Breaking Roast Beef Tradition

I, believe it or not, do not always fancy a heavy DSL (delicious Sunday lunch) of roast potatoes, buttered boiled veg with some roast beef. It's very tasty, but lacks a little brightness. As a result, for today's Sunday lunch, I broke from tradition, and did a fairly Italian-inspired roasted creation, with griddled courgette and aubergine and a steamed cabbage, parsley and pine nut salad (please add this to your repertoire!).

As offbeat as the rest of this meal was, I couldn't give up Yorkshire pudding; that fluffy, eggy blandness is just essential. But I do this slightly unorthodox too, you'll see.

I am not doing separate recipes, just as they would all be too sparse separately, and this is the order it is most efficient to do things.

1)Make the Yorkshire Pudding batter so you can let it stand. Crack 4 eggs into a bowl, and whisk in 300ml milk. I've been doing batter this order for ages, on pancake morning I don't want to be whisking eggs into just flour and somehow dissolving the clump of dough on the whisk into milk. It also seems to make everything lighter. Add 250g plain flour, a good scrunch of pepper and salt, and whisk that until smooth. Then loosen the batter with another 300ml milk, and cover with clingfilm and leave to stand for a while.

2)Mix a bunch of rosemary, chopped and two bunches of thyme leaves with a teaspoon of English mustard and coarse salt and pepper, and rub all over your beef joint, scored on the top. Roast at 220 degrees for about 20 minutes, then lower the heat to about 180 and roast for about another hour, but cut into it to see how pink it is, to your liking. Remember it will cook further as it rests.

3)Thinly slice an aubergine and a courgette, I like slicing courgette diagonally to increase the surface area of each slice, and marinate it in some garlic oil, a good squeeze of lemon, and about 2 tsp of dried oregano. As delicious as these two vegetables are, they are quite dim in flavour, so let them soak up this Mediterranean marinade for a long time.

4)Now's a good time to take the beef out and wrap it in foil to rest for a while. 

5)After it's been resting for about half an hour, activity will steeply increase, so be preoared. Bring a pot of water to the boil to steam about a quarter of a head of savoy cabbage, and get the griddle really hot. Set the oven to the highest temperature in can get to, and put some fat in a roasting tin. You can use the beef dripping, but a hard vegetable fat like trex, or coconut oil is better as it has a good flavour and a much higher smoke point, so won't burn or smoke out the kitchen, which is good because griddling yields plenty of smoke, too.

6)Once the griddle is really hot, cook the slices of aubergine and courgette, for about 2 minutes a side, until they go soft but not soggy. Transfer to a plate but don't let them get very cool.

7)Steam the cabbage for about 4 minutes, until tender but not mushy, and arrange on a plate, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, some torn parsley, and some toasted pine nuts. By toasted, I mean tossed in a dry pan until fragrant and golden.

8)Pour the Yorkshire pudding batter into the hot fat, and quickly shut the door and bake for about 15 minutes. If you've conquered it, it should puff up magnificently.

9)Boil the meat juices, plus any that collected in the foil, with a few knobs of butter and a good glug of marsala and some beef stock. I don't want a thick sauce gravy, so no flour here, just a kind of rich broth, so let this boil for a bit, before transferring into a jug and drizzling over your generous plate of everything.