Lamb and rose stuffed quails with harissa and apricots

Quails are popular in France and available in the supermarkets all year. Easy to ignore because of their diminutive size they do offer a delicious meal though you normally need two per person.

This recipe come from a London chef, Yotam Ottolenghi, who was born and grew up in Jerusalem and the influences of the middle east show in his cooking. He writes regularly in the Guardian newspaper and, to be honest, we’ve not tried any of his recipes before because; a) they often seemed too cheffy and time consuming for the home cook, and b) he uses ingredients that aren’t readily available outside the metropolis of large cities like London. However, we spotted this recipe at the weekend and it seemed quite easy and with ingredients readily available – though would you believe we scoured the local supermarket and their wasn’t a dried rose petal in sight!

We had friends over for a meal last night and this is what we cooked, minus the rose petals and rose water – they were really delicious and we added to the stuffing some of our favourite Seasoned Pioneers ras-el-hanout spice which has rose petals in it. If we ever get the chance to buy the rose petals it would be interesting to see what difference it would make.

It may seem a strange combination poultry and lamb but it works so do try it.

The recipe given by Ottolenghi is for 6, which seems an odd number to choose. We made the full recipe of stuffing (which was easier than trying to scale it down) which leaves some over and we plan to use it for another meal later in the week – meatballs or koftas perhaps?

serves 6

150g dried apricots
400g minced lamb
150g fresh white breadcrumbs  
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp grated lemon zest
4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
20g chopped parsley
40g chopped coriander
3 tsp dried rose petals
Salt and black pepper
12 medium-sized quails
1 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp harissa paste
2 tbsp rosewater
2½ tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp honey

Finely chop 30g of the apricots and put them in a bowl with the lamb, breadcrumbs, cinnamon, lemon zest, garlic, parsley, half the coriander, a teaspoon of rose petals, a teaspoon of salt and plenty of black pepper. Mix well and stuff into the quails.

In another bowl, mix the oil, harissa, rosewater, lemon juice, honey, three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt and some pepper. Rub this all over the quails and marinate in the fridge for at least two hours, and preferably overnight.

Heat the oven to 200C/390F/gas mark 6. Put the quails breast side down in a roasting tray large enough to hold them snugly. Pour over any marinade and 150ml water, cover with foil and roast for 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, cut the remaining apricots into 0.5cm-thick slices and, once the 25 minutes are up, add to the pan. Turn over the quails, return to the oven uncovered, and roast for 20-30 minutes more, until cooked. Remove the quails from the pan and keep them covered in a large bowl.

Tip the sauce from the tray into a medium saucepan and simmer for three to five minutes, until thick. Pour over the quails, add the rest of the coriander and stir to coat. Place the birds on a platter, sprinkle with the remaining rose petals and serve.

couscous with toasted seeds, almonds and pomegranate

We served it with couscous to which we added a mixture of toasted seeds and flaked almonds and to emphasise the middle eastern we stirred in pomegranate seeds and some chopped coriander.

Tagine of lamb with dates and almonds

The weather is grey and miserable at the moment – today was the sort of day when you stay indoors with a roaring fire and snuggle down with a good book or film. So when thinking of food for dinner we wanted something warming and sustaining but with one eye on our expanded waistlines, something with at least a pretension to healthy eating. We had some lamb shanks in the freezer and these ‘mini portions for one’ seemed to fit the bill. Now, we’ve cooked these in various ways over the years and conclude that some sort of braise is the only way to go. Roasting just doesn’t seem to work – it needs long slow, cooking to breakdown all that connective tissue. We decided to go Moroccan for a dose of winter sunshine and consulted our guru Claudia Roden. She offers various tagine combinations for use with lamb and we liked the sound of this one with dates and almonds. It also gave us the chance to use up the remains of a packet of dates lurking in the cupboard. She uses a boned shoulder or neck fillet but the shanks work just as well.

It looks, when you read the recipe, not very exciting but we have come to trust Ms Roden and we have never been disappointed and this time was no exception, it really is a delicious combination. She comments that some people (including herself) find it too sweet with the honey in which case leave it out (as we did).

• 1 lamb shank per person, or equivalent of boned shoulder or neck fillets
• 4 tbsp sunflower oil
• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 1/2 tsp saffron threads (optional)
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• salt and black pepper
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 – 2 tbsp clear honey (optional)
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 200g pitted dates
• 100g blanched almonds

If using shoulder, trim any excess fat from the lamb and cut into large chunks. Heat 3 tbsp oil in a large casserole, put in the meat and brown lightly all over. Take out the meat and put in the onions and cook, stirring, until they begin to colour. Stir in the saffron and ginger and return the meat to the pan. Add salt and pepper and the cinnamon stick. Add hot water just to cover, and simmer, covered, for 2 hours or until the meat is very tender, turning the pieces from time to time.

Stir in the honey, if using, and the ground cinnamon and more pepper (it needs plenty to counterbalance the sweetness). Cook uncovered, until the sauce is reduced, turning the meat over as you do so. Add the dates and cook for 5 – 10 minutes more.

Meanwhile, fry the almonds in the remaining tbsp of oil until lightly golden then drain and cool on kitchen paper. Chop roughly.

Serve the lamb sprinkled with the chopped almonds and accompanied by couscous.

A week of nothing new

Goodness, how the time does fly – a week has nearly gone by without us posting anything and now we do post we don’t have anything very original to offer. But, for the record here is the low-down on our week. We have had visitors this week; the first was our friends’ dog Bulli who we were looking after for a week while they were away and he left Thursday morning to be replaced by two friends Thursday evening who stayed until this morning.       Monday lunch was a salad with tinned mackerel fillets and a horseradish dressing and the evening we had pasta with ricotta and tomato.   Tuesday we were out for most of the day as our friends Bruce & Jacs organized a golfing day at a lovely coarse that runs along the coast in the Landes near Soustons. It was great fun and in no small measure due to the patience and kindness of Bruce and Jacs (we had never played golf until we came here and this was only Derek’s third time). The weather was lovely and we had lunch at a small restaurant overlooking the lake at Soustons and an after-lunch stroll in the afternoon sunshine.

Wednesday john felt in the mood to bake bread and for lunch we made lentil and spinach soup but substituted Swiss chard which is suddenly giving forth in our veg plot having stubbornly produced virtually nothing all summer. Dinner was some really nice lamb steaks which we had spotted in the supermarket which we simply gridled and then deglazed the pan with red wine and added some redcurrant jelly. We ate it with couscous with chickpeas.

One exciting thing this week is the flowering of our very exotic-looking Datura which we have grown from a cutting given by friends whose own plants have flowered and finished while ours had not produced anything. Our friends moved the plant while we were in Canada saying that they were having too much sun and hey presto we now have flowers.

Thursday lunch was an egg salad with anchovies and balsamic dressing and we made sushi for our friends in the evening.

Friday we went with them to a local restaurant for lunch and in the evening made farfalle with artichokes and lemon but this time substituted goats cheese for the parmesan.

Lamb Jalfrezi

The weather turned cold at the weekend (but fret not the warm sunny weather has returned today) so we decided on something a little more hearty and warming than of late and for Saturday lunch we made one of our favourite soups, Jamie Oliver’s chickpea and leek which we have posted before but this time we gave it a little heat with a pinch of chilli flakes.

For dinner we headed to India with a lamb Jalfrezi. We cheated, if that is the right word, by using a Jalfrezi spice mix that we had bought from Seasoned Pioneers – we have mentioned them before for other spices and have no hesitation in recommending their excellent products and it you are interested they ship worldwide. The recipe we give below assumes that you are using normal spices rather than a blend like us but if you have a good Jalfrezi blend then just substitute that.

serves 4

For the curry paste

• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp chilli powder
• 1 tsp turmeric
• juice of a lemon

For the Jalfrezi

• 900g lamb leg steaks, cut into cubes
• vegetable oil
• 2 large onions, finely sliced
• 2 bell peppers, deseeded and thinly sliced
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 cm ginger, grated
• 2 green chillies, thinly sliced
• 2 tsp cumin seeds (leave out if using the spice mix)
• 1 tsp fenugreek seeds (ditto)
• 1 tbsp ground coriander
• 400g tine chopped tomatoes
• 4 tbsp tomato puree
• salt and pepper
• bunch coriander, chopped

Get started in the morning by mixing the curry paste ingredients in a bowl, adding the meat and mixing to evenly coat. Leave, covered, in the fridge to marinate for a few hours. When you are ready to cook, take the meat out of the fridge and let it come back to room temperature while you prep the rest of the ingredients. In a roomy pan or casserole heat a little oil over high heat and fry the lamb until browned all over. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and set aside. If necessary, add a little more oil to the pan and turn the heat down to moderate. Add the onions and peppers and sauté until the onions are softened and golden brown. Add the garlic, ginger, chillies, (cumin, fenugreek if not using the spice mix), ground coriander, tomatoes and tomato paste and cook for 5 minutes. Season to taste. Return the lamb to the pan, turn down the heat to a gentle simmer, put a lid on and cook for about 90 minutes stirring from time to time, until the lamb is meltingly tender. You may need to add a little stock or water if the sauce becomes too thick. Stir in the chopped coriander before serving with rice or bread and your favourite chutneys.

The sun is shining and the living is easy …

Since Monday we have had blue skies and sunshine and at last it feels like July should. Yesterday and today is hot and it is surprising how that changes the way you live. Suddenly we don’t have the energy to do too much and our thoughts turn to the coast and cooling sea breezes.

On the food front there is not much that is original; Monday we had a salad for lunch with smoked trout, for dinner we had planned bbq’d lamb but that went awry when we met up with friends at our favourite local hotel for a drink and didn’t leave until gone 9.30pm. Sitting outside in the warm evening air beside the swimming pool overlooking the golf course with good friends and lively conversation it is amazing how time passes. We had gone past the idea of dinner when we got home so settled for cheese and biscuits (our default it seems – we must think of an alternative).

But the lamb didn’t go to waste, of course not, we ate it for lunch yesterday with roast vegetable couscous. Strip a few branches of rosemary leaves into a pestle and mortar, add a big clove of garlic and a teaspoon of coarse salt then mash it up till you get something like a paste.  Drizzle some olive oil in, grind some pepper and you have a perfect baste for your lamb.  We don’t normally have our main meal at lunchtime but with the hot weather it felt the right moment to bbq. Azure blue skies, bright sunshine and the smell of the lamb and rosemary on the hot grill wafting in the air was so evocative of a perfect summer.

In the evening we went to the coast, which is only about 50 minutes away, leaving just after 5pm so that by the time we hit the beach the sun was less intense and the temperature tempered by sea breezes. We stayed until after 8pm and were home by 9pm and feeling surprisingly hungry so rustled up our other favourite standby of nasi goreng. When we had the curry on Sunday we cooked extra rice with another meal later in the week in mind. The nasi is almost instant food; just stir fry a selection of veg, add the paste and rice and hey presto.

Meat cigars – Briwat Bil Kefta

The hot weather has returned today and we decide that this evening’s meal will be a mezze style meal of several small dishes.

For lunch we ate up the leftover of Rita’s salad (only a couple of mouthfuls each), a couple of toasts with duck rillets and some salad leaves with the rest of the tuna mayonaise mixed with chopped gerkins. We made a dressing for the leaves by mixing a splash of wine vinegar into some of the juices from the leftover salad.

We can’t buy minced lamb in the shops here so we order it from the butcher and then divide it into 500g lots and keep them in the freezer. Which means, having used half yesterday for the lamb burgers, we have 250g of lamb mince to use. So we are including in the mezze some meat cigars. They originate from Morocco where they are called Briwat Bril Kefta.

Use the same mix as for the lamb burgers but omit the breadcrumbs and add 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon. Form into small sausages – about 9. Heat a splash of olive oil in a frying pan and fry the sausages, turning from time to time to brown all sides, about 4 minutes. Remove from the pan and allow to cool.

To make the cigars, aim for a shape much like a spring roll.  Cut a strip of brik pastry wide enough to allow a fold at each end that you can tuck in.  With the sausage in the middle nearest to you, roll up half a turn then fold the pastry at the ends inwards, so it forms a strip only as wide as the sausage and carry on rolling.  Brush the end with some olive oil, sitting it on some baking parchment then brush the top with a bit more oil. Whew!  Take a sip of your cocktail, collect yourself and off we go again.

Bake for about 20-25 min in an oven at 210C.  Season a pot of yoghurt and add some chopped mint, parsley, coriander or all three.  It’s a great dipping sauce…and you might want the option of a tasty chili sauce to take a dip into too.  One of John’s absolute favourites this year!

Lamb burger with tzatziki

Yesterday was hot and sunny until it suddenly changed mid-afternoon when cloud rolled in and the temperature dropped about 10C. Which was unfortunate as we were going to a bar in a nearby town in the evening to listen to a rock group (Driving South) and imagined sitting outside on a balmy evening enjoying the music. But though cooler it was still warm enough to be outside, albeit with a sweater on, and the music was great.

The morning we spent inside with domestic chores so grabbed a quick tuna mayonaise sandwich for lunch.

For dinner we made lamb burgers with tzatziki and a salad John’s mother always made – it’s a kind of Italian version of a Greek salad.

Lamb burgers

serves 2

• 250g minced lamb
• 1 shallot, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• handful of breadcrumbs
• 1 egg, beaten
• pinch of ground ginger
• pinch of ground cumin
• salt & pepper
• tbsp harrisa diluted with 2 tbsp lime juice
• small handful of parsley, finely chopped

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl (best to roll your sleeves up and use your hands) until well combined. Form into 2 patties, put onto a tray, cover with cling film and rest in the fridge for a while to set.

Using a very hot ridged fry-pan or bbq, cook for 3 minutes each side for medium rare or 4 minutes well done.

Tzatziki

serves 2

You don’t need to make this too far in advance, perhaps 1/2 hour before you eat. Some say it is essential to remove the seeds from the cucumber but we don’t. Salting the cucumber is essential otherwise the tzatziki will be watery and running all over your plate. If you are pushed for time and can’t do this then just make it at the very last minute before you are going to eat.

• 1/2 cucumber, washed
• 125ml think greek-style yohurt
• mint or dill
• salt and pepper
• 1/2 garlic clove, crushed

Either grate the cucumber on the coarse blade of a box grater or chop into small cubes. Put it into a non-metal sieve and sprinkle with a little salt. Leave for about 10 minutes for the water to come out and then squeeze gently to make it as dry as possible.

Put into a bowl and add the yoghurt, a handful of finely chopped mint or dill the garlic and some pepper. Mix to combine then taste and add more salt if needed. Chill for up to 1/2 hour or leave at room temperature.

Variations; you can add lemon juice and olive oil and make it more of a dip and eat with warm pitta. The dill version would be good with hot or cold poached salmon and the cucumber cubed rather than grated. With some lemon zest it can be a salad dressing over cold chicken.

Barbecued Marinated Lamb and Vegetables

With the steady improvement of the weather throughout yesterday we rapidly came to the decision that we should fire up the bbq.  We bought some lamb cutlets and marinated them in a Gordon Ramsay herb paste for a few hrs.  The paste consisted of the zest and juice of a lemon, 1/2 tsp of each, dried oregano, mint, thyme, rosemary and tarragon as well as a crushed garlic clove or two with some olive oil to loosen it up.  Add some seasoning and rub all over the lamb, leaving it to do it’s herby magic for a while.

We sliced 2 courgettes into thick, long pieces and blanched some asparagus spears for about 2-3 min.  Make a vinaigrette with some good balsamic and olive oil to baste onto the vegetables.

When the barbecue is nice and hot, brush your courgette and asparagus with the dressing and grill for not more than 2 minutes in total, the obvious pretty charred marks should be there.  Put them on a serving plate and brush once more.  Keep warm.

Grill your lamb next for about 2 minutes a side.  No real need to rest these little beauties after cooking, just tuck in with the help of a fairly robust glass of red…and ideally, a burnt pink and orange sunset to watch as you lick lamb juice off your fingers.  Let’s hope summer stays a while.

Tagine of lamb with artichokes and peas

On one of our shopping trips to Spain we spotted some fine looking lamb shanks. They don’t appear in our local supermarket very often and when they do they seem to be snapped up very quickly so we took the opportunity to buy some and put them in the freezer. Slow braised until meltingly tender they are really delicious. This is not a cut of meat you can hurry – all that sinew needs time to break down. For dinner yesterday we decided to take it down the Moroccan route in a tagine and while the classic is with dried fruit such as apricots we thought this sounded a nice change. It is based on a recipe for knuckle of veal by Claudia Rodin from her book Arabesque. It struck us that veal knuckle and lamb shanks were not a million miles apart. If you don’t have lamb shanks you could use boned shoulder or neck fillets but they won’t need so much cooking.

serves 2

• 2 small lamb shanks or 500g of shoulder/ fillet (or 2 thick rounds of veal knuckle)
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 garlic clove, crushed or chopped
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• a good pinch of saffron threads (optional)
• 200g frozen artichoke bottoms, defrosted
• 200g frozen peas, defrosted
• salt & pepper
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• peel of 1/2 preserved lemon
• bunch of coriander, chopped
• 8 green olives

Heat the oil in a roomy casserole or saucepan. Brown the meat  on all sides. Put in the onion, garlic, ginger and saffron and cook over a low heat for about 5 minutes until the onion is softened. If using shanks, pour in enough water to half cover, if using one of the other cuts then enough water to just cover. Season with salt and pepper and simmer with a lid on for about 2 hours for the shanks (less for the other cuts) until the meat is so tender it comes away from the bone. Check from time to time in case it needs a little extra water and turn the shanks and give it a stir to ensure that nothing is sticking to the pan. Remove the lid for the last 15 minutes or so to reduce the sauce.

Add the artichoke bottoms, cut in quarters, lemon juice, preserved lemon peel cut into strips, and cook for 5 minutes. Add the peas, coriander and olives and cook for 5 minutes more. Check that the artichokes are tender and the sauce reduced and thick. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

Serve with couscous (see our previous recipe for this).

Another leftover day …

Normality returned today with drum lessons restarting for John and french for Derek so a quick sandwich lunch using up the coleslaw with some cheese and ham. Friends called and invited us to meet for a drink at the local hotel this evening and we dug into the freezer again for a couple of lamb steaks which we simply fried and ate with the tomato butter beans and a salad to which we added some feta to complete the Greek theme. It worked really well and guess what – no more leftovers. Not that we mind leftovers if it is something yummy.