spiced lamb ragout

The berger brought round some lamb for us the other day, all neatly bagged (in brand-new poly bags) and labelled: épaule, côtelettes, côtes baronnes, ragout. It was a million miles away from Mini-B's rustic presentation, when he delivers his goat meat wrapped in a bit of old bed sheet, probably off his own bed, which I doubt he sleeps in very much given the number of times he crashes on our sofa or in the field behind the salle des fêtes. That guy can sleep anywhere. Last summer a few of us spent the night in a hunting cabin way up in the mountains and as we all set about bedding down - unfurling camping mats and sleeping bags and plumping up pillows sultan's divan-style - Mini-B just curled up under the table on the concrete floor and went to sleep like a dog.

I'm off to Paris tomorrow for a couple of days to sort out accommodation so I leave you with this very tasty recipe for spiced lamb ragout which uses relatively inexpensive neck of lamb. It's even better reheated the following day.

Ingredients
Serves 4
2 lb (900 g) neck of lamb
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 medium onions, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 heaped tablespoon flour
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 dried red chilli
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
12 oz (350 g) potatoes, larger ones cut in half
1 tin tomatoes (without the juice)
salt and freshly milled black pepper

Smash up the coriander seeds and chilli and mix with the oregano and rosemary. Roll the lamb pieces in this mixture. Heat the oil in a flameproof casserole dish and brown the meat a few pieces at a time then remove from the pan. Fry the onions in the fat left in the pan for about 10 minutes until softened and browned round the edges, add the garlic.

Next stir in the flour and gradually pour in 1 pint (570 ml) boiling water then return the pieces of meat to the casserole and season. As soon as it comes back to simmering point, put the lid on and transfer the casserole to the oven and cook for about an hour at 275°F/140°C. After an hour add the potatoes and tinned tomatoes and return to the oven for another hour.

Foodista Food Blogs Cookbook - please vote

I was recently contacted by Foodista.com, the online cooking encyclopedia, saying they were looking for recipes to feature in their upcoming Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook and would I like to enter some. So I have submitted the following four and I would be very, very chuffed if you could all vote. You can vote for each one by clicking on the Foodista button beneath each photo below - and you can rate all four.

The site is jaw-droppingly user-unfriendly but I've outlined the quickest way to do it at the end of this post. Voting ends on Sunday 28 February and I've got a lot of catching up to do since the competition has been open since the beginning of December - so I'm relying on you, my trusty readers. Yours, grovellingly!

To vote for Vegetarian Scotch Eggs:

To vote for Raspberry Mousse and Summer Berries:

To vote for Roasted Red Peppers with Tomatoes, Anchovy and Garlic:

To vote for Egg Mayo:

How to vote:

1. Go to www.foodista.com and go to "sign up" at the top of the page.
2. Enter your name, email and password and click "sign up".
3. You will be taken to a "Taste Profile" page. Click on "skip step" bottom right.
4. You will then be taken to a "Tell us more about yourself" page. Don't put anything in and click save profile.
5. Leaving that window open, open another tab/window and open my blog http://atasteofsavoie.blogspot.com/
6. Click on the first recipe to vote. You will still be signed in to Foodista so just click on the star ratings below the recipe heading and it will say "Rating Saved".
7. Then back-click and click on the next recipe and repeat etc.

the way to a girl's heart ...

The snow is beginning to melt and Spring is just around the corner. Spring and Paris. It's only four weeks now until I leave (yikes - and still no apartment!) so I've started stocking up the freezer with PC dinners for BB so that he can concentrate on building work while I'm away.

He's actually not a bad cook, BB, but boy, what a drama queen in the kitchen. On the rare occasion that he does cook, when I should be reclining on tasselled cushions with my feet up, sipping a G&T and unfolding my latest copy of Country Living, instead I'm up and down like a fiddler's elbow, digging out kitchen utensils, peeling vegetables (it hurts his thumbs!), mopping up spillages and applying band-aids - all to a Gordon Ramsay-esque soundtrack.

But it wasn't like that in the beginning - not when he was trying to woo me.

The first meal he ever cooked for me was seared encrusted tuna steak with fresh coriander and basil served with braised puy lentils with rosemary and garlic. This was not long after we first met in France (where I was working in a ski chalet), when I went back to England to visit him.

As I sat in the kitchen of his little cottage in Surrey, calf-eyed, watching him smash up dried chilli and coriander seeds and deftly chopping fresh herbs, I thought that this was a sign of great things to come. And when I reach back for memories of our early romance, I remember that meal - for that meal sealed the deal.

But as soon as I said "I do", he said "Do you mind if I don't cook anymore?"!

pancakes with honey and summer berries

We don't tend to eat too many sweet things chez nous, preferring to end a meal with some cheese and a piece of fruit, but when I do get a sugar urge, a crêpe - which is quick and easy to make - served with a sprinkling of sugar and a squeeze of lemon usually hits the spot.

Today, as it's Pancake Day, I made these thin pancakes served with a drizzle of honey and summer berries. They can be made in advance and stored between sheets of greaseproof paper in the fridge then reheated in a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes. Pancakes freeze well, stacked as above then placed in freezer bags. If frozen, it's best to defrost the pancakes before reheating.

Basic pancake mix
Makes 12-14 in a 7 inch/18 cm pan
4 oz/110 g plain flour
pinch of salt
2 eggs
7 fl oz/200 ml milk mixed with 3 fl oz/75 ml water
2 oz/50 g butter

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, make a well in the centre and add the eggs. Begin whisking the eggs then gradually add small quantities of the milk and water mixture, still whisking, making sure the flour is well mixed in. Continue until the batter is smooth (pass through a sieve if need be) and the consistency of single cream.

Melt the butter, add 2 tablespoons of it to the batter and blend for a few more seconds, then pour the rest into a bowl and use to grease the pan using kitchen paper between each pancake.

 
Heat a 7 inch/18 cm pan and add 2 tablespoons of the batter using a ladle, quickly lifting, tilting and swirling the batter evenly over the pan. Cook over a medium heat for a minute or so until the surface is set and the base golden. Toss or turn with a spatula and cook the other side for a few more seconds.

Stack the pancakes as you make them between sheets of greaseproof paper on a plate fitted over simmering water, to keep them warm while you make the rest.

raclette

The busiest time of year for us, guest-wise, is during the ski season. Why pay a fortune to stay in a ski resort when you can stay with your sister/friend for free? That's what sisters/friends are for, right?  There are some weeks in winter when one set of guests is departing as the next arrives. This week a couple of friends from Courchevel were here for two days and my brother and three friends arrive today (in the midst of which I thought I was going to have to dash off to Paris to view an apartment! but that fell through at the last minute).

One of the things I like to do for dinner, which guests love, is raclette. It's a winter staple here in Savoie and very popular in mountain restaurants.

Raclette is essentially melted cheese (the name comes from the French verb "racler", to scrape, because of the way the melted cheese is scraped out of the pan or off the block, depending on the type of machine used) served over boiled potatoes, accompanied by assorted meats (such as ham, prosciutto, salami) and pickled onions and/or gherkins. The only cooking involved is steaming some potatoes, after which everyone just melts some cheese in their own little pan under the raclette grill. Yum.

steak pie and Cockney rhyming slang

 

I realise I haven't reported on progress on the mill for a while. That's because - erm - there hasn't been any. Although we've been having beautiful sunny weather ...

... (first picture of snow on the new roof), it's been well below freezing - minus 10 today - and according to BB, (ahem) the tools stick to his hands! But here are our new doors and windows ...

So, in the absence of any building work, it's back to cooking.

I was a vegetarian for many years a while back and whenever the subject of what we missed from our carnivore days came up, my fellow veggies and I were unanimous that we would sell our souls for a bacon roll - or a steak pie.  A steak pie can make you do crazy things you know. My sister the journo likes to remind me of the time (in my veggie days) when I cracked and bought a steak pie supper from the chip shop, devouring it like a wild animal before practically holding her at knife point until she promised not to tell anyone. More recently I've been known to drag unwilling friends round more than a dozen pubs in Edinburgh at lunchtime in search of a pie and a pint. And it featured in the weirdest reply to caution and charge I've ever heard; a client, arrested outside a chip shop for illegally possessing a gun, told police officers: "It wasn't a gun. It was a steak pie"!

I'm surprised I haven't attempted to make one before. I think the pastry puts me off - I'm intimidated by pastry - but when I saw a recipe for steak and kidney pudding on Delia's website the other day (endearingly subtitled  "Kate and Sidney", if you can Adam and Eve it from the earnest Delia) I thought it was high time I tried. (Actually, Delia directed by Guy Ritchie might be a good bobble hat and scarf.)

I ended up not using Delia's recipe because it required steaming for five hours and I only had two hours before BB got in a right old two and eight from hunger, so the pastry recipe - which was lemon squeezy and turned out so well I couldn't believe my mince pies - is from Good Food magazine and the filling I just cobbled together. Jurassic.

red pepper pilaf and postie problems

My first subscription copy of Country Living arrived this week (a Christmas present from Mum and Dad) miraculously intact - by which I mean, still in some form you could physically read, i.e. turn the pages, even if you didn't have opposable thumbs. If you can imagine the trajectory of my magazine from the printers in West Yorkshire in the UK to our little Alpine village 1500 km away, that's a lot of handling and you could forgive the odd torn or punctured packaging or dog-eared page. But the most dangerous leg of its journey, the critical stage which determines whether it arrives flat, as the publishers intended, or geometrically folded and creased like some origami composition, is the final two feet, the arm's length between the yellow Postman Pat van and our mail box.

The posties here in the country don't like to get out of the car (it's against their human rights or something), so rather than knock on your door and hand larger items to you, they bend and fold and wrestle them into the mail box. Two Christmases ago, a calendar measuring a square foot and featuring beautiful photographs of Scotland - clearly identifiable as a gift - was manhandled into a quarter of its size and forced so tightly into the mail box that it required a screwdriver to prise it out. It means having to be on postie alert on magazine days - and especially over the Christmas period.

This recipe for red pepper pilaf with chilli and cashews, featured in said mag, is a one-pot rice dish made with sweet red peppers and fiery chillis. I didn't have cashews to hand so I used peanuts (any nuts would work well I think) and I used a good squirt of Sriracha chilli sauce instead of paprika. Great as a starter or as a vegetable side dish with a main.

 

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

4-5 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

2 red peppers, seeded and cut into strips

12 oz/350 g long grain rice

handful of fine spaghetti, broken into small pieces

salt

1 tbsp smoked hot pimentón or sweet hot paprika or chilli flakes

2 hot green chillies, seeded and diced

4 oz/100 g cashew nuts, toasted

3-4 large red peppers, halved lengthwise and seeded

Heat the oil in a heavy pan and fry the onion gently until caramelized and very dark. Push aside and add the pepper strips and fry until soft. Sir in the rice and pasta and turn in the oil.

Add enough water to cover to the depth of two fingers, salt, stir in the pimentón or paprika, turn down the heat and leave to simmer for about 15 minutes until the water has been absorbed and the rice is nearly tender. Stir in the diced green chilli and sprinkle with the roasted nuts. Cover with a cloth and leave for 10 minutes to settle and swell.

Arrange the pepper halves on a baking try and roast in the oven at a high heat until the flesh softens but hasn't yet collapsed. Heap the rice into the shells and place in the oven for another 5 minutes to heat through.