Braised Ox Cheek

Decided to take a run over to the Wholefoods Market at Giffnock last week and spent a happy hour, and £22! wandering the aisles.  I had thought it very expensive on my first few visits but, whilst I'm unlikely to ever pay £1.79 for a bunch of spring onions, I realised that there are plenty of great foody bargains to be had, in fact by paying just a fraction more you are getting a far superior quality and selection that will never be found at supermarkets. 

None more so than at the fish and butcher counters.  Fish is expensive, right?  We all know that. But lovely silvery glistening mackerel fillets, not too bad,  thank you.  Big fat hand made sausages, a little more expensive but three bangers between two people would be more than enough.  Ox cheek.  Ox. Cheek.  The butcher seemed genuinely pleased at my excitement, each one cost less than £3.50 and would easily serve two/three in a casserole. The cheeks were vacum packed so I bought two, one for the freezer. I never buy chicken wings even though I love them, as the only ones you find in supermarkets are from their value, this chicken had a miserable life, range.  But here I found free range chicken wings, still cheap (or cheep, sorry).  All in all I was impressed.

Braised Ox Cheek. (would serve three but we are greedy, so serves two)

Set the oven to Gas 3. The meat was trimmed of excess fat and quartered, making four little rumps.  These were then browned in a heavy casserole pot until well coloured.

I used the usual selection of casserole veggies, onion, leek, swede, carrots, around 5 cloves of garlic and sweated these off in the pot.  I returned the meat to the pot, seasoned well and added a generous amount of thyme and a half bottle of decent red wine.

I then added around 300 mls of beef stock, and around 4 tomatoes, quartered.  The casserole was then placed in the oven for approx 3.5 hours.  I checked it after a couple of hours just to check the lovely liquor was still covering the meat.  When done the meat was amazingly tender and the liquor reduced to make a lovely gravy.

We kinda didnt do it justice by sticking a few boiled potatoes on the side but the overall taste was fantastic, melt in the mouth, strong almost gamey tasting meat.  And what a bargain!

I also made a pretty decent stab at Hestons chocolate tart with popping candy inside;

Ooooft was that good!  Recipe on the Channel 4 food website so I wont repeat it here.
All in all it was a Sunday feast to remember!