Seriously Good Christmas Mincemeat

It hasn’t stopped raining now for 4 days. It’s playing havoc with my new running regime. Which is a shame.  And though the woods in our beautiful area here are full of mushrooms ripe for the picking, you can’t pick them in the rain so we sit and wait.

Instead today I made my Christmas mincemeat. A lovely Sunday activity. A good pot of coffee, Frank Sinatra on and away you go. I remember my Mum making the mincemeat when I was a kid; a sign indeed to begin growing in anticipatory excitement for that most brilliant time of year – Christmas. The smell of the fruit, nuts and mixed spice really get the festive juices flowing, that and the cake and the Christmas pudding mixtures. I can’t remember now which one my sisters and I had to have a turn stirring to make our Christmas wish. Small hands clutched around a wooden spoon, fighting against a quicksand of currents and brandy-dissolved brown sugar, tongue sticking out in closed-eye concentration on that most heartfelt wish.

I still do it. I still make my Christmas wish and I make it into the mincemeat for the mince-pies. I try to get the guys to have a Christmas wish too but so far they have refrained. Boys. I will leave the mincemeat out for a day in its bowl so that I can continue stirring it before I stuff it in jars and reckon they’ll probably have a little go when they don’t think anybody’s watching. But it’s a sweet little tradition and if you can get your kids to do all the weighing and stirring then making the Christmas mincemeat can be great fun to do together.

My recipe is a slightly less traditional one without the candied peel that I’m sorry to say, I’m not a huge fan of and I don’t know of many kids who are either. I don’t put anything weird in it, like dried pineapple that I have seen in some recipes, I stick to the traditional Christmas flavours. But I like mine a little less tart and a bit more ‘zesty’.

Also, in France it’s a little hard to come by all the usual and traditional ingredients like suet and Brambly apples. So I have devised my own child-friendly, French-a-fied recipe. And my mince pies are the best mince pies I have ever tasted…is that rude to say?

Maybe just try for yourself. If you’ve never been a huge fan of mince pies then I’ll give you my mincemeat recipe now and then my extra special and slightly different mince-pie recipe a little nearer Christmas. I reckon I could convert you into a mince pie lover. Now, that is a bold statement but I seem to be on a roll today so going with the flow, here it is, my Christmas mincemeat;

For about 4-5 medium jars worth you will need;

1 brambly apple or 2 granny smiths

150g currents

150g sultanas

150g dried cranberries

200g glacier cherries

50g pecan nut

50g walnuts

50g ground almonds

250g dark muscovado or natural molasses sugar

1 heaped tsp cinnamon

1 ½ tsp mixed spice

A quarter of a grated nutmeg (do not use ready grated, it tastes of dust)

Zest and juice of 1 large orange

Zest and juice of 1 large lemon or 2 small ones

300g suet or 150 g grated, frozen lard

100 ml whiskey or brandy

Method;

• Peel, core and grate the apples and set aside. They might go a little brown but that’s fine.

• I like to weigh all my currents, sultanas, cranberries and cherries out and then before I put them into the large mixing bowl I either give them a brief whizz in a blender or chop them roughly with a knife. This just breaks down the ingredients a bit allowing the flavours to mingle and mix a little better. Also this works better for mini-mince-pies. 

• Finely chop the nuts but don’t blitz to a powder, you want some texture. Add to the bowl of currents and cherries with the ground almonds.

• Add the sugar and spices, the orange and lemon zest and juices and then the grated apple.

• Now add the suet of you are using but if you can’t get hold of suet, use frozen lard. I chopped mine up into pieces with a heavy knife then put it into my mini blender with a tsp of ground almonds to coat the lard to stop it from sticking together. Or simply grate straight into the bowl.

• Pour in the brandy or whisky and now is the very satisfying part where you get to use your biggest spoon to mix it all up.

• Pass around the family so that each person gets a stir and makes a wish. Or leave on the side for 24 hours so that the older chaps can make their wishes in private.

When you’re ready to put the mincemeat into jars, put 5 jars through a dishwasher cycle to sterilize. When they are completely dry, fill each with the mincemeat, top with a circle of greaseproof and screw the lids on tightly. They should keep for up to 6 months but I have used a jar after a year and it was really good.

Oh I do get excited about Christmas. A little while to go yet I suppose. And besides in the mean time there are mushrooms to get excited about. I saw so many today on a little drive we went on through the woods. I hope those little umbrellas of tastiness are still there when it stops raining… will it stop raining?

I know, I’ll go make a little wish into the Christmas mincemeat now. That should do it.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

Rabbit and Rosemary Ragu

 

We sanded the boom today. Not quite the whole 100 foot of it mind.  Due to the reduced crew numbers there were only three of us at it with the sandpaper, the captain down below at his desk.  It was a good day for it with a soft, steady autumn sun that encouraged the t-shirt out from under its cardy for a few hours, whistling away as we worked to a little music accompanied by the swish-swishing of sand paper on wood.

By God it was dull. Really, after a few hours of that you really do not need to do any more. I am saved from absolute insanity by my fortunate job description as chef in these circumstances and lunch must be cooked. Pity it realistically takes a mere 40 minutes to make lunch for 4 people. However it does offer enough variation to my day to keep me ploughing on through the afternoon. Swish-swishing away.

So cheering up and finding my mojo for the Rabbit part of this two-part blog, I have the recipe I promised. Will wants to cook this for his Mum and Dad so I’d best get it in.

This makes a very tasty, rich rabbit sauce to go with pasta (preferably the chestnut pasta in yesterdays blog. Though it is simple to make and full of autumnal flavours. The ingredients and method are undemanding and if you are making the pasta yourself then the easiness of the sauce frees you up to get on with that, or indeed any other lazy Sunday-type activities like lying on the sofa in front of the fire.

Rabbits can easily be bought whole in French supermarkets and I had this one in the freezer. I thought I might spare you any pictures but the thing is, this is cooking and it is healthy to know where your food is coming from. So there it is; a rabbit. As I said yesterday, they are very popular in France and should be, they taste fantastic. The reason you want a whole one is because (brace, brace) it is preferable that you make the stock with its head. Do not panic. You can use chicken stock if you must. It just won’t be the same and you’ll know you're being a sissy.

If you have any doubt that this is great recipe then take a look at the end results after I cooked this last Sunday.

Mmm, a fire, a bottle of red and a rich rabbit and rosemary sauce with chestnut pasta on a lazy Sunday night… Need I say more?

For 4 people you will need;

1 whole rabbit, jointed and head set aside for the stock

1 onion roughly chopped

6-8 cloves of garlic left whole in their skins

2 sticks of celery roughly chopped

2 tbsp of roughly chopped fresh rosemary, lightly bashed with pestle and mortar

1 tbsp dried thyme or a couple of large sprigs of fresh

2 bayleaves

Good guzzle of olive oil

1 glass of white wine (and one for you)

For the stock;

1 rabbit head

1 carrot finely chopped

1 celery stalk finely chopped

1 onion finely chopped

1 clove of garlic sliced

Sprig of rosemary

Sprig of dried thyme

1 bay leaf

6 peppercorns

For the sauce base;

2 small onions finely chopped

1 clove of garlic, crushed

1 tsp sugar

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1 tbsp fresh rosemary finely chopped

1 tbsp fresh sage finely chopped

1 tbsp fresh parsley finely chopped

Method;

• Heat the oven to 200ºc, gas mark 6. Joint the rabbit roughly into largish pieces, setting the head aside (stay with me). Sear the rabbit pieces in a hot pan in some sunflower oil and put into a good and sturdy casserole dish. Roughly chop an onion and having given the garlic cloves a small and light thwack with the back of a knife, bung those in too. Add the herbs, bay leaves and the glass of white wine. Give it all a good drizzle with some olive oil and a seasoning of salt and pepper, cover and put into the oven. Turn the heat down immediately to 140ºc, gas mark 3. Roast gently for around an hour to two. No stress here.

• When the rabbit is done use two forks to shred the meat off of the bones, it should come off with no hassle at all. Nice and easy. Squeeze the roasted garlic from the skins and set aside with the all the lovely rabbity juices in the roasting pan. You will need this for the final sauce.

•  Now, fill a largish pan with 2.5 pints, 1.5 litres of water and pop your little rabbits head in along with all the other stock ingredients. Bring to a gentle boil, turn down the heat and let it simmer very, very gently for an hour or so. When its time is up, strain all the stock through a sieve into another pan and bring to a rolling boil to reduce by half. This will take about 15-20 minutes of boiling and will smell divine. Once the stock has reduced and all those lovely flavours intensified, set aside for the grand finale.

• In a large non-stick frying pan, sauté the finely chopped onion in some sunflower oil and a tsp of sugar. Turn the heat to low and let it really soften and begin to colour, about 10-12 minutes. Add the cider vinegar, garlic and season with salt.

• Let this cook for another 5 minutes then turn up the heat and add a ladleful of the rabbit juices from the roasting pan letting it bubble and reduce to a few tbsp’s. Carry on adding ladlefuls of the roasting juices, letting it reduce a little each time. Once all the roasting juices have been used pour all the stock in and let it bubble and thicken for a few minutes.

• Turn the heat down and add the shredded rabbit and saved roasted garlic and cook gently for a few minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning as you wish. Just before it is ready to serve add the freshly chopped rosemary, sage and parsley.

• Serve with tagliatelle or papperdelle and some crunchy sweet mange tout, some worthy red wine and curl up in front of the fire like we did.

Heavenly.

The top mast is being pulled out tomorrow by a crane which will be pretty exciting and brings a small reprieve from sanding the boom. However in preparation for the next bout of sanding I will come prepared with a couple of great playlists on the old ipod. Best start that now, could take some time.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

Homemade Chestnut Pasta

 I’m very excited about this blog. It will be my first ever two-part blog; the first instalment today and concluding chapter tomorrow. It’s just that I have so much to tell you and two great recipes. I’ll be up to the wee hours if I try to write it all out for you tonight. Forgive my apparent lack of commitment, all will come clear soon.

Firstly I really wanted to show you pictures of the boat at this time of year and how she looks a bit like the trees here in France that have lost their leaves for the winter.

Bare.

Even her usually glossy cap-rail has been covered with plastic wrap to keep the varnish preserved from the weather which is due any minute now. The interior of the boat is quiet and covered in dust covers and most of the crew have left for the winter. There are 5 of us left out of 12 crew. Lunch takes me a measly 45 minutes to cook and although I will adjust eventually, so far I keep trying to over-feed the remaining crew. Well, it is winter and they need fattening up for the cold months ahead surely.

Where did all my blocks go?

Now, autumn being a season of produce and harvest and because I missed out on the whole jam making adventures because I had to go sailing (poor me), I was desperately trying to come up with something interesting I could make with the glut of sweet chestnuts we have here in the cote D’azur. The chestnut festival’s final day was yesterday and I hit upon my great idea whilst rummaging around in the freezer for a suitable Sunday dinner.

The last hour of the final chestnut festival in La Garde Freinet

Rabbit. It is a shame that rabbit is not as popular in the UK as it is in France and I really don’t know why. For sure the wild rabbit is a very gamey meal and probably best suited to the game lover but a farmed rabbit is very mild and basically a lot like chicken. 

I had one in the freezer and as rabbit works very well with pasta I came up with my idea; chestnut pasta!  A low gluten, tasty roast chestnut pasta I could make myself and serve with the rabbit. Now can you see why I am so excited? 

Today I think I will start with the chestnut pasta recipe and follow with the rabbit sauce tomorrow. How will you sleep?!

So a quickie on the health benefits of chestnuts. They have fewer calories than any other nut and are the only nut to contain vitamin C. They have a high starch content and because they are so ‘dry’ can be used as a flour substitute, a fantastic non-gluten alternative. And it made the tastiest pasta ever.

Okay, I’ll stop blathering on and crack on with the recipe.

I don’t have a food blender but I do have a pasta machine. If you don’t have either this is still possible to make so do try it!

For chestnut pasta for 4 people you will need;

170g chestnut flour or 30 roast chestnuts, the skins removed

90g strong white flour

2 large eggs

1 egg yolk

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tsp fine sea salt

Method                           

 

• I went to the chestnut fare and bought about 30 roasted chestnuts which I shelled and put into my mini food processor to make into flour. It worked! Brilliantly!  If you don’t have roast chestnuts then you can get chestnut flour from most health stores. It’s sort of nice to do it yourself though and I think the chestnuts had that nice smokiness from the good roasting they’d had at the festival.

• Sift both of the flours into a large cold glass bowl or into a food blender. Make a well in the centre and add the eggs, salt and olive oil. Using a fork, start to whisk the eggs and slowly begin to draw in the flour from the edges of the well, incorporating more flour until you have a rough dough. It will get to the point when it’s easier just to get your hands in and bring it all together. If using a blender, blend till the dough forms.

• Now is the fun, stress relieving bit. Knead the dough for about 8-10 minutes on a cold flat surface, sprinkling on more plain flour if you need to. It should be a silky, springy dough and not too dry or sticky. When the dough is fully kneaded, wrap in cling-film and rest in the fridge. This is a good time to start the rabbit dish, the recipe for which I will share with you in the next exciting addition of, ‘An Autumn Boat’!!!

• Anyway. Once the pasta is fully rested (bless) sift some plain flour over a cold, flat work surface and begin to roll out half of the pasta with a floured rolling pin till it is good and thin enough to cut into tagliatelle or papperdelle or whatever shape you please! If, like me you have a pasta machine then proceed as you would normally and then use the tagliatelle function on the machine to finish. I usually rest the pasta again covered in flour and some clingfilm on a tray in the fridge.

• When you are ready to cook the pasta, put a large pan of salted water onto boil. The pasta will take just minutes! Literally just 3-4 of them. Drain in a colander and drizzle with some good olive oil.

• Serve with the rabbit sauce coming tomorrow in the next exciting addition of blah blah blah…

As you can see the pasta had a lovely ‘marron’ colour and wasn’t at all crumbly or difficult to work with and tasted delicious

Thanks for reading such a long and maybe slightly over-excited blog. I think perhaps tomorrows will be slightly calmer. But no promises. If you need any help with any of this then do feel free to contact me on the gmail address at the top of the page.

Á Demain!

Chestnut Festival and De-rigging

As the days begin to shorten here in the South of France, the boat is being stripped down to her winter coat. Sails have been washed and scrubbed, hung out to dry and are now in storage. Blocks have been de-rigged, the coins, sheaves and forks removed, labelled and bagged up, ready for sanding.

Sanding blocks. Now there's a job. There are about 200 of them. Between us we will be fingerprint-less and pretty bored, wondering was it really a year since we did this last?

Lines and rigging are slowly being removed from Mariquita, down to the bare minimum and stored in our container here in Cogolin Marina. Our container becomes both storage and workshop and will gradually get colder as the weeks pass requiring us to wear layers of clothing and rig up heaters in the vain attempt to keep reasonably warm and newly laid varnish to stand a chance of going off.

The work does become quite tedious. I am now part chef, part maintenance man, spending a fair ammount of my evenings trying to remove varnish and paint from my hair and teak dust from my eyes. However this is all offset by the simple pleasure of having weekends off. Hooray for weekends off!

And this weekend was the start of the Chestnut Festival. The Fetes de la Chataigne starts today in the village of La Garde Freinet where our crew house is and will continue next weekend ensuring we have all had our fill of roast chestnuts, pig roast baguettes and confitures. Market stalls selling produce from jams and honeys to saucisson and cakes fill up the market square in the village and thousands of people come from far and wide to sample, buy and eat and of course to drink rosé.

The chestnut was an important food staple in the past as wheat and potatoes were hard to grow in this area, so the star of the show, the chestnut, is celebrated this time every year in La Garde Freinet which is surrounded by chestnut groves (Chataignerales). You can buy produce made from chestnuts of every concievable style. Chestnut jam (confiture marron), sweet chestnut purees and and chestnut honey (miel chatignier) are but a few of the varieties and you can be sure to find chestnut ice cream, cake and crepes filled with sweet chestnut purees and cream.

I inevitably came home after a little wander around armed with a chestnut cake and a jar of sweet vanilla chestnut puree. Yum. I think I may sneak up to my room with that, some butter and a pot of tea to picnic on my bed whilst I finish this blog. The cake is lovely, not too sweet and great smeared with butter and the chestnut puree.

Trés bien! 

The weather is definately turning and although the days are still sunny it's becoming quite chilly here now. I've unpacked my winter wardrobe and am cosied up in an old favourite hoody. Unlike Mariquita who looks naked now without her huge mainsail and webs of lines and shrouds, my winter coat is fur lined and many layered, rigged with scarves and boots. And I'm loving it.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

The old boys making the tartiflette

The Do’s and Don’ts of Delicious. /dɪˈlɪʃəs/

I’ve just been on a food writing course. I’m sure you’re delighted if you’re a regular reader for reasons I can but imagine. And I’m excited to put into practice all the hunks of useful information I have eagerly digested and present you with perfectly formed prose, without passive verbs, long and complicated words and I’ll try to cut out the irony.  Never, ever use irony.

I do have one little issue with the weekend. It has been bugging me and I’d like to share it with you and see what you think. You see we had a little session on words that we shouldn’t use, over-use or even mis-use, say for example the obvious; nice – fine -  unctuous (which means oily but when it comes to food is apparently rarely used in its proper context). But then someone mentioned the word delicious accompanied by a groan and the implication that it didn’t really mean anything. Some others agreed.

I’m confused. Does not the word delicious mean that something tastes really good? A word that plays seductively with the tip of your tongue, committing you to three consonant-laden syllables. I have quite enjoyed using the word delicious in the past on my blog and am very aware of being a regular user. Have I been an embarrassingly naïve food blogger? Six months writing recipes and food stories and nobody said anything! Feels like I’ve been wandering around in public with the back of my skirt tucked into my knickers.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of delicious  is; ‘highly pleasant to the taste’. It then goes on to state that the word’s origin is from Middle English, 'also in the sense, characterised by sensuous indulgence’. Now I like that. I’m not sure though that when telling you how good a particular recipe is that I should be replacing the word delicious with the fact that it is ‘characterised by sensuous indulgence’ too often. You might get the wrong idea about me, what with that and my knickers.

What words can I use to replace it with I wonder that simply define how good, good food is? Scrumptious, yummy, delectable. All reasonably good foody words I suppose. I am wondering however, how easy it’ll be to slip back into old habits having exhausted my small repertoire of non-delicious words.

Maybe I could somehow organise with my computer that every time I write the word, one of those angry red zig-zaggy underlines will, as it commonly never fails to do, remind me of my mistake. It could tut at the same time to make me feel suitably dense.

In conclusion, I therefore forecast henceforth that I will indulge in breaking all the aforementioned rules of writing, what I learned last weekend and sanctimoniously fraternise with humongously complicated words in a desperate attempt to avoid the use of one innocent and fittingly descriptive one.

Oh, the delicious irony of it.