Cooking With Richard

Slightly better photos of the pigeon pie:

Everyone should have one of these at home …

… and we do!

Apparently it’s called “Sushi Bar“. It’s impossible for non-Japanese.

I made the pheasant pie again, much better this time. Unfortunately I didn’t take any good photos :-(

The pheasants were from Gibson’s in Watford market.

I found three shot while I was making it, and N-sama found another two:

… with lots of instructions!

A brace of pheasants in a pheasant pie:

Tarte tatin, named after a French hotel:

A very tasty Sunday dinner!

The recipe for pheasant pie is very easy, although somewhat time-consuming. It is adapted from this one. First I simmered the pheasants, onions, carrots (etc) in water and some white wine for a few hours:

Then I separated the meat into some pie dishes and covered it with streaky bacon:

I returned the bones to the stock and boiled it further, then removed all the bones and vegetables from the stock and boiled it hard to reduce the stock and intensify the flavour:

I also added sage, thyme and pepper at this point to get the seasoning right.

Finally pour a little of the stock over the meat (not too much — you can save any stock you don’t use), cover with puff pastry, and cook in the oven 200C for about 20 minutes.

Image from NASA’s Terra satellite, huge version here.

I finally got a log to plant my shiitake mushroom plugs in.

I took this photo last week during the cold snap. It’s of a large field next to the house, covered in snow.

Click for the big version!

Here’s another — the enchanted forest:

Click for the big version!

Here is my kakizome for 2010:

2008’s kakizome (水/”water”) worked out. We got plenty of water, of the wrong sort.

2009’s kakizome (金/”money”) worked well too … Now I have no money.

In 2010, either I’ll grow lots of these, or I’ll become a vegetable. Tune in during 2010 to find out …

By the way, thanks for everyone who wished me a happy birthday. However it’s not actually my birthday. It’s just that I put 1/1 in Facebook because of their privacy-sucking policies.

Update

N-sama making a gift for 書き初めの神:

Chipperfield Common, covered in snow:

I got a bit lost and had to follow my own footsteps back:

Previously and previously and previously.

Crazy Japanese …. One of them looks like lovely Yuka though.

I ordered a goose from Clerkes Geese, but how best to cook my goose? (I’m going to call her “WAAKO”).

This site has illustrations on how to truss, cook and slice a goose.

Gordon Ramsey’s Christmas goose recipe looks a bit poor.

Delia’s suggesting goose, pork, sage and pears.

Goose, plum and sage, sounds nice.

Goose with cranberries, sage and a traditional stuffing. Another goose recipe with a traditional chestnut stuffing. I think I’m seeing a pattern here …

Goose with apple stuffing, and another goose and apple recipe, and yet another one.

I ordered a goose for Christmas from Clerkes Geese.

Something of a lost opportunity. The Two Brewers is a traditional pub in just about the perfect English village setting (yet close to London). With the right owner it could be a great pub, but instead it’s a moderate chain pub with restaurant-cum-hotel pretensions. The food was 5/10, certainly not bad, but nothing of note.

After months of wrangling and worry we finally exchanged contracts on our new house. Here it is. The strange raised section with a window on the right is the wretched flying freehold that caused everyone so much trouble:

The lane:

Big garden!

This is where Mito can stay when she comes. Probably when the house was built in the 1920s it was the toilet …

The village common:

The brawn is tasty, rather like a cold, meaty pâté.

We ate it with home made toast. The only problem is there’s just so much of it, a complete “loaf” of brawn which we won’t ever be able to eat in time. Luckily Hugh has a recipe for fried brawn — we’ll see about that.

Brawn with toast and salad. Everything here is home-produced!

Next time: More spices. This dish will take a large amount of spice because the pig is highly flavoured itself, and there’s such a lot of it. I think I’d want to go with a real recipe next time so we can choose to make it Chinese-spicy and British-spicy. Also more salt for the same reason.

So the pan arrived this morning and it turned out to be a little bit larger than I anticipated:

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