Chicken sausage, pea & courgette risotto - fresh and tasty!

As much as I would like to, I can't take credit for this delicious risotto recipe. No, that accolade needs to go to Heck Sausages. However, I found the recipe because it was featured on lovefood.com 
with credit going to Heck - so I suppose this is the great-grand daughter recipe recommendation, if you like!  I have changed the recipe a tiny bit, but it's only re-organising the order of play and not changing the ingredients.  Now I could have just placed the link here and not bothered to reproduce the recipe, but I have learned that sometimes favourite recipes disappear from the internet never to be found again - so I'm immortalising it here for future reference.

If you're still with me after such a meandering explanation, well done.  LOL

It has been ages since I made a risotto.  Hubby is ordinarily the risotto chef in our house - and he does a cracking job at it too.  However, he was otherwise engaged so I decided to give it a go.  I'd made some good risottos in the past, so my track record wasn't bad.

For all that it is currently autumn - and a good time for risotto - I have to say that this recipe would be very much at home in a springtime capacity.

The addition of the courgette and petit pois, with the light touch of the chicken sausages, definitely made us think of the relief of coming out of the heaviness of winter and into a relatively lighter menu, as spring comes around.  However, as all the ingredients aren't reliant upon seasonal produce (although, again, it is the perfect time for young courgettes), you can enjoy its fresh tasting loveliness at any time of the year.

As with all risottos, they live or die on the quality of the stock you are using. So at this point I have to blow my Essential Cuisine trumpet once again.  I used 75% Essential Cuisine chicken stock and 25% Essential Cuisine vegetable stock for this risotto and it was fantastic.  The very best part of the Essential Cuisine stable of stocks is their wonderfully intense flavours, however, because they are a stock powder (and they have a new range of liquid stocks, too) it is so simple to just increase the intensity by adding another half a teaspoonful as required.  For a risotto stock, this works perfectly.  So - I recommend them.  'Nuff said.

As for Cook's Tips, I have two :

Firstly, I wasn't looking forward to the unzipping the sausages and separating the sausagemeat into individual little meatballs.  It's a gacky thing to have to do, even if you baste your hands liberally with cold water so that the sausagemeat doesn't stick.  Then, I had this brilliant idea.  I unzipped each sausage from its skin, ran my chef's knife under the cold water and chopped each sausage into five pieces.  It worked, too!  You have to wet the knife in between each sausage, but it is SO much more of a pleasant way to do it.

Lastly, if you're wondering what pan to use to cook the risotto in, well I used our new wok.  It's quite compact, with high walls and fits nicely onto each burner so there are no cold spots to contend with.  So if, like me, you were worried about the rice catching on the bottom of your pan and/or can't see in to the top of a tall pan (alright, so I'm short and most unhelpfully, have to sit to cook), consider using a wok.  It worked absolutely perfectly for me.

So, without further ado, here's your recipe :

CHICKEN SAUSAGE, PEA & COURGETTE RISOTTO    (serves 3-4)

Ingredients :

1-2 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil
8 chicken sausages (Heck or Asda are our favourites), skinned and each sausage formed into 5 small meatballs
450g approx of courgettes, cut into half centimetre dice
1 sweet onion, diced small
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
125g Arborio risotto rice
pinch of sea salt
quarter of a tsp ground black pepper
1 litre of good quality hot chicken stock, or chicken/vegetable combined
half a tsp of ground nutmeg
1 heaped tsp of Dijon mustard
300g defrosted petit pois (peas)
1 handful basil leaves (I used Thai basil as we prefer it)
grated Grana Padano, Parmesan or Manchego cheese to garnish.

Method :

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and once heated, add the sausagemeat balls. Fry on a medium/hot heat until deeply golden on at least three sides, then remove from the pan into a bowl and reserve.

In the meantime, make up the stock in another saucepan and place on the heat to simmer.  Just before you are due to add the peas to the risotto, give them a few minutes in the stock pan to take the rawness off of them and heat them up.

Leaving the sausage flavoured fat in the pan, add the chopped courgettes and fry until just beginning to soften and take on colour.  Remove from the pan to the same bowl as the sausage balls and reserve.

Decant what little fat is left into a high sided saucepan or wok and add a little more oil if necessary.  Once the oil is hot, add the onion and garlic and fry over a medium/hot heat until softened and transparent.  Add the sea salt and black pepper and stir through.

Increase the heat under the pan to maximum and add the dry rice.  Stir well, to cover the rice in the flavoured oil and cook until you can see the rice is beginning to toast.  Add a ladleful of the stock and stir well, to release the starch from the rice.  Add the nutmeg and Dijon mustard and stir in.  Once the stock has all but disappeared, pour in another ladleful and stir consistently - it is the stirring that ensures you wind up with a creamy texture to your risotto. Once the pan is again almost dry, repeat with another ladleful of stock and continue this way until the rice is very nearly cooked through.  You may find that you have a little too much stock, or you may need to add a little boiling water as your last ladleful - it all depends on how much you stir and how starchy your rice is.

Add the petit pois along with your last ladleful of stock and stir through, then add the courgette/meatball combination and stir through.  Make sure to bring the pan contents to piping hot and add the torn basil.

Serve immediately, on warmed plates and with grated Grana Padano or Parmesan cheese as garnish.

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Creamy chicken & courgettes - my "Masterchef" box challenge!

This meal wasn't intended to be what it turned out to be, at all.  However, sometimes us cooks are just blessed with happy accidents like that.  I can hear you all laughing hollowly and saying "maybe for some people!" and yes, it's true that more often than not, when you go off piste and start creating something from scratch, it can go appallingly wrong.

However (and you knew there was one of those coming, didn't you!), I have learned that where "home creations" are concerned, it is good to keep the list of ingredients down.  The more flavours you throw at a dish, the more likely it is that at least two of those ingredients will clash.  Which makes me wonder how on earth this recipe wound up with fifteen ingredients - and still worked.  I guess we'll just call it luck.

Originally, it was supposed to be an easy recipe of pork and courgettes with a sauce made with Sainsbury's Speciality Ingredients' Porcini Mushroom Paste.  The changes began to set in when hubby got to the butcher and discovered that the pork is no longer on special offer and the chicken breasts were cheaper.  So, we swapped from pork to chicken - which was perfectly acceptable.

However, discovering that the lid of the Porcini Mushroom Paste was loose and the contents had obviously been tampered with, wasn't so acceptable.  I sat there looking disconsolately (and slightly disbelievingly) into the paste jar, wondering what the heck I was going to do now.  We, quite obviously, couldn't use the Porcini paste, which was a great shame.  I expect it was simply a matter of someone back at base having got curious and opened the jar for a sniff rather than somebody maliciously opening the jar to include something dodgy in the paste (it happens!), but there were too many chances to warrant taking any of them with it.

So, into the bin it went and I was left with no base for my sauce.  It occurred to me that this was rather like the Masterchef Box Challenge.  Along the lines of "here are your ingredients, now make something edible!".  Initially, I was a bit stuck - until I remembered a can of Campbell's Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup that had been lurking in the can cupboard.  That was a start - but what other flavours to go with the creaminess of the sauce that would increase the flavour dimensions?  Fill in the blank : " ........ and mushroom cream sauce".  Sherry?  Yes!  "Chicken in a Mushroom & Sherry cream sauce" that made sense!  A sort of fricasee.

I set off along those lines.  The only thing I would do differently in the future, would be to not include quite so much smoked bacon as the saltiness was a bit intrusive amongst the flavours.  Hence, I've adjusted the recipe down to three rashers from the six rashers I started off with.  I want the bacon in there, as it adds a great base note from which to build the flavours and can increase the savoury quotient, when you've a lot of potentially sweet ingredients, like onion and sherry.

I had a few mushrooms lurking in the bottom of the fridge, so they went in to help with the mushroom effect of the soup.

The only sherry I had to hand was a cream sherry - which is a sweeter type.  Hence, to offset some of that sweetness, I added a teaspoonful of white wine vinegar just to sharpen it all up a little - which worked perfectly.

I'm a very definite convert from using stock cubes, to using stock powder.  I was sent six different flavours of stock powder from Essential Cuisine to try - and so far, have only used three of them.  I made use of the chicken version in this dish and it is so great to be able to infuse stock flavour into something like a cream sauce, without having to introduce water that then needs to be reduced again.  It keeps the intensity of the flavour, which in turn means you don't need to use as much of the powder.  It blends in perfectly, without any hint of powderiness or lumps and has been a real godsend for several dishes I've made just recently.

I served the chicken mixture with some of Napolina's Mafalda Corta pasta, which is delightfully wiggly but comes in short pieces as opposed to something like tagliatelle - which always results in the majority of the sauce going down the front of my shirt.  I joke with you not - you just ask my hubby about the Chinese noodle dish I only just ate, one day.  Awesome.

Because of the mushrooms and courgettes included in the chicken mixture, I reckon this is a pretty darned versatile dish.  You could serve it with pasta, as I did, or alternatively with anything from rice through to mashed potatoes.  Yummy!

CREAMY CHICKEN & COURGETTES    (serves 3-4)

Ingredients :

3 rashers smoked streaky bacon, diced
1 medium onion, finely diced
2 tbsp rapeseed oil
2 medium courgettes, cut into 3-4mm slices
3-4 chestnut mushrooms, cut into 3-4mm slices
3 boneless & skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite size chunks
freshly ground black pepper
half a tsp of dried thyme
2 tbsp cream sherry plus a teaspoonful
1 tsp white wine vinegar
2 tbsp Campbells' condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 heaped tsp low salt chicken stock powder (or 1 low salt chicken stock cube, crumbled)
200ml water
2 tbsp double cream
a handful of parsley, chopped finely.

Method :

1.  Heat a deep frying pan or wok and add the bacon.  Fry on a medium to hot heat until all the water has come out of the bacon and it is starting to fry in its own grease.  Add the onion and keep the contents of the pan moving until the onion has softened.  Remove and set aside.

2.  Add one tbsp of the rapeseed oil, then the courgettes and mushroom.  On the same heat as previously (hopefully, the pan is still hot), fry until the courgettes are softened and are showing some colour.  Only let them sit for seconds at a time.  It is best to keep them moving as in such a hot pan it would be easy to let them burn, when they become bitter and nasty.  You don't want that!  Once they are softened and coloured (the mushrooms are just along for the ride), remove and set aside.

3.  Add the remaining tbsp of rapeseed oil and, while the pan is still hot, add the chicken.  Fry quickly on a hot heat to colour and seal the outside of the chunks.

4.  Add a good quantity of freshly ground black pepper and the thyme.  Stir to combine.

5.  Add the bacon & onion mixture to the pan and stir to combine.

6.  Add the sherry and vinegar to the pan and allow it to bubble like mad to burn off the alcohol.  When reduced by half, add the stock powder and water.  Stir again.

7.  Add the mushroom soup and stir well to ensure all the lumps are dispersed.

8.  You can now turn the heat down to a simmer.

9.  Add the courgettes and mushrooms and the cream.  Stir gently and allow to simmer until the chicken is completely cooked.  Stir through half of the parsley.

10.  Serve with pasta ribbons and a sprinkling of the remainder of the parsley.

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Stuffed Marrow - a blast from the past

Is it me, or do The Hairy Bikers appear to be all over the place at the moment?

Every time I turn the t.v. on, there seems to be a programme on one or the other channel that stars the hirsute lads, with their quirky humour and yummy recipes.  They're almost as omnipresent as Jamie Oliver used to be.

So, the other day, there I was doing a bit of channel-surfing when I spot the Bikers in the company of a marrow.  Being a bit partial to a chunk of marrow or two, I stopped and was treated to their rendition of a Stuffed Marrow.

Now I've looked extensively online for this recipe and I'm darned if I can find it.  For sure I can find various Hairy Bikers recipes for stuffed marrow, but not the one I saw them create.  If anyone knows where to find the recipe I'm after, let me know where and I'll link to it.  (Thanks to "Anonymous", who directed me here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/italian-style_stuffed_63676).

Anyway, all this got me to thinking about the stuffed marrows I used to make when we were living in Chatham and things were particularly hard.  You could always guarantee a good feed for very little cash, with one of those.

With the boys' recipe in mind, I decided to have a little go down memory lane and update my version.

Ooooh, hand me a knife and fork, quick!

I know that hubby likes to have a marrow with highly flavoured stuffing, so that gave me a guideline upon which to work.  I also remembered various problems with getting the marrow itself to cook, so made sure there was plenty of room in the roasting pan and that I had plenty of time in which to cook it.

I wanted to use mushrooms in the stuffing, but am aware of son & heir's likes and dislikes - which very definitely include the texture of mushroom.  Now, because I'd be using minced beef, I figured that if I chopped the mushroom finely enough (very much how you would for a mushroom duxelle), then the chances were that he wouldn't detect it.  Which he didn't.

I was impressed by the Hairy Bikers' idea of making the cheese coating in the form of a thick cheese sauce, rather than just grated cheese sprinkled over which then bakes to an impermeable crust.  Making the roux-based sauce is simplicity itself and son & heir was very happy to do his part in the washing up of the cheese sauce saucepan, although that didn't go as far as involving washing up liquid, rather more of some serious work with a finger and his tongue.  Ah well.  If he hadn't have, I would have.

Garlic mushroom couscous - a very acceptable accompaniment

I served the marrow with mashed potato for son & heir and a garlic mushroom couscous for hubby and I.  In fact, hubby had a bit of both!

We each wound up with two-thirds of each half of marrow on our plate, which was a gargantuan portion and I was glad I hadn't made more vegetables to go with it.  I figured that what with the carrot and celery in the stuffing mix, plus the marrow itself, we'd probably got sufficient vegetable matter to satisfy the veggie police, should they have decided to show.

All three of us left a small amount of marrow, as there's only so much marrow one can send stomach-wards at one time.  The cheese sauce worked beautifully and I felt that the stuffing followed along particularly British lines in its flavours.  Hubby could have done with it being a little more highly flavoured and less "juicy".  However, I do feel that the "juiciness" originated from the marrow itself, rather than the stuffing - which was virtually dry by the time it went into the marrow.

We were each happy with the meal in varying degrees.  Son & heir would have liked less marrow, hubby would have liked more flavour, I would have liked more of the "overflow" (the bits that landed up on the roasting tin).  As an occasional dish - i.e. I wouldn't want to make it regularly - it was a lovely blast from the past.

STUFFED MARROW  (feeds 3-4)

Ingredients :

A marrow
1 tbsp olive or sunflower oil
500g beef mince
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 celery stick, de-strung and diced finely
1 medium carrot, peeled and diced finely
3 chestnut mushrooms, chopped finely
1 beef oxo cube, made up with 200ml hot water
1 tsp bovril
1 tbsp tomato ketchup
1 tsp horseradish sauce
half a tsp of dried sage
1 tsp English mustard powder (or half a tsp ready-made mustard)
a good shake or two of Worcestershire sauce.

For the cheese sauce :

25g butter
2 tbsp plain flour
1 pint milk
strong cheddar, grated, to taste
half a tsp English mustard powder.

Method :

Pre-heat your oven to 180deg F/350deg C/Gas 4.  Be aware of how long your oven takes to heat up and don't turn it on before you need to - saves energy!

Take the marrow and cut it equally down its long length into two halves.  Shave off a slice from the underside, so that the marrow will sit without rocking and remove the pips by scraping them out with a spoon, and discard.

Heat a frying pan and dry-fry the mince until brown, just beginning to caramelise, and the fat has rendered out.  Remove the mince with a slotted spoon to a bowl and reserve to keep warm.  Discard the remaining fat in the pan.

Add the oil and the onion.  Cook on a medium heat for around 5-10 minutes or until soft and golden.  Add the garlic and cook for another minute, then the celery and carrot and cook until heated through, then add the mushroom and stir through.

Replace the mince back into the pan and stir through.

Add all the remaining ingredients then stir through and leave to cook for some 10 minutes or so, or until the "gravy" has reduced down to almost nothing.  Taste to check the seasoning and correct if necessary with a pinch of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.   Place to one side, whilst you make the cheese sauce.

In a small pan, melt the butter, then add the flour and stir through.  Cook over a gentle heat for a minute or two.  Add a small amount of the milk and stir furiously, repeating as necessary until you have as thick a sauce as you can bear.  Remember, it's going to have to sit on top of the stuffed marrow and not run everywhere!  Add the cheese and stir gently until it has melted.

Next, assemble the dish.

Place the marrow pieces into a large roasting dish that will allow plenty of room around them - and leave a gap in between the two halves.

Fill the marrow pieces with the mince mixture - if your diners aren't too keen on marrow, you can always scrape a little bit more away, thus leaving more room for the mince mixture.

Spoon the cheese sauce over the top of each marrow half and place into the oven for 35-40 minutes, or until the top is golden and bubbling.  Check the marrow is cooked by inserting a vegetable knife into the thickest part.  If it needs a bit longer in the oven, you can always form a "hat" out of silver foil to go over the top and stop the cheese sauce from burning.  Don't be tempted to serve until the marrow is completely cooked, as uncooked marrow is yuk!

Serve with mashed potato or your favourite couscous dish.

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