Winter Recipes

In this weather one's mind turns to good sustaining food so here I present a couple of favourite recipes for this kind of weather. One is a proper recipe, the other is an out and out cheat...

The first recipe is derived from a baked mushroom recipe that I first saw on 'The Victorian Kitchen' cooked by Ruth Mott. Her recipe was simply Portobello mushrooms baked with butter salt and pepper for about 20 or 30 minutes depending on the size of the mushrooms.

Delicious though the recipe was, I thought of a few things that I could add to it.

Robert's Portobello Mushrooms.
Ingredients:

• 4 or 5 large Portobello Mushrooms.
• A cup of pearl barley.
• 2 rashers of back bacon per mushroom.
• A large nob of butter per mushroom plus one.
• Salt & Pepper.

First cook the pearl barley in boiling water for about 45 minutes to an hour (untill cooked and lightly fluffy). Drain and keep the water if you want to make barley water. Pearl Barley once cooked can be kept in the fridge for a few days or even frozen for a few weeks.

Place a baking tray in an oven at 155 - 175 degrees centigrade to pre-heat.

Remove the stalks from the mushrooms trim them and add to a stock pot if you have one available.

Place the mushrooms with their bottoms up so that they then can be filled with the cooked pearl barley. Place a nob of butter on top of the pearl barley filling the mushrooms and season to taste. Be light with the salt as the bacon will add a lot of flavour.

Allowing two rashers of bacon per mushroom, halve the rashers so that you end up with 4 pieces per mushroom. Lay the first two pieces next to each on top of the mushroom. Then at ninety degrees to the first two pieces lay the next two pieces next to each other. You should end up with the pearl barley mostly covered by the bacon. Of course if you have massive mushrooms you may need to use whole rashers to do the covering.

Take the baking tray out and place the extra nob of butter in the bottom, allowing it to melt and cover the base. Place the filled and topped mushrooms carefully in the baking tray and return it to the oven.

Allow to bake for about 40-45 minutes.

Serve and eat...

I like to put the mushrooms in the oven before I go out for a brisk walk outside so I have a hot snack when I get back.

Cheat's Luxury Scotch Broth
This recipe depends entirely on the availability of certain products in the supermarket. Baxter's Scotch Broth is excellent, but is identifiably not a 'home made' Scotch Broth. Waitrose and a few other supermarkets have been selling a range of foods called 'Look What We've Found'. Basically stews, and casseroles in pouches that just need re-heating; the quality is excellent. One of the recipes that they do is 'Herdwick Mutton Stew'. It is delicious, but I find it a little heavy sometimes.

What I do when I'm feeling extremely lazy and want to have a delicious Scotch Broth or to impress someone is mix a pouch of the mutton stew with a can of the Baxter's soup and heat.

You end up what tastes like a brilliant home made Scotch Broth that will serve 2-3 people.