Beef Cheeks Bourguignon: A Hearty Stew

Boef Bourgignon aka Boeuf à la Bourguignonne is a classic French dish originating, as its name indicates, from the Burgundy region, as do a number of other dishes incorporating red wine, such as coq au vin and oeufs en Meurette. I've been meaning to try the latter ever since our last trip; I'll try and blog that one soon.

So back to the beef: this hearty stew is characterised by a slow braise of beef in red wine, which renders the meat tender and succulent, and the addition of bacon, pearl onions and button mushrooms. Most recipes use shoulder or stewing steak and combine beef stock with red wine for the braising liquid.

I decided to use beef cheeks, as I love the way these break down with slow cooking. I used shallots instead of pearl onions. And I substituted some dark ale for the beef stock, just because. These slight variations on the traditional version turned out extremely well!

This is a very easy dish, though you'll need some time at the start, to prep all the ingredients and separately brown the beef pieces, mushrooms and shallots.

The amounts are flexible, to make it easier to do your shopping. These minor variations really won't make a difference to the final result! Even if you're cooking for one or two, I recommend making this recipe in the quantities below and freezing the extra portions for another time.

Kavey's Beef Cheeks Bourguignon

Serves 6

Ingredients
1-1.2 kilos beef cheeks, trimmed and cut into 2-3 inch pieces

2-3 tablespoons seasoned flour
Vegetable oil for cooking
200 grams bacon in cubes or short strips
200-300 grams button mushrooms, cut in half if large
300-400 grams shallots
2 medium-large onions, diced
1 bottle full-bodied red wine
250 ml dark ale
1 sprig fresh thyme or teaspoon dried
2-3 bay leaves
1 sprig fresh thyme or teaspoon dried

Method

• Dredge each piece of beef in seasoned flour.
• In a large lidded casserole dish – big enough for all the meat, onions, mushrooms, wine and liquid – heat a little cooking oil and fry the floured beef pieces until the surfaces are crusty and brown with caramelisation. Do this in batches so the meat doesn't steam. Set aside the browned beef.
• Add more cooking oil if necessary to brown the mushrooms in the same pan, then set aside.
• Now do the same for the shallots, and set them aside with the mushrooms.
• Again, add more oil to the empty pan, if necessary, and fry the bacon and onions until the onions soften and the bacon takes on a little colour.
• To the bacon and onions, add back the beef pieces plus the bay leaves, thyme, red wine and dark ale.
• Leave to simmer for 3 hours, with the lid on.
• Add the mushrooms and shallots back to the dish and cook for another 30-45 minutes, uncovered, on a gentle simmer. The time depends on the size of your shallots, as you want to ensure they are cooked through and soft. Leaving the lid off will also allow the sauce to reduce a little further.

Serve with buttery mash potatoes, or plain steamed potatoes if you want to be more traditional.

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Pommes de Terre Braytoises - Cheese & Ham Stuffed Potatoes

As a cheese and bacon addict, I often have leftover cheese in my fridge, not to mention the stash in my freezer. There's often half a tub of sour cream or crème fraiche hanging around too, a few rashers of bacon leftover from a weekend brunch and half a bottle of mustard languishing in the cupboard.

And even though our harvest of home-grown potatoes was the lowest for several years, there are nearly always potatoes lurking in a dark corner of the kitchen.

So this pommes de terre Braytoises recipe adapted from Diana Henry's Roast Figs, Sugar Snow book was a perfect choice to counter the cold weather outside, be frugal with leftover ingredients and try something from a new cookery book too!

We adapted the recipe to 2 people, changing some of the ingredients and instructions to suit us better.

Diana Henry's Roast Figs, Sugar Snow

Diana Henry is a cook and food writer with six books under her belt including Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, Cook Simple and Food from Plenty. She also writes for the Telegraph and it's magazine, Stella, presents food television programmes such as Market Kitchen and broadcasts on Radio 4.

I'd read good feedback on her book of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and North African dishes (Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons) and likewise, for her latest title, Food from Plenty, which aims to share recipes made from "the plentiful, the seasonal and the leftover".

But I'd not really seen a great deal of discussion about her previous book, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, originally published by Mitchell Beazley (an Octopus publishing imprint) in 2009, but with a new edition released in November 2011.

Having grown up in Northern Ireland, she adores snow, "its crystalline freshness, the silent mesmeric way it falls, the way it blankets you in a white, self-contained world". For this book, she travelled to several other cold climate locations, compiling a collection of recipes that represent winter food.

As for the name of the book, a passage in her introduction partially explains:

"On dark afternoons, my fifth-year teacher read us the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the simple snowy world of the American mid-west found in Little House in the Big Woods, an orange and a handful of nuts in the toe of a sock on Christmas day seemed as alluring as the seeds from a crimson pomegranate; fat pumpkins gathered in the autumn and stored in the attic were fairy tale vegetables. But it was the story of maple syrup that intrigued me most: how you could tap the sap of maple trees when there was a 'sugar snow' (snowy conditions in which the temperature goes below freezing at night but above freezing during the day), boil the sap down to a sticky amber syrup and pour it on to snow. There it set to a cobwebby toffee. Here was a magical food that you could get from inside a tree and make into sweets. I got my first bottle of maple syrup soon after being read this passage and have loved it ever since."

In a similar vein, throughout the book are passages from poems and books as varied as Robert Frost's Evening in a sugar orchard, Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney, Figs by D H Lawrence, Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau and Hans Christian Andersen's The Fir Tree.

Photography, by Jason Lowe, is beautiful and evocative. There are images of big hearty dishes, ingredients and scenes from the places whose food Henry brings together. That said, many of the recipes – I'd say well over half – don't have an accompany photograph, so this may not suit those who prefer to see what all finished dishes look like.

Oddly enough, whilst I really loved reading this book, flicking from recipe to recipe, reading the introductions and stories about the places, ingredients and dishes, I found that there were only a handful of recipes I want to actually cook. Partly, this is because there's a Northern European preponderance of walnuts and pecans, poppy seeds and cinnamon, dill, prunes, cranberries and juniper berries, chestnuts, dried mushrooms and smoked fish. Some of those ingredients I like, in some contexts, but less so in cooking. Others, I'm simply not a fan of. I like this book but can't see me using it very often.

That said, there are still many recipes that appeal as great comfort for a cold day – Antico Risotto Sabaudo (a Fontina-rich risotto), Poulet Suissesse (chicken with crème fraiche, mustard and cheese), Sobronade (an every day version of cassoulet without the duck), Beef Pie with wild mushrooms and claret (billed as better than cleavage for its seductive powers), Dublin Coddle (a layered bake of sausages, bacon, onions, potatoes and chicken stock), Poires Savoyards (cream, butter and sugar baked pears), Hot Lightning (featuring apples, pears and bacon), Apple Bread, Roast Figs and Plums in Vodka with cardamom cream and Scandinavian Pepparkakor (Christmas biscuits).

Pommes de Terre Braytoises
Cheese and Ham Stuffed Baked Potatoes

Adapted from Diana Henry's Roast Figs, Sugar Snow

Ingredients (for 2)
2 baking potatoes
25 grams butter
Salt and pepper
125 grams Camembert
4 thick rashers of bacon or about 60 grams ham, cut into small pieces
4 tablespoons sour cream or crème fraiche
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 egg
50-75 grams Comte, grated

Note: We used left over bacon, fried in a pan, so we added the bacon fat to the mix too.

Method

• Prick and bake the potatoes (180 C fan oven) for approximately an hour, or until tender all the way through.

• Cut each potato in half, scoop out most of the flesh, careful not to pierce the skin.
• Mash the potato flesh with butter and season with salt and pepper.

• Roughly chop the Camembert and the bacon or ham. Mix with the mashed potato flesh, along with half the sour cream or crème fraiche, the mustard and the egg. Henry suggests discarding the rind of the Camembert before using, but we chose to use it.

• Divide the mixture between the 4 potato skins. Mix the rest of the sour cream or crème fraiche with the grated Comte and spread over the top of each potato.

• Bake for 10-15 minutes until the tops of the potatoes are golden and bubbling (180 C fan oven).

We really enjoyed these potatoes, they made for a very comforting and delicious week day dinner and were very easy to make.

We so often have cheese, bacon and sour cream or crème fraiche left over, we have already made these a couple of times and will certainly be making them again soon.

I'm submitting this post to Family Friendly Fridays, a monthly blog event hosted by Fabulicious Food.

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Diana Henry's Roast Figs, Sugar Snow is currently available from Amazon UK for £10.55 (RRP £15.99).

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Popping in for a Coffee: Roasting your own beans at home

Another great guest post by Matt Gibson.

The other day, I woke up and realised I had no coffee in the house. The fact that this realisation terrified me might give you some idea of the relationship I have with caffeine. It's a geek thing.

Luckily, I remembered I *did* actually have some coffee. The only problem was that what I had, tucked away in the back of a cupboard, was a bag of unroasted green beans.

So. Out with the popcorn maker!

Yes, the popcorn maker. I've had one hanging around since I read a fellow geek's blog post about how you could convince a hot-air popcorn maker to roast coffee beans. A week after I read that post, I saw one going on Freecycle. They're just the kind of appliance that people buy on a whim, use twice, and then relegate to the back of a cupboard until the next clear-out, so Freecycle is a pretty good source for them.

The next bit is more easily shown than told, so, without further ado, here's me, on a Saturday morning, making a cup of coffee all the way from a handful of green beans to the mug:

The coffee tasted pretty damn good. It helps that green beans last for *ages* compared to roasted beans, which is excellent motivation for home roasting.

If you want to try this at home, (a) see if you can find a friend with a popcorn maker they've not used since 1988 and steal it, and (b) look to somewhere like Has Bean for supplies – all their beans are available to buy green.

Enjoy! But do bear these caveats in mind:

• The same hot air that's designed to lift the popped corn out of the machine also blows out the chaff (the papery "skin" of the beans.) The chaff starts floating off soon after you put the beans in the machine, and is much harder to catch in a bowl than popcorn. Be prepared to sweep up afterwards.
  
• You normally roast coffee to somewhere between first and second "crack". Each coffee bean makes a sharp little cracking sound once, near the beginning of the roasting, and then again, a few minutes later in the case of my popcorn maker. The longer you leave it, the darker the roast, which I like, but it's a fine line between "French roast" and "burned to a cinder". This guide may help.
  
• Coffee roasting takes longer than popping popcorn. Be careful your popcorn maker doesn't overheat! Watch for deforming plastic, etc. Don't leave it unattended. Basically, don't try this at home, kids, unless you're prepared for unexpected consequences.
  
• You can, of course, buy "proper" home coffee roasters, but they're more expensive. And less fun, in my opinion, than repurposing something orange and plastic from the 1980s and bending it to your will.
  
• If you're going to point an expensive camera lens into a hot-air popcorn maker's exhaust port, make sure you do it from a safe distance. I got away with it, luckily.
  
• You probably want your beans to "rest" a while after roasting to "de-gas" them. The typical advice is to wait around a day between roasting and using the beans. In practice, though, the coffee tasted fine to me straight away, but that might have been because I was caffeine-starved :)

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Gooey Delicious Banana Cake (Revisited)

Charles Campion's Banana Cake is a recipe I copied across to my blog from a post that originally appeared on a food chat board, or in my general online diary, or was sent via email… or in one of the many places I shared my food experiences before I finally realised I was "stealth-blogging" and set up Kavey Eats!

It's such a good recipe I always intended to go back and add photos the next time I made it… but, although I've enjoyed making and eating it so many times since, I never have.

My talented-photographer-friend Matt Gibson made it recently and showed me his gorgeous photos. My brain started to tick tock tick tock and I discarded the plan to simply slot his photos into that old post, and asked him to guest blog it afresh instead.

Sharing the same recipe on a blog twice might be odd but Matt's lack of food processor means he's brought some new advice to the recipe, not to mention his confirmation that it's a doddle even for novice or nervous bakers.

Over to Matt:

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One evening, a week before Christmas, I peered into my fruit bowl. My three remaining bananas stared forlornly back at me. Over-ripe and -- based on evidence from the two I'd already eaten -- also rather bruised underneath. What to do?

Twitter to the rescue. "Got a banana bread recipe" I asked. "Only this one I've found is American, and I have no idea how many bananas there are in two-and-one-third cups."

Auntie Kavey responded instantly, pointing me at her Charles Campion's Banana Cake page. Not only did it sound easy -- always a bonus for an inexperienced baker like me -- but it called for three medium-sized bananas, exactly what I needed to make use of.

So, I dived in, stymied briefly by the local Co-Operative supermarket having run out of both eggs *and* caster sugar (hint, Co-Op: more people than normal are probably baking stuff in the week before Christmas.)

Another minor speed-bump in my road was the first instruction in the recipe, "Measure all ingredients straight into your food processor and whizz into smooth batter," which rather assumes you own something as fancy as a food processor. Still, at least I've got an electric whisk. Instead of boshing it all together I cubed the butter, which I figured would be the difficult-to-mix bit, and rubbed it into the sifted flour and sugar until I had a breadcrumb-like consistency. Then I added everything else, roughly mixing as I went. Finally I took up my electric whisk and zizzed the mixture to a nice smooth batter.

And that was the hard work done, really. I poured the mix into my greased, floured loaf-tin. Pausing only briefly to check I was neither very young, very old, nor pregnant, I took my life in my hands and tasted a wooden spoon's scraping's-worth of the cake mix that had clung on in the bowl. Niiiice. So, all the signs were good.

I popped the loaf tin straight into my pre-heated oven, did the washing-up, and went to post some "before" photos on Twitter. This is the 21st century, after all; if you've not tweeted about it, it hasn't happened.

About forty-five minutes later I was walking past my kitchen door and had to stop and stick my head in and inhale the lovely banana-ey bready smell that was coming from the oven. Another fifteen minutes and I was pulling open the oven, crossing my fingers, and manhandling the loaf tin onto the kitchen worktop with two strategically-positioned tea towels (I know, I know. "Oven gloves" has been just above "food processor" on my kitchen equipment shopping list for about eight years now.)

It looked good. Dark-to-golden brown, with a nice light sponginess showing through the split that had formed on the top. After a few minutes, I gently tried to slide the loaf out, but it felt a bit too wobbly and was clinging to the sides, so I tried to practise some patience and left it to cool in its tin for a while. Once it wasn't so hot, it slid out more easily, and kept its nice loaf shape as I rolled it onto the cooling rack, though the gooey bottom did sink a millimetre or so into the rack as it settled densely down.

After my disaster with Nigella's Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake, which stayed entirely liquid in the middle when I made it, I was a little scared to finally start slicing into my banana cake, but my fears were unfounded. It was a little gooey at the bottom, but pleasantly so, and the rest was a lovely moist cake with a delicious light crust on top and at the edges (the end parts were my personal favourite.) The banana flavour was good, and I hadn't overdone the vanilla, despite my worries.

All in all, this was a fantastic recipe, easy for the baking beginner, even if you're only armed with a £4.99 electric whisk from Argos that smells a bit like a Scalextric car when it's running. You'll never let over-ripe bananas go to waste again.

My beginner's tips:

* "a few drops" of vanilla essence is just under a quarter of a teaspoonful.
* Wait until the loaf's cooled a bit before you try to de-tin it.
* Don't shop for cake ingredients in the Co-Op just before Christmas.

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Here's the recipe again with my original notes below. ~ Kavey

Gooey Delicious Banana Cake

Ingredients
175 grams caster sugar
225 grams white self-raising flour
100 grams unsalted butter (I always use lightly salted actually)
3 tablespoons fresh milk (I used fully skimmed as that's what we buy)
2 large fresh eggs
3 medium sized, very ripe bananas
A few drops vanilla essence

Method

• Preheat oven to 185 C (adjust down for fan ovens).
• Measure all ingredients straight into your food processor and whizz into smooth batter.
• Butter a large loaf tin well, then throw in some flour, tap and turn the tin to coat the flour over all surfaces and then tap out any excess into the bin/ sink.
• Pour the batter into the tin.
• Bake for an hour.

Note: Campion says "Because we are looking for a soggy end product, the old-faithful test of sticking in a skewer and withdrawing it clean is not appropriate. With practice you'll simply need to glance at it to tell. In the meantime, because of the style of cake we're trying to achieve, there's a wide margin of error to make things easier."

Note: If it helps, I find the cake rises delightfully and the top turns a lovely rich chocolatey brown (darker than golden brown) and also usually splits, like a lemon drizzle cake.

All images by Matt Gibson.

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Confit Clementines & Lemon Posset

When thinking about a suitably delicious but prepare-ahead dessert for Christmas day, lemon posset sprang immediately to mind. I first made it last January and was amazed at how quick and easy it was. After that, I took it along as my contribution to a couple of cooking clubs, and was delighted at the extremely positive feedback.

On those occasions I served it with a single long strip of candied lime in each serving. (I stuck it upright into the little black and white espresso cups, above, but forgot to take another picture).

This time I was determined to bring one of my favourite winter citrus, the wonderful clementine, into play but I didn't think candied clementine peel would work.

At first, I thought about making a two-layered posset – lemon underneath and clementine on top. But I wasn't sure whether pouring a second layer of hot posset would cause the previously set layer below to melt and result in a messy mix.

Luckily, I found inspiration in my RSS feed when I saw a post in which blogger Atomic Shrimp preserved whole clementines in sugar syrup. Essentially, the recipe creates candied or confit clementines which are soft and yielding and break apart easily.

Knowing the preserved clementines would be tooth-achingly sweet I made the lemon posset with a little less sugar and a touch more lemon juice than usual, to balance the sweet with more sharp. My unadjusted recipe is below; drop sugar by 30-40 grams and up lemon juice by about 20 ml for a slightly sharper posset.

The dessert went down well! Everyone enjoyed the rich, thick, silky creaminess of the posset and most also really liked the clementines. I particularly loved the way my clementine oozed thick, sweet syrup as I tore into it with my spoon and how the distinct flavour of my favourite orange citrus came through loud and clear.

Lemon Posset

In medieval times posset referred to a hot drink of milk curdled with wine or ale, often with treacle and spices added for flavour. It was considered to be a general restorative and a remedy for various illnesses. Later, in the 16th-century, posset was often made from citrus juice; cream and sugar, sometimes with the addition of egg; it sounds rather like lemon curd to me, but was apparently served as a sauce to accompany meat. These days posset most commonly refers to a cold set dessert containing cream, sugar and citrus juice, similar to a syllabub but without any wine.

Ingredients
600 ml double cream
180 g caster sugar
90 ml lemon juice

Note: I nearly always double the recipe to make twice the amount.
Note: Extra portions can wrapped in clingfilm and frozen. Defrost overnight in the fridge before serving.

Method

• Put the cream and caster sugar in a large saucepan (that allows for the liquid to double in volume) and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar.
  
  This takes several minutes but keep a close eye, as when it reaches boiling point, it expands very fast.

• Reduce the heat so that the mixture doesn't boil over, but not too low as you want to allow it to bubble enthusiastically for 4 to 5 minutes, stirring regularly.
  
  
• Remove from the heat, stir in the lemon juice and leave to settle for a few minutes.

• Pour into small serving dishes or cups and leave to cool. Refrigerate for a couple of hours before serving.

Confit Clementines in Syrup

Ingredients
Approximately 750 grams whole, small clementines
500g white sugar
500ml water
Optional: 100 ml gin or other spirit

Note: AS' recipe used cloves and cinnamon in the syrup to add spiced flavours. I chose to omit these, as I wanted the pure clementine flavour to dominate.

Method

• Prepare the clementines by washing them well, picking off the woody stalk remnants and cutting a small cross into the non-stalk side with a sharp knife. This will allow the syrup to penetrate the clementine and ensure it's fully softened and saturated all the way through. Take care not to make the crosses too large or the clementines may split during cooking. An alternative might be to prick the skin all over with a thin skewer instead, though I've not tried this yet.

this cross is a touch on the generous side

• Choose a pan that fits all your clementines in a single layer. Personally, I'd pick a pan that fits them all in fairly snuggly, as a smaller pan means a greater depth of syrup. My pan was a little larger.
  
• Put the sugar and water into the pan over a gentle heat and stir until the sugar is full dissolved.
  
• Carefully place the fruits into the syrup, to avoid splashing hot sugar syrup. I put all mine the same way up (see later).

• Bring the sugar syrup to the boil, and then reduce the heat to a very low simmer and cover.
  
• For the next hour, continue to cook the clementines at this low temperature, returning to the pan every ten minutes or so to turn all the fruits over. By keeping mine all the same way up, I found it easier to quickly identify which ones I'd not yet turned each time, though towards the end of the cooking time, a couple of them spun around quite contrarily!

• Sometimes, just before turning, I gave each clementine a gentle squeeze down on the base of the pan, to squeeze a little of the juice out and encourage more syrup to take it's place, however take care as too much pressure will cause your clementines to split apart.
  
• If the clementines have had enough cooking time, you should see that the skins look a little darker in colour, because they are saturated with sugar syrup. The fruits will also be fairly soft to the touch, if you squeeze them gently with a spoon.
  
• If your clementines were larger than average, or the fruits don't seem to be soft, continue cooking for another half an hour, turning regularly, as before.
  
• When the clementines are ready, turn off the heat and lift them carefully out of the pan with a slotted spoon and pack them into sterilised jars.
  
• If you are adding alcohol, stir this into the sugar syrup now. The amount above will not give a strong alcoholic kick so increase by taste if you wish.
  
• Pour the sugar syrup over the fruit in the jars to cover them completely.

• If there isn't enough syrup to cover the fruit, you can make more up by dissolving sugar into water.

Having preserved enough clementines for Christmas day dessert the first time around, I made some more a few days later. These ones I stored in sterilised jam jars and kilner jars, as above. I sterilised the jars (and lids) as I usually do for jam and chutney making and put the fruit into them whilst both fruit and jars were still hot. I am assuming that the high sugar content saturating the fruit should preserve them for medium to long term storage, however if you are at all unsure, you may wish to boil the sealed jars in a hot water bath.

My next project is to try the same technique to confit thin-skinned lemons and limes. I'll let you know how it goes!

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