Pork Hocks with roast potatoes, red cabbage and peas..and NO PICTURE! :( Sept 23rd 2013

Dinner was all set, neatly arranged on the plate, and the camera said "please replace the battery".

No time to ruin my dinner looking for another camera, so you have no picture of the delicious slow roast Gloucester Old Spot pork hock bought from Picks Farm at my local Walthamstow farmer's Market . So you will have to imagine.

But it looked very like this one from Donald Russell

yum!

Dexter Beef Brisket with red cabbage - Sept 22nd 2013

I've been giving the pressure cooker a real outing this week, nearly every meal has been cooked in it, and tonight's was no exception. A nice little piece of Dexter beef brisket from the farmer's market took my eye, and I pot roasted it in the pressure cooker with carrots, onions and celery, with Essential Cuisine beef stock and a good slug of Lea and Perrins.   It still takes a surprisingly long time to be really tender, even in the pressure cooker, I had to give it a good hour in there.

Roast potatoes, the pot roast moved to the oven for the last 10 minutes, enough time to cook the red cabbage in the pressure cooker (using Catherine Phipps' fab recipe from her Pressure Cooking book)

Most excellent.

Beef Stew with fregola - Sept 21st 2013

It's very hard to make a beef stew look appetising in a photograph.  Not as hard as making a plate of mince look good, but it's up there....

So you will have to take my word that this stew of braising steak with fresh plum tomatoes and fregola thrown in at the end to soak up some of the juices was delicious.   The veg were supposed to have been roasted, but I ran out of time, and so just sautéed them - there is red pepper, courgettes, onion and patty pan squash in there.  Very yum if less pretty :)

Italianesque mince - day two - the Pastore Pie Sept 2013

Left over from day one of the Italianesque mince,  an easy peasy dinner tonight. I popped the sauce in nice flat individual dishes, topped with mashed potato, some butter flakes and grated cheese.  In a hot oven for half an hour to heat through thoroughly and brown the potato topping, and served with carrots and cauliflower.

Done!!

p.s. Pastore is Italian for shepherd... get it now?

Italianesque mince... day one.... the pasta. Sept 2013

Sorting out the freezer (use it all up time...) I found a pack of mince loitering near the bottom. In the fridge, I found a solitary cooked chicken thigh, and a quarter pack of sausage meat from sausage patties earlier in the week.  All to be used up in a sorta Italiana sauce thing.  A slosh of Marsala (this makes everything good..) finely chopped onions, a can of tomatoes, some Italian herbs (aha!! there is another Italian bit) and spices (a teaspoon of  Urban Spice Man's 5P seasoning and a teaspoon of ground allspice), salt and a pinch of sugar.  And a long long simmer...

Fat shells of pasta. A sprinkle of basil leaves

YumYumYum.

Bunny Stew with leeks and fregola - Sept 2013

I love a little bunny.

This was a lovely little bunny, a youngster from the new season, and as tender as anything. Braised in a pressure cooker, with pancetta, carrots, onions, celery, Marsala wine and Essential Cuisine veal stock,  it only took 20 minutes.

Plenty enough time to cook the leeks and the fregola to serve with it.

It's September, back to school and back to blogging...

Now I haven't totally lost it, I do remember that I don't have any children of school age.  But it is that time of year for all things to start again.

Including blogs.

So I hope you had a lovely summer of salads and picnics. Autumn has started and I am starting to cook properly again, rather than just assembling cold food, so will be kicking off my dinner diary again.

And whilst I write up my first dinner for Autumn, a reminder for you to visit my other blogs:

A Greedy Piglet -  the first blog that I wrote exclusively about food, and still the place  to go to for lengthier posts on experimental cooking and good recipes.

This has a little sister blog A Greedy Piglet - Just the Bare Minimum , short snippets, reviews and events and food festivals are all here.

Do have a little look around - they will be getting injections of new writing too, but in the meantime there is still lots of good stuff there. Let me know what you think, yes?