Giant potato croquette recipe
My mother used to reheat yesterday’s mashed potato with milk, in a saucepan, very gently. This wasn’t good – it had a wishy-washy taste. Up until two weeks ago we made potato cakes if we had some left-over mash knocking about in the fridge and were feeling galvanised. More often than not, the bowl would be pressed into a dark area of the fridge where food mysteriously vanishes until it is exhumed days later to make room for something fresh. One lazy day last week, I opened the fridge and found a decent sized bowl of cold...
read morePheasant stew with mushrooms, oven baked shallots and Puy lentils recipe
This is the first time that The Cottage Smallholder has participated in a blog event. ‘Waiter There’s Something In My…’ is hosted across three great sites. The first theme is stews. *See the bottom of this post for the link to the details. Tasty pheasant dishes needn’t be rich to be good. This stew is packed with flavour and is good to eat at this stage in the season when you might be beginning to suffer from a surfeit of rich game dishes. We call this condition Pheasantitis. The only remedy is to freeze the birds...
read morePheasant braised with grapes, clementine juice and white wine recipe
Sometimes the Cottage Smallholder game plucking service comes in very handy. We’ll pluck and draw some game in exchange for a brace of pheasant or partridge. This gives us a good supply of fresh game right through the shooting season. This is our own recipe for pheasant and grapes, braised in clementine juice and white wine. The fruit both tenderises the flesh and balances well with the rich meat of the pheasant. Loads of summery flavours. The ginger wine was an experiment that worked surprisingly well. This is quick to prepare and...
read moreLazy duck in apricot sauce recipe
I often turn my collar up and haunt the condemned food section of Tesco. Sometimes I bag a real bargain. Often I find duck legs. The first time I swanked home with this gem Danny was forthright. “it’s all very well bringing home cut price stuff but do you know how to cook duck legs?” I had no idea. “Of course I do.” My mind whirled madly. “I’m going to cook them slowly with apricots.” His head remained cocked to one side. “And wine.” We were both stunned that I could so easily pluck...
read morePerfect Seville orange marmalade recipe
As the topping for the best slice of toast of the day, good marmalade is a joy. We like it dark, chunky, hand cut and never in moderation. Marmalade was the first preserve that we made. We were so proud of it that we could hardly bear to move it from the worktop to the larder, let alone eat it. Eventually we opened the first jar and lavished it on slice after slice of hot buttered toast. We immediately christened it Intellectual Marmalade as so much ground work, research and care had gone into its manufacture. Visitors who spotted the label...
read moreDavid’s pheasant breasts sautéd in butter and marsala recipe
You will need a steak hammer for this recipe or a sturdy wooden rolling pin. This is the story of how I found mine. Many years ago, at the end of my first tumultuous love affair, my mother gave me a two week holiday on the island of Hero (one stop on from Gomera) in the Canary Islands. She booked me into a hotel that was starred in The Good Hotel Guide. She had loathed my boyfriend and probably hoped that I’d meet a new Adonis. I was happy to go along with the plan and arrived safely on the island in a small propeller plane. The spacious...
read moreIn the bag roast chicken recipe
My friend Carol keeps on mentioning how good game cooked in a bag is. I vaguely remember people using roasting bags in the eighties. Everybody was using them for a few months and suddenly they just fizzled out. Actually, I hate to admit it but I thought the attraction was that using roasting bag was to stop your oven getting so dirty. Until last weekend, I had no idea of their magical effect on food. Carol’s advice is sound. Everything that she recommends is good, from tiny tomato sandwiches on a hot summer’s day to her own herb...
read moreDr Quito’s Jewish Chicken Soup recipe. A cure all.
I’m always reading that someone somewhere has proved that Jewish Chicken soup is a natural cure for colds, flu, fevers and even the blues. A few years ago I decided that it had to be part of our repertoire. The best Jewish chicken soup recipes are often carefully guarded family secrets, handed down through generations. We refused to be knocked back by this. We tried a few recipes, identified what worked for us and started to experiment. Our goal was to create a soup that would appeal equally to an invalid and a super fit trapeze artist....
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