Gravy - Artform and Austerity Weapon

At first blush there is nothing austere about a rolled rib of beef joint that cost £25. And very delicious it was too. But the gravy that accompanied it is another matter.

Our national inferiority complex about food has, happily, been weakened over the last two or three decades. We still tend to think though of e.g. French sauces as things of artistic beauty, and dismiss gravy as very basic and unworthy of consideration. Nonsense, a well made gravy is a joy. It lifts the potatoes that go with a roast, and moistens the meat if it needs that treatment. Given the basis is what you scrape off the roasting dish it gladdens the austerity heart too.

I cheat a bit, using a tsp of Bovril to add extra meatiness. Yesterday's version had a cm of white wine left from the previous day to loosen the thickened juices and de-glaze the dish, then some vegetable water, and included a finely chopped shallot for some texture. For me, though the meat was very good (farm shop, a proper mature brown not pink), the gravy and mash were the best bit of the meal.

Later in the week I'm going to do bangers and mash. Again a gravy will make the thing moist and interesting, and as it will be onion gravy an extra vegetable will be smuggled in - my onion gravy involves very slow melting of four or five finely chopped onions until they start to caramelise. It takes a good 25 minutes or more, but it's worth the wait. Thickened thereafter with plain flour, then made into a luscious liquid with potato water and that magical tsp of Bovril added to give extra flavour, it's not far off very thick French onion soup by the end.

Six fat 'taste the difference' sausages from Sainsbury's cost £2 the other day; spuds for the mash maybe 50p; onions 25p; with in all likelihood peas and steamed carrots for more veg the lot will come to at most £3.25 for three of us. Which makes £25 for the beef joint a little less painful (though it must be said the leftover meat will make hot beef sandwiches tonight - my own bread, some lettuce and cucumber piled on top, thin raw onion rings, and a knife full of mustard). And just one slice saved for another day will make a starter of lentil and beef salad with gherkin and raw onion chopped in, so the £25 does stretch to three meals).

Good Filla for Good Fellas

We are in culinary winter mode, the threat of a chance that there may possibly be the potential for snow ("Britain Doomed to Snowy Hell" - The Daily Wail) meaning we stoked up the multi-fuel stove, lit a rare fire in the living room (in the fireplace rather than just generally somewhere in the room) and have been upping the solidity of our evening meal. Tonight's was particularly robust, a simplified version of pasticcio.

The simplification only came in the layering - instead of the cookbook version that cut through resembles a sedimentary cliff face this was just penne and cheesy bechamel, tomato sauce and meatballs, penne and bechamel and a good layer of cheese on top.

This was another Monday night supper inspired by Sunday's roast, a way of using some of the remaining beef rib in the meatballs, and doing a bit more fridge clearance with three uncooked pork sausages that were disdained on Sunday morning, and about a third of a pack of 'recipe' bacon (another third became the stuffing served at the same Sunday afternoon meal). Hugh F-W was the source of the idea. In matters of meat I tend to refer to his books, which mix sound sense, culinary knowledge, and environmental awareness. It was he too who called pasticcio Mafia food.

How many Monday meals are dictated by the weekend's feasts? The rib of beef was not as extravagant as it sounds, reduced at Waitrose, and I have a feeling the girl behind the butcher's counter made an error, as a hefty 1.7kg two-rib joint only (only) cost £13. Given it did the Sunday roast, today's meatballs, and the rest will make a salad (with the bones destined to become the heart of a stock) or maybe a spicy Chinese soup tomorrow, that is not bad value.

Another spur to making the pasticcio was our new food processor. Toys need playing with. I'm still in mourning for the old one, about to be tipped. It was a present on our engagement, so not far off 30 years old. Fittingly, rather poignantly, it merely seemed to die of old age: no bangs or rattles, no distasteful smell of burning, one minute it was working, the next gone. It would have wanted to go that way. The new one has variable speeds and more attachments than James Bond's cigarette lighter, but I am willing to bet it won't last five years, let alone 30.