Daube de boeuf

I’ve not posted here for ages, partly because I’ve not been cooking much that I haven’t written about before, but also because I’ve been away on holiday. So, here is an attempt to remedy this situation with a classic dish

Roast chicken with a Provençal gratin

Yet another roast chicken Sunday.

The bird was simply roasted with salt and pepper and olive oil, with some butter and dried fines herbes under the breast skin and with a few crushed cloves of garlic in the body cavity.

The vegetable gratin was a Provençal kind of thing, layers of aubergine and courgette slices with sliced tomatoes in between, with grated pecorino cheese on top and cooked in the same oven as the chicken. The slices of vegetable were rubbed with olive oil and griddled first. This gave them a lovely smoky flavour and a meltingly soft quality.

To accompany this, there was some Bertinet olive bread and a green salad with a vinaigrette.

To drink we had a bottle of Côtes du Rhône Villages from the Cave Cooperative at Saint-Pantaléon-les-Vignes that I have written about before.

Braised leg of mutton, Provençal style

Mutton is such a great meat, flavoursome and rich compared to lamb, but needing a longer cooking time.

I had a lovely thick slice cut off of a leg and after colouring it in a frying pan with olive oil, I put it in a casserole while I sautéed some sliced onion, celery, garlic and carrot in the same oil and then added some salt and pepper, herbes de Provence, white wine to deglaze the pan, tomato passata and black olives and cooked this down a bit before adding it to the casserole and baking this in a Gas Mk 5 oven for two and a half hours.

After this time, the meat was tender and the sauce rich.

I served this with some green flageolet beans and a potato and celeriac purée, garnished with chopped parsley.

This really called for a Rhone wine and we had a bottle of 2009 Chartreuse de Bonpas Réserve, Côtes du Rhône, from Sainsbury’s. This is a lovely rich and full-bodied wine made from Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre, with plenty of fruit and a nice long finish.

We also had a pudding. I made a Tarte Tatin and we had it with crème anglaise.

I used puff pastry for this and the apples were Cox’s, slowly cooked in a lovely caramel made from soft dark sugar, butter and a little water.

I served the tart with a nice ready-made custard, made with cream, vanilla and free-range eggs.

Another way with roast chicken

Roast chicken with courgettes niçoise and polenta crusted roast potatoes.

The chicken was stuffed with some cubed stale bread, mixed with thyme and marjoram, salt and pepper and an egg and milk to bind it all together.

I put garlic, herbs and butter under the skin of the chicken’s breast and roasted it in olive oil.

The potatoes were par-boiled and rolled in polenta and then roasted in sunflower oil.

The courgettes were topped and tailed, peeled in places to give them a striped appearance and sliced and then sautéed in olive oil with tomatoes, chopped parsley, salt and pepper and black olives.

A simple dish and a nicely Provençal take on a traditional Sunday roast.

We drank a nicely mature Côtes du Rhône, a 2006 Château Boucarut, a Syrah and Grenache blend with enough are to soften the tannins but still with plenty of backbone and a rich spiciness.

Poulet basquaise

It is a pretty standard French chicken sauté dish really. The thing that makes it Basque is the addition of Piment d’Espelette, a Basque type of chilli that is not that hot but is essential in the cooking of the region.

There are lots of recipes for this, mine uses onions, garlic, red and yellow peppers, a decent splash of white wine, chopped tomatoes (plus some tomato puree if you have pallid tomatoes), chicken pieces (legs are good but we had breasts tonight), the piment and some dried herbs (I like herbes de Provence).

It is a pretty simple dish, you sauté the chicken in olive oil and then cook the vegetables down in the same oil and put the chicken back and simmer the dish covered until the chicken is done.

I like to add in some olives too, towards the end of the cooking time.

We ate this with plain rice and drank a nice rich Côtes du Rhône with it, but any southern French red would be excellent.

Souris d’agneau aux légumes à la Marocaine

Otherwise lamb shanks and vegetables with some Moroccan-influenced spicing to give it a bit of interest, which we ate with couscous.

The vegetables were onions, peppers, garlic, celery, carrots, sweet potatoes and tomatoes and I used paprika, cumin, ginger and turmeric as the spice blend and I garnished the finished dish with chopped coriander.

I took some of the broth and mixed it with some harissa paste to serve as a condiment. I think it is nice to have this separately so that each person can adjust the heat and spiciness of their own plate.

You can get harissa in a lot of places nowadays so it is worth getting some if you want a real North African kick to your dishes. If you can’t, just use chilli sauce but it won’t taste the same even though it gives the heat.

Anyway, I coloured the lamb shanks in some olive oil and set them aside while I softened the onions, diced celery, chopped tomatoes and carrots and crushed garlic before adding in the spices and returning the lamb shanks to the pan.

I then added in some vegetable stock, made with Marigold vegetable stock powder, which is a brilliant store cupboard essential as far as I am concerned, and simmered the whole dish until the lamb was nearly tender. At this point I added in some diced sweet potato and carried on cooking until this was done and the meat was ready.

Couscous is easy to do, you just add boiling water to a bowl with some couscous in it, stir in a good glug of olive oil and cover with clingfilm until all the water has been absorbed. Then you just fluff it up with a fork and use it.

A nice hearty dish and one that cries out for a big red wine.

We had a bottle of 2007 Saint-Pantaléon-les-Vignes Réserve, a Côtes du Rhône Villages wine which has had 12 months ageing in oak casks and is a blend of 40% Syrah and 60% Grenache.

A rich, spicy wine, it has had the tannins softened by the time in oak and has a lovely softness which should develop further over the next couple of years.

A Middle-eastern lamb meal

Well, kind of Middle Eastern anyway.

The lamb was a thick slice from a leg, cut lengthways and without any bone. I slashed the skin and rubbed it with some Sofra brand Syrian hot red pepper paste and some olive oil and then roasted it, covered at first, in a medium oven.

Pork goulash and pappardelle

Well, a kind of goulash/paprikash sort of thing really. Not really massively authentic, I suppose, but simple and tasty.

What we did on our holidays …… part 1

I did take the laptop on holiday, but even though I had good intentions about finding a WiFi hotspot, in the end I just wrote up one bit of a diary to cover the first week we were away.