The veg garden is keeping us well fed with sweetcorn, french and runner beans, salad leaves aplenty and the odd courgette (the green ones are good, but a yellow-fruiting variety, delicious in previous years, tastes watery and slightly bitter). Cucumbers in the greenhouse are doing well, but we harvested the tomatoes as blight was getting the better of them. A meal of spicy fried green tomatoes resulted (okay, but not delicious) and those that didn’t have a hope of ripening before they rotted went into chutney, that needs time to mellow, but tastes very promising.
A successful family forage resulted in a heaped basket of blackberries (so late this year). They became a crucial ingredient for the two most mouth-watering dishes of the week: venison in bramble sauce, and blackberry and raspberry pancakes.
Inch-thick venison steaks (from a road kill found recently by a friend) were fried swiftly on a high heat so they remained pink inside, then the juice from sieved blackberries – it’s worth the effort of removing the pips – was poured in for the last minute. The steaks were turned to pick up an even coating, and the juices deglazed the pan, mopping up every last bit of flavour. With boiled harlequin potatoes and steamed green beans, they made a super-healthy and lip-smackingly good meal.
The only rival for ‘dish of the week’ was the pancakes, slightly less virtuous due to lashings of double cream. Keeping up with the autumn raspberries is a challenge - they are amazingly prolific, and the children in particular require a ‘twist’ if they are to continue to appreciate the good flavour. But who wouldn’t go weak at the knees for a freshly-cooked pancake, stuffed with raspberries and blackberries that had been rolled in crabapple jelly (melted over heat with a tablespoon of boiling water), and whipped cream to smooth out excessive acidity? Yum!
No comments:
Post a Comment