There was a brisket joint at the butchers last week – it was cheap, looked good and with a Bank Holiday looming, I figured it was bound to be slow-cooking weather. So in the inevitable pissing rain, I  went searching for a recipe this morning.

I’ve never cooked it before and my only real reference point was episodes of the Big Bang Theory. I did wonder about a more traditional British approach, but I can’t resist American BBQ food so went for Southwestern Pulled Brisket. It’s a really easy recipe and the result is meltingly tender beef in a tangy, smokey sauce.

I’ve had to convert a bit from the US recipe but here’s the ingredients:

1 1/2lb beef brisket

sea salt and pepper to season

2 cloves garlic, smashed up

1/2 onion, finely sliced

2 tsp chilli powder/flakes

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp ground cumin

1 teaspoon smoked paprika (or smokey chilli sauce would do)

2 tablespoons balsamic/cider vinegar

3/4 pint water

1 tin of tomatoes

1 bayleaf

1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

First season and brown the beef in a heavy casserole. Move it out of the pan and fry the onion, garlic, chilli, coriander, cumin and paprika for about a minute. Then add the vinegar and scrape up all the bits from the bottom of the pan, until most of the vinegar has gone. Add the water and the tin of tomatoes, chopping them up as they go in.

Put the meat back into the pan, bring back to the boil and cover tightly with a lid – I added a layer of foil to make the seal tighter. The real recipe advises using a slow cooker for eight hours.

I’m using an oven at 130 decC for six hours, turning the brisket once halfway through. Time to go and do something more interesting for a bit – I went to the pictures.

To serve, pull the meat apart while still in the pot and stir through it gets a good coating of sauce. If the sauce is too thin, reduce it on the stove top a bit first. Mine needed about 30 mins.

We ate it with coleslaw, crusty bread and potato rostis – would be good with rice and salad too. It makes epic sandwiches.

You can’t beat a home-made pie – it’s up there with soup and a cracking roast in terms of ‘most comforting things to cook’ in my book.

And it doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming, thanks to frozen pastry.

Turkey or chicken and ham pie is a fantastic way to turn leftovers into a midweek treat and it’s pretty forgiving in terms of what you chuck into the filling.

Here’s a version I did recently with some turkey breast – not leftovers, I quickly poached it in a little stock to start things off. It’s a ‘healthy’ version (one layer of pastry and no cream).

Start by sweating off a leak in a little butter until soft. Then stir in a tablespoon of flour and cook that through for a minute or two.

Pour in a good slug of white wine or dry vermouth and cook for another minute or two. Add a generous pinch of thyme, a grate of nutmeg and plenty of black pepper before adding about 400ml of stock.

Now add two heaped tablespoons of creme fraiche – it’s much lower in fat than cream and the flavour is a bit more interesting. Put the cooked meat in – chunks of turkey, chicken and/or ham.

Simmer this down for 10-20 minutes until thickened. Pour into an ovenproof dish brush the top of the dish around with some beaten egg to help the pastry stick. Now top with the pastry (ready-made puff pastry) and press down with a fork around the edge to make a seal.

Cut a small hole in the middle to allow steam to escape and brush with more beaten egg. Bake at around 170 decC for half an hour until the pastry is golden brown.

Enjoy with lots of veg and a smug smile. And a beer.

You know how The Colonel has a secret blend of spices for his fried chicken – well, I’ve got one too. Only it’s not a secret because I’m about to share it.

I use it for traditional ‘Southern Fried’ coating for fish, chicken, turkey or fish. Recently I’ve taken to doing a final coat of panko breadcrumbs – making a Southern Fried Schnitzel. It’s a particularly good thing to do with a pork fillet.

The mix for the coating is dead simple:

1 cup flour

1 tsp salt and 1 of pepper

1tsp garlic powder

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp mustard powder

1 tsp All Purpose Seasoning (the Jamaican kind – or a poultry seasoning mix)

1 tsp celery salt (optional)

In separate bowls, prepare: the flour/spice mix, a beaten egg with a splash of milk and the breadcrumbs if you’re using them.

For normal Southern Fried, dredge the meat in the flour, then the egg then the flour again. For the schnitzel, add an extra egg and then breadcrumb stage.

Pop the coated meat in the fridge for about 15 minutes to set a little then fry off in about half an inch of oil (or deep fry if you have a frier).

Drain off on kitchen paper to make sure the end result is dry and super crispy.

You’ll never need to eat chicken out of a cardboard bucket again. Unless drunk, of course – that’s still fine.

I’d never seen oxtails until the butcher had some a few weeks ago. I had to give them a go and the only thing I knew about them was they needed very slow cooking. I have to say though, I think this might be one of my favourite things I’ve cooked for a long time.

I adapted a slow-cooked Chinese beef recipe I remembered from somewhere. I guess red wine, shallots and mushrooms would have been a good alternative approach.

It is a bit of a faff so probably one for the weekend but it’s worth it. Using something like shin of beef or pork shoulder would have made it a lot easer and wouldn’t have altered the end result too much.

Start by rolling the oxtails in flour and browning them in a casserole. Take them out and set them aside for a bit. They don’t look particularly appetising at this point.

Fry a diced onion and carrot in the pot until soft then add a good shake of five-spice powder (probably about three teaspoons). Pour in a tablespoon of soy sauce, the same of oyster sauce and about teaspoon of sesame oil. Cook this out for a few minutes then add a star anise – the magic ingredient in this as it gives is such a rich depth of flavour.

Put the oxtails back into the pan and cover with beef stock. This then goes in the oven at 170 degC for three hours, turning the oxtails over a couple of times during the cooking. The meat should be ready to fall off the bone by then.

This is the fiddly bit now as you need to take the oxtails out of the sauce and pull the meat off them. I went at them with a pair of forks, just pulling the meat away in chunks. Seemed to work.

Strain the sauce through a sieve, pushing down on the veg to get all the flavour out. Return it to the casserole on the stove top and skim off any fat from the surface. Add the meat back into the sauce and simmer on a low gas for about half an hour to reduce and thicken.

In the last five minutes I added some chopped pak choi to add a bit of crunch to the finished dish. Serve up with beansprouts and noodles dressed with a little sesame oil and soy sauce.

I shouldn’t say it myself really, but it’s pretty awesome!

Such an easy dish, this. Takes no time to cook and livens up a tea time very easily – perfect to make a pork chop or chicken thigh a little bit more exciting. And saves on making a separate sauce.

Pop the oven on to 200 decC to get warm. Separate a cauliflower into florets and boil in salted water for about five minutes.

While it’s boiling, make some easy cheese sauce. It goes like this:

Using a teaspoon as if it were an ice scream scoop, scrape out a rough ball of butter and pop it into a small pan to melt. Whisking the butter, add a tablespoon of plain flour and whisk together for about a minute over a medium heat. Now add the still warm milk very gradually at first, whisking as you go. About half a pint of milk is about right. Let this come up to boiling while stirring and then turn the heat down. Add the cheese and stir until it melts through and the sauce is smooth and creamy. Add a scrape of nutmeg, black pepper and some chopped parsley – or don’t if you haven’t got them to hand, it’s fine without it. The whole process takes about 10 minutes.

Never fails me – it’s best with a really strong, mature cheese.

Pop the parboiled florets into an oven proof dish – good things to add at this stage are some of the green leaves from the cauli, a few broccoli florets or some diced crispy bacon. Pour over the cheese sauce.

Top the whole thing with breadcrumbs and more grated cheese. Panko breadcrumbs and parmesan give a really crispy toping.

Bake until golden brown – usually about 15 minutes.

This is 20 minute tea that came about from a Friday-night need for something quick to cook with fish. It’s mostly ‘store cupboard’ ingredients too which helps in a busy week.

I used a smoked haddock fillet (a favourite at the moment) but I’d make this with cod or coley too I think. Maybe even a tuna or salmon steak.

Start by frying chopped chorizo until it starts to colour. Remove that from the pan and fry a diced onion in the oil from the chorizo. Add some chopped garlic and some mushrooms, peppers or courgettes.

Let this cook until softened then add about half a jar of passata and simmer for about five minutes. Season to taste with plenty of black pepper and at the last minute add a handful of fresh basil or a good shake of thyme.

Pour this sauce into and oven dish and sit fish fillets on top. This cooked in a hot oven (200 degC) for about 10 minutes. While it was in the oven I fried some sauté potatoes.

Some olives or maybe a little chilli would have been good additions to the sauce – it’s definitely one that will be added to our regular fish recipe list.

I didn’t hang onto the recipe, but this was inspired by an Olive article on things to do with passata.

It’s inspired by a brilliant book – Just Like Mother Used to Make by Tom Norrington-Davies. It bears little resemblance to the original now after a few years of playing about with it, but it’s a quick, easy way to knock up really tasty gravy from scratch.

Start off by finely slicing and onion. Sweat this in butter and a little oil with a lid on the pan for about 10 minutes until the onions have softened, then without the lid for a further ten. The onions should be sweet and just starting to catch – Tom recommends red onions.

Stir through a heaped tablespoon of flour which will thicken the gravy. Add a slug of wine and stir in well. A teaspoon of mustard, a squirt of tomato puree and a good shake of Worcester sauce (about a tablespoon).

Top this up with about 400ml of stock (chicken, beef or veg) and let it simmer for another ten minutes until thick and glossy.

Dip your bread in…

Faggots and peas for tea has been a recent discovery. They were a favourite of my dad’s for a Saturday lunch but I always thought they were pretty grim.

On a whim about a year ago I tried some from the butchers at the local market – they’re amazing! This weekend they didn’t have any with them, so he offered me his recipe instead. Pretty good deal, I thought.

So here they are – a delicious cross between meatballs and pate.

And appropriately enough for a Valentine’s day post, an easy tea with real heart…

The meat mix is pork and some lovely Welsh lambs’ hearts and lambs’ liver. It’s simply mixed with fresh onion and the butcher’s secret ingredient – Paxo sage and onion which binds the mix and adds flavour. The mix makes about 18 lime-sized faggots – they freeze very well.

In a food processor start by blitzing a medium onion. Next add the liver (c300g) and four hearts (c 400g). Give this a good mix before adding 500g of pork – a cheap cut is fine. I added the pork last as I didn’t want this to be over processed. Half a packet of Paxo binds the mixture together – the consistency is like thick porridge. Season well with salt and particularly pepper. Pull out a small bit and fry it quickly so you can taste and check the seasoning.

At this point, it looks minging.

Form this into balls with well-floured hands. I then rolled them in a plate of flour just to stop them sticking together too much as they froze – it also helps to seal them when frying.

I froze them in batches of six, based on a serving of three per person.

To cook, fry in a hot pan with a little oil – this will firm them up. Once browned, transfer to an oven dish for about 20 minutes at 180 degC. Check with a skewer to makes sure they’re done through.

Great with peas, mash and onion gravy (recipe coming soon).

It’s a bit of effort, but I made the whole batch in less than an hour on the weekend and they’re ready in half an hour then for a mid week tea. There’s no fat in them and offal is really good for you – I’d never have thought to make my own, but they were fantastic.

I’ll be saying a big thank you to the fine chaps at Cig Lodor meat on Saturday.

Mutton has a reputation for being full of flavour but you rarely see it on supermarket shelves. So when the butcher at the market had a couple of lovely-looking Welsh mutton joints last week, I had to give it a try. Not knowing what to do with it, I asked the butcher – low and slow is the trick, apparently.

I happened to see a recipe in Olive for a three hour shoulder of lamb which seemed to fit the bill. I’ve adapted it slightly as it uses broad beans and lettuce ( so it would be a great spring lamb recipe) by using cabbage instead of lettuce and adding parsely to cut the richness of the mutton.

Start by heating the oven to 130 degC. Slash the meat and rub over a mix of crushed garlic, dried oregano, salt and pepper.

Add whole shallots or chunks of onion around the meat and pour over about 300ml of stock (lamb ideally – I used beef which was fine).

Put a lid on and pop this in the oven for three hours – low and slow.

Take the lamb out of the pot and skim off any obvious fat from the surface of the liquid. Add in peas, broad beans (runners, in my case) and lettuce/cabbage. Turn the oven up to 180 degC. Put the joint back on top and pop back into the oven for 30 mins without the lid.

Once that’s done and the meat’s browned nicely, remove it to rest in a warm place.

To the sauce add the juice of half a lemon and a handful of chopped mint, coriander and flat leaf parsley. Put this back in the oven uncovered for five to ten minutes just to let the flavours combine.

The meat is falling-apart tender and the sauce retains all the deep flavour from the joint, with a real punch of sweetness from the veg and freshness from the herbs and lemon.

A fantastic put-it-in-the-oven-and-forget-about-it Sunday afternoon dish. Ours went in at half time between Wales and Ireland this afternoon and was ready in time to celebrate a nail-biting victory.

As a first experiment with mutton it was a definite success – it’s certainly going to be on our menu whenever I can find it.

It’s that time of year again when the fine chaps at WordPress send out a little reminder of what my blog’s been doing all year.

Last year enough people had been kind enough to drop by to fill 14 Boeing 747s, apparently. This year about 16,000 turned up – the equivalent of a six-date sell-out run at the Sydney Opera House. Which is nice.

Last year’s top five recipes were mostly comfort food with sausage casserole topping the list. I guess a big snowy winter may have had something to do with that. This year was much the same, though, with traditional favourites coming out top.

So here’s what was top of the recipe tree this year:

1. Giant filled Yorkshire puddings

2. A traditional fish pie (including easy cheese sauce)

3. Sausage Casserole

4. Cheat’s chicken casserole

5. Slow Roast Moroccan Lamb

And the really strange thing – there was a proper giant yorkshire pudding frenzy on 26th October! More than 300 views in one day. Haven’t the faintest idea why!

Anyway, a big thank you to anyone who stopped by and I hope you enjoyed your tea.