Curried Beef Marrow Bone: A Trip Down Memory Lane

When my sister and I were kids, we'd fight over the marrow bones in mum's lamb curry. Mum would usually make it with leg or shoulder of lamb, which she'd have the butcher cut into large pieces, with the bones left in. The marrow managed to retain it's distinct oleaginous texture and taste whilst also taking on some of the rich, fragrant flavours of the spices, tomato, onions, ginger and garlic that make up the curry sauce.

You can surely understand why we were so insistent that mum shared out the marrow bone pieces with scrupulous fairness!

Beef marrow bone curry

Every now and then, she'd ask the butcher for extra marrow bones. Back then, people asked for these to feed to their pets, so when she said, no they were for her children, the butcher jumped to conclusions about family finances! Mum had to explain that actually, her girls adored marrow bone and that she was buying it for a treat. But he never would charge her more than a few pence for them!

And this one of mum's girls still adores marrow bone - both lamb and beef - so was delighted when Paganum's Chris Wildman kindly put some beef marrow bones into the box for me!

As we were cooking mum's egg curry recipe anyway, the base of which is not disimilar to that of the lamb curry I decided to make extra sauce and used half of it, with added water to thin and increase the volume, to cook my three huge marrow bones.

Beef marrow bone curry

I left the three huge bones bubbling away until the marrow was cooked and the sauce reduced.

Of course, my eyes were far bigger than my belly, and I couldn't finish all three but I can tell you that I really, really, really enjoyed this very nostalgic treat!

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Michel Roux's Sauces

I love a good sauce. Even the most beautiful, flavoursome, delicious meat can be lifted by a good sauce. So I've been keen to get my hands on Michel Roux's Sauces.

Michelin-starred Roux first wrote his compendium of savoury and sweet sauce recipes back in 1996. Quadrille have now published a new and revised edition of his comprehensive collection in which many recipes have been updated for today's lighter, healthier tastes. Roux has also added 20 new recipes, not to mention many new photographs.

With two fabulous Paganum rib eye steaks in our possession, we opted to make the sauce suprême with sherry and mushrooms. Like many of the recipes in the book, this is based on another recipe, so we first made up the velouté sauce. (This in turn refers to Roux's recipes for chicken stock or vegetable stock, also in the book, but instead we used some chicken stock we'd made and frozen a few weeks earlier.)

I say "we" opted to make... Actually, Pete was the chef, I just hovered around the kitchen, taking photos and making a nuisance of myself! (I did, at least, sort out the potatoes!)

The steps were easy to follow:

• For the velouté, first make a roux before adding chicken stock and cooking for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

• For the sauce suprême, take your velouté, add cream and mushrooms, simmer for 10 minutes. If you're following the recipe, strain to remove the mushrooms before whisking in some butter and finally adding in some dry sherry. Voilà!
  

As Pete was making the sauce, I cooked the steaks.

Our only mishap with the sauce is that Pete got it to an absolutely perfect, creamy consistency before adding the sherry. We hadn't realised how much the sherry would thin the sauce, so our final sauce was thinner than we intended. We'll remember next time to ensure that the sauce is a little thicker than we'd like it to be before adding the alcohol.

We also decided to leave the mushrooms in, rather than strain and discard as per the recipe.

The sauce was absolutely delicious. Really, really, really tasty!

Much of it's flavour comes from the stock so I would strongly recommend making your own or buying a top quality fresh one rather than using a concentrate or cube. We make our chicken stock in a slow cooker, overnight, using the carcass from a roast chicken, the giblets (minus liver which I'll have enjoyed as a pre-dinner snack), onions or leeks, depending on what's in the fridge, carrots, a bay leaf or two and water to cover. In the morning, it's ready!

There are several more recipes that we want to try from the book so I'll be sure to blog those too.

Many thanks to Quadrille for the review copy.

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The list price for Sauces: Savoury and Sweet is £14.99 but it's currently available from Amazon at just £8.97, an absolute bargain!

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Love it or hate it? The Marmite Pop Up!

Marmite are the latest brand to jump on the pop up bandwagon with a Regent Street pop up shop through November and December.

Inspired by the idea of "over 100 different Marmite inspired products" we dropped in yesterday to check it out.

The window and internal displays are fun - a tower of Marmite jars, a Love Hate wall art of jars and lids and an old-fashioned record turntable slowly rotating yet more jars. But we found the selection inside pretty disappointing.

Mugs and tins sport Warholised versions of the familiar Marmite logo in a range of pastel colours. If one counts all the colour variations and sizes of tins, that's no doubt where the "100 different products" claim comes from! A shame they don't have mugs with the logo in it's standard colours... I might just have bought one of those!

There are a range of T-shirts - not bad but certainly over-priced.

And a very small selection of Marmite snacks (though we noticed the absence of Marmite twiglets and the new Marmite bar we'd recently encountered).

The biggest disappointment? None of their special editions of Marmite are available. Pete's developed quite a taste for the Champagne edition so was hoping to pick some up here.

Upstairs is a small room that looks like a school art room. On the wall are Marmite art installations, including a huge wall of Love or Hate stickers which visitors choose and put up. And a table with marker pens too. Much more fun that your usual visitor book so I did, of course, join in!

Visitors can pause for a snack here - as long as they're happy with tea and Marmite on toast!

And that's about it. It takes only a few minutes to check out the shop and realise there's really not much on offer at all.

If you're a Marmite fan, and passing, you might like to pop in for a moment. But I wouldn't make a special trip for it myself.

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Free Range v. Organic Chickens: The Test

There can't be many who aren't aware of the horrors of battery farming at it's worst. Thousands of birds crammed into vast sheds - often windowless with artificial lights on 24/7; their movements completely restricted; their bodies pumped full of growth hormones to speed up the production cycle. And goodness knows what they're fed on! Sometimes, the birds grow so fast their legs can't support their bodies; they spend their short lives sitting in their own filth. As you can imagine, these birds are highly stressed and regular doses of anti-biotic are needed just to keep them alive. Shudder!

So what are the alternatives?

Free range, in my mind, is predominantly about animal welfare. There are controls over how the number of birds per square foot and the animals are free to... well... range! They have access to open-air grass runs. Feed must contain at least 70% cereals. That said, they can be given chemically treated feeds and can be treated with drugs including, as far as I can tell, growth hormones.

There's also the subset of free range corn-fed birds - their feed must include at least 50% maize, which gives the meat it's characteristic yellow colour.

Organic, as I understand it, goes quite a bit further. It too governs how densely packed the birds are in their sheds and specifies access to open-air grass runs. But it also rules out growth hormones (antibiotics are permitted to treat sick birds but cannot be regularly and routinely given for any other purpose). The makeup of the chicken feed is also regulated. It contains cereals, some vegetable protein, a small amount of fish meal, and a vitamin/mineral supplement. In addition, the feed itself must be grown organically. In many cases, it's often also free from genetically modified produce.

To my mind, even if one puts aside the animal welfare issue, it makes sense that animals allowed to grow at a natural rate, to develop their muscles by normal movement, to eat a healthy and natural diet and to live a relatively relaxed life interacting with their fellow birds will taste better than their cheap, mass-produced counterparts.

A few years ago, some newspapers made a great fanfare about research papers published by food scientists at Strathclyde University. There was rather a large leap from what the papers contained to what the journalists claimed - that the scientists had shown that organic confers no nutritional benefit over non-organic and that it doesn't taste better either. All in all it was a gleeful nose-thumb to the merits of organic farming and the high prices of organic produce. In reality, the papers concluded no such thing, and what they did put forward was based on statistically insignificant samples.

In any case, I had never held the belief that there is a nutritional benefit to organic. My thinking is that organic is about curtailing the use of artificial chemicals in production, and therefore as much about the environmental benefit as the quality of the produce itself. And perhaps, there may prove to be long-term health benefits to ingesting less chemicals, though it's not something I worry about.

I figured that, in terms of taste, both free range and organic provide a clear taste/texture improvement over battery-farmed.

My question was whether organic would taste any better than free range or about the same?

So I set out to find out.

Abel & Cole have recently launched a range of free range meat, alongside their organic. They kindly sent me two beautiful chickens - one free range and one organic.

The birds were the same size and my plan was to cook them side by side and make a direct comparison.

The first step was to score a big F and O into the skins to ensure no accidental mixups! As you can see, the organic bird has a yellower tone to the free range.

Then a liberal application of butter (à la Simon Hopkinson) and the birds went into the oven.

And came out beautifully roasted!

So what was the result?

Both birds did taste fabulous, but the organic one definitely had the edge. It's skin, especially, had far more flavour. The meat too had more flavour, though both were moist, tasty and with similar great texture.

I also fried both chicken livers as little snack before the meal. Both were delicious! Really not much in it, but the organic one was just that bit firmer and meatier.

We made stock from both carcasses / giblets and the two batches were indistinguisable.

A round of applause to the organic bird! It won, by a small nose (or should that be parson's nose?)


For those on a tighter budget, the free range bird is a great quality choice. When pushing the boat out, it's worth paying more for the organic.

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Blaggers Banquet 2009 - Tickets Now On Sale!

Read all about the fabulous Blaggers Banquet in my previous blog post, here.

Tickets are now on sale! Click here to go to our ebay page.

(Keep an eye on that page as we'll also be auctioning some wonderful items over the coming month).

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A big thank you to the suppliers who've responded to my blagging requests so far:

Giraffe Restaurants

(All the suppliers who've responded to the many blagging bloggers will be listed and thanked on a Blaggers Banquet website, coming soon).

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Student Days:The UItimate Student Cookbook

Although I cooked quite a lot as a student, it was longer ago than I'd care to admit and it's hard to think back to what it was like coping with a student budget, restricted space and equipment and a desire to spend less time in the kitchen and more in the student union!

I do remember cooking lots of pasta, stir fries and sausage curry (the first time, I thought I had mince in my freezer, so made-do with sausages, after that it was deliberate!) but I also remember cheapy chicken burgers with coleslaw from the student snack bar!

So when I was asked to review The Ultimate Student Cookbook I turned to my niece, Rosie, who is now in her final year of an undergraduate biology degree at Imperial College. I invited her to visit, browse the book, select a recipe, cook it and give me her feedback.

Her first comments on the book were mixed. She really liked the sections at the front advising on basic equipment but thought some of the items were really unlikely, even for students who are really, really into their cooking. The advice on shopping and budgeting could be handy, she thought. Many of the recipes struck her as too time-consuming - although some of the overall time didn't involve effort - marinading or cooking time for example - she pointed out that recipes with a long total time really meant having to think about what to make pretty far in advance, which didn't fit in with her lifestyle very well.

But she persevered and found a handful of recipes that appealed.

Sweet & Sour Chicken was her choice for the evening - a dish her mum cooks at home, and one she judged as suitably straightforward, with easy-to-find ingredients.

I'm too lazy to type it out for you so here's a preview of the book instead!

The main variation was the substition of dark soy for regular soy sauce, which was down to what we had in stock. I assume this is what made the finished dish so dark in colour. But what Rosie liked about the recipe was that one could clearly vary both the meat and vegetables used according to one's tastes and what was going cheap on the day.

After a trip to the supermarket with my husband Rosie got on with prepping and cooking, interrupted regularly my me and my camera.

Before too long, the meal was ready and it certainly smelled great.

Although the dish didn't look like the bright red dish so familiar to customers of Chinese takeaways, the taste was great, with a rounded sweet and sour flavour.

Rosie's final analysis was a big thumbs up and a comment that she'd be making this recipe again! I sent her home with the cookbook (and some food, of course, what kind of Aunt do you take me for?) and she's promised to let me know how she gets on with other recipes from the book.

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A week after taking the book home, Rosie sent the following message:
"Have used the cookbook several times now, cooked the spring lamb stew with lemon for my housemates and it turned out nicely, like many of the recipes it took ages but was a filling meal and made us feel all virtuous about the number of vegetables in it. Also worked out favourably pricewise, as for 4 ppl at around 2.50 each.

Made the macaroni cheese when mum came up to stay, added garlic to the white sauce and it came out really nicely. Instructions were easy to follow so although i knew how to make a cheese sauce, I'dve been able to do it had i never seen one before."

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Boneless Leg of Lamb Braised in Red Wine With Garlic

Anyone who's visited Niamh (eatlikeagirl)'s stall at the Covent Garden Real Food Market over the last couple of months may well have salivated over her delicious slow-roasted pork or lamb served in home-made blaas (bread buns) with home-made condiments. Recently, she's resolved her meat sourcing difficulties by turning to online farmer's market, Paganum, purveyor of fine quality meat produced in Yorkshire. Having scarfed my way through some of Niamh's fine fare, I have been very impressed with the quality of the meat.

Some of you might know that, because of a dearth of butchers in my local neighbourhood, I've been investigating online sources of good quality meat over the last few months. Thus far, The Well Hung Meat Company has delivered acceptable meat but at prices too high for me to place repeat orders. And Abel & Cole have impressed me with the quality of some of their meat, but less so with consistency not to mention issues with the ordering and delivery process. I've also got a list of other online meat suppliers to try, most of whom I encountered at the Organic Food Festival in Bristol some weeks ago.

So, recently I received a delivery from Paganum. I really like the environmentally friendly woolcool insulation - it kept the contents very well chilled and is made from British sheep's wool. The meat looked great!

Sturdy packaging using environmentally friendly insulation

I consulted the twitter food community for ideas on how to cook my leg of lamb and opted to go with thelarderlout's advice to "slow cook at 170C w/ 1/2 btl redwine, rosemary, garlic, carrot, celery, onion, anchovy paste. baste every 1/2 hour. 3 hours'll do it."

I hate celery, so I dropped that straight away. I intended to go out for anchovy paste and fresh rosemary but, in the end, decided to make do with what I had in, so onion became spring onion, fresh rosemary made way for dried and I didn't bother with the anchovy paste!

So, go ahead and use this "recipe" as a starting point. I'd love to hear about your own variations and successes.


Boneless Leg of Lamb Braised in Red Wine With Garlic

Ingredients
1.7 kilo boneless leg of lamb joint
Some home-grown carrots
Some spring onions
Some cloves of garlic, chopped
Half a bottle of Argentinian Malbec red wine
A scattering of dried rosemary

Method

• I made a bed of carrots, spring onion and garlic in the bottom of a large glass casserole dish.

• The lamb leg was place on top. I made holes with a sharp knife into which I pushed large chunks of garlic.

• I glugged half a bottle of red wine over the lamb. It covered the vegetables and came a little way up the side of the lamb.

• And then I popped the dish into our fan oven, set to 170°C, for 3.5 hours.

The finished lamb was beautifully tender. The red wine had produced a wonderful, deeply coloured stock - to my surprise it didn't have a particularly red wine taste at all! The garlic and rosemary flavours came through, but didn't overwhelm the rich lamb taste. And the lamb did taste great - nothing like the insipid, anonymous taste of cheap lamb but an almost hogget-like intensity that I liked very much.

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