Reet good Yorkshires

By gum, and all that jazz.

Recording for my own reference before I forget, since they've never been quite this good before...

2 eggs
70g plain flour
100ml milk
salt & pepper
fat for cooking (I used Trex)

Beat the eggs and flour together with a whisk until smooth. Mix the milk in, in three or four goes, combining it well each time and adding seasoning on the last one, then give it a good old beat to get some air in. Leave to stand while you sort out the tin.

With the oven already cooking the beef (mine was at 170-180°C), place a dot of Trex in 8 holes of a muffin pan. (Dot = chickpea size or a bit bigger, although surely no true Yorkshireman would fart about with such airy fairy rabbit food.) Give the pan a good 15 minutes or more to heat up - I put the pan on the top and moved the meat and roasties to the bottom shelf.

20-25 minutes before you want to serve your roast dinner, quickly whip out the pan, add the batter mix to the eight holes (get the right eight!) and return to the oven. After this, open the door as little as possible - I had to open once to get the meat out to rest. Watch and wait. If they don't rise after all that, don't blame me! These ones did receive genuine Yorkshire approval.

Spanish roast chicken

Hot off the press - this is a BBC Good Food magazine recipe, and I'm a subscriber so this issue has only just hit the shops :)

It's paprika-covered roast chicken, but with potates, chorizo and chickpeas in the roasting pan with lemon, garlic, stock and white wine. I really don't think quantities are that vital, but it was a 1.4kg chicken, 800g potatoes, 200g chorizo, 2 tins of chickpeas, 2 lemons, a whole head of garlic, a glass of white wine and the same of chicken stock. All pretty standard - for reference, I used Revilla chorizo and it was fab, not too spicy but very tasty.

Rub the chicken with paprika, oil & salt, and stuff with 1 lemon, halved. Cook the chicken, chorizo (chunks) and potatoes (chunks or use small ones) in a big pan under foil for 30 mins (180°C fan). Remove foil, baste chicken, add other lemon (in wedges) and garlic (peeled cloves), roast for another 30 mins. Add stock & wine, mix everything around, and do a final 30 mins. Garnish with chopped parsley before serving. Original recipe suggests serving with yogurt with paprika, lemon & saffron (and adding saffron to the stock) but I didn't do that.

I found that 90 mins was not enough, and we usually do chicken for 1h40-1h45, so would increase the cooking time next time. There was quite a lot of liquid but we ate it from bowls with the chicken carved on top. Some of the potatoes were a bit solid (which seemed odd having been roasted for so long) so I'd chop them a bit smaller next time, maybe 1" or so. Hubby felt there was too much garlic in terms of whole cloves, but it didn't seem to add to the taste. Next time I would remove the chicken for carving then squish a couple of the roasted cloves and stir them in before serving.

When we'd finished, I stripped the chicken carcass and put the meat in with the other leftovers for the next day. It was even better - tangy and juicy, and reheated well.

For a really easy version I think I would use bone-in chicken thighs (and lose 1 lemon), parboil the potatoes, and make the other changes above. I wonder whether a few salty black olives stirred in before serving would also be good?

Pork with parsnips and fennel

Waitrose Kitchen magazine, October 2010.

Ingredients

• 3 parsnips, peeled, cored, cut in wedges
  
• 1 med-large bulb fennel, thinly sliced
  
• 12 shallots, peeled and halved
  
• 2 pork neck steaks
• 200ml low-alcohol cider
• few sprigs thyme
  

Method

Place the vegetables in a roasting pan with the cider, and roast at 220C for 5 mins.
Place the pork on top, season, and roast for a further 30 mins at 200C.
To serve, place the meat on the veg and pour over the juices. Serve with steamed vegetables (we did savoy cabbage) or salad.

Comments

The roasted parsnips were a little dry. Next time I would spray with oil before roasting, or baste in the cider. The shallots were lovely and sweet, though.
The pork was tender but needed a bit of oomph. I was thinking of mixing some wholegrain mustard with a little cider and maybe even marinading them for a few hours. Maybe honey too, but the cider is pretty sweet. I don't know why they specified low-alcohol cider; perhaps I would try another one next time.
Apple wedges could go nicely in the vegetable mix as well.