When the supervisor visits, it is her custom to take cottage pie for lunch, a pie which is sometimes rendered as 'cotton pie'. Her visits are presently suspended, but following the frozen leg of reference 2, we though to make a cottage pie in her honour. Or, to be more exact, a shepherd's pie, as shepherd's sheep rather than the cottager's cow was the main ingredient.
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| The view from the south |
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| The view from the north |
From Grandpa's point of view, this was a grand opportunity to fetch down the Spong No.10 from the roof and give it a bit of exercise.
Just the one carrot, so he thought to add a bit of celery, not to the mincing, but later when the second cooking was near complete. Plus just a touch of e-number in the form of the left over gravy, gravy which had been made with the help of both juices from the first cooking and a stock cube from Knorr. It being one of many culinary curiosities that gravy made when roasting lamb needs a lot more help than that made when roasting beef, pork, chicken or turkey. Never tried with ducks or geese, despite the large amounts of fat which leaks out of them during the roast, that first cooking.
Simmered the assembled mince for about an hour, adding the cross-chopped celery a little before the end of that period.
Meanwhile cook enough potatoes that will cover the whole when mashed. Grandpa a bit hit and miss at that bit as he does not cook very often.
Put mince in dish, cover with mashed potatoes and bake for around an hour at 175C, the third cooking.
Towards the end of this process, boil up some chou pointu.
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| The inspection |
Polly, acting for the supervisor, was a bit late on the scene and was very suspicious. Her orders from her boss had been very clear on the need to check for alien ingredients - other, that is, than the lamb mince. But her suspicions were soon allayed: no sign of mushrooms or peas and the bits of celery were hardly visible at all. Pedro and Yuri concurred and lunch was allowed to proceed.
Grandpa, once again, was pleasantly surprised at how different thrice-cooked mince was from once-cooked mince. Part of this being that mincing cold cooked meat gives a finer mince than mincing raw meat. Furthermore, this meat probably had less fat and gristle than finds its way into butchers' mince - although you do need some of that for texture and flavour.
Perhaps also there was pleasant association to his childhood, when beef and lamb roasts on a Saturday often found their way into mince on a Sunday. Sunday roast being a day out in his family, as both father and mother were working during most of his childhood - the part he remembered most about - so roast on Saturday was a low-labour approach to weekend cooking, not then regarded as a proper activity for proper, educated people. Not quite sure how this fitted in with the fact that his father usually did a long morning shift at the hospital (Addenbrooke's) on Saturdays, not coming home until his waiting room was empty. Perhaps memory muddled yet again.
While Grandma remembered a friend of hers, in whose family it was the custom to use up the left over beef roast in rissoles, which might be characterised as a twice cooked beef-burgers.
PS: one portion left over, warmed up for Grandpa's lunch the next day. While Grandma had her mushroom omelette all to herself.
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