One of the things that we are finding it hard to source are really good stock cubes. The good old OXO cube is still made in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Which is all well and good but I must admit to not being a great fan of their flavour. Ordinarily we would go for the Knorr stock pot brand but they are obviously not an option for us at the moment. So we have decided to make an investment in stock by making our own.

Because stock is the staple ingredient for a great stew , risotto or soup to make this type of dish taste great you need to start with a fantastic stock base.

One of the best things about making your own stock is that it can cost you nothing but time to make.

Ingredients

One stripped chicken carcass (this is obviously going to be Chicken stock)

Any old vegetables that are on the turn. The classic combo is carrots, celery and onion. I personally did not have celery but included an old leek and added some celery salt.

Herbs: I added sage, rosemary, basil and pepper leaf (more about this last one another day)

3 big cloves of garlic

Salt (and pepper if you have it… we don’t… not British)

A knob of butter

How to…

First roast the chicken carcass until it is browned (about 20 minutes). While this is roasting fry your onion, garlic an veg in a large saucepan. When the onions have gone transparent leave this is cool.

Add your chicken to the cooled veg and add enough water to just cover the chicken. Add you salt (and pepper) and bring to the boil. Allow this mixture to simmer for about 20 minutes or until the carrots are soft.

At this point get a potato masher and mash-up all of your ingredients. What you are trying to do here is get all of the flavour out of the chicken and veg. This leaves you with a rather tasty but bony soup. Now simply pass the whole lot through a fine sieve.

What you are left with is a fantastic stock!

You can then freeze it or use it straight away.

Once again pancake day has rolled around and with no lemons in sight this year (yes I am feeling somewhat deprived) I have had to go slightly European to get pancakes on the menu.

So here is my all British pancake day recipe for a filling dinner for 2.

Chicken, Mushroom and Tarragon Savory Pancakes

Ingredients

Chedder Cheese

For the filling;

• 2 free range chicken breasts
• a handful of sliced chestnut mushrooms
• a leek, washed and sliced
• rapeseed oil

For the sauce;

• plain flour
• butter
• milk
• dried tarragon
• mustard
• salt

For the pancakes;

• Plain flour
• milk
• 2 eggs
• salt

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Start by making the pancake batter. Weigh the eggs (shell on). I know this sounds daft but as all eggs are different sizes it will keep your batter in the correct proportions. Crack eggs into a bowl and weigh the same amount of milk, add this to the bowl and then add the same weight of flour. Whisk this together and add a splash more milk for a slightly thinner batter as well as a good pinch of salt. Set this aside.

Put rapeseed oil in a frying pan and add the mushrooms, leeks and chicken and fry until chicken is cooked. Set aside to cool slightly.

Make a bechamel  sauce by melting a good size knob of butter in a saucepan, adding the dried tarragon, salt and a tablespoon of flour. Cook the flour for a minute or two and then add approx. 500ml of milk and allow to thicken slowly stirring constantly. Once thickened to a pouring consistency add a generous teaspoon of mustard.

Heat a small amount of rapeseed oil in a non stick pan and make the pancakes by adding one ladle at a time of the batter, swirling it around the base of the frying pan and then flipping over in the normal pancake fashion!

Place a spoonful of the filling into each pancake, roll the filling up in the pancake and place in an ovenproof dish. Repeat until the dish is full, you run out of filling or you run out of pancakes. Cover with the sauce and grate some delicious British cheese on top.

Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes or until the cheese is bubbling and browned (we couldn’t wait for this step as we were hungry and it was getting late but it is well worth the wait).

Enjoy 😀

– Emily

Today we received our new frying pans ordered from Netherton Foundry in Shropshire. These are the sort of pans that Lucan’s children will be using, so while they are about £45 each they are a real investment (so long as you look after them that is). I was excited to give them a whirl so decided that fish cakes would be a fitting christening.

Every 3 weeks we get a fish box as part of our subscription to Kent veg box. Last week we received a beautiful piece of smoked haddock so this was going to form the foundation of my totally British fish cakes. Here’s the recipe:

One side of smoked haddock

3-4 reasonable sized potatoes

Optional: Fresh Corriander (we did not have this)

2 cloves of garlic

1 egg

half a preserved lemon (or lemon zest)

Emily preserved a number of lemons about 2 years ago in salt water and herbs liqueur. This stock might help us get some much needed zest into certain foods as our year progresses.

An end of bread.

Nob of butter

Rapeseed oil

This recipe is really simple. Peel and boil your potatoes before mashing. Leave your mash to cool. De-bone your fish and  shred it into small pieces. Once your mash is cool add the fish, garlic and egg (coriander if you have it). Chop your preserved lemon into small pieces (or zest your lemon). Add the lemon, butter and season with salt (and pepper if you have it – we didn’t). Shape your mix into patties.

Now take your end of loaf (or stale bread) and make it into a decent sized bowl of crumbs. Coat your fish cakes into this crumb mix.

I made 7 decent sized fish cakes out of my mix. This is obviously too much for our little family so I have put 4 of the cakes in the freezer for another day.

Take a large frying pan and glug in a liberal amount of rapeseed oil. Fry the patties for 4-5 minutes each side or until they are nice and crispy.

I steamed some cavolo nero with some salt and rapeseed oil and served just like that!

Emily and I wash tonight’s dinner down with some cold bottles of Gadds’ Black Pearl Oyster Stout. Yummy!

– James

cavolo nero

I am the kind of guy that does not read instruction manuals or follow set directions. I especially never follow recipes. This approach means often means that constructing Ikea furniture often ends in prolific blasphemy but that cooking is always a voyage of discovery. This recipe was basically restricted to what I had in the larder but in the end was fantastic, perhaps mainly because the quality of the ingredients was top-notch. It is becoming increasingly apparent through our efforts to buy only British that the supermarkets are not the best place to get the best quality produce at the best price.

Anyway, I started the preparation for this recipe at 10am this Sunday morning and because the recipe requires booze it did mean that the drinking started early.

Father and Son Stew

500g of stewing steak (I actually used braising stake and it was a little too lean) if you can use Ox cheek you are on to a winner!

The key is quality ingredients

1 large leek

1 onion

10-12 small carrots

1 swede

5-6 large cloves of British Garlic (Ours is from the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm and is huge)

Carrs Sauce Flour

Celery salt (ideally proper celery)

Knob of butter

A glug of rapeseed oil

1-2 beef Oxo cube

A dash of Worcestershire sauce

3 dried bay leaves

2 sprigs of fresh rosemary

The secret ingredient is 1 bottle (minus a few slugs for the chef) of Sambrook’s Wandle Ale

The main event!

Cut your steak into 1″ cubes salt and brown in a pan with a large nob of English butter and a dash rapeseed oil. Throw some salt in (and If you are not being as strict as us in your effort to buy only British then some black pepper). Once browned an all sides take out of the pan and let it rest while you and your and your 2 year old son chop the veg (2 year old son optional). Make sure that you don’t chop your veg too small. I left some of the smaller carrots whole.

Fry the onion first and then all of your veg in the same pan (if you have some celery add about 2 sticks – I did not have any so added celery salt).

Lucan cutting carrots

Make sure all of your veg is sweated down a little then re-add the meat. Then add your whole garlic. Do not be tempted to chop the garlic as there is nothing better than finding a sweet chunk of stewed garlic in your dinner.

At this point add as much of a bottle of ale or stout as you have not drunk and a dry beef stock cube. An a dash of Worcestershire sauce, the bay leaves and rosemary. Now the key ingredient is time.

I left mine in a low oven of 150c for 6 hours. Take it out every 2 hours and stir lightly so as not to break up the veg too much.

After 6 hours of cooking you should be left with about 1″ of sauce left in the bottom of the pan. This sauce will be quite thin still so add some sauce/corn flour to thicken it up slightly. Your sauce should add a gloss to the meat and the veg without being too watery.

I served mine with mashed potatoes made with a blog of butter and a generous table spoon full of garlic mayo.

Let us know how you get on!

Beautifully dark and moist winter stew

– James and Lucan

Fruit is a little issue for us at the moment. We are only able to source apples and pairs at this time of year and as we get a weekly order from Kent Veg Box we have ended up with masses of apples. More apples than we can ever get through. The pears Lucan hoovers up pretty quickly but the apples are his second favorite and so don’t get eaten so quickly. We have had to start getting innovative with apples. If you have any great apple recipies please let us know!

This one is loosely based on an Amish recipe but has been given a unique Bradshaw twist. It really is exceptionally good.

One thing to note is that there is actually no butter in this recipe at all. The butter element in the title refers only to the buttery consistency of the apples in the finished jam.

Ingredients

2lbs apples – we used cooking apples but will in future try a mixture of anything that is going.

250ml water

125ml cider vinegar

sugar – for us silverspoon sugar beet sugar

10 juniper berries

a pinch of salt

Quarter the apples core, skin, stalk and all and place in a a heavy bottomed pan with the cider vinegar and water. Cover and cook gently for about 20 minutes or until the apples are cooked through and mushy.

Pass the apple mush through a fine sieve to remove the skin, pips etc. Weigh the apple mush and put back into the rinsed out pan with an equal weight of sugar, the juniper berries and a small pinch of salt.

Simmer this mixture stirring as often as you can for about 1-2 hours. Be careful not to let the mixture catch on the bottom as it burn quickly and spoil the flavour.

Once the mixture is thick and a dark amber colour put it into sterilized jam jars and leave to cool.

Serve on warm buttered toast for the most amazing mouthful of wintery goodness.

Enjoy 😀

– Emily

As any traditional British family would agree one of our biggest staples is pasta. I was terrified at the thought that we would be living without this for the year as on both supermarket trips I have only found pasta made in Italy.

I am however not afraid of a bit of ‘do it yourself’ and have been a proud possessor of a pasta machine since my 18th birthday (a bit of a right of passage). So with this in mind, on my last trip to Waitrose I found some lovely white spelt flour from Sharpham Park. Spelt is supposed to be easier to digest than wheat and have all sorts of other health benefits, but to be honest it was the only flour I could find that I thought might make a reasonable pasta flour substitute.

I present my first recipe of the year and with it a word of caution; If you roll this too thin it will turn into glue when you try to cook it! (This was the conclusion of spelt flour experiment number 1)

Spelt Flour Pasta Dough

500g Spelt Flour

275ml warm water

a good pinch of salt (British of course)

2-3 tbsp rapeseed oil

Mix all of the ingredients together and knead gently until dough is slightly springy. Wrap in clingfilm and rest for at least an hour at room temperature.

Roll out or shape on a pasta machine (3 or 4 on our machine was thin enough). Make sure that you work and roll out the pasta enough as this is what makes the pasta really silky and smooth to eat.

Enjoy with whatever sauce you like!

Ours contained leeks, home preserved sun dried tomatoes (from our garden 2 years ago), fresh basil, Isle of Wight garlic, Rapeseed oil, and Welsh hard goats cheese.

The pasta had a great taste and next time will have an improved texture. I would completely recommend you give it a go. We would love to see your results 🙂

– Emily