Weekly Menu Swap - Hosting Ingredient - Suet

I realise that many people will probably never knowingly have used suet and indeed suet recipes seem to be mainly British dishes but the actual ingredient is available anywhere that cows and sheep are eaten. Why? Because it is the fat from around the internal organs.. OK I know at this point some of you are thinking that's gross but really it's not much different to using dripping or similar. Suet has the properties of being quite flaky in nature, having a low melting point and producing a very distinctive pastry among other things. There is also a vegetarian version though that might be hard to get in none suet using areas.. OK it's not probably something you want to use every day but there are some traditional winter dishes here which don't work without it.

To be fair much of it doesn't get used at least not by butchers these days as my previous post will show, I got a large amount for free of my butcher as he normally asks the abattoir to remove it before sending him the meat.. it's crumbly nature means the cool-room floor gets covered in bits otherwise. Now the abattoir might well have a use for it other than sending to a butcher.. You can certainly buy it in packets but it is coated in flour after it is grated to keep the bits separate so it is no good for me.  It is also used a lot over here to make fatballs to put out for wild birds by combining it with seeds and other bits they like, it makes a good high calorie food for them. Traditionally it was rendered down to make tallow for candles too, very smoky candles for the masses who couldn't afford beeswax! .

So what recipes use it? Well Christmas pudding for a start and mincemeat, this is probably partly because mincemeat at least used to have meat in it.. I once made a traditional mincemeat with minced meat in it and apart from having to keep the mince pies in the fridge they really tasted no different to the none meat version which keeps for at least a year in a jar!

It is also used in suet pastry which is used in suet puddings.. these are savoury puddings ie steamed in a pudding basin, normally an outside of pastry with a pie type filling or even a plain sponge pudding type one to serve with meat a bit like Yorkshire pudding is . There are also sweet suet puddings eaten for pudding such as spotted dick and jam suet pudding... Have you noticed we like the word pudding over here  :)   I'm planning a meat filled suet pasty style pudding this week.

Delia's suet pastry
Bacon and leek suet pudding from Farmers Weekly
Plain suet pudding from The Foody
Spotted Dick from the Jane Austin Centre
Jam spong pudding from Cook it Simply

It's also used in dumplings to put in a stew for the last 20 mins or so of the cooking time which are a firm favourite here. Dumplings are very easy.. they are basically twice as much flour as fat and whatever flavours you like such as herbs, onion, cheese or whatever goes with the stew.


Basic dumplings from The Foody
A version from Jamie Oliver for those who don't have suet

I posted some links to Christmas pudding recipes a couple of weeks ago and will post up my gluten free, corn free, citrus free version when I have finished trialling it..

Here are a couple of mincemeat recipes, mincemeat is easy to make and once made you can make another British Christmas staple the mincepie. There are plenty of other uses for mincemeat too as you can see here.

Delia's version.
A meat version from River Cottage
 
Anyway that is probably more about Suet than you ever wanted to know so on to the menus.

Our menu this week.

Monday - Suet meat pudding with potatoes, cabbage and carrots.

Tuesday - Fish pie

Wednesday - School play so something simple like baked potatoes we can have quickly.

Thursday - Cauliflower cheese.

Friday - Stew and dumplings.

Baking and other batch cooking- Chrismas puddings, Banana bread, banana chukney, banana curd, banana steamed pudding.. (well I do still have about 16lb of bananas to use up! )

Other Menus

Heather over at Celiac Family has just got back from a surprise trip to Disney World the lucky thing, she has a lovely sounding menu plan though she tells us it is quite simple due to the hectic time of year !

Angela at Angela's Kitchen does use suet even if only to make fat balls for the birds ! her menu so based on some deals her hubby picked up which is the sort of menu I love. her Thai seasoned patties sound particularly interesting.

Cheryl from Gluten free goodness  has a lovely photo of her cats all curled up to greet us. She has a very interetsing sounding menu and she may never have heard of suet but then I have no idea what mahi or kalamatas are so we are even !  

Doughnuts - Mrs Beeton style

So there I was flicking through Mrs B looking for basic biscuit recipes to make the small ones something for a picnic tea and I come across the batter section. Having been playing with various batter recipes recently I thought I'd have a look and got to her Indian Fritter recipes, which are basically jam filled doughnuts and sounded pretty simple! So I'm sure you know where this is headed..

Doughnuts or Indian Fritters based on a Mrs Beeton recipe.

3oz basic gluten free flour mix, I used Dove Farm.
pinch of salt
boiling water
3 eggs (she used 2 eggs and 2 yolks)
jam or jelly
deep fat fried oil (and pan)

Sieve the flour into a bowl and add the salt. Then stir in enough boiling water to make a stiff paste, she says a good 1/2 gill, I just added it till it was stiff but reasonably lump free. Leave to cool for a short while.

Beat the eggs in a bit at a time until smooth.

Make sure the fat is up to heat, I ended up having it quite high as it seemed to need it, she says when it is just beginning to haze as she didn't have temperature based deep fat friers!

Now comes the difficult bit she says take a half filled tablespoon, add a tsp of jam in the middle then cover with more mix to fill the spoon and then drop into the fat. I found it pretty impossible to stop the jam leaking out and deepfried burnt jam is very unpleasant! So after a couple of goes I made unfilled ones and they were great. The two below are the jam filled ones.

Cook till golden brown then drain well and roll in sugar.

They are really nice and did taste just like doughnuts, the batter itself has no sugar so you can easily decide how much you want when you cover them.

Don't do much more than a tablespoon at a time as they puff up a fair bit and I found any bigger ones were slightly under cooked in the middle.

Fish and Chip shops

I know that Fish and Chip shops are a very British thing so I thought I'd try and explain them to those of you who are not familiar.

The chipshop as they are commonly known is our traditional fast food and every town has at least one, though these days they compete with pizza, kebab, chinese and many others..

The standard fare on offer is chips obviously, fries to some of you but never thin cut which is what we would call french fries, chips are always cut a good fairly chunky size then deep fried. A good chip shop has nice crisp chips with fluffy middles. Traditionally the frying oil is beef dripping though many now use vegetable oil which of course allows you to sell to vegetarians but some will tell you the flavour isn't the same, personally I think the frying technique is more important than the oil.

Along with chips there is of course fish, always in batter. A chip shop batter is quite thick and puffed up and most people would not try to emulate it at home. This is out of bounds for us gluten free people so I have tried with some success to make my own, though it is a bit variable. What type of fish it will be varies though cod is the norm. Certainly in more coastal shops you often get a choice, traditionally cod, place or haddock though these days some are branching out or just specifying fish so they can use some of the tasty but less over fished varieties.

If you want something different the other things normally sold include breaded fishcakes, saveloy sausages, big battered sausages, and roast chicken portions. Steak or chicken and mushroom pies are normal too. It is very common these days for them to also sell doner and chicken kebab meat as well.

There are also regional specialities like potato scallops, deep fried roast potatoes, deep fried Mars bars (a Scottish 'delicacy') and even deep fried black pudding. We have cheese jacks in ours which are flavoured mashed potato, coated in a thin batter then deep fried and they have just started doing battered chips too !

Most of these come served wrapped in paper and liberally doused in salt and vinegar (normally malt or a pretend version there of) which you can then eat as you walk along.

There are a few extras that are normal to have on the side. These include mushy peas, curry sauce, pickled eggs, pickled onions and you can normally get little jars of pickled cockles too.

As you can see most things are deep fried and heavrly potato based often in batter which is a problem for celiacs. In all truth i probably shouldn't even eat the chips as there is going to be some cross contamination from the batter but I seem to manage though these new batter chips are making me rather nervous as that has got to up the chances.

Choc Sponge Pud

I love British puds and traditional food in general so when I found out about a new blogging challenge called the Great British Pudding Challenge I had to consider joining. The first challenge is a chocolate sponge pudding. Such a hardship !

I haven't made many sponge puds since I stopped eating gluten and the few I have were done by the microwave method which while it is fast didn't give me that good a result. However when I started cooking gluten free anything resembling the real thing was good enough so they filled a gap but now I am more picky as the flours are available to do better than that and my confidence has grown to try adapting recipes.

This recipe is done by the traditional steaming method which takes much longer but all the best things take time and once the mix is made up all you need to do is make sure the steamer doesn't run out of water so can be getting on with other things which in my case was cooking tea, we had lamb chops with a salad. For a steamer I used a large pasta pan, one of those with an internal pan like a colander which can be pulled out to drain the pasta or in this case to lift the pudding basin away from the steam.

The original none gluten free recipe is here. All I did was to replace the flour with a gluten free general flour mix and it worked very well. The mixture is easy to make up and the resultant pudding is very chocolaty indeed. I used Bornville Chocolate for the chunks as I love dark chocolate. The texture was very good and light though I think from seeing pictures of a couple of others mine might be a little more crumbly than a gluten version but not so much it spoilt the feel in the mouth.

We all ate it with cream though I suspect had Tom not been feeling low with a cold he would have made custard to go with it as well.

My small one insisted on being pictured with the pudding as well sorry it's rather dark it was getting close to his bedtime so I wanted to get it served up.