What I did with leftover oxtail stew

I read in the paper this weekend that people have forgotten how to cook with leftovers, so I thought I'd blog about how to squeeze an extra meal out of the remains of an oxtail stew. It meant that I got a second meal for three out of the oxtail (just as well, as these days it's significantly more expensive than braising steak). This works because oxtail gravy is about as meaty as gravy comes.

Oxtail is well suited to this treatment: there's always a lot of gravy because of the need to cover the big bones. But second time around there's not much meat, so you'll need to find some "meaty" vegetables to take its place. Mushrooms are a must, and I also used the last blue squash in the larder. (You could, at a pinch, use a well flavoured gravy, providing there were plenty of vegetables.)

We ate this for lunch yesterday, sitting in the garden - this wintry meal was perfect for our first al fresco meal of the year in the weak spring sunshine.

Something special with oxtail leftovers

Meat and gravy
Mushrooms
Onions
other vegetables to roast - squash, carrots, parsnips, etc
thyme

Strip the meat off any remaining oxtail bones and set aside. Next, enrich the gravy as if you were making stock - boil up the bones in it for an hour or so, adding extra water if necessary, even some fresh vegetables. Strain this mixture. You can do all this a day or two in advance, so that you're not eating oxtail two days in a row. This will also mean that you can scrape away the fat which will have risen to the top.

Braise some mushrooms in a little stock or wine. Roast some onions and any other vegetables you have - I used the last squash in my larder, a lovely blue one, and chopped a great deal of thyme onto the roasting tin. When the vegetables are ready, layer them into a heavy casserole dish with the scrapings of meat, then add the gravy, which will probably have jellified. Heat through - in the oven if it's on anyway, or slowly on the hob.

Nettle pesto

A couple of days ago, I noticed the nettles bursting through in the garden - a real sign of spring. A weed, but welcome, because the butterflies love them. And because they taste so good, at least while they are young.

Here's a quick recipe for a homemade convenience food that will sit happily in your fridge for most of the week. This nettle mess works both as an green sauce / salsa verde AND as a pesto. It's a thrifty recipe, as it uses breadcrumbs to cut down on the nuts and cheese. It's delicious too. We ate it with vegetables at the beginning of the week, and finished it today on pasta, thinned down with a little of the cooking water.

Nettle pesto

Nettles
Mint (if you've got it, or other herbs, or none)
Garlic
Wholemeal bread
Cheddar
Oil

Pick a colander full of young nettle tops (you'll need gloves). Rinse them, then plunge them into boiling water for one minute to blanch them and take the sting out of them. As soon as the minute's up, tip them back into the colander (keep the water, it's full of goodness and can be drunk like a tisane) and run under the cold tap to stop them cooking. When they're cold, squeeze out the water.

Put a slice of wholemeal bread into the food processor. Add a chunk of cheese, a peeled clove of garlic and the nettles and a little mint. Blitz, then add oil in a stream. I used rapeseed oil. Keep tasting, adjusting the amounts. Hard to say how much oil, as it depends on what you are going to do with the sauce.


Links to related posts

Nettle soup
Nettle tea
Nettle beer
Ground elder salad

Welcome

Welcome to new readers who have come via the forum at Taste Australian ... four and a half years ago, my apparently healthy husband had a heart attack out of the blue (on the tennis court). Soon after, I started this blog to keep notes for myself and my friends about the changes we were making to our diet. Less salt, less fat, more vegetables, more oily fish - easy to say, harder to incorporate into daily eating, particularly with a young family.

After all this time, my main piece of advice would be to take back as much control of your diet as you can from the food industry, by cooking from scratch as often as you can manage. You've got the best interests of your family at heart; the food industry doesn't even know them.

But, whatever you do, don't get worked up about getting there all in one day: baby steps, one meal at a time. And remember the 80/20 rule on bad days.

The sidebar has links to posts for people starting out on this journey ... also quick links to some of the best authorities on heart disease. Do feel free to email me if you think I can help


PS that heart-shaped stone ... my youngest, then aged about four, lugged it up a cliff from a beach in Brittany. At the top, he took it out of his rucksack, and gave it to me. It's been on my mantlepiece ever since.

Daily bread 3

Another five minutes' work this morning, and there's fragrant fresh bread for lunch. Not a smooth round ball, because I'm cack-handed. But who cares, when it's gone in minutes? This is a good daily loaf, achieved with very little effort (see previous posts for details).

It takes a little more salt than I usually use in my bread, but that is both to preserve the dough in the fridge and to keep fermentation in check (a couple of months ago I posted at length about the role of salt in bread dough).

If you like, you can replace some of the white flour with wholemeal, but not too much, or you'll lose the lightness.

This type of baking originated in the US: Jim Lahey's no-knead bread swept the blogosphere a couple of years ago; around the same time Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois published Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Peter Reinhart is currently testing recipes for a second book on the subject. These notes are based on a recipe in Hertzberg and Francois's book, which I have adapted for a European kitchen.* Americans cook and bake using cup measures, which are in some ways very freeing. But with bread, I like to know what I'm doing so that I can do it again, and that means weighing. I use a very cheap scale, the sort you can re-set to zero between ingredients. Perfect for weighing water, yeast, salt and flour into a box - no washing up. And if you like the taste of sourdough, no need to wash it up between batches.



















Dough to make four loaves over a fortnight

5 litre food-grade plastic box

650ml cups of water
15g tablespoons dried yeast
20g tablespoons Maldon salt
780g cups strong white flour
cornmeal / flour for dusting

• Weigh the water into your box. Add yeast and salt, then the flour. Mix with a spoon until there are no more lumps of flour. You should have a shaggy mess. Cover the box loosely, and leave for 2-5 hours. I use water straight from the tap and leave for four or five hours; if you use water warmed to no hotter than blood heat, this stage could take as little as 2-3 hours.

• When the dough is smooth (see yesterday's photo if in doubt), put it in the fridge. You could use it straight away, but after 2-3 hours, it will be easier to handle (and this is a material consideration).

• When you are ready to bake, sprinkle a little flour over the dough, then pull off roughly a quarter (do it by eye). You will probably have to cut it with a bread knife, and you should flour this first. Stretch the dough, pulling it out as if you were playing an accordion. Then, on a floured board, tuck the ends underneath four times, giving a quarter turn each time. This will give you a boule (the smoothness of which will be related to how well you played your accordion). Put this on a floured peel - just a flat metal baking sheet in the absence of anything fancier. Leave it to rest for half an hour.

• Put a stone in the oven and switch it on to very hot: 220C - more, if you can. Flick the dough** from the peel onto the stone***, shut the door, then add a low baking tin with a little water into the oven. Half an hour. You might finish it upside down if it's not quite ready when you check. Cool it on a rack.

The rest of the dough will keep for a couple of weeks, covered loosely, in your fridge.


















Notes

* These notes should be enough for an experienced baker to follow. If you're having difficulty, email me and I'll try to help out. Better still, buy the book, as it's full of wonderful variations on the basic doughs. But if you're European, you'll also need a set of US measuring cups.

**This is tricky, and I suspect there are demos on YouTube. But however mis-shapen your loaf is when you deposit it onto the stone, it will rise magnificently in the oven. And it will still taste good. (This dough is first cousin to the NY Times loaf that hit the blogosphere a couple of years ago, and would therefore, I suppose, bake well in a hot covered Le Creuset pan instead of free-form on a stone.)

***You can spend a lot of money on this, or you can buy a paving slab at the builders' merchant.

Related posts

Daily bread
Daily bread 2

Six seed rolls
Bread knots - another simple way to make beautiful and delicious rolls, using this dough, or your default dough

Yeast starter for bread - and the bread make your own sourdough starter

No-knead bread the famous NY Times recipe
Speeded-up no-knead bread and a different take on it

Yoghurt bread fabulous, easy, TRY IT
Quick oat loaf
Spelt bread - it's getting easier to buy this highly-flavoured flour

Anti-oxidant tea bread - I made this for my husband for a pre-surgery boost - delicious, too!

Yeast conversion - fresh/dried/quick

Things to do with stale or leftover bread

Panzanilla
Herb stuffing for roast chicken
Grilled trout with rosemary stuffing
Baked scallops
Anchovy toasts

Daily bread 2

The flour and water mess I made this morning has - all by itself - turned into bread dough, full of lovely air pockets. I've put it in the fridge; I'll be baking either late tonight when we get back from the theatre, or first thing tomorrow morning. I'll post the proportions I've used tomorrow, when I'm sure it works as well as I think.


Nine o'clock this morning, straight after measuring the flour, water, yeast and salt.


12 noon, the shaggy mess has turned itself into a smooth dough. No kneading involved, just a little light stirring with a wooden spoon.


It's also twice the size, and full of air pockets.

Want to try this yourself? Come back tomorrow ...

Daily bread

Baking your own bread seems to me to be at the heart of a thrifty kitchen - there's always something wholesome to eat, expensive ingredients can be stretched further, there are myriad delicious dishes to cook with any stale slices and crumbs. To simplify daily baking, I've been using a bread machine for over a year for the majority of our dough (I haven't bought a loaf of bread since 2007). And now I'm experimenting with the kind of dough you mix up once a week and pull off pieces to bake.

I've just spent five minutes measuring water, dried yeast, salt, flour into a huge plastic box. The resulting shaggy mess - enough for four loaves - is sitting on the kitchen table, and later this morning will go into the fridge, where it will stay until I'm ready to bake the first loaf this evening: by then it will have magically transformed itself into dough. That's it: no kneading, no fiddling with little cups of yeast foaming in warm water, no fuss. The proof, of course, will be in the baking. Watch this space.

Things to do with stale or leftover bread

Panzanilla
Herb stuffing for roast chicken
Grilled trout with rosemary stuffing
Baked scallops
Anchovy toasts

Related posts

Six seed rolls
Bread knots - another simple way to make beautiful and delicious rolls, using this dough, or your default dough

Yeast starter for bread - and the bread make your own sourdough starter

No-knead bread the famous NY Times recipe
Speeded-up no-knead bread and a different take on it

Yoghurt bread fabulous, easy, TRY IT
Quick oat loaf
Spelt bread - it's getting easier to buy this highly-flavoured flour


Anti-oxidant tea bread - I made this for my husband for a pre-surgery boost - delicious, too!

Yeast conversion - fresh/dried/quick

Links to the best blogging bakers I know

Tanna at My Kitchen in Half Cups
A Year in Bread
Susan at Farmgirl Fare

this list is not exhaustive, there are dozens of wonderful blogging bakers