SAUCE WITH RED WINE RECIPES

Steps:

• Melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Add the garlic, vegetables and herbs, and cook on a medium heat until they soften and begin to colour. Heat a drop of olive oil in a frying pan. Season the beef trimmings and fry until coloured and sealed all over. Add the meat to the vegetables.
• Pour 1-2 glasses of wine into the frying pan in which you have cooked the meat. Bring this to the boil, scraping and lifting all the meat residue from the bottom of the pan. Pour the liquid into the pan that contains the meat and vegetables. Let the pan’s contents bubble until the wine has reduced by three-quarters.
• Now add and reduce the rest of the wine, 1-2 glasses at a time. If you tip it all in at once, you wash the vegetables and meat of their roasted edge, so their flavour in the finished sauce is bland. Reduce by three-quarters, glass by glass until all the wine is used.
• Now add the beef jus, bring to a simmer and cook gently for 45 mins to 1 hr. Regularly skim away any impurities by weaving a small ladle in and out of the top of the sauce. Taste regularly and when you are happy with the flavour, strain the sauce through a fine sieve, squeezing out all the juices from the meat and vegetables.
• Ideally, also pass the sauce through a sieve lined with a piece of muslin, which will help remove fine impurities. Check for seasoning. You can make ahead up to this point, cool and refrigerate or freeze.
• Heat a grill or pan to hot, smear the steaks with oil and cook them, turning once, 4-5 mins for rare, 7-8 mins for medium, 8-10 mins for well done. Serve the steaks on a bed of wilted spinach with sticky shallots and pour the red wine sauce around. Mashed potatoes make a good accompaniment to this.

Steps:

• Preheat the oven to 200ºC/gas mark 6. Toss the potatoes in a roasting tin with 1 tbsp oil, 1 sprig of rosemary and the lemon zest. Roast for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the remaining rosemary and oil together with the cumin and garlic to make a marinade.

  Heat a frying pan over a high heat. Add the duck, skin side down. Reduce the heat and fry for 6-8 minutes until crisp. Turn and cook for 5 minutes. Brush with the marinade, then remove and transfer to the tray in the oven. Roast with the potatoes for 10 minutes.

  Meanwhile, pour the wine into the pan used to cook the duck and mix in the jelly. Simmer for 5 minutes. Cook the beans in a pan of boiling water for 3 minutes. Drain. 

  Slice the duck and serve drizzled with the red wine sauce and the veg on the side.