Jottage from Lancaster - Tupperware Mexican Chorizo

I am surprised, amazed even, that I haven't written a blog about this before as I'm sure this was one of the first recipes I cooked from River Cottage Everyday - it's probably one I have made the most often. I have made it up for guests coming as well as just a weeknight tea and it was the recipe that introduced me to smoked paprika. It's so very versatile and easy to make. I would say that you can't really go wrong - but I nearly always do as I forget that 1 tablespoon of smoked paprika makes it far too hot to eat. A couple of times I have had to add extra meat - a LOT of extra meat - to make it edible. 


Hugh does tell you to break a bit off and cook it so that you can taste it as you go along so that you can add more seasoning if you need to - but he doesn't say how to adjust for LESS. This time I used just a teaspoon of the hot stuff and cooked a marble-sized piece which I have just eaten and established that the seasoning is just about right. 

Meatballs gently frying

Tin of tomatoes for the sauce

Pasta simmering

I am going to make meatballs with half the quantity and we will have that with pasta tonight using a tin of tomatoes reduced for the sauce, then I will make some pizza dough tomorrow morning and we will have the rest tomorrow night on home made pizzas.

The finished meal

Easy, tasty, cheap, and with enough leftovers for another meal!

Jottings from Lancaster - Pheasant and Chorizo, birthday celebrations

It's my sister Gwenda's birthday today and she and her husband are over from Germany for a short stay during which she turns 57. OK, she isn't really 57 but that's near enough, particularly as I conveniently have those wax candle numbers left over from my 57th birthday which will do nicely on top of Hugh's little black cake and which is looking very chocolately and ready to eat later for tea time along with a glass of Prosecco.

We thought of going out to lunch and tossed about a few ideas ranging from the tried and trusted Lunesdale Arms (quite near and not too expensive) to the Inn at Whitewell which is altogether a bit posher, further away and more pricey. Eventually we decided to stay in and I would cook. It would be hard to think of what to make from a book which is for everyday cooking since a celebration meal usually entails a book that is dedicated to entertaining, but Hugh evidently thinks we could all be eating pheasant a couple of times a month and we all decided that it was worth a try. 


I haven't cooked pheasant before and Hansotto, who is my brother in law had some doubts about how it would work with butter beans and chorizo. He is a superb cook himself, as is Gwenda, so I had a lot to live up to. Normally I would have defaulted to roast lamb or something that I had cooked up enough to be confident with, but knowing and trusting the Everyday recipes I was keen to have a go at this one. For a start I got muddled up with lots of pans frying onions and pheasant and realising I hadn't used a big enough dish to cook the pheasants in the oven and I had to find increasingly bigger dishes out of the cupboard until I ended up the biggest one I had - which would do just nicely. Once I had sorted out all the pots and pans I put it into the oven and forgot about it for 2 hours as instructed. 


I had decided to do parsnip, carrot and potato mash, knowing that Gwenda likes parsnips. I would normally have done roast potatoes but somehow reading the mash recipe I felt that it was better to make that. It took some preparation and as I had to cook the potatoes and the carrots/parsnips separately it involved more saucepans - more washing up. But although it was a bit of a faff to make, having to whizz up the veggies and mashing the potatoes, it was well worth the extra bit of effort.


After 2 hours everything was ready and if I had had my wits about me I would have taken a photo BEFORE we ate all of it. As it is this is the best I can do...

Remains of a pheasant.

This is what was left on the plates (after 2nds all round)...

Carrot, parsnip and potato mash...

Satisfied brother-in-law...

All in all it was a very successful celebration lunch.  This is the birthday girl afterwards in some kind of ecstatic moment after eating the rich and tasty juices...???

Jottage from Cambridge - Curried Fish Pie p 176

There were few things I dreaded more when I was growing up than having to eat soggy Weetabix. However there were a couple of other dishes which competed for the accolade. One was semolina (a staple pudding at my primary school), and the other was fish pie. The thing about fish pie which I loathed the most were the hard-boiled eggs which my mother always added to what I think would otherwise have been quite an acceptable meal. But I happen to love fish, and I always seem to have lots of potatoes in the house that need eating up so, when I finally moved in with my husband and had to start cooking proper meals (the pans and cooking pots which were bought for us from our John Lewis Wedding List provided another incentive) a fish pie seemed like an obvious thing to make.

Fish Pie (without boiled eggs)

Before I acquired Hugh’s Everyday book I found a couple of fish pie recipes which, although listing hard-boiled eggs, had that golden word for lazy cooks, ‘optional’, written by the side. I discovered that, without the egg, fish pie was indeed delicious so I was excited to make the recipe on page 176. I used pouted fillet and trout and, instead of curry powder, I put in a couple of teaspoons of cumin. The end result I considered to be something of a triumph – see photo. 

Heather with the Fish Pie

I served it up with mashed potato and peas, and for pudding we had the Apple and Walnut Crumble (p.378) which my mother had made and brought up from Lancaster. (My mother can’t come to Cambridge empty-handed, and I anticipate what she’ll decide to take out of her fridge that needs using up, and the bits of food that she’ll inevitably buy for me when they have a motorway stop. This time – and clearly now in a meaningful relationship with Hugh – she bought a packet of chorizo and a couple of packets of spelt.) I put all the leftover vegetables (which had been used to flavour the milk) in the blender, along with a few pieces of fish, and served up to Tristan the next day. He had no complaints.

Apple and Walnut crumble