Pigeons with red wine sauce

Yesterday Wil and I were incredibly lucky at Galerie Lafayette. The woman in the meat section was kind of confused and sold us two pigeons for the price of two corn-fed chicken. Sounds weird? Yeah, that's what we thought as well, when we went to a market a couple of weeks ago where they wanted to sell us two tiny pigeons for almost 30€. Pigeons and doves, or so-called squab (for less association issues), seem to be ridiculously expensive. Don't get me wrong, I'm not considering eating those sick and scruffy looking city pigeons. But pigeons are everywhere on the countryside and should be quite easy prey. I don't understand why they have to be more expensive than corn-fed chicken...Well, the ones you buy are most often bred. So that may be why. But still...

Anyways. We got two for less than 9 bucks. So we went home, filleted the breasts and legs and removed hearts and livers from the carcasses.

From the carcasses, wings and organs we made a stock. We browned the carcasses and wings in a big pot with some olive oil and deglazed them with 250ml red wine. We then added water and some leftover game stock until everything was covered by liquid, added the chopped up organs as well as 1tsp dried thyme, 2 rosemary twigs, 2 juniper berries, 2 bay leaves, 1 big crushed garlic clove and a dash of nutmeg, pepper and all-spice and let it simmer for 60 minutes with lid closed.

We then strained everything to separate the stock from the bones and spices.

Afterwards we reduced the stock to make a sauce to serve with the pigeons. We didn't use all of the stock for it. That would have been to much. A third of the total amount should be enough. After reducing I seasoned it with salt and for a bit of sweetness added 1/2 to 1 tsp of red currant jelly.

To thicken the sauce and in order to make it richer (pigeon meat is very lean) I also stirred in some small ice-cold cubes of butter in the end.

While making the sauce we fired up our cast iron pan to medium heat with 1 tbsp of olive oil two rosemary twigs and another slightly crushed garlic clove. Once the oil was hot enough we placed the breasts and the legs in the pan and fried them for a total of 5-6 minutes; 3 minutes on the skin side to give it a nice sear and 2 to 3 minutes from the other side.

It's important that the meat is still medium rare. Otherwise the meat gets too tough. In France they even it their pigeons raw.

Let the breasts and legs rest for another 5-10 minutes before serving. We wrapped ours in aluminium foil for that. 

Serve with the sauce and pair of heavy red wine. The meat of pigeons is a bit like duck meat, just with less fat. It's very dark in color and has a gamey and quite organy flavor to it..

PS: We had chive and sour cream mashed potatoes with it and a glass of French Malbec.

PPS: I'm sorry for the crappy photos. Unfortunately my beloved camera broke and therefore iPhone it is for now...

Guinness Pie (New York Times/Jamie Oliver)

Hopefully this is going to be the last wintery-cold weather recipe for the next six months at least.

Don't get me wrong. This pie tastes delicious. But I'm so looking forward to spring and seasonal food such as asparagus, strawberries, peaches, rasberries, arugula etc...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I haven't been cooking that much lately, or at least not that much new or worth posting. But luckily I have a very ambitious fiance in Wil, at least when it comes to all kinds of meat dishes. He is currently curing his third bacon (which we are going to smoke afterwards), made pork rillettes and his own trotter gear (which is part of this guiness pie recipe, as well).

And yes, Wil also prepared this Guinness Pie, which he found here in the New York Times.

He altered the original recipe a little bit, but, of course, I will provide you with the info (in red) of what he did different and how it affected the dish in the end.

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons butter

2 large red onions, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 carrots, peeled and chopped

2 ribs celery, chopped

- Wil used celeriac instead of celery, and added 3 medium potatoes, 1 large parsnip, 2 medium black radishes and 1 small violet turnip, and 1 small leek all chopped in bite-sized cubes and pieces.

10 mushrooms, trimmed and sliced

- Wil used dried wild mushrooms instead. They are much more flavorful than fresh cremini mushrooms or portobellos

3 pounds brisket (preferably second-cut) or stew meat, chopped into bite-size pieces

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons flour

1 sprig rosemary

About 4 cups (2 cans) Guinness or other stout

1 cup trotter gear (recipe to come!) or 8 ounces freshly grated Cheddar

For the pastry:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour  

- Wil used whole wheat flour, which gave the pie crust a much heartier flavor.

2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt 

- he added a pinch of sugar and a dash of cinnamon to the dough, to make it less bland.

1/2 cup (1 stick) very cold unsalted butter, diced

1 egg yolk, lightly beaten.

 Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2. In a large, ovenproof pan fitted with a lid, heat 2 tablespoons of the butter over medium-low heat. Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until soft, about 10 minutes.

3. Add the carrots, celery/celeriac, potatos, parsnip, radishes, turnip, dried mushrooms and remaining 2 tablespoons butter and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms are dark in color and the moisture released by them has evaporated, about 15 minutes (that doesn't count for the dried mushrooms, of course!).

4. Season the beef pieces all over with salt and pepper. Add the beef, flour (Wil coated the meat in the flour) and rosemary to the pan and cook/brown over high heat, stirring often, for about 5 minutes.

5. Add enough Guinness to just cover the beef. Cover the pan and put it in the oven for 1 1/2 hours. Remove from the oven and stir. If using trotter gear, stir it in now (Wil went a little heavier on the trotter gear. It's just too good and rich!). Return to the oven and cook for 1 hour more. If it remains thin, set the pan over medium-low heat, remove the lid and reduce the liquid. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If using Cheddar, fold in about half.

6. While the stew is cooking, prepare the pastry: sift together the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Using a pastry cutter or your hands, quickly work the butter into the dough until it is the texture of coarse meal. Add ice water, a splash at a time, until a firm dough forms. Wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

7. Place the dough between two sheets of plastic wrap and, using a rolling pin, roll to the thickness of a computer mouse pad. Pour the stew into an 8-inch-square, 2-inch-high Pyrex dish or a deep 9-inch pie pan. If using Cheddar, scatter the remaining cheese across the top. Place the dough on top of the pie and pinch it closed around the edges using the tines of a fork, then slash the center lightly with a knife. Brush with the egg yolk, place on a baking sheet and bake for 45 minutes, or until the pastry is puffy and golden.  

Serves 6. 

The original stew was adapted from Jamie Oliver; the original pastry was adapted from Fergus Henderson.

Notes: 

Feel free to go heavy on the spices and seasoning. If you decide to use paprika, that's great and will definitely be a good fit. But please remember that this will give your British stew certainly a Hungarian twist. That's not bad at all. But if you want to keep it British you may better want to save the paprika for your next Gulasch. I would suggest, instead of using it here to rather find spices other than paprika to finish up your Guiness pie, even if this seems to be a bigger challenge.

Regarding the pie crust, I can say, that we are still trying to find the recipe for the perfectly soft but at the same time crunchy crust. The dough also should be flavorful, but not compete with the stew flavors either.

The whole wheat with some sugar, salt and cinnamon was an excellent decision. But the consistency was still a little bit too caky. We'll work on that and let you know how it goes...

River Gojee.

I don't know if it's cause I'm busy with wedding preparations and my two jobs or if I'm just annoyed by not being able to take nice photos of my food due to winter darkness. For some reason I just seem to be unable to write new blogposts. It's probably a combination of both.

But I'm optimistic that it will be getting better again in the near future, once I have more time and spring is approaching.

Since I don't have a recipe to share with you I would like to leave you with two recommendations today.

The first one is "River Cottage" a British TV show that aired at the end of the 90s beginning of the ne millenium. For those who don't know this show already: Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, a food writer and chef and journalist leaves the city and moves to Britain's countryside to live a self-sufficient life. He grows everything himself, gets livestock and, of course, cooks really nice meals from what he finds on his land and around it. It is very inspiring. Thanks to Carson and Erin for recommending this to us. We watched the whole trilogy "Escape to", "Return to" and "River Cottage Forever" within a couple of days. The newer episodes I don't like as much though. They get too Jamie Oliver, kind of...
Not that I have a problem with Jamie Oliver. But one is enough and I prefer the episodes where Hugh discovers a whole bunch of new things and is rather teaching us how to be self-sufficient rather than being a chef.

Anyway, watch it. It's great!
Here is a youtube-link:

My second recommendation is the NY based food site Gojee.com. From how I understood they pick really good foodblog writers and post their recipes on their website. I may be wrong though... But, at least there is a whole bunch of food writers who contribute recipes to the Gojee page.

However, the recipes divided by food and drinks look so delicious, and before browsing you can enter what you crave, what you dislike and what you have at home.

Go check it out: www.gojee.com
(you have to register)

Sea Salt Caramels With Bittersweet Chocolate

Whereas usually I bake cookies for christmas last christmas I decided to surprise my loved ones with homemade chocolates instead. I always thought the combination of caramel and salt is ingenious. Caramel simply tastes better with a dash of salt. 

So I decided to make chocolates with a salted-caramel filling and searched the internet for a good recipe.

This one here on About.com sounded quite promising, and I decided to give it a try.

Ok, I need to confess something here. I kind of messed the recipe up. But making caramel and chocolates can be quite tricky, and so it happened that I misread a few things and didn't pay proper attention. Mine turned out way too heavy and too salty. Otherwise they would have been delicious, I swear. But I will point out exactly where I did wrong so this won't be happening to you, as well. Yes, I will at some point make them again. And for all the family members who were wondering why I had decided to kill them with a butter and salt overdose: Sorry...it was so much work that I simply could not toss all these little "goodies". I really hope they weren't that bad....

Anyway, here we go!

You'll need:

320 ml / 1 1/3 cup heavy cream

400g / 2 cups granulated sugar

120ml / 1/2 cup light corn syrup (or rice syrup, which you can get in organic stores/Bio-supermarkets)

80ml / 1/3 cup honey

6 Tbsp (85g or 3oz!!!) cold butter, cut into small pieces 

- Mistake No.1: I used about 200g (2.5oz) butter...

1tsp vanilla extract

3tsp sea salt (fleur de sel) 

- Mistake No2: Only 2tsp go into the caramel, the 3rd one is for garnish

450g / 1lb bittersweet chocolate, chopped

Directions: 

Prepare an 8-inch baking pan by lining it with aluminum foil and spraying the foil with nonstick cooking spray.

Place the cream in a large saucepan over medium-high heat and bring it to a boil. Stir in the sugar, corn syrup and honey and stir until it begins to boil. Periodically wipe down the sides of the pan with a pastry brush dipped in water to prevent sugar crystals from forming.

the caramel already turned a little browner but needs to get way darker

Cook the caramel, stirring occasionally, until it reaches 257 degrees on a candy thermometer.                 

I didn't have a candy thermometer, and it still worked out fine. You just really have to pay attention. Never leave the pot alone or get distracted. It takes a while until the caramel turns brown. It takes another while until the caramel gets darker brown. But then everything goes really quick and before you know it you may end up with burnt caramel. A thermometer may be a help but it's all about how quickly you can pull the caramel off the heat.

I also read on David Lebovitz's blog that you should avoid stirring the caramel if you can. Only carefully scrape the bottom of the pot every once in a while to prevent the caramel from burning.

You can see here, how dark my caramel got. The yellow part is the massive amount of butter, I stirred in...

Remove the pan from the heat immediately and stir in the butter, vanilla, and 2 teaspoons of salt.

Pour into prepared pan and let set at room temperature until firm enough to cut.

I couldn't cut my caramel at all. It was way too soft.

Cut the caramel into small squares or strips with a chef’s knife.

That's why I pulled out little bits and formed them to chocolates.
Btw, you see those tiny brown spots? That just indicates that my caramel almost burned.
I guess I was lucky.

See, due to the fact that I used far too much butter my caramel was way to soft to be cut. I had to put the whole pan intothe freezer, then pull out some caramel balls with my hands, form them and again put them back into the freezer. otherwise they would have just melted away once the melted chocolate would have hit it...

Temper the chocolate and dip the caramels in the chocolate one at a time. Place them on a baking sheet covered with waxed paper or foil to set. While chocolate is still wet, sprinkle on the remaining salt and allow to set completely.

PS: Even though I messed up a bit here, I can only highly encourage everyone to try making these chocolates. They will be absolutely delicious, when done right and make a wonderful gift!

How to make the perfect bird (works guaranteed)!

Happy New Year everyone,

I'm back from my Christmas&New Years holiday break with a full sack of plenty of things I finally wanna post about. What held me back was not only the usual christmas madness, but also the fact that quite a few of my potential posts are about christmas presents I made and food I actually ate over christmas. So that's why I couldn't post it before.
After Christmas Wil and I also went away for a couple of days to a German island called Rügen to recover from those busy days (and to get rid off our extra holiday-pounds). We walked probably 10-15 km (that's 6-10 miles) per day, at least, went swimming (in a pool/waterpark) and ate lots of fish and good, good food paired with fabulous wines and drinks...

But back to Christmas. We spent it at my Mum's house this year and she made tons of good food. For Dec.26th my Mum and I prepared a goose. As you know from my previous post, I'm not that experienced with whole birds and my first attempt still turned out a bit dry. That's why I watched every step of my Mum and read the recipe thoroughly.

The secret is, surprise, surprise, SLOW-COOKING! We already knew this, right? So, I will need to get a proper oven at some point, that will allow me to reduce heat to lower than 150°C/302°F, or try the brining-method, next time.

But yeah, this here definitely works. My Mum found the recipe on some website, where over 150 people had commented how great this recipe is and how well it turned out (none of the comments were negative).
I'm sure you can cook any bird with this method perfectly. Depending on the size some just won't need as long as our goose.

We served it with German potato dumplings, red cabbage and green cale (the one that I made earlier)

The perfect bird (in this case goose) cooks as follows:

The night before

• Make sure it is completely defrosted (if you bought afrozen one) and all organs are removed. They usually come in a palstic bag inside the bird.
• maybe remove some quill and left-over feathers.
• rub the bird with salt from the outside and inside. You may wanna use more salt inside, so that the meat won't taste as bland in the end.
• Stuff the bird with whatever you like. I heard some fill the carcass with dried rice so that the bird blows up while cooking and looks all nice and round...well, I think I prefer good flavour. We stuffed our goose with quarters of onions and apples, prunes, and the roughly chopped organs, as well as some dried lovage (herb). With a goose you cannot really eat the stuffing afterwards, cause it is soaked in goose fat and really not that pleasant anymore. But it adds a nice flavour. With any other bird, except for maybe duck: Go for it! I always love the stuffing.
• Put the bird on a (deep) baking tray and bake at 180°C/356°F for about an hour.
• Turn down the heat to 80°C/176°F and cook the bird overnight for at least 7 hours. The first person that gets up in the morning gets to turn out the oven. I think we had it in for 9 hours in the end (the goose weighed 5.4kg).

The Bird

Day of goose dinner

• The goose can now stay in the cold oven until lunch/dinner, whatever. You only need to heat it up for about another 60minutes (not longer!) at 180°C/356°F before you want to eat.
• In order to make the skin nice and crsipy, resolve salt in some water and brush the the breast and legs with this mixture. You can also brush the bird with maple syrup, jam or honey for some sweetness. If you have a broiler, turn it on maximum heat and broil the bird for about 5minutes or until the skin has browned.
• Carve and serve with whatever side-dishes you like!

It was bigger than it looks here! It's a very big knife and fork....

Oh yeah, I forgot about the sauce!
Pour the drippings from the tray into a bowl. Wait a few seconds. The fat (and that's a lot with a goose) will separate and be on top (light-golden and almost clear) so that you can easily recognize it and with a spoon skim it off the rest (dark brown) that will be our sauce.
You may wanna mix in some plum jam (or maple syrup, honey etc) and red wine, as well as a tiny little bit of the stuffing. That way the sauce gets a bit thicker, as well. Just blend everything together with a hand blender until smooth and heat it up again. Season to taste if necessary.

Always happy carving

This really should work with any bird. A chicken or duck might not take that long. But really, there is not much that can go wrong with 80°C/176°F. It won't get hotter than that. The best indicator that it is fully cooked is when the meat comes off the leg bones...

Last but not least


Even though I thought the goose turned out pretty good and was delicious, my Mum still thought the breast was a little dryer than necessary.
So in the first hour at 180°C/356°F try to cook your bird upside down, the back up the breast is lying on the tray. For the slow-cook marathon you can turn it around again.

Ready for the feast. Oh I could eat this again, right now!

PS:

Don't forget the Schnaps afterwards. You will definitely need one after such a heavy meal. Espresso will work as well, of course...