This is adapted from my friend’s recipe, which itself was adapted from a Heston recipe, so apologies to Heston!

Ingredients:

• Shallots (approx 5 or 6 or 250g ish), finely chopped
• 100g butter
• 150ml wine (the recipe says white, but I think red, white or sherry would all work)
• 1tbsp dijon mustard
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp cider or white wine vinegar
• 500ml Beef stock (you can either use fresh stock or make it up from a cube or pot)
• 2 or 3 cloves garlic (not in the original recipe but I bloody love garlic in everything), crushed or finely chopped
• 20g parsley, finely chopped (I just used a handful)
• 20g chives, finely chopped
• Salt and pepper to taste

Steps:

1. Melt the butter on a low heat and gently sweat the shallots and garlic for 10 mins or so until golden brown (you need them starting to caramelise to get the sweetness)
2. Add the wine and boil until reduced by about 3/4 volume.
3. Stir in the mustard and mix well before adding the beef stock
4. Boil and reduce it further by about half
5. Reduce the heat, and add in the herbs, lemon juice and vinegar

(Note at this point mine was tasting very sharp as I had not got much sweetness from the onions so I added a tiny bit of sugar, and then used a hand blender to zhuzz up the onions into a smooth sauce. It made it a slightly odd greyish colour but brought back all the sweetness and oniony flavour.)

At this point you can check if it needs salt or pepper, but bear in mind stock can be very salty so taste it first! You can also use cornflour to thicken it, though I think whizzing up the onions with a hand blender makes it thicker anyway so you may not need to thicken with flour.

Then all you need to do is add in any meat juices from your roast chicken/beef/lamb etc and voila! It’s the best gravy I’ve ever made, and now I have a load of little tubs in my freezer so I can have it any time I want! Yum!