and f-yayoi for finding BENINGTON (BENKYOSHIMASU) LORDSHIP gardens …

Benington Lordship Gardens (looks much bigger in the photo than it does in real life) ..

M-kun’s dinkle?

The best bit was the CHICKEN TOILET. N-sama wouldn’t go do OSHINKO because of the chickens by the toilet. Eh tou.

Pheasants from last weekend, cooked like coq au vin:

Pork belly (cooked by N-sama, it was excellent!):

Perfect sausage and mash:

Carrot cake with ice cream — really delicious, made by N-sama:

And last but not least, N-sama’s present for me, chocolate cake — yum yum:

They are pheasants really, but I tricked N-sama into thinking they were pigeons …

I’m leaving them to stew in wine overnight:

A willow tit (or marsh tit?), blue tit and robin:

I can’t believe that a couple of inches of snow caused the whole of London to grind to a halt.

Blackbirds – 2
Blue tits – 1
Great tits – 2
Sparrows – 5
Long-tailed tits – 3
Robins – 2
Starlings – 2
Wood pigeons – 1
Wrens – 1

This weekend (24th/25th January) is the RSPB‘s Birdwatch weekend, where you spend one hour counting birds to contribute to the RSPB’s survey.

From:

CC-licensed image c/o Rhys Jones photography

to:

using the standard coq au vin recipe. Cheap and tasty!

The pheasant was from the butchers in Sandridgebury.

When I was in the supermarket last week they had a special offer on cans of beans, so I was thinking about something to do with chicken and beans … This recipe for a chicken cassoulet seemed to fit the bill. It starts out good, with a thick, tasty red wine source. But at the end they add 2 pints of stock, mustard, lemon etc. which just dilute the flavour and/or have no discernable effect. So this could have been good, but in reality was tasteless.

Thanks Natsumi for the huge box of food and these TOKIKI. Next time you come I will make Jamie’s steak and ale pie for you. It’s very english and I’m sure you’ll like it.

In the meantime, here is a picture from the Piccadilly Line. カラスがちかてつにのっています！

You will need:

• One whole chicken. Happy chicken, please.
• Bacon or pancetta
• One bottle of red wine
• Chicken stock (or water)
• Onions and garlic
• Tomatoes skinned (or tinned tomatoes, drained)
• Herbs (eg. thyme, rosemary, parsley, oregano, bay leaves)
• Mushrooms
• Flour
• Butter

This makes enough for 3-6 people. Everything is variable, including the ingredients, amounts, and number of people who can eat it!

Take a whole chicken and chop into 6 or 8 pieces. Brown them off in some butter in a casserole dish:

Take the chicken out of the casserole and then brown off some bacon. Take the bacon out, and put in some onions (just chopped into half or quarters) and brown off the onions and garlic:

Now take all the ingredients out of the casserole, put them aside. In the casserole dish, put the bottle of wine and bring it close to boiling point, then remove the heat and stir in some flour (say, 1 or 2 tablespoons, enough to thicken the sauce). You can also add hot chicken stock or water at this point or later. Stir that for a few minutes:

Now place the chicken, bacon, onions, tomatoes back into the casserole with the wine and stock. Take a big bunch of herbs and add that too:

Bring everything up to the boil, then cook on a very low heat for 2-3 hours.

In the last 30 minutes, fry some mushrooms and add them.

(In the voice of Gordon Ramsey …) “Coq au vin in 3 hours … Done!”

Here’s a terrible photo of the result:

This is a better photo from when I made it earlier:

I love it! Pen and ink sketches of a lovely baby chick growing into a delicious-looking chicken, every day. Click:

I photographed a sparrowhawk catching, killing and eating a starling in the garden today. Well, the killing and the eating kind of overlapped. As you can imagine the starling was not too happy about this situation and made a lot of noise.

Click photos for larger versions.

I’m afraid that the ducks eggs and nest has gone. Something dug under the fence from the next door garden and swiped all the eggs. Only 2 days to go before they hatched as well :-(

Update

The neighbour thinks it was a fox, although maybe it was the neighbour’s dog. You can see the hole and the broken nest here:

and from the other side of the fence:

There was no sign of any eggs or even egg shells.

Mother was OK, but shaken. She sat in the garden for about half an hour like this, just doing nothing:

And that was that.

ガーコ is still sitting on her nest. We’re expecting ducklings towards the end of this week. Here’s the latest photo of (an) egg, she covers them up before she goes out each time.

While you’re waiting, here’s a photo of our lovely long-tailed tits:

Here is M-kun playing Mario Kart Wii, which is bloody good fun:

Looking at the duck’s arse:

The meat is from a great little butchers called JTB Butchers out in the back of beyond:

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Our duck (N-sama is calling her “ガー子”) has now laid a full clutch of at least 10 eggs, see the photo below. N-sama bravely took this photo.

Here she is sitting on the fence and flying off: