Meat Monday

An autumn Saturday last year, inspired by the amazing meatloaf that Fran had just cooked and the lament that some of us were not as carnivorous as we wanted, a group of us made a solemn promise that from that day forward Mondays would be Meat Mondays!

Each Monday one of us would take it in turns to cook a meal around which the main focus would be meat.

Since that day Monday has seen steaks, pot roasts, pork belly, pheasant, shepherds pie, stews, bolognese, casseroles and numerous other meaty wonders.

The plan is that every Tuesday from now on will feature a post about the previous days Meat Monday.

Today, though, I am going to write a little about probably the highlight of these meals:

Lewis received from his girlfriend Mathilde for Christmas this cookbook. It is written by the owner, Fergus Henderson, of the famous London restaurant St. John.
There are many amazing dishes in that book and hopefully we will have a chance to write about some of them in later posts. I would love to eat at St. John and you can be sure that if I do a review will follow!

This particular Monday, however, Lewis's friend Ben, an excellent cook who has just started his first restaurant job, was going to make us something particularly special from it's pages.

As a starter we ate fried lambs brains, the main course was home-made salt beef, I don't think we had any room left for pudding!
The brains were delicious, very crunchy on the outside the inside was creamy, rich and subtly flavoured.
Here they are after being poached in stock and still quite clearly brains!

After this they were split in to lobes, dipped in egg, breadcrumbs and deep fried. We ate them served with a bowl of green sauce or salsa verde again using a recipe from Nose to Tail Eating.

If you are not picky about food you should definitely try brains, you'll be glad you did!
We ate the salt beef with green vegetables and mashed potato and lots of strong mustard, delicious.

I don't have any photos of the meal on the plate, hopefully future Meat Monday posts will have some of the food more attractively presented.