Cooking with Jonny69: Game stew with stilton dumplings

[Jonny69]

One of the great things about a credit crunch is people tend to buy cheaper food. This means the expensive stuff in the supermarket gets knocked down and I'm usually there ready and waiting to scoop it all up. My freezer is full of nice meat and I haven't paid more than half price for any of it. Yesterday they had reduced all the game on the butcher counter. There was venison steak (which was still a bit out of my price range at £11.99/kg) and game pie mix down to £5.99/kg. This makes it the same price as stewing steak except it's partridge, pheasant, pigeon and rabbit, meat that is normally available only to the rich. I got the last kilo, half is in the freezer for another time and the rest is tonight's fantastic dinner of game stew with stilton dumplings. I am posting this realtime as well, so anyone wants to join me you'll be just 30 minutes behind :D

You can make this with beef if you didn't manage to get the game, total cost for 4 servings is about £5-6

Ingredients:

1/2kg game mix or stewing beef
3-4 small onions quartered
2 rashers of fatty bacon
1/2 bottle of red wine
Hefty spash of brandy
1 pint of game, chicken or beef stock

For the dumplings:

75-100g of blue stilton
150g flour
100g suet

Look at this meat, it's just beautiful, all dark colours purples and reds and smells fantastic:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3284.JPG

Chop your onions and dice up the bacon so you have lardons. I used Sainsburys Ultimate back bacon, the expensive free range stuff that I had in the freezer. Usually £3.59 a pack and I got stacks of it reduced to £1.19 a pack and further money off because it was on offer as well. Make use of your freezers folks:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3285.JPG

Coat the meat in a tablespoon of flour, this will thicken the stew, and season with salt and pepper:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3287.JPG

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3288.JPG

If you've been reading my cooking series with a bit of luck you'll have roasted a duck and kept the fat. Melt a nice large knob of the duck fat in your biggest pan. Use butter if you don't have the duck fat:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3289.JPG

Add the meat and brown all over. At this point it already smells fantastic:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3290.JPG

Remove the meat and fry the lardons until crispy:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3291.JPG

Remove those and put some colour on the onions, adding more fat if necessary:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3292.JPG

Return the meat to the pan:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3294.JPG

Now pour in half a bottle of red wine. This Californian Zinfandel is reduced to £4.99 in Sainsburys. It's a bold full bodied red with lots of fruit and sweetness and a little oak. If you don't drink much red wine this is a great one to get started on and doesn't need food with it. You will enjoy the other half of this bottle:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3295.JPG

The naughty element to this recipe is some brandy. I don't drink brandy and it only comes out at Christmas or special occasions so you can afford to splash out on a decent bottle for the booze cabinet as it lasts forever. I put a good generous slug of this in to give some caramel woody taste to compliment the stilton in the dumplings:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3296.JPG

I then added a pint of home made duck and chicken stock which I previously made from the carcasses of past Sunday roasts. It sits in the freezer waiting for an opportune moment which is now! We should be looking something like this:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3297.JPG

Put a lid on it and let it simmer. I'm going to give it an hour and a half. The dumplings need to go in about half an hour before the end and I'll go over how to do them in a bit.

[BBx]

Bugger if I could move and had a car I would have joined you :D

You should get your own series Jonny! :D

BB x

[Jonny69]

It smells fab, I am struggling to wait for this one to cook :D

[Pheebs]

I nearly dribbled looking at those pics.

My GOD that meat looks good. If I was anywhere near it I would have snuck a bit of raw aside and nommed it like a starved, slightly crazed velociraptor.

Dagnammit. I now want a blue steak and Jurassic Park.

And stilton.

DARN YOU JOHNNY *shakes fist*

[Jonny69]

Dumplings.

These are really simple to make. Dumplings are basically flour, suet and water. Suet is beef fat and makes the dumplings moist and fluffy and you add about two parts flour to one part suet as a general rule. I'm adding blue stilton to compliment the stong flavours of the meat, the red wine and the brandy.

Put the flour and suet into a bowl and crumble the stilton over the top, minus the rind. I haven't added salt because the stilton is already quite salty:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3299.JPG

Break the stilton up a bit with a fork so it's a finer mix with no big chunks:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3300.JPG

Now add a little water and work it together so you get a dough:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3303.JPG

It should form a ball like this but not be too dry. Keep adding water little by little until you get it right:

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3304.JPG

If it goes very sticky you can simply add some more flour, then break it up and roll it into balls. Don't forget they swell up quite a bit when they go in the stew so don't make them too big!

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3306.JPG

These can now sit and wait until 1/2 hour from the end of the cooking...

Lol @ pheebs ;D

[Jonny69]

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3307.JPG

Dumplings are in ;)

[Jonny69]

http://www.dropfiles.net//files/319/cooking/IMG_3309.JPG

Ah, that was delicious :D

[Burble]

That looks scrummy!

I had game for the first time in ages when I was in Belgium last week. I had a mix of hare, wild boar, pheasant and deer liver. It was yummy.

[Tak]

God I'm hungry now :/

[Burble]

Me too. I'm grumbling to myself that I burnt that second slice of toast this morning.

[Belmit]

That looks so lovely and rich, with the creamy mash...

My tongue just LOL'd. I mean lolled.

[lostkat]

I bought some venison at the Good Food Show today to cook with the baby rabbit that Leon's Mum gave me. I may well give this dish a go, although I'm torn between a stew or a lovely pie topped with shortcust pastry. HMMMMMM!!!!

[Burble]

PIE!!

[Wryel]

Suet, game, stilton and VSOP!!!!! God damn that looks good.

[phykell]

Just an aside - you can get vegetable suet for the dumplings and it's just as good as beef suet.

I *LOVE* dumplings :cool:

[lostkat]

I find veggie suet a lot less stodgey than beef suet, so I always use that instead. You can also make dumplings without using suet at all, but I can't remember which cookbook the recipe is in.

[Jonny69]

I use veggie suet in the girl's food, she's a vegetablearian.