We've just had a fairly indifferent dinner - venison sausages, mashed potato, and gravy (plus peas and sweetcorn for me). The sausages were nice, the mash was okay but a bit bland (could have done with boiling the potatoes for another minute or two, and perhaps adding some mustard to give it a kick - but we didn't have any), and the peas and sweetcorn were as you would expect.
The method for the gravy came from the Hairy Bikers "Perfect Pies" book, which advocated slicing and frying an onion, adding some wine and some flour, some stock, boiling it down and straining. Nothing much to it, really.
I think that what went wrong was two-fold: too much flour, and boiling down a little too long. The outcome, therefore, was a really thick gravy that tasted fine but looked fairly unappealing - not really what I was aiming for.
I actually have loads of different methods for gravy scattered among my many books, most of which go unnoticed (since I don't generally care for gravy, we only ever have it fairly seldom, and when we do I tend to just bust out the granules as a lazy solution). But it's something that it's good to have in the back pocket, if only for special occasions. So I'll be making gravy again... just not necessarily this one. Though I should perhaps note, if it wasn't obvious, that the weaknesses of this meal were more down to my preparation of the components rather than anything in the books.
