161: A pot-roast pheasant with celery and sage, p25

Recipe six this weekend, and the shops are stocking pheasant again, now it's in season - hurray! Unfortunately they all seem to come wrapped in bacon, so after searching for a naked one everywhere, I gave up, bought one with the bacon, and peeled it off before cooking. Don't think it affected the flavour of the meat in the recipe though.

This recipe called for browning the meat and then cooking up the other ingredients in a casserole dish before putting it in the oven... after the disaster of the pot-roast pigeon where one of my two Denby casserole dishes shattered into pieces, with about two litres of ingredients and stock flooding the kitchen, and therefore me discovering that Denby dishes aren't hob proof (doh!), I very carefully used the second one for this - I really need a Le Creuset dish for Christmas - if I can find anywhere to store one!!

There wasn't an enormous amount of liquid in this so although I pushed the pheasant down as much as I could, it was mostly sitting on top of the other ingredients so I was worried the meat might end up a bit dry but it didn't seem to and after 40mins in the oven seemed to be cooked just right - cooked through but still a little moist. The potatoes were perfectly cooked, the celery still slightly crunchy, and plenty of lovely yummy, vermouthy, sage-y gravy. Yum!

134: Pot-roast pigeon with luganega sausage, p307

This is days late - a) been very busy and haven't had a chance to write it up, and b) it's taken this long to get over the disastrous evening that it involved... Bad day at work, home not too late, both of us in, I decided to treat us to two Nigel recipes for dinner to destress. Hah.

I've used my Denby casserole dish on the hob many times, as in so many recipes, to brown meat / boil up ingredients with wine/stock before putting it in the oven. This time, after browning the sausages (not luganega, but the recipe says herby chipolatas are fine) and then the pigeons, and softening the onions, I added the stock, and two minutes later there was the most almighty crack from the kitchen and my lovely casserole dish had shattered on the hob into a dozen pieces, depositing two pigeons, six sausages, a chopped onion, and 500ml of hot stock all over my hob. After much swearing, the solid ingredients were chucked into my mum's old pot-roast pot and a fresh batch of stock poured in and the whole lot shoved in the oven, ignoring the 'bring to the boil on the hob first' instruction. Clearing up the stock that was everywhere wasn't quite as easy...

Unfortunately I messed up again though and giving the pigeons an extra 10-15mins on account of the lack of boiling first stage was too long and they were a bit overcooked. Rats. And they are a bit of a sod to eat, fiddly little bony things, but the herby sausages and gravy were delicious, especially with a heap of mashed potato.

Unfortunately, the disasters for the evening didn't stop there...

30: A herb and barley broth to bring you back to health, p41

Don't really need to be brought back to health, but hey, can't beat a bit of broth... uses up lots of veggies too, which is useful because I slightly over-bought in Tescos yesterday and the fridge is overflowing...

Essentially stew without the meat, very similar in delicate sweet taste to the lamb stew earlier this month. I'm not sure that the specially-purchased goose fat really adds that much, but c'est la vie...