Sausage Casserole

Simple filling dish, rammed with flavour and of course all with a gentle chilli heat.












Sausage Casserole
Ingredients
1 Tbsp oil
6 good quality Pork Sausages
4 Rashers of streaky bacon (1 inch pieces)
1 Onion (finely sliced)
Clove of garlic
1/2 Tsp of Hot Chili Powder or @JoolsCyprien's Firepowder if you are lucky enough to have some.
400g can of chopped tomatoes
300ml chicken or vegetable stock
2 Tbsp Tomato puree
1 Tbsp Henderson's Relish (or Worcestershire sauce)
1 Tbsp dark sugar
Lots of Fresh Rosemary/Thyme (to taste)
100ml Red Wine
400g Can of Kidney beans
Salt and Pepper to season.

Fry the sausages in the oil until browned all over, remove from frying pan and place in a large saucepan

Fry bacon in the frying pan until crispy, remove from frying pan and place in the saucepan

Fry the onion in the frying pan until soft, add the garlic and fry until golden.
Add the chili powder and fry for a bit longer.

Add the tomatoes, puree, stock, Hendersons, sugar, wine and herbage into the frying pan. Bring to a simmer

Transfer into the saucepan and simmer for 20 minutes.

Add the kidney beans and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Season to taste

Serve on its own or with crusty bread, jackets, mash, rice, wedges. Its up to you.

Enjoy

Wig & Pen, Sheffield

The Wig & Pen is the second restaurant from the owners of the Milestone, the Sheffield restaurant that narrowly missed out on the final of Ramsay's Best Restaurant.
Located on Campo Lane, this bustling Gastro Pub promises to stick to the Milestone ethos of serving fresh, local seasonal food from local suppliers so one Saturday evening we booked a table and went along to check it out.




We were shown to our table and given the menus to browse, being a Gastro pub a couple of Sheffield ales were on the bar which I happily went for.

We did plan on going for the excellent value 3 course pre theatre menu for £15 but the rather tempting sounding full menu drew us in and we went for that instead.

We started off with a plate of Olives and freshly made bread while deciding what we wanted.

I opted for the Pan Cooked Duck Heart with scallop, white onion puree and chorizo oil. the duck heart was a very pleasant experience, very tender with a subtle delicate meaty flavour perfectly accompanied by the creamy scallop.

For my main I went for the Wig and Pen mixed grill: Lamb cutlet with chicken mousse, home dried tomatoes, small fries, black pudding fritter, homemade sausage wrapped in leek, home cured bacon and mushrooms in a herb crust. this was a superb take on the traditional mixed grill whilst celebrating quality produce, I can't actually decide which bit I liked best.

For dessert i went for the Rhubarb and vanilla custard mousse, shortbread, rhubarb syrup, confit of rhubarb and rhubarb foam. This was very tasty and light, a delicious variety of rhubarb textures and flavours and an excellent demonstration of how one ingredient can be used in may ways.

Service was excellent, efficient, speedy and friendly.

Final bill came to £80 for two consisting 4 courses, drinks, and coffee.

Rutland Arms, Sheffield

Having been in Sheffield since August it took me a good few months to finally visit the Rutland Arms despite walking past it many times to get home but hey we learn from our mistakes.

Located near the Showroom cinema, the Rutland arms is a cosy little pub decorated in traditional style with an excellent selection of real ales usually from the local breweries of Sheffield and Yorkshire. I recently sampled Moonbeam from the Blue Bee Brewery, a deliciously hoppy pale ale from Sheffield's newest brewery.


While wasting away a Sunday afternoon in both the Sheffield tap and the Rutland arms, we decided to try out the food. The food has an excellent reputation, freshly cooked with quality ingredients so we were expecting good things and we weren't disappointed.

We opted for the Rutland burger and the Bhaji butty, a naan bread stuffed with onion bhaji, chips and curry sauce. They also do a roast menu on Sundays as well as the usual menu.

My burger was very good, thick juicy and slightly pink in the middle and the chips were epic as you can see from the picture. The picture of the Bhaji butty doesn't really do it justice, as we opened it up to get a picture but I can assure you it was very tasty.
Superb pub grub and excellent value with both meals costing just over a tenner

Well worth a visit and only 2 minutes walk from the rail station so perfect for a pre journey beer.

Scales, Spons and Horses

A month or so ago, the Bakelady over at http://bakelady.wordpress.com told us about a comment she wrote on another blog post talking about how they had received free chocolates from a website called Appliances online for commenting on another blog post of a person who had also received something and so on. From this comment the Bakelady was the lucky recipient of a set of cake tins simply for commenting on a blog.

So following the trend, she wrote about it on her blog, 'when it pays to never look a gift horse in the mouth' and invited people to comment on what they would like.

What my kitchen desperately needed was a decent set of scales, preferably electronic because it is just not fun balancing a large bowl (the original measuring bowl was lost) on top of a tiny set of mechanical scales and trying to measure out ingredients without the bowl crashing to the floor.

A few weeks later and having thought no more about it, I received a pleasant email from Ian at Appliances Online about my comment and they offered me a set of electronic scales which I duly accepted.

The twitter conversation about the original post was also noticed by Neal Robertson, the inventor of the Spon who also offered us both a set of Spons to try out and which have proved very useful especially for pancake batter recently.

So now I invite you to comment on this post about what you want or need in your kitchen and you never know you might be the lucky recipient of a gift.

Many thanks to Neal and Ian for their useful additions to my kitchen.

Lemon Cake

For this months Clandestine Cake Club meeting I didn't have much time to experiment and play about and create a new cake but I also didn't want to turn up without one, so having bought Raymond Blanc's new book I decided to make his tasty looking lemon cake...







Lemon Cake
Ingredients
5 Eggs
300g Caster Sugar
140ml Double Cream
Zest of 3 lemons
Pinch of salt
25ml dark rum
80g butter, melted
240g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder

For the glaze
50g apricot jam
Zest of 1 lemon
3 Tbsp lemon juice
150g icing sugar

Method
Line and grease a loaf tin and preheat oven to 180C
In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, cream, lemon zest, rum, salt and melted butter.

Sift in the flour and baking powder then whisk into the egg mixture until smooth.

Spoon or pour the mixture into the loaf tin and gently level the surface.

Bake for 50 mins -1 hour, test to see if it is cooked by inserting a skewer or a knife into the centre, if its clean when removed its done.
Remove from tin immediately and cool for 10 mins on a wire rack.

Warm the jam slightly and brush all over the cake, leave for 5 minutes
Mix lemon zest, icing sugar and juice into a pan and gently heat to 35C until smooth.

Brush evenly over the cake and leave for a couple of minutes to set.
Place the cake on a baking tray and place back in the oven, switch the oven off, and leave the cake for 3-5 minutes, this makes the glaze translucent.
Allow to cool and serve.

Enjoy.

Sunshine Bakery, Leeds

Chapel Allerton, just outside of Leeds, seems like quite a nice place to live. They have an excellent Mexican restaurant, an Indian home delivery service that delivers authentic Indian food and they have the Sunshine Bakery...







On what turned out to be a tour of everywhere we like (foodwise) in Leeds. Sunshine Bakery was our first stop. The last time we went it only had one table, this time it had managed to squish a few more in to accommodate its evening supper club.
It is decorated in a quaint tearoom style with food and drink served on mismatched china, basically this place defines cosy and intimate. Our initial intention was to get some of the bakery's epic cupcakes but seeing that they now had a delicious sounding lunch menu we decided to stay and make a meal of it.

We opted for the Sunshine Beefburger (me) and the Pork belly and sausage meat sandwich (Other Half), both came on the bakery's homemade tomato and pesto bread with salad. The burger, which came with bacon and cheese, was very juicy, slightly pink in the middle and very flavoursome.

For dessert we (naturally) got cupcakes. Sunshine Bakery cupcakes are quite special, lighter than air sponge with masses of various toppings ranging from peanut butter, double chocolate, strawberry and mango, Eton mess plus Britians Best Cupcake 2010 - Mango and Banana.
Cupcakes usually are sickly sweet things usually sacrificing flavour for extravagant decoration, these cupcakes avoid this. They are full of flavour but still remain quite light allowing for more than one to be eaten at a time without that sickly feeling afterwards.

The final bill for two sandwiches, two cupcakes, tea, coffee, a pot of chai tea plus two of the tomato/pesto teacakes (it's a teacake not a barm or a bap or a bread cake, deal with it and move on) another cupcake and a large brownie to takeaway came to £24. An absolute bargain.

If you live in Leeds or the surrounding areas, go for a visit if you haven't already.

Sticky Honey and Lemon Chicken

This a recipe from Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers. It looked good and thats usually enough of a reason for me...











Sticky Honey and Lemon Chicken
Ingredients
3 Chicken Thighs (skin and bone on)
Juice of one Lemon
2 Cloves of Garlic (crushed)
1-2 Tbsp Honey
1-2 Tbsp Grain Mustard
1 Tbsp Freshly Ground Black Pepper

Mix the lemon juice, garlic, pepper, honey and mustard in a bowl.
Add the chicken to the mix andensure it is well coated.
Leave for a few hours/overnight to marinate. shake the mix up every so often.

Preheat the oven to 200C.
Place the thighs on a roasting tin and pour over the rest of the marinade

Cook for 40 minutes, turn half way through to ensure its well coated.
Remove from the oven and serve.

Eat and enjoy, prize for person who gets the messiest.

Verdict: sticky, soft chicken and a deliciously messy plate of food, also easy to alter according to preference, more lemon, less honey etc..