Dry spell + Downpour = GLUT

Ooops

 

So what is a person to do with 15 kilos of courgette and another 20 of deformed patty pan squashes?

Light the Rayburn and get cooking......

 

... from left to right ratatouille, patty pan squash Thai soup and squash and veg soup.

 

 Winter larder is stocked up, some soups in Kilner jars, some boiled down to thicken as sauce bases for Thai curries, and several tubs of ratatouille for the freezer.

As well as the pickled walnuts now in jars ready for Christmas.

Now the sun is out the greenhouse is starting to produce ripened fruits too, today's harvest is a one person serving of green pepper, aubergine and assorted varieties of tomatoes.

 

They are going to be my dinner tonight, chopped and fried with a bit of garlic to go in my risotto.

A day in the life of my Rayburn

Got up to another showery day, with gaps between the showers too brief for a walk, and the flue on my fire requiring a bit of attention so a studio day out of the question, all leaving me a bit loose endy feeling.

So I reverted to my default setting for a rainy day, I lit the Rayburn and spent the day cooking.

I started by playing a little game I like to call  'Deep Freeze Tease', which basically involves finding random unlabelled packages in the chest freezer and cooking something out of the contents.

Today I found:

2 duck breasts
1 small joint of shin of beef
1 handful of chestnuts
5 hot dog sausages

which translated to:

1 spicy chinese duck with noodles
1 beef curry
1 mediterranean beef casserole
6 spicy beef kebabs
10 sausage rolls

So here are my recipes for June

Spicy Beef Kebabs

500g  lean beef 
3 slices of bread
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
4 tablespoons of dried parsley
2 tablespoons of lemon juice
1 tablespoon of tomato puree


I started by piling all the ingredients into my food processor and whizzing them all up together.

If you are going to barbeque these, then make sure you soak the kebab sticks, but as I am going to grill mine I haven't bothered.

Flour your hands and take a golfball size of mix and roll between your palms to create a sausage shape, then push the stick up through the centre.  Coat with flour and leave to set in the fridge for at least an hour before cooking.

 This the joint I found in the freezer, as you can see it is not that big, but it was half price, and that is always a selling point.

After taking the bit required for the kebabs, I cut the rest up into little chunks and spread them out between two further dishes, a curry (on the right) and a light summery mediterranean casserole.



Mediterranean casserole

2 large onions roughly chopped
1 kilo of tomatoes roughly chopped
4 cloves of garlic
500g of lean beef cut into small cubes
1 large courgette cut into chunks
12 pitted black olives

Fry all the above in a little olive oil, then add a litre of water and a veggie stock cube and leave to cook overnight in a Rayburn or 4 hours at 150°C, season and serve with hot crusty freshly baked bread.

Spicy Duck Noodles

Marinade ingredients:


2 cm of fresh ginger
2 cloves garlic
1 fresh red chilli
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
2 limes
1 tablespoon of sesame seeds
1 teaspoon of chinese 5 spice powder
1/2 teaspoon of ground black pepper

Blitz everything up together in a food processor.

2 duck breasts
1 small glass of wine
1 teaspoon of brown sugar
250g of dried rice noodles

Take 2 duck breasts or chicken or pork or whatever meat you have, and cube, then stir over the marinade and leave for about 4 hours in the fridge.

Scoop the meat out of the marinade with a slotted spoon and fry.

Once browned add back in the marinade juices and leave to cook for a couple of minutes. 

In the marinade dish break up the dried noodles and pour over enough hot water to just cover the noodles, cover and leave for 5 minutes, enough time for the noodles to swell and soften and absorb most of the water. 

Add the noodles to the meat pan, pour over a little glass of wine and finally add a teaspoon of brown sugar to thicken and sticky up the sauce.

And finally, what are you supposed to do with 5 random hot dog sausages and a handful of chestnuts.....

....well sausage rolls of course.

Chestnut Sausage Rolls

Whizz up some hot dog sausages with a couple of teaspoons of whole grain mustard and a handful of blanched and peeled chestnuts.

Roll in some pastry, either filo or flaky, whichever you have or whichever you like to make, I like to make neither but usually have a roll of flaky in the fridge for tarts and the like.

Bake in the oven at 180°c for 20 minutes and eat either hot or cold. 

Well - that's the rainy day cooking over, just enough residual heat to make me a pot of coffee!

January's C of Cooking - Rabbit Cobbler - A Rayburn Recipe

This is a slow cook recipe designed for the Rayburn or other wood stove.  For electric equivalent either 120°C for the same number of hours or 180°C for a couple of hours.

Also designed to be cooked entirely in one pot - for those lazy Sunday afternoons.

First take your rabbit - here is one I prepared last year.

Cut him into eight sections, 2 back legs, 2 front legs with rib cage, and the saddle and back into two then halved down the spine.

Brown the pieces in a large oven proof dish - I love cast iron pans because they radiate heat so well for the Rayburn -  TOP TIP - to store your cast iron pans without them rusting, after using and washing, once dry, brush the insides using a pastry brush with a bit of vegetable oil before storing, to reuse, just wipe the insides with a bit of kitchen paper and they are ready to use.

Once the rabbit is browned add a splash more olive oil and 3 peeled and quartered onions and a generous grinding of pepper.  Leave to sauté for a few minutes until the onions start to soften.

 
This recipe calls for stock, but because this is a one pot recipe and it will be cooking for quite a while, there is no need to create or add a separate stock, just make it in the pot you are using, and it will be full of meaty flavour.

To the rabbit and onions add a couple of litres of hot water, then add in some carrots chopped into large pieces, 2 bay leaves and a couple of stalks of celery.  In France it is practically impossible to find celery in the shops in winter, seasonality is very important here, and nobody in my family including me actually likes celery to eat.  It does however seem to be an integral flavour in stock, so I always grow a small patch then chop it and freeze it to use during the year.  (Alongside lots of other frozen herbs).

Season the stock well then bring to the boil.  Add mushrooms - either frozen, or tinned, fresh or rehydrated dried mushrooms, whatever you have to hand.  You will need a couple of handfuls.

Once the stock is boiling, cover the pan and shove it into the centre of the oven for as long as it takes to cook the rabbit so the meat is falling loosely off the bones - in my old Rayburn at approximately 250°F / 120°C that can be up to 4 hours on wood alone.

To serve the rabbit add copious amounts of either dried or frozen thyme.  Season to taste.  Once the liquid is to your taste, throw over the cobbler.

Cobbler is a thick pastry type top that is very easy to make and is a real alternative to a pie pastry, I usually serve it in place of potatoes as it is quite stodgy.

Sift 100g white flour, 100g of wholewheat flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder and a pinch of salt.  Using your finger tips to rub together to a bread crumb consistency add two heaped tablespoons of room temperature butter and a tablespoon of herb of your choice - here I am using parsley.

To bind together, slowly pour in about 100ml of milk, maybe a tablespoon more, just enough so that the pastry does not crumble too much.  Don't make it too wet as it will need to absorb liquid from the stew, both to cook the cobbler and to thicken the stew.

Make a soft dough, then with floured hands roughly pat it flat and into the shape of your pan, lay over the stew leaving a small air gap around the edges.  Leave to cook for a further 40 minutes (probably less in the electric oven at 180° C°).

Serve in big spoonfuls into bowls for a tasty Sunday dish that takes 20 minutes to prepare, about 5 hours to cook and is totally yummy bunny.

A DIY project today

And a bit of history.

When we bought our house the main chimney breast in the kitchen had been backed in some rather fetching green linoleum stretched out between batons.

Of course we removed it as a matter of priority before installing the Rayburn into the chimney.

Because I am the one coat queen and have no patience whatsoever for decorating (you'd think a renovation project would be a baaaad thing for me to take on - and you'd be right), when I ripped the lino and its batons off, there were all these little wooden posts left sticking out of the wall.  They had obviously been concreted in place and really I should have cut them off with a saw flush against the wall, filled and plastered over them.

Instead I have stuck nails and hooks in them and am left with a random assortment of hanging things hanging up behind the Rayburn.

I call it kitchen kitsch, Brendan calls it clutter.

I like it - it stays!

Unfortunately it does seem to gather a lot of dust, a LOT of dust, particularly over winter with the fire going.

Today I gave it all a major clean, everything off, washed, dusted, wiped down, dried and now rehung.

In amongst all my lovely kitchenalia I have some vintage pieces, a moulinette, a chestnut pan, a potato ricer and a juice squeezer found at car boots here in France.

Anyway, when we ripped off the lino we discovered a niche in the wall, that, after asking the neighbours we discovered is for salt.  We had originally thought that these were proofing spaces for bread making, but they are acutally for keeping salt dry.  I  use the little convenient cubby hole for keeping the matches handy for lighting the fire, and also for a couple of candles for when the electric goes out in winter.

Today I cleaned it out, got a bit of plaster courtesy of my ever helpful hubby and set a piece of roof slate in there as a shelf.  The white gunk on it is the PVA glue I am using to seal it, not yet dry.

My not so secret, secret addiction. (updated)

My name is Monika and I am a Rayburn-a-holic.

It started when we were in the process of talking ourselves into buying a permanent home in rural France as opposed to a fixer-upper to use in our summer holidays, in amongst all the mental bargaining and deal making we had decided on wood fired heating incorporating a stove and a means of meeting our hot water requirements.  The perfect solution was a Rayburn (ours is a no.3 built in 1953), with an integral back boiler, multi fuel so coal as well as wood, and a kitchen classic from the 1950s, right in keeping with a stone rustic farmhouse from the 1850s.

We bought the carcass of a Rayburn from ebay for 99p.  I still remember clearly the guy's face when we turned up with the Land Rover and trailer and he asked us how we thought we were going to lift three quarters of a tonne of cast iron onto a trailer and we replied that we were going to dismantle the Rayburn first!

The Rayburn we bought had excellent enamelling however it was pretty rotten on the sides and back, but the back boiler was in good order and it had all of its door handles, hinges, plate rack and stove tops.

So started the restoration.

We had the good fortune to be living about 50 miles from the home of Aga and Rayburn (a Rayburn being the solid fuel incarnation of the more well known Aga), so finding replacement firebricks was a doddle, then the rotten sides and back were replaced by shiny stainless steel, the gaps filled with Rockwool, a few screws and some fire cement and my beautiful stove was reborn.

This is the point at which some photos are called for but the battery is on charge again.

My beautiful Rayburn now runs two bedroom radiators, provides our winter hot water, kitchen heating and I do the majority of my cooking in it.

So why am I telling you all this? -  because I was going to light it today to get started on my beetroot pickles and marrow jams, and then went and got all distracted tidying up my greenhouse instead - it was a bit Day of the Triffids in there.

 Having cut back all the tomatoes, weeded and harvested those lovely little cherry tomatoes ready for cooking I then came back inside and tackled all those housework things that Brendan had been blind to whilst I was away, hence the stairs got swept, dusting got done, floors got mopped and bathroom had a proper clean round.

If this wet weather that I have bought back from the UK persists I may light the Rayburn tomorrow and start pickling then.



So - updated - Saturday afternoon while I was busy hacking away in the greeenhouse it started to persist it down, coupled with Brendan declaring all the plums being ripe, I decided to light the Rayburn and get on with the first lot of autumn harvests - feels a little odd to be doing this in August but hey ho - funny old weather.

We picked a row of beetroots and set them to boiling for the pickled beetroots.  I always scrub mine very clean before boiling because I preserve the water afterwards to make Barszcz for Christmas.  This beetroot soup is a good old fashioned Polish addition to our menu.

To preserve the juice, once I had claimed all the beets out of the water, I simply poured it into a freezer bag held upright in a measuring jug and put it in the freezer, then I can remove the jug and just have a solid block of purple-y beetroot stock ready for use.

 With 7 jars of beetroots pickled, I also managed to bottle up 9 jars of plum and elderberry jam, delicious.

This is only the second year that our plum tree has fruited, they are small dark purple plums but so juicy and tasty.  I have no idea what variety they are as the tree was already here in the garden when we arrived, and even our neighbour does not know what sort it is - although he has told me on several occasions that the tree won't fruit.

It overlooks the chicken pound and as they get ripe and fall the chickens fight over them.  They wolf them down to the point that they end up with discoloured poops everywhere - today all the poops are a virulent shade of red due to them eating beetroot peelings and drinking the last of the beetroot water, then scoffing elderberries and plum skins.

We also had a go at pickling some of our quail eggs - but in red wine vinegar to stain them pink - no I don't know why it just seemed a good idea at the time.

And of course in the background you can see some plum syrup heavily doused with vodka ready for autumnal cocktails!

Day 3 of the Larder Challenge - Carrot and Potato Thai Green Soup

It seems ridiculous that I am considering making a hot soup to eat in June, but with the constant rainfall, a winter warmer soup is just what I need.

And with the Rayburn lit for the hot water as the solar panel is 'resting' (posh actor's euphemism for not working - due to lack of solar input), I thought a hot soup bubbling away on the hot plate would raise our morale from the sodden depths.

Raiding the depths of the veg basket - I should have considered stocking up on fresh veg before starting this challenge, oh well too late now, I found a handful of sorry looking carrots and a couple of spuds.

Carrot and Potato Green Thai Chili Soup


Peel and chop into smallish chunks a handful of decidedly limp carrots and a couple of spuds about to sprout (you could use fresh ones but this is what was left in my larder)
Boil in a litre of chicken stock until they begin to disintegrate, then either blitz with a stick blender or use a potato masher to achieve a puree
At this point you may need to add some water, taste to see if you need just water or seasonings as well, a strong stock would be fine but if you are using a cube you may need the additional seasonings.

Now stir in a heaped teaspoon of green Thai chili paste

Leave to simmer away gently for half an hour  until serving or cover and stick in the oven for later, then serve with some bread.



To make your own paste:  Green Thai Chili Paste

Blend all the ingredients together to make a small
jar's worth that will keep in the fridge for a couple 
of weeks, or can be frozen in teaspoon sized dollops
on a tray in the freezer to use another time.

• 1 small onion or a shallot
• 4-5 cloves garlic
• 1 thumb-size piece of ginger
• 1  cup chopped fresh coriander leaves & stems
• 1/2 tsp. ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp. ground pepper 
• 1/2 tsp. ground coriander
• 3 Tbsp. fish sauce
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 Tbsp. lime juice
• 1 tsp. brown sugar
• 3-4 Tbsp. coconut milk or double cream
• 1 stalk lemongrass
• 1-3 green chilies depending on how hot you like your curry