We’ve been eating oxcheek quite a lot lately – it’s very cheap and very very tasty. The only downside is it needs to be cooked pretty much all day, so we can only really have it when one of us is going to be working at home.
Anyway, we decided to have a change from casseroling it with wine, and used a recipe for Lahore-style lamb from The Curry Book. It was amazing.
Back in January we decided to start making bento boxes for Al to take into work. Most of the ingredients (apart from the rice) can be made at the weekend for the next week. The first week we made:
carrots and mushrooms
and mini burger things
as well as a few more bits and pieces that we didn’t take pictures of.
All the recipes came from here.
This is what the first ones looked like:
I tried remaking a soup I’d cooked a few times in Sydney for Jenny and Laurence. Getting the ingredients in Oxford was a little tricky; in particular the prawns just weren’t up to those you can get from the Sydney Fish Market, and the lemon grass wasn’t as fresh. They didn’t add enough flavour, and the whole thing ended up being a little weak. Not to worry, I’ll still make it again (but will know to either buy more prawns, or make less soup…)
Made these from a Jamie Oliver recipe on the internet. They weren’t that great frankly – too eggy. I made them again a few times during the next week from this recipe for Scotch Pancakes and they were much much better – light and tasty with just the right amount of egg (the pictures are of the Jamie Oliver ones – they looked pretty!).
Partridges stuffed with liver and mushrooms (from Jane Grigson’s English Food) with pierogi stuffed with cheese and potato, and cabbage fried with cream and caraway seeds.
Afterwards Al finished off the Christmas pudding:
A pear and ginger upside-down cake; recipe from Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book. We didn’t have any preserved ginger, so we improvised syrup by heating sugar with some fresh ginger in it, and added some ground dried ginger to the cake. It would’ve looked a bit prettier if I’d cut the pear in vertical rather than horizontal slices, but it tasted fine!
