Writing this feels more like a confession than a blog post: Forgive me father, it has been four weeks since my last post. I really don’t know how that happened, apart from the universal fleetingness of time, and the more specific laziness of me. There are other excuses I could make, like the possibly sand induced jamming of my camera, which occurred after a trip to the beach at Cabo de Gato in Almeria and explains why there was only the one post on what we did and ate on our Andalucian holiday. Decent pictures really are key to this whole blogging thing, and I apologise in advance for the reduction in image quality that will be inevitable until I can either fix or replace the jammed Lumix. Mind you, I blogged for several months before I got the Lumix in the first place, so it’s not really a valid excuse. Which tangentially reminds me: since I last blogged the first anniversary of my first blog post has passed. A whole year. How? I refer you again to the universal fleetingness of time…
There’s also been the weather, which has been lovely, but unsettlingly unseasonal. In the Stoke Newington wine shop where I work part time (more like full time recently – another excuse) a couple of weekends ago we had girls coming in to buy chilled rosés to drink in the park. In bikini tops. In October. Not that I have anything fundamentally against girls in bikini tops, but in Stoke Newington, in October? That’s surely wrong. Anyway, wrong or not, and nothing whatsoever to do with the girls and their tops, it does throw all your plans for featuring seasonal produce out the window, all the roasted squashes and game casseroles you had in mind no longer seem appropriate. The weekend of the bikinis, incidentally we had a wine tasting in the shop, that had been scheduled weeks in advance, and the chosen wines advertised, for which, it being the first weekend in October we’d cunningly chosen big, hearty, autumnal reds. Not so many takers for those, as it turned out…
It’s also not been much of a mushroom season, unlike last year. Although that said, we did return from a family wedding weekend in the Peak District - which did at least manage to be partly autumnal, with horizontally driven rain on one day, albeit followed by baking sunshine the next - with a bag full of winter chanterelles, and a couple of small boletes.
That made it seem like an appropriate time to dig the spare grouse we had left over from Christmas out of the freezer.
Once thawed, I removed the breasts from the grouse and then pulled as much of the rest of the meat off the carcass as I could. Then I put what was left in a roasting dish, along with a couple of pigeon carcasses (the ones I’d stripped the breasts from for Valentines) I also had in the freezer and briefly roasted them (for just about 10 minutes), before transferring them into a stockpot along with the regular stock veg, seasonings and water, and simmering them away for several hours to make an intensely gamey stock.
 |
| Scary space alien? Or grouse carcass stripped of its breasts? |
The grouse breasts I put in a Tupperware dish, covered them with the juice and zest of one orange, a little olive oil, salt and pepper, then put them in the fridge to marinade for what turned out to be a couple of days. In the meantime I took the remaining shreds of meat pulled from the carcass and fried them up with some similarly shredded bacon, a finely chopped shallot, clove of garlic and knub of red chilli, then tossed in a couple of handfuls of mushrooms (the chanterelles simply cleaned, the boletes thickly sliced). Then it was just a case of adding a splash of white wine and a ladle of the game stock and bringing them to the simmer while cooking up some trofie pasta (trofie are little, knobbly, apparently hand rolled scraps of pasta, that have a basic rusticity that seems well suited to game and foraged wild mushrooms). I added the pasta to the sauce (along with just a little of it’s cooking water, which Italian cooks always seem to insist on, and really does seem to help bring the pasta and sauce together), stirred it through thoroughly, along with a handful of freshly chopped parsley and served it up in bowls. Apart from the two to three hours of simmering the stock, the whole meal was done in the time it took to bring the water to the boil and cook the pasta, and yet it was a rare, and intensely delicious treat. That really is my favourite kind of meal.
To make up for the sorry shortage of posts over the past couple of months, I’ll hold back writing up what I did with the rest of the grouse and mushrooms till next time, but rest assured there are two whole meals to come yet. Not bad from one tiny bird that cost me a fiver, and a bag of mushrooms foraged for free.
Until next time, which I promise will be sooner than four weeks…
No comments:
Post a Comment