Lapin à la moutarde

My weekend visit to the butcher (the one who was down in the dumps) yielded a wild rabbit which I decided to turn into the great French bistro dish Lapin à la moutarde. There are two ways of making it - smothering the pieces with mustard then roasting them or cooking them in stock then adding the mustard - and cream if using - at the end, a technique favoured in my battered copy of Poor Cook.

As I wasn't sure how tough or tender the rabbit was I decided on a halfway house, pot-roasting it in a relatively small amount of liquid to get a nice caramelised effect than adding more stock and the mustard. Just as well as it took almost two hours. Here's the recipe:

Serves 4
2 tbsp olive oil
1 rabbit, jointed
75g bacon lardons or chopped streaky bacon
1 onion, peeled and roughly chopped
1-2 large cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
A couple of sprigs of fresh thyme or tarragon or 1/2 tsp dried thyme or tarragon
1 glass of white wine (about 150ml)
350ml chicken stock
3-5 tsp Dijon mustard (depending how hot it is and how much you like mustard)
2 heaped tbsp crème fraiche or double cream
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
Salt and pepper

Heat the olive oil in a deep casserole and fry the lardons or bacon until beginning to brown. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon then brown the rabbit pieces. Remove them from the pan then cook the onion over a low heat till soft. Stir in the garlic and thyme or tarragon, add the white wine and bubble up till it has almost evaporated. Add half the chicken stock then return the rabbit to the pan. Put a lid on the pan and cook in a moderate oven (180°C/350°F/Gas 4 for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours until tender, topping up the stock if necessary. Add a splash more wine and as much of the stock as you need to make a thin and stir in mustard to taste, depending how strong it is. (The mustard will also thicken the sauce) Reheat gently without boiling. Stir in the crème fraiche or cream and sprinkle with parsley. Probably best with boiled new potatoes (although I served it with roast Jerusalem artichokes and some wilted wild garlic)

I'm off on my travels again tomorrow, this time to Toronto (my first visit to Canada) so probably won't post again till the middle of next week. Unless I find some bargain maple syrup . . .

How to cook a pigeon

Even in the current rush to snap up cheaper cuts pigeon is good value. We bought two recently for £3.50 which have been sitting in the freezer for a few weeks so my other half decided to tackle them this weekend.

He cooks like a typical bloke i.e. without the slightest concern for frugality. If I’m writing a a recipe I worry endlessly about the number of ingredients, in case readers don’t have them and feel they need to go out and buy them. He just plunders the storecupboard and drinks cupboard so this dish (basically pot roast pigeon in red wine) contained bacon, onions, mushrooms, rosemary, oregano, thyme, pimenton, chilli, cumin, mixed spice, red wine, brandy and grated dark chocolate. A sort of mole in other words and very, very good it was too.

Although a pigeon seems like a small boney bird, the richness of the meat makes it go quite a long way particularly if you pad it out with extra ingredients. Stretching strategies might include:

* A rich winey sauce which obviously need not be quite as complicated as my beloved’s
* Some extra meat in the form of bacon or chorizo
* Some forcemeat balls or stuffing
* Bread sauce (though my husband, who hates it, wouldn’t agree)
* Roast root veggies or a root vegetable purée like a parsnip purée or celeriac and potato mash. (We had roast carrots as I’m trying to cut down on carbs post-Argentina)
* Sloppy polenta (very good with dark winey sauces)
* A baked potato

You could even cook it as he did then take all the meat off the bone and turn it into a luscious dark meaty pasta sauce along the lines of pappardelle alle lepre (pasta with hare sauce) only in this case it would be pappardelle alle piccione). Or into a Pigeon Pie. I just recommend cooking it well as it’s much easier to remove what meat there is off the bone.

Do you cook pigeon or other game? If so how cheaply do you get it and what do you like to do with it?

Our £2 pheasant feast

Our best buy at the Dartmouth farmers’ market we shopped at on Saturday morning was two trays of pheasant legs at £2 each. (£2 a tray, not £2 a leg!) From a real farmer which, it has to be said, is unusual at farmers’ markets these days.

I don’t know about you but I’m getting more and more disillusioned with them. Most seem to be full of stalls offering overpriced cupcakes and chutneys. Very few offer genuinely local food. And why is it that the only cooked food being produced seems to be burgers and sausages? Surely someone has the wit and imagination to produce something a little different - like the raclette I wrote about on my cheese blog the other day.

Anyway, I digress. My husband being a much better game cook than me was in charge of the pheasant and produced a fantastic stew with a few onions, a lot of red wine, a dash of sweet sherry and an extraordinary concoction of spices which included (I pressed him to remember) cumin, coriander, sweet pimenton, thyme, oregano, bayleaf and cloves. Which I suppose makes this dish not quite as frugal as heralded and why, being more of a realist, I’m the cookery writer and not him. (It’s a very male way to cook ;-)

My contribution to the proceedings was some braised carrots (3 from a kilo bag from Tesco which cost only 45p) and some sprouts from the farmers’ market (about 45p worth) which I stir-fried with a splash of light soy sauce, some water and a few drops of sesame oil (OK, I admit that was a bit of an indulgence too) Total cost, provided you’ve got a well-stocked store cupboard and some leftover booze, £1.50 a head. Not bad for a slap-up Sunday night supper.

The perils of brown food

One of the problems about using leftovers is that everything can end up looking sludgy. I fell into that trap last night with my pheasant and mushroom pilaf. Good though it tasted it looked unrelievedly brown.

In my defence I should say that I deliberately didn't buy any fresh herbs which would have immediately made the dish look - and taste - more appealing. We're off to France on Monday and I'm trying to run the fridge stocks down instead of chucking away a bin bag full of unused food. Parsley would have done but coriander would have been better. And even a few finely chopped mint leaves

Other ingredients, currently missing from our store-cupboard would have also helped. Some finely snipped dried fruits (apricots or figs would have been nice with the pheasant); some nuts to add crunch (we normally have some brazil nuts lying around but cashews or pistachios would have worked). Oh, and a final squeeze of Seville orange juice would have been lovely.

They'll be gone from the shops by the time we get back so must buy a few to freeze. Although you can create a similar flavour by mixing orange and lemon juice they have a unique aromatic bitterness which gives a lovely lift to game like pheasant or duck.

Town vs country

Yesterday I bought a pheasant. It cost £5 which isn't bad if you compare the cost with a free-range chicken but I hesitated because it feels to me like a luxury ingredient.

That's very much an urban point of view. If I was living in a country village then I might well have been able to get a brace for that price or, indeed have traded something I'd grown or produced for a free bird from a neighbour. Game is cheap in the country. If I was thinking of making a curry on the other hand I would probably pay far more for my ingredients than I would in a large city. So you can't be absolute about which ingredients are cheap.

Anyway, I pot roasted the pheasant for about an hour and a half with some root veg spiced with sweet smoked pimenton and a pinch of cinnamon, a small (about 50ml) glass of leftover Christmas port, a similar glass of white wine and some stock. After it had been cooking for an hour I removed the lid for the remaining cooking time to brown the bird. While the pheasant rested I skimmed the fat off the pan juices (tiresome but well worth doing). We ate the two breasts with the roast veg and stir fried sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes which I'd first boiled and then peeled (easier that way round than peeling them first). The veg by the way cost £1.78.

The legs and remaining meat on the carcass will make a pilaf for tonight. The carcass can be used for stock for a soup. The leftover veg can be fried up bubble and squeak-style with some cold ham or other cold meat. With a few modest additions we should get three more meals for our £7 outlay.