Confit of rabbit

Rabbits are plentiful, sustainable, cheap and healthy*.

Cooked properly, they're delicious.

Cooked badly, they're about as appetising as an old boot.

I've found that farmed rabbits can be successfully roasted with lemon, rosemary and garlic, but try the same treatment with a lean, muscular wild rabbit and the dish generally ends up in the bin.

On the other hand, cook a wild rabbit in a slow cooker with tomato, wine, garlic and onions, and you'll end up with tender meat and a pasta sauce to end all pasta sauces.

Farmed rabbits tend to be plumper and softer, the flesh not as exercised as their wild brethren.  Try to find out which sort you're buying and keep that in mind when you're deciding what to do with it.

This method is simplicity itself, and guarantees the most tender rabbit possible.

Lay the leg and shoulder joints from two rabbits out in a single layer in a casserole dish and salt with a couple of tablespoons of sea salt.  Cover and refrigerate for a few hours, up to six should be OK.

When you're ready to cook, quickly rinse the joints of excess salt and pat dry with a clean tea towel.  Rinse out the casserole dish too, and return the rabbit to it.

Add a handful of black peppercorns, a bay leaf and a good sliver of lemon peel to the dish and cover the rabbit with melted duck or goose fat.  It's always difficult to work out how much fat will be necessary - this time, I used three 300g jars.

The meat should ideally be covered by the fat, but if it isn't, don't worry.  Just turn the meat over a few times during the cooking process.

Cover the dish with foil and put it in a low oven, 150c, for at least an hour and a half.  If you're using wild rabbits, they'll take much longer, maybe another half an hour or forty minutes extra.  The meat is ready when it's meltingly tender when prodded with a knife.

Using a pair of tongs, lift the cooked joints into a large, clean Kilner jar, tucking them in tightly.  Pour the fat into the jar, making sure that it completely covers the meat.

The fat will set, encasing and preserving the meat.  When you want to eat some, just dig out a joint and flash it in the oven for ten minutes to crisp up.

The rabbit will keep like this for weeks.  It's tender to the point of collapse, salty and bursting with flavour.

This recipe is from Tom Norrington-Davis and Trish Hilferty's superb Game: A Cookbook.

* Rabbit meat is healthy.  Duck or goose fat, with salt, is not.  Beware.  This is not everyday food.



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Pheasant ballotine, stuffed with pork, prunes and pistachios

"My father was standing on the edge of the clearing with the moonlight streaming down all over him and a great bunch of pheasants in each hand.  His face was bright, his eyes big and bright and wonderful, and he was staring around him like a child who has just discovered that the whole world is made of chocolate"

Danny, The Champion of the World - Roald Dahl

We read Danny, The Champion of the World at bedtime, a chapter at a time, Ethan tucked up, listening intently, lost in the story in a way that only a seven year old could be.

I'd read Danny before, at school when I was about Ethan's age.  As I read Roald Dahl's words out loud, I realised that I knew the whole story.

I remembered it all.

The caravan, the workshop, slitting the raisins open with a razor blade and stitching them back up again, Victor Hazzell, the policeman, the thud of the pheasants as they rained down out of the trees.

It's a wonderful book, a truly glorious work of fiction, and worth reading even if you don't have a seven year old to read it to.

It seemed appropriate to cook some pheasant in honour of Danny, his father and Roald Dahl himself.  This recipe is quite unusual, but it's very successful.  It's suitable for birds from the tail end of the season, the ones that are a little tougher, having spent Christmas and the New Year in the woods.  These bids need a longer and slower treatment.  They need stews, casseroles, poaching.

Start by boning out two pheasants.  This may seem daunting, but it's quite easy.  Start on the back and carefully and gently cut the breast meat away from the rib cage.  This is all much easier if you remove the wishbone first.  Carry on carving the meat away, working your way carefully around the leg bones, popping the joints from their sockets as you go.  The aim is to keep the skin completely intact.

Next, make some stuffing from 300g of coarsely minced belly pork, three chopped rashers of streaky bacon, 100g of pitted and quartered prunes and 75g of roughly chopped pistachio nuts.  Add three generous tablespoons of brandy to the mix, along with two cloves of garlic, finely chopped together with the leaves of a sprig or rosemary.  Season well with salt and pepper and mix thoroughly.

Lay the boned out pheasants on a board and season the fleshy side.  Divide the stuffing between the two birds, spreading it evenly down the centre third of each bird.

Gently pull each side of the pheasant over the stuffing and roll it up into a big sausage, tying firmly with butcher's string.  Secure the ends with a couple of toothpicks to stop the stuffing spilling out.

To cook, poach in a litre and a half of stock.  Any poultry based stock will be fine, but the best result will come from a stock made from the pheasant's carcasses.

Poach for forty minutes, covered, the stock barely bubbling.

One pheasant will be enough to feed two people.  If there are only two of you, it's still worth cooking two pheasants - this ballotine is sensational cold and thickly sliced, served with a chutney and some good cheese.

The best place to eat this would obviously be with Danny and his dad, sat on the steps of their caravan.

This recipe is from Tom Norrington-Davies and Trish Hilferty's excellent Game: A Cookbook.




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Game: A Cookbook

There are a lot of myths about game.

It's hard to get hold of.  It tastes strong, sometimes bitter.  You'll crack your teeth on lead shot. You can ruin a dish by cooking it for a few seconds too long.

As with all myths, these and most of the rest are completely untrue.

Game has a lot to offer the cook, and even more to offer the diner.  It has a sense of homely exoticism about it, of something special, traditional, rooted.

Heritage in a pot.

Trish Hilferty and Ton Norrington-Davies' book Game: A Cookbook is a detailed look at game in all its guises, and provides a useful starting point for the aspiring game cook, or more likely, the cook who's happened to chance upon a couple of rabbits or a brace of pheasants and hasn't the slightest clue what to do with them.

I fall firmly into this category. My experiences with game have been mixed.  Some recipes have worked, others have failed in a spectacular fashion.  I realise now that my  techniques have been off the mark.  A  pheasant is  not simply a small chicken.  Lesson learnt.

Game: A Cookbook divides its subject into three broad sections, dealing with animals with two legs, four legs and no legs at all, essentially birds, mammals and fish.  It's a clever approach and marks the crossover in cooking methods amongst members of each group, playing on the synergies and the possibility of substitution.

There is plenty to inspire.  Basic roasting techniques are covered well, with proper attention to the intricacies of dealing with different species.  There's some exotic approaches, rabbit in Thai yellow curry, an Indonesian-style roast wild duck along with plenty of traditional standards such as a venison Wellington or a startlingly old-fashioned rook pie.  There's the odd bit of charcuterie as well.  Wild duck ham, a cured and dried duck breast will be in production this afternoon.

A couple of pages of stuffing recipes towards the back will come into their own next Christmas.  Sage and breadcrumb stuffing should be an early shoo-in when I turn to planning Christmas dinner in December.

Hilferty and Norrington-Davies' book is a huge triumph.

It succeeds on many levels, not merely as a stand-out cook book with accessible and engaging recipes.  Above that, it's an inspirational book, shining a light on an under used and under appreciated collection of ingredients that really deserve more attention.

Hugely successful, and worthy of a place on any cook's bookshelf.

All photos are copyright Jason Lowe, and in my opinion, are superb. Photography often makes or breaks a cookbook, and Lowe's pictures are a complete joy.

Thanks to Absolute Press for sending me a review copy.


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Alex James' Blue Monday cheese

Alex James is an unlikely cheese maker.

As Blur's bass player, James claims to have drunk a million pounds worth of champagne in three years, whilst contributing to some of the most innovative and  enduring records of the last twenty years, both of which I suppose are significant achievements, just in very different ways.

All things come to an end, and the inevitable in-fighting and parallel success of Damon Albarn's side projects left Blur on the shelf, leaving James free to try something new.

Making cheese in the country was clearly the obvious choice.

Blue Monday is a creamy Shropshire blue, sharp with a very faint sourness, named in honour of New Order's eighties classic.  It's an excellent name, and a superb cheese.

I'd love to see the newly reformed Blur back in the studio, but at the expense of James' second career as a cheese maker?  That's a tough call.

Blue Monday is available from Coxon's Kitchen, a great little deli and cook shop on Gordon Terrace in Saltaire.  Their website is here and their Facebook group is here, both of which, along with the shop itself, are well worth a visit.

I couldn't possibly write about both Blur and New Order without including some of their work, so here's New Order's Blue Monday:



As for Blur, this could have been Tender, Beetlebum, Girls and Boys, To the End, No Distance Left to Run, Charmless Man, There's No Other Way, Song 2 or any one of a dozen more.

Here's Out of Time:



Just be thankful I resisted the temptation to drag up that bloody awful Fat Les abomination.

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Possibly the best three-bean chilli in the world?

I need to point two important things out before I start:

• everybody does this differently.  This is just my way.  Yours may be better. The title of this post is obviously a provocative lie.
  
• I've no idea what 'authentic' is when it comes to this dish.  Hot? Mild? Beans? No beans?  No idea. This is probably not authentic, but it is quite good.
  

OK, that's the disclaimers out of the way.  On to the food.

Chilli recipes vary enormously in method and technique, but they all start with onions and garlic softened in oil.  Three medium onions, chopped finely and about six cloves of garlic, crushed, should be enough.  Keep the heat medium to low, so that the onions and garlic don't colour too much.

In a separate, large pan, brown a kilo of beef mince, the best quality, leanest you can find.

When the onions are soft, add chilli and continue to cook, slowly and gently.

The amount of chilli to use is entirely subjective.

I used two large dried ancho chillis, steeped in hot water for quarter of an hour and then sliced thinly, along with one similarly reconstituted chipotle.  The anchos are mild, with a smokey flavour of dried fruit and tobacco.  They're normally stuffed and roasted in Mexico, or pureed to make sauces for enchiladas.  The chipotle is a different beast - fiery hot, vicious with a distinct smell of smoke (a chipotle is a smoked jalapeno pepper).  This is the one that gives the dish its kick.

The onions will take on a different character as the chillis start to cook.  You'll be able to smell the chilli, the sharp power of the fruits catching the back of the throat.

Next, add some spices.

Toast four teaspoons of cumin seeds and two teaspoons of coriander seeds in a dry frying pan over a medium heat until they start to turn a nutty brown, and then grind them to a powder in a pestle and mortar.

Add the spices to the onions and chillis with two teaspoons each of ground cinnamon and smoked paprika.  You can also add some cayenne pepper at this point, for an extra kick, although this is purely optional.

Let the spices cook for a couple of minutes, then deglaze the pan with a cup or so of beef stock.  Stock from a stock cube is fine.  Scrape the bottom of the pan thoroughly, stirring all the time, and then add two cans of chopped tomatoes and four tablespoons of tomato puree.

Stir everything together, and then tip the whole lot over the browned mince.

Season with salt and pepper, add a large bay leaf and top up with stock.

Leave the chilli to bubble away on a very low heat, uncovered.  Keep an eye on the level of liquid, and if things start to look too dry, add a splash more stock or water.

After two hours, add some beans - kidney, pinto and black eye - soaked and cooked according to the packet's instructions if you're using dried, or thoroughly drained and rinsed if you're using canned.  Use about a kilo of beans in total, maybe three tins.

After another half an hour, add two teaspoons of cocoa powder, or a few chunks of dark chocolate with a very high cocoa content (75% plus).  Combining chilli and chocolate sounds strange, but the two ingredients go very well together.  The chocolate will add the slightest hint of sweetness and a thin layer of bitterness to the finished dish.  South and Central Americans have been doing this for centuries.

Cook for yet another half an hour, adjust the seasoning and serve with rice.

The finished dish is very powerful, especially if you choose your chillis recklessly.  The ancho and chipotle layered a deep rustic taste into the chilli, without the sharp slice you often get from using just chilli powder.  The beans take some of the edge off the heat.

These quantities make a huge amount of chilli, but it freezes well and defrosts quickly over a low heat.  You may as well make a lot in one go and save some for those nights when you just can't be bothered.

My chillis come from The Cool Chile Company - well worth a quick look.


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Could the Nordic Diet stop obesity?

There should be little doubt that Britain has a problem with its' weight.

Current estimates rate the level of obesity at around a quarter of the population.

That's a lot of big people.

The traditional British diet, heavy in saturated fats and carbohydrates, added to an ever more sedentary lifestyle would seem to be the cause of the problem.

But what about the solution?

A Mediterranean diet of olive oil, fish, and vegetables has been the cornerstone of 'healthy eating' for the last generation, but scientists have noticed that the Scandinavian know the odd thing about healthy eating, too.

A broadly Nordic diet shares many of the same characteristics as that of it's southern neighbours, replacing olive for rapeseed oil, Mediterranean vegetables for brassicas and citrus fruits for cold climate berries.

The University of Copenhagen is funding a study into regional Scandinavian food aimed at identifying a canon of ingredients to rival the famed Mediterranean diet in terms of nutrition and taste.

The principles of a Nordic diet are simple, based around a few core principles:

• eat more fish
• eat less meat, and when you do eat meat, eat lean game meat such as venison
• brassicas are intrinsically healthy, packed with vitamins and antioxidants.  They can taste good.
• a couple of meals a week should be vegetarian
• cut down on saturated fat

It all seems quite sensible.  But does it taste good?

Trina Hahnemann wrote the successful Scandinavian Cookbook in 2008, and follows up with The Nordic Diet, a further collection of Scandinavian recipes masquerading unconvincingly as a diet book.

Hahnemann's cooking is simple Scandinavian, adapted for the foreign market and palate.  Recipes are simple and bright, with clean, fresh flavours from recognisable and easily obtained ingredients.

Easy Danish smorrebrod, open sandwiches of rye bread topped with herring or salmon, egg, tomato, chervil, dressed with cutting vinegar dressings contrast with a stunning beetroot salad, bright Bishop's purple, bound with yoghurt, low-fat, naturally, served with a fillet of pollack cured in salt and lemon zest.

Crisp, bold flavours.

A kale and chicken salad did little to convince me that I should actually like kale, but the thought of roasting a leg of wild boar is with garlic, rosemary, thyme and red wine, and eating it with roasted Jerusalem artichokes, carrots and potatoes, a lingonberry compote on the side, is reserved for such a time as I can find a wild boar.

Funnily enough, Leeds Market is a bit light on wild boar these days. 

They've got plenty of kale, though.

Any diet that pushes the consumption of cabbage and Brussel sprouts is going to struggle with it's image, but the benefits of a Nordic diet are self-evident.  Apart from the fairly standard and dull advice about enjoying meals with the family more, sitting down at the table to eat instead of in front of the TV, there's a lot to like about Hahnemann's book.

The central message is one of balance and care - take time over your food, its selection and preparation, and enjoy eating it.

I'm not so sure about the rye bread pizza, though.

I think the Italians probably do that better.



Thanks to Quadrille for sending me a review copy.

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