Proper stodgy food

When you get as much snow as we had today, you need a good, warming meal in the evening, with lots of fat and baking or roasting involved. Tonight we had chipolatas baked in the oven nestled around veg (onions, whole garlic cloves, pieces of yellow pepper, carrot and courgette) with roasted new potatoes and leeks in white sauce. Perfect winter food. I ate loads, but still feel hungry when I look at this photo and see the glistening fat on the potatoes. Such gorgeous flavours - proper stodgy food.

Friday Sunday lunch

It's a Friday, but it seems that it's a Sunday, as we're definitely having a full Sunday roast and pudding. I don't know why and I wouldn't dare ask in the post-Christmas frenzy we seem to be experiencing in this house. But I'm not complaining. We had delicious roast beef (topside) from the village butcher, perfectly rare and tender, as you'll see in the picture, with roast potatoes and parsnips, green beans and cabbage. We served it with Suffolk Mud (the brand name - thankfully there's no mud in the ingredients) cider and horseradish mustard and other horseradishes and mustards which went well too.

For pudding we had a sort-of pavlova. Home-made meringue covered with a layer of whipped double cream, then a layer of British pears, sliced, and pomegranate seeds. Delicious. I've shown you a picture of it on my plate and a picture of it whole. It was all eaten very fast. Scrumptious.

Christmas Lunch

Turkey, roast potatoes, sausage stuffing balls, veggie (walnut and apricot) stuffing, bacon rolls, sausages, sprouts with chestnuts and pancetta, peas and gravy (not seen, but I did have some on the meat), bread sauce (not seen either as it wasn't on my plate yet).

Christmas pudding (some burning booze made a run for it and burnt along the table - a scary Christmas moment there - and it was alight for so long we thought the plate might crack) and the tastiest threesome on the Christmas table - brandy butter, oozing rum butter and cream. I don't even like Christmas pudding much, but I don't need much coercing to eat these three.

Succulent roast chicken

On Sunday night we went to my parents' for roast chicken. I wasn't feeling very well so I had a smallish portion, although looking at it there it really isn't so small. I was really unhappy not to finish it, although the gannets around the table swooped on my discarded sausages and spuds as soon as I was finished. The chicken was so juicy and delicious there was no need of gravy and the mixed vegetables which had been roasted underneath the chicken (it was on a rack above the veg with the bacon slices laid across it) added the necessary meat juices and moisture. As you can see, we also had green beans and roast potatoes. Fantastic.

Sunday Roast Beef

Wow, I'm stuffed. And I think I might pop into our local butcher's on Monday morning to give Tom the Butcher a kiss - the joint of beef (Scotch topside) he sold me yesterday morning was simply incredible. It even looked so perfect when it was cooking that I took a photo of it in the pan (see below).

I dabbed it with a mixture of grainy mustard and butter, roasted it at 220 degrees centigrade for half an hour, then sloshed a glass or so of red wine over it and turned the oven down to 200 for about an hour. I left it to rest for a good twenty minutes while I simmered the carrots and beans and made the red wine gravy. As you can see from the steamy photo on the left, we had roasted salad potatoes (I had lots in the cupboard and when roasted they're lovely and sweet), roasted parsnips and boiled carrots and beans. And we opened a bottle of beaujolais - roast beef just wouldn't be the same without a glass of red wine.

Somehow, everything worked perfectly - the meat was rare and beautifully tender, just how I like it, the potatoes were crispy on the outside and fluffy in the middle and everything else turned out really well. I was really pleased as I haven't cooked a roast for ages and last time I overdid the potatoes (even I admitted they were a little too charred, and I love crunchy roast potato) so I wasn't expecting too much from this one. And I even had a bit of gravy on the meat - as its main ingredient was red wine.

And yes, of course we had seconds. But fortunately I bought such a large joint there's loads left for the rest of the week. Cold roast beef butties - I can't wait!