Akhmed decided to host a “bring a dish” party at his flat, with each guest bringing a plate of something authentic from their home country. “OK”, thought me. A great chance for me to knock up something from my copy of Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food. I guess I could have chosen any of the 100 or so recipes I still have left to cook, but this one for Manchester Tart just seemed to jump out at me.

Manchester tart is all about school dinners. I can remember it being served up by the dinner ladies at my old junior school – it was always one of my favourite puds. It’s a bit of strange recipe for a cookbook by a Michelin starred chef such as Gordon Ramsay. And I’m not convinced I have ever seen it served in a British pub. Though I suppose there are those niche drinking dens in London that cater for gentlemen with a certain type of school teacher fetish. Perhaps it pops up there?

I awoke from my Saturday afternoon siesta rather later than planned, so I had to put the tart together in an awful rush. That, and getting to grips with my new Panasonic Lumix camera, perhaps explains some of the less than stellar photography (sorry!). Here’s the first snap of the ingredients. You can see eggs, milk, cream, butter,  caster and icing sugars, desiccated coconut, bananas, raspberry jam and vanilla pods.

To start off, I had to tackle my kitchen nemesis. I could almost hear Gordon admonishing me. “Its only f**king pastry you big girl. Get stuck in”. Hmm, easy for him to say. But, perhaps because I was so rushed that I didn’t have time to worry about it, the pastry making actually went pretty well. It was the usual drill. I piled my food processor high with butter and sugar and whizzed to combine. Then an egg and another whizz. And then the flour and a final quick whizz until the dough came together. I gently kneaded the dough for a while and then shaped it into a flat disc, wrapped it in cling film and popped it into the fridge to chill for 30 minutes.

Half an hour was just long enough for me to grab a quick shower and pick up some beer for the party. When I got back from the shops, I took the dough out of the fridge and rolled it out to about the thickness of a pound coin (or I suppose

about two one-euro coins back-to-back is more appropriate). I lined the tart tin and then added baking paper and some dried beans before “blind baking” the tart for 20 minutes.

OK, next job – pastry cream. I added milk, cream and a little sugar into a pan over a low heat. I split open a vanilla pod and added the seeds and the pod into the mixture and slowly brought the whole lot up to a simmer. I loved the smell of fresh vanilla as the creamy milk gently warmed through.

Meanwhile, I beat together egg yolks and sugar until smooth. I then whisked in 40g of cornflour, a bit at a time, keeping the mixture smooth.

Once the creamy milk was at the boil, I took it off the heat and slowly trickled it onto the eggy mix, whisking all the time until I had a nice runny custard.

Next, I used a sieve to strain out the vanilla pod and added the mixture back into the pan and onto the heat.

The heat under the pan must be very gentle – if it gets too hot the mixture will curdle. Not good. I kept stirring and slowly, slowly the pastry cream began to get nice and thick and smooth. It’s thick enough when you can draw a line across the bottom of the pan with a spoon.

By now, the pastry case was out of the oven and cooling. While that happened, I whipped together more cream with some icing sugar. As soon as it began to stiffen, I folded it through the pastry cream and gently combined the two.

Now to assemble the tart. First I spread the base of the pastry case with raspberry jam before layering on slices of banana, which I had previously chopped and tossed in lemon juice.

I then spread over the pastry cream mixture to fill the tart. There was a fair bit left over, but that quickly disappeared into the chef. Yum!!!

For the last job, I quickly toasted some desiccated coconut in a dry pan before mixing in a bowl with caster sugar. Finally, I sprinkled the sweetend coconut over the top of the tart, tucked it under my arm and headed out of the door towards the party. I was late!

So, how did it go down? Well, I wouldn’t say the tart was something I was overly proud of – it was hardly a gourmet recipe. The taste was very much school dinners, and I guess that was ok. The  “bring a dish” party was fab though. There are people from over 90 different countries on my course here in Madrid, so the range of food and drink on show was pretty amazing. And, once the Manchester tart finally got to the table, it certainly didn’t hang around too long. But then maybe that’s students for you…..

This would be my second attempt at one of Gordon’s tart recipes, and as the first one, an asparagus and spring onion tart, was so utterly delicious, I had pretty high hopes for how this one would turn out. Despite being in Spain and away from readily available, traditional British ingredients, I do plan on trying to keep this blog as authentic as possible. As such, I was particularly pleased to find some nice quality (read expensive) Scottish smoked salmon in the supermarket’s chiller cabinet (although it turned out to be a discovery I would later regret). You can see the salmon below, along with the other ingredients of watercress, crème fraiche, lemons, eggs, flour and butter.

I started things off by making up the pastry. Up until now, I have been fairly lucky with my Ramsay’s pub food pastry attempts. I have to admit to you that this is far from the norm. I have a pretty awful track record with pastry, and usually resort to buying the pre-made stuff from the shops. Still, after my last few attempts had gone so well, I felt like I had nothing to fear.

I added plain flour and a pinch of salt to my blender along with some chopped up cubes of butter. After a quick whizz the ingredients had come together to resemble coarse breadcrumbs.

I emptied the contents of blender into a large bowl and added in a few tablespoons of cold water and slowly brought the mixture together. After lightly needed the dough into a smooth ball, I wrapped it up in clingfilm and left it to rest in the fridge to firm up. So far, so good.

After half an hour, I took the dough from the fridge and attempted to roll it out. It should end up roughly the thickness of a one pound coin and large enough to line a large tart tin. I say attempted, because this is where it all started to go a bit wrong. My first pass at rolling out the dough ended up with the pastry stuck firmly to the work surface (dough too wet, not enough flour on the countertop?). So I had to quickly scramble the dough back together and try again. I had a bit better luck the second time around, but my pastry still ended up a rather sad looking patchwork of fixes and plugs.

A little disheartened, I lined the tart base with baking paper and dried beans and popped into the oven to bake ‘blind’ for about 20 minutes.

After blind baking, its best to remove the paper and the beans and give the pastry case another 5 minutes of oven time until the base is properly cooked.

Once baked, you can use a sharp knife to trim around the edge of the tart case to tidy up the overhanging edges and at the same time brush the pastry with a little egg white.

Now for the filling. First of all, I grated the zest of a couple of lemons into a large mixing bowl.

Into this, I added three large eggs, crème fraiche and lemon juice before lightly beating the mixture and seasoning well with salt and pepper.

To assemble the tart, I first spread out the watercress leaves evenly over the base of the pastry case.  Next, I roughly tore up the smoked salmon into smaller pieces and scattered this on top.

Finally, I poured on the egg and crème fraiche mixture until it reached just below the rim of the tart.

And that was it. All that was left was for me to pop the tart back into the oven to bake for 45 minutes, until the filing had set and the top had gone a nice golden colour. It came out of the oven looking pretty good.

After leaving it to cool for ten minutes, I served a generous slice of the tart for supper, along with a few sprinklings of left over watercress. What do you think? Well, maybe it didn’t look as pretty as the picture in the cookbook, but I was fairly pleased with how it had turned out. At least my mish-mash of pastry was well hidden by the scrummy looking, creamy filling.

However, to be honest, I was a little disappointed with the tart’s taste. The Scottish smoke salmon was incredibly strong, its flavour really overpowered the other ingredients. Not that the tart was unpleasant (I love smoked salmon!), I just felt that overall the flavours of the dish were somewhat out of balance. I’m sure you could use a more gently smoked salmon instead but, while that would help, I cant help feeling that this tart recipe doesn’t quite hit the heights of the earlier asparagus and spring onion one. If you find yourself poking through the cookbook wondering which tart to make, I would have to recommend that you try the asparagus one instead.

So, my first Madrid recipe wasn’t quite the smashing success I was hoping for, but still, onwards and upwards! Coming up over the next few posts: some thoughts on Spanish pinchos, an old school dinner favourite and a Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food Extra recipe. Stay tuned!

With a relatively simple dish like this, where one or two components are the stars of the show, it really pays to spend a little more on sourcing good quality ingredients. In the huge Monaco Carrefour (which I have genuinely come to appreciate) I was able to find some fantastic mussels from the bay of Mont Saint Michel, on the Normandy coast.  The mussels from Mont Saint Michel can boast of being the first seafood product to be designated the French Appellation of Controlled Origin (AOC) status, and once you taste the sweet, creamy meat you can understand why.

The quality of the mussels can be attributed to the large tidal range in the bay, with up to a 14 meter difference between the high and low tides. These large differences in sea levels expose thousands of hectares of sand at low tide and the constant refreshing of the salt water means that the area is the perfect environment for the mussels to thrive in.

To go along with the Normandy mussels, I was also able to find a nice bottle of artesian Normandy cider. Cider from that region is, quite simply, some of the best in the world (see my post pears poached in perry for another recipe that uses Normandy’s famous booze). Needless to say, I had pretty high expectations for how this dish was going to turn out. Below, you can see both the mussels and the cider together with the other ingredients of smoked streaky bacon, garlic, fresh thyme, parsley and olive oil.

To start with, I gave the mussels a scrub under some cold running water, making sure to remove any beards that were still attached to the shells. At this stage, throw away any of your mussels that are open and that don’t close when given a gentle tap – they are bad, and, believe me, food poisoning from bad mussels is not something you want.

As soon as I was ready to get cooking, I sloshed a good glug of the olive oil into a big, heavy saucepan. Once it was hot, I added in the streaky bacon, which I had previously cut into thick, rough and ready chunks.

I kept the bacon pieces moving around the pan and after about 5 minutes they had released most of their fat and begun to turn a nice shade of golden brown.

I then added in a half dozen garlic cloves (unpeeled but lightly crushed) and a few springs of the thyme, letting these fry off for another minute of so.

Next, I tipped in all of the mussels and a small glass of the cider (which left plenty over for me to polish off…). I took a quick picture before covering them with a tight fitting lid and giving the pan a gentle shake from side to side.

After about 4 minutes of steaming, the mussels had opened up. I took the pan off the heat and added in a few grinds of black pepper. At this stage, take care to remove any of the shells that have not opened (again, they are most likely to be bad).

That was pretty much it. I sprinkled over some chopped parsley and served the mussels in the hot cooking pot along with some good crunchy French bread and a cold glass of the Normandy cider.

Fantastic! I took a first mussel using my fingers, and then used that empty shell as tweezers to pick my way through the rest of the pot, fighting with the lawyer over each delicious morsel. They really did taste divine. The rendered bacon fat combined with the dry cider and the moule juice to enhance the sweet yet savoury flavour of the Mont Saint Michel mussels. An absolute delight and so easy to make. It really is one to try yourself!

Oysters are one of those foods, like olives or kippers, that I can’t believe anyone really likes the first time that they try them. But try them often enough and, although they may not have you falling in love with your dining companion (despite the myth), I’m pretty sure that soon enough most people will fall in love with an oyster’s fresh, briny taste. As the French poet Leon-Paul Fargue wrote, it is “like kissing the sea on the lips”.

Any London pub worth its “gastro” tag will inevitably offer a plate of oysters as part of their menu. As in Gordon’s cookbook, they are usually served simply, open on the half shell alongside a sharp, vinegary sauce.  There are a whole variety of oysters to choose from, but for this recipe I went with some medium sized Fin de Claires, which are grown off the French Atlantic coast. Any oyster type will do for the recipe, but as both England and the States have some fantastic native varieties, do try to stick to local if you can.

You can see the oysters below along with the other two ingredients of shallots and good quality wine vinegar and the all important oyster knife!

To start with, I finely chopped a couple of shallots and mixed them together in a small bowl along with a few good glugs of the wine vinegar.

I set the bowl aside to infuse for an hour while I got on with the prep for the next recipe of mussels and bacon. When I was ready to serve the oysters, I spread out some ice onto a large plate and got on with the not insignificant task of opening up each shell. Shucking oysters is a little bit tricky and takes some getting used to before you are regularly able to pop open a shell with the minimum of fuss and without spilling too much of the salty liquid inside, crumbling too much of the outer shell into the edible flesh, or taking a big gouge out of your hand with the tip of the blade.

In my left hand I wrapped a clean tea towel to help with grip and to serve as some protection should I slip with the knife. A special oyster knife, or shucker, is recommended as regular knifes can be too thin and the blade twists too easily. To open an oyster, I held it in my towelled hand with the curved side facing down so that, when opened, the deep shell would retain as much as the inner liquid as possible. Using the shucker, I wedged the tip in between the two shell halves, as close to the hinge as possible.

With a little force, I pushed the tip of the blade through the small crack between the shells.

Once the knife was in, I twisted it in a circular motion, as you would a screwdriver or a doorknob. The oyster should literally “pop” open.

Once the seal between the two shells was broken, it was then a relatively easy task to run the knife around to cut away the muscle holding the two halves together and remove the upper shell.

And that was it. I set the successfully shucked oyster onto the ice and repeated, more or less successfully, for the rest. You can see the full platter below, served alongside the shallot vinegar and a cold bottle of fizz. A great start to the end of Monaco life!

Perry, or pear cider, seems to be all the rage right now in the UK. Huge marketing spend from the likes of Magners has seen the idea of perry drinking quickly change from something done by 80 year old web-footed farmers in bubblefuck Herefordshire to a bit of a trendy, high street party drink. Something that your younger sister might vomit up on a Friday night “up the town”.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Magners. As a food product it is pretty shit. It tastes far too sweet and sickly. Their TV ads cleverly state that “the only fruit that goes into a Magners pear cider is pears”, which then allows them to get away with adding that the product is “100% pears”. This makes it sound as though the drink is made from nothing but fermented pear juice. But of course, while there may indeed be no other fruit but pears in there, there are a truck load of other nasty additives that just don’t count as fruit. Swines!

Anyway, it’s a poor imitation of the real deal, which is usually made on farms and served strong, often straight from the cask. But for years, traditional English perry has been on the verge of extinction, so if the likes of Magners new push into perry increases the general awareness of the genuine article, then I guess that can only be a good thing…

Getting English perry here in Monaco would prove impossible, but not to worry. France, and in particular Normandy, has a long heritage of producing great cider and perry. I was able to pick up this traditional “poiré de Noramndie” at the local Carrefour.

While I was there, I also picked up the other ingredients of firm but ripe pears, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, star anise and black peppercorns.

To start things off, I quickly peeled the pears using an everyday potato peeler. You might want to use a sharp knife to tidy up the top of the fruit, where the stork meets the skin. Leave the stork on though – it looks so much prettier when served that way.

The next stage isn’t strictly taken from the Great British Pub Food recipe, to me it seems a bit of a glaring omission, Gordon – core the pears! I’m not sure why Ramsay misses this step out. When I learned to cook at Leiths in London, poached pears was one of the first dishes we were taught. I don’t know what kind of brain washing agent they put in the kitchen wine there, but since leaving I’ve found it impossible to deviate from doing things “the Leiths way” (for another Leiths way tip, see my post Sausage and Mash). Anyway, I instinctively flipped over the pears and hollowed out the hard bit of the core from the base of each fruit.

At this stage, I also find it useful to trim off the base of the pears so that they sit level when presented on the plate.

For the poaching spices, I gathered up some cinnamon sticks, cloves, star anise and black peppercorns.

I added these to a saucepan along with a generous swoosh of sugar and a pint or so of the perry (keeping back a small glass for the chef, of course!).

I brought the pan to the boil and let the liquid simmer for ten minutes of so until the sugar had melted and the syrup had thickened slightly. I then lowered in the pears and left them to poach away merrily.

After about twenty minutes the pears were ready. You can check they are done by piercing one with a small knife – the flesh should be soft and tender all the way through. Using a slotted spoon, I set the pears to one side to cool and then turned up the heat under the poaching syrup to bring it back to a steady boil.  I let the liquid boil away until it had reduced down to a thick, syrupy sauce.

With the poached pears in a bowl, I poured over the syrup and gently tossed the pears around to coat them evenly in the sweet sauce.

To serve, I popped each pear upright on a plate with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream and a generous drizzle of the poaching syrup. Delicious!

It’s such a simple dessert but at the same time it is really tasty, the sweetness of the fruit and syrup set against the spicy hints of anise and cloves and cinnamon. And unlike many desserts in Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food cookbook, it isn’t overly decadent. A perfect midweek treat that even the most ham-fisted of chefs can manage!

Luckily, there are a few recipes in the pub food cookbook that I have the tools for here in Monaco. And so what better way to welcome The Lawyer home from her first week at her new job than with a nice plate of chicory, walnut and stilton canapés and cold bottle of rosé?

However, in addition to the ridiculous non-kitchen here in Monaco, there was one other problem that I hadn’t considered – being abroad and still managing to source some of the peculiarly English ingredients for Gordon’s recipes. This is something which I guess is going to be an ongoing issue now that I am moving to Madrid. Still, I was blissfully unaware of any of this as I headed off to the local Carrefour supermarket to pick up the ingredients of chicory (a.k.a. endive), stilton cheese, walnuts, runny honey, English mustard, walnut and olive oils.

Coming from a home in central London, where grocery stores cram their stock into the smallest of spaces, to me the Carrefour seemed impossibly huge. After trawling the isles for what felt like forever, I had managed to pick up most of the ingredients. Even the English mustard had proven no problem. The only thing still eluding me was the Stilton cheese. I took a few laps up and down the long cheese aisle, but I was greeted with a wall of French cheeses. Now, I knew the French were a little precious about their cheeses, but surely a hypermarket of this size would carry at least one line of stilton, which is, after all, a world renowned cheese?

Perhaps I would have more luck at the deli counter, where the finer cheeses were cut and sold by weight.  Judging by the French deli-man’s reaction to my request for “une petite tranche du fromage stilton Anglais”, you would think that, rather than a simple appeal for a non-French (worse still, English) cheese, I had instead asked him to cough up the contact details of his Nazi collaborating grandmother. A definite “Non” there then. In the end, I had to make do with blue d’Auvergne, which is a blue cheese, not dissimilar to stilton (perhaps a touch softer and creamier), but one that I felt would do the job well. You can see the French interloper alongside the other ingredients below.

To start with, I prepared the canapé toppings. First of all, I cut a nice slice of the cheese and then roughly crumbled it into a small bowl.

Next came the walnuts. First, I tossed them into a dry pan, on a hot heat, and toasted them for just a few minutes.

I then needed to lightly crush the nuts, something I would normally do using a pestle and mortar. Of course, my temporary, under-equipped apartment has no such luxuries, so I had to make do with the wrong end of the kitchen’s oyster shuck (yes, unbelievably, it does have an oyster shuck – but then I suppose this is Monaco, darling).

I was careful not to crush the walnuts too much. I wanted a nice mixture of textures, from almost whole nuts down to some more finely ground bits.

For the final topping, I mixed up the honey mustard dressing. To 1 parts honey and English mustard I added 2 parts walnut and olive oils before seasoning with sea salt and black pepper.

Using a whisk (yes, I have a whisk!), I quickly blitzed the dressing until the mixture came together as one. Its consistency was slightly sticky and gloopy, and the taste was sweet but with a kick of heat from the mustard. Yum!

With the toppings ready, I got on with prepping the chicory. First of all, I trimmed off the base of the heads before peeling off the larger, outer leaves ( I saved the smaller leaves and chopped them through a mixed salad for the next day’s lunch).

Finally, to prepare the canapés, I arranged the chicory in a nice flower-petal shape and then scattered over the crumbled blue cheese and the crushed walnuts, trying my best to distribute them evenly among the leaves.

To finish, I drizzled the dressing lightly over the topped chicory and served with a cold bottle of local rosé. Perfect!

The flavours were each individually powerful, but all worked together rather well. I could really taste the distinctive bitterness of the chicory alongside the strong blue cheese and the sweet but hot dressing.  The texture of walnuts gave each mouthful a satisfying crunch. The spoon shape of the chicory leaves also made them natural finger food. The strong tastes mean that it is probably not something you would want to eat too much off at once, but they did make the perfect pre-dinner aperitif. I’m not sure how much the recipe really has to do with good, honest pub food, but its definitely one to consider the next time you have friends over for dinner. So much more fun than the usual smoked salmon blinis!

That said, there are upsides to moving to a new area. For one, there are lots of new and exciting places to source ingredients for my recipe attempts.  My old neighbourhood of Fitzrovia was seriously lacking a decent fishmonger, whereas my new temporary home in Notting Hill has quite a few to choose from. My favourite, and right on my doorstep, is the wonderful James Knight of Mayfair.

Now, lets be clear, this certainly isn’t the cheapest fishmonger you will ever come across. However, the quality of the fish and seafood is undoubtedly first rate. The produce is all wonderfully laid out on a huge ice shelf at the front of the store.

What a sight! It’s enough to make you hungry just walking past the shop and I didn’t need any more of an excuse to tackle something from the “Catch of the Day” section of my Great British Pub Food book. The picture that goes along with the recipe for “Cod with Clams and Smoked Bacon” had me drooling – it’s exactly the sort of flavour packed dish I go nuts for. I popped over to James Knight and picked up two fantastic, thick pieces of fresh cod and a small bag of clams and got cracking. You can sea the fish and the clams below, along with the other ingredients of smoked streaky bacon, fresh thyme, white wine, olive oil and butter.

First of all, I gave the clams a scrub in several changes of fresh water to clean off any grit trapped on the shells. At this stage, if any of your clams don’t close up when they are knocked, you should throw them away. I then set these to one side and seasoned the cod fillets with some good quality sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

To a large, hot pan I added a glug of olive oil and then added the fish, skin side down, along with a couple of sprigs of thyme.

After about three minutes, I carefully turned the fillets over using a fish slice and added a few knobs of butter to the pan. As the butter melted, I used it to baste the fish, which I let cook for just another minute or so.

I then carefully removed the cod from the pan (by now it was starting to come apart in big, juicy flakes) and set them to one side for later.

I then took another large saucepan, this time one with a tight fitting lid, and added some more of the olive oil. I roughly chopped the streaky bacon and, as soon as the oil was hot, added it to the pan along with a few more sprigs of thyme.

The bacon sautéed for a few minutes until it had taken on a nice colour and had begun to release its fat.

Once that was done, I added in a generous glass of white wine and brought the liquid quickly to the boil before tipping in the clams and sealing the pan tightly with the lid.

With the heat turned up high, I let the clams steam for about 4 minutes, giving the pan a gentle shake every now and then as they cooked, until all of the clams had opened up nicely. I tasted the cooking juices and added a bit more black pepper before sitting the cod fillets back over the clams to warm through.

That was it, lunch was ready! I divided the cod between two plates and tipped over the clams and cooking juices before garnishing with a sprig of thyme. You can see the finished dishes below served with the rest of the white wine and a fresh bag of chips from the local fish and chip shop. Heaven!

So, did it taste as good as I had hoped? Absolutely. The cod, clams and bacon were a perfect combination and the chips, soaked in salt and malt vinegar, made great sponges for the cooking juices. Being critical, I could have got the skin on the cod a little crispier and the dish was a touch heavy on salt, perhaps from the choice of streaky bacon I had used. But to be fair, neither of these would be hard to fix next time and they can hardly be blamed on Gordon’s recipe.  So many pubs in London serve bog standard battered cod and chips. If only a few more places could produce something like this instead!

Anyway, for the international readers amongst you (and maybe also the Londoners who aren’t quite sure what lies outside of the M25…), the Black Country is a small part of England’s west midlands region. It’s concentrated around the coalfields of south Staffordshire, and is a friendly, rough and ready kind of place. I was raised just a few miles up the road in the pot (the ceramic kind) making areas of north Staffordshire, but we always considered ourselves completely different from our black country cousins. For one, they talk REALLY strangely down there. Not exactly famous for its culinary heritage, the area is probably best known for pork scratchings and pints of dark mild, both of which I happen to love. I imagine this hearty stew, rich with beef and black pudding, was just the thing for a guy returning home after a long days slog down the mine.

I was pretty excited about cooking this recipe as it would be the first chance I had gotten to use some of the veal stock I made a few weeks ago. I was hoping that the homemade stock would give the stew a real depth of flavour. You can see the stock below, straight from the freezer, along with a host of other ingredients, namely good quality braising beef, plain flour, olive oil, onion, carrot and celery, tomato puree, bay, parsley, sage and thyme, a bottle of decent pale ale, top quality black pudding, chestnut mushrooms and a handful of chives.  Quite a list!

To get things started, I roughly cut up the braising beef into generous bite-sized chunks. I took a couple of tablespoons of the plain flour and seasoned it well with salt and pepper before spreading it out loosely over a large plate.  I then tossed the beef chunks in the flour to coat each one.

To brown the meat, I heated a wide, heavy pan with a little olive oil and then added  the beef and cooked it for a couple of minutes on each side until the edges began to take on a nice dark colour. I think it’s best to cook the meat in small batches so as not to overcrowd the pan. You want the beef to fry, but trying to fry too much at once will just result in the meat stewing in its own juices instead – not good.

As the batches cooked, I set them aside onto a plate to use later.

Once the beef was all nicely browned, I added some more olive oil to the same pan followed by the onion, carrot and celery that I had previously chopped. To this I added a good squeeze of tomato puree and a little seasoning, before leaving the vegetables to sauté.

While that was gently cooking, I got on with tying the herbs into a bouquet garni. I’m sure there are correct French techniques out there for making these things, but I’ll be the first to admit that I know none of them! I just took a rough handful each of bay, fresh parsley, sage and thyme sprigs and roughly tied them all together using cotton string. It didn’t necessarily look pretty but it seemed to get the job done.

After five minutes or so, the vegetables had begun to soften and take on some colouring.  I tossed in the browned meat and the bouquet garni and then added in the defrosted veal stock and a pint of decent pale ale (I used Batemans triple XB). At this point it’s a good idea to open up a bottle for yourself too!

I gave everything a good stir and then turned up the heat to bring the stew to a simmer. Once things were bubbling away, I turned the heat right down and partially covered the pot with its lid and sat back to wait. The stew takes about four hours to cook, ever so slowly, until the meat is mouth-wateringly tender.  After four hours, my stew had reduced down somewhat and the smells coming from the stove were absolutely delicious. By now I was starving!

At this stage you can add a little cornflour or arrowroot to thicken the stew slightly if you wish. My tummy was now rumbling so I wasted no more time in getting on with finishing off the stew with the addition of mushrooms and black pudding. First of all, I chopped up the pudding into bite-sized pieces, added a little seasoning and then fried them in a wide pan with some olive oil. I let the pudding pieces cook until they had gone a rich black colour and the edges were a little crunchy – just how I like them!

I added these to the stew and then quickly did the same with the mushrooms, roughly chopping and seasoning them before frying them off in olive oil until evenly browned.

I stirred these into the pot before tasting the stew and adding salt and freshly ground black pepper until the seasoning was just right.

I served it up alongside some simple boiled potatoes and a sprinkling of freshly chopped chives. You can see the finished dish below, paired with a bottle of  Moorhouse’s Black Cat, which is a great example of a traditional dark mild.

The first bowlful certainly didn’t last long, and I was straight back to the pan for a second helping. The stew was fantastic, well worth the wait. The homemade veal stock gave the stew an incredibly rich background flavour and the beef literally fell apart in my mouth.  The addition of the black pudding was unusual but really worked, making the dish just that little bit different from a normal beef stew. Overall, definitely a success and certainly something I would be more than happy to make again. Chalk this one up as a winner!

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I’m a guy and, like most guys, I love steak. I’m not sure why, it must be something that’s encoded in our DNA from our caveman days. There is nothing quite as exciting to a bloke as a good slab of fleshy meat, cooked to juicy perfection over a naked flame. With London’s heat wave finally at an end, I deemed it safe to venture back into the sweatbox that has been my kitchen and have a go at this Gordon Ramsay recipe for sirloin steak with green peppercorn sauce.

Now, I’ll be honest with you here, when it comes to steak I am a bit of a purest. I don’t eat it that often so that, when I do, I like to indulge in a really good piece of meat. Something well aged and cut from a decent, nicely brought-up cow. There is no way I would normally cover my steak in a sauce, green peppercorn or otherwise. Likewise, when I am eating out for steak at a pub, I’m equally wary of their own sauces. You just know that, most of the time, that grey, gloopy paste has come straight out of a jar. I insist on it served on the side and will, at best, use it to dip the odd chip in. Yes, I was approaching this Great British Pub Food recipe with a touch of skepticism…

By now you should be realizing that there was no way I would be subjecting a nice piece of 28 day, dry-aged, organic Aberdeen Angus to the torture of death by steak sauce. So, instead, I popped down to my local Tesco Express and picked up some regular, el cheapo sirloins. They certainly cost a good deal less than the steaks I would normally buy! You can see them below along with the other ingredients of black peppercorns, olive oil, shallot, garlic, dry sherry, green peppercorns in brine, double cream and English mustard.

To prepare the steaks, I first crushed up some black peppercorns with a pestle and mortar before tipping them onto a plate and spreading them out into a thin layer.

I seasoned the steaks with just salt and then pushed both sides down onto the plate to coat them evenly with the crushed peppercorns. By now my wide frying pan, which had been on the gas, was really hot – you should be able to feel the heat blasting off from the cooking surface. I added a glug of the olive oil, swirled it about the pan and then carefully placed in the steaks.

I gave them about 3 minutes on the first side before flipping them over for about the same on the other side. I like my steaks cooked medium rare, so I cooked them until the meat was beginning to feel slightly springy to the touch.

Once they were done, I transferred the sirloins to a plate and covered them loosely in foil to keep warm while I quickly made the sauce. I started this by adding the finely chopped shallot and crushed garlic to the same frying pan I had used for the steaks. These were cooked for a few minutes, until the shallots had started to soften, before I poured in a splash of dry sherry.

As the sherry bubbled away, I scraped the bottom of the pan to fetch off the brown sediment that was left over from frying the steaks. After about half a minute more, I stirred in the cream, mustard and green peppercorns (which I had previously rinsed and drained). A little Gordon Ramsay chef’s trick next – I took the plate that the steaks had been resting on and drained in the released juices. Yum, steak juice equals flavour – a handy tip I certainly wouldn’t of thought of myself.

I let the sauce simmer away for a few more minutes until it had reduced to a nice consistency – it should lightly coat the back of a spoon.

After a final adjustment for seasoning, I placed a steak on each plate and spooned over the sauce, which by now was smelling delicious. You can see the final dish below, served with a simple cabbage and spring onion mash.

The sauce was, I have to admit it, pretty damn good. Rich and creamy yet with lots and lots of punch from the pepper and mustard. It was miles away from the tasteless wallpaper paste I have been served in the past. The el cheapo steaks themselves weren’t that good, but crusted in peppercorns and served with the sauce they really didn’t need to be. Maybe with my impending return to the cash strapped life of a student for a year, I’ve discovered the way to eat my steaks on a budget. To be honest, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry!

The ingredients for the pudding are just plain, dark chocolate (I used a bar with 70% cocoa content), eggs, butter, sugar and flour.

First of all, I put the oven onto a medium heat to warm up and used paper towel to line a couple of ramekin dishes with butter to stop the fondants from sticking to the side.

Next, I put half the bar of chocolate and a decent sized knob of butter into a small bowl and set it over a pan of gently simmering water.

I stirred the mixture constantly and everything soon melted together. Once the chocolate sauce had achieved a nice, smooth consistency I set the bowl to one side to cool.

Meanwhile, to another bowl, I added a whole egg plus an egg yolk and some sugar.

Using an electric whisk, I beat the mixture for about four minutes until it had gone a paler colour and the volume had roughly tripled in size.

Carefully, I folded in the still warm chocolate sauce and a little flour. You want to try and keep as much of the air still in the mixture as possible, so go easy.

The mixture was then divided between two ramekins, set on a baking tray and popped into the oven to bake. How simple was that!?

The fondants should be baked just long enough for the outsides to set, but the insides to be still soft and runny. Mine took about eight minutes before they were ready. I took them out of the oven and, using a thin, flexible knife, eased them out of the ramekins and onto the plate for serving.

You can see them in all their gooey glory below. I served mine with some home-made schezuan pepper ice cream that I had left over in the freezer from a few weeks ago.

I usually end these cook through posts with a short “So, how did it taste” type blurb, but this time, I think a picture says a thousand words!!!

Simply divine. Give it a go yourself.