smoked paprika & other tales from the kitchen

Ramblings about cooking, culture and other clutter together with the occasional recipe borrowed from 'proper' cooks poorly transcribed for your culinary enjoyment. NB- All the links are intended to be relevant, interesting, amusing or educational - but I cannot be responsible for any content linked to from this site as the web is strange place and things change.

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Location: Manchester, United Kingdom

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Rick Stein's French Lamb, The Humble Haricot Bean & Lil Miss Sunshine


I’ve just got back from the cinema where we watched Little Miss Sunshine – a road trip movie about a dysfunctional family trying to drive 600 miles in an old VW van to make it to one of those very disturbing US beauty pageants for little girls. If you like films like Sideways, Happiness, and The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore etc. then you’ll probably like it. I couldn’t thinking that the character played by Greg Kinnear was written with William H Macy in mind, but asides that niggle the film has some genuine laugh out loud moments and a life affirming conclusion that isn’t too sentimental. So, 7/10 from me in case you care what I think. On the stove at the moment I’m trying a French lamb ragu cribbed from a recent re-run of Rick Stein’s French Odyssey. Rather than shoulder of lamb diced up I’m using some mutton on the bone I got from a halal butcher in Cheetham Hill which might mean cooking it for an extra half an hour – but in terms of flavour and value it will hopefully be worth the wait. You basically brown the lamb with some flour and remove, then fry a chopped onion and a couple of cloves of chopped garlic for a few minutes. Lob the lamb back in, add a squirt of tomato puree, some bay leaves and dried thyme, a third of a bottle of dry rose wine, salt & pepper and several fresh tomatoes skinned and de-seeded. Then add some stock (I’m using some of the chicken stock that I went on about in the previous post but an oxo would do I’m sure) and let the whole lot simmer on a very low heat for 1 ½ hours. It also involves haricot beans and of course Rick used ‘fresh’ cos the French have such things in their markets but I’ve had to use some that I soaked overnight and are now simmering themselves for an hour before I add them in. I think sometimes with some pulses that the tinned are the answer – I mean 8 hours soaking and then an hour simmering until they are edible? – Its only a haricot bean, not a flipping whole roast hog or something. But the upshot of this particular meal of course is finding what to do with the remaining rose wine – so a big glassful with a couple of ice cubes is on this occasion chef’s privilege. Yeah, I know it’s a school night – so sue me.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

hi - love the blog

any chance of giving us the the proportions for the lamb dish? - sounds interesting - especially the use of rose wine.


Sarah, Dorset

Tuesday, 03 October, 2006  

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