Compromise Gravy

This is an addendum to my roasting experiences (SFW). 

Who doesn't like gravy? It's the one sure fire way to get kids eating their veg and disguising a mediocre meal, or accentuating a fantastic one.

So what's not to like? 

Here's my confession. I am a food snob. Jus ok, gravy granules not. I would forego gravy at my inlaws, but spend ages scraping around the roasting tin and coming up short quantity wise, till I wised up with the following tips.

• Get a gravy boat. Fill it with boiling water when you take the meat out of the oven. Cover the meat with tinfoil and tea towels and let it rest while the gravy boat soaks up the heat.
• Put the roasting tin on a low heat till it starts to bubble. At this point you have a decision to call between yourself and your GP as to how much fat to leave in. Come on, it's a Sunday roast!
• Chuck in some flour, start scraping. When it gets all blobby, time to deglaze.
• Deglaze with wine or balsamic vinegar. Remember you can get cheap ersatz balsamic vinegar which will make a reasonable gravy, but will not get you drunk - the choice is yours.
• Make sure you have some hot stock ready. This can be organic chicken stock from your previous meal or gravy granules. As a half way house, Marigold vegetable stock power. YMMV
• Carve the meat in some chopping board contraption that somehow retains the juices. See above photograph for one such item that somehow appeared in our kitchen years ago without planning. Tip the last bit of meat juice goodness from this into the roasting tin.
• Plate up the meat and keep warm in the oven while you attend to the gravy as follows
• Chuck the stock in.Taste (it will inevitably be delicious) and season if neccessary (it will not be).
• Let it cook to the desired consistency while plating up at the table 
• Decant into gravy boat with "Anyone want some gravy?"

Enjoy

Classic fish curry

The last three weekends have been roasts so time for a break from the meat.  My wife picked up the following monster piece of hake from the local fishmonger. I don't know why hake is so underregarded in Ireland. It's way tastier than cod, is easy to skin and bone and is reasonably sustainable and affordable. Ah well, mine and Spain's gain.

Gonna need a bigger chopping board!
Skinned, pin boned (using the perennially useful leatherman) and we're left with this

One of my earliest cooking successes was a Madhur Jaffray fish curry that surprised me by actually looking like one. And tasting not bad either. I can't remember the recipe but have made innumerable variants of it since, so here goes my bog standard curry recipe.
First of all, dry roast the garam masala.

Here we have bay and kaffir leaves, coriander, cumin, cloves, green cardamon, fennel and mustard seeds. I would have added cinamon and curry leaves but I appear to be out. Sin é. I roast them on the lowest flame for ten minutes giving them the odd shake and picking out some the chaff. Memo to self - go back to black cardamons as the green ones are way too fiddly to skin. Time for a glass of wine, a fine Georgian white from one of Fairview two excellent independent off licences (Martins in this instance, the other being Lilac wines) - Kinsale watch out, Fairview is on the up!

Decant the spices into the pestle and get the onions on the go.

Getting back to Madhur Jaffray, the one thing she really stressed was onions sweated for an eternity was the base of a good curry, so here they are after 15 minutes

According to Jaffray, the onions should slightly brown and just about to start catching. But people are getting hungry so this will have to do.
On the subject of Madhur Jaffray, before even Keith Floyd she was one of the first celebrity chefs for my generation.  And despite being a very personable and attractive woman, she did it before appearing on television. Donal Skeehan, take note.And on that note I vow to keep my highly photogenic family members out of this blog.
Now time to sweat the fresh aromatics (a scotch bonnet, a nondescript dutch chilli and a handful of garlic cloves - ginger and lemon grass would have been included if available) for a few minutes before adding the body of the sauce. btw, I owe Mr Skeehan an apology for singling him out, as the one programme of his I did watch converted me from my highly pretentious but incredibly time consuming brunoising of garlic to simply top and tail, crush, skin then rocking chop.  This will add whole days to my productive life, so chapeau.
Meantime, here's the remaining components of the sauce

  Spinach was defrosted then had as much water squeezed out as possible. Also added but not in camera were a bunch of dried prawns and some nam pla, resulting in possibly the least promising looking dish this side of chick liver pate at the food processor stage:

A bit of turmeric here would have helped, but my store cupboard management has been letting me down today.
Let it cook down for a bit, then after the rice is put on (basmati, washed and soaked for an hour, with pomegrate seeds added to perk up the flavour and appearance), add the fish.
Et voila!

Once again, no points for presentation, but dinner a three lunches taken care for so job done.

Here piggee piggee

Had some success last week with Domini Kemp's roast lamb shoulder so the family want more Sunday Roasts, so this week it's a pork shoulder from the excellent Brady's of Fairview

A simple stuffing of onion, sausage (can't have too much piggy goodness), apple, sage and thyme

Unfortunately there isn't much space inside the shoulder for the stuffing, so most will be cooked outside, and here it is, somewhat rustically tied

Now for my latest experiment in the pursuit of the perfect crackling. Most recipes suggest starting off hot then going slow, but to my mind you want it hot at the end. So I'm going to bypass this this by going long and slow then finishing the crackling off under the grill while the meat is resting.
So here it two hours later

And here's the final plating up (0 out of 10 for presentation, 10 out of 10 for gluttony)

Crackling turned out pretty good, but you have to keep a beady eye on the grill.   So that covers Sunday and the early part of next week where we'll eke out the remains with stir fries and a stroganof/goulash hybrid I stumbled on the week before (pork+mushrooms+peppers+tons of paprika+cream, nom nom)