Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, White Wine and Honey

It's that time of the year, not even December yet and I'm noticing that my 'Perfect Christmas Turkey in the Weber' article is starting to receive visits. Forward planning, I like it.

It's a traditional Sunday roast tonight at the firefoodie household so I visited my favourite farm shop on the way home from Luca's rugby match. Foxbury Farm, near Burford in Oxfordshire, one of the best local farm shops around here. We had already decided on pork so I chose a portion of boned shoulder and had the butcher score the skin nicely so we would have loads of delicious crackling. The fresh produce section had some lovely locally grown brussels sprouts, our first dose of brussels for the year. It was here that I also found some great local streaky bacon.

This recipe is a variation on a Delia Smith Christmas recipe and can be made with any sweet white wine, smoked or unsmoked bacon and good fresh sprouts. A white marsala wine is sweet enough to not need the honey, but I only had a dry white so I tried a small amount of honey to give a nice glaze and add that extra bit of sugar.

The pork shoulder, of course, was cooked in the Weber (keeps the hot smoky bit out of the kitchen) and the rest of the meal was cooked indoors. In addition to the sprouts, I served mixed roasted root vegetable (potatoes, swede and parsnip), and steamed carrots. I also made a simple stuffing (cooked separately) with fresh sage, more bacon, minced onion and fresh breadcrumbs.

Serves four:

- 600g brussels sprouts, trimmed and washed
- 200g streaky bacon, finely chopped
- 25g butter
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 small glass of white wine
- 1 dessert spoon of clear honey
- Salt and pepper

Method:

Steam the sprouts until they are about half cooked, that is still firm when tested with a fork. Meanwhile, fry the bacon in a pan in melted butter and olive oil until the bacon is nice and crispy. Don't worry about all those bits that stick, the wine will sort it out when it deglazes the pan. Add the par cooked sprouts and then add the wine in small splashes so the sprouts aren't drowned in it. Keep the heat high and as the liquid evaporates, add more, a little at a time. Put a lid on for a few minutes to steam them a bit more and then add the honey and toss them about before serving.

I will remember this night by the broken handle on my Weber. It was a bit tricky getting the lid off and on, but then I've had it for over ten years. Not impossible, just tricky. I'm not going to get rid of it, I am going to fix the handle. I am going to fix the handle...

Moroccan Spiced Chicken Skewers

Cooked over the embers of a damson wood fire

Friday night dinner parties require a special kind of planning. Being a work day, I don't have the luxury of spending all day food shopping and cooking so things need to be prepared in advance as much as possible. This is a great first course in this respect.  You can marinate the chicken the night before, and the skewers take no more than ten minutes to cook. The spectacle of the fire is also a nice warming welcome for when guests arrive.

These skewers were prepared as part of a menu for a dinner party for ten. The evening was a Moroccan themed variation of a dinner party we hosted earlier this year. I was determined to burn some wood but in complete denial of the twenty-four hour weather report; drizzle followed by heavy rain, just about exactly when I needed to be cooking, outside.

The firewood was a gift from my friend Ben when we visited recently at their new place in Herefordshire. Firewood as a gift? Yes, but this was no ordinary firewood. He had some dead branches from a damson tree and gave me some to take home as we were leaving. I was thrilled, and thank you Ben, it burned beautifully. (For tips on a wood cooking fire have a look at my earlier article, A Real Wood Barbecue.) The embers were hot. Really hot. Even with my long wooden handled tongs I managed to singe all the hair on the back of my hands.

I found the skewer recipe at waitrose.com and it is seriously good. I used chicken breast  instead of thigh as it is perfectly suited to hot, fast cooking and the lighter meat absorbs marinade flavours wonderfully. The spice mix is amazing; coriander, cumin, cinnamon, garlic, cloves, lemon zest and olive oil. I made the mix the night before and got a full upper body workout with my beastly pestle and mortar while gazing mindlessly at an episode of Masterchef on the telly. The chicken marinated overnight and all that was left to do on the day was skewer the pieces and whack them on the barbecue. I put coriander leaves (cilantro) between each piece for extra aroma and colour.

They need to be cooked hot and fast, so they are just starting to char on the outside without drying out on the inside.

The Waitrose recipe includes a parsley, almond and feta salad, and I added a home made tsatsiki from a  Tessa Kiros recipe in her wonderful book 'Falling Cloudberries'. Half a piece of pitta bread toasted over the embers plus a lemon wedge and the plate was finished off nicely.

By some twist of fate, the weather report wasn't quite right and it was just after we sat down for the first course that the heavens opened. It absolutely chucked it down.

The main course was a Moroccan Beef Tagine from a brilliant recipe by Jamie Oliver from his recent 'Jamie Does..' cookbook. Also great for a Friday, as you can marinate over night and cook slowly during the day or the day before with minimal attention. The beef was served with saffron and petit pois cous cous and slow roasted halved tomatoes.

A dessert of cinnamon oranges finished the meal from a great recipe from ehow.com with our own addition of a splash of cointreau to give it a bit of a kick.

The next morning we received some really lovely thank you notes and text messages. Makes it all worthwhile really. And by the way, that's me, second from the right.

Chilli Bounty Number Two

Robbie, Robbie, Robbie. I enshrine you in this post. You never cease to come good with your extraordinary chilli generosity. As if the first batch wasn't good enough you return with yet another. I used a few of the skinny green ones in last nights Moroccan Beef Tagine, and the rest are going to join their friends in the freezer.

A Surreal Chilli Moment

A typically mad packed Sunday, and I'm at home for a short period between taking our son to rugby training and having to shoot into London to collect our daughter when the door bell rings. Our good friend and neighbour Rob has turned up with a carrier bag... full of chillies! Red ones, green ones, yellow, black, brown, big, small, you name it. My eyes nearly jumped out of my head.

He had met someone nearby with a poly tunnel who loves growing chillies. Why? because they are so beautiful to look at. Here's the best bit... he doesn't even eat them! We were like two kids in a sweet shop. Ooing and aahing over this one and that one. We spread them out on the table, meticulously sorted them out and divided them evenly. What you are looking at is my half of the stash. This lot went straight into the freezer so now I'll be able to taste and savour them for months to come.

Freezing is a great way to preserve lots of fresh chillies. I take a few out at a time, slice them thinly,  put them in a small bowl and barely cover them with olive oil. They retain their colour and flavour and once in the oil, they will keep in the fridge for days, that's if they last that long!

A Real Wood Barbecue

How to make a proper cooking fire.

Let's face it, a barbecue is not really a true barbecue without wood. Don't get me wrong, lump wood charcoal is wood, as are charcoal briquettes (we hope!). Gas barbecues have their place too, but sometimes it just has to be a real fire with real wood. The fire making ritual is ceremonial and therapeutic, and therefore was perfectly suited for my Mum's last day with us before she headed back to Australia. The unprecedented late September heat wave helped add to the outdoor occasion.

A wood cooking fire is not complicated, but it has to be right. The wood needs to be a dense, seasoned hardwood (I used oak) and in pieces no thicker than 3-4 cm. Start by building a small fire with a piece of screwed up newspaper and then placing tinder such as dried twigs and small sticks on it. Once the tinder has fully ignited, build the hardwood over the fire to make a pyramid.

The oak I used was foraged from local woodland. It came from branches that had fallen some years before and although they were slightly damp, they were completely dead. I stored it in my garage for a few weeks and by the time I came to use it it was bone dry.

The fire should burn hot and fast, and only take about twenty minutes to become a pile of searingly hot embers. The embers are then spread out ready for cooking. A few words of warning, hot means hot. About 1,000 degrees C to be precise. I was cooking marinated chicken thighs and wings which need to be cooked slowly, chicken breast (tandoori kebabs), and some little chipolata pork sausages. You obviously can't turn the heat down, so you need to create cooler and hotter cooking areas either by moving the embers around, or by raising the cooking grill higher above the embers.

I started by putting the chicken pieces around the edge in fire proof pans, so I could move them easily and make sure they didn't burn early on. These pieces cooked for forty minutes in total. The tandoori kebabs went on to the grill next (about twenty minutes after the chicken pieces went on), and the little sausages about five minutes after the kebabs. The initial embers were too hot for the more delicate chicken breast and sausages, so the twenty minute wait made all the difference.

Surprisingly, with good hardwood, a fire like this will last for at least 45 minutes, which is long enough to barbecue pretty much anything. Super hot at first, and cooler towards the end, so it's just about timing the different foods accordingly. Once you get the hang of this method, you can pretty much barbecue anywhere you can find wood.

Slow Roasted Pork Shoulder

Cooked over charcoal in the Weber

It's been a fairly intense month with family visiting from Australia combined with a massive work catch up after our summer holidays. I was uncertain as to whether I was going to meet my self imposed target of a minimum of one article per month, for the first time ever.

Luckily, a traditional Sunday roast and some locally made charcoal saved the day. I had a large shoulder of pork in the freezer, ideal for cooking outside in the Weber kettle barbeque. My Mum and parents-in-law were our guests so I planned a roast pork meal with all the trimmings.



Firstly, some musings on charcoal. Lumpwood charcoal is my preferred cooking fuel despite the number of branded barbecue briquettes on the market. With charcoal, you know what you are getting, or so I thought. I recently stopped at a garage on a country road for fuel and spotted bags of British charcoal for sale in unfamiliar packaging. The garage owner informed me that it was supplied to him by a couple of guys who had some local woodland. It was a large bag and reasonably priced. I did notice however that it did feel lighter than I would have expected for its size.

As usual I made a plan; light the charcoal at 2:15; start the roast at 2:45 and so on with view to serving the meal at 6:30. Then I read the lighting instructions. Ten minutes from lighting to cooking? I was more used to 20 or even 30 in colder weather. No fire starters or tinder required either? This was unexpected. Instead I was to select a handful of small pieces, scrunch them up with one piece of newspaper, light it, and then build more fuel on top. This stuff lit so quickly it was scary, and also a bit worrying in so far as how long was it going to burn for? For a good roast you need a hot starting temperature and a fairly slow burning fuel that doesn't give off too much smoke. This was going to be interesting.

Reading the packaging I discovered more. Ninety-eight percent of charcoal used in Britain (52,000 tonnes in 1992) is imported. The source wood is harvested mainly from mangroves and tropical forests with scant regard for regeneration. My charcoal however was made from coppiced wood in well managed local broadleaf woodlands, a practice that goes back as far as 6,000 years. So, the nice dense slow burning charcoal I had become so accustomed to wasn't so nice after all.

So what did this all mean? Mainly, that I was going to have to constantly top up the fires during the cooking time and use more charcoal than I would normally expect. The main consequence of this is that it was going to be a fairly smoky affair because normally you would allow the charcoal to become white before cooking after the initial smoky starting stage. And smoky it was. With each charcoal top up, smoke was pouring out of the top vent in the Weber and I frequently had to lift off the lid and fan the fire to accelerate the initial burn. I was planning to cook this pork for at least three hours.

All that said, let's get back to the pork. My 2.5kg shoulder had been defrosting over night and was the only thing to be cooked in the Weber. The potatoes, squash and stuffing went in the oven, and the broccoli and carrots in the steamer on the gas hob.

INGREDIENTS (Serves 8):

- 2.5 kg pork shoulder with rind scored with a knife
- 1 tablespoon of olive oil
- 1 heaped tspn of salt
- 4-5 large sprigs of fresh rosemary, still on the stalks

CHARCOAL METHOD:

Prepare two indirect fires in the base of the Weber (know your charcoal!). Rub the olive oil all over the rind and then sprinkle on the salt. Make a bed of rosemary stalks in the base of a roasting dish and rest the pork on top. Check the pork (and the fire) from time to time and baste the fat over the skin. After about two hours cut any string, and remove the rind from the meat with a knife. This will guarantee that the crackling will turn out soft and crumbly. At this point, I left the pork in the Weber for a further hour and put the crackling in the oven over the top of the roast potatoes. The extra heat is needed to finish it off properly. About half an hour before serving the pork, remove it from the Weber and cover with foil to rest before carving. Pour off most of the fat, and remove all the juices from the roasting dish with boiling water for the gravy. I thickened the gravy with some plain flour and added chicken stock to ensure there would be plenty.

OVEN METHOD:

Put the pork in a deep sided roasting dish as above and roast at 150 deg C for at least two hours before removing the rind. To get a crispy rind, finish the roast off at a high temperature (220 deg C). Cover the pork with foil towards the end to keep it moist for carving, while allowing the rind to become perfect crackling.

Ours was delicious, and worth all effort. The smokiness from the charcoal had subtly flavoured the meat and gravy, and the crackling was intensely flavoured and crumbly. The pork itself was deliciously moist and tender. Lucky there were some left overs, because writing this is making me hungry and I'm about to snack on them right now!

I'm still left with the charcoal quandary. The local stuff is easy to light and quick burning, ideal for open grill type barbecuing where food is being cooked fairly quickly. It would also be perfect for my open fire rotisserie, but it's got me thinking regarding slow cooking in the Weber. Extra effort and a smokier roast might just be the way forward.

Petit Feuilleté Boeuf et Figues

In honour of dear friends moving away and inspired by our recent holiday in France, this dish was the first course of a four course French themed feast for the occasion. My wife and I had this at a restaurant in France, La Ferme Ladouceur, and all I had to go on was my memory of the dish and a photograph I took at the restaurant.

First of all, what is a 'femlleté'? I've searched, run various derivations through Google translate and have come up with nothing at all that is food related. The nearest was 'femmellete' which apparently means 'sissy'. So 'sissies' they are. Help me out here, please. (Mystery now solved... see comments below).

The filling is made from seasoned pureéd beef, and a piece of fresh fig, all wrapped in a shortcrust pastry. Seeing what I was doing, my wife stepped in with her artistic talents and actually made them look like figs. Impressive work. The sauce is a rich beef stock reduction and the garnish a simple leaf salad topped with redcurrants. I had recently bought some fig balsamic vinegar which was perfect for the dressing.

INGREDIENTS:

(Makes 10)

- 650g sirloin steak, trimmed and finely pureéd in a food processor
- 1 tbsp finely chopped parsley
- 6 small fresh figs, quartered
- Salt and pepper
- Shortcrust pastry (1 'Jusroll' pack was good for 4)
- 500ml good quality beef stock (this was from Waitrose)
- 1 desert spoon of plain flour
- 1 desert spoon of butter
- Mixed soft leaves
- 1 tub of redcurrants
- Thick balsamic vinegar
- Beaten egg for brushing on to the pastry
- Parsley sprigs to garnish (I forgot this bit)

METHOD:

Start by making the filling. Trim the thick fat rind off the sirloin, cut it into chunks and put it in a food processor. Add salt, pepper and the chopped parsley to taste. (it tastes great raw so don't be afraid). The pureéd beef needs to be really well seasoned, but not too salty.

Divide the seasoned beef into ten balls (each should be the roughly the size of a golf ball). Lay each ball on a square of shortcrust pastry, put a quarter of a fig on top, brush beaten egg on the inside of the pastry, fold up the sides and then do your best to make them look like figs (or whatever your creative talents desire). Brush the outside with more egg before laying them onto a buttered baking dish.

Pre-heat the oven to 200 deg C and allow 30 minutes for them to cook. While they are in the oven, prepare the sauce by putting the flour and butter in a saucepan over a low heat to make a roux. Then add the beef stock, bring it to the boil, and then reduce it down at a low simmer until it is nicely glossy and just a little thickened. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste.

Lay the leaves on the side of the plate, dress with some balsamic vinegar and place the redcurrants and a quarter of a fig on top. Finally, plate up the femlletés and drizzle over plenty of sauce before garnishing with a fresh sprig of parsley.

We followed this with coq au vin blanc (I found a brilliant recipe at The Gourmet Traveller), a cheese course, and a refreshing 'le colonel' (Bombay Sapphire version). The evening was topped off by burning some of my treasured foraged oak in the brazier as a treat for the South African majority (well, for all us blokes actually).