THIS week’s recipes are a little more technical than usual, so are not necessarily for the faint hearted. Having spoken with our customers in the cookery school, some are clearly very accomplished home cooks and love to try something a little bit more challenging – so now it's your turn.
Both dishes ones we cook as part of our Effortless Entertaining class where we get our cooks to try something that they would eat at our restaurant but never dare to cook at home. These are perfect dishes to pull out when you are having friends around for great food and wine.
We use a lot of birds in the restaurant, whether partridge, pheasant or pigeon. This dish uses celeriac, a great vegetable at this time of year; it is salt baked and turns out pretty impressive and tasty. The second recipe is rabbit with polenta and olives, a real winner on the seasonally yummy scale – which is definitely a thing in our house!
CONFIT RABBIT LEG WITH POLENTA AND BLACK OLIVES
4 rabbit legs
1 litre duck fat
2 tblsp Maldon sea salt
4 cloves garlic, chopped
10g fresh oregano
10g fresh thyme
Start by covering the rabbit legs with the salt, garlic and the herbs and cover in cling film to marinate for up to six hours in the fridge. Preheat the oven to 130C, and once marinated, thoroughly dust the salt off the legs and place in the duck fat in a roasting dish. Put the lid on and place in oven, cooking for three hours until the meat is tender and just falling away from the bone. Remove the legs from the fat and serve with freshly cooked polenta.
For the olives, cook 150g black pitted olives, with Forum cabernet sauvignon vinegar (or other high quality red wine vinegar), a splash of white wine and one finely chopped shallot. Cook until the shallot is cooked through and the olives are warm. Serve over the rabbit leg. You will see from the picture that I have added some fresh leaves and a handful of pine nuts to this dish.
If you are unsure of how to cook polenta, let me know, but this dish also works really well with creamed potatoes.
ROAST PIGEON WITH SALT BAKED CELERIAC
For the pigeon:
4 pigeons, crowned (you can ask any good butcher to do this for you)
4 scallions, trimmed
Radishes, cleaned and halved
Mixed salad leaves
Rapeseed oil
Place a drop of oil in a pan with a knob of butter and bring up to heat. Colour the pigeon until completely browned. Place in a preheated oven and cook at 200C for six minutes. Allow to rest for five minutes but turn the bird upside down as this will keep the breast juicy, remove breast meat from the bone.
For the salt-baked celariac:
1 celariac, whole, washed only
Salt baked pastry
500g flour
250g sea salt
250ml water
Mix all ingredients together until a dough is formed. Roll out to around 2cm thick and wrap around the whole celeriac. Place in a preheated oven and bake at 200C for two hours. Remove from oven and allow to cool. Once cool remove pastry shell and peel skin from celeriac. Then slice into desired shape and size for serving.
Boil the scallions in seasoned water (with salt) and cook to al dente.
To serve: place the pigeon on the plate, add celeriac, the halved radishes, scallions and decorate with salad leaves.
