Frog and Goat

We have an electronic file system we use for recipes. Nothing fancy but it is shared so both of us can save recipes. Sometimes the recipes come straight out of magazines/newspapers/online journals and the attribution is saved as well. We prepared Steak and Kidney pie last night and I don’t know the source of the article that contained the recipe, but I can tell you the recipe is in Gina Mallet’s book, Last Chance to Eat.

I actually started the recipe on Friday afternoon by chopping mushrooms (button and reconstituted shiitake), an onion, and, of course the kidney and steak. We bought a large bag of dried shiitake for Chinese New Year so I’ve been trying to use those mushrooms. The recipe didn’t call for anything so exotic.

The meats were dusted in a flour/salt/pepper mixture and then browned. I worked in batches and, admittedly, towards the end I got a little lazy about making sure each bit was as browned as the first batch. All pieces had color, those at the end were a little less crisp on the outside.

I transferred the meat to our big pot and then cooked the mushrooms. I tend to like larger pieces of food, but next time I make this I’ll chop the kidney and mushrooms into smaller bits. The kidney needed to be more dispersed and the mushrooms were a bit large even for me.

The mushrooms, onions, meats, a bouquet garni and beef stock went into the oven for 90 minutes. By this time the house smelled so amazing. After the 90 minutes, the pot chilled out in the garage and then sat in the refrigerator overnight.

The better-half rolled out some packaged puff pastry and made an edge around the pie plate and then I scooped the stew into the plate. If you look closely, you can see oysters in them thar hills.

He used the remaining circle of pastry to create a lid, brushing it with an egg wash. It leaked a bit but was beautiful and tasty.

I made a carrot, garlic and thyme side dish and the better-half boiled some fingerling potatoes. Dinner was heaven.

The other day while I was laying on the couch recuperating, I watched Everyday Italian. Even though I couldn’t really imagine eating anything, I got up and retrieved this recipe. I also grabbed the farro salad recipe. We have another recipe that calls for farro but we’ve always substituted barley. Now we have a bag of farro and it is a coin toss, in my mind, which recipe will get the farro. Perhaps there’s enough for both. I can’t remember where we got the bag, even though, it was somewhat recently. Farro is hard to find, at least around here.

Yesterday we thawed two bone-in pork chops from the Butchery. The recipe calls for boneless, but we went with what we had. The results were amazingly good and tasted just like what I had imagined it tasting like after watching the show.

Finished, on our new plates:

We had a good amount of baby spinach but not enough for me to make my usual soy sauce, garlic, spinach extravaganza so we made a salad instead.

The white shapeless blob is goat cheese. Pignoli, pickled carrots, celery and spring onions rounded out the salad.

Crusty bread with butter and an Italian Montepulciano completed the meal.