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 
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:
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:
Coat the meat in a tablespoon of flour, this will thicken the stew, and season with salt and pepper:
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:
Add the meat and brown all over. At this point it already smells fantastic:
Remove the meat and fry the lardons until crispy:
Remove those and put some colour on the onions, adding more fat if necessary:
Return the meat to the pan:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
Coat the meat in a tablespoon of flour, this will thicken the stew, and season with salt and pepper:
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:
Add the meat and brown all over. At this point it already smells fantastic:
Remove the meat and fry the lardons until crispy:
Remove those and put some colour on the onions, adding more fat if necessary:
Return the meat to the pan:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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