Why slow cookers are like the Mersey Tunnel. And the joy of Dumplings

From the age of 4, until I was 14, we lived on the Merseyside coast, north of Liverpool. Not quite as far as Southport, and certainly not as posh as Formby, where all the footballers live nowadays (so I hear). I remember the first time I was invited to go to the other side of the Mersey with some friends who had a cottage on Anglesey. Notwithstanding a trip away to a little cottage on my own without my parents, the real excitement was the prospect of going under the River Mersey. I was soooo excited, but a little apprehensive. Excited because I’d see all the fish swimming around – but nervous because the friends had a jeep type vehicle and I was sure that one of the features was a flap in the dashboard which opened up. What happened if the water came in?

Of course, no one had taken it upon themselves to explain that I would be going under the Mersey IN A TUNNEL. 

There I was, considering a drive that was almost beyond imagination: I could see us in their mustard yellow Diahatsu, a vehicle that must have been purchased solely for the purpose of driving across the sea bed, fearlessly traversing the sandy bottom of the Mersey over to the Wirral. Much influenced no doubt by watching ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’, I did not allow the reality of what I knew of the Mersey from frequent dog walks along the Waterloo/Crosby shoreline (where severed feet still in boots – I kid you not – , foul-smelling rotting cuttlefish, and used condoms and hypodermic needles were more likely to be washed up from the grey and murky waters) to sully the mental picture that became more and more vivid each day as the trip approached. I anticipated ‘bobbing along’ while many brightly coloured and interesting fish swam passed me; perhaps a shipwreck or two would be there to divert attention and may be even (I am fairly sure I was not quite in double figures) a mermaid…

Imagine my disappointment.

We descended into the mouth of the tunnel. I held my breath in anticipation, hardly daring to look. But where was the water? The fish? The mermaids?

Hidden behind a wall of concrete. Damn those tunnel builders who didn’t have the imagination even to make their tunnel out of reinforced glass. Still, I got over it pretty quickly - I had the 'holding your breath over the Menai Bridge' competition, and chips at Conwy castle, to look forward to...

This happens to me a lot. My imagination runs wild, and then I have to not be disappointed by reality. Take slow cookers.

We were given a slow cooker when we got married. It was one of those weird presents that we weren’t really sure about, and it looked as if it might in fact have been a ‘regifting’. Not that I mind about re-gifting, in fact, I do quite a lot of it myself these days, but we were younger then, and it was our wedding...

I didn’t use it for ages, the Husband went off on an operational tour straight after we got hitched and I stayed in London, but 6 months later, moved out into Army land with a ridiculous commute back to work, I read something about how it was the miracle kitchen gadget, reducing time and effort spent in the kitchen, meaning you could come home to a casserole or curry after a hard day at work. 

“Oh how good is that?" I thought. "I must give it a go”. 

At the time, we were eating a lot of Egg Surprise, cooked mainly by the Husband who had a much less arduous commute (when he wasn’t in a war zone), so the possibility of being a good little wife and producing a delicious dinner as well as doing a hard day’s lawyering up in ‘town’ – well, it was irresistible. 

But just as no one told me about the tunnel, no one told me that I’d still have to do all the prep. I couldn’t just chuck in onions, mushrooms, meat, a stock cube into the crock pot, flick a switch and disappear, to come back at the end of the day and find a casserole. Oh no. I still had to peel the onions; brown the meat; make up the stock...

So the slow cooker went back in the cupboard – I was already getting up at 6 to catch the train. I was damned if I was getting up even earlier to get the dinner on.

Time passes, however, and while it took me quite a long time to throw off that particular disappointment (longer than getting over not driving across the actual bottom of the Mersey) and realise the benefits of the slow cooker I am now a total fan (even if you do have to peel the onions and brown the meat first).

Less time in the kitchen means more time on the beach for him...

Even more so now that we’ve moved. There is so much lovely countryside and coast out here; so many markets and farm shops to visit. Spending 20 minutes in the morning getting the slow cooker on repays itself many times over. Yes, you have to put the effort in early on, but then you are free, free as a bird (well, sort of), for the rest of the day. Of course, having children puts paid to lazy mornings in bed, I’m no longer engaged in some dreadful commute to work, and really, to some extent, it’s all a ‘smoke and mirrors’ psychological trick, that makes you THINK it’s much less effort. But the fact that you can leave the food and it won’t burn the house down does work in it’s favour. You know what I mean.

The versatility of the slow cooker has become more apparent to me too since we moved. Not just main courses, but I made a delicious gammon ‘chowder’ the other day for lunch, and in something more akin to the witchcraft I was originally anticipating, the Husband has, in recent weeks, produced a steamed pudding of much gloriousness – sticky glazed banana gingerbread no less – from the humble depths of the of the crock pot. I cannot tell you how good it was.

Versatility aside, my main thing to cook recently in the slow cooker has been beef casserole. Do the prep, chuck it all in early, spend the day walking the coast path, throwing stones in the sea for the dog or mooch round a market, before returning home, dinner done. And in the quest for easy carbohydrate, I have discovered that 45 minutes before you want to eat, you can knock up some dumpling dough, pop the dumplings in the top of the crock pot, and leave them to cook and bingo. 

Easy Slow Cooker Beef Casserole & Dumplings

Serves 4

Plain flour

Salt & freshly ground pepper

A bunch of fresh thyme, leaves only

400g stewing steak

Rapeseed oil

1 onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped

2 rashers of bacon (not essential, but a tasty addition), de-rinded and chopped

2 medium-large carrots, peeled if necessary and diced

½ a swede (use your judgment – you’re looking for about the same quantity as of carrots) peeled and diced

150g chestnut mushrooms, quartered

100ml of Guiness or a glass of red wine if you have

350-500 ml beef stock

½ tbsp cornflour

150g self raising flour

75g vegetable suet

2 tsp Dijon mustard

Some fresh thyme leaves, roughly chopped if necessary

Salt & freshly ground pepper

5-7 tbsp water

Heat your slow cooker on the low setting.

Put about 4 tbsp plain flour into a bowl and add some salt & pepper and the thyme leaves. Stir together, then add the cubed meat, coating in the flour.

Gently sweat the onion and garlic in a  frying pan, in a tablespoon of oil for 10 mins or so, then scrape into the slow cooker. 

Add a little more oil if necessary to the frying pan and gently fry the bacon for a couple of minutes till starting to colour, then add in the carrots and swede and cook for 5 minutes before adding to the crockpot, then cooking the mushrooms in the same way.

Brown the meat in batches in the frying pan, using a little more oil if necessary and adding to the crockpot as you go.

If using Guiness or red wine, tip this into the frying pan and scrape up any crusty bits, add in the stock and bring everything up to the boil before tipping in to the crock pot till the meat and veg is just covered.

Put the lid on and go off to enjoy your day…

45 minutes before you want to eat, flick the slow cooker setting to high.

Mix the cornflour with the same amount of cold water till smooth, then stir into the casserole. Replace the lid while you make the dumplings.

Mix together the flour, suet, mustard, thyme and salt & pepper, then add the water slowly to combine to a soft (but not sticky) dough.

Divide the dough into 8 and shape into balls.

Take the lid off again and pop the dumplings on top of the casserole, before replacing the lid and leaving to cook for 45 minutes. 

The real genius of this of course is that there’s so much veg in the casserole that with the dumplings to provide carbohydrate you need to no more (although I won't complain if you add in some steamed PSB as a flourish at the end). So the only disappointment is that if the slow cooker has already got the casserole in it, where’s the steamed pudding going to come from?

News

I've been up early.

Today, as many in the last few weeks - there's a lot on my mind.

We have news, and today's the day we tell the children.

The news must wait till after Remembrance Day parade, though. Perhaps, somehow, the message of what others have been though, and continue to go through, in the name of their country, of freedom, of stabilisation and humanitarian aid, will help them put the news, when it comes, and as they digest it over the next few days, in perspective. 

I suspect not.

I peel shallots, dice vegetables, brown meat. I take extra care to make sure the flavours are right: rosemary and bay, a couple of anchovies, wiped of oil and snipped up, hopefully to melt in to the gravy. The slow cooker is on, and there's a crumble to prepare. 

Nothing fancy:  comfort food, familiar food. 

Food that will tell them that they are loved.

Uncomplicated food that we can sit down and eat without really thinking, so we can concentrate on telling them the news.

Wish us luck.

Beef & Beetroot curry - and the balance of power between garden & kitchen

Pickled Chillies. Some like it VERY hot.

The Husband, as you know, is the grower of vegetables in our house. I am involved in executive decisions at seed buying time, and he gets on with the growing and the harvesting. The Husband does a lot of pickling - this year gherkins and chillies - and chutney making, but the day to day use of vegetables is down to me.

Sometimes, I get it wrong. This is not an untypical conversation:

Him: "Please don't use the shallots like you normally do."

Me: "???"

Him: "Well, just like another oniony thing. Can you use them like shallots?"

Me: "???"

Him: "So, don't just slice them up because you haven't got any onions. Use them in recipes that use SHALLOTS".

Me: "Oh".

You see, I am sure I do appreciate a good shallot when it's needed - whole in a casserole, or in a pot roasted chicken dish that I do sometimes, but I am guilty as charged: I'll be scouring the kitchen to pull together whatever it is I need, and if the recipe calls for onions, but there are only shallots, well, shallots will have to do. 

And then, to add insult to injury, when he actually wants shallots for something, there are none left. 

I am a bad person.

However, after the shallot conversation, I have been slightly more wary of how I utilise the produce from the allotment and the  garden.

Beetroot, for example, has been something that doesn't get much beyond being boiled or roasted and then eaten as part of a "pull it all out of the fridge on to the table and pick out the best bits" weekend lunch. Occasionally, it gets grated raw, or turned into a hummus type thang, but not much more than that. This is how we eat beetroot. 

We have decided to give back the allotment and create more growing room in the garden, and so we're currently making sure we get the last bits of this year's veg before handing it over. This has included some extra beetroot that we weren't counting on. 

With some trepidation, I suggested a curry - I had some braising steak, and I knew that I'd seen a recipe for Beef & Beetroot Curry somewhere before, which has been playing on my mind. I don't normally consult the Husband about the menu, but given the reaction to the shallot (mis)usage, I felt it was only right and proper. After all, I haven't been aware of any beetroot in Rick Stein's recent (fabulous) series on Indian cooking, and a quick persual of the indexes to my Madhur Jaffrey books reveals only a beetroot chutney.

As it turns out, beetroot works quite well in a curry, adding an earthy depth. Unfortunately, it doesn't give you a vivid pink or deep purple plateful (disappointing when you see the curry paste that you make with it), but, if you live with a beetroot hater, you don't really know it's there. I can attest to this, because Pink, who is an avowed hater of beetroot (what was I saying about not having fussy children...) ate this - AND it had a green chilli in - one that escaped the pickling pot... 

Beef & Beetroot Curry

serves 4

200g cooked beetroot (if you buy it, don't get the stuff in vinegar) 
'top thumb joint' piece ginger, chopped 
1 large garlic clove 
1 whole green chilli, seeds and all 
small bunch flat leaf parsley 
3 cardamom pods 
1 tbsp tomato ketchup 
1 tbsp treacle 
1 tbsp ground cumin 
1/2 tbsp ground coriander 
1 tsp fennel seeds
 pinch ground cloves 
fresh ground black pepper
1 tbsp sunflower oil 
500g braising steak cut into big chunks 
1 onion (not shallots), chopped 
1 beef stock cube made up to 250ml stock with boiling water
flaked almonds to sprinkle (toast them if you have time - I forgot)

If like me, you're making this in a slow cooker (and why wouldn't you, marvellous thing that it is), turn the cooker on to low to pre-heat.

Make a paste by blitzing the beetroot, ginger, garlic, chilli, parsley, cardamom, ketchup, treacle cumin, coriander, fennel seeds, cloves and a good grind of black pepper in a food processor.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and brown the beef in batches, returning them to the slow cooker crock pot once browned.

Once all the beef is in the slow cooker, add the chopped ONION to the pan and fry for a few minutes, then add the paste to the pan and fry for about 5 minutes more, till you've got all the beefy bits scraped up from the pan and it all smells fragrant. Tip in the stock and bring to the boil then tip over the beef, put the lid on the slow cooker and leave for 8 hours or 
overnight.

Serve with rice and poppadums (and, in our case, cauliflower and broad bean curry) with the flaked almonds sprinkled over the top. You could add in some chunks of cooked beetroot at the end as suggested in the original recipe, but we'd eaten all that we left for lunch...

Old-fashioned cookbooks, bags of nostalgia and Boeuf a la movie - a random recipe

I have recently inherited a collection of old recipe books from my mum. 

A couple are 'fundraising' efforts, with recipes provided by the good people from a variety of parishes. In the case of "My Favourite Recipe" (circa. 1984), in aid of the Merseyside Association for Kidney Research, it includes Ken Dodd's 'Steak Diane', John Inman's Beef Wellington, and my personal favourite, Willy Russell's 'Midnight Madness' - which is essentially how to cook 2 slices of toast when you come home rather worse the wear for drink... reminds me of a story of a friend from law school who was once roundly berated by his wife, the long suffering Barbara (I never knew any more about her, and never met her) for frying ice cream wagon wheels one night, which he mistook for burgers. The mess was apparently something truly terrible to behold.  Willy Russell's method for toast fills just over 2 pages of the book:

"Switch on the kitchen light; you may have just put the world to rights and drunk eight pints of bitter beer but, and I am quite confident of this, YOU CANNOT SEE IN THE DARK, the best chefs of the best kitchens of the world agree with me on this." etc

The Carrier book "Childrens Party Menus" is one I remember flicking through incessantly as childhood birthdays approached.

Mum, why did you NEVER make me the carousel cake? Or hard boiled eggs decorated like mice and rabbits?

Best of all, the pile of books included 2 notebooks from a Great Aunt. Handwritten recipes, cuttings, little comments - I love them.




I was blessed with some great ,Great Aunts, though none of them are still living. I've already mentioned the one who not only worked full time but went home to cook a 2 course lunch every day for her husband - another Random Recipe entry, in fact.

The Great Aunt to whom these notebooks belonged was a cabinet maker and worked with the renowned (and currently in vogue) Edward Barnsley. I am lucky enough to have a stool that she designed and had made in the later years of her life by one of her own apprentices. I believe all her great nieces and nephews have one, elegant and beautiful.

She herself was a fantastic character. All tweed skirts and sensible shoes. She smoked like a chimney (indeed it was the fags what done her in, in the end) and lived with her devoted 'companion' (no other attribution or recognition could be given in those days, even though their relationship was far more devoted than many marriages I have seen). As I recall, they shared their home with a grey African parrot. I always remember how interested she was in anything and everything I was doing; What was going on at school, what I was studying. I was off to France for a year - fantastic! what a great opportunity. She spent hours telling me about her own travels. In fact, she sadly died while I was in France and I missed her funeral, but somehow being in the Languedoc at the time, an area I know she loved, made it more bearable. My memories of her are fading but I have some clear images of her and her partner, their house and beautiful garden, which I know will stay with me.

Having her notebooks has brought many of those images and memories that I do retain back to the forefront of my mind. I can't date the notebooks accurately. One of them includes recipes attributed to "(Delia Smith TV)" in the exquisite handwriting you might expect. In fact all the recipes that have been written out by hand are attributed - names I recognise from my childhood - Jessie (my granny), Mrs Godfrey, Beth - and some I don't. There is an article about aubergine, cut out and kept from a newspaper from the day before my 6th birthday (I am sure the events were unrelated, but it puts things in context for me). I am particularly tickled by the comment accompanying a recipe for Roast Duck: "Very satisfactory." Those 2 words transport me right back in time - the sensibleness and practicality of them. No flowery nonsense. Just "Very satisfactory". I can hear her voice now.

But what of the random recipe? Well, this month the randomness is down to us: Dom's challenge at Belleau Kitchen is to choose a book our own way but to be sure to select a recipe randomly from it.




Alas, the roasted duck was not the random recipe. You'll understand why I had to choose one of these notebooks as my recipe book, tbough, so I very scientifically held them behind my back, swapped them over a couple of times and in my right hand the ringbound, falling apart Sherwood Notebook from Boots Stationery Department. 






And the recipe? Well, the page that I opened included 4 recipes cut from newspapers. 2 veal recipes ('Veal Cutlets - Victoria', and stewed breast of veal), another one  for a 'Standing Pie' (lots of lard) and this one. I couldn't resist. I love the idea that whenever this was written (imperial measurements, oven temp in Gas mark/farenheit only), people were thinking about how best to make sure they had a hot meal on the table - even if they wanted to go out and enjoy themselves in the meantime.

I copy it out directly because I am sure that any copyright has long since passed. If it hasn't and you recognise this as yours, please let me know, and I will offer full attribution.

Boeuf a la movie (for 2)

So called because you throw everything into a casserole, go to the cinema (and come back and eat it)

1lb stewing beef
small tin tomato soup
glass red wine
2 medium carrots, sliced
2 medium onions, sliced
1 medium potato, sliced
bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon of salt, and some screws of pepper

Put everything in a casserole and cover it closely. Put it into the middle of the oven with the heat at mark 1, 275F and leave it for 4 1/2 hours. When you return, serve it with tinned Swedish red cabbage (heated).

And that's it.

I defy anyone to say "Wow, what a beautiful looking dinner" - because frankly it wasn't:

The soup in the sauce made it alarmingly orange, and the fact that you don't brown the meat first meant that there was really quite a lot of fat floating around, but it was all cooked and quite tasty actually. It was completely hassle free - as all slow cooking is - and for a day when I was out at a training course and backwards and forwards on the school run and then delivering children to Rainbows etc, it was super-convenient. The only changes I made were to slightly up the vegetable quantities and I used a large tin of soup to stretch it to 4 of us. I also couldn't bring myself to serve it with tinned red cabbage - indeed I couldn't find any (although I didn't look too hard), but in keeping with the recipe, I did liberate some red cabbage, left over from Christmas, from the freezer.

I'm not sure it's the kind of thing I'd want to come back to from watching a movie, but I can certainly imagine Vera & Freda (you knew they'd have names like that) coming home - more likely from a concert at the Liverpool Philharmonic than the movies (although you never know), kicking off their brogues and sitting down, with their napkins on knees, to a big plateful of this...

Sunday Special - Slow roast merguez shoulder of lamb - and a comedy potato

Just before Christmas, we were in receipt of a lamb. Melvin's lamb.

I think I have written before about Melvin's pork (although I can't find the post). Melvin is our friendly, local, slightly erratic small holder. A couple of weeks before Christmas, the Husband rang Melvin to inquire about the availability of logs for the woodburner. During the course of the conversation, Melvin let slip that the lamb that he and the Husband had discussed some months previously was about to be butchered. We had all but given up on getting a lamb this year. A week before Christmas, realistically, we had neither budget nor freezer space for a butchered lamb, but these opportunities do not come along everyday, and before I knew it, Melvin was on my doorstep with the lamb, and the freezer is now creaking.

Fast forward to last Sunday and we have friends for lunch and a shoulder of said lamb out of the freezer. What to do, what to do? Faced with the meat, I had a crisis. Slow roast or conventional cook? English traditional or something more adventurous?

Much as I love the traditional English pairing of lamb with garlic and rosemary, my time in the South of France, on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border, has made me a huge fan of the 'merguez' flavours from North Africa. I have fond memories of barbecued merguez sausage - spicy and piquant: chilli, harissa, garlic, perhaps fennel, cumin and coriander...

Lamb as good as Melvin's already has a fantastic flavour, but it was too much of an opportunity, and 'adventurous' (if Sunday lunch could ever really be called adventurous? I don't know. Humour me) won out, although I kept the chilli down as a nod to the the less mature palates at the table. 

The only thing you really need to know about this is that it does need about 4 hours in total to cook, so get in the kitchen early, but then you have the luxury of just leaving it to do its thing while you get on with other stuff.

Slow roast merguez shoulder of lamb

1 shoulder of lamb (bone in) - 2 kg will feed 4 adults and 4 kids, possibly with leftovers
1 tsp each cumin seed, coriander seed, fennel seed & black peppercorns
1 cinammon stick, broken into pieces 
1 tsp smoked paprika
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 large sprigs of rosemary, leaves only, finely chopped
zest of a lemon, finely grated
2 tbsp olive oil
1 glass of red wine
1/2 glass water

First, pre-heat your oven to 220C and score the skin of your shoulder of lamb. While the oven is heating, make your paste: toast the seeds (cumin, coriander, fennel and peppercorns) and cinammon stick in a dry frying pan over a medium heat for a minute or so. Bash up the toasted spices with the paprika, rosemary, garlic, lemon zest 

and mix with the olive oil, then smear half of the resulting paste over the scored lamb (which you have, of course, put in an appropriately sized roasting tin. (If you were more organised than me, you could of course make the paste and smear the lamb the night before).

Put the meat in the hot oven for 30 mins, after which, remove from the oven, and smear the remaining spice paste over the meat - use a wooden spoon or somesuch to do this. Pour the wine and water into the tin around the meat (but NOT over the meat - you don't want to wash that paste off), then cover the joint with tin foil, seal it round the tin and put it back in the oven. Reduce the heat to 130C, and cook for about 3 hours, when it will be easy to pull apart, and taste delicious.

In my usual haphazard fashion, I made a gravy from the juices, some sherry and the water that I'd parboiled the parsnips in. We had whole roasted new potatoes (from last summer's crop - still going strong in a thick (and large) paper bag), parsnips (also homegrown) roasted with honey, rosemary and ground cumin, and steamed carrots and leeks. The great thing about home grown veg is the opportunity for amusingly-shaped specimens, and I'm sorry, but I can 't resist showing you this potato (snigger)

Haphazard gravy and comedy potatoes aside, this is a really fantastic way of roasting lamb. Hugh suggests roasting at a slightly lower temperature for longer (6 hours) but by the time I was contemplating what to do, a 6 hour roast would have meant eating at around 3 in the afternoon - no good when small children are involved. Also, I have done a longer roast and for me it hasn't turned out quite so well, although I added more liquid to the roasting tin this time than I have previously, so may be that helped. It's a method of cooking that lends itself to fiddling around, and because it's at a low temperature, there's less chance of ruining the meat by overcooking.

We had a fabulous afternoon, a lazy lunch then we sent the kids outside to build an igloo while the grown ups stayed firmly ensconced around the table with the wine. As we got our snow on Friday, and had already had plenty of opportunities for sledging and snowballing, what better way to spend a snowy Sunday afternoon?