Pheasant a l'orange

Recipe:    

4 wild pheasant breast (shot and dressed in Virginia, relatively buckshot free!)

1/2 a cup of red wine vinegar

3 cups of fresh orange juice

1 cup of chicken broth

2 cloves of garlic

1/2 of a large white onion, finely chopped

1tsp coriander 

3tbs of brown sugar

Old bay and salt for dusting the breasts before searing them

Olive oil

As much Grand Marnier as you'd like to taste!

All the fixins' for frying pheasant. 

Directions: first sear the pheasant breasts in olive oil at a high temp. after dusting them with old bay and a bit of salt.  You want to really sear them well to keep the juices in them as the danger with pheasant is that it gets dry pretty easy.  Remove the breasts after their seared, and add a bit more oil to the pan, along with your onion and garlic.  If you're not using a nonstick pan this will really deglaze the pan.  Turn the heat down and let the onions and garlic caramelize. Then add the sugar, mixing it quickly along with the orange juice, broth, and vinegar.

You then want to allow the sauce to simmer on a lower heat setting, adding Grand Marnier to your liking as it reduces.  Finally when your sauce has thickened to your liking (usually reduced by about half) move your sauce to another pan, place your pheasant breasts back into the sauce pan and cook them properly at a medium heat setting for around 9 minutes.  Around the 6 minute mark you can add the sauce back in, the danger with adding the sauce early being that it will burn and carbonized the meat (a little bit of this is tasty of course).  Once you've checked that he meat is medium to well done you're ready to eat!

Delicious pheasant a l'orange. Bon Appetit 

Of course, cooking birds ain't as fun as shooting em!

And you're bound to eat some buckshot!

Tom.

Red Pepper and Corn Soup

So as you gathered, I like soup. Here is another one.

Ingredients:
2-3 large red peppers  (the peppers I used were HUGE so perhaps 4-5 if they are smaller peppers).
1 medium onion
2-3 hot peppers
3-4 heads of garlic
2 cans of corn (~670 grams)
3-4 carrots
salt and pepper

How It Is Done:
This soup is very very easy to make in that all you really need to do it dice the vegetables and add them to ~1 litre of broth (vegetable or poultry would be best). Bring the mix to a boil and then reduce and simmer until the contents are fork tender.

At this point you can use an immersion blender or a regular blender to puree the contents. After the contents have been pureed add the preferred amounts of salt and pepper and simmer for ~10 mins further.

the soup should be thick and typically all of the corn does not truly puree so there will be some kernels left to give more texture. For the hot peppers I used Thai chillies and it made the soup just nice but not very spicy, so you can gauge and very for how spicy you would like.

For one bowl of this soup I also diced up a hard boiled egg and added it to the soup. This worked quite well, I liked it at least. You might also try it with milk or cream, which I think would be good but I have yet to try.

Well, that's about it. I hope you enjoy this soup if you try it.


RAFTIN'!


Huck

MVE Soup

I thought this soup might be a good idea to put up today as there has not been any mention of soups in a  while. This soup is quite rudimentary and is both inspired by and named after a good friend of mine who is a bacon lover. I very much enjoy making soups and so I thought to myself one day "I wonder if I could incorporate eggs and bacon into a soup?" So I set about to try this. The end result was tasty, but I do admit a little tweeking here and there might be needed. Eggs in soup are an interesting entity as it is  challenge, I think, to put eggs in soup. A challenge perhaps well worth taking on. I have found in various other soup manifestations that if the right amount of egg and egg cooked the right way are placed in soup it is a truly delicious addition.

So here is how I went about this soup. I wanted it to be a hearty "breakfast in a bowl." Try it for yourself and let me know.

Ingredients
liquid smoke
bacon
lentils
scrambled eggs
salt
black pepper
beef stock

How It's Done
you will see in the ingredients section that I have not provided exact measurements for this soup. That is because it is very much a preference based soup, you have to pick your own balance of items.

1.) pan fry the desired amounts of bacon and scrambled eggs.

2.) bring the beef stock to a boil then add the lentils in with some salt and pepper. Allow this to simmer for ~5 minutes and then reduce the heat to low bubble. After ~5 more minutes add your scrambled eggs and bacon with ~5 dashes of liquid smoke to impart a hickory flavour.

3.) serve hot.

This soup is an experiment. One of the key difficulties that might be dealt with is the addition of the bacon causes it to get "soggy" losing its crispy pan fried delicious taste. The bacon still tastes great, it is just softer. If you would not like this effect, you can add the pan friend bacon as a garnish when the soup is served, allowing it to maintain its crispness longer. Another variation involves pureeing the lentils to have a smooth thick soup base.

I will leave it at that for now, this soup has the potential for lots of alterations, so try one out and I hope you enjoy, as I did.


"It's not as bad as it sounds."


-quoth Huck

Equine épicé or horse vindaloo

In light of the recent outcry in the news about tainted horse meat lasagna  and other debacles I thought it might be nice to post a recipe that ACTUALLY meant to have horse meat in it. As is the trend with this blog Tom and I like, in part, to address cuts or types of meat that are often perceived as odd or outright wrong. Horse definitely falls into this category.

Many individuals are sheepish about engaging in the consumption of horse meat because we see the horse as a nobler beast, like the dog or the cat, that is not meant for consumption. Yet in reality the nature of horse in terms of use exclusively for work and leisure is not necessarily seen as universally paramount. And in this sense, just like beef, pork, lamb, goat, chicken etc... horse has been a dietary staple in many places for many years. This concept of ironic perspectives on the foods we eat is well addressed and delved into in more detail in the infamous cookbook "Unmentionable Cuisine" by Calvin W. Schwabe, well worth a read.

I have had horse meat on a number of occasions. It is an interesting product to buy in that it typically gets its own freezer "section" in the pre-cut grocery store meat and more typical for diverse cuts of horse meat there are dedicated Equine butchers. It was once told to me that exclusive horse meat butchers exist because there is some chemical level difficulty that if horse meat is sold fresh next to other meats (beef, pork, etc...) that there is something in the horse meat that will quickly corrupt the other meat varieties rendering them rancid. This is the tale I was told but I have yet to be able to confirm it, though I can't say I really looked high and low for evidence. I was confident in the source who told me so I just took it at face value. Whether it is lore or law it is no big difference. Equine butchers exist. I would one day like to try horse ribs, I think they would make for a tasty slooooowwwwwww cook dish.

                                  

I find horse meat to be a little tougher than beef as well as a little richer in flavour. It, to my tastes at least, has a stronger "meaty" taste, if you will allow this horribly ambiguous descriptor to stand, that makes it a bit sweeter as well as noticeably different from other cuts of meat, almost moving closer towards the range in which heart meat would fall...but still a long way from true heart meat in taste...just heading that way.

So down to brass tax. I set out one day to make a horse vindaloo. This vindaloo is in no way particularly special in terms of a unique vindaloo. Rather it is a typical vindaloo with the unique use of horse meat. So we whipped up a spicy horse vindaloo and it went something like this:

Ingredients
200-300 grams horse meat, cubed
1 tsp. cumin seeds (jeera)
1 tsp. turmeric
5 cloves garlic
8 Thai chilis (vindaloo is meant to be very hot. You can choose the spicy peppers you like and how many you want to use for your own preference of heat of course).
1-2 star anise
500 grams of tomatoes
1 tbsp. ginger paste
ghee or butter or oil
mango pickle--as you like
2 tsp. garam masala
salt
black pepper

How It Is Done:
1.) using the garlic, ginger and chilis combine these three items in a dish and puree making a paste.

2.) in a large pan add the desired amount of ghee or butter or oil. Once liquid add to this the cumin seeds and pan fry for ~1 minute or until slightly browned.

3.) once this occurs add the ginger-garlic-chili paste to the pan and fry for ~1 minute further.

4.) add the turmeric, garam masala, a little salt and the mango pickle.

5.) at this time add the tomatoes to the mix. If pureed or not pureed you can allow this mix to cook for ~3-4 minutes until everything is very soft and then puree this mixture to a smooth consistency.

6.) when you have the pureed base sauce add the cubed horse meat and the 1-2 star anise. Let this concoction simmer over low heat for ~30-40 minutes, or longer, until a desired sauce consistency for your preference has been reached. Close to the time when the dish is done you can add a little black pepper if you like. This is added so late to keep the black pepper taste, so it does not "boil off" so to speak.

This dish will feed a fair amount of people, ~4-6?, or will give you lots of leftovers for later lunches/dinners. In reading this you might think "why the heck did he add mango pickle?" This is a good and fair question. It was just a preference I had. I experimented with this idea once and it worked nicely, so I like to add the mango pickle for the unique tangy-tart taste it imparts.

That is pretty much it, I hope you enjoy.

I-PP-I-SS-I-SS-I-M


Huck

"Huck's Hocks" (a long distance collaboration)

"Huck's been cooking up a weird storm over in Italy, and while I'm not much of a cook (more the fisherman in this operation, but the water is still to cold and high to get out the fly rod), the other day I picked up some hog hocks.  Under Huck's long distance advice I put them in the slow cooker all day long on low with just a few ingredients and they turned out wonderful.  They tasted like suckering other kids into doing my chores (which would be nice about now!):

Ingredients

3 big pig hocks 

1 dollop of cheap single malt scotch

1 can of tomato sauce

1.5 cups of BBQ sauce (I used "Sweet Baby Ray's Gourmet Sauce")

1 cup of Bloody Mary Mix (I used Smirnoff's Spice Bloody Mary Mix)

3 whole cloves of garlic

1 quarter of a chopped spanish onion

a shake or two of salt and pepper

  

How It's Done

Cooked it for about 8 hours, and came home to a wonderful meal.  

If only I could have shared it with Huck!  

Tom

A "Witness" To Cooking Testicles

So...testicles, not perhaps the first cut that jumps to mind when planning dinner. That said, testicles are a surprising cut of meat that should not be underrated. It is more the "creepy" factor that inhibits the use of this cut for consumption than the actual taste. Some of you out there might be hunters who like to use all parts or you might be fond of Rocky Mountain oysters  or some of you might even regale in a testicle festival or the fine recipes of the testicle cookbook. Whatever your level of testicle consumption, they are worth trying either for the first time or again and again. I recently endeavoured to try this cut of meat and was pleasantly surprised.

Voyaging out to meet my local butcher at his regular stall in the local fresh market I set about to purchase a bag of testicles. The whole outing seemed to shout of the oddity or rather odyssey of cooking this cut. I attempted to purchase these parts originally on a sunny Saturday morning only to be told that testicles are a Monday cut, for whatever reason. So waiting with baited breath until monday I finally obtained the desired testicles. It was a heavily rainy morning, which made the whole outing all the more "Conrad-esque" and very memorable. I met my butcher friend at 8 AM before heading to work. The whole encounter was quite interesting and funny in part. I arrived to find a plate overflowing with testicles in the meat cupboard. I requested two testicles. My friend the butcher intimated to me that he would sell me the whole plate of balls for the same price of two. Taking this as a good faith deal I ended up with a shopping bag full of 8 bull balls. The humour in the whole encounter came when my friend the butcher was packing the testicles up for me to take away. As you can imagine the testicles of cows are rather large, that is until the butcher hit upon an abnormally small testicle, which he held up for me inspection laughingly saying "the little one!" It was both an odd and mostly hilarious moment.

So sack of testicles in hand I headed for home. Now that I had more testicles than I originally needed for myself and my roommate I endeavoured to cook these fellows in two ways. I was going to make an "appetizer" of breaded testicles followed by a main course of "kashmiri testicle curry." I set out to get cooking with my roommate, an Englishman with a true to form heart from the age of exploration, willing to eat anything once if only to have "explored" that culinary unknown on the food map.

Testicles require a little delicate preparation, but once you get going it is nothing. What you need to do first is make a small lengthwise slit along the outer membrane. Once slit you can essentially squeeze the inner testicle membrane out of this thick outer casing, exposing the membrane covered inner section. Now that you have this first layer exposed you essentially need to repeat the step and make yet another slit lengthwise along the membrane. This time the inner organ will not slip out nearly as easily but rather requires that you either carefully use a paring knife to remove the membrane or what I recommend is running your fingers under the membrane breaking all the little tendrils of soft tissue that fuse this layer to the inner organ meat. This perhaps sounds unappetizing but is in fact easy to do and not as offensive to undertake as it may sound. After this step you will have what you are after, the inner organ meat, which is somewhat "gooey" and looks roughly like a skinless chicken breast. Discard the outer membranes and cut off the "tube" end, which will be obvious when you are preparing the testicles. For those of you wondering "won't it be messy?" No, you will not be getting oozing semen or urine or anything of this sort, just in case anyone was wondering. In fact testicles smell less odorous then kidney and are easier to prepare.

Now that you have the organ meat you can set about cooking as you like. For myself I sliced the meat lengthwise, ran it through beaten egg and breading.  For the breading I used breadcrumbs, chili powder, salt, black pepper and a pinch of ground mint to give it a little zest. Once you have breaded these pieces you can pan fry them as you see fit (just like I reported in the previous brain post). Testicles take a little longer to cook than panfried brain. Allow about 3 minutes per side to cook through. Keep an eye on the pan though as cooking times will vary widely, so just be careful.

As for the Kashmiri testicle curry preparation just simply swap in the testicles for chicken in whichever recipe you choose to follow. Cube the testicle meat into preferred sizes and then you can add it straight to the pot to cook through with the sauce. If you do not like adding raw meat to your curry sauces you can always pan fry the testicle meat first and then add it to the Kashmiri chicken sauce. The Kashmiri chicken that I went with was as follows:

Ingredients
1 tbsp. garlic
1 tbsp. ginger
1-2 chilies
1 large onion
~500 ml. coconut milk
shredded coconut
dried apricots
cashews
raisins
1 tbsp. ghee or butter or oil
garam masala
turmeric
salt
black pepper
honey
1-2 tbsp. jaggery (if you don't have jaggery just use brown sugar)
1-2 tsp. brown sugar
~250 grams of plain yogurt

Steps
1.) before starting to cook anything you want to make a ginger-garlic-chili paste. Chop these items as fine as you can (it does not have to be SUPER fine). Then place the items together in a bowl and blend using a hand held blender. Or if you do not own a hand blender you can simply mash the mix into a paste or use a mortar and pestle--this just simply takes longer but gets the same result.

2.) in a frying pan heat your ghee or butter or oil. Once liquid add your chopped onion and fry until translucent. To this mix add the ginger-garlic-chili paste, garam masala, turmeric and fry for 1-2 minutes longer.

3.) to this frying mix add the coconut milk, salt, honey and jaggery stir the mix and allow to simmer for a minute.

4.) once all mixed together you can add the testicle meat.

5.) at this point you are faced with a preference choice. You can either add the yogurt, raisins, cashews and shredded coconut and allow the whole mix to simmer. Or you can allow the mix to simmer about 10 minutes and then add these items. Both ways work it is simply a matter of how you like your Kashmiri chicken. If you want your dried fruit to puff up and become softer then add it earlier. If you want it to remain harder then add it later.

6.) Once the dish has simmered for ~20 mins. you can add the brown sugar and black pepper. The brown sugar is not essential as you will already have jaggery, I just like the dish sweat. The black pepper can go in at this time so that it retains its pepper flavour and is not "cooked off" due to long simmering.

Serve this over rice or couscous and if you can get it naan, the ultimate best! You can alter this recipe widely. You can use whatever kind of dried fruit you prefer or even fresh fruit (such as pineapple) and lychees. Kashmiri chicken is a great sweet curry dish, I hope you like it as much as I do. The testicle blends nicely as it adapts the flavours nicely and is fork tender after simmering.

In the end this was a very very good meal. Testicle was surprisingly one of the best meat cuts I have ever had. The meat is tender and light, flaky and smooth to eat. It lacks the general "offal" flavour of other organ meats. Testicle, I found, is most comparable to pork medallions in shape and texture, though actually softer than regular pork medallions. My "try anything once" British roommate was even quite fond of the meal and we both agreed that it was a foodstuff that we would readily have again.

Testicles are quite diverse and can honestly be used in place of chicken or pork in a lot of recipes. This cut of meet it especially preferred for stews and long slow simmered dishes. So give 'em a shot and I hope you enjoy eating testicles as much as I did!

A Real Cerebral Experience

If you have read the other posts on this blog you have probably gathered that there is a lot of "variety meat" dishes discussed. This will not always be the way, but for the time being that is what has taken my interest of writing about. 

One dish, or rather meat variety, that has intrigued me is the use of brains. You see this part of the animal used in all kinds of dishes all around the world. Yet despite this there still remains within me a slight hair raising reaction at the notion of eating brains. Perhaps it is the ghost of Kuru or the more recent fear of BSE-CJD. But despite these concerns--well mostly just BSE-CJD in my case...but perhaps not yours, it depends I suppose--brains are widely used and are overall safe to eat (though still use caution!). Brains are high in many beneficial vitamins and minerals and are the cause of great fanfare among many culinary enthusiasts. Another part of what sparks my interest is that this delicate part is not readily available at home and thus the opportunity to buy brains with ready ease as well as eat in them restaurants of course sparked my interest in trying this dish. It was thus the other night that I finally, as I have thought about this for a while, took it upon myself to try and cook veal brain at home. This endeavour was filliped by my recent good fortune of stumbling across a nice Egyptian cookbook (Nagwa Elfayoumi, 2012. “Feasts for a Pharaoh: Traditional Egyptian  Cuisine with a Modern, Healthy Touch,” www.feastsforapharaoh.com), which provided a recipe, so I jumped both feet in. The recipe I followed from this book is reiterated below for those who might also like to try their hand at cooking brains. 

Poached and Pan-Fried Brains (Mokh Maslouq)-Serves 2-3

1 Lbs. calf brains

1 tablespoon vinegar or salt

1 small onion, chopped

4-5 cardamom pods, split

salt and pepper

2 medium eggs

¾ cup breadcrumbs

½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg, marjoram or thyme

1/3 cup sunflower oil

1 tablespoon butter (optional)

juice of 1 medium lemon or lime

1.) Cover the brains by 1 inch with cold water. Add vinegar or salt and let stand for 1 hour

2.) Remove the brains from the water and rinse gently, but thoroughly, trim the white part off the ends and remove any large veins and blood clots etc...

3.)  Put the brains in a pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Maintain at a lively simmer for 7-8 mins. And remove any scum that accumulates on the surface.

4.) Add the onion, cardamom pods, and salt. Let bubble over a medium high flame for 15-20 minutes

5.) Drain the brains and let them cool in the pan. Lift them gently to plate and chill for 30 mins. to 1 hour

6.)  Beat the 2 eggs with 2 teaspoons of water in a deep dish or a bowl. Place breadcrumbs on a flate plate and mix with the nutmeg, and season with salt and pepper.

7.) When the brains have chilled, remove the dark veins and slice them. Dip the slices in the egg and dredge in bread crumbs. Fry in hot oil, and a little butter if you like, for about 3 mins. on each side or until golden brown.

8.) Top with squeezed lemon 

This same preparation also works very well with sweetbreads. You simple need to substitute in a step of placing the poached sweetbreads under weight in the fridge for a few hours to firm them up before cutting to fry. This step of placing a weight on the sweetbreads to "firm up" SHOULD NOT be followed for brains as you will just get a big mashed pile of brain in your container!!!--they are even more delicate than they look! 

On one other preparation note, you can soak the brains in vinegar/salted water in the fridge for several hours or even over night changing the water and salt a few times. This simply helps to remove more of the blood from the brains and make them a little less potent. I have also read of the possibility of peeling the outer membrane and surface blood vessels from the brain after the poaching step. I did not really try to do this, but in the stage where I removed sliced the brains it was quite evident that you would have to be very nimble and careful to really successfully peel a brain. Though if you are not opposed to more chunks than slices in your fry-up this would surly be fine.

In the end I have come to the conclusion that I am not a huge fan of brain as a meal. There is something about it that just lacks what I would like in this kind of preparation. I read once of cooked brains described as "savoury marshmallows" and I think this pretty much hits the nail on the head and is the reason I am not a big fan. Brain is very delicate and liquid and hence lacks the "chew ability" of other meats breaded and fried. I could see brain very well adapted to some sort of spread as it has a great characteristic for this but for bread crumb covered pan fry dishes, it is just OK in my books. The flavour is rich and definitely unique. 

So that said, despite my lack of overall enthusiasm for of this foodstuff, I would likely try it again in another preparation form, just to see if my appreciation of brain is changed by different preparation method. I hope that others give brains a taste as well, if even just once.

Huck

Offaly Good Rabbit Bits

So its be a while...I had thought to post more food related stuff a while back but then for whatever reason I did not. I attribute this to the syndrome where you have several ideas for something and then they all try to jam through a door together and ultimately none get out...that is my explanation.

Anyways, this entry is about using the fiddly bits, particularly rabbit. I had purchased a rabbit the other day for dinner and of course it came with the organs (heart, liver, kidney, lungs, tongue). When I made rabbit once before I grilled these up and fed them to a loving cat. This time there was no cat available and I felt that I should not waste the organs. So as most of the scion of invention are, this recipe too is born of necessity. So next time you buy/hunt a rabbit(s) and wonder what you can do with the organs give this a shot, I hope you like it as much as I did. If you don't, this other blog gives a bunch of alternatives, they all seem tasty.

I had expected this organ meal to be well, very organ-y. It turned out to be not that offal tasting at all. It goes as such,

Ingredients
melange of rabbbit organs (heart, kidney, tongue, liver, kidney...and if you really like brain).
sour cream and onion Pringles crushed into breadcrumb crumbs
olive oil
spices of choice (I used curry powder and black pepper)
lemon (for squeezing on after cooking)

Preparation
1.) remove the organs from the rabbit and wash quickly under cold water. After washing cut the organs into smaller pieces and place all the organs together in a pile (similar now to Italian coratella). You can now proceed to chop this organ pile into what can only really be called a fine meat paste (i.e. diced and chop until the meat is of a paste consistency). You see as well that I listed brain above. I personally am not a huge brain fan. It is not the worst, but it is not the best and frankly brain as a food always gives my just enough pause to avoid eating it regularly. I suppose the irrational ghosts of kuru, BSE and CJD linger in my mind. If you enjoy brain, it would surely meld well into this dish.

2.) take the desired amount of Pringle chips and crush them into breadcrumb sized portions. For this I ballpark estimate that you will need ~10 chips. Into the crushed Pringles pour ~2 table spoons of olive oil (so as to coagulate the crumbs). Mix this all together, coasting the crumbs with oil.

SIDENOTE!!! this Pringle idea works nicely but was also originally crafted out of necessity. I wanted to bread this offal but it was late and the store was closed so I could not get eggs or proper breadcrumbs-you can definitely opt to do this instead, I just simply have yet to.

3.) now that you have a mass of oiled crumbs you can cover a pan lightly with a little more oil or butter. Make a little thin bed of crumbs on the frying pan the size you would like your final product to be. This is done because the meat mass lacks cohesion so it is hard to "roll" the meat in the crumbs. You could always take steps to make the meat more cohesive.

4.) once the bed of crumbs is in the pan place the meat paste on top. Cover the top of the meat with more crumbs (you can also work the often left over crumbs from the bottom up onto the sides of the meat). Once the meat is all covered as you like FRY IT! -I go with low and slow. Do it however you see fit.

When the meat is cooked you can serve it with a slice of lemon for drizzling over top. This is a very tasty approach.

You will see in the ingredients section the call for "spices." You can go three ways with this I figure: 1.) no spices at all, 2.) include the spices in the meat before cooking-this worked nicely with curry powder but less so with pepper, 3.) put the spices on after with or without the lemon option-this worked best with black pepper, I did not try straight curry powder...in case anyone wondered.

As you can imagine the organs of a rabbit do not provide a whole lot of meat, so expect small servings. These can be made into small hors d'houvers for a bunch of people or eaten as a meal for a single person (or I guess if you had a lot of rabbit organs for some reason, a full meal item for many people...).

I hope you enjoy this rabbit offal recipe as much as I did,


Huck