It's slow cooker season

.. well, almost.  It's definitely getting colder.
I love my slow cooker in winter.  It cooks stuff while I'm not home.  Beautiful, tender, meaty stuff.

Lamb shanks are delicious, and surprisingly easy.  They have had a bit of a surge in popularity lately, so I tend to wait until they're on special or they can be pricey!
Just throw the following into your slow cooker: 2-4 lamb shanks (one per person), one large onion (diced and browned in a frypan with a little oil first), 2-3 carrots (cut in half), 2 tsp crushed garlic, 2 Tbsp tomato paste, a few shakes (about 1 Tbsp) of worchestershire sauce and a couple of sprigs of thyme.  Pour over 1 cup of stock (I use vegetable stock, but beef works fine, too.)

Sit it on the cold stovetop, and turn the extractor fan on.  (Trust me, the fan is the easiest way to stop the whole house smelling like casserole for a week.)  Pop the lid on, switch on, low setting, for 4-6 hours.  Walk away.  Stir once if you need to, but the shanks really won't mind if you just leave them.
While you're off doing something else, this happens:

It's a beautiful thing.  The meat is tender, and falls away from the bone.  The juices have all run together to make a delicious gravy.  I'm getting hungry all over again just thinking about how this smells.

Serve with green veges, and mashed potato.

Venison pie

My brother is very proud of his ability to transform from city slicker to bushman on weekends, and we all tell him he's very clever when he shoots a stag (a.k.a. bambi's daddy), because he typically turns up shortly afterward on the doorstep with back steaks, and sausages, and casserole meat. And a beard, usually, but I try not to judge.
Casserole meat is perfect for pie.  Venison casserole meat is especially good for pie.

I love pie for a number of reasons, but mostly because it's really easy, and really really tasty!
First, the meat.  Cut 1kg of venison into a rough (appprox 5cm) dice.  Shake it around in a bag with about 3 Tbsp flour, and 1 Tbsp paprika (I used smoked, but plain old everyday paprika is fine), until it's coated.  Do this in batches so there's room to shake it!

Brown the meat in a frypan on high heat, with a little oil.  Again, do this in batches so that the meat is in a single layer.  The aim is not to cook the meat, just to seal it and add a little flavour when it browns.

Transfer the browned meat to a slow cooker**, and add the following:

• 2 carrots (diced)
• 1 leek (diced)
• 1-2 cups button mushrooms
• 2 medium onions, diced and browned (always brown onion before slow cooking.  Trust me, the difference to flavour is huge). 
• 4 cloves of garlic (crushed)
• 2 Tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tsp red wine vinegar
• 1 cup of goood pinot noir
• 4 rashers of bacon (cut into small pieces).

Now for my favourite part.  Turn the slow cooker** to HIGH for 30 minutes to get it cranking, then drop it back to LOW and find something else to do for 4 hours.  I watched a football game in the sun, it was good.

To turn a casserole into a pie, pre-heat oven to 220C.  Grab a sheet of pre-prepared puff pastry, and leave on the bench for 10 minutes to defrost (cover with a damp tea-towel to stop it drying out).
Transfer the casserole from the slow-cooker to your pie dish(try to resist the urge to eat it all straight away - again, you're going to have to trust me, but everything is better with pastry.  This will be worth the wait.).  Cover with the pastry sheet, trimming if you need to.  Use a sharp knife to make a couple of small steam vents, or go all out and carve a stag's head if you're feeling fancy.  I was feeling fancy.  Brush with milk, or beaten egg, and pop into the oven for about 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Don't spend too much time carving pretty pictures into the pastry, you can't really see them without concentrating!

Enjoy.  Preferably with more pinot noir.  And brussels sprouts if you can handle it.

**If you don't have a slow cooker, add one and a half cup of wine, and simmer for an hour or two on low heat, either on the stovetop, or in the oven.  Or buy a slow cooker - with winter coming, I'll be posting lots of slow cooker recipes!

I feel like chicken and chips

Driving home from work, we managed to reach agreement on dinner: chicken drumsticks, with a request for "crunchy, please".  I felt like potatoes, so threw this together:

Crunchy chicken, with homegrown Maori heirloom potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower.  Oh, and cheese sauce because when you cook, you get to make whatever you feel like eating and I felt like cheese sauce.  No idea why.

On this side of the plate are the potatoes.  Chop roughly into equal-sized pieces (so they cook evenly).  Most of these are just cut in half because they were the small ones, left at the bottom of the bin.

Coat with flour and spray lightly with oil.  Spread on a baking tray lined with baking paper.

Next, the chicken:

 

Note that to get a crunchy coating, you need to crumb properly - none of the cheating you may have seen earlier!
Simply coat in flour, with a little salt and pepper to season (I just throw the whole lot in a plastic bag, and shake).  Dip in beaten egg, then breadcrumbs.


Then, just throw the whole lot into the oven, uncovered, for about 20 minutes (or until the potatoes are browned, and the chicken is cooked through - juices should run clear.)  Sprinkle the potatoes with garlic salt to serve.
Roughly 30-45 minutes from fridge to plate.  Easy.

Variations on a theme

Still craving seafood, so when I saw cockles (NZ little-necked clams) at the supermarket this week it was hard to resist!  As I made this, I realised how similar this recipe is to the mussel recipe I posted last week.  Once you know a few basic techniques, and understand flavours, you can mix and match pretty easily.. as I did here to make a quick seafood pasta:

 

The main difference between mussels and clams is that the latter have a tendency to hold sand.  Rest in a bucket of cold water while you prep, to encourage them to spit some of it out! (not as important if they've been sitting in the spray bin at the supermarket).  This also means you don't really want to use the cooking fluid as your sauce, unless you like a lot of texture (and personally, I gave up eating sand as a toddler!).
Steam the clams in a saucepan with a little white wine (NZ sauvignon blanc is beautiful with shellfish), using the same technique as for the mussels, but keep an eye on them as they'll open much faster.
I usually multi-task, and at the same time boil pasta and brown terakihi fillets to pad out the dish!

Yes, I left the stalks on the onions and the dirt on the garlic so you'd notice they were home-grown!

In a separate pan, soften half an onion (finely diced) and a clove of garlic (crushed).  Add cream, grated parmesan, and the zest and juice of one lemon.
Add about a cup of peas (frozen), and a few handfuls of shop-bought pasta (I used spinach and ricotta), and the terakihi.  Shell the clams into the sauce (save a couple of shells if you are taking photos, or trying to look fancy).  Decant a little of the cooking fluid to thin and flavour the sauce (just try and leave the sand behind!)  Stir it all up, and voila:

 

The hard work is in the multi-tasking.  Otherwise, this is so easy it should be cheating.

 
This post was entered into the "Grow Your Own" roundup, created by Andrea's Recipes and hosted this month by House of Annie. 

Mmmmmm.. Mussels

It doesn't get better than this:

 

Oh - sorry - I meant this:

You have to be quick around here!!
I grew up with shellfish, and have fond memories of standing in a crowd around the BBQ hotplate after a day at the beach, scoffing cockles and pipi straight from the shells as fast as they would open!  My tastes haven't changed, but today I can get beautiful, fresh green-lipped mussels from the supermarket now, at a minute's notice, and without getting wet!!

This is my favourite lunch or dinner:

Prepare the mussels by removing beards (just pull), and give a quick scrub and rinse under cold water.  Never use mussels that smell bad, or that don't close when tapped sharply with the back of a knife.  

Don't ask me how many mussels you need: I can eat 1kg in a sitting, but I think most people go for about a dozen per person.  I don't know where they get their willpower.  I'll let you figure out where you sit on that scale, just make sure you have a big enough saucepan!

Finely chop a small onion, and a clove of garlic.  Throw in a handful of other veges at the same time to make this feel healthy if you're prone to guilt trips about meals based almost entirely on cream, butter, and meat!

In a large saucepan, melt a tablespoon of butter, and add onion.  Stir until softened.

Stir through garlic and vegetables, then add just enough white wine (or chicken stock if you're stuck) to cover the base of the pan.  Throw the mussels on top, and cover.
Walk away for about 5 minutes, leaving the pan on medium heat, and let the steam work its magic.  Give the pan a bit of a shake from time to time if you have OCD, and tell yourself that this makes the mussels cook evenly, even though it doesn't really make any difference.
When they start opening, lift them out with tongs into a bowl for serving (careful, they'll be hot, and steam is nasty stuff)

Keep shaking them around (or watch patiently if you can!) until they all open.  Discard any mussels which don't open after a reasonable period of time.
Now, the good bit.  Turn off the heat, and pour in about 1/4 cup of cream.  Trust me on this one, you don't want to skip this step.

Stir to mix, then pour the sauce (and veges) over your bowl of mussels.

Serve immediately, with bread and butter, forks, a big pile of napkins, and a spare bowl for empty shells.

Butter your bread and dip it in the sauce.  It will ruin you.


DISCLAIMER: (If you're not NZ-based) These are New Zealand green-lipped mussels (you can tell by the green lip - see?)

This recipe will need adapting if you're using the small varieties of mussel found overseas (they'll cook much faster, and if my experience is worth anything, they'll be tough and taste like old boots no matter what you do with them)..  Really, I'm sorry if you can't get NZ mussels.  You should be too, you're missing out.. 

More potatoes

I dug the last of the potatoes on Friday night - and they were in the pot within about 20 minutes!  Nothing beats freshly dug spuds.

These are Maori heirloom varieties Urenika (or tutae kuri) and Kowiniwini (also creatively named purple-and-cream!), and both taste fantastic!  Our local farmers market often has both varieties, and the friendly stallholder is usually more than happy for me to pick out the small ones (I love the 'bite') which others avoid!  I buy them every time I see them, and when the last couple decided to sprout last year, I decided it was time to grow my own!
I used the same technique as for my Jersey Bennes, with one potato per bag.  This lovely pile of spuds started out as just three.

Unlike anything I've seen before, Urenika is purple the whole way through (!), and holds its colour when cooked.

I imagine this might be a good option for fussy children: mashed, these look like Play-Doh!