Moving home

As some of you may have noticed Sheep's Head Food Company has moved home.

All future posts will be appearing from 

http://sheepsheadfood.com/

All the old post are there if you want to catch up.

Thank you for reading

Pork belly

Last week at The Farmer's Market in New Ferry Galen and I bought ourselves a piece of pork belly for £5.00. It went into the freezer for the week but I took it out last night and we ate it this evening.

Coming home late on a Friday evening there wasn't really time to do it justice with all the slow cooking it deserved but it came out okay.

I started by sharpening the old steel blade I somehow inherited from my mother and scouring a set of deep lines down a good half inch through the skin. That was all rubbed with a hand full of rock salt and left to sit for a while as I ground up the garlic and herbs.

Actually the herbs were only a good few pinches of fennel seeds mixed with some more salt and crushed to a powder in the pestle and mortar. Garlic was then added and loosened slightly with with touch of olive oil. This mixture was then rubbed into the underneath of the pork belly with my fingers as the oven was put on to its highest setting. This required some negotiation as a dish of vegetarian lasagna was warming up for the rest of the family's tea. With some slight of hand the lasagna was extracted out of the oven for twenty minutes as the pork belly went in at a sufficiently high heat to start blistering the skin and bring on the crackling.

Once the skin had started to blister the oven was turned down (and the lasagna returned) and the pork moved onto a more benign metal plate to be finished off. Ideally it should have had another two hours in a very slow oven. Time to cook completely through with the meat falling off the bones, no burning, and a crisp crunchy skin.

We didn't have that time and compromised with the oven turned too high and hoping for the best over an hour. Ten minutes before eating I took the pork out and put it on a serving dish covered with some foil and a tea towel. Potatoes were boiled, quartered and fried and a gravy was made with a good splash of sherry into the pan. The bones slipped away from the meat and plates were cleaned.

We were still listening to Mark Eitzel.

A mushroom log

At the cheese fair a few weeks ago we were given a mushroom log. The instructions said that it needed to be soaked for a few days in a basin of water and then allowed to stand in a cool well ventilated place away from direct sunlight. Well, we followed the instructions, and this evening I brought the log up from the basement a good two handfuls of shiitake mushrooms hanging carelessly from its sides.

Whilst the kids were called into the kitchen to admire the fruits of our labour I scanned through the books on the shelves for something to do with them. For the second time in a week I found that Annie Bell's Evergreen came up with the answer. Now I know why I plucked it from the shelves of The Good Things Cafe all those years ago. The recipe itself was so simple I should have come up with it myself but seeing the words on the page gave it some form and reassurance.  

The mushrooms were cut from the log whilst a large pan of water started to boil. I took my new frying pan and melted a small pat of butter to which I added a finely chopped onion. That was given five minutes and the odd stir through to soften before I added a squashed, chopped clove of garlic.

Once the water was boiling I started to cook. A bag of tagliatelle and more was put into the boiling water. I turned up the heat under the pan with the onions, chopped up the mushrooms and stirred them in and gave them a few minutes to wilt before throwing in a good glass of white wine. That bubbled for another few minutes whilst I grated a good couple of handfuls of Parmesan.

Grating done I poured in a tub of double cream and drained the pasta. Once the pasta had been drained and shaken it went into a clean white bowl. Before I poured over the sauce I stirred in the Parmesan, some chopped parsley and plenty of salt and pepper. The kids turned their noses up at the mention of mushrooms but all their plates were clean.

This evening we listened to the bitter sweet ruminations of Mark Eitzel. All in preparation for doing battle with Plan B.

A horseradish tart

After last nights meat extravaganza it seems only right that a bit of time should be spent today in making a vegetarian supper. Galen complained on Friday that when we eat meat there is always a vegetarian alternative but if the cooking is vegetarian then there is no meat to be had. He was eating an aubergine and mozzarella bake whilst I had made myself a fried chicken baguette to gird my loins before an evening watching Macbeth at The Royal Court. He sort of had a point if only because the vegetarian alternatives are often no more than a couple of spicy bean burgers from the freezer cabinet in Sainsbury's.

Today I made more of an effort. Some of you may have noticed the horseradish root lurking in a picture last weekend. There is now a patch in the garden that is in danger of getting out of control. Last year all we had out of it were a couple of thin tubers not much more than half an inch wide but I must have left something in the ground. We now have a wide splay of thick green leaves and furtling under the soil there are obviously a few good sized roots. I will have to dig them out come the end of autumn but in the meantime I have the cooking of this years harvest.

A good 40 minutes were spent going through the books on Saturday morning and I was surprised and disappointed by how little there seemed that could be done with them. There were a few suggestions for mixing it with beetroot but little that made it part of the main attraction.

Eventually I was pointed towards a recipe in a book by Annie Bell Evergreen bought years ago after a lunch in The Good Things Cafe. Bought because she wrote (or co-wrote) one our most used books Living and Eating.  She wrote it with John Pawson the architect and the pictures and a large part of the text sketch out a way of living that is well beyond most of us. But the recipes work, and the pictures of the food make it look good, although she is responsible for the notion that my fish pie should be made with cider resulting in my white sauce splitting. The book has the added attraction of featuring my brother in law's best man, Oscar, lounging on a lawn in one of its pictures.

Back to Evergreen  the recipe was for a Potato and Onion Tart with Horseradish Cream. It was another of those recipes that require the cooking of its constituent  parts before the whole was put together.

There were three parts to it. I started with the onions, two large Spanish ones from the grocers on Oxton Road, sliced thinly and cook down slowly for an hour or so in butter.

Then the potatoes, peeled, boiled for ten minutes, browned in more butter and sliced into rounds. The horseradish was peeled and grated and mixed with creme fraiche. Puff pastry was rolled out and put in a pie tin and cooked for twenty minutes then the whole thing was put together.

The onions were spread over the base of the pastry, the slices of potato were then laid out on top and the creamed horseradish was then spread on top. It all went back in the oven to cook and to brown together with the roast chicken the rest of the family were having.

Today we have been listening to Mark Mulcahy. He has a new album out soon and is playing in Manchester in early December. We should all have a bit of him in our lives.

A birthday supper at Lunya

There is a print in The Heron Gallery, Ahakista by Annabel Langrish called Happy as a Pig in .... Gubeen. The pig is a piglet and it is smiling from a bed of straw happily innocent of the fact that one day soon it would end up bringing a smile to my face made up as sausage from the Gubbeen Smokehouse. I was reminded of this picture half way through our meal at Lunya last night when a roast suckling bring was brought out for us to eat.

We were there to celebrate Anna's 18th birthday together with Kevin and Julie and a small group of Anna's friends. We started the meal with a glass of bone dry sherry and small plates of tapas. For me the highlight was the the small plate of smoked dried anchovies. We also had dishes of hot chorizo, hotter than expected, the maker in Spain must have thrown in an extra handful of paprika, bread and tomato, plates of young leaf salad with cherry tomatoes and red onion dressed in sherry vinegar, deep fried crispy squid with garlic mayonnaise and slabs of cheese with a thick orange jelly. 

The plates were cleared and replaced and the suckling pig was brought out on its platter. Anna was called up to start slicing it up by taking off its head with the edge of of a side plate. It was then carved and passed round the table.

I had a rear leg in front of me, soft forgiving meat and a think tight layer of crackling. The head was passed round the table for all to pick at. We pulled out its cheeks, and chewed on its ears.

The was a large platter of vegetable paella for the vegetarians.

We were eating it for almost an hour. Most of us gave up on knives and forks and tucked in with our fingers, the bones fell away easily from the flesh. Peter had recommended the brain and we were able to scoop it out in small mouthfuls with our forks. It was creamy and smooth and its texture and taste reminded me of the coral from a lobster.

We ate almost all of it apart from its squeak.

The adults were too full for anything else apart from a small plate of cheese and restorative glass of pacharin on ice.

The kids had cups of hot chocolate with churros.

The music was a young man playing Spanish guitar on the balcony.

Garlic water

Ottolenghi has a new cookbook out and whilst it will no doubt be in the house by the time we get past Christmas but I am conscious we are still cooking our way though the first two. The most popular recipe has been the Caramelized Garlic tart.

I cooked it this evening having got home early after getting up at 5.00am to drive to High Wycombe and back and then receiving a text to say the ingredients were in the oven if I wanted to start making it.

It is one of those recipes that blur the lines between cooking and making, a large part of it lies in the assembly of the ingredients into the pastry base and putting it into the oven for thirty minutes. There is not a great deal of cooking involved.

It was made easier by the ready rolled pastry, although that wasn't quite big enough for the tart tin and needed to be rolled out a couple of inches to fit in.

Most of the cooking was done in caramelizing the garlic. The recipe suggested that the peeled cloves from two bulbs of garlic be blanched for three minutes to dilute some of their harshness. I did this, drained them and set the water aside. Once it had cooled I drank it, a garlic infused restorative after four hundred miles in the car.

The cloves of garlic were then fried for a few minutes in olive oil and then covered with more water and a good splash of balsamic vinegar. That boiled down for ten minutes and I then added some sugar, chopped rosemary and thyme and continued to boil it down until the garlic was soft and the sweet sauce bubbled fiercely and small puddle in the bottom of the pan.

It was then all assembly. The pastry base had been baked blind. I filled it with crumbled goat's cheese, the garlic and its dark sauce and that was all covered with a custard of lightly whisked eggs and cream. That all went into a medium oven for half an hour to cook through.

We ate it with roasted new potatoes listening to The Velvet Underground.

I am now thinking of spending time at the weekend making some garlic soup. In the meantime my colleagues at work will have to put up with the vampire scaring vapours I will no doubt be giving off tomorrow.

Fish Pie

It was a weekend of missteps. We thought the Farmers Market was on so made the trip to New Ferry on Saturday afternoon but the car park was empty and we will have to wait until next Saturday to buy our roast chicken. It appeared that someone may have taken on Strut Your Stuff  as the sign was being painted over.

On Sunday we walked down to Birkenhead Park to see the old car rally only to find that we had missed it. So it was a walk round the lake instead imagining the boats that would have parked by the boathouse a hundred years ago.

On the way back from New Ferry I stopped off at Wards to buy the ingredients for a fish pie -  a slab of smoked haddock and a mixture of salmon and cod ends- then into the greengrocers to get a bag of potatoes for mash.

I poached the fish in milk seasoned with a couple of bay leaves, an onion stuck with cloves, salt and peppercorns. I made the mistake of adding a large cup of cider to the milk which curdled it over the heat. I think I must do this every time I make fish pie.

Earlier that afternoon I had dug up my first horseradish root. We tasted a couple of thin slices, the fine heat of it clearing heads and noses. We will need to find something to cook with horseradish.

Once the fish was cooked I let it cool for a few minutes until I was able to handle it. I then peeled off the skin and put the bite sized chunks of flesh into the large orange Le Creuset dish, flaking the larger pieces. My fingers were sticky with the hot milk and the just cooked skin.

There was some dill left in the bottom of the fridge and that was chopped up finely and scattered over the fish.

I strained the split milk and cider into a jug and then started on making a white sauce. A good chunk of butter went into a hot pan and once that was sizzling I added a good tablespoon of flour. I beat the butter and flour with a wooden spoon and let it cook through for a few minutes. I then added some fresh milk beating hard with the wooden spoon to avoid any lumps. Once it had taken I added the milk and cider and brought it all to a slow simmer, stirring all the time until I had a silky smooth white sauce. Once that was ready I took it off the heat and stirred in three large spoonfuls of creme fraiche and a dash of mustard for flavouring and then a final seasoning of salt and pepper.

The sauce was poured over the fish and then dish was then put to one side in a cool place whilst I did the potatoes.

The potatoes were boiled until soft, drained and mashed with another good hunk of butter and some more splashes of milk. they were given a further seasoning of salt.

One of the most satisfying aspects of making a potato pie is laying the mash over the top and smoothing it down so that it completely covers the fish underneath. I got the amount of potato just right and there were no awkward gaps. I made a rough ploughed field pattern with the tines of a fork and scattered the top with some more small cubes of butter.

It all then went into the oven for 30 minutes until the white sauce started to bubble up through the potato. We ate it with green beans from Dad's vegetable garden and Stokes Tartare Sauce.

We listened to The Poet by Bobby Womack on vinyl. Getting up every 20 minutes to turn it over. One of the kids asking if you can play the other side as well.

Southern Central Rain (I'm Sorry)

...last week was Dexys' turn and this week it is time for REM. The occasion,  the re-release - on its 25th anniversary - of Document, the last of the run of albums they made with IRS before defecting to Warners and the $ where they were never quite the same. All things grow up and REM lost their innocence with that move. Before that each album had been like the shedding of another layer of skin.

Murmer started off bathed in mystery, an opaque set of songs, difficult to pin down, like music seeping out of the bunker, odd hollered words hinting at an emotion before lying back down in the sonic murk. Reckoning carried on the theme but with more clarity, Harbourcoat was a clarion call. Tales of the Reconstruction was a step back into the mystery of Murmer although the bright sheen Can't Get There From Here was a fore-shadowing of things to come.

After that the drums got louder and you had a band that knew it wouldn't take much to take them over the edge, out of the niche within college rock, but they continued to hold back. Amidst some of the brashness of Its The End Of the World As We Know it and One I Love there was still room for mystery with Kings of Birds

I saw REM in concert 8 or 9 times over the years that they released those five albums. They were some of the best concerts I've been to. A combination of a band that I loved at the cusp of being great. The best time to see a band.

I saw them play at The Milton Keynes Bowl supporting U2. The Ramones were also playing along with Spear of Destiny and The Faith Brothers. I am still slightly proud of the fact we walked out as U2 took to the stage.

At about the same time they played The Summer Ball at Warwick University. The evening started with Jonathan Richman. I can't remember what time REM came on stage. I stood near the front and somewhere I have a grainy photo of Michael Stipe in a hat. They played an old Creeedance Clearwater Revival song Have You Seen the Rain and it was one of my best evenings.

This is the set list for that evening.

• 01. (Set)Feeling Gravitys Pull
• 02. (Set)Second Guessing
• 03. (Set)Green Grow the Rushes
• 04. (Set)Laughing
• 05. (Set)Maps And Legends
• 06. (Set)So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)
• 07. (Set)Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
• 08. (Set)Driver 8
• 09. (Set)Can’t Get There From Here
• 10. (Set)(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville
• 11. (Set)Hyena
• 12. (Set)1,000,000
• 13. (Set)Old Man Kensey
• 14. (Set)Just A Touch
• 15. (Set)Auctioneer (Another Engine)
• 16. (Set)Pretty Persuasion
• 17. (Encore #1)Jimmy Crack Corn
• 18. (Encore #1)Behind Closed Doors
• 19. (Encore #1)Harborcoat
• 20. (Encore #1)California Dreaming
• 21. (Encore #1)Mystery To Me
• 22. (Encore #2)Barney Miller Theme
• 23. (Encore #2)Theme From Two Steps Onward
• 24. (Encore #2)We Walk
• 25. (Encore#2)Little America

After REM played Green on Red were on stage. They had driven down from Leeds that evening and didn't start until early in the morning. Pete Buck joined them on stage to play along with the encore including a cover of Sympathy for the Devil. Dan Peters thrust the microphone into the crowd and we sang along to the OO OOS.

The re-release of Document comes with a extra disc of a live show they played in Utrecht in September 1987. It finishes with a version of So. Central Rain which I think I may have somewhere else on the back of a 12 inch single. It is just Pete Buck on guitar behind Michael Stipe singing. Mike Mills comes in on harmonies towards the end. For the coda he sings I come to you defences down with the trust of a child. I wish I had been there.

The tomatoes from the greenhouse

At the cheese/food fair two weeks ago I had planned some oven baked Gubbeen. In anticipation I had sliced a Baby Gubbeen in half so that it made two smalls wheels. Onto the open side of the bottom half I scattered a squashed clove of garlic, some chopped herbs from the garden and a scattering of salt and pepper. I then put the top half back on and placed the cheese into a small terracotta bowl and wrapped it in foil.

I found it a few hours after everybody had gone on the side uncooked. In the great rush of people I had forgotten about it. So it went into the fridge until lunchtime today.

We had two loaves from the Bread Circle waiting to be eaten and a handful of red tomatoes from the greenhouse.

The cheese went into the hot oven for twenty minutes. I sliced up the bread and quartered the tomotoes.

When I took the cheese out of the oven and took off the foil the familiar smell of the farmyard rose up. The cheese bubbled and steamed in its red bowl.

I toasted the bread and we dipped knives into the melted cheese. The taste of the tart tomatoes cut through the rich cheese. A good early autumnal lunch.

The Kernel Brewery

There is an inevitable frustration in making a 24 hour trip down to London for work. Trapped in a taxi from Euston to the hotel the whole buzz of the city passes by unheeded-I could be travelling anywhere.

We ate in a branch of Byrons tucked on the first floor of a mostly closed chopping precinct on Cheapside alongside St Pauls. Although the setting was soulless it was difficult to fault the food – posh burgers and chips. The chips, the mark of any half decent restaurant were properly hot from their fat, crisp with a good bite. The burger was layered with onion and tomato, medium rare, as I had asked. Last time I had been there it came with a bourbon flavoured dressing. That did not seem to be on the menu but the great fat gerkin slice on the side of the plate made up for that.

There was a short menu of craft beers and I had a couple of bottles of The Kernel Pale Ale – good depth of flavour and finish and pleasantly cloudy. I have never heard of The Kernel beer but a quick squint at their website would indicate they are worth investigating

http://www.thekernelbrewery.com/index.html

The website then led me onto beer online which could be dangerous in the lead up to Christmas

http://www.beermerchants.com/

After Byrons we struggled to find a pub that was open at 10.00 on a Monday evening evetualy stumbling across The Centre Page on Knightrider Street. We were the only people in there apart from the east European bar staff sat round a table polishing up culterey before serving us another pint. There was a Dvid Hasselhoff shrine in the corner and a note of the number of times he had visited. I should of had my camera.

There was more frustration the next day in the rush to get back to Liverpool there was no time to find somewhere half decent to eat so it was an expensive ham sandwich, crisps and a bottle of Coke on the train.