Osso bucco alla Milanese with risotto allo zafferano

Under normal circumstances being left home alone means one of four things:

• a week of wild culinary experimentation 
• a week of eating all those meals I love but Ana hates
• a week of going out and eating toast
• a combination of all three, but tending to point three with a lot of leftover ingredients from point one cluttering up the fridge

This week frugality is the name of the game as we're off to Norge on Friday so all money must be carefully husbanded into Krone rather than a crate of Corona and a variety of odd spices.

However I know for a fact there is a lonely osso bucco in the freezer, along with a cheeky tuna steak. The trick is working out which to eat when.

On the basis it takes over two hours to cook Jamie's osso bucco wins the Sunday night dinner race - although having spent almost three hours building Lego on my own, it very nearly turns out to be early Monday morning breakfast.

This is one of those recipes we tried during the blog hiatus, so not strictly experimental, but it also wasn't amazingly successful, lacking a wee bit of punch to the sauce and the meat not quite being as tender as I'd hoped.

This time I get it bang on, and not just because I was absolutely famished by the time it was ready:

I think the trick was to double up the amount of nutmeg and rosemary, I used a better tomato paste and a bit more stock. Worst case scenario the stew is too runny and you've got to boil it off, best case - it's unctuous and bursting with flavour. It was the latter in this case.

sources

osso bucco alla Milanese with risotto allo zafferano - Jamie Oliver, Jamie's Comfort Food, p244