A winter Sunday lunch

Onion Soup

I made a vegetable stock with carrots, onion, parsnip, celery and fennel
Then I finely chopped some red onions (though white would have been just as good) and caramelised them.
Then I combined the onions and the stock and simmered them gently for a while.
Then I left it overnight until lunchtime when I heated it gently and served with grated cheese (but no bread or courtons because I needed something light as a starter)

Steamed Steak and Ale Pudding

I used (boneless) shin of beef for this, which I got from an online butcher based near Aberdeen. I buy meat boxes from them two or three times a year. The meat is extortionately expensive but always very high quality and comes frozen, in covnenient freezer friendly packs. Most recently I bought a winter slow cooking selection which has lots of goodies you seldom see in regualr butchers shops. Anyway. The recipe

I chopped the beef into bite sized pieces and browned it gently with some sliced onions. Then I added about 150g plain flour ahich I stirred in until it was incorporated. I mixed half a pint of ale (The Cat's Whiskers - cute!) with half a pint of water, which I then slowly added until the sauce thickened. Then I added a dash or three of soy sauce and left it all to sit overnight.

In the morning I mixed up a fluffy patry mix with self raising flour and lined my pudding bowl with it. Then I poured in the beef and sauce, topped with more pastry, covered the pudding bowl with foil and simmered it all in a very gently simmering stock pot for 3 hours (or, on this occasion, 4). I think there might have been a touch too much sauce - the pudding fell apart when i took it out of the bowl. Fortunately, i had tried to turn it out into a serving bowl so all was not lost! I just arranged the pastry over the top of it and covered it all with a mixture of mushrooms, sauteed.

We had it with baby potatoes and cauliflower, sprouts and carrots. It was very tasty but I think that next time I'll make the sauce slightly richer and I'll incorporate the mushrooms. And I think I'll add a bit of suet to the pastry. Not too much but enough to make the pastry also slightly richer

Apple and Rhubarb Snow

I stewed some bramley apple and some rhubarb with a very little caster sugar and divided it among four ramekins. Then I topped it with a meringue mix and baked in an oven preheated to 180d until the meringue was crispy on top and soft and squishy in the middle. We had it with home made vanilla ice cream.

With all of this we had white wine and red wine and lots of pleasant conversation