Hotpot

[Lancstree]

I do a lot of cooking on my woodburning stove hotplate now and I'm wanting to make a lancashire hotpot. Has anyone tried it? If so, what method and cooking implements did you use?

[pgkevet]

A lancashire hotpot is a meat dish covered in potato slices and baked.. not going to be easy to do on a hotplate unless you make some sort of oven to sit on top first. That'd have to be a metal box with a shelf so the hot air circulates all around instead of direct bottom heat otherwise you're not going to get that nice potato crust on the top of the spud slices..

A good stew is under rated, though. Any stew or casserole is always best slow cooked. That might mean putting a stand-off under the pot to get the temp down if the plate is really hot OR another old fashioned trick is to get things thoroughly cooking and then put the pot in an insulated box (a simple cardboard box with loose balls of newspaper all around and over the pot lid) and leave it to do it's magic.

 

There's a million and one recipes for stews - depends what you like. Personal favourite is good old beef based.. you know the score.. slice and pink up the onions in oil, toss the meat chunks in a bag of flour, seal them on the onion/oil then chuck in everything else, add some stock and water and seasoning and wait. Campbells game soup is a tasty stock.

 

If you want to be creative for a dinner party then you can do fancy things like cut some radish into water lily shapes (they stay firm in a stew) and make up frankfurter squid (half a frank then cut down longways 3/4 times not quite to the round end).. they splay out and look wriggly.. and shove a slug of booze in towards the end...chunks of crusty bread to mop in it too...

 

As students we could keep a stewpot going all term.. curry it the last fortnight then throw the pot away..impossible to clean by then :-)

Whoever was home first used to switch on the gas, add new stuff and start it simmering. If it got too thin we chucked in some stock or rice or cornflour. If we saw a butchers shop closing we popped in for the cheap leftovers.. and we lurked around the markets for the bruised veggies going free..just cut the bruised bits off - in went the rest plus chickens from the college farm and rabbits and duck from the physiology labs....

[Lorry thompson]

Just just made me hungry