Thursday 1 January 2015

Such Honour!

It is always with a certain degree of anticipation that I go to my blogger dashboard most mornings, and when I see certain of my fellow bloggers' names appear on the list of new posts, that anticipation grows. One such name is Yorkshire Pudding, because I nearly always find either great pictures of beautiful countryside on his blog, or an amusing account of something he saw or heard or experienced, or a well-written piece of prose allowing a glimpse into past times and lives.
Imagine my surprise when, upon opening this post, I was looking at myself, proudly holding the Laughing Horse award!

Thank you very much, Neil - as I said in my comment on your post, this came totally unexpected, and I feel much honoured!

Let me honour Your Puddingship by posting about last Sunday, when I invited my parents and my sister over and made Yorkshire Puddings for them.

Now, I know it is usually assumed that it takes a real Yorkshire man or woman to make real Yorkshire puds. But before you wonder why this Swabian Librarian thinks she can make a decent Yorkshire pud herself, consider this: The recipe I have (if you can call it that; actually, it's a few words scribbled on a yellow post-it) is from an 80-year-old lady from the Barnsley area, Yorkshire born and bred. She passed it on to her son, who had the courage to leave his home county (and country) to live with and eventually marry me, and who taught me how to make them.
Therefore, I think my Yorkshire puds are not that far off from what you'd expect to find anywhere between Scarborough and the Pennines. To really judge for yourself, I'm afraid you'll have no choice but travel to Ludwigsburg and have a Sunday meal at my place.

Here is (almost) everything I needed for the meal I had in mind:

I peeled and diced the spuds and carrots, added three tablespoons of olive oil and some salt and pepper and tossed them in the pan as you'd do with a salad. Three twigs of rosemary were enough. The pan went into the oven and took care of itself for the next 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, I prepared the ingredients for the salad I was going to serve for starters: goat cheese, tomatos, pine apple and spring onions. The mushrooms were not for the salad, but for the meat.

It was now time to make the Yorkshire Pudding batter: 2 eggs, one cup of flour, one cup of milk and a pinch of salt. That's it.

Next, the frying pan came out. Don't you love the smell of butter melting in a pan? I do!

This is meat from (farmed) deer. It is sold at Aldi's as "Hirschgulasch", and I make it relatively often during autumn and winter.

The mushrooms go in the pan as soon as the meat has been fried up well from all sides.

Then a bit of water is added (not too much, since the mushrooms will add liquid, too), and because I am equally lazy and creative in the kitchen, I did not make my own tomato sauce from scratch, but added several spoons of red pesto.

Remember that the oven is blasting away all the time. I now take out my battered old baking tin for muffins - sorry, but that is one thing I don't have: a proper Yorkshire puddings baking tin. But you'll see that this will do the job quite well. In each cup goes a bit of lard. No oil, please, or margarine or butter - it has to be lard. Then the tin is put in the oven.

Time to mix the salad...

...and set the table for four.

The herbs (two types of parsley) can now be chopped up. Half goes into the gulasch, half into the salad.

The baking tin has been in the oven long enough now for the lard to be smoking hot. Whisk the batter through one more time and then pour it into the cups - preferably without as much splashing as I did.

My guests have now arrived and brought a bottle of champagne dressed up in a Santa outfit.

After we've eaten the salad, the Yorkshire pudding and the veg have been in the oven long enough to look like this:

The combination of meat and sauce, spuds and carrots and Yorkshire puds didn't just look good on the plate - it tasted good, too, even if I say so myself.

Dessert was a lazy option again: Cinammom-flavoured vanilla icecream on a chocolate base with bits of gingerbread with almonds.

Everyone ate up what they had on their plates, and some even asked for second helpings, but of course I had plenty of leftovers, meaning I was on a YP-diet for three days :-)

24 comments:

  1. Errr... what's this about a "YP diet"?
    Your Yorkshire puddings certainly appear to pass muster and your secret recipe is almost identical to ours. Having consulted with The Yorkshire Ridings Society, I am happy to inform you that having married a Yorkshireman, you are allowed to make Yorkshire puddings without fear of legal action. Why don't they sell "Hirschgulasch",at our local Aldi I wonder?

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    1. Maybe in the UK people don't eat game? (Can it be called game when the animals were farmed instead of hunted?)
      Thank you for the kind permission you managed to obtain for me from The Yorkshire Ridings Society.
      The YP diet was my Yorkshire Pudding diet - I ate the same for three days in a row!

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  2. Your Yorkshire puddings look fabulous! It's the same recipe and instructions I use, and I got them from my English husband too. We've always baked ours in a muffin tin - easier to serve, as it doesn't have to be cut. Plus, you can count them out (two for everybody!!) so that we all get the same amount. Because we all feel the Yorkies are the best part of the dinner! xoxox

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    1. That's right, they come out of the tin so easily with this one. How nice to know that you make them exactly the same!

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  3. Your meal looks delicious! I wish I could find farmed deer over here, I would cook it often. I never have tried, but I want to, cook Yorkshire Pudding. My sister-in-law makes it every year, and hers is very good.
    Congrats on your award!
    Happy New Year to you,
    Dorothy

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    1. Thank you, Dorothy! They are so easy to make, I am sure you make much, much more complicated and elaborate dishes all the time.

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  4. Congratulations on the award and what should be an award winning dinner!

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    1. Thank you :-)
      It certainly won my personal award for Longest Stretching Dinner, as I was eating this for three days in a row!

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  5. Congratulations on your award, and your wonderful supper with such authentic Yorkshire Pudding!
    It's time for me to go to be and now I feel hungry! Nothing in the house would satisfy my, however. It would need to be your meal. It looks delectable! And your dessert sounds perfect after this rather heavy meal.

    (We had wonderful raclette last night at my daughter Em's and my German sil's home....)

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    1. We had Raclette on New Year's Eve, Kristi, it was wonderful, too!
      Sorry to have made you feel hungry at bedtime... :-)

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  6. Certainly looks like you knew what you were doing :) I never quite "understood" Yorkshire Pudding but then I haven't had any since I was in my early teens...

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    1. I did indeed know what I was doing, Monica :-) For someone who cooks so rarely, it actually amazes me that there aren't any more kitchen accidents happening to me.

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  7. I love Yorkshire pudding and yours looks delicious and perhaps this southern girl could give it a go.

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    1. You do that, and let me know how they turned out! It's really not difficult at all - if it was, I would certainly not be able to make them.

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  8. You are correct, there is no way I can judge this without coming to Ludwigsburg! Next time you make this, let me know!! And there is no need to buy deer meat at the store here, there are plenty of hunters who hunt deer. Very often, someone will offer to give you some, but I have never liked it myself! Don't know why, maybe the idea of the deer, they are so beautiful, but then, cows are too....oh well, let's not think about it too much, my sister is a vegetarian!
    Love that you got that award!
    I just read that there is word for intense anticipation in German....what is it, I think I wrote it down....yes, I just looked it up...vorfreude. (It made me think of how it was for me as a kid before Christmas, I loved the anticipation up to Christmas so very much!)

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    1. "Vorfreude ist die schönste Freude" [the joy of anticipation is the most beautiful joy] is a German expression used often. Must have been an interesting article or book you were reading which brought that up, Kay!
      Like you, I love the Vorfreude for events such as Christmas, birthdays, my annual trip to England etc. very much. I remember how I felt before my first City Run. Afterwards, it was a bit strange, something like a feeling of anti-climax set in.

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  9. Congrats. And this meal and dessert look amazing.

    I think I'm going to sign off and make dinner...though it will not be so beautiful as yours for sure.

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    1. Thank you, Christopher!
      I am sure your dinner was/is good nonetheless. And anybody can put ready-made ice cream desserts on plates and make them look nice... I didn't make these myself.

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  10. Oh, it looks lovely! you can come to cook for me next! :)

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    1. No problem, Jenny - I'll just have to arrange some time off, so that you could show me around your favourite places in London and beyond :-)

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  11. We had the good luck to get served this super meal from our daughter, and I can tell you, we enjoyed it very much. And also the raclette on New Year's Eve with Meike's sister.

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    1. Thank you, Mutti! Yes, the raclette was very nice, too. And the invisible fireworks :-D

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  12. That looks good and, by a stroke of coincidence, I'm doing venison for my dinner guests this evening. We get plenty of wild venison in season here on the Island but the steaks I'm doing this evening came from, again coincidentally, New Zealand. Deer products are readily available in our local supermarkets (we don't have Aldi or Lidl). PS I can't believe it's 11 days since I read your blog. Where does time go?

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    1. Glad to see you've been catching up with blog reading, Graham! Whenever I've been unable to read blogs for just a few days, getting back on track with everyone can be a bit of a challenge.
      I've made this type of Hirschgulasch a few times last year. It has an autumn-and-winter-feel to me.

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