Sunday

Dinner Sunday evening:

An amuse: pate on an oat biscuit

Plaice å la meuniere with pea puree

Roast quail, parsnip puree, bok choi, parsnip crisps, quail jus

Orange & lemon pudding

The Weekend

It’s been a moderately busy weekend. We went shooting and worked in the garden on Saturday and then to a folk club the other side of Worcester – an interesting place where it’s nice to be one of the better (or at least, more accomplished) performers.

Cycled first thing on Sunday and then more time in the garden, digging out the root of an ancient mahonia (we cut it down on Saturday). 

Alison cooked her excellent lasagne Bolognese for dinner and, for once, I was responsible for dessert.

My dessert repertoire isn’t huge, but I decided to cook tarte Tatin, that famous upside-down apple tart from Normandy. Though I say it myself, it really wasn’t bad. Not the prettiest thing (as you can see from the picture below) but the flavour was good. Ate it with some crème fraiche.

Thursday

We've still got builders: it's not really going as well as it might :(  we'll survive, though.

Last night for dinner did a real old English favourite: Liver, bacon & onions (there was also mashed potato, peas and gravy). We have a bit of a disagreement about to what degree liver should be cooked: I'm in favour of just searing the outside, my partner would really like it grey all the way through. So we compromise and I try to cook hers enough that she wont complain. We also disagree on the type of liver: she prefers pig's, I prefer lamb's (obviously calf's liver is best, but is really difficult to get and VERY expensive). Anyway, we had pig's liver which was delicious.

Tonight, it'll be a chicken & tomato pasta thing.

Steak!

My partner is away (at her mother’s) and we’ve got builders in (rather like an infestation of fleas, I think – no respect for people or property), so I was on my own for dining.

Lazily, I just defaulted to one of my favourite meals: steak & chips (sort of). I like the flavour of rump steak, even though most seem to think it’s inferior to sirloin. The trick, of course, is in the cooking. If you’ve never seen Heston Blumenthal cook a steak, then you should! Grills at home are NEVER hot enough to do what a restaurant can, so the frying pan is the answer. The steak should be lightly oiled and seasoned and the pan HOT. Sling the steak in and turn it every 30 seconds until it’s cooked to your liking (or just a little less, really).Throw in a knob of butter at the end to enhance the outside. Then – CRUCIALLY – leave it to rest for 10 -15 minutes. This makes all the difference.

I served the steak with new potato wedges and mushrooms cooked with shallots and finished with crème fraiche and Dijon mustard. Not a bad meal at (relatively) low cost and only about 20 minutes work.