We had a duck damage herself yesterday morning and somehow, she ended up with broken ribs and internal bleeding. I originally thought that it was a broken leg, but it doesn’t matter either way, when you’ve got a hurt duck, you need to put them down.

Sooner than I liked and in weather colder than I appreciated, I was catching and holding onto the poor thing, while Nathan did the deed. Five minutes later, she had splashed blood all over me, and I was ready to start cleaning her.

It’s been a while since we had to kill anything and I was shaky and cold as I dressed her out. It wasn’t until I had my hands inside her that I discovered the large blood clots and broken ribs.

I don’t like killing, but the pay off is so very worth it and we got to eat duck for two nights running.

Yesterday, I poached her, in a light veg stock, with some extra salt, onions, carrot, celery and garlic, saving the poaching stock for tonight.

I reduced down the stock until it was suitably flavoursome and then made a basic duck risotto, using the left over meat and veg from the stock, plus the stock itself. Nothing fancy, just delicious.

No photos because it wasn’t until some people asked for the recipe on twitter than I decided to blog it.

Ingredients:

Duck stock, brought to a boil and reduced slightly.
Boiling water, in case the flavours get too intense
1/4 of cream
1 c of chopped cooked duck pieces.
the veg from the bottom of the stock from yesterday (I had garlic, onion, celery and carrot, all suitably duck flavoured)
a little less than 1 cup of arborio rice.
1 TB each oil and butter

Method:

Melt the oil and butter together and then add the rice. Cook until the rice is translucent and then add a ladleful of hot duck stock.

Stir until the stock is absorbed, and then add another ladleful. Stir.

Repeat until the rice is just about al dente, before adding in the cooked vegetables and duck meat. Somewhere in there, taste it and make sure the flavours aren’t too strong. If they are, use boiling water instead of stock for the final few ladles full.

Finish with the cream and serve with chopped parsley and Parmesan on top.

***

It also would have been nice with chopped mushrooms added, or with peas, or with other veg. I was working with what I had in my pantry and fridge, which was not very much.

Normally, if I hadn’t made the stock with veg in, I would saute off onion and garlic in the butter/oil mix, before adding the rice. You could also saute off the veg of your choice before starting the rice, adding it back in at the last moment.

The trick to good risotto is to stir, gently and constantly and to keep it simple. Finish with cream to loosen the grains of rice and season to taste.

Warning, this post talks about things that some readers may find distasteful. Please don’t read it if you can’t get your head around animals being slaughtered for food.

***

There is a feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you kill an animal. It’s that sinking feeling as you hit a wallaby in your car, that drop when you have to kill something for it’s own good.

These are the things I thought about as I held a flapping dead chook in my hand this afternoon.

3 hours previously:

Walking to collect the eggs, I entered the shed with the laying boxes and spooked one of my hens – she wasn’t laying, but she bolted when she saw me.

Another hen was laying at the time, curled up in her nesting box as I went down the row, collecting duck eggs and a chook egg.

Only…

Is that a peck hole? In my egg shell? Fuck.

It was, a suspicious peck in an egg – done recently as there was no dirt or grit around the entrance. As recently as me walking into the chook shed.

Fuck it.

Some chooks, they eat eggs. Something happens and they discover what is inside an egg and they start pecking all the eggs to pieces. If left, they’ll teach the other hens how to eat eggs and it will end up terribly. No eggs = no baby chickens = no reason for keeping chooks.

There is only one cure for an egg eating hen, and that is a quick death.

A few days ago, I’d found a duck egg broken in the bottom of the nest. I thought it odd at the time, knowing how tough the shells on my eggs are and I wasn’t sure a duck standing on the egg would have broken it.

I didn’t clean it up at the time, planning to come back and clean the straw and broken mess out of the bottom of the nest when I got a chance. So this morning when I found the pecked egg, I remembered the broken duck egg and went over to clean the nest.

Only to find the entire egg was gone, shell and all.

An egg eater, for sure. A possum or rat, well, they would have taken eggs from the other nests as well and made a right mess.

At this point, I was fairly sure that the chook I’d seen disappear when I walked into the chook shed was my culprit. She didn’t make an alarm call of ‘I was laying and PREDATOR’ or act like the other hens, quietly clucking at me in distaste when I bothered them.

AND she was standing leaning into the nest with the pecked egg.

So, we did what you do with an egg eater.

We caught her and killed her, humanely and fast. One chop and she went from upside down and relaxed in my hand, to dead. It was fast and it was painless for her, over in less than a moment. Slightly more traumatic for me, as my stomach dropped and I felt the feelings that come with slaughtering something.

But this is how it works when you’re making an effort to live more sustainably and only wanting to eat happy, ethical chickens. No one likes killing, (no one normal anyway), but it’s a fact of life.

Once she stopped flapping the death flaps and relaxed, we strung her up by a leg and did what you do – skinning, gutting, cleaning. It took a little while, as it was the first chook I’d done myself. I watched plenty of times as a child, but the actual act of doing, well, slow and steady and all that. There are things I’d never asked my father, like ‘how do you get the lungs out?’ and ‘how do you make sure you’ve got all the unborn eggs and kidneys out?’ but no matter, I worked it out myself. Me and my sharp knife and Nathan chatting to me while I worked. It was okay once I started, less like killing and more like processing meat. No different to gutting and filleting fish – a regular part of my growing up.

And then I brought the meat inside and chopped it into pieces for soup – which is bubbling nicely at the moment.

Tonight when we eat, I will silently thank the chook for living a good life and enabling me to eat ethical meat my way and I will know that this chook, she had the best life possible before she died and that her death wasn’t traumatic, for anyone other than Nat and I. Amy walked outside just after we’d chopped the hen’s head off and we talked about it.

That this is where meat comes from. We don’t get meat from the supermarket, meat comes from animals and our job is to give animals a happy life and ethical humane death.

Note the yellow fat? Proper free range healthy chooks have yellow fat and skin. Supermarket chooks have generally been bleached to make them more ‘attractive’. Personally, I’ll take bright yellow over covered in bleach any day.

This is once I’d broken it down and was browning in olive oil.

Recipe for chicken and potato soup:

Take your chicken, make sure it’s free range and break it down into it’s various elements. Take off the breasts, chop the legs down close to the carcass and remove them from the body. Brown everything in olive oil, including the carcass.

When everything is well browned, add 5 roughly chopped onions and a leek. Let them colour a little. Don’t burn anything!

Deglaze the pot with some white wine if you’re organised, or if you’re me, deglaze with warm water.

Cover the chicken pieces with water and bring to a simmer.

Add 4 large potatoes, chopped.

Cook until the meat falls from the bones and the potato falls apart.

Season with salt and pepper.

When Mum slaughtered her pigs, we knew that I was going to be playing around with making bacon from the belly. This week, I did a trial run, using some pork cheeks from the pigs.

I wasn’t too impressed with the butchering of the cheeks – it seemed like a fair amount of meat hadn’t been cut off of the head. That said, the guy who did the killing didn’t charge very much, so I can’t complain too much.

To start with, I cured the cheeks in some sugar and salt for a week.

A proper cure is meant to contain pink salt (curing salt containing nitrite) however, finding curing salt in Tasmania is like looking for a needle in a haystack, so I gave up and just used regular salt, replacing the quantity of curing salt with regular salt.

Basic Dry Cure:

450g (1lb) of salt
225g (8oz) sugar
50g (2oz) pink (curing) salt.

I halved this recipe, knowing that I didn’t need as much as the recipe made this time around.

After I made the cure, I dredged the pork cheeks in the mix – basically dipping the wiped clean meat into the salt/sugar mix until it’s coated – and then I popped them into a snap lock bag and removed as much air as possible. Laying the bag flat in the bottom of my fridge, I turned it every day for a week.

Now, my bacon was very salty – I would suggest anyone else using pork cheeks to only cure for 3-4 days, or until the meat feels dense when poked.

After the meat had cured, I rinsed it and set it aside to dry.

You can see how the fat has softened and I’ve poked it.

If you’ve got a hot smoker, you then put the cured pork into a hot smoker and smoke it until it reaches 65C in the centre, otherwise, put it into an oven set to 90C and cook it slowly until it reaches 65C in the centre. Then cool.

I don’t have a hot smoker, but I do have a whole heap of ingenuity and so I rigged a smoke infusing mixture in the bottom of my roasting pan. Cherry wood chips (thankyou cherry tree) and a warm oven.

However, it didn’t smoke as my oven wasn’t hot enough. So once the meat had spent long enough in the oven (I don’t have an meat thermometer, I should probably buy one) – which was almost 2 hours at 90C, I popped it onto my stove top and turned the hot plates on underneath the pan. This made the cherry chips smoke rather well, thankyouverymuch.

Well enough at least that I filled the house with cherry smoke and the smell of smoky bacon. I suppose I’m just glad I didn’t have clean washing drying inside this time.

5 minutes of smoke with the whole lot covered in foil and my bacon was lovely and smoky. So was my hair/clothes/hands. Heh.

I cooled the bacon after that and then used it as a base for pasta sauce that night. It was delicious.

Personally, I think curing meat is a huge learning curve and I’ll definitely do things differently next time – like smoking over the BBQ instead of inside and not letting the meat cure for quite so long. Even though it was a little salty, it will make the BEST base for soups and stocks at the moment – because of the meat/fat ratio, I don’t think these cheeks would be the best bacon for serving alone, there really just isn’t enough meat.

The bacon has since been dispatched to the Frogpondsrock household and I’m waiting to hear what they have to say about it.

I’m counting it a success though.

Herb Marinated Lamb Chops:

I was worried, with all the effort I went to, that no one would eat them. It’s murphy’s law with kids though, the more time and energy expended, the less they eat.

However, I needn’t have worried. They were delicious and if the kids didn’t eat any more than normal, I’m not fussed because they did eat some. Isaac was more impressed with the cooked silverbeet to be honest. Obviously he’s his father’s son, because it took until I started growing my own silverbeet for me to be able to eat the bloody stuff. I preferred English spinach any day of the week. And before we start arguing, yes, they do taste different.

I marinated my lamb chops for around an hour, if I was more organised, I would have marinated them for 24 hours. But I’m not, so I didn’t. Organisation isn’t my strong point. I have my internet stuff organised perfectly and I can generally find what I’m looking for, but remembering to plan ahead for dinner? Nope, not something I’m good at.

Now, the all important Marinade – because I’m fairly sure you all know how to cook roasted potatoes and lamb chops.

In a snap lock bag combine:

3 cloves of garlic chopped finely, NOT crushed
half an onion, very finely diced
2-3 tips of fresh oregano, finely chopped
a spring onion, finely chopped
5-6 chives, finely chopped
a small handful of parsley, finely chopped
5-6 mint tips, finely chopped
juice from 3/4 of a lemon
5-6 tablespoons of olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt, more if you like things saltier
1 1/2 teaspoons of sugar

Add the lamb chops and mix to make sure they’re entirely covered with marinade. Squeeze the snaplock bag to remove as much air as possible before sealing. Set aside in the fridge for as long as you can bear.

Trust me, it’s delicious.

If you don’t have the herbs I did, experiment with what you’ve got. I’m lucky enough to have fresh herbs in the garden all year around. Previously, when I was living in rented properties, I used to grow all my herbs in window boxes. So worth it.

I got to cook some of Frogpondsrock’s pork last night.

Can I just say ….. Mmmmmmmmm.

It was delicious.

I scored it and rubbed salt into the scores.

Then, I baked it for 20 minutes at 220C, before turning down the heat to 190C and cooking it slowly for nearly 2 hours.

I served it with potatoes and onions roasted in the pork juices, peas, gravy made from said juices and my home made chutney.

It was delicious.

So today, as I was felled by a virus that left me feeling like death warmed up, I decided I needed to do something other than flail about on the couch and moan. So, as you do, I went and harvested tomatoes. Because you should absolutely be outside playing in the garden when you’re ill.

Only to find that the slugs and snails were absolutely decimating any tomato that even showed a glimmer of ripening, leaving me with fifteen or so lovely looking red, gorgeous tomatoes, until you looked at their bottoms. That were eaten away and rotten.

So we pulled the plants – all 30 or so of them and popped them in our indoor/outdoor area to hang and hopefully ripen – still on the vine. If they fail to ripen, I’ll be making green tomato sauce and green tomato chutney, rather than the red versions.

The tomatoes at the back are hanging 2 rows deep, from 2 separate roof beams.

Maybe there are more than 30 plants. I forget how many I planted. Lots.

(The bowl was made by the very clever Frogpondsrock)

Anyway, while I was out there I did some garden maintenance. The kale was useless and had to be thrown in the compost, snails and earwigs had eaten it to within an inch of it’s life and then laid eggs all over it. *shudder*

I picked 2 of my purple cabbages, simply to  see if my father was right when he predicted that they would be full of grubs. The outsides had been pretty well nibbled, but the insides were fine.

I also picked out the leeks that were starting to go to seed, leaving the smaller ones still growing for a little while yet.

By this stage it was dinnertime, Isaac was melting down and hungry and Amy, well, she was being THREE!

So I chopped some chuck steak into small cubes, covered it in season-all and then bashed it with a rolling pin for a little bit. I sliced the freshly harvested vegetables and stir fried them as well. Then I served everything with rice and we were done.

Of course, Isaac did nothing but throw the food around and steal mouthfuls of mine, Amy spent dinner taunting her brother and I was really just ready for a good lie down.

But that’s the way life goes.

Ingredients:

Chuck steak, cubed and bashed with season-all
Zucchini (not from my garden, but from a home garden on Freecycle, yay freecycle!)
Purple Cabbage
Leeks
Olive oil
and more season-all to taste, because the children were screaming and I couldn’t be bothered with a proper sauce. Sue me.

All stir fried off.

]]> http://veronicadoesfood.com/garden-harvest-and-beef-stirfry/feed/ 9 http://veronicadoesfood.com/the-best-gluten-freebeef-burger-recipe-ever/ http://veronicadoesfood.com/the-best-gluten-freebeef-burger-recipe-ever/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:05:31 +0000 Veronica http://somedaywewillsleep.com/food/?p=172

No photos, because I’ve been slack.

I made beef burgers yesterday and they are honestly delicious. The children love them, I love them, even my partner hasn’t complained. This recipe is gluten free, so long as you double check all of your ingredients for GF status.

1kg of beef mince (2 lbs ground beef)
1 cup of rice crumbs (I bought mine from the supermarket)
2 tablespoons of Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons of all purpose seasoning (check the ingredients, most companies use rice flour in their season-all, but I have found a few brands with wheat starch in them)
1 teaspoon of salt
3 tablespoons of tomato paste
3 tablespoons of tomato sauce (ketchup)
2 carrots – grated.

Pop the cold mince into the bowl of your mixer and start the mixer churning, using the paddle/cake batter attachment. You want the meat to become sticky and hold together. After a minute or two, add the Dijon, the all purpose seasoning, the tomato paste and sauce and the salt. Keep mixing until everything is combined and the texture of the meat begins to change.

Once the meat starts to look sticky, add the cup of rice crumbs and continue mixing to combine. At the last moment, add the grated carrot and once combined, stop mixing.

Shape into burgers and fry or grill. The rice crumbs keep them nice and light, as well as helping to retain moisture so the meat isn’t dry at all.

Of course, you don’t need a bench mixer to do this, I just use one because it’s easier on my hands. If you’re not using a mixer, dump everything into a bowl and use either your hands or a wooden spoon to mix the meat vigorously until it starts to stick. Add the rice crumbs and the carrot at the last moment. Prepare to work up a sweat.

Normally I would also add one finely chopped onion and 4-5 cloves of garlic to my burgers, but I didn’t have any in the cupboard this time.

First of all, you have to have something to roast. My favourites are Lamb, Beef or Chicken. I like Pork too, but Nathan doesn’t so it kind of rules that out for me.

Pre-heat your oven while you season and prepare your meat. Just season however you normally season your roast meat, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy.

Slice some onions into halves (I use 1 big onion, or 2 smaller ones generally) and peel some cloves of garlic. 4-5 does me, but use more or less if you want to.

Now the important bit:

You need an oven pan with a rack in it. I use a spare grill pan and rack, but other people apparently have actual roasting pans with racks to fit! Who knew?

Pop the onion and garlic into the bottom of the pan and place the rack on top. Meat goes onto the rack and then… the secret… put a couple of cups of water into the bottom of the pan. I generally don’t use any oil whatsoever as I only end up skimming it off at the end.

Cook your meat for however long it needs, making sure to top up the water in the bottom of the pan. The onion and garlic should be looking nicely roasted and mushy.

While your meat is cooking, combine together in a small bowl, 2 Tablespoons of flour and 2 tablespoons of butter. It should make a thick paste. Set is aside in a coolish spot until later.

Once your meat is cooked, set it aside – on a plate – in a warm place to rest for 15-20. I sit it inside the microwave, as this stops hungry vultures from picking at the meat while you get the veggies and gravy together.

Drain all the water and juices and onion garlicky bits into a saucepan. Let the juices settle a little and then skim off as much fat as you can from the surface. A roast beef gives me very little fat, a chicken gives me heaps (I skimmed nearly a cup off last nights roast chicken) and lamb gives me a little bit. Skim it. Get rid of it, you don’t need it in your gravy making everything oily and gross.

As a side note, my cats always get very interesting when I am skimming fat from juices. They know full well that they get the fat poured over some dry food to eat.

When you have most of the fat gone, pop the saucepan onto a medium heat to warm everything up. Now would be a good time to taste the juices, but don’t worry, your gravy will taste slightly different.

once the juices get nice and warm, give them a good beat with a wire whisk. Yes, the whisk is very VERY important at this stage. You need a whisk.

While whisking everything, drop in some of the butter/flour mix that you made earlier. A piece about the size of a marble is good. Whisk everything madly until you can’t see any floating buttery bits in the juices. Repeat. Repeat. repeat. Keep repeating until your gravy is as think as you want it to be, then stop.

Still whisking – slowly now though, let everything bubble and cook for about a minute or so. Taste the gravy and season as needed. Sometimes I need extra salt and pepper, sometimes I add a little cream and parsley. Whatever you think will go well with your gravy.

And TA DA! The best meat juice gravy ever.

Easy Stir-fry Marinade

Beef – sliced as thin as you can get it. Stick it in a bowl and add….

Enough olive oil to coat meat
Juice from half a lemon
Fresh cracked black pepper to taste
Garlic salt to taste
2 teaspoon Paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons of Fish Sauce
and finally…
A tbsp of light Soy Sauce

Mix and let sit for about an hour. If you are running short on time this marinade still works well even if you don’t let it sit.

Stirfry meat in batches until brown.

I serve the stirfried meat on top of a green salad and it is delicious.