Tag: thyme

Turkey roll

As Christmas gets ever closer, if you haven’t got your food sorted, there’s no need to panic – it might be time to cheat! And cheating doesn’t mean poorer quality when you buy from Tesco’s Finest range. Don’t spend time fiddling around with bacon and sausages – buy your pigs already in blankets! Roasties can be hit and miss – make sure yours are always a hit with Finest Goose Fat Roast Potatoes or follow our easy recipe. Add Christmas cake, pud and mince pies to your shopping list and make sure you keep our roast turkey with olde English chestnut stuffing recipe handy and you’re all set for the big day. Happy Christmas! Nichola Palmer – Recipes Editor, goodtoknow

A delicious, moist and tender beef fillet wrapped in crusty puff pastry. A red wine sauce accompanies the beef. Great for Sunday lunch or dinner celebrations

Serves: 12
Prep time: 45 mins
Cooking time: 1 hr 20 mins
Total time: 2 hrs 5 mins
Skill level: Bit of effort
Costs: Mid-price

Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1-1.5kg (2¼-3lb) beef fillet
60g (2oz) butter
2 shallots, peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
250g (8oz) chestnut mushrooms, finely chopped
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme leaves
250g tub mascarpone cheese
2 tbs wholegrain mustard
2 x 80g packs Parma ham
375g packet ready-rolled puff pastry
1 medium egg, beaten

For the sauce:

2 tbs olive oil
350g (12oz) shallots, peeled and chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
3 tbs tomato purée
2 tbs balsamic vinegar
200ml (7fl oz) red wine
300ml (½ pint) hot beef stock

This recipe is a great idea for an alternative to turkey for Christmas dinner.

Season beef well. Heat 30g (1oz) butter in a large frying pan over a medium heat and, when foaming, put the fillet in pan and brown it all over for 4-5 mins, taking care not to let the butter burn. Cool meat, and cover.
Meanwhile, melt rest of butter in the pan, add the chopped shallots and cook for 1 min. Add the garlic, mushrooms and thyme and fry for a few mins.
Beat the mascarpone with the mustard until smooth. Mix in mushroom mixture. Season.
Lay half the Parma ham slices on a large piece of cling film with slices overlapping. Spread half the mushroom mixture on one side of the beef, then turn it over on top of the Parma ham. Spread rest of mushroom mixture over top and sides of beef, then wrap the rest of the Parma ham slices round, overlapping on top of the mushroom mixture. Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge.
Heat the oven to Gas Mark 7 or 220°C. Unroll the pastry and cut off a third. Roll out the smaller piece to 5mm (¼in) thickness and 2.5cm (1in) bigger than the beef. Prick several times with a fork. Transfer to a baking sheet and bake for 12-15 mins or until brown and crisp. Allow to cool for a few mins, then trim to the size of the beef. Remove the cling film from the beef and place on the cooked pastry, brushing pastry edges with egg.
Roll out the rest of the pastry to a rectangle 25 x 30cm (10 x 12in). Cut 10 diagonal slashes in the pastry. Cover the beef with the pastry, tucking the ends under the cooked pastry base. Brush with beaten egg. Cook on a baking sheet for 40 mins for rare to medium-rare; 45 mins for medium. Leave to stand for 10 mins before serving.
For the red wine sauce: Heat the olive oil in a pan, and fry shallots until soft, about 10 mins. Add garlic and tomato purée and cook for 1 min, then add the balsamic vinegar. Bubble for 1 min, before adding red wine. Continue to boil for a few mins to reduce, then add the beef stock and boil for 10 mins more until reduced by a third. Serve with the beef. Freeze unbaked. Defrost overnight in the fridge. Cook as above.

By Woman’s Weekly

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Gordon Ramsay’s Herb Crusted Rack of Lamb ? F Word Series One

Gordon Ramsay made this tasty looking rack of lamb on the first episode of the first season of The F Word^[1]. Like many of Gordon’s recipes, the primary herb ingredients are rosemary, thyme and garlic. This is sure to be a scrumptious meal for fans of Chef Ramsay’s cooking.

Ingredients for the Lamb:

2 large racks of Lamb cut in half with 3 bones per serving
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil

Ingredients for the Crust:

4 slices of stale bread made into crumbs.
7 Tbs. grated parmesan (roughly 1/2 a cup)
Sprig parsley
Sprig thyme
Sprig coriander
Sprig rosemary
2 tablespoons English mustard (or sub with dijon)
splash of olive oil

Preparing the Lamb:

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. It should actually be 392 degrees, but don’t worry about getting that technical unless you have a digital oven.

Place lamb on cutting board fat side up. Lightly score the fat layer with a sharp knife. Next, generously sprinkle the lamb with salt and pepper. Mop up the excess seasoning with the rack of lamb, ensuring it’s thoroughly coated.

Heat some olive oil in an oven safe pan. Seal the lamb by holding each side in the oil long enough to develop color (careful not to burn your hands). Gordon Ramsay says, “it’s simple mathematics, no color, equals no taste”. Quite simple indeed! Make sure you brown that lamb.

Transfer the pan with the lamb into the oven and bake for 7-8 minutes. Prepare the crust while the lamb is cooking.

Preparing the Crust:

Place all of the ingredients for the crust except the mustard into a blender and pulse several times until it looks nice and green. Make sure you don’t over do it with the olive oil, just a splash.

Pour the mixture into a deep dish (bowl or plate) and set aside.

Putting it All Together:

Remove the lamb from the oven and brush generously with mustard. Dip the lamb into the crust mixture coating it completely. Dip several times to ensure an even coating. Allow meat to rest for a bit.

Place it back into the oven for 3-4 minutes when you’re ready to serve.

Gordon serves the lamb with potatoes boulangère and courgettes provençal, but you can serve with anything you find fitting. I’ll gladly post the recipe for the side dishes if someone wants it. Just ask for it in a comment.

Let me know how this recipe turns out for you.

EDIT: I’ve added one of the side dishes, Gordon Ramsay’s Potatoes Boulangère^[2]. I will add the other soon and update this post with it’s link.

References

^{^} F Word (www.amazon.com)
^{^} Gordon Ramsay’s Potatoes Boulangère (gordon-ramsay-recipe.com)

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Pot-roast partridge with savoy cabbage

I felt so guilty all of yesterday for the carpet disaster that I set about making a very elaborate partridge thing for my husband’s dinner, using the two partridge he had bought on an impulse at the Farmer’s Market the previous Saturday.

This was a slightly over the top thing to have on a cold November weeknight but I think my husband liked it – though I had a sudden and unexpected massive attack of nausea at 7.45pm so couldn’t eat a thing.

This would be very good for a dinner party – everyone gets their own partridge and the sides are straightforward and easy to do in bulk. I’m sure you could do this with quail, as well. Or pheasant? Or are pheasant huge?

Pot-roast partridge with Savoy cabbage

For the partridge

2 partridge
1 small savoy cabbage
2 carrots
1 medium onion
2 bay leaves
4 sage leaves
4 sticks thyme, leaves picked off
2 sticks celery
1 glass white wine
1 pint chicken stock

For the cabbage
(you do not have to have cabbage with this. Maybe some lovely mash instead, or a cauliflower cheese?)

1 cabbage
1 small onion
4 rashers streaky bacon
1 tbsp cream if you have it

1 In a casserole pan with a lid, melt some oil and butter and then brown the partridge all over. Do this quite thoroughly – I’d say for about 6 minutes in total. Once browned, remove the birds to a plate and take the casserole pan off the heat.

2 Now make your mirepoix. Don’t panic! I will explain what this is.

A mirepoix is a mound of very finely-chopped onion, celery and carrot, (although there are variations on this), which makes up the base of a lot of French sauces and soups. This is one of the reasons to own an incredibly expensive, very sharp knife from the likes of Global. Ask for one for Christmas! (I am not on commission)

Chopping up carrot and celery very small is easy enough, but I always struggle with onion. What I tend to do is try my best and then when it all starts going to piss and slipping about everywhere, I just go over it with my knife in a levering motion to get the rest really small. Not what Jamie would do BUT HE’S NOT HERE 🙁

Anyway so that is a mirepoix. Make one of these and then add to it your bay leaves, thyme leave and torn sage leaves.

This is a mirepoix. The veg could stand to be even smaller but I am a bit ham-fisted.

3 Add the mirepoix to the recently-vacated casserole pan and cook this over a medium flame for 4 minutes. I chose to stir this a lot to stop the onions from catching and it was a good idea. After this time, add your glass of white wine and turn the heat up so that it all bubbles down to just a thin pool of liquid at the bottom of your casserole. This takes a few minutes.

Now add your stock – it really must be decent stock, not from a cube – and put the partridge back in. Put the casserole with a lid on in a 180C oven.

The recipe I followed, although good, left the partidge rather scarily underdone as it only specified a 15 min cooking time. So if I were to do this again I would do 15 min with the lid on and then 10 mins with the lid off. Another benefit of this is that partridge can have an unfortunate greyish tinge to the skin and taking the lid off allows the top to brown, which is so important for presentation. And, because this is a pot-roast, you don’t have to worry about the partridge drying out because it is protected by the surrounding liquid.

4 While the partridge is cooking, shred the savoy cabbage and chop up the onion and bacon. Sweat the onion for a few minutes in some butter and oil and then add the bacon. Cook this for about four minutes and then add the cabbage. Put a lid on and leave for another four minutes. I was not happy about leaving this with so little liquid so added a ladleful from the partridge cooking sauce. In all I reckon I cooked the cabbage for about 10 minutes. The recommended 4 minutes just left it raw and crunchy. I finished the cabbage with some cream I had knocking about.

4 Once the partridge is done, remove and put somewhere to rest and keep warm. Put the casserole pan back on the hob and give it a good boil to reduce the sauce. Season generously with salt and pepper after it has reduced.

5 Serve with a pile of cabbage, a partridge (on or off the bone, up to you) and the cooking sauce.