6 November 2006
Samhain dinner
I had one and a half kilos of boneless beef rib, one butternut squash which has been sitting in the vegetable rack for over a month (but as we know, squashes are immortal, so no need to worry about its quality), some parsnips, onions and mushrooms, and a bag of strawberries frozen when they were still fresh. I wanted to make a hearty autumnal dinner with a particularly masculine appeal. This may explain the lack of greens, but I also had some pretenses toward seasonality.
Historically I am not very good at cooking beef. Despite my best attempts it tends to come out stringy and chewy. I wanted to avoid it this time as far as possible, and consulted my personal kitchen goddesses Jane and Nigella. I discovered that Jane had an “everyday” way of doing this, but she also quoted directions given to her with regard to a particularly good lump of meat which was to be cooked for special occasions. These directions appeared more or less equal to those of Nigella’s, so I followed them. The principle was to heat the oiled pan first in pre-heated oven, for five minutes (if you cooked the roast on a rack, you could cook a Yorkshire pudding underneath in the pan), after which you put the roast in and cook it in as high a temperature as your oven will manage for fifteen minutes, then turn the heat down to 180C and calculate the cooking time.
I rubbed the roast with copious quantities of olive oil, freshly ground black pepper and Maldon sea salt while waiting for the oven to heat. This done and the meat safely in, I turned my attention to the parsnips. I peeled them and cut them in chips, and, following Jane’s instructions, blanched them in boiling salted water for five minutes, after which they joined the beef in the roasting pan.
When I usually cook butternut squash, I merely split it in two, scoop the seeds out and roast the whole thing, partially because it’s a bugger to cut. I had a desire for something different this time, so I cut it to chunks. Subscribing to the “What kind of crazy shit can I get up to with this?” school of cooking as I do and remembering Amanda’s recent successful experiments with squash and maple syrup, I reached for the peanut butter jar. Two liberal tablespoonfuls over the squash pieces was more than enough. I considered spices but decided not to spoil the sweet nuttiness. Again into the oven they went.
At this point I had a spare few minutes so I took the chance to prepare the dessert. My mother advises me that you should start every meal’s preparation with the dessert if serving any, as it can often happily wait while everything else is still in process. I fancied that after a rich main course a fruity dessert would round things up nicely and this would also give me an excellent excuse to use up those strawberries sitting in the freezer. So I went about preparing stewed strawberries, a fairly common Finnish dessert and snack dish.
Here’s how it works: You scoop up a 300-500 ml measure of fresh or frozen berries. If using frozen ones, you don’t need to defrost them, which makes this incredibly convenient. You heat up 500 ml water and 100 ml sugar OR 500 ml sugary juice (obviously use juice which goes with the berries) and 2 tablespoons of cornflour. Whisk the flour in so that it doesn’t get lumpy. You bring all this to boil and let it only bubble a few times - if it boils too long theliquid won’t thicken, but even in that case you will have a very delicious fruity soup, and nobody will be able to tell that this exotic dessert isn’t quite as it should be. Remove the saucepan from the heat and only now stir in the berries. Pour the mixture into a serving bowl and sprinkle a liberal dose of sugar on top so that the surface doesn’t dry out. Serve either as is, or with a dollop of cream or a spoonful of ice cream or custard. This amount serves two very generously and four after a vast meal.
Because the meal at this point wasn’t yet being masochistic enough and because I felt that parsnips, squash and beef were perhaps a little Spartan, I set about making a sauce. No gravy, oh no. An actual, practicing, stir-it-like-crazy rouge sauce.
Butter. Two tablespoons thereof. Melted in a saucepan until it’s lovely hazelnutty colour. Three tablespoons of flour mixed in. Stir stir stir. Remove from heat and pour in 400-500 ml cold or cool beef stock (mine was on the hot side of warm as I didn’t read the recipe until at this stage, but it seemed to work), all at once. Stir all the time. Move back to heat and keep sitting until the sauce comes back to boil and begins to thicken. Let simmer for a few minutes and stir (noting a theme here?). I added some beef juices and whatever herbs I had in hand, as well as mushrooms and onions I had fried earlier. At the end there still wasn’t enough colour so I used my mother’s secret trick and applied tomato ketchup. Not too much, but enough to give colour and some flavour. It all worked and I was tremendously proud of myself.
To my delight the beef too turned out very well. It was still a bit chewy, but the interior was very nicely medium rare and comfortably bloody. The parsnips were cooked all right but a little pale and not crispy enough on the outside. I might just stick them in the oven next time and ignore the blanching step. I had worried a bit about the lack of carbs, but the onion-mushroom sauce provided a good substantial contrast to the roast vegetables and beef. If carbs were added, I’d want to go for good bread or fluffy mashed potatoes.
I served all this with rich red wine, although it would go very well with quality ale or beer as well.
[…] Nina has posted an account of the Samhain dinner she cooked on Rocking Grass. Reading it is almost as good as having the meal again, and the sauce really was absolutely excellent. […]