Sunday 16 November 2014

Saturday 15 November - Wild Boar

Found this on offer in Lidl this week. I've never cooked with it, or even tasted it before, but had seen Rick Stein making a dish of wild boar, chorizo and chestnut stew a few weeks ago so decided to give it a try. 





The recipe started the night before, marinating the meat in redwine and various fresh herbs, along with juniper berries.

After 24 hours the meat was drained and the liquid, vegetables and meat were seperated out.

 

The meat was seared, and some sliced chorizo was added to it, and then the vegetables from the marinade were added back in and browned.


Then, in went the liquids - red vermouth, the wine from the marinade and some beef stock, plus a big handful of dried porcini.


After a couple of hours, in went some chestnuts, and it was all finished off with some wild mushrooms fried in butter.  Waitrose came to our rescue here, as wild mushrooms weren't available anywhere that I looked.


This was served with mashed potato


This was delicious, however, it would work just as well using pork shoulder - I wouldn't go to the expense of using the boar again.

As this meal was a special one for Bob, to say thank you for my beautiful new kitchen, I had to use crab in the starter as it's his favourite.

I found a recipe in the Waitrose magazine for a crab, orange and fennel salad. These are not flavours I would automatically assume would work together, but to our surprise it was delicious. The dressing was made of orange juice, olive oil, honey and chopped mint.


An alternative starter was made for George, who isn't keen on crab - cured beef with parmesan shavings.





To round the meal off, little lemon and lime meringue pies, served with a fruit compote.

Quite difficult to make the filling and meringue in small enough quantities to fill these tiny cases.

I made a butter pastry and added an egg yolk and some icing sugar,then blind baked the cases.


Once the filling was added, and cooked until set, I piped the meringue topping on, and they went back in the oven to lightly brown the topping.



These were the perfect size after a filling main course.


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