Osteospermum

In my garden I have a few pots of Osteospermum plants, grown from seeds I brought back from our holiday in France earlier this year. I hadn't expected any of them to flower this year, but one of them has taken advantage of the exceptionally mild Autumn to produce a single bloom.

I can see this flower from our Living-Room window, and it happened to catch my eye in the afternoon as a shaft of feeble Winter sunlight fell on it. So out I went, camera in hand, to capture the moment...

It may only be one flower, but I think it's beautiful. Next year there will hopefully be many more.

And hopefully some in different colours. Blue is nice, but not easy to do justice to in a photograph!

And with the sausages...

Recently I wrote about making home-made sausages wrapped in clingfilm. I know that that particular post will not have been attractive to my vegetarian friends, so this post is aimed at redressing the balance, by describing the vegetable-based accompaniments I served with the sausage meal.

First up, a very easy to cook dish - Cavolo Nero with chilli and garlic.

Naturally enough, the Cavolo Nero was from my own garden. Here it is in the raw state:-

I prepared the Cavolo Nero by stripping-out from the leaves the tough central veins, and chopping the green parts into small pieces, which I then briefly blanched. This meant that I could stir-fry it very rapidly at the last minute, using only a very small quantity of oil. I peeled two cloves of garlic and sliced them thinly. Likewise, a large red chilli, sliced and de-seeded.

Shortly before the sausages were ready, I heated up a splash of vegetable oil in a small frying pan and stir-fried the garlic for a minute or so, allowing it to cook to a golden colour but not go brown. Over-cooked garlic is very bitter! I then added the blanched Cavolo Nero and the chilli and stir-fried them for two minutes. That's it. Done.

My next dish was one that needed a LOT more time: Black Beans in Chipotle Tomato Sauce. The beans were little black "Cherokee Trail of Tears" ones I grew and dried earlier in the year. I had about 170g of them, which made a generous serving for two people. Being quite fresh they didn't need to soak for very long. I gave them a scant 8 hours to rehydrate, but made sure to boil them hard for 10 minutes or so before turning the heat down to simmer them until soft. If you use shop-bought beans it is usually best to soak them for at least 12 hours.

After boiling the beans hard for 10 minutes, I simmered them for about another hour. It's impossible to say how long it takes to cook beans. They are all different. Just cook them until they are soft. [Tip: only add salt at the end of cooking, because salt inhibits the softening process.]

Meanwhile, I soaked five dried Chipotle chillis in some boiling water. They were from a batch that we bought in New York at the time of Fiona's wedding last year. These chillis are used mainly for their smoky flavour rather than for their heat, but they do impart a lovely warm glow to a dish of beans.

I added the soaked chillis, and the water in which they had been soaked, to my bean dish after the beans had been simmering for about 45 minutes. At this stage I also added a tub of our home-made tomato sauce from the freezer, and a squeeze of bright red tomato puree from a tube, just to enhance the colour a bit. After another 15 minutes or so the beans were nicely soft, and I turned off the heat and left everything to infuse.

About 15 minutes before my sausages were ready to serve, I fished out and discarded the Chipotles and slowly warmed up the beans, before decanting them into individual miniature casserole dishes for serving. I did this for two reasons - to enhance their appearance, and to avoid making the whole dish too sloppy.

Here's the finished bean dish - thick, gloopy, smoky and thoroughly "unctuous". With a couple of corn tortillas this would be a meal in itself.

The final part of the meal was plain Basmati rice. I won't insult your intelligence by telling you how to cook that. I'll simply say - we use an electric rice-cooker and get perfect results every time.

OK, so I believe there was something in that meal for both vegetarians and non-vegetarians...

Red, red wine, stay close to meeee...

[With all due deference to Bob Marley and UB40]

No actually this is not wine, though you could be forgiven for thinking it was...

This is my Sloe Gin. It's the Cabernet Sauvignon version, you know! :-) The sloes I picked this year were probably the best I have ever had. I'll be going back to the same spot next year, and I'm not letting on where it is! I also think that freezing them before use has helped. It seems to break down the flesh so that the juice comes out better.

It looks pretty good to me. It's probably mature enough to drink now. I think I will filter and re-bottle it next weekend.  I noticed recently that good Sloe Gin is selling at nearly £30 a bottle in the supermarkets, which is more than a decent Single Malt whisky. Crazy!

Here's another red thing I wanted to show you. (Yes, I know it has absolutely nothing to do with Sloe Gin except that it is a similar colour). It's one of my red chicories. This type - whose name I do not know - has not hearted-up as tightly as the "Firestorm" variety did, but it's looking nice nonetheless, covered in raindrops and lit by the weak December sunshine.

Since I'm obviously on a red theme today, maybe I should show you my latest batch of chillis, which I harvested yesterday...they're mostly red.



I'm particularly pleased with the two "Cherry Bomb" ones at bottom right of this photo. The biggest one is about the size of a golf ball.

We have had a couple of frosty mornings now, and despite the protection of the little plastic greenhouses, the chillis plants are looking a bit sorry for themselves, so I picked these fruits to finish ripening indoors, before I lose them to the weather. The completely green "Serrano" ones will probably go in the freezer just as they are.

Just to complete my set of "red things", I feel I must include a picture of the soup I made for lunch today - Chickpea and Chorizo (with tomatoes and chillis, you'll note...)

I'm not including a recipe for this one, which was done using store-cupboard ingredients and made in true bung-it style: a few slices of Chorizo from the freezer, an onion and a leek, a tin each of chickpeas and chopped tomatoes; half a teaspoon of dried oregano, half a teaspoon of chilli flakes, a small fresh chilli for garnish, a spoonful of stock powder and some water.

And, yes, it was as good as it looks!

Home-made skinless sausages

Inspired by that book about sausages that Jane won a few days ago ["Sausages" by Paul Gayler], I decided to make a meal centred around some home-made sausages, made with Paul's technique for skinless sausages cooked in clingfilm.

I bought some pork shoulder (about 500g) from my local butcher, and got him to mince it for me. I then marinated it for a few hours with some flavouring ingredients: Fennel seed, oregano, garlic, salt, pepper, and a spoonful of my own home-made Chilli Relish.

Later, I added a small amount of breadcumbs (Paul recommends not more than 10% of your mixture), formed the mixture into roughly sausage-shaped pieces and rolled them up in clingfilm, which I then knotted at each end.

I then cooked the sausages for ten minutes in a steamer, over a pan of boiling water. This firmed them up enough for me to be able to slice them, although they were not yet fully cooked through.

I allowed the sausages to cool a bit before removing the clingfilm. Be careful here, because a fair bit of fatty liquid comes out! I then sliced the sausages into 2cm rings, and fried them in a little low-calorie cooking spray (PAM). I'm sure you could grill them if you prefer to lose a bit more of the fat.

Here they are frying...

I like my sausages "Well done", so I cooked them until there were lots of brown crispy bits on each surface.

I served the sausages with basmati rice, stir-fried Cavolo Nero and beans in Chipotle and tomato sauce, but I'm planning to write about the accompaniments separately to avoid making this post too long...

Here's the finished article then:-

Our verdict: really tasty, (largely due to starting with good quality meat I expect) and comparitively easy to make.

One observation though: making skinless sausages does produce a drier texture, since a lot of the juice is lost when you remove the clingfilm, but actually this may be a good thing since a lot of that "juice" is actually fat which is probably best discarded anyway!

P.S. Some more good news - there was pleny left over to have for lunch the next day, served cold with pickled onions, onion marmalade and a sliced tomato.

Raindrops

For some reason this piece of  "poetry" has been going through my mind today.

"Whether the weather be wet, or whether the weather be fine, whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot, we'll weather the weather, whether we like it or not."

Well, in the UK we have had a very strange Autumn. This time last year our temperatures were about 30 degrees cooler than they are now! (And that's Celsius, not Fahrenheit.) We have had very little rain, and few of the usual Autumn gales. Yes, I know this is a generalisation, because some parts of the UK have had worse weather than others (Shaheen? Elaine?), but I'm writing about Fleet, which is about 35 miles South of London.

Having been away from home for a few days on business, I wanted a good look round the garden on Friday morning. It had rained during the night, and unusually, everything was dripping wet. I couldn't resist taking some "raindrop" photos...



There was a frost too, as evidenced by this complex pattern on the waterproof cover over the barbecue:

I keep thinking there's not much to photograph in the garden at present - but I think it's just that I need to look a bit closer than at some other times of the year.

Christmas decorations of a different sort

Who needs man-made baubles for their Christmas tree when you can have these...?

They are "Cherry Bomb" chillis.

Ok, so you don't like them; then what about these?

No self-respecting Chilli-Head can afford to be without a set of these!

My friend James from Chilli Pepper Heaven is also a devotee of the chilli lights, and would like anyone who uses them to send him a photo, which I think he will publish on his blog, so why not visit his site and find out more?

Sausage Souflette

Jane has won another cookery book (as if we didn't have enough already!). Actually I'm not complaining, because it is a lovely book. It is written by Paul Gayler (published by Jacqui Small), and is called simply "Sausages".

Paul's book covers a whole range of sausage-related topics, including how to buy them, how to make them, and how to cook them, with a bit of history thrown in for good measure. The book is lavishly illustrated with some amazing photos by Will Heap. Recipes and pictures are both truly inspirational, and we set-to to make a dish from this book only the day after it arrived. Actually, it's arrival was nicely timed, because only the day before we had bought a pound of lovely pork chipolatas (from a real butcher, not a supermarket), and we had been wondering about the best way to use them.

The book has a very wide range of recipe styles, from the traditional British "Bangers and Mash with Onion Gravy" right through to "Indian Sausage Masala", so it was hard to decide, but eventually we opted for "Sausage, Portobello Mushroom and Winter Root Soufflette".

This dish has red-wine-braised sausages and shallots topped with a light Cottage Pie-style topping made with Parsnips and Swede.

We used some of my home-grown Parsnips in the topping, and served the dish with my own Purple Sprouting Broccoli as an accompaniment too.

This is Jane's interpretation of the recipe:- lovely light, tasty souffle-style topping with rich meaty sausages in a winey, onioney gravy underneath.



Served with broccoli and Charlotte potatoes...

Although this was probably the most washing-up-intensive dish EVER, it was really nice to eat! I'm looking forward to more recipes from this book. I might even have a go at Paul Gayler's way of making skinless sausages (partly cooked in clingfilm before grilling / frying)...