Seville Orange Stew

This stew is a real winter one – powerful, robust, tasty and concentrated. Containing potatoes, there will be no need to offer a vegetable with it. Leftover juices make the start or addition to a soup. 

The zest of one Seville orange, with its bitter juice, is enough to give the stew such a distinctive taste. Because of the seasonal bitter orange crop, the dish is a late winter’s one.

The time taken to cook this stew on top of the stove or in the oven will depend on the meat used. But allow an hour at least or, if using mutton, for instance, two to three hours.

SEVILLE ORANGE STEW

You will need:

Meat of your choice

A Seville orange

A bottle of any red wine

Onions

Garlic

Potatoes

Ginger root (optional, but gives punch and crunch)

Pepper and salt

Flour

Oil

Gravy browning (for looks, but not necessary)

Oxo cubes or stock cubes (I favour Oxo for this dish)

In oil, cook two chopped onions and the peeled cloves from a whole head of garlic.

Add finely chopped peeled ginger root.

When the onions start to brown add a dessert spoon of flour and stir.

Add the chopped meat and turn it all around.

Put in the juice from the Seville orange and all its zest – which I shave off with a sharp, thin bladed knife, chopping up the result.

Pour in the entire contents of a bottle of red wine. Stir again.

Add pepper and salt and several pulverised Oxo cubes (or stock cubes). I add a little gravy browning.

Cover with cubed potatoes.

Cook slowly on top of the stove or in the oven for an hour at least, whatever the meat – longer for tougher meat.

Keep an eye on the liquid content, adding boiling water as necessary if it appears to be drying out.

That’s it.

Simple Salmon

We seldom cook fish in our house, saving it as a treat when eating out. But when I found a couple of raw salmon steaks in our refrigerator after Margreet’s week of cooking, the task (or pleasure) was mine.

As I had heard many times that a whole salmon should be covered with cold, salty and spiced water, to be brought to the boil and then left to get cold, I did the same.

The cooked steaks needed patting dry with kitchen paper when extracted from the water. Then it was a simple matter of making a mayonnaise and boiling some potatoes.

SIMPLE COLD SALMON

You will need:

Salmon steaks (one per person)

Salt

Spices of your choice

Mayonnaise (made of egg yolk, Dijon mustard, salt, oil, and a little lemon juice)

Potatoes

Cook the salmon steaks in the way aforementioned.

Make a mayonnaise by putting an egg yolk into a bowl and adding half its volume of Dijon mustard and a little salt. Stir in oil – either olive, rapeseed, groundnut or other, or mixture, until the consistency of mayonnaise has been obtained. I use mostly olive oil. Do not worry about the temperature of the ingredients. An added few drops of lemon juice is an improvement.

Boil some potatoes (20 minutes).

Serve the cold mayonnaise-coated salmon with hot potatoes.

It is as simple and delicious as that.