The Fumblings of a French Chef

Frittata

2012-08-28T02:39:00.000-07:00

Some friends of mine recently declined a dinner with someone who was proud to be able to demonstrate his culinary skills by boiling frankfurters in their can, cremating an omelette and garnishing a Caesar salad with a torn in half Scotch egg... I can understand why. Said person is, however, one of the reasons this blog was started, and why it will include the most basic of dishes alongside the most gourmet cuisine.

Peel and boil a couple of potatoes in salted water. Meanwhile chop the onion and red pepper (seeds, pith and stalk removed!) and put them with a little olive oil in a good frying pan over a medium heat to lightly brown them.

Brighton being a University town most students spend their first year trying to learn to cook and discovering how expensive it is if you eat out every night. By the second year most of them can manage staples of Spaghetti Bolognese, pizza, beans on toast and similar simple dishes aided by jars of ready made sauces and pre-made bases. Depending on whether or not they go home after Uni, to the sanctuary of Mum's cooking, or whether they're staying on in the town, some of them even go on to investigate the world of food further.

Roughly chop the mushrooms, about the same size as the peppers and put them to one side.

Fancy things like Frittata usually come about the end of year one, when they lose their fear of buying things not in tins - like vegetables. It's pretty much as simple as it comes, really, but it is a filling, satisfying meal done in one pan for two people.

A cupped handful each of frozen sweetcorn and frozen petit pois - set these aside for now.

Since there is yet a chance of the dinner invitation being re-offered I can only hope that my friends send the food miscreant to this blog for his step by step photo guide to cooking something without killing people or requiring a stomach pump.

In a jug take 6 eggs out of their shells and check them for any shell that may fall into the jug. Add about an eggcup full of milk - not a comedy eggcup, an ordinary one. Or use a half egg shell twice to measure out some milk. Add in some salt and freshly ground black pepper and use a fork to mash the yolks up and whisk the mixture together a little bit.

Put the whoel pack of Frankfurters, un pierced, into the microwave for one minute 40 seconds. When the timer goes on them, cut open one end of the pack and drain out the liquid. You'll want about 4 or 5 of these, and you need to chop them into little barrels, about a centimetre and a half long. Put these to one side for now.

Grate some hard cheese such as cheddar - the choice is yours, but cheddar melts easily and has a good flavour. You want about enough that when you put your hand over it all you have your hand cupped and your fingers spread and the cheese is kind of poking through your fingers. This is a normal sized hand, not a mahoosive hand or a tiny paw.

When the onions are browned lightly - not dark brown, not crispy, not black, the smoke alarm is not going off, add the Frankfurters to the pan and let them brown lightly. This means you have to stir them from time to time to turn them over and mix everything together. Do this every time you add something to the pan to brown. Give it a stir, let it sit so it browns, then stir it again. This way you don't get one side raw and the other side black.

Your potatoes should be soft after 10 to 15 minutes of boiling. If they are starting to fall apart this is over cooked. You want them firm but cooked. Crispy in the middle is not good, either. Strain them and let them dry by shaking the colander up and down to get the water out. Do this hard enough that the potato leaves the bottom of the colander, but not so hard they leave it completely.

Add your potatoes to the pan and mix in well then let them brown a little.

When everything has a bit of brown on it, add in your chopped mushrooms and cook until they shrink a little. No, not to nothing, not to burned to death little cremains, just darkened and a little shrunk where they have lost their water.

When everything is nicely browned and the mushrooms are shrunk, you're ready to add your egg mixture. Turn down the heat to no more than half the amount the dial can go to. So half way round on the dial is fine. It won't be quarter past or half past, you should have numbers or little flames that show you how hot the cooker top is under the pan. Choose the middle one, then turn it just down a little from that.

Tip the sweetcorn and the peas into the egg mix and beat with the fork until all combined and spread out. Pour this mixture into the pan. Do not wander off at this point to go wash the jug or whatever. Get stirring! Use your spatula to mix in the egg and the contents of the pan before the egg starts to set.

Once the veg are mixed in and the egg starts to set, stop stirring and let it start to become one solid lump. Don't turn the heat up. You need to watch the edges now and see how dry they're getting. That will tell you how well cooked it is underneath. We're not cooking it all the way through on the top of the stove, so don't worry if it's a bit damp on top.

This is the point where you want to start looking under the sides. This is still wet and runny in the middle, but while some of the edge is damp other bits are cooked and solid.

Gently lift back the edge of the frittata and see if it is cooked. It doesn't want to brown the egg or burn it, just set it. If you can do this and no fluid leaks out, go a little further. Stuart - please note - this is the colour the bottom of an egg dish cooked in a frying pan should be...

Slide the spatula further under and gently lift a little. If it holds together well, and doesn't leak fluid, it's time to take the pan off the stove.

If you're thinking that doesn't look completely cooked yet, you're right. There are still milky patches of liquid in the middle of the Frittata. They're supposed to be there, because we haven't finished cooking yet. Go and turn the grill on - the one that goes over things, not the George Forman (TM) or whatever gadget someone though would be cool.

This is the big where we add in all that cheese you grated. Just sprinkle it all over the top, as much as you like. Just make sure you can still see some of the Frittata underneath! Now put this under the grill, in the pan. Make sure the handle sticks out, no matter what it's made of. You'll need to grab hold of it to get the pan out, so you don't want it to melt, burn, be on fire or anything else. Ok?

This is what you're looking for. When you look under the grill and you see a Frittata through the melted cheese, it's done! Get an oven glove or wrap a towel round your hand and get the pan out.

This is it - done, finished, cooked through, not burned on the bottom, not raw in the middle or on the top, perfectly cooked, with melted cheese on top. Time to get it onto a plate.

Well, yes, you could eat it right from there, but it's nicer and more polite if you cut it into chunks and put those on a plate to eat. Especially if you're sharing.

See - all cooked. Both the health inspector and your mother would heartily approve, I'm sure. A meal with protein, carbohydrates, vegetables in three different colours and mushrooms, too. Hearty, healthy and delicious. How deep your pan is will dictate how thick the Frittata is, but whatever size you make, follow the same rules. One thing to change - if the pan is deeper turn the heat lower and let it cook until when you put a spatula in the middle and move it slightly the middle is cooked up above one half of the way through. That's the point to take it off the stove.

On a plate, in chunks, waiting for the Lea and Perrins! Delicious.

And look - no burnt bottom, either!

Frittata (Printed Version)

Ingredients:
2 medium sized potatoes, peeled and cut into 2.5 cm cubes or roughly that
1 onion, peeled, topped and tailed and chopped
1 red pepper, pith, seeds and stalk removed cut into 2.5 cm squares or thereabouts
Half a punnet of mushrooms, roughly chopped to be about the same size as the pepper
1 pack 10 Hurta Frankfurters
1 cupped hand of frozen petit pois
1 cupped hand of frozen sweetcorn
6 eggs, preferably large and free range
An eggcup full of milk
Salt and Black Pepper
A small block of hard cheese such as Cheddar

To Serve:
Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce (optional)
Bread and butter (optional)
Salad (optional)

Method:
Put the peeled and chopped potatoes into a pan of salted water for 10 to 15 minutes until they are cooked and just going soft. Drain, shake dry and set to one side.

Prepare the pepper and onion as above and put into a good, non-stick frying pan with about a tablespoon of olive oil. This is about one and a half times the spoon you eat your pudding with that isn't a teaspoon. Turn the heat to about three quarters, so the pan gets hot enough to brown things but they don't cremate and the oil doesn't burn. If the pan is smoking, turn the heat down and let it cool before you add the oil or you will set your kitchen alight.

So, oil in the pan, pepper and onion in the pan. Get them lightly browned - that means mostly a pale goldish colour with the odd spot of brown here and there.

Chop the Frankfurters into 1.5 to 2.5 centimetre long logs and add them to the frying pan. Stir them in with the rest of the ingredients and let them get a little bit browned.

Add the potatoes and again stir them in with the other bits in the pan and let them get a few brown spots on them.

Add the mushrooms and let things carry on cooking with the odd stir while they shrink down a little and get a bit darker.

Grate a good handful of the cheese and set it aside for now.

Crack the eggs into a jug and make sure there is no shell in with them. Add the little bit of milk and the salt and pepper. Use a fork to break the yolks and whisk the eggs a little.

Mix the sweetcorn and petit pois into the egg mixture and again, give a little whisk.

Pour the mixture into the pan and turn the heat down to a little less than half. Immediately stir the egg through the ingredients, so it gets underneath everything and it spreads all round the pan evenly.

Stop stirring, flatten it down a little and leave it alone until you see the sides of the Frittata have set.

Put your spatula under the outer edge and gently lift. If fluid runs out then put it back and let it carry on cooking. Next time check a different place. When you can pick up the outer edge and the pan remains dry underneath, slide your spatula towards the middle of the pan and gently lift a few centimetres. If the Frittata stays together and no fluid runs out underneath, take it off the stove.

Turn on the grill to warm up. You want the grill hot but not overly scorching, so again, somewhere between half and full, about three quarters or two thirds of what it can do.

Sprinkle the cheese over the top of the Frittata and slide the pan under the grill with the handle sticking out so you'll be able to get the pan back out again.

When the cheese has melted to your satisfaction, remove the pan from the grill and slide the Frittata out onto a plate where you can then cut it up and serve it.

Simple!

Salmon Koulibiac

2012-08-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

It is worth buying the most up to date Larouse that you can, because it no longer retricts itself to the purely French. These days the Larouse has expanded somewhat, it has a page on Japan, it mentions classic dishes from cuisines outside of France, and it also strays into the realms of patisserie. Just briefly. It still has, however, all the wonderful, classic, old fashioned dishes that are still so relevant today. Ok, so some of them need a tiny twist, maybe we're not going to cook it with lard and drippings, but if all it takes is a change to olive oil then there is no reason that an old dish cannot also be a new dish.

If you put the pastry on a sheet of parchment it will simply slide off when it's baked, no need to grease the tray at all

It is from these classic dishes that our next dish arrives, Salmon Koulibiac, from fine Russian cuisine. Eaten hot or cold this dish can can be eaten all year round. It's great for preparing ahead for dinner parties, or having cold with a picnic. It holds together very well in slices so it's wonderful for lunch boxes for work or school. Sometimes spelled with a C (Coulibiac), Leith's spells it with a K, and it is this recipe we are using today.

Cut a simple third off the end of the pastry and peel it off the backing paper, onto the baking tray.

The pie can be made in several ways, either in layers, or all mixed together with the eggs chopped in. This is a small one, just for 4 people; but if I were doing it for a buffet or banquet I would still layer it. People like to see what they're eating, and if it's all mixed together you loose the visual appeal and you deny people the chance to decide if they don't want to eat a bit of it, too.

I'm afraid we were incredibly lazy with this one - we used ready rolled puff pastry from the chilled section at Sainsburys. I have to say, it's probably the best ready made pastry I've used so far, but it's still not a patch on home made. If you decide to make your own home made pastry watch out for the tutorial that I will be doing in the next few weeks.

The dish requires you to cook several different fillings in advance of putting the dish together. Starting at the bottom we put in rice, mixed with chopped parsley, pepper, salt and lemon juice. Four ounces may not seem like a lot when you weigh it out, but do remember that it will swell with cooking, and it's not the only filling.

Chopping onions is now always a job for the alligator. As mentioned in a previous post it takes the sting out of the job, it's easy to clean, and it's reliable and simple to use. Mr FC was happy to use it to finely chop the onion. Don't over chop the onion here - you'll find that even with an alligator there is lots of juice comes out of the onion. You don't want to add that to the pan; get a cloth and wipe it away. If you over chop the onion you'll end up with a pureed pulp that won't cook properly.

The eggs need to be cooked ahead, too, then peeled and rinsed to make sure there is no shell or membrane left on them.

Cooling the rice under cold water stops it cooking further and getting too starchy. It also washes off any starch that the rice has released, leaving it fluffy. Do be sure to drain it very well before you put it on the pastry.

Despite all those fork pricks the pastry still rose rather alarmingly. Make sure it's well cooled before you use it or it will be soggy from the trapped condensation.

Sieving the lemon juice before you use it makes sure the pips that fall out and the flesh that gets ground into the juice don't get into the finished dish.

Chop the parsley finely. This is a job for a mezaluna knife which rocks across the herbs, chopping them evenly.

You can use the eggs whole, you can chop the eggs up and mix them in, or you can cut the eggs into sections and spread them evenly through the pie - which is what I did. If you use whole eggs you will get the effect of a slice through the egg when you cut the pie.

The salmon was steamed in a pan of water and wine, then the skin, dark strip down the middle and anything else extraneous was removed and the fish flaked. Mr FC got a bit carried away with the flaking and we ended up with what now looks like tinned salmon - it is fresh, I promise. You can see it in the ingredients photo at the top of the blog.

Add the salt, pepper, parsley and lemon juice to the rice and stir it through well.

I couldn't possibly use the pastry as it had risen, so I simply laid my hands on it to flatten it a little. A couple of tiny pats and ti was soon in a condition to have things laid on it without them rolling off!

Gather your fillings round, ready to layer onto the pastry.

Before you start filling the pie, make sure yo tuck the remaining pastry under the cooked piece by about an inch. This will help you later when you wrap the slab.

Being the driest and bulkiest of the fillings, the rice was laid on first, and carefully spread about to make an even layer that went right to the edges all the way round the pastry.

The salmon was next - you can see I had a little difficulty keeping the fillings on top, but don't worry, because you can always put it in at the end when everything has stabilised.

Putting the eggs on their backs didn't work, so I rolled them over and topped them with the bits of salmon that had escaped previously.

The cooked mushroom and onion mixture went on last, as being the wettest and least of the ingredients. This way the bottom of the pie won't be soggy and greasy, and the flavours will work their way down through the fish to the rice while the pie cooks.

I took advantage of the backing sheet on the pastry, leaving it on as I wrapped the pastry over the top of the pie. One simple peel and it came away, leaving the pastry exactly as I wanted it. If your pastry doesn't go over with an inch to spare to tuck under, flatten your pie down a little and try again. It's tempting to make a heap of the ingredients in the middle, but the more you spread them out to the edges the better the pie will be and the greater the chance of your pastry fitting.

Using your longest pallet knife - preferably a thin, strong, metal one - slide it completely under the base pastry. You can see here that my 30cm knife fails to show on the opposite side of the pastry.

Use the knife to carefully lift the pie and tuck the remaining pastry under the edge of the pie to close the second side.

Using the pre-rolled pastry mean that I had to pull the ends a little to get the top and bottom of the pie to close over, and a good dollop of egg wash was used to stick them down well.

The rest of the egg wash was used to coat the pie completely, ensuring that it would gain a lovely, golden glaze when it was baked.

There are a million things you can do with this pie when it comes to dressing it. I've made it fish shaped, I've put marks on it with a teaspoon to make scales, I've done intricate vines and leaves over it, all manner of things. But today I was exhausted, I was hungry, and all I wanted to do was bake the pie! I will be back to form by the end of September, unfortunately until then we do rustic!

And rustic is just as good as anything else when it tastes as wonderful as this pie.

I trim the very ends of the pie off, only about three quarters of a centimetre, not even half an inch. Just to get rid of the pastry overload. You can cut it thicker for the end slices so everyone gets the same amount of filling. You can cut it into simple quarters if you like. The pastry isn't very thick on this one anyway.

Even just at the very start of the pie you can see that already it has all 3 layers and the eggs clearly visible.

Sliced and plated with new potatoes and green beans, the pie looked amazing. It tasted amazing, too. Mr FC felt it deserved a little parsley garnish for being so wonderful. If you want a sauce with this, sour cream with freshly ground pepper and maybe a little dill in it goes wonderfully; however, this was moist enough that we didn't need anything with it at all. It was delicious.

I suspect you'll be getting a lot more recipes from Leiths - after this dish Mr FC has declared it his favourite cook book.

Salmon Koulibiac (Printable Version)

Serves 4

110 g/4 oz long grain or basmati rice - not quick cook
170 g/6 oz flour quantity rough puff pastry - I used a single pack of ready rolled puff pastry 375 g
55 g/2 oz butter
1 onion, finely diced
30 g/1 oz mushrooms, chopped
1 tab chopped fresh parsley
Juice of half a lemon
285 g/10 oz cooked salmon, flaked
2 hard boiled eggs, roughly chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 egg beaten with a pinch of salt, to glaze

Preheat the oven to 200ºC/400ºF/gas mark 6.

Cook the rice in a large saucepan of boiling water for 10-12 minutes. Drain in a colander or sieve and refresh with cold water. Stand the colander on the draining board. Using the handle of a wooden spoon make a few draining holes through the pile of rice to help the water and steam escape. Leave until cool.

Roll a third of the pastry into a rectangle as thick as a £1 coin. Leave to relax in the refrigerator for 10 minutes.

Place the pastry on a baking sheet. Prick lightly all over with a fork. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes, until golden-brown. Transfer to a wire rack and leave to cool but do not turn the oven off. Rinse the baking sheet under cold running water until cool.

Melt the butter over a medium heat and add the onion. when nearly cooked add the mushrooms and cook gently for 5 minutes. Allow to cool.

Put the cooked rice into a bowl and fork in the onion, mushrooms, parsley, lemon juice, salmon, eggs and plenty of salt and pepper. (Note: I chose to use the original method for this of layering out the rice, mushrooms with onion, fish and eggs. I just happen to prefer the layout, but it's entirely up to you. It certainly won't change the flavours.)

Place the cooled pastry base on the baking sheet and pile on the rice mixture. Shape it with your hands into a neat mound, making sure that it covers the fish completely.

Roll the remaining pastry into a blanket large enough to cover the mixture with an overlap of 2.5 cm/1 inch. Using a sharp knife, cut the corners off the blanket at right angles to the cooked base. Working carefully with a palette knife, life the base and tuck the pastry blanket underneath it. Brush with beaten egg to seal. Repeat with the other 3 sides. Chill until the pastry is firm.

Meanwhile, shae the discarded pastry corners into leaves, making the veins and stem with the back of a knife.

Brush the koulibiac with more beaten egg, decorate with the pastry leaves and brush again with egg. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes, until the pastry is golden-brown. Serve hot or cold.

Original notes: If a sauce is required, serve plain soured cream, seasoned with salt and pepper. This is also delicious made with cooked chicken instead of salmon.

Original receipe and notes by Prue Leith & Caroline Waldegrave from Leiths Cookery Bible, with amendments and comments by Mrs FC

Choucroute Garnie

2012-08-19T23:04:00.001-07:00

This is a very hearty meal that you would expect to be on a winter menu - yet in the Alsace they only make it until September. I can only assume that they are using up the last of the previous years canned cabbage and preserved sausages, ready for the canning to come when the last of the cabbages are pulled. To be fair, the last time I cooked this dish was as part of a bigger meal for a very dear friend who chose to visit on the hottest day of the year. We had it with Pork Schnitzel, Polish Potato Salad and Cheese Pierogi fried off in bacon and onion. All these recipes will, in time, be printed up in here. If you want to see the Cherry Sacher Torte I prepared for afters you'll need to look in the Amazing Bakery blog!

Sainsbury's were our saviours for this dish, with their Sauerkraut in wine. Normally in the UK you buy it in vinegar or brine, but that is not what you want. Vinegar is too harsh for what is about to become an extraordinarily fragrant dish and brine is too salty, it would overwhelm everything.

First thing you need to do is wash the cabbage. The wine that was in there is no good now and can be poured away. In the Alsace, when you go to the supermarkets, you'll see huge vats of cabbage. When you buy it they scoop it out fresh and put it in a pot for you. They usually have several types of pickles for sale in this manner.

As Mr FC discovered, you can't just shake out the jar. You'll need to use a fork or spoon to get the highly compressed cabbage to give up its cozy home. Use the biggest collander you've got, so you can fluff up the cabbage, getting all the wine out and separating the strands.

When it's washed, drain it well for a few moments before putting it in the largest casserole dish you own. Not a stock pot, but a spacious casserole that the cabbage looks a little lost in. That way there is room for the rest of the ingredients.

Top, tail and peel an onion well, stripping off any tough outer layers.

It doesn't take many herbs and spices for this dish, 6 cloves, a bay leaf or two, a handful of juniper berries. The key, though, is making them as fresh as possible; so that even though they're dried they're still full of flavour. Hold them in your cupped hand and smell them. It's a most luxurious combination.

Stud the onion with the cloves, one top, one bottom, four at the compass points round the middle. This makes it a lot easier to keep track of the cloves so you don't bite into one and numb your mouth completely!

Pop all of the herbs into the pan with the cabbage - don't worry about spreading them around or whatever, the flavour will get everywhere, I promise.

It's worth getting a wine from the Alsace for this, as it adds to the fragrant bouquet you will get at the end. Just add enough to the pan that you can float a couple of the berries. Remember, this dish steams more than boils, so don't overdo it with the liquids!

The dish is wide, so there is more wine in there than it looks like. I think I used about a third of a bottle of white wine. You need to ensure that even when the fluid is simmering the bottom of the pan remains covered.

Next comes the meat - and lots of it! You can use plain pork belly strips, or you can buy pre-seasoned ones; but remember they will pick up the flavours of the spices and smokiness from the other sausages used, so there could be a clash of flavours. Here I've used Pork Bratwurst, Bockwurst, long Kabanos and plain pork belly slices. A good mix of meats and sausages adds to the fragrance of the final dish - not to mention the taste!

The bad news is that I don't have a photograph of the finished dish. After two hours of simmering Mr FC was so hungry he just threw the food on the plates and brought it in. We were nearly finished eating when I suddenly asked if he had taken a picture of the finished pot, but he hadn't even thought about it. Clearly I shall have to cook this again so you can see it when it's cooked. We had it with simple, boiled potatoes and a good dollop of mustard! It was delicious. The sausages and pork were cooked to the point of falling apart, the cabbage was sweet and well spiced. Everything complimented everything else.

You can see that there is still some liquid in the bottom of the pot, so that tiny bit of wine was just right for the job. I promise I didn't add any more cooking liquid. If your lid fits well the fluid simply condenses and runs down back into the dish to heat up again. This is the unfortunate debris that I found in the pan when we cleared our plates and took them to the kitchen. One lonely Bratwurst, one lonely Bockwurst, an onion and some cabbage. I believe it became lunch the following day! It was delicious, and I think after 2 hours of waiting you can forgive us failing to provide you with a picture of the cooked pot. To be fair, it doesn't look much changed from the uncooked one, except the meat has changed colour a little.

If you prefer your sausages browner, although most German sausages are cured ready for eating, you can always put them under the grill for a minute or two before you cook them; although there's really no need and it adds nothing to the flavour.

The smoked flavours from the sausages along with the caraway seed tastes from the Brats ensured there were plenty of husky tones to match the spices and herbs. When you lift the lid on this dish the whole kitchen suddenly smells of Christmas or a hunters lodge when they're cooking stews. It's delicious, you can't help but drool. Best of all, Mr FC finally gave it his official seal of approval by saying that I had got it "right".

I did try to find a recipe in my books for this, but drew a total blank - I learned it from Mr FC's mother. The only one I found was a total surprise after I received a copy of a 1978 book by Prue Leith, cooking for guests. I could not believe that this was the only cookbook to have the recipe in. Hers varies a little from mine, as is to be expected, and the only guarantee of authenticity I can offer for this recipe is that it has been passed down an Alsace family for several generations.

Choucroute Garnie (Printable Version)

Serves 4 with boiled potatoes

Ingredients:

1 jar of Sainsbury's sauerkraut in wine
1 onion, topped, tailed and well peeled
6 cloves
5 juniper berries
1 or 2 bay leaves
2 slices of pork belly, halved - allow between half and a whole strip per person on average.
A selection of sausages, either whole or halved. Can include Bockwurst, Knackwurst, Bratwurst, Kabanos, Nuremberg, Frankfurters, Strasbourg Sausages or other German or Eastern European sausages. Allow 2 or 3 halves per person on average of the larger sausages.
White wine as needed

Method:

Take the sauerkraut out of the jar and wash it well. Allow it to drain before adding it to a large casserole dish.

Stud the onion with the cloves, then add all the herbs, spices and meats to the pan.

Add wine sufficient to cover the bottom of the pan and allow for the meal to be steamed.

Bring the dish to a simmer, then cover with a well fitting lid and allow to simmer gently for 2 hours or more as wished.

Serve hot with the boiled potatoes and a selection of good mustards.

Enjoy!

Mustard Rabbit

2012-07-22T17:22:00.001-07:00

This week the recipe, chosen by Mr FC, is from Leith's. Both the book and the woman. To be precise from Prue Leith's Cookery Bible.

Prue Leith is an amazing woman who has trained extensively and when she found the quality of non-catering colleges in the UK to be lacking she opened her own school, which is now the school of cookery if you want to attain an International Baccalaureate in food. I was lucky enough to be an early student on one of her courses and I will never forget the lessons I learned there.

Rabbit has been the backbone of many peasant cuisines in Europe. Plentiful and easy to find in the wild or to raise and breed, it didn't just fill poachers pots. This version is a grand example of a poor persons dish elevated to grand cuisine. We reinforced that image with our choice of accompaniments - truffle mashed potatoes and red cabbage cooked in pear cider or perry as it's also known.

Put a good dose of salt in the water, it wants plenty to do the job.

The main dish takes two days to prepare and includes a process known in Kashrut law as Keshering. This means to drive the last of the blood from the meat by soaking it in salt water, thus whitening the flesh of the animal.

So, on day one there is not much to do. First we take a skinned and decapitated rabbit and we cut it into 6 sections. Rabbits are readily available in your local butcher and game dealer, or in some supermarkets. They only cost a few pounds each, and a rabbit feeds two people. I'd recommend buying local rabbit over the very scrawny Chinese rabbits that some places sell, and not just because of the air miles.

Ok, so it's likely that you've got something like the image above sitting on your chopping board and you're wondering how to get from that to the 6 pieces that the recipe requires. How about a step by step for you? Bear in mind that the way I'm pointing the knife isn't always how you use it. Sometimes I'm just pointing to the place where I would use it. Ok? Right, let's get started!

People get quite shocked the first time they buy a rabbit. They're used to giblets coming in a bag and being optional. Most of our meat is so well cleaned and tidied that you hardly know where on the animal it comes from. This time you get to see it all. First off you can see a kidney. You'll want to remove that. You can cook it with the organs still in there, but Mr FC doesn't like offal, so we take it out for him. Just grab it and pull, it comes off quite easily.

Ok, the next thing to do is lift up the flap covering the ribs. Under there you're going to find a liver. It looks like the rabbit has several livers, but in fact it's made of several lobes all joined together. You'll also find the other rogue kidney and a membrane barrier blocking your way. We're going to pull out those organs and ignore the membrane for a moment. Because we have the back end cleared we may as well take those legs off.

Just before you pick up the knife and start waving it around, take a look at the pictures, see where my hands are. They are never in the path of the knife, even in the carefully posed stills shots that aren't how I would use a knife my fingers are again well out of the way. Never hold meat in your hand and drive the knife through it into your palm, never let your fingers get close to the sharp blade. When you do fine chopping your finger tips should be curved back and the side of the blade resting on the knuckle and the knife should never rise so far as to touch the knuckles with any part of the sharp edge. If you're serious about food your knives will be razor sharp, and it only takes a moments lapse of concentration and you're sitting in A&E holding a bag of ice and hoping they can sew it back on again. Please, be careful. Professionals cut themselves, that means you can too.

This is a case of me pointing with the knife. What you need to do is move the leg around until you feel where the hip is. If you try to go through the bone you're going to splinter it, even with a cleaver, and you'll get tiny needles of bone in your meat. So to avoid that we go through the joints. The tendons can be as tough as bone holding them together, so first we want to cut away the meat around the joint so we can see what we have to cut.

Lowering the knife I cut the flesh through once, and you can already see the head of the thigh bone in the middle there, that shiny grey piece. Now we cut the back of the joint, cleaning the flesh from there as well, and expose the tendons completely. I don't know why my hand turns my knife up like that, it does it without me noticing. I guess that's something I've learned from taking these photographs.

Here you can see that all that is holding the leg on now is a bunch of white tendons. Chop through these and your leg is free. Now repeat for the other leg.

When it comes to the front legs, follow the same procedure. You will, however, meet an option. You can remove the shoulder blade or leave it on the body. I've left it on the body quite deliberately so you can see why it's better to take it off!

Now we go back to that membrane and the chest. You can either use your knife by turning the rabbit over and snipping through the ribs on the board, or you can use poultry shears to cut through them. I'm demonstrating cutting through the ribs here, but you need to turn this upside down and put the knife towards the board. I'm only doing this because you can't see me cutting under the rabbit.

As you can see, when you tear through that membrane you expose more organs. This is the heart, nestled under the ribs. Again, pull it out. The Aorta which attaches the heart is quite thick, and it runs up the neck with the oesophagus and the wind pipe. If you give it a good pull you can take out the last remnants of these thick tubes. You'll find they're ridged, as though there are white rings set a distance apart from each other along the length. This is cartilage and it's job is to strengthen the wind pipe so it doesn't crush easily. Fascinating, but not really edible. Out it comes.

These white and pink squishy sponges are the lungs, just as before, pull them out. I pulled the heart and lungs out together, and so got the wind pipe, aorta and oesophagus all in one go.

Here you can see me pulling the lungs out to leave a clean cavity, offal free. If you have cats you can always boil up the offal a little, until its cooked, chop it and serve it to them mixed in with their regular food. Or if there is a fox nearby, put it raw on his path. It won't last long!

Here we have it all laid out in the order they sit in the rabbit. At the bottom, or far right, the peach pit of dark purple brown is the heart, then two lungs, what turned out to be 5 lobes of liver and finally, on the far left, two kidneys. If you open up any animal, bird or fish this is roughly what you can expect to find. Of course there are other things, like the stomach, bladder, bowel and gut, but the butcher had already removed these to stop the meat going off or spoiling. Right, back to the bunny.

I'm afraid you really can't be squeamish about this - if you enjoy eating rabbit you have to be prepared to get your hands bloody preparing it, just like other game. With the legs off, front and back, the only thing left is to snap the rabbits back in the middle, separating the two halves of the body. Bend it backwards until you feel with your thumbs that something has given in there. Then bend it back the other way and squish it together hard, concentrating on the place where you felt the spine give.

It doesn't hurt to just slot your knife between the two vertebrae and just make sure it's not going to be a problem by taking out some of the tendons and creating a bit of space there.

Now take your knife and again find the bone and cut away the flesh.

You'll notice I've opted to use my filleting knife for this job, over my chef's knife. If you're working with a smaller animal it's often easier with a thinner blade. You don't need a heavy knife for this work, just a fine, sharp one. My filleting knife fit the bill nicely.

Last of the flesh has gone, and only the spinal cord and a few tendons are left. Although I am holding the meat up and appearing to cut upwards you should do this flat on the board, with the blade of the knife down.

When you have cut all round you'll find that the spine is very easy to separate. Just grip both ends and pull! There you have it, two halves of rabbit.

The chest now needs opening up completely. Take your knife and use it to chase up the front, above the ribs and through the front of the throat. I don't need to mention that this is not how it should be done, do I? Put it down on the board. This is a still shot to show you where you're making the cut.

This allows you to butterfly the top half, flattening it out to make it easier to cook and handle during the next stages of the cooking. Flatten the rib cage out by bending the ribs backwards and popping them.

There you have it, six pieces of rabbit in cold, salted water, ready for its 3 hour swim. If you want to you can cut the top and bottom parts in half as well by removing the spine and cutting down the central line, but I really find it unnecessary. Also, this recipe says it feeds four. I'd dispute that quite vigorously. These days I serve half a rabbit per person, so if I were cooking this for four I would double the quantities of rabbit, tarragon and mustard. The rest of it seems to work to make enough sauce for four without adding more, unless you want gallons of gravy.

As much as we'd all love to grow tarragon in our gardens, not all of us can. Enter supermarkets stage left with plants of ready grown herbs and bags of them, too. This small bag and a small pot of French mustard are all that's needed for the next stage.

Strip the leaves from a couple of the tarragon branches.

Work against the leaves, from the top down, wrap your fingers found the stem and run them to the end of the branch, you'll find the leaves come off very easily.

A couple of strands is plenty for the quantity we require. Don't chop the stems if you don't have to, use the fragile leaves and they won't add to the chew factor when it's all cooked.

Now we get to the chef's knife, a rounded blade that works perfectly at chopping herbs. Gather the herbs in your finger tips, and roll the leaves together if you can. Bend your fingers so that your knuckles are further forward than your finger tips and rest the side of the blade against your knuckle.

Carefully, without raising the sharp edge of the blade higher than your knuckle, rock the blade on that rounded edge against the board. As you practice this you will soon be able to chop herbs faster than the herb choppers they advertise on TV. A few seconds and the herbs have had their first chop, then you take your hand away and just use your knife hand to gather the herbs with the blade and roughly rock the blade through them, this time with the curved part of the blade doing the cutting. And there you go. One spoonful of chopped tarragon plus a little bit left over.

Put the herbs in the bowl where you want the mustard to be mixed. Get your teaspoon out and spray it with a little vegetable oil. This will help to get the mustard out of the spoon, instead of you needing another spoon to clear it out.

Make the spoonfuls roughly level, maybe a little extra to allow for what stays in the spoon despite everything, and then use the spoon for mixing so you have plenty of marinade.

Once it's well mixed you can set it aside while the rabbit soaks. Time to put your feet up and check your email maybe?

Three hours later and we can see a change in the rabbit. The blood in the meat has been driven out into the water and the flesh is now eerily pale.

Empty out the water and wash the rabbit well. I use the same pot, empty out as much as I can and then leave it under a running, cold tap for a while, stirring it with my hands to get all the blood out and rinsing each piece under the tap as I take it out of the bowl.

When it's clean lay it out on kitchen paper.

Using another piece of kitchen paper dab the meat dry, getting into all the little holes where water can hide. If you don't do this properly the mustard will just slide off the meat, so make sure you get it as dry as you can.

Splat the mustard on well, I suggest portioning it out before you start spreading, figuring out how much for which limb.

Once they're all smothered on top you want to refrigerate them. Yes, I know, they're only covered on one side. Don't, whatever you do, double the mustard. For a start you'll overwhelm the taste of other things in the sauce unless there is another rabbit in the pot.

The easiest way to get the mustard on both sides is simply to stack the pieces one on top of the other. Put the ribs at the bottom, as they won't be eaten anyway, then the saddle or back half, then the back legs and finally the front legs. There you go, both sides now in contact with the marinade. Shove this in the fridge overnight and get on with your day.

Now, the following day brought a bit of a disaster. We needed truffle oil for the mash. I'm used to going to my local Sainsburys or Waitrose and just picking up a bottle. Often there's a choice of types as well. However, beggars can't be choosers and when after searching all the local supermarkets all we could turn up was olive oil and a jar of truffles in their own juices that was what we settled for.

Get an old bottle with a good stopper, or even use the bottle the olive oil is in if you like! In this case I used a bottle that had previously held Farnese Olive Oil. Being dark it was perfect for the job. It also meant I could poke my tongue out at Mr FC who always moans that I keep empty bottles and jars and don't do things with them.

The truffles, of course, refused to be the right size to go in the neck of the bottle, and being a bit crusty on the outside they don't like being squeezed.

Simple solution? Cut them up! One pair of scissors and one snip later we have a halved truffle.

Use a wooden spoon handle or chopstick to make sure the neck of the bottle is cleared and the mushrooms are at the bottom of the bottle.

The potent juice that the truffles were in can also be added to kick start the process of flavouring the olive oil. After all, it only contained truffle juices and a little salt and truffle flavouring.

Next you want to fill the bottle almost to the top with really good quality olive oil. This isn't the one I'd normally choose, but it is a cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. Those are the terms you need if you want the very best oil. Also, if the bottle has bits at the bottom or floating in it, don't panic. It's only olive puree! It's a sign of a good oil that has plenty of flavour.

Finally put a cap on the bottle and give it a really good shake before putting it somewhere safe. Make sure you go back to it regularly and give it another shake or the flavour won't infuse through the whole bottle.

Finally our ingredients are ready for prepping. You can see on the plate where a little blood is still running out of the rabbit. This is good. It means the salt did its job.

It says to fry it in butter, but butter burns at a very low heat. So to top it up we add in some olive oil, which won't burn at the heat we're using, and a little bit of butter for taste. This prevents the butter from burning and stops it from going brown, too.

Under the plate you can just see the silver and grey base of the scales

Since I wasn't about to buy a whole bacon joint for 85 grams of bacon I opted for Waitrose's lardons. These are, effectively, bacon, but it's pre-diced for you to use when you want a good dollop of bacon flavour. They come in smoked and unsmoked, we went for unsmoked so it didn't compete with the mustard.

My Salter scales are amazing. A plate that sits over a clock on the wall. You take the plate off and put your things on it and the weight lights up on the clock. It does grams, ounces, fluid ounces and millilitres. You can also use the tare function to zero the scale at any point. Very useful.

Another useful gadget is the Alligator. I admit to being one of those people who see a gadget and go "Oooh!" But I'm also one of those people who after inspecting it sees the pitfalls or the fact that it won't do the job any better than I can do it now, and put it back on the shelf. These, however, proved to be a godsend. A friend of mine was using the large one for onions when I stayed with them and cooked a Stroganoff. Lots and lots of shallots means very sore eyes and lots of sneezing and crying. To save this she had her husband cut them in the press. Just lift up the white plate, set the shallot or onion on the green pad, close the plate down and press. The cubes of onion end up in the container on the top. No crying, no sore eyes and no runny nose! I immediately went out and bought both sizes from the Steamer Cookshop in Alfriston.

Cutting this onion open shows you clearly the tough root and tip of the onion, and why you want to get rid of them. Bitter and tough they will spoil any dish.

Chop them off completely, leaving no trace behind.

When you peel the onion look for things that may cause problems. In this case a bit of mould that has dried out the first layer of the onion. Discard this, too.

The Alligator has a little white plate that sits over the top of where you put your onion or garlic. This is so that you can just lift it up to remove the debris when you're done.

A quick snap down of the lid and there's the first bit of onion, neatly cut fine and not a single tear was shed. Repeat with all of the onion.

Mash needed preparing, so Mr FC peeled potatoes ready to be boiled until soft.

The white mat lifts up bringing a blanket of unwanted onion skins that would otherwise have been trapped and dried out in the tines.

There's not much you can do about the top, but a stiff brush soon has it cleared.

So, we now have our lardons, our garlic and our onion and some butter. Time to cook!

The stock is measured out and ready to go. The pot of stock we had wasn't quite a pint, it was short about an ounce or so. Just top it up with water, it'll be fine. Also, the recipe states white stock, which may confuse you looking at the brown liquid in that jug. That means the stock is made from white meat bones - veal, chicken, rabbit and such - and so is a lighter stock for cooking with and not so intensely brown as a brown stock. It also doesn't have the heavy flavour of the brown stock.

Heat your oil and butter until they start to bubble and add your first bits of rabbit.

This time we're using the heavier, Meyer pan because we want to hold the heat up quite high.

Don't worry if it doesn't all fit in the pan, just do it in a couple of batches or more. Don't overload the pan or you'll just get steamed rabbit from too many juices running out of half cooked meat.

Here's the problem with the shoulder blades - remember those? Because we left them on they now act like wings and trap mean under them that doesn't get browned. It's quite a feat to get that meat on it's side with the shoulder blade held back and brown that meat. You'll only do this once - next time it will come off with the front leg.

Make sure all of the meat is well browned as this is the only chance it has to gain colour.

Propping the meat up to get under the shoulder blade.

As the last of the batch finishes browning the last bit of rabbit goes in. Now you can see the colour that you're aiming for, that rich, golden brown.

When the rabbit is browned, take it out and put it in the casserole. Then add your onions and lardons to the pan. If you don't have a lot of oil left in the pan, don't worry. The fat in the bacon will melt into the pan giving you an oil to fry with.

When it's all gently golden add in the garlic and cook it on for a minute, stirring the garlic through the onions and bacon.

Take the pan off the heat to add the flour and mix it gently into the mixture. This means it is only cooking with the heat from the pan, so it won't catch or burn.

With it still off the heat we slowly start to add the stock, little by little, stirring well to keep the lumps at bay.

Once it's all in there put it back on the heat and bring it to a good boil. This ensures there is no flour taste in the pot and that all the little bits of goodness stuck to the pan are lifted. We've done this before with the Carbonade, it's called deglazing.

Mr FC washes up as we go to keep the kitchen orderly.

Finally tip the stock, bacon, onion, garlic and flour into the casserole over the rabbit.

Now we pop the lid on and set it in the oven for an hour and a half or until the meat is tender. This oven has a terrific gadget. It has a removable cradle on the oven door that holds a roasting tin, or on which you can put a casserole. This means that you don't have to dive into the oven and burn yourself or risk dropping the tray when you pull it out to turn something, the whole thing comes out to you and you can turn or baste in safety. Every oven should have one!

It took us one minute until we got a good shot of the timer. Taking the flash off when dealing with shiny surfaces is a good idea...

Taking out one of Mr FC's Global knives and opting for a heavy half cleaver I set about the red cabbage. It's such a pretty vegetable. First cut it in half.

Then halve it again, into quarters. The pattern inside demonstrates the mathematical progressions that you find everywhere in nature. This one just happens to be very pretty. I have been found standing, staring at the cabbage and finding things in the swirls before now. A swift nudge and I'm back on Earth again.

Generally a quarter per person is enough. Once it's chopped and cooked it does swell up.

Here you can see the difference between a quarter that has had the exposed outer leaf removed and one that hasn't. Do take the outer leaves off and wash your cabbage well, you never know what might be on it, and it's not just pesticides, either!

Next you want to cut the tough core out of the cabbage, easily done by cutting it diagonally.

The back of this core is almost like a Christmas tree.

Now you want to shred the cabbage. Start by standing it on end and slowly rocking it backwards as you chop, so the slices are even.

Rock the cabbage right the way round until you're at the end.

Even slices ready for the pot.

Trouble's wondering where her share of the rabbit is. Sorry kitty, not this time.

Red onions need topping and tailing just as much as yellow ones do. This just happened to be the only other onion we had in the house, but it went prettily with the cabbage.

Since Mr FC is also a body builder and has far more muscles than I, it's his job to press the soft potato through the ricer. He's given to making a bit of a mess with this, so I make him do it in the sink where some of it at least will be contained. Hopefully.

One big squeeze and a potato surrenders, passing through the holes to make a light, fluffy pile that looks like a cross between pasta and rice. You will never have fluffier potato than you get with a ricer. Buy a good one and throw the masher away!

Adding in a little of the truffle oil.

Meanwhile, back at the stove, we start to heat up our olive oil and butter in a good sized saucepan.

Add in the chopped onion and fry it until lightly golden.

This is when you want to add your cabbage. Frying the onions off on a highish heat means that we get the caramelised sugar in them that adds to the sweetness of the cider.

It's amazing the colour difference the flash makes, turning the dark red cabbage a bright purple!

Add your pear cider and watch as it fizzes up in the pan, hissing at you. Add it little by little, letting it die down nicely as you go.

Once it's all in and settled down you can put the lid on to let it simmer gently for 5 to 10 minutes. Check it regularly.

Ninety minutes later and the rabbit is done! Looking and smelling gorgeous.

The oil gets stirred in and mixed through the potato to make it smooth and tasty.

Put the rabbit on your serving plate with the mashed potato. It already looks amazing, but it's going to get better.

A few leaves off the parsley plant and remember that knife technique you just learned? You can use it again.

In just a few seconds the leaves are cut and chopped finely, ready to go. As much as I detest parsley it does actually add to the flavours of this dish so in this case I make an exception.

If you look closely the remaining sauce has a skin on it. That's not fat, or oil. If you put in a fork and wrap it round the tines it will pull out as a sheet. It's protein, pure and simple. The meat and bones have been giving up some of their protein to the sauce and it has floated to the top. You don't need to worry about this, when you stir the sauce it will all mix in and disappear.

After half an hour of hard boiling the sauce it was still very thin and runny, and there was a copious amount of it! We cheated. McDougalls Thickening Granules to the rescue. I just added a couple of spoons to the sauce and mixed it well, letting it boil up as the granules melted and disappeared. Mr FC asked what about a beurre manié? Well, that's what these granules are, only this version is a roux. They're a bit of flavourless vegetable shortening mixed with flour and made into tiny pellets that dissolve completely in hot liquids. I don't often cheat, but there are times when it's clearly going to be a lot easier than reducing litre after litre of stock down to a thick sauce!

As you can see, it worked! The colour intensified and the extra mustard that we had stirred in gave it a yellow tinge as well as a lovely smell of mustard and tarragon. If you have a problem and you know a good cheat - like this roux in a tub - don't be afraid to use it. Nobody is going to look down their nose at you because you did something a bit different with their perfect meal. In fact, I don't know any cooks who have never cheated. It can be as simple as a dessert dropped on the floor and having to bodge together a replacement dish very quickly, or finding that you have a runny sauce. There's a reason the fixes exist, and it's because problems happen.

The red cabbage doesn't take long to cook, so watch out that you don't make it soggy. You want it with a little firmness to it, but not hard and crunchy.

Pour the sauce over the rabbit.

The salt and pepper pots went unused as the seasoning in everything was already perfect. You may want a turn or two of pepper when you balance the seasoning, but don't forget that the rabbit was soaked in salt water and still has quite a lot of salt in it already - and will have imparted that to the sauce as well.

Mr FC didn't wait for the photographs, he just dived right in!

The red cabbage gives the plate a festive appearance.

Plated, parsleyed and ready to eat!

Now the rabbit bones have been cooked they're not just tiny, but they're friable. You an easily pick one up in your fingers and bend it over and watch it snap. Some of these bones are incredibly tiny and you really need to watch out - just like those needle bones you get in chicken legs, only much smaller.

This little critter was only 4mm long, but it's enough to stick in your throat or you gums and cause you a lot of pain. I don't like trips to the hospital, so I search my meat thoroughly before it goes in my mouth.

I swear there's an alien peeking out the middle of this picture! See what I mean about the bones - you can just about make out the pattern on the plate through the shoulder blade.

So there you have it, Mustard Rabbit. Not a quick dish as such, because it takes 2 days, but a very easy and simple dish that tastes amazing. I didn't think I was going to be able to eat much, but the next thing I knew there was just a pile of bones on my plate. The red cabbage was amazing with the pear flavour and sweet onion, and the truffle oil in the potato gave everything a rich, musky edge that truly elevated this meal to the level of gourmet food.

We hope you'll enjoy making this dish and eating it as much as we did, why not let us know how you get on or if you have any questions. Just use the comment box at the bottom of the blog.

Enjoy!

Mr & Mrs FC x

Mustard Rabbit (Printable Version)

Serves 4

Ingredients:
1 rabbit, skinned and cleaned
7 tsp French mustard
1 tsp chopped fresh tarragon
45g or 1.5 oz butter or bacon dripping
85g or 3oz bacon or salt pork, diced
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, crushed
1 tsp plain flour
570ml or 1 pint white stock

To garnish:
Chopped, fresh parsley

Method:
If the rabbit's head has not been removed, cut it off with a sharp heavy knife.

Then joint the rabbit into 6 neat pieces.

Soak the rabbit in cold salted water for 3 hours.

Drain and dry well. (This is to whiten the rabbit.)

Spread 6 teaspoons mustard mixed with the tarragon over the rabbit pieces and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, preheat the oven to 170ºC/325ºF/gas mark 3.

Heat the butter or dripping in a frying pan and brown the rabbit pieces all over.

Remove them with a slotted spoon and place in a casserole.

Add the bacon and onion to the pan and cook over a low heat until th eonions are soft and just browned.

Stir in the garlic and cook for 1 minute.

Remove the pan from the heat and gradually stir in the stock.

Return to the heat and bring the sauce slowly to the boil, stirring continuously.

Pour this sauce over the rabbit.

Cook in the oven for about 90 minutes or until the rabbit is tender.

Lift the rabbit onto a warmed serving dish.

Add 1 teaspoon mustard to the sauce and check the seasoning.

Boil for 1 minute.

If the sauce is now rather thin, reduce it by boiling rapidly until shiny and rich in appearance.

Pour the sauce carefully over the rabbit pieces.

Sprinkle with the parsley.

Recipe originally printed in Leiths Cookery Bible by Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave

Beef Carbonade

2012-07-07T14:48:00.002-07:00

Before we get down to it today, a little word about recipes. Recipes, from the scribblings of the Victorian cooks to the Larousse itself, tend, at best, to assume that you have a level of knowledge about your ingredients and techniques; at worst they are a vague guide with some things likely to be forgotten or missed out deliberately! Because of that, when you decide to do a classic dish, the first thing you have to do is find as many versions of it as you can. The Larousse, as good as it can be, does tend to be a bit brief on the recipe front because as in itself it's a glossary of techniques. You have to cross reference and research the dish properly. Other books may have an agenda - they may be for money saving recipes or they may be low fat. They are most certainly likely to be balanced to the tastes of the person who wrote them, rather than yours.

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to balancing flavours. The point of food is that you should enjoy it, and that means you balance things to your own palette. Like more mustard? Add some more mustard. Don't like beef? Make it with pork. There is a way round everything. The real trick, however, is to make it well the first time, so you get an idea of what it should taste like.

The bible of French food - in English

So - first things first, we dig out the recipe books and narrow it down to just one or two recipes that reasonably coincide. I settled on the version I have used before and liked which is from Great Meat Cookery, edited by Tony de Angeli. Despite being published in 1989 this book is still available new - a good sign that it was valued enough to reprint. The numbers of old ones for sale, used, is also a sign that it is still a valuable reference book. Certainly it's a book that I've turned to many times without any concerns that the recipes will be a problem or the results disappointing.

So - we have our recipe. The next thing we need is our ingredients. Forget about counting pennies right here and now, please. This is a dish that uses a very inexpensive cut of beef (roughly £6 per kilo) and very few ingredients, so don't scrimp. Spend the money to get the very best that you can afford. I don't mean the most expensive, but the best.

Gather together your recipes first

When you choose your meat look for the thin lines of crumbly fat and steer away from tiny scraps with lots of gristle. If possible, buy it in one lump and trim it yourself, you'll get far better results that way. Get it cut from the thick end of the piece so that you have something easier to handle as well. The thin end tends to be full of connective tissues, tendons, gristle and other stuff that you don't really want to find yourself chewing on.

When you choose your vegetables look for signs of freshness. A cabbage should be full of colour, with crisp leaves and strong stalks. Potatoes don't want to be black or have too many eyes, and green ones should never be used as they contain toxins. Onions should be firm, dry, the outer leaves crisp and not dusty, the top and tail still spongy.

Choose a good quality brown ale

With meat, too, don't go for shiny redness, or sticky meat that's covered in plasma ooze. Let it be a better colour, slightly darker, not shiny, smelling fresh and clean, but with an edge of earthiness. You don't want it too fresh, but then you don't want it too matured for this dish, either.

Garlic wants to be papery but white, maybe a touch of purple in it, but no green and no black. There's not much in life more revolting that opening a head of garlic to find it's a black puffball of decayed matter inside; so squeeze it. Don't poke it, but put it in your palm and squeeze it to see if it's firm. You don't have to bruise fruit and veg to make sure that they are ripe or ready, but you do need to use your eyes and your hands together.

Sabatiere knives

Look at the outside of it, all over, look for damage, bruising, rot; feel it, run your fingers over the surface, how does it feel? Do your fingers find healed over damage by an insect, perhaps? That could be a sign that in the middle of that lovely Victoria plum there is a knot of eggs just waiting to spoil your day.

Be picky, because it pays dividends on the plate. Supermarkets are very keen on having fruit and veg uniformly coloured and uniformly sized, but that's not what's best. What's best is fresh, undamaged, ripe, ready to use, properly stored, carefully transported, full of flavour - in fact all the things that you want from what you're eating, no matter what size or what colour or how well it matches its box mates.

Spoiled for vinegar choice

When it comes to wine vinegar I tend by default to use white wine vinegar, but in fact this dish can also take red wine vinegar quite happily, so you can use either. Don't think you can get away with cider or sherry or balsamic, because it will affect the finished taste of the dish. Remember, this time round is about doing it right. The next time you cook this dish will be about doing it to suit your own tastes and ideas.

Sugar - coy, isn't it? That recipe just says brown sugar. Does it mean Demerara, soft, Okinowa black, dark, light, golden, Muscovado, Barbados, turbinado? What is brown sugar? Well, in this case it's light or dark, soft brown sugar. That is pretty much the default setting for brown sugars. The brown granulated sugar that you get in sachets is basically white sugar with a touch of molasses added for colour, but because it needs to flow freely it's not real brown sugar.

Only buy gadgets you have a real need for

Real brown sugar is mostly soft to the touch, slightly stick and very easy to dissolve. It doesn't matter if you use light or dark, although dark gives a slightly richer taste. The point of it is to smooth out the edges - we use the vinegar to sharpen things and cut through the grease from frying, but we need the sugar to counter bitterness from the frying where perhaps things may have over caramelised and moved into the cremated category. So because this use of sugar is to counter bitter and not to actually flavour or sweeten in its own right we can safely use pretty much any true brown sugar that we have to hand, so long as it's soft.

By the way - if you open a pack of soft sugar to find a solid lump that resists all attempts at breaking it up without using road digging equipment its very simple to soften it back up again. Put it all into a bowl so that it has a gap of several inches between the top of the sugar and the top of the bowl. Put a tea towel or other clean cloth under the tap and soak it thoroughly before wringing it out again. The towel won't be dry, no matter how hard you wring it, because the fibres have soaked up the moisture. Place the towel over the top of the bowl and put it aside for a few hours. When you go back to the bowl the sugar, which attracts water, will have softened back into fluffy granules again.

It pays to have more than one type of frying pan

Another oddity is French mustard. You see what I mean about failing to narrow things down to specifics? Do I use my French's mustard? Do I use wholegrain? Do I use Grey Pupon, Dijon, what *is* French mustard. Well, of course, as any Frenchman will tell you the basic, standard French mustard is Dijon. Not wholegrain Dijon, but just the mustard made from Dijonaise mustard seeds mixed with white wine vinegars to provide a soft, smooth, oyster coloured paste that is mildly warm. You don't want to change this for English mustard unless you want your guests retrieving the tops of their heads from the ceiling - bright yellow English mustard is much more harsh, much hotter and far more vinegar is used to make it up - it's also got malt vinegar in it which is harsher than wine vinegar.

So - you've been to the shops, you've quizzed your butcher thoroughly about where your meat comes from, is it organic, is it local and the fifty other things that a good butcher will volunteer about a piece of meat they're selling, and you're home with your lovely treasures, ready to make the Carbonade.

Mustard is never just mustard - choose carefully

This means it's about time to talk through the equipment you're going to need to make the dish. I would recommend the largest casserole dish you have with a tight lid on it, be it enamel or stainless steel. The point being that the juices will evaporate, rise up into the lid and come back down into the dish as the heat works its way through the contents. If you use a tiny, deep dish, you will end up with something that has more heat on the outside of the dish than the middle, so your meat will vary in tenderness. If you use a large casserole with lots of space for the meat to spread out in the juices, it all gets the heat from the oven evenly and will be cooked equally all the way through.

People all around the world have their favourite skillets or frying pans or sauté pans, but for me it's hard to live without the best quality of non-stick frying pan you can afford. I have two, a Meyer from the Kitchen Aid range and a Tefal, with the hot spot technology that lets you get the pan really hot and know when it's ready. They're both excellent, and they're both different. The Tefal is light and quickly adjusts to temperatures as you change the heat under it. The Meyer is a thicker, heavier pan which holds the heat well, allowing you to turn the heat down but let the contents continue to simmer. They each have their own uses, but this time we're using the Tefal, because we're doing high heats and quick cooking.

Gorgeous Jersey Royals - look out for the marks on the bag.
No marks, then they're not Jersey Royals.

If you ask any chef in the world, of any sort of cuisine, they will tell you that the most important thing in their kitchen is sharp knives. This is for several reasons - a sharp knife makes work quicker and easier, but it is also less dangerous. If you hold your knife up to the light, and tilt it so that you can see the very cutting edge of the blade, it should not reflect light from the top. From the sides, yes, but not the top. If you get light off the top it means the blade is dull. Dull blades mean you use more pressure, you fight with your meat, knives will slip, you'll end up cut or gashed. Don't use dull knives, please, for your own sake.

We have two sets of knives in our house; my traditional Sabatiers, which are a good weight, well balanced, and where the blade is full length, running back through the whole handle, with the grip pinned onto the sides of the single piece of metal. I love them to bits, but I have to admit they're not very good at keeping an edge, they have to be sharpened and fine tuned far more often than some other knives I've used.

Free flow brown or golden sugar is just white with colouring

Mr FC prefers his Global knives as being lighter, keeping their edge longer, being made from a single piece of metal including the handle which is shaped out of it. We use both and either, those just happened to be the ones we bought at the time.

I'm currently torn about buying a new set of knives, I can't decide between the horrifically expensive Japanese knives with ceramic sandwich technology where a sliver of sharpened ceramic is encased in steel to provide strength to the fragile blade which can be sharpened more than steel ever could be, or a really good set of traditional Wusthof knives, which I have pined after for years and which are a bit more reasonably priced.

If you don't yet have a set of knives, don't rush to buy them, don't just order on line and for goodness sake don't pay less than the going rate. There is a massive trade in knock off knives which are very cheap, very fragile, will blunt when looking at a blancmange and which are an utter waste of money.

Feeds at least 4 - or save some for later

The first thing to do is to go to the biggest knife store you know; that big, expensive one with the glass cupboards on the walls, securely locked, with all the knives protected behind them.

The knife you're going to use most, and the jack of all trades in the knife world is the chefs knife, and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. If you've done your research on the net before you go, you should have a good idea of the top brands out there for what you're doing. Places like Cooking for Engineers are a good place to go for a review as they are independent and not interested in which brand comes top so much as which brand actually does the job best.

So, you're in the store, you know which brands have the best blades, now you want to feel the knife in your hand. Ask to see a selection of chef knives, in several brands. Pick them up with whichever hand you use most for cutting and see how they sit in your palm. Too big? Too small? Awkward? Reject it and try another. Some companies recognise that chefs come in all sizes and provide chefs knives in several lengths, too.

Stock and ale measured and ready to go

The one that you choose should almost feel like an extension of your own hand. Hold it properly, handle diagonally across your palm, from forefinger base to bottom outside corner of your palm and wrap your fingers lightly around the knife with even pressure.

You should never have to struggle to use the knife, it should never require a palm on the back of the blade to give it extra energy. If it's not cutting easily then there's a problem - either it's blunt, it's the wrong knife, or it's the wrong knife for you.

1.1 kilos of completely trimmed braising steak yields plenty of lean meat

It should balance easily, if when you're holding it you unwrap your outer three fingers and leave it held by forefinger and thumb it should remain in the palm of your hand, but not be pushing up hard into it. If it pushes up hard or tips the blade upwards it is badly balanced and that will work against you when you're using it.

So check them all, every last one of them, as thoroughly as you can. Look for how the raised edge of the handle rests against your index finger, is that going to get annoying? Do you need something smoother? Maybe you hold the knife further back a bit so that's not a problem. The trick isn't to get the flashiest knife, it's to get the knife that is best for you and easiest for you to use. They are worth saving up decent money for, because you're going to get a lifetimes use out of this piece of equipment. It won't be something you'll use to undo screws when you can't find your tools, nor to hammer in nails with the handle, and it certainly shouldn't be something that snaps and gets thrown in the bin after 6 months.

Garlic, mushrooms and badly chopped onions ready to go in the pan

Once you have your chefs knife, consider which other knives to put in the set. A filleting knife is essential if you cook fish or meat, a carving knife, too. After that the knives come in a pretty quick descending order of being needed. Bread knives are fine, but not essential day to day, a vegetable knife is needed, but not seven different sizes straight away for doing fine decorative cuts. You'll get a good deal on your chef's knife if you buy it as part of a set, but don't get too obsessive just yet about how many knives you're going to need. Many chefs only ever use three out of the whole set of knives their entire career, so don't spend the extras on more knives if you don't have to. Not straight off the bat, anyway.

Apart from your pans and your knives the remainder are just things to stir with or crush with or measure with. If you're using non-stick you will need wooden or non-stick tools as well, to prevent damaging the finish. You don't need a garlic press, you can crush garlic perfectly well using a heavy knife, put the side of the blade on the clove and press, then give a rough chop and you're done. If you're going to buy tools to do the job for you my advice is as follows - 1) It's easier if it goes in the dishwasher. 2) If it's going to press things through holes, does it have something to clear the holes out easily? 3) Gimmicks bought off tv adverts rarely work; save your money.

This pan is too cold. You can see the brown dots in the oil where juices have
already escaped, yet the meat is not yet sealed at all. You don't want this,
turn the heat up and get the meat properly sealed

Measuring things are the third rank of need after pots and knives, and they need to be accurate. If your scales or spoons or cups are not standard marked then you will not get the right results, especially if you're baking, because the ingredients are all measured in specific ratios. Spoons are quite simple, because a teaspoon measure should always hold 5ml or 5grams of water, a tablespoon should always be three teaspoons, a dessert spoon should be two teaspoons, and so on. Jugs that are marked clearly in ml/cl and fluid ounces are useful because it means you don't need two jugs to do Metric and Imperial recipes.

Cups, however, is where things go sideways. American cups and European/British/Australian cups are different sizes. Also, you cannot convert a measure in a cup directly to the same weight because of the varying densities. Take a cup of popcorn and a cup of rice and go measure them - you'll find the weights vary vastly. This is where the internet is your friend, again. Look up a really good conversion site that doesn't just tell you how much a cup weighs, but how much a cup of a specific thing weighs.

This is just right - hot enough to brown and seal the meat quickly, before
the juices run away into the pan

For metric weights water is always used as the basic. One cl of water is ten grams of water and it takes up one cc or cubic centimetre of space. You can't do the same with ounces or cups. I can't advise getting the sort of measures that have the marks painted on, because paint comes off. Get metal or silicone spoons and cups that have the marks moulded or stamped into them. That way you will always know which one is the teaspoon, and you won't have to line up all the cups and guess which is a third and which is a quarter.

For your scales you will want to go with the best local manufacturer you can find. A good tip is to look at the scales used in supermarkets and stores selling food by weight. Because the laws state that these scales have to be calibrated regularly to ensure that you're not cheated out of stuff they have to be reasonably accurate most of the time. That's why the stores buy the ones that stay accurate longest.

Spot the difference - this is the garlic just added to the browned onions and
ready to cook. You can clearly see the undercooked lumps that I would
later have to remove.

In the UK one of the best brands of digital and spring scales is Salter. They've been around for forever and they're used everywhere for a reason, they're good. But they're not infallible. Once a week in a commercial kitchen or once a month or so at home take a known quantity, a small one and a big one. Say a small bag of peanuts with a stated specific weight and a large bag of sugar that's about a kilo, but again, with a specific stated weight. Put these on your scales in turn and see if you get the same readout as the object is supposed to weigh. You can also buy weights to use and check your scales, but since you're likely to have things around anyway that are accurately weighed you can use those quite easily. If you're doing molecular gastronomy you need to buy the weights, and you need to get ones that are used in laboratories to ensure absolute accuracy to at least one tenth of a gram.

For baking or general cooking within an eighth of an ounce or 3 grams or so is fine. Just adjust them to being as accurate as you can and use them from there. A good digital scale will have a tare function, allowing you to put a container on the scale and then zero it before weighing the contents. This can also be used to calibrate the scale to zero at any point.

Deglazing, first the flour to soak up the oil and make a Beurré Manie

So - we have our equipment, we have our ingredients; you're now going "Please can we start cooking now? Please???" Ok, well, nearly. First we have to prepare our ingredients. But we're nearly there, so don't lose heart just yet, alright?

First we want to trim our meat, and this is the point at which there is going to be the biggest row over the blog. In today's age we want to eat leaner meat, because it's better for us. But that's not the whole story. We also want to eat healthily, keep our joints lubricated, our hair shiny, our nails and bones strong, our skin glowing, and all that takes vitamins and minerals that are found in different things - including meat fat. The fat just also happens to contain the vast majority of the taste in meat, so if you want to eat well, you need to eat a bit of fat - for your tastebuds and for your body. What you need to recognise when you're trimming meat is that there are different types of fat. At this point some of you will turn vegetarian, because I'm about to talk about the human muscle structure.

Adding the fluids to the flour and sugar

If you've ever done biology at school, or even opened a biology text book, you will be aware of the pictures of people without skin, showing all the muscles and veins and everything else. The piece of meat we're using for this dish comes from the leg of the cow, the same as our legs and arms, and is a section cut from the front legs, usually above the knee. So we're not talking about a really thick piece of meat like the rump, we're discussing a long length of meat made up of several muscles which do lots of different jobs and which each gets attached to the bone by tendons.

To get an idea of what I mean put your hands round the middle of your thigh and flex your leg. You'll feel some bits move up, some bits move down, some bits bulge and others go flat. It takes one muscle to bend a leg forward, and another to move it back. But it actually takes a set of muscles to do each because we don't look like Popeye. There are several muscles doing the same job to avoid overstraining the muscle, or in case it breaks. Each major muscle is backed up by smaller ones attached to the bones in front or behind each other or alongside, so that they allow for lateral or twisting movement and support the main muscle doing its job.

Squashing out the biggest lumps

So, if you imagine a lot of half inflated, long balloons, all packed together, end to end in cling wrap, you're starting to see what the meat looks like.

At the end of a muscle you get a tendon. This shiny, white or sometimes yellow membrane is very tough and definitely not wanted in your food. Find the middle of the tendon - in short muscles you often find the tendon encases the entire muscle - and slide your knife just underneath the sheath of white, from side to side, and slide the blade gently along a few inches of the tendon. Now get your finger and thumb in the hole you've made, and lift it up so you can see how much meat you're taking off with the tendon. It's very thin, but very wide, so you don't have to cut deep, but you do need to take all of this off. If you look at the meat grain on you'll see it as very thing white lines that don't spread if you try to squash it. Follow all of these through the meat and cut them out one at a time. You'll end up with a heap of mostly meat and some more fat.

Beginning to thicken, but still some lumps left

The second type of fat in the meat is crumbly, off white, and can be scraped off the meat or squashed under your thumbnail. This is protective fat, it's a relative of the suet that surrounds kidneys, and is the far you don't want to worry about. This stuff melts out of the meat, it gives the meat its moisture and tenderness and when the meat is well marbled with it, it is exactly what you want in any meat you're searing or frying. Which we will be. If you find a big lump of this stuff, however, you may as well just cut it right out. Nobody wants a mouthful of the stuff.

The third thing you find in meat is gristle. This is usually cartilage and it shows as rigid lumps of semi-transparent tissue without a grain. It comes in slabs, so a piece will run through or across a piece of meat, but it doesn't tend to have the many offshoots that the tendons can have, pushing out into the meat. So this is very easy to deal with.

You'll notice a colour change to orange as the stock and ale begin to boil.
And look - the lumps have magically disappeared

For this recipe I buy a kilo or so of meat. On this occasion it weighed in at 1.1 kilos, and when I had finished trimming it I had roughly 700 and something or other grams of pure meat. The cats enjoy this process, too, as they get given a tiny bit of the raw meat - not more than one or two centimetre cubes. Don't make your animal obese because feeding them gives you pleasure. This meat comes out of their normal feed weight and is given to them because it gives their coat a beautiful lustre.

Biscuit is a very happy cat

Cube your remaining meat and set it aside on the worktop. Don't refrigerate it, you'll only upset it. Meat clenches when it gets too hot or too cold - just like your skin and muscles do. So when you're going to get it hot, at least let it be from room temperature, not from freezing cold. That way it will relax quicker when you take it off the heat. Relaxed meat = tender meat.

When you prepare onions or garlic you need to take off the tough outer layers and remove the top and bottom. There's a good reason for that. The bottom of the bulb is a root knot which is tough and bitter and will mary the flavour and be excessively chewy. Discard all of it. The top is the growth point, and has lots of tissue gathered together, but it is also the first point to dry out and pick up problems. We don't want tough or not perfect things in our food, so we take that top bit off as well.

Adding the vinegar, mustard and teabag like bouquet garni. Do remember to
remove the bag before you serve the dish

Mr FC has deliberately cut the onions wrong for this dish so you can see why it's wrong. He has cut his onion halves from side to side instead of from top to bottom. This means that the inner pieces, which are more likely to be held together at the top, and the outside edges which curve downwards, are going to result in slabs of onion. If you cut it from top to bottom you get thin slivers of onion which cook evenly, don't get tough or overcooked while you're trying to cook the slabs, and which will give an even texture and taste to the meal. See, there's a reason why your teacher was picky about which way you do things.

With garlic it has to be crushed to release the oils which hold the flavour. Just slicing or chopping the cloves will result in the odd bit of garlic flavour here and there. To get that flavour throughout the dish you need to squash the thing, break open the cell structure and let the oil out.

Mushrooms added, ready to simmer

If you buy tiny button mushrooms, just use them whole, otherwise if there are any huge ones make sure you halve them through the middle, top to bottom. Measure out things like the stock and ale before you start, put them into little bowls by the stove and it will save you fumbling for the cookbook and measuring it all out as you work. It makes things a lot smoother when you're at the hob. You can mix up the vinegar, mustard and bouquet garni together, too, as they all go in the same pan at the same time.

It's worth while, if you buy something that comes in a small glass dish like a creme caramel, shoving the dish in the washing up and using it again later when you just need a tiny bowl for an egg yolk or similar.

Simmering gently can be done in the frying pan or the casserole. I prefer
the casserole to reduce the possibility of slopping over the sides of a
shallow pan

At last - you should have a plate or bowl of chopped onions, a dish with some crushed garlic in it, a heap of trimmed meat, a jug of ale, a jug of stock, a pot of mushrooms, an opened jar of mustard, and the rest of the ingredients sitting by your stove, measured out and ready to go.

Pour out about 3 tablespoons of the best quality cold pressed extra virgin olive oil that you can afford and turn the heat to about 3/4's of the maximum temperature. The first thing we are going to do is seal the meat, and this needs high heat.

A good grind of coarse sea salt and fresh black pepper. Don't be timid with
these, your guests should not need to add more seasoning.

The intention is two fold - browning for colour and taste and also sealing the meat to keep the moisture and flavour in. If you don't have your pan hot enough at this stage you will end up with the juices from the meat seeping into the pan and boiling your meat. Boiled meat in casseroles ends up grey, tough and tasteless. Don't do it. Unless you're using a wok ring or a thermonuclear device for cooking I cannot express enough how virtually impossible it is to use too much heat at this point. Of course, the hotter it is the faster you have to work, so you don't want to be flogged to death by your own saucepan, but do keep that heat turned up.

Because we need to keep that heat in the pan we don't want to throw the meat into it all in one go. Break it into thirds or even more if your pan is smaller, and brown each one well before you put it into the casserole.

Delicious Jersey Royals waiting to be cooked

Once you've done that you can cook the onions. These onions are to be browned, but not too much. This caramelises the onions, darkening them to add colour to the gravy and making a rich, sweet vegetable. For this you need to turn the heat down to about half. You have to have heat to brown it, but you also need to have it cooked without burning, so turn the heat down. This is where we step out a little from the Larousse and indeed the recipe chosen. The recipe states to add the garlic and onions and brown. Now I know, from experience, and particularly from cooking Indian food, that garlic is much more tender than onion. It browns quicker, it burns quicker, and it is acrid and bitter when it burns.

Because of this I cook the onions almost completely before I even think of adding the garlic. When the garlic is added I stir it in well and keep turning the onion as the garlic browns. Once I get a good billow of garlic smell coming out of the pan I know it's ready for the casserole.

Well seasoned and well simmered, ready for the lid and the oven

The next stage of the dish is where we thicken it, add more colour, and where we also ensure that the maximum flavour is in the dish and not in the washing up. It uses a technique called de-glazing. It's exactly what it sounds like, it's taking the glaze off the pan. Mine looks a bit odd, simply because there are no juices left in the frying pan when I empty out the onions and meat. In the days before non-stick we had copper, steel, iron and even aluminium pans which stuck to anything and everything that went into them. You'd finish up with bits of meat, lumps of vegetable and everything else crusted on the bottom of the pan. The flour and the fluids were used to soak up any oils or fats, making a beurre manié which would thicken the sauce, and then floating off the bits from the bottom of the pan, rubbing gently with a wooden spoon or spatula to get everything up until the pan was almost clean again.

This is what you don't want to see in your pan - half cooked slabs of onion
when the rest is already browned. Notice, too, the tough, green tip on the onion
on the right. If left it this would be bitter and chewy

You do need to boil the flour. This is what gets rid of the taste of the flour or thickening agent, you cook it off. If your pan is dry, don't add things for it to soak up, just brown the flour gently in the pan with the sugar until they are both about the same pale golden colour. Stir in the beer and stock and crush the lumps out of the flour. You'll always get lumps, you can't odds it, but you can get rid of them quite easily If you have a silicone or non stick whisk you can use this to take out the lumps very easily. Otherwise just give them a bit of a squish with the spatula and keep stirring, gently. Don't forget to scrape the back of the spoon, though, keeping all that flour in the pan. When you're happy with the lack of lumps, add it all to the casserole with the remaining ingredients.

Two portions gone and the pot still has plenty more to offer

Some recipes at this point will tell you to make a flour water paste and seal the top of the casserole. That was needed in the days when pans were hand beaten and lids didn't fit so well. Nowadays casseroles and pans have very good lids that fit well enough that you really don't need to do this. The fluid will stay in the dish sufficiently that you'll have plenty of gravy.

I have omitted something else from this recipe, simply because I consider it un-necessary and creating a greasy finish to the dish. The French serve the Carbonade with slices of toasted and buttered French bread on top and a sprinkling or sprigs or parsley. I have to admit a problem for me with garnishes. If something is going to be in my food it has to perform a function, like adding to the flavour or texture. I don't like parsley, it adds nothing to this dish, it's raw, so at its most foul to my taste as well, so the last thing I want to see on my plate is a ruddy great stalk of bitter parsley. Don't feel you need to garnish everything with the ubiquitous parsley, it really isn't necessary.

The finished dish - Beef Carbonade with Jersey Royal potatoes and Savoy Cabbage

And that's all there is to it - she says looking back up the very long post. Actually this is a very simple meal to cook, you can use a slow cooker if you have one, and you can impress people with your French Carbonade, or just enjoy beef stew with onions and mushrooms. It makes plenty to feed at least four, and freezes like a dream in individual portions, so if you like to batch cook and use the meals for when you've had a long day at work, you can have comfort food very quick and easy with this dish from the freezer.

The evidence of a messy eater!

We had ours with savoy cabbage and Jersey Royal new potatoes, which we mashed into the copious and delicious gravy. Mr FC took a picture of his t-shirt so you could see how much he enjoyed it all.

We hope you enjoy yours, too!

Mr & Mrs FC x

Beef Carbonade (Printable Version)

Serves 4 to 6

750g braising or chuck steak, cut into 2.5cm or 1 inch cubes
3 tablespoons good quality olive oil
2 to 3 onions, peeled and sliced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
2 to 3 tablespoons plain or all purpose flour
2 teaspoons soft brown sugar
300 ml brown ale
300ml beef stock
salt and black pepper
2 tablespoons wine vinegar
1 bouquet garni
1 teaspoon French mustard (Dijon)
100g button mushrooms, trimmed and halved if large.

To garnish

4 to 6 slices French bread
a little butter
parsley

Preheat the oven to moderate - 160ºC, 325ºF or gas mark 3.

Trim the beef. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a pan and brown the cubes of meat all over; then transfer to a casserole.

Fry the onions and garlic in the same fat, adding a little more oil if necessary, until lightly browned. Transfer to the casserole.

Stir the flour into the pan juices and cook for 1 to 2 minutes then add the sugar followed by the ale and stock and bring up to the boil.

Season well, add the vinegar, bouquet garni, French mustard and mushrooms and simmer for a minute or so.

Pour into the casserole and cover very tightly. Cook in the preheated oven for 2 to 2 and a quarter hours until tender.

Just before the casserole is ready, spread the slices of bread lightly with butter and put under a fairly low grill until just lightly browned and crisp.

Serve the casserole topped with the slices of bread and garnished with sprigs of fresh parsley.

Recipe originally printed in Great Meat Cookery, edited by Tony de Angeli, with amendments and notes by Mr & Mrs FC.

Raclette & Peach Melba Cocktails

2012-07-01T10:22:00.005-07:00

The ingredients...

Ok, an easy one to start off with, and a double to boot! Raclette followed by Peach Melba Cocktails. I first discovered Raclette as a child, holidaying in Switzerland. We had family out there, so it was a cheap holiday for us. It was only later I would realise just what a privilege living or holidaying in Switzerland could be!

Raclette is named after the round cheese made in the Swiss alps. I used to go to a restaurant on the edge of a glacier to watch the cheeses being cut in half and pushed up against what looked like a cage full of coals. Wood was burned in niches in the wall which were fronted with decorative grilles against which the cheese could be melted. Not actually touching the metal, but happily taking on the heat from the fire.

Our choice of cheese

The face of the cheese would be melted just enough before it was rushed to your table, tucked into the elbow of a waiter/chef who would scrape the molten goodness onto your plate over a mound of steaming potatoes. You were told to drink tea with this meal as they thought the cheese would otherwise set in your stomach and make you ill. Of course we now know a tad more about cheese and happily much on molten cheese with wine or beer.

In the modern European home Raclette has become something more elaborate if a little less magnificent in its move from coals to a small electric element in the middle of the table where you place trays of cheese or meats and sausages under the grill to cook.

Meats, cheese, pickles and olives waiting patiently

Ours was done a la Alsace - in deference to Mr FC's heritage - with a grand plate of meats and salamis, frankfurters, hard boiled eggs out of their shells. With it we put a salad of onions and tomatoes dressed in olive oil, a bowl of boiled potatoes in their skins, and, of course, heaps of Raclette cheese from France, courtesy of FrenchClick.co.uk - an excellent online store providing the best of France to the UK.

Our usual accompaniments include Italian salami, German salami, Pepper salami and Bavarian ham along with a selection of mustards and pickles such as cornichons or sliced dill pickles and pickled beetroot. The salad is made by thinly slicing tomatoes and covering them with finely chopped onion and fresh basil leaves. Dress this with a very high quality olive oil, a touch of vinegar and a good sprinkling of freshly ground, black pepper.

The feast

The eggs are very simple - boil them in water for about 8 minutes once they come to the boil, then place under cold running water to cool. When you can hold them without burning your fingers peel off the shell and put the whole egg into a bowl. You can cut them in half for the look of things, but they're easier to transport to the plate from the bowl if they're intact. I used a half a green pepper and a half a red pepper that were hanging around doing nothing to garnish the eggs, sausages and meats. It not only looked pretty but it tasted good mixed in with the rest of it, too.

Buy good quality potatoes, be they new or as we used here, Maris Pipers which are fluffy and soft. Boil them in water until soft. Their arrival at the table is the start of the meal. Also on the table is a dish of olives to nibble on while we waited for the potatoes to finish cooking, and some good red wine, French, of course. We had a Cote du Rhone and a vin du Pays brought by our guests, both of which vanished just in time for dessert.

The 30 year old Raclette

The Raclette we used for the evening is something like 30 years old, given to Mr FC by his mother when she upgraded to a newer model. It reminds him of his childhood. The age came up in conversation when our French guest asked about the machine, she had never seen one such as this before. There are plenty to buy on line these days, including top griddles, Pierrade stones and other delights. Check out your local Amazon for a good selection.

I wish I could tell you that I was controlled enough to take photographs of our convivial evening, but I wasn't. Like everyone else I was too busy with the food! A good thing I took the pictures at the start of it all, really.

The potatoes to start the meal. Mr FC couldn't find a smaller bowl...

Because the meal is really very filling dessert had to be something light, and preferably alcoholic! Some time ago now a friend introduced me to her cocktail called Peaches and Cream. To return the favour I introduced her to Chambourd liqueur - the black raspberry delight that the French make in round bottles with crowns. It deserves its reputation as something special, it is pure raspberry flavour captured in a dark, purplish red liquid that belies its alcohol content.

For four of these cocktails I used a quantity of ice, about double that of the half 500ml tub of vanilla ice cream I was going to add, roughly 20cl of good vodka (Russian Standard Gold), a similar quantity of Archers Peach Schnaps,maybe a little more. The contents of two 400g tins of peaches in fruit juice, drained and the juice discarded, and 250ml or a half tub of really good quality vanilla ice cream, in this case I used Hagen Dazs. The peaches are best bought in juice rather than syrup, you don't need and won't want the extra sugar.

4 glasses waiting and ready

This is a drink that can only be made by tasting. What I used produced something full of flavour but not sweet, some like it sweeter - add more schnapps. Some like it creamier - add more ice cream. Some like it fruitier - add more peaches. You get the gist? The aim is to have something that tastes strongly of peaches and cream without being sickly or overwhelming, that's cold and slushy without being completely frozen, and that you can't really taste alcohol in. The last thing you want in pudding is a really strong taste of alcohol. Well, I don't, anyway!

Half tubs are easy with good knives.

Blitz the whole lot in a blender or food processor until smooth and then taste it. If you like what you've got then it's time to pour it out. 4 large cocktail glasses, 4 spoon straws, and about 5mm of of Chambord goes into the bottom of the glass. Slide the peach mixture down the side of the glass so it doesn't mix into the Chambord too much, leaving it layered.

Ready to blend

Normally I serve this with a Maraschino cherry on the straw, too, just for a bit of an extra twist. However, in deference to a guest who hates cherries in all their forms this time I left it out. Ok, so I ate one in the kitchen while I was making it. A girl has her limits, you know!

Mixed and ready to pour

Our guests were quick to pounce on the cocktails and stir in the raspberry from the bottom, adding a pink tinge to the yellow mixture. Pronounced delicious they tucked in until one of them realised the effect it was having and that if he carried on slurping it down at that rate he wouldn't be getting up out of his chair at the end of the meal so much as slithering to the floor.

Chambord black raspberry liqueur

I don't condone drunken-ness, but the occasional numb lip and slight wobbliness is ok so long as you're not driving, which none of us were. And this was *very* occasional since I can no longer really drink at all. Remember - drink responsibly! /end of public service announcement.

Here's to pudding!

Sipped a little slower through the straws we remained capable of conversation and enjoyed watching the cats chasing each other in and out of the garden. Oh, that's something else about Raclette - the room gets very hot! We had ours in the conservatory where we could open the doors to the garden and keep comfortably cool.

The empties

Enjoy!

Mr & Mrs FC

Our thanks to Doug and Marie who joined us for dinner and were most complimentary, thank you also for the excellent wine they provided! We hope to be able to host you again soon.

Raclette (printable version)

200g per person of Raclette cheese - or other cheese of your choice, cut into slices about 4mm thick.
A selection of hams, salamis and other cooked meats as you wish
A selection of cooked sausages such as Frankfurters, Nurembergers, Kabanos, Bratwurst, etc.
Mustards - I recommend Dijon, wholegrain Dijon and English for a good selection
Pickles such as cornichons, onions and beetroot or others as wished
Up to 2 hard boiled eggs per person
A couple of tomatoes per person
1 onion - in the UK we just call these onions, but they're the ones in golden skins, variously known as white or yellow onions
Olive oil
White vinegar of your choice
Fresh basil leaves, chopped

A selection of olives

Red and green peppers, thinly sliced, to garnish

Method:
If possible make the salad about an hour beforehand to allow it to blend the flavours together. Thinly slice the tomatoes and spread them on a plate. Cover them with the chopped onion and dress with the best quality olive oil you can afford and a touch of white vinegar, either white wine or cider vinegar will do. Grind over some fresh, black pepper and top with the chopped basil. Cover and refrigerate until ready.

Bring a pan of water to the boil and add the eggs, boiling them for about 8 minutes to ensure the centres are hard. Put the pan under running water when the time is up and keep the tap running into the bowl. This will cool the eggs quicker and also prevent that nasty black line round the yolk that can occur if they cool too slowly. When you can comfortably pick up the eggs without burning your hands peel the eggs and put them in a bowl.

If using the peppers, core them and remove the seeds before slicing them thinly. These can be sprinkled liberally where you wish to add colour.

Before your guests arrive, drain the pickles and olives and put into bowls for the table. Plug in your Raclette and pre-heat the element so your guests don't have to wait longer for their first melted cheese.

When your guests arrive put a pan of water on to boil. Add to it your potatoes, washed and in their skins, and boil until they are soft when tested with a fork.

Lay out the cheeses and meats on plates or in bowls, with the sausages cut to the size of your Raclette dishes so that they will fit under the grill, or leave them whole if you're lucky enough to have a griddle on the top of your Raclette.

Dress the table with mustards and the pickles, the plates of meat and cheese, uncovered salads, eggs and any other accompaniments you may wish, and finish with the potatoes, which is the signal to start eating.

Melt the Raclette cheese and brown the sausages under the grill - the peppers can be put into the little dishes, too. The cheese can be poured over the potato or poured onto the plate or anything else as you wish.

Peach Melba Cocktails (printable version)

Serves 4

Ice up to the 500ml mark on a blender jug, or use an empty ice cream tub to measure out twice as much as the ice cream you will use
20cl good quality vodka
25cl peach schnapps
2 x 400g tins peach slices in fruit juice, drained and the juice discarded
250ml good quality vanilla ice cream
10 cl Chambord

Maraschino cherry - optional

To serve:
4 tall cocktail glasses
4 spoon straws

Put all the ingredients except the cherry and the Chambord into a blender or food processor jug and blitz until smooth. Have a taste of the mixture and see if it is balanced to your palate, and adjust accordingly.

Pour about 2.5ml Chambord into the bottom of each glass, careful not to splash it up the sides. Side the peach mixture down the side of the glass on top of the raspberry so that they remain layered, remembering to share the mixture out evenly between the four glasses. If using the cherries push one over the end of the straw and slide it down about 5 or 6cm.

Serve immediately.

Beyond Larousse...

2012-06-29T15:05:00.002-07:00

I remember being given my first Larousse Gastronomique and being disappointed. It seemed like such a weighty tome it *had* to be the ultimate reference on cooking, didn't it? Sadly it was only on French food. It was also, despite being comprehensive, based in traditional food, obsessed by the premise that French was all there was and that the only way to do things was to do them as per the Larousse.

In some cases, they're right. But in many cases they're not. The world is shrinking, bringing us closer to cuisines and ingredients that as a child were no more than words in a travel brochure to me. Unattainable, impossibly distant and unlikely to ever feature in my cooking.

As much as I love and support the traditional shops, the tiny ones that still cure their own delicious bacon, who make breads and support local bakers, farmers and growers, who provide us with duck and goose eggs, we would be remiss if we did not recognise the part the supermarkets have played in shaping our plates.

Nobody has to wait for strawberries any more, bananas and avocados are daily fare all year round, the widest possible range of meats, dairy produce, fruit and veg possible is there, on our doorsteps, every single day at our command. Not just tinned or frozen, but fresh. Forty years ago the only way you were getting a dragon fruit was by getting on a plane and flying to where they grew. Nothing else would work. There were stories of people paying fortunes to hire planes to ship in impossible cargoes for special meals. It was the fare of the very, very rich and nobody else.

Now, if I want Australian fish for dinner, or New Zealand lamb, I walk into my local supermarket in Brighton and pick it off the shelf. A few Indonesian lichees for afters? Maybe some delicious Kulfi to go with that? How about veggies - Cavolo Nero or Pak Choi?

Chefs have noticed this and begun to mix and match, combining flavours into something new, known as fusion, where the rule book has gone out of the window. And still it's not enough. Enter the likes of Heston Blumenthal and Molecular Gastronomy stage right. Now we can take every possible flavour or texture and we can present it any way we like - spaghetti made from Champagne? A frothy foam of skate with caper flavoured pearls suspended in it? You name it, you can now do it, and it's all on the net to be discovered.

But I still have my Larousse on the shelf, and other books with it. Because no matter how we push the envelope of food and food preparation we still need to remember our roots. Fancy is fine when you feel like it, but if you want a good Bouillabaisse or Daube, pick up the Larousse, now battered and stained, but still turned to regularly.

This blog aims to resurrect good, fresh, French food in a traditional manner. It also aims to look at every day dishes and modern fusions. It will mean each month you'll get 4 step by step recipes, two classic French, one International and one which will be anything from Molecular Gastronomy to student cooking - a pot luck if you like, just for fun.

If there is a dish you would like to see done, please, let us know and I'm sure we'll add it to the blog.

Happy eating from Mr & Mrs FC.