Gin & wild boar sausages (or meatballs or burgers)

wild boar sausages

 

Please don’t avoid making sausages because the entire idea of stuffing ground meat into intestinal tubes is abhorrent! Have a go with the seasoning and create amazing meatballs or gastro-burgers. If Michel Roux Jr can create a duck burger then it’s all OK! Now I did create these this week for a dinner where we served parsnip ciabatta (kind of gives it a sweetish flavor). The thought of slapping in a couple of sausages between the bread, adding a bit of salad, some meat juices and some red onion marmalade is more than appealing.

Making good sausages is really all about having good fresh meat, working fast to keep things cold (I know that every American article I read about making your own sausages involves hyper attentive instructions involving ice water baths but this is overkill). Simply work fast and keep things as cool as you can without giving yourself frostbite. The other key to sausages is seasoning – which is why starting with meatballs makes sense. When you have mixed your mixture fry up a little and taste it for seasoning and mouth feel. Now the first pass at this recipe made very lean sausages – not dry and besides you want things a bit lean from gamey sausages – but personally I would steer to a little more fat next time.

We made 5kgs of wild boar with 1 kg of fatty pork. 6kgs of sausages might be a bit much even for the most ardent sausage fan, so I have scaled it down here. The seasonings are personal – but don’t play too much with the salt because it is there for a reason. This recipe was sort of inspired by one of my favorite Greek sausages (involves red wine, chilli and orange zest) and also by my love of juniper. I find restraint quite difficult generally, but in this recipe go easy on the juniper to avoid sausages with a “soapy” flavor.

These sausages go great with a celeriac and potato mash or green lentils cooked in red wine and I really do think as meatballs or burgers sandwiched between good bread or popped in a pita they would be magical. I would be tempted to smoke these and in fact am curing a couple to see how they behave.

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Masoor Dal (Indian red lentils) – fast, cheap, simple, healthy food

mansoor dal-001

 

I know this is not exactly a local ingredient but I make it when I am sick, when skies are grey and when I am hungover. All three of those situations have occurred recently so I thought it was worth sharing. I used to think I knew exactly how to make dal (having been eating it and making it for more than twenty years…gosh I know what you are thinking… A toddler cooking her own food…anyhow…) and then because I was teaching it, I looked up a few recipes and techniques… found this one, adapted it a bit and I now absolutely swear by it.

Now the great thing about this recipe (apart from ticking just about every health box going…lycopenes from the tomatoes, anti bacterial/ viral/ cancer Turmeric, antibiotic onions and garlic, cleansing ginger, endophion inducing chillies) is that it is incredibly easy and very fast and it also makes two dishes. On the first day, eat with rice (it’s supposed to be fairly liquid, sort of like a thick vegetable puree soup) then on the second day (when in fact it will taste better) thin down with a little water and eat it as soup.

Ingredients

200g  red lentils

1 liter water

3 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp cumin seeds

1 small onion chopped

3-4 whole green chillies, pricked with a knife (feel free to up the chilli ante)

2cm/¾in piece fresh ginger peeled and chopped into cubes (I actually put more ginger in but then I like a lot of ginger)

3 garlic cloves, peeled and left whole

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

2 tsp ground turmeric

¾ tsp garam masala (a mix of cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper) – try and find all the spices in particular the cardamom but no disaster if one is missing

1½ tsp ground coriander

salt and freshly ground black pepper

handful chopped fresh coriander leaves

How To

Cook the lentils:

Place the lentils and 900ml of the water into a pan, stir well and bring to the boil. Skim off any froth that forms on the surface of the water with a spoon. Cover the pan with a lid and reduce the heat to a simmer. Simmer, stirring regularly, for 20-30 minutes, or until the lentils are just tender, adding more water as necessary.

When the lentils have cooked through, remove the pan from the heat and use a whisk to break down the lentils. Set the mixture aside to thicken and cool.

While the lentils are cooking:

Heat the oil in a pan over a medium heat. Add the cumin seeds and fry for 20-30 seconds, or until fragrant. Add all the remaining spices (you may need a little more oil..they tend to absorb a lot of oil)

Add the onion, chillies and ginger and fry for 4-5 minutes, or until golden-brown. Add the garlic and lightly fry (garlic burns easily). Add the tin of tomatoes. Add 100ml of water. Simmer for approximately 10 minutes.

Pour the tomato, spice and onion mixture into the saucepan with the lentils.

Blitz the whole thing with a stick blender until it is very creamy and smooth.

Check the taste and add more salt or pepper as necessary. Stir in the chopped coriander just before serving. Serve with plain boiled basmati rice or thinned down as a soup. A good cold beer is what is needed with this, although it’s not really part of the de-tox theme.

Redcurrant Crumble

This week I was super excited to see my favorite berries of the season on sale in Matache – redcurrants or “coacaze rosii”. Memories flooded back of last year’s “mouli marathon” where I made seedless redcurrant jam using David Lebovitz’ recipe as a guide. I briefly cooked the fruit and made a puree by passing them through a hand food mill. I was left with an iridescent red gloop to be made into jam and a large pile of pips and pulp.

Having read up on the power of fruit acids to cleanse and renew skin, I resourcefully decided to use the seedy leftovers as a bath time scrub. As with many things in life, sometimes the idea and the execution are very different things. For those of you who want to try this at home, I can say that the exfoliating sensation and the kind of fruity fresh smell were good. Not so good, however, was dying my skin bright red.

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