Food

Those frogs must of been massive!

Bubble and Squeak boxing day brekkie.

Almost as good as the main event.

Oh and, "have".

Butter, pâté, Gorgonzola, mustard as the base for my leftovers sandwich this morning. Turkey and steak in one, pork and crackling in the other. Merry Christmas to the sandwich crew

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Winner!

Bubble and squeak brunch about to be made here.

Leftover sprouts with lardons and chestnuts will be added to mashed spuds and crushed leftover roast spuds with a handful of spring onions.

Served with black pudding and duck eggs from one of my neighbours.

I’m only jealous. For years I’ve petitioned for goose at Christmas but always been outvoted. Family tradition is hard to argue against. Not fussed tbh as I love turkey, it’s fricken delicious.

It’s just that I do a roast most weekends, about a 20% of them will be beef, so i have it maybe 10 times a year. We never have turkey other than at Christmas so the associations and traditional trimmings make it really special for me in a way that another roast beef wouldn’t be.

If you held a gun to my head for one or the other on any other day of the year it would beef every time, but that’s not the point is it?

Had goose yesterday. It was lovely but so little actual meat, loads of super crispy skin and I now have enough goose fat to roast spuds for the next couple of years.

Fin

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Crackling of the year, right there.

The butcher had already taken the liberty of scoring it diagonally so I scored cross hatching, I was pulling off bits and eating them like pork scratchings

Oh yesss

For me I went with polish traditional hunter stew ;) "bigos" plus lot of fish :)

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Any nonsense like bicarb? It just looks stunning.

The big old knobbly pork dildo of my dreams

None of that. Salted the skin before the fridge, in the fridge for about 36 hours, patted it dry and then salted it again. 1 hour out of the fridge before it went in, 3 hours at 160 (fan oven), then just 15 mins on high had it puffed up and crispy like that.

4kg was the post fridge weight, so cooked for 1 hour less than expected, meat thermometer suggested it was over cooked, was up to 80-85 degrees in parts but was so juicy inside so didn't taste overcooked at all.

Had Fois Gras on toast for breakfast this morning

#winning

Sister in law's partner made a gingery sweet and smoky ham too, plus the turkey leftovers from yesterday, and more cheese, I feel fucked.

Nice.

My porchetta suffered from a little inattentiveness, and from being mothered...

^ those sandwich & crackling photos!

Classic Italian cappelletti and lasagna, vegetarian the latter

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That lasagna looks amazing! Have you got a recipe? That's something i never feel like I've really nailed... Cheers.

I kinda wing it every time I make it, this particular one was vegetarian and went down as follows:

tl;dr: (pasta sheet + ragout + bechamel + parmesan ) * amount of layers + more parmesan on top

Ragout (here is where you can chuck in the meat original one):
200-300g of cashews and some walnuts, chop finely in the food processor, but not to powder level, roast on a tray in the oven at 120 for 1h. In the meantime whizz 2 large carrots, 2 celery sticks and a large onion in the processor and add to a pot with 100g of butter, soften until golden/caramelised. Add the nuts and stir some minutes. Add a glass of red wine and once it's evaporated add about 500ml of passata and about 2L of vegetable stock. Simmer for 4-6h stirring occasionally, try to keep the boiling to the very minimum.

Bechamel:
100g of butter, 100g of sifted flour and ground nutmeg. Melt the butter and take off the heat, add the flour and nutmeg, whisk and put back on the heat and cook the roux until golden/browned. Add 1L of milk. Whisk constantly on medium heat for about 6-8m until it thickens, keep in mind the thickness increases as the bechamel cools down.

Pasta:
About 100g of 00 flour per 1 medium egg. The above probably required 2 eggs worth of dough. Knead until smooth, add some water/flour if required. Cover in cling film and rest for 20min. Flatten to the thinnest you can achieve by hand, I do 8 out of 9 on my pasta machine. Cut to sheets of the shape of the tray you'll be using and rest it flat on some kitchen towel. Keep in mind it swells up a bit when you cook it.

Pasta pre-cooking:
This is the boring part. Boil and salt a large pot of water and prepare a bowl of cold water next to it. Cook each sheet of past indicidually for about 1-2min, then take it out of the boiling water and straight into the cold one to stop it from cooking. Lay it flat on a kitchen towel to drain. Avoid them overlapping or they will glue together.

Assembly:
Start at the base of the tray with a thin layer of ragout, then each layer repeats of pasta sheet, ragout (not too much), bechamel, and grated parmesan. Trim the pasta sheets to the correct sahpe and use the trimmings to fill all the gaps on the sides, but avoid pasta bunching up at the corners, this will dry up/burn otherwise. Be genereous with parmesan on the top last layer to achieve a good crust. Bake for 40-50min, if the crust is done before cover it with a sheet of kitchen foil.

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I'm definitely going to try that, it looks brilliant. I've never thought of using nuts instead of meat in a ragout.

Nuts, beans, quorn, I am sure there are multiple solutions. I like cashewes as they are quite fatty on their own, not as much as meat, but more than pulses.