Recipe XL - Venison in Guinness

To celebrate my 40th recipe, and the fact that it's Yule, I would like to present my own recipe. Most things have already been done before, so at the risk of coming across like the man who goes to a desert island and invents the wheel, I would just say that I found some general ideas on the Net, but adapted them to my own preferences. This meal is for my three guests today. I was wondering what to call it - "Deer Raymond" seemed a bit too pretentious. So I settled on "Deer in Beer", and I hope you like it.

Ingredients:
1kg cubed venison
2 bottles of Guinness
A glass of Port wine
5 small red onions, quartered or 7 shallots, halved
A handful of porcini mushrooms
5 cloves of garlic (crushed and chopped)
A handful of raisins and/or sultanas
2 Braeburn apples, chopped (leave the skin on - only chop one apple, a the other one is needed the next day)
At least a tablespoon of cinnamon
20 whole black peppercorns
7-10 crushed peppercorns
1 bay leaf
Some salt

Instructions:
Put the venison in a large bowl. Sprinkle a handful of salt onto it and then add the crushed peppercorns. Mix together well with a spoon. Put a tablespoon of cinnamon into the mixture and again, stir well. Add the onions (or shallots) and one of the apples, the dried fruit and the whole peppercorns and mix them all in. Very carefully, pour one of the bottles of Guinness and about two shot glasses of Port into your mixture. Put some clingfilm over the top and put it in the fridge overnight.



The next day, take it out of the fridge and set the venison on some kitchen paper to dry. Take some cinnamon and roast it in a rounded pan until it goes a little darker. Put it in a casserole dish to wait.



Fry some onion strips in butter and then add the venison for five minutes, constantly turning, to seal it.



Put part of the venison in the casserole dish. Add some of the ingredients from the marinade then the rest of the venison, followed by the last of the marinade, so they are nicely mixed in. Give it a stir.



In a very little oil, fry the other apple and the garlic for a couple of minutes maximum, constantly turning.



Pour over some more fresh Guinness until it covers the rest of the ingredients, cover the pot and cook for about two hours.



Serve with potatoes, red cabbage and Brussels sprouts.

Recipe XXIX - Tomato Ragú à la Bolognese with Tagliatelle

Italian food is always tricky to make, because Italians will never say it's the right recipe. It wasn't done by an Italian in an Italian way using Italian products. Well, I don't really care - it's like a Skoda Fabia: it has a Volkswagen engine, it was designed by Germans and parts of it were made in far-flung places like Ukraine and Spain, but nobody would dare call the Skoda anything but Czech. The fact Italians can talk so passionately about following the rules in the kitchen, yet wouldn't even slow down for an old lady crossing at a red traffic light outside a police station is really showing where their priorities lie.
This recipe is just a theme on a variation, a ragú-like dish which anyone whose surname doesn't end in "-ini" or "-ossi" can identify with, even if Italians themselves don't. And any entire nation who votes for a corrupt, sex-mad TV mogul as Prime Minister TWICE has absolutely no right to criticise the following recipe!




Ingredients:
500g minced beef
5 cloves of garlic, crushed under a wide knife and diced
10 leaves of fresh basil, chopped
7 peppercorns, crushed in a pestle & mortar
7 mushrooms
1/3 of a large courgette, sliced and quartered
2 onions, diced
1 red or green pepper, diced
A large glass of red wine
A tin of diced tomatoes or a carton of passata
Grated cheese (see after the recipe)


Instructions:
Take a bowl and put in the minced beef. Take a large pinch of salt, the chopped basil, the crushed pepper and the crushed garlic, and with a fork mix the ingredients up until they are well integrated.



Put them in a frying pan with olive oil and move about until the red changes to brown.
In a separate frying pan, put in the onions and red pepper; allow them to sweat and then add some more olive oil before you put in the courgette and the mushrooms, because they suck in the oil.



After about 5 minutes, add the mince from the other frying pan, the wine (see the photo below for the amount of wine I dared to use!) and the tomatoes, and cook on a medium heat for 45 minutes.



Serve with pasta and a generous portion of cheese.



Another thing I would like to mention, is that Cheddar is an ideal accompaniment to Bolognese. It has much less pungency about it than Parmigiano and blends in so well. I think Cheddar is one of the most underrated cheeses, and gets a bad reputation from its processed namesakes, used in American fast food *the author spits*.
If any Italians criticise your choice of cheese, let them know - it is better to have imagination and mix & match ingredients than to slavishly follow a recipe to the letter, in case Mamma would disapprove!

Recipe XX - Paella Del Norte

When I set out to make a paella, I decided not to call it anything Spanish - the Mediterraneans are so fastidious when it comes to food that naming it anything other than something new was never going to happen. They are all about sun, sea and food, but when it comes to substance, forget it. For example, I would like to draw your attention to the cooking instructions written
on the side of the rice packet I bought in Luxembourg:


It says:
"1. To warm up 600cl of meat soup and 1/3 of Paella seasoning(PDS) until Bowling. Soon to extinguish fire. 2. To place in a paella pan, 4 spoonfuls of olive oil, 250 g of chicken (pieces), 250 g pork ribds, 1/2 red pepper stripes, fry during 5 minutes until they are gilded and to add 1 tomato grated, to continue frying 4-5 min all the ingredients together.
3. Add 200g, fry 1 minute, add the broth and to cook during 10 strong fire min, 5-6 min to average fire. To extinguish and to let rest 5 min (cover the paella pan with a rag).
Upon not having a copy of the Sun, I settled for a glass lid. Anyway, here's my version:

Ingredients:
300g paella rice
4 chicken thighs
3 tomatoes (quartered)
1 pepper (sliced into strips)
1 courgette
1 onion
Some frozen peas
500ml chicken stock
Some chives
Fresh herbs (oregano, thyme, etc...)
Pepper
Salt
White wine (or a squeezed lemon)



Instructions:
Cut up the vegetables into different shaped pieces. To cut a courgette into quarters in less than 2 minutes, firstly cut it lengthways twice to make a cross-shape, stopping a centimetre from the end. Then put it on its side and cut it into thin pieces (see photo).



Put the chicken into a paellera or wide frying pan, put salt over it and fry gently until sealed. Add the vegetables (not the tomatoes, peas or herbs) and continue frying for a further five to ten minutes, until they are nicely sweating but not soft.



Put the paella rice in for a long minute to soak up some of the oil. Add the tomatoes, and put a lid on to allow the juices to run. A couple of minutes into this stage you can add the stock, the peas and the herbs. Put more salt in, and add some white wine. I love to put a lot in because it complements the salty flavour of the meat and rice, but you can put as little as you like in.



By now the whole dish is bubbling away with all the juices and liquids, cooking the rice as it goes. Paella rice, contrary to most people's expectations, takes a relatively short time to boil, only 15 minutes. So once those 15 minutes since you added the rice are up, the rest is letting the dish mix in and acquire flavour. Some like to wait until the juices have been absorbed, and some like there to be
something runny. That's the reason for the lid - it is a harmless way for the juices to absorb.




Other notes:
Serve preferably outdoors.

A bottle of sweet wine from Moravia or Alsace will go splendidly with it!