One pot cooking, good prep, plus hearty (vaguely Greek) beef casserole

One pot, slow cooking methods are an odd mixture of convenience and time-commitment. It's not the kind of thing you can really do in a hurry, obviously, and once you start cooking you're kind of stuck with dinner plans from about three in the afternoon.

As someone who has been known to decide on a dish to cook only about half-way through cooking it, it's a very different way of looking at food.

But, on the other hand - the whole one pot thing. Small inner city kitchens do not lend themselves to extravagant meals that require a stock to be bubbling, sides cooking, mains in the oven, and another two or three stations of prep. Oh for one of those Hollywood room-sized kitchens with a chopping island the size of a... well, island.

A lot of the one-pot cooking I do tends to be on the faster side - chop vegetables, throw into large pot with oil or goose fat, saute for a metric bit, then cover with stock and simmer for an hour. But just a little more time spent on prep, ingredients and cooking time can deliver a fantastic dish.

Beef casserole

As usual, our Feedbag delivery came through with some great stuff, including a chunk of sirloin roughly the size of my girlfriend's head. It was a lovely, marbled piece of meat. There was also the usual selection of market fresh veg, and the Feedbag run before, which my girlfriend went on (note, girlfriends are tetchy that time of a morning), we scored a huge bag of 'souvlaki mix'.

We've had this stuff before, and it's an awesome pre-mixed herb and spice powder. The only thing - no one's quite sure exactly what's in there. Undoubtedly there's salt and oregano, and some debate over pepper, lemon or lemon pepper. I think there's more to it, though - the flavour is a touch more complex. Maybe some thyme, or onion powder, it's hard to tell. Regardless, it's extremely tasty, so it seemed the perfect compliment to the beef.

ingredients

Chunk of sirloin

potatoes

green beans

carrot

zucchini

onion

celery

tinned tomato

bacon bones

chicken stock

goose fat

In terms of directions, it doesn't get simpler. There is, however, one complication to be mindful of - the state of your meat.

If you've ever wondered why beef dishes can be so tender and wonderful in a restaurant, but so chewy and disappointing at home... it's all in the prepping of the meat. More specifically, it's in the removal of connective tissue.

Not all connective tissue, however. Good connective tissue, the stuff that surrounds each muscle fibre, is made from collagen. Collagen breaks down with slow heat, and adds that silky fattiness that makes a real gourmand water at the mouth and go weak at the knees. The bad stuff, though, is made from elastin, and this doesn't break down. In fact, it gets tough and will actually curl and warp the meat as it cooks.

So how do you tell the bad stuff?

Well, it's usually the very obvious silver membrane running through a cut of meat. This is the stuff that connects two different muscle groups - it has to be tough stuff, to stop muscles from separating. Good for walking around without tearing yourself limb from limb, bad for cooking. Thankfully, it only takes a bit of effort to remove, and when you get really good at it, you won't waste a bit of meat.

I'm... not that good at it yet. You need a really sharp knife, too, but the trick is to part the two layers of meat gently apart as you stroke the edge of the blade along the grain of the meat. If you've a cut of meat with the membrane running through the center, you'll need to trim twice - once to halve the meat into a good bit and a membraned bit, and then trim again to remove the membrane altogether. Yes, there will be a bit of wastage, but practice will make perfect.

More importantly, a bit of wastage is worth it for the end result. So, with the dreaded silver membrane removed, what do you do for this stew?

Simple. Cube your sirloin into good sized chunks, and lay flat on a tray or pan. Sprinkly with your souvlaki mix - or whatever herb-spice combo you want, really - pat the mix into the meat, then turn the pieces. Repeat - spices, pat etc - and then let sit while you get chopping the veg. Chop roughly and not too small, otherwise you'll end up with beef in vegetable soup. Do chop the bacon bones carefully, though - relatively small, and be careful to avoid too much bone.

With everything chopped up, get a tablespoon or so of goose fat melted in a heavy bottomed pot, and brown the beef. And since we're being all educational, no, you don't sear or brown meat to "seal in the juices" - cooking meat actually cooks the juices off! The reason you do brown is to caramelise the beef, adding an important flavour element.

Once all the beef is nicely browned (it should be rare at this stage, and you'll need to make sure by popping a piece into your mouth - you like rare beef, right?) take the pot off the heat, and add everything else. You don't want to cover the ingredients with the stock, but add just enough liquid that you can see it just below the uppermost layer of ingredients. Give it all a mix, then bung in an oven pre-heated to about 170 degrees.

Cooking for a few hours. Stab a carrot to test if it's ready. If not, up the temperature and cook for a bit longer. Once it's ready, plate in a bowl by itself, or add to a plate of boiled white rice, or even a nice creamy mash if you're really feeling like a lot of potato.

Okay, not my best photo. But man, it was a very good bottle of wine.

My hazy focus aside, this is serious business. This is cooking at not only its simplest and most basic, but also illustrative of the simple tricks you can use to really lift a dish. Cooking something like this in goose fat delivers a triple-threat of culinary oomph: it's flavoursome, silky from the goose fat, and silkier again from the broken down fat in the beef.

It's like eating... something really expensive and melted.

But the real star, the Jewel in the Silky Crown, is that beef. Tender. Fall apart on your fork. Melt in your mouth.

Happy. In your pants.

And that's the whole point of taking the time to properly trim your meat. That investment pays fucking dividend's when it's on the plate in front of you or your guests. Especially your guests. They'll ooh, they'll ahh. They'll ask how you did it.

"It's all in the prep," you'll say. Cool, just like that. When you'v cooked a great cut of beef to perfection, a cook deserves some cool.

The simple things, plus Chicken and Vegetables in Oyster Sauce

One of the things that's guaranteed to get me in a rage are sauces in jars. Chicken Tonight, Leggo's pasta sauces, or any of a million other varieties - with very few exceptions, these are all sauces that are so damn easy to make that it's criminal that these things are so popular. They take up so much space on supermarket shelves that it's easy to believe some people must east nothing else.

That said, I can see the reasoning, at least in terms of the time-poor. It's not everyone who has the time to come home and make a proper meal accompanied by a freshly made sauce and sides. And for a lot of people, cooking is a chore (gasp!), not something to do because you like it.

And let's be honest - I like cooking... and sometimes even I fall back on the one-bottle solution.

Chicken and Vegetables in Oyster Sauce

The other day while shopping a bottle of Oyster Sauce caught my eye. It's a vegetarian one, made from aged mushrooms, and a dingy plastic bottle, with the usual scrawl of Chinese characters that I've often assumed say "The one who purchases this cannot cook".

But I picked it up anyway, because it's always handy to have a selection of good Asian ingredients on hand. It is, after all, a region that really understands fast cooking. And that's what this meal is all about - it's quick, stupidly versatile, and as I've been having it, loaded with good fresh veg, a really good hang-over cure.

It's also, in my opinion, barely cooking, but it's still so damned tasty it's worth sharing.

ingredients

Chicken thighs, sliced

Red capsicum

Squash

Mushrooms

Onion

Shallots

Garlic

Ginger

Oyster sauce

Rice

Start off by tossing two cups of rice into a rice cooker. We only recently got one of these heavenly engines of cooking, and they are a true Gods send. You could add something like finely sliced water chestnuts or shiitake mushroom to the rice, but it's fine just plain - but then again, I loves me rice in any form.

Slice up your chicken thighs, trimming off any excess fat (I'm picky - sue me), and then toss into a pan with a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil. I've been meaning to get some sesame or peanut oil for this, but vegetables been working fine. I've also been meaning to get a proper wok, but again, am making do with a simple pan.

When the chicken's starting to cook all over (and keep stirring, you don't want it to stick and burn, or overcook), add in the chopped veg. Stir for a few minutes, add the garlic and ginger (which I just slice), stir again, then stir in a mess (a very precise measurement... ) of the oyster sauce.

Enough to give it that takeout Chinese shine.

Keep stirring, add a bit more sauce if it looks as though it's cooking off, and by about now the rice should be done. Rice in a bowl, food on rice, eat.

Like I said - it's really not cooking, really just assembly. But it's very tasty, highly nutritious assembly. And, possibly as importantly, it's really fast, maybe twenty minutes all up to cook.

As to the versatility, well, you can pretty much cook it with any ingredients. Bok choy or other Asian green are a no-brainer, and I've done a purely vegetarian version with just that. Carrots and broccoli are another option... basically, pretty much anything fresh will cook up really well.

A rice cooker and a good oyster sauce - essential tools in any lazy cook's arsenal.

Getting excited about food, and côte de porc à la charcutière

As I've mentioned, I recently had a short trip overseas. It's kind of messed up my joy for cooking - I guess getting waited on for a week and a half spoils you somehow.

Who knew?

But the latest Feedbag box has come in, and it had some lovely pork chops. I rarely cook with pork, so I wanted to do something special; something that would re-ignite that passion for cooking and good food. So where do you turn to when you need that kind of kick in the pants?

The Les Halles Cookbook.

Gods, how I love that book. It's essentially the bible to Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles restaurant, containing his philosophy for cooking, signature dishes, and some truly awesome food writing. I only own a handful of cookbooks, and this is the one I refer to almost as much as Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Companion (the true "If you only own one cookbook" cookbook).

So back to the pork, and the recipe at hand. If you google côte de porc à la charcutière the top four or five results refer directly to the Les Hallse recipe. The rest are in French. So now I'm going to add my take on this great dish to the Google Gods.

côte de porc à la charcutière

For all that this sounds rather fancy, what it essentially translates to is pork the way the pork butcher prepares it. So you've got to guess these butchers know their job, more or less. It's also a fiendishly quick meal to cook, which means it's an ideal dinner party meal that you can cook in twenty minutes or so, and then casually mangle some French as you serve the meal.

It's the little things, really.

Please note: my recipe does deviate a touch, thanks to not having the right range of cookware or proper stock on hand. Which... yeah. Bourdain would kidney punch me for a crime like that.

ingredients

Two pork chops (about 300gm each)

Oil

Butter

Small onion

Flour

White wine, the drier the better

Beef stock (which is not only the wrong stock, but is store-bought - egads!)

Dijon mustard

Half a dozen cornichons

Sprig of flat leaf parsley

Salt and pepper to taste

See? Simple! To accompany the dish, I also prepared some cabbage and apple in butter.

First up set your oven to 190 degrees Celsius, and season the pork with salt and pepper - just pinch of each, on each side, and quickly rub into the meat. Heat up the oil, and then add the butter - about a tablespoon of each - in a non stick pan. Throw in your pork, and cook for four minutes a side. Then transfer the pan to oven... assuming you have an oven-safe pan, which I foolishly don't.

So what I did was simply pour the pan's contents into a glass roasting dish, and then put the pan aside. Cook the pork in the oven for eight minutes, which is about all you need for the rest of the prep.

Finely chop the onions, the cornichons (or baby gherkins, if you don't want to fancy about it) and the parsley. Chop the cabbage and finely slice up small apple. In preparation for the cabbage and apple, melt some better in a pan, with another pinch of salt and pepper.

Right about now, your pork should be done. Ideally, you'd remove your pan, set the chops aside under some foil, and put the pan back on the heat. In my case, I reserved the chops, and simply poured off the baking dish into the pan. I don't think it hurt the dish any, but I bet this will taste better once I get the right cookware.

Anyway, with the pan back on the heat, it's time to work on the sauce. Add the onions, and sauté until golden. Add the flour, and stir for a minute. Then half a cup wine goes in (and you'll need a refill by now, too, if you're a cook after my own heart). Reduce this by half, then add a cup of stock, again reducing it by half.

While working on the sauce, you can easily knock off the cabbage. First, toss the apple slices into the butter, toss a couple of times until coated, and then add the cabbage. Toss and stir, and let the cabbage wilt slightly - but not too much. Take off the heat and plate.

The sauce - which you've been stirring and paying loving attention to, right? - should be about done. Remove from the heat, whisk a teaspoon of the mustard through, then add the gherkins and parsley. Stir, and admire the lovely colour, and the rich, mustardy aroma. Take your two well-rested chops, place on the cabbage and apple, and then pour off any juices into the sauce. You do not want to waste good pork fat.

Then simply pour the sauce over the chops. Jobs a good'un.

And man... for one thing, I think we really lucked out with the pork. It was sublime; and pan frying and then finishing in the oven really does a great job of producing a tender bit of meat. To be honest, this would have been great just with plain three veg, but with the sauce...

Sweet fuck, that's a helluva sauce. Rich, creamy, and full of sharp flavours from the cornichons and the mustard. In combination with the pork - well, it made me very happy in my mouth.

I was pleased with the cabbage and apple, too. It's a classic accompaniment to pork, but you really don't need to do much to it. The apple sweetness and crunchiness is a great offset to the heavy textures of the meat and sauce, while cabbage is a much needed concession to a reasonable vegetable intake.

All up, it was so good - especially with a New Zealand Sav Blanc - that I felt compelled to take an 'after' shot of the plate...

What you need to know about this image, is that I am fiendishly picky when it comes to finishing a bit of meat on the bone - gristle, fat, finicky stuff... I usually can't be arsed. After this dish, though, I gnawed the bone, cleaned my plate with a bit of bread, and then set to the saucepan with another piece of bread.

So here's to you, Anthony. To your words, your passion, and most importantly your food. I raise a glass... once I refill it, of course. Anything else would be rude.

Beef bourguignon, or, more accurately, how not to make beef bourguignon...

Sorry for the absence folks. Had a business trip to the US where I had planned to not only cover off on the work I had to do, but also talk about food a bit.

Instead, I'm still recovering from the impacted bowel I always seem to get when I digest what passes for food in that forsaken land. There is good food in the USA, but you just happen to pay through the nose for it, and no matter what you pay, getting a good serve of vegetables, or bread without gallons for corn syrup, is nigh impossible.

Vancouver, which I also visited, is a foodie heaven, however. Awesome seafood, an understanding that vegetables are important, and a mighty fine understanding of how to make a martini.

But, long story short, I'm back. Now to try and get the hang of cooking for myself again after a week and a half of being waited on and making nothing more strenuous than black coffee.

So, let's drift back in time to a dinner party I hosted a little while ago, for a lesson in how far you can push a recipe and still make it work.

Beef in Red Wine, with boiled new potatoes

Normally I like to go through ingredients and do the whole nine yards recipe thing, but the truth is... I really consider this dish a pretty serious failure. So, basically, I'm not even going to suggest you cook it. But it's an interesting and illustrative failure, at least.

Beef bourguignon, which this is a bastardised version of, is a classic dinner party dish. Rich, hearty, and really easy to make ahead of time. In fact, many recipes call for just that - make it the night before, let the flavours intensify overnight, then reheat to the tasty amazement of your guests. The problem with that is simple - who has time to cook a meal that technically should be on the go for hours, put it aside for the next night, then make something so you can eat there and then? It's a time intensive dish, and like a lot of city dwellers, time's a serious commodity for me.

That said, there are some handy shortcuts, and I've made this dish before in about an hour, and it's super good. But when you're already shortcutting a recipe, the last thing you want to be doing is cutting any more corners, and that's where my last Beef and Red Wine really fell down.

The people I was cooking this for presented a range of interesting challenges, not the least of which was a serious dairy allergy. Another guest doesn't dig on pig (I know, it's crazy, but she's a lovely person), and I do believe there was even some gluten issues at hand.

The thing about cooking is that it's effectively science for your mouth. Any really good dish is a series of chemical and organic reactions, as well as complex interactions of mouth feel and flavour; messing about with any facet of a dish often has disastrous consequences. I know this. I knew it then, too, but I was so stuck with the idea of presenting a ballsy beef bourguignon, and cooking it in front of my guests (because, for me, cooking is as much about being seen to prepare good food as it is presenting that good food - it's a performance thing) that I just plowed ahead, and figured I could easily cook a dish that was already flaunting the recipe, and go ahead and remove butter, bacon, and flour.

Rookie. Fucking. Mistake.

Sure, it looks okay. But that's just what it wants you to think. Look closer, and the rich-seeming sauce is missing that all important shimmer of butter. That sauce is also being soaked up by the beef, because it's not been thickened by the flour.

And, when you taste it, it's lacking anything like the body it should have. Oh, bacon, why dids't I forsake thou?!

Because I'm an idiot, that's why!

The annoying thing is that this is dish I can really cook - and in just an hour or so. But it needs those important ingredients. The butter adds richness, a silky mouthfeel, and thickens the sauce. The flour should coat the meat when it's first browned, which transfers a magic amount to the pan, while also adding further thickness when the meat's added again later in the dish, not to mention changing the consistency of that meat. And the bacon - it's bacon! Rich, smoky bacon.

There's simply no stock rich enough, no demi glace ballsy enough (as Bourdain would put it), to make up for not having those important elements. What I produced was a flat, flavourless dish that if you got it in a restaurant, you'd send back to the kitchen with a sternly worded letter to the chef.

Of course, all this whining aside, the final irony is, well, kind of delicious. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, but one of my guests went back for seconds and thirds. He told me it was one of the tastiest things I'd ever cooked for him.

Then again, this is the guy who's allergic to dairy - what would he know*?!

* Actually, quite a lot, as he's a cook I quite respect in his own right. But nonetheless...

Just a quick observation...

It goes without saying, that good spelling and grammar are important. But it's doubly important when you are listing food ingredients.

Now, I admit - I don't really give accurate measurements for my dishes. Mostly because I don't cook with accurate measurements, and much rather the 'cook by feel and taste' approach. But, if I were making something where measures are vitally important, they'd be here.

And that's not something you want to make a mess with. If you look up a recipe here and I've transposed a few digits, you'll be suitably cross. Like if I recommended putting, say, 23 teaspoons of chilli powder in a dish, you might well grow to hate me (once you wake from your coma).

But another area where things can go horribly wrong - as I'll soon illustrate - is in the unfortunate turn of phrase you may end up with by leaving an important word out. Not only can this be clumsy and make a recipe unclear and hard to follow, it too can lead to unfortunate cooking decisions.

Case in point: I point you to this otherwise fine-looking recipe for Stuffed Spatchcock, from the ABC's The Cook and The Chef. I think this will definitely inspire a recipe of my own, but I do hope that the recipe doesn't actually call for...

knob butter

But maybe it does! Perhaps Maggie Beer, delightfully foodie-type that she is, likes a bit of, well... sauciness in her cooking. For all I know, knob butter adds a silky finish, as it were, to the sauce that accompanies the dish. Or she's just an inveterate knob-butter-gobbler*.

Who can say.

Well, I can say one thing - be very careful when transcribing your recipes.

* Did I just call Maggie Beer a knob-gobbler? I think I did. Oops. Expect litigation and firebombs made from tasty food any day now.

What's in the box?

I've mentioned our little local food collective, called Feedbag, a few times, and since this weekend just past was Feedbag day, it seemed a good opportunity to share the awesomeness.

There's some onion and potato from a previous Feedbag run, but otherwise, that's everything we received on Saturday. Impressive, huh? It's effectively three boxes of awesome produce bought direct from Flemington markets at ohmigod o'clock. The brave souls who do the run are starting to get known out there, and are even getting some stuff discounted - remember, there are about a dozen other people in the co-op, so we get a lot of food.

Some of the market guys even thought the two girls who do most of the shopping were running a restaurant.

Anyhoo, here's the complete list of stuff:

Vintage Gouda
Dutch cream potatoes
Kipfler potatoes
Gold sweet potatoes
Button mushrooms
Broccoli
Limes
Mandarins
Baby cos lettuce
Daikon radishes
Yellow capsicum
Baby eggplant

Brown onions

Single clove garlic
Rhubarb
Grape tomatoes
Baby squash
Chinese cabbage (wombok)
Granny smith apples
Fuji apples
Diced goat
Carrots
Oyster blade steak

Spatchcck
Fresh coriander
Fresh mint
Fresh basil
Persian dried figs
Cardamom pods
White peppercorns
Spice mix for goat

See? Huge amounts of goodness, and all for only $50. It's more than enough to last the fortnight between shops, lasts wonderfully long (remember, this is literally market fresh, so it's not sitting in a cool room at a Woolies or something), and is a serious cooking inspiration. I find the surprise ingredients really pushes my cooking in interesting directions.

Like the spatchcock...

... and the figs, for instance.

Not stuff I'd normally consider purchasing or cooking with, but now in my kitchen and in need of a worthy cooking effort.

Feedbag - we hearts it, precious.

French Onion Soup

It's getting colder, and it's certainly been a wet week or two in Sydney. In other words, it's perfect weather for a nice hearty soup.

One of the things I love about a good soup is how easy they are - chop up your ingredients, saute a bit in oil or butter, add stock and herbs, and then let simmer away for however long you've got. Soup can be as structured or as freeform as your ingredients allow - it's a real wonder meal.

That said, there are some classics that really do deserve a bit more attention, and French Onion Soup is one of them.

Interestingly, for a lot of people the term 'french onion' was likely first associated with heavily creamed dips and Jatz crackers. As a kid, I devoured entire bowls of french onion dip at parties and BBQs. When my tastes started to broaden, and I moved out of home, I encountered the real thing. This taught me two important lessons:

1. French onion dip is a crime against food and likely humanity as well.

2. For true disdain and cranky service, you can't go past a pissed off Frenchman.

It was... some time in the early nineties, and the restaurant in question was a converted cellar in a Sydney laneway, called Le Guillotine. Sounds cheesy, yeah, but trust me, this place made a French Onion Soup that you'd gladly form a revolutionary government for. Most of the staff were either French or pretending, and man... they hated anyone who interrupted their busy Gaulish habits. You know - smoking, wearing berets, and wearing onions instead of cooking them.

But that soup stuck with me, and when I was recently staring at the large amount of onions in our pantry, it seemed the kind of thing that an onion would be proud to be a part of.

French Onion Soup

In the classic French style this is a dish that started out as simple peasant fare, but has now become more of a dinner party staple. Say to someone that you're cooking up a pot of French Onion Soup and they're likely to go "Wow, that's cool" instead of "You poor peasant sod." But that's the genesis of this dish - in many regions of France onions are plentiful, grow all year round, and are easy to come by.

It is, in effect, the inland version of bouillabaisse, though far easier to cook, at least.

ingredients

Eight medium onions

Goose fat

Beef stock

Sprig of Thyme

Sprig of Flat Parsley

Bay leaves

Dry white wine

Salt and pepper

Brown sugar

Crusty bread

Gruyere cheese

That's a lot of onions.

The first step is to get chopping those onions up. You'll want to make sure you've got a good sharp knife on hand, too - it'll not only make that much work a lot easier, but the onions need to be sliced as regularly as possible, so that it cooks as evenly as possible. After skinning the onions, I chopped each in half, then sliced away, producing one hell of a mound of onion, and making myself cry like a two-time Oscar-winner.

Once sliced up, add two large scoops of goose fat to a heavy bottomed sauce pan, introduce a medium heat, and toss in the onions. Toss the pan a couple of times, cover, let sit for about ten minutes. This essentially steams and softens the onions for the next phase - caramelising.

This is where you need to be a bit careful. The onions will need constant attention to stop them from starting to overcook; you'll be stirring every few minutes for about fifteen to twenty minutes. It's slightly more intensive than making a good risotto, but soon you'll see the mass onions reduced by about half, a lovely thick yet clear fluid start to build up in the pan, and the onions should be lovely and golden, and smell ever so sweetly.

Add a dash of wine to deglaze the pan, stirring vigorously to make sure you scrape all the tasty stuff up and into the dish itself. Then pour in the stock, and add the herbs and salt & pepper to taste. Turn up the heat to get a good boil, then reduce to simmer, covered, for about ten minutes.

When that time's up, uncover, add a teaspoon of brown sugar, and keep simmering uncovered for about a quarter of an hour. Technically, this is a dish that deserves a lot of time, but it can be made fast with a few tricks - that's where the brown sugar comes in, as it adds a further caramel texture. It's a cheat, but I want tasty food and time to enjoy it, dammit!

After this time you should have a lovely gold brown broth, and the attention of any partners within smelling range. Take off the heat and set aside - time for some cheesy toast!

Slice roughly centimeter thick chunks of bread - I used a fresh baguette - and sprinkle on some grated gruyere before placing under the griller. Technically, you should place the bread on the bowls of soup, sprinkle the cheese, and toast the whole lot, but I don't have oven proof bowls, and this is again a good shortcut. When the cheese is melted and just starting to brown, add soup to bowls, and top with the bread. Sprinkle a bit of spare gruyere into the soup itself, add cracked pepper, and you're done.

And oh... Gods... the tasty.

There's almost more solid onion in this than liquid, but it's rich and smooth without any bite. The goose fat adds a delicious silkiness to the soup, too, one that you just can't replicate with olive oil or butter, which is what most recipes call for. Really... you want the fat.

The toasted bread and gruyere adds great mouthfeel and flavour complexity, too. It's such a heartwarming meal, too - you just can't feel down enjoying something like this. And the brown sugar cheat works a charm - the caramel complexity of the dish is just about perfect.

In future I'll be keen to add some more authentic embellishments, like preparing my own veal stock beforehand, and investing in some properly rustic (and ovenproof) ramekins for an even better plating experience. But even as it stands, this is a keeper.