It's the 8th of November already? Where the hell did all that time go? By my estimations this year has been only six months long. Am I feeling the effects of time and ageing? Is global warming making the autumnal weather colder or am I just getting...old...er? I mean, I actually hurt my hip last week! My hip! I might as well put my name down on the NHS waiting list for a hip replacement because by the time my turn comes around I'll bloody well need it. Nursing my faulty hip, I took solace in writing absolute garbage for NaNoWriMo this past week. It's great emptying the cache of blunted creativity lurking around in my mind but I'm not sure how viable my 'novel' actually is.



















So I took my creativity and went back to the kitchen where I had a few disasters and one or two successes. This is one of those successes. I love quail but I usually have it barbecued so I went in search of a new recipe. I consulted The Complete Robuchon by (surprise, surprise) Joel Robuchon and came away with a great recipe for roasted quail but I needed something to pair it with. One epiphany later and I was making Roast Quail with a Cannellini Bean Stew and Chestnuts. I'm not sure where I got the idea from but this definitely went down as a success.



















Ingredients
Roast Quail
4 quail
4 dessert spoons of butter
4 sprigs of thyme
4 cloves of garlic - finely chopped
a good amount of fleur de sel
a sprinkle of white pepper

Cannellini Bean Stew
1 can cannellini beans - drained
2 spring onions
4-5 Chantenay carrots - diced finely
1 stalk of celery - diced finely
1 dessert spoon of butter mixed with 1 teaspoon rapeseed oil
1 cup of chicken stock
1 teaspoon freshly picked marjoram
a splash of white wine vinegar
seasoning

Chestnuts
a handful of Italian chestnuts - oven roasted, peeled and diced*

* To cook chestnuts: pierce the skin and cook for 10 mins on full heat in the oven (the skin will split when they're cooked). Alternatively roast your chestnuts on the barbecue!



















Method
Preheat your oven to 250C/475F and lightly grease a deep baking tray.Trim and clean your quail. Combine butter, thyme, garlic and half of the fleur de sel and spread on the quail (in the cavity and on top of the breast and legs). Rub the remaining fleur de sel and pepper on the skin of the quail and place them in the baking tray on their sides. Cook for five minutes and turn the birds so the breasts are facing down. Turn onto the other side after another five minutes and then complete the rotation and cook for another five minutes. After twenty minutes of cooking (in total after every rotation has taken place) sit the quail on their backs and spoon over the juices and roast for a few more minutes until the skin has browned. Cover with foil and let the birds rest for 5 or so minutes.

The stew takes 20 minutes to cook so you want to be prepared to start cooking the beans when the birds go in to the oven. Sauté the onions, celery and carrots in the butter and oil mixture until softened. Add the beans, the marjoram and the chicken stock and cook for 15 minutes (stirring occasionally). Add a splash of vinegar and season to taste. Spoon the bean stew onto a plate, place one quail on each plate and scatter with the chopped chestnuts. Top with the juices from the roasted quail and/or truffle oil if you fancy it. Eat and be happy!

So it was approaching the big night of my first underground restaurant event and I still didn't have a main course. I had sent out the invites three weeks ago. 21 days. 504 hours. 30, 240 minutes ago. How was I not panicking? I should have been panicking! Something inside me was ignoring the warning signs with an assured calm. I guess by chipping away at the expectations of my guests by suggesting in the invitations that a successful night was one in which I didn't make anyone ill and one in which I provide three moderately edible courses. It became my self-fulfilling prophecy and up until the day before the event I was walking blindly into failure. And what did I do when I knew I was gravitating towards failure? I went off and made a cup of coffee and put my internal alarm on snooze. Somewhere between making and consuming the coffee an idea hit me. Lamb! Yes! Lamb! That's kind of Lebanese, isn't it? I couldn't get the word lamb out of my head. I was just sitting there, tapping my fingers muttering the word lamb under my breath. I guess I was making lamb. What kind of lamb and how wasn't apparent just yet.

















The haze of procrastination started to wear off about lunchtime when some internal resilience actually saw me make some steady progress. I typed the word lamb into google and realised I was being silly. I typed in lamb recipes and I managed to get to page three of the search results before deciding I had to actually figure out what kind of dish I wanted to make. I got up to have a breather (after two or so minutes of actual thought) and then inspiration struck. I don't know why or how but I suddenly had a vivid idea of what to make (I was even aware of the ingredients). Saffron and Orange Lamb Shanks...how did I even know how to make that? Maybe wasting your days away reading cookery books, blogs and magazines pays off! I wrote down the ingredients I thought I needed and went off to the butchers. Suddenly everything was okay. Melodrama was replaced by a real assured calm and I was happy with my main course selection. I decided to pair it with a mashed potato recipe inspired by Joel Robuchon's famous pommes purée. This is how I made it!

Ingredients
Saffron and Orange Lamb Shanks
6 lamb shanks
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 onions diced
4 carrots roughly chopped
4 cloves of garlic
1/2 teaspoon of cumin
1 teaspoon of saffron
3 bay leaves
4 1/2 cups of chicken stock
1 can of diced tomatoes
a splash of Worcestershire sauce
zest and juice of 1 orange
salt and pepper

Robuchon Mash
900g - 1kg of a floury variety of potato
300g butter
150ml milk
salt and pepper

Method
Lamb Shanks
Brown the lamb shanks in olive oil and set aside. Heat up your stock in another pan and add the saffron to it. Fry the onion until translucent and then add the girl. Add the canned tomatoes and cook for a minute. Add the cumin, bay leaves and Worcestershire sauce. Place the lamb shanks back into the pan and top with the stock. Heat till boiling and then cover the pot before turning it all the way down. Cook for 3 and a 1/2 hours. Turn off the heat and add the zest and juice of an orange. Check seasoning and adjust.

Mashed Potatoes
Bake the washed and unpeeled potatoes at 180C until soft (this takes quite a while...like over an hour). Scoop out the insides of the potato into a ricer. Set aside the riced potatoes (hah) and then work through a sieve (this is quite difficult). Add the potato to a pan with the butter and heat up until the butter has melted. Add the milk in slowly until it reaches a consistency of your liking. Add the seasoning and then serve with the lamb shanks and a little bit of the cooking juices.