Terrine

Adapted from Michael Rhulman's Charcuterie.

Chicken livers and pork mince. Each sprinkled with sea slat, a sprig of thyme, and a bay leaf, and left in the fridge overnight.


Thyme and bay leaves discarded, the livers get nicely browned on the outside, then onion and garlic are added, and then brandy to deglaze …


… I didn't feel like dirtying the mincer, so I chopped the livers the old fashioned way, with my mezzaluna/hachoir/whatever you want to call it …


… before adding them to the pork mince along with the onions/garlic/brandy mix.


An egg, some milk, a bit of flour, some nutmeg and white pepper, and a fair bit of parsley went in next …


… Then I hunted around in the fridge to find something else tasty to out in and found these caperberries …


… So I chopped them up and in they went:


I poured the rather wet mixture into this little terrine:


Popped on the lid and stuck it in a low oven in a bain marie:


I think it was in there for an hour or so, the internal temperature was about 72°C when I took it out anyway.


I made some crackers too:


A jolly good mid-afternoon snack. With plenty more to eat.

Another hearty stew

Literally. Freely adapted from this.

Sautéed mushrooms …


… mixed in with pork mince, flour, milk, seasonings …


… and a bit of chopped parsley, thyme, and rosemary …


… stuffed into a couple of sheeps' hearts, then trussed up with string. Not a lot of space for stuffing in a sheep's heart, even with the wall between the ventricles removed, …


… so I made the leftover stuffing into little meatball things, and browned everything in a little oil …


… before putting it all in the small slow cooker with some flour.


Then I sautéed carrot, onion, and bacon …


… and put that on top of the hearts.

Red wine, tomato paste, and a frozen block of pork stock/jelly went in last …


… and then the slow cooker went on overnight.


I haven't eaten it yet, but it tastes delicious. Quite rich. I'm going to have it with cabbage steamed with grated apple and black pepper.

Oxtail

There was oxtail at the supermarket the other day. I love oxtail, but it's not so easy to find these days.

I pulled this huge heirloom yellow carrot from the garden; I only needed about a third of it!


I browned the oxtail bits (a lot more than this photo shows) …


… and put them in the small slow cooker with the chopped carrot, some onion, garlic, tomato paste, red wine, some flour, salt and pepper. Turned it on and left it overnight.

In the morning I woke up to this:


I let it go cold during the day so I could get the fat off the top, then re-heated it in the microwave two days in a row for my dinner. Stews like this improve with reheating.

Marrons glacé

Chestnuts are not a traditional food in New Zealand, in fact I'd never seen anything other than a horse chestnut until I saw these in the supermarket the other week:


I must say, people who rely on these things as a staple starch certainly have to put a lot of work into getting their food. There's probably some trick to peeling the things that I don't know.

However, what I did was to slit the shells, par-boil them, then peel off the outer shells. I tried to peel the inner membrane too, but the chestnuts started to disintegrate.


Once they'd cooled I reheated them quickly in hot water so just the outsides were warm, and they were a lot easier to deal with.


The procedure for making marrons glacé is very similar to that I used for glacé kiwifruit, but on day five you boil the chestnuts for a few minutes in the syrup and added sugar, then leave them for two days, then repeat and leave them for four days.


After that you drain them …


… and dry them:


I've never eaten marrons glacé before either, so I'm not sure if they've turned out the way they should. They're nice though.

Tortillas

Firstly flour tortillas.

Flour, melted lard, salt, water. Same sort of proportions (with lard taking the place of butter and water of milk) as scones.

Kneaded, divided into six bits …


… rolled out as thin as can be …


… cooked on a hot cast iron griddle for less than a minute on each side …



… perfect:


I am never buying these again. They are so easy to make, and I can make as few as I want, no need to use ten at once.

Quésadillas:


Yum.

Then corn tortillas.

Masa harina, water. Mix.


Sounds easy, but getting exactly the right proportions is a bit trickier than flour tortillas. This mix is a little dry, I ended up adding a bit more water to each lump. The mix wants to feel about the same as gnocchi dough.


Rolling it out isn't quite as easy as flour tortillas either. You need to roll it between two bits of plastic. I used a couple of bags.


I also found that it was not so easy to get them flat on the griddle, and they ended up somewhat corrugated.


But then I had a brainwave, and cooked the rest in my panini press.


Nice and flat, but you need to be careful not to cook them to crispness. A hotter panini press might be a good idea too.


Still, I think I'll be making these again too. It might even be worth getting a tortilla press, but I have no idea where I'd keep it. My kitchen is full.

Prosciutto, part 1

This is going to be a bit of a saga. Prosciutto takes a good many months to make.

We start with the nearly 10kg leg of pork I got from the supermarket the other day when it was on special for $6.99/kg. The nice butcher there removed the remnant of hip-bone (aitch-bone in butcher-speak) for me, leaving just the ball at the top of the femur visible:


I trimmed the top of the leg to a nice rounded shape, removing a bit over 1 kg of meat, which I saved to use for a fermented sausage.


The proto-prosciutto went into my deepest roasting dish and got covered in coarse sea-salt, paying particular attention to the bits around each end of the femur and any cuts or holes …


… then the whole thing was inserted in a big plastic bag, taken to the coldest room in the house (it is winter, and it wouldn't fit in the fridge) and another roasting dish, containing 5kg of weights was placed on top:


That coldest room is the spare bathroom, in case you were wondering. It's the only room in the house that gets no sun, and I don't use it unless there are visitors.

For the next few weeks I need to check the leg daily, re-salting bits where the salt has dissolved, and draining off the fluid which is drawn from the meat by the salt. The original set-up, with the roasting dish in the plastic bag, turned out to be a bit of a pain in the arse to check and drain. The leg didn't really fit, and bits of salt got spread everywhere when I removed the bag, so I put on my thinking cap and came up with a better (I hope) idea.


The leg is now in my newly scoured laundry tub, with the plastic bag merely acting as a cover to keep dust, cat hair, and whatever else from settling on it. When I want to drain it I just lift the leg by the ankle, scoop any salt out of the way and pull the plug from the plughole. There's a lot more space in which to manoeuvre when applying more salt too. The laundry is not exactly a room, it's a sort of large cupboard off the kitchen, and it's kept cool by the constant draught of wintry air that gets in via the clothes-dryer vent.

I'll give a progress report when there's anything interesting to say -hopefully it won't be that the whole thing turned into a rotten mess and had to be discarded.