cooking up a storm

My Dad likes to say that if there's an easy way of doing something and a difficult way of doing it I'll always find the hard way. This sprung to mind today as I spent all afternoon in the kitchen.

On the May Day bank holiday monday Dan and I are having a little house warming party/birthday party for Dan. It will be lovely to have our friends, new and old, round to visit. Its going to be a busy few days though: I'm off to the ballet on the friday evening, then my parents are coming to visit for saturday and sunday. Its going to be a lovely social weekend, but there will be no time to cook anything for our party guests that weekend.

I really didn't want to buy frozen pizzas or other crappy processed food that would be easy but not particularly nice. So, today I've been getting organised, and cooking up a storm with freezeable food.

First up, a trip to the farmers market and farm shop for ingredients.
Look how lovely the eggs I bought are:



I suppose its a little odd to feel pleased by pretty eggs, but I did enjoy a childhood-nostalgia lunch of dippy-egg.



Then I knuckled down to the catering.

First up; bread.
I was a bit stupid and forgot to to dust the baking paper with flour to stop the bread sticking. Consequently, the 1st batch will not be going to the party. Dan and I will have to eat it ourselves and pick off the paper as we go!

Then cheesecake.
Its somewhat horrifying the amount of cream and cheese in a cheesecake, but it always seems to go down well. Yummy. I have tried making cheesecake before but it didn't set. This time I had more success, so we have one Rhubarb and Ginger cheesecake, and one Mixed Berry cheesecase.



On to the quiches. A couple of roasted vegetable ones and one quiche-lorraine style onion, bacon and tomato quiche.

Ooof. The freezer's pretty full now.

I'll make a couple of tomato and mozzarella pizzas tomorrow, then that's enough for now.

It wasn't all hard work though. I had time for an icecream in the sunshine at the farmshop. Apple pie flavour no less.

In (late) celebration of Chinese New Year

It was Chinese New Year last weekend (14th February), but I had a busy weekend and got back late on sunday from playing the cello at a wedding, so my intended Chinese-style meal had to be postponed for a week. This turned out to be a good thing in the end, as leafing through this saturday's Guardian newspaper I came across a delicious sounding Thai/Chinese style salad which I decided to make for the main course.

I tried out Salt and Szechuan Pepper Prawns (I have made these before, so they can't count towards a Recipe of the Week!), which are always yummy. I love the flavour of szechuan pepper.

Also, steamed vegetable stuffed spring rolls. I used rice noodle wrappers for these, which were a disaster! Rubbish to work with; either too sticky or too easy to crack. The filling was delicious but the wrappers were completely inedible. Never again. I'll use wonton wrappers next time.

Then the piece-de-resistance, Pork and Mango Salad. I tweaked the recipe from the newspaper in the following ways:

I used Pork instead of Beef.
I didn't have any avocado so I left it out, but added a few cherry tomatos and a few slices of spring onion.
I had watercress in the fridge but no rocket, so it was a watercress salad for us.
Dan had the salad with oodles of noodles, I had it as it came. Both were good.

Delicious - thank you Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.



Find the salad recipe here

I also made crumpets this weekend; nice to have on a snowy day after a run across the hills.





They were quite time-consuming to cook though, and not so much better than shop-bought ones, so I think laziness will prevail in future and I'll buy them ready-made!

Free-styling

This week I went off-piste a little.

I did follow a recipe for one of the weekend's experiments - houmous without the tahini. Personally I prefered this to the tahini'd version as you could taste the chickpeas and spices much more clearly without the sesame. I'll definitely do it that way in future. It was another recipe from the Claudia Roden book I borrowed from the library - its proving a great success!

Then after that I came over all over confident, with mixed results:

We had fish for dinner on saturday. Sole to be precise. Now, I thought it would be a good idea to pimp my sole a little.

So, I decided to make a sort of pesto with a handful of parsley, a couple of mint leaves, a squeeze of lemon, a few blanched almonds and a crushed garlic clove. Pounded it all together (good for the stress-levels!), spread it on the sole, the rolled the whole thing up and steamed it.

I felt like a culinary genius.

"I can do this" I thought.

"Lets have sauce too."

"Not just any sauce...I'll freestyle a hollandaise type of sauce."

"How hard can it be...?"

Oh yuck.

Too much lemon.

Too much white wine vinegar.

Not enough butter.

So sharp it made me wince.


(The fish with almond pesto was good though, so at least we didn't starve that night.)

Fulfilling a promise

A year ago I promised Dan a meal of calamari and chips with prosecco.

A YEAR AGO.

I finally made it for him just after Christmas.

The chips were rubbish. They were meant to be thin and crunchy rosemary roast potatoes but didn't crisp up properly.
Moral of the story? Never try to cook potatoes in a hurry, and certainly never try to cook potatoes in a hurry after a cold run in which the sadists at running club have made you run up lots of hills while it snows.

HOWEVER, the squid was perfect.

I deep fried it after coating it in a mixture of cornflour, salt, pepper, and szechuan pepper. I'd never deep fried anything in my life before, but after draining the squid on kitchen paper it wasn't greasy at all. It was great with french beans and garlic mayonnaise. We had Cava rather than Prosecco, but I figured the principle's the same.

A very similar recipe to the one I used can be found here, but mine was actually from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Every Day book.

It was almost good enough to makeup for the rubbish potatoes. I'll substitute warm crusty bread next time.

A couple of classics and an unsuccessful experiment

In the spirit of tieing up loose ends before the end of the year, and also because my mum bought too many eggs over Christmas, I decided to try a couple of eggy classics over the Christmas break - homemade custard (without Birds custard powder) and homemade mayonnaise.

My custard recipe was great on flavour but didn't thicken as much as I would have liked. Not sure if that's how the recipe is, or whether I went wrong, but I thought I'd try it again in future with a different recipe. I bought a River Cottage cook book in the January sales so I'll try Hugh's recipe next time. It has a bit of cornflour in it so I imagine it would thicken more successfully. We'll see.

The mayonnaise was good. I'm not usually a fan of mayo. Its that old condiments thing - I just don't really see the point of drowning food in layers of cheap nasty processed sauce. But homemade mayonnaise was great.

I made a garlicy version, as we had it with squid so I thought that would go well. I put too much garlic in but otherwise it was a great success. At least it kept the vampires at bay for the evening! I would use a little more lemon juice or some white wine vinegar to give it a bit of bite if I was makig a 'straight' mayonnaise, but the garlic was more than enough flavour for this.

Mayonnaise

100ml extra virgin olive oil
1 egg yolk
a few squeezes lemon juice
1/2 clove garlic (crushed)
salt and pepper

Stir the egg yolk with a wooden spoon until it thickens. Add the garlic and stir.
Pour the olive oil in a drop at a time, keeping stirring all the time with the wooden spoon.
Take your time or the mixture will curdle. Add the olive oil VERY gradually, stirring all the time. Add the odd squeeze of lemon as you go.
Once the mixture starts to stiffen you can speed up the oil a little, but don't rush.
If it curdles (mine did, so I know this works!), take another egg yolk and put it in a clean bowl. Stir it until thickened then gradually add your curdled mayonnaise mixture, stirring all the time. This will fix it.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.

The unsuccessful experiment was pastry made with wholemeal flour and olive oil, instead of plain flour and butter. It came out with a bready texture and was rather hard. It also didn't keep or freeze as well as normal pastry and was much more difficult to roll out. I think I'll stick to the traditional pastry recipe in future.

Pickles, pears, and puddings

Well the weekend cookery didn't quite go to plan as I forgot to buy chocolate for the chocolate dipped fruits. They will have to be done later - maybe on Christmas eve.

However, I did manage to make a lovely crumbly vanilla fudge without 1. burning the whole of the bottom of the saucepan 2. burning me 3. setting off the smoke alarm 4. swearing. It was even edible!
I felt this to be a significant achievement.

I also experimented with a new pear recipe. I think pears are my favourite fruit.
Well, actually that's not true as I love strawberries more, but they're certainly my favourite autumn/winter fruit.
I've been exploring ways to preserve them for nibbling throughout the year. A few weeks ago I tried drying them in a cool oven, which was pretty good. They turned out chewy, a bit grainy, and very very pear-ish. Nice.

Over the last week or so the BBC have been running lots of Christmas food & drink programmes. In all honesty they're a bit irritating on the whole, but I did watch the Hairy Bikers christmas programme last week, where they made pickled pears. I'm not usually bothered about pickles but the combination of spices in their recipe sounded lovely so I gave it a go this weekend. I made half quantities, as 20 pickled pears seemed a little excessive for just 2 people. They'll be ready to eat in a week, so I'll keep you posted on whether they're edible. They smelt like vinegary mulled wine as they cooked, so I have high hopes.



On the otherhand, my jar has sprung a leak, so I hope that being 100% air tight isn't crucial to the recipe.
I do rather like the Hairy Bikers recipes - their baking programme was good last year and I like their sense of irreverance. Did you see the wedding cake they made? So fun.


But I digress; here's the link to the recipe.
I also fancy having a go at their pretzels recipe. We saw some proper German-style pretzels in Merano, in Northern Italy when we were there this autumn. They were massive and doughy, rather than the biscuity variety we get here. Could be interesting to try.

Also this weekend, my very first attempt at roast beef and yorkshire pudding. The perfect dinner according to Dan. Feeling smug at acheiving perfect yorkshires on the first attempt I decided to use the remaining batter the next day and do sausage and mash with yorshire puds. Sadly it seems that it was beginners luck. The pudding still rose but it was somewhat soggy in the middle. Ah well, you win some,you lose some....

Minding my P's and Q's

Parkin, Pesto, Quince.

Not all together!

Parkin, because it was bonfire night the week I attempted these, and Parkin is Dan's childhood-nostalgia bonfire night fix.


Except the recipe I tried was very old-fashioned and treacley. Dan remembers it as more ginger and golden-syrup and less treacle. I'll try the another recipe next time I feel inclined to try making Parkin and see if I can get closer to what he remembers. Still, what was left over after we attacked it on bonfire night went down well with my colleagues in the office on monday!

Pesto for no reason other than that we had a load of basil in the fridge which needed using. Yummy mixed with a little tomato sauce on gnocchi. Much nicer than the shop-bought jars. But the I suppose that shouldn't be surprising since anything fresh is usually better than something made in a factory and then left sitting in a jar for ages.

Now, the quinces.
This was because of my photography tutor John, who taught me on a darkroom course a couple of years ago. John has a love of quinces, jam in particular. I had never even heard of the fruit until I did that course, and this week I saw them for sale for the first time ever. They were in a metal bin at the farm shop - funny little fluffy things, like hard yellow pears. On impulse I bought a few. I had no idea what I would do with them or how you eat them.

Once at home I found a recipe for pear and quince compote in my Kitchen Bible (not me being facetious, it really is called the Kitchen Bible ), which took care of 2 of the fruits. I was a bit perturbed by my quinces not going a lovely ruby colour when stewed like the picture in the recipe book, but they tasted very yummy served slightly warm with a scoop of vanilla icecream, so I assume I just had a different variety of quince.
As I chopped, peeled and cored the quinces for the compote it became very obvious that they are not a fruit which you eat raw. The taste is so sharp it almost makes you wince (unintended rhyme!) and they're as hard as wood.
Ok that's an exaggeration, but you get my point.

I couldn't quite face chopping, peeling and coring the final quince. They were pretty awkward to work with because they were so hard. Baking seemed the way to go - 20 minutes or so in a medium oven (about 180C) softened the fruit up beautifully, making it easy to chop and mix with sugar for adding to a crumble at a later date.

I loved the flavour of quince. It tastes old-fashioned. Somewhere between an apple and a peach perhaps. I don't quite know how to describe it. Yes, its a pain-in-the-arse to prepare - certainly not a low-maintenance fruit. But I think they're worth it once in a while.

Thank you Mr Oliver...

...both for saving me from awful boredom on the long train journey from Glasgow to London, and for making Dan very happy.

Let me explain:
Dan's starting to get interested in the project. Not enough to get involved in the cooking you understand, but enough to put in a few requests. So far; bonfire toffee, treacle pudding, parkin, dauphinoise potatoes, and eggs benedict.

The week in question I had spent from thursday in Glasgow at a conference. I hadn't visited the city since I was child, and was pleasantly surprised by it, despite getting soaked every time I stepped outside. But I digress...
I was getting an early train back to London followed by a short break before my chiltern line back to deepest-darkest Oxfordshire. 7:55am on a rainy saturday morning didn't seem like a time to be breaking out the laptop and working on the train, so it had to be a magazine. Sadly, there wasn't much of a selection at the station. I had already read the ones I like for that month (I had been on the train quite a bit over the previous weeks!), and couldn't quite bring myself to part with my money for most of the others on display. So I was left with the Jamie Oliver magazine. Whilst this would not usually be my chosen reading material I figured that at the very least I could flick through and then donate it to my nephew who loves Jamie, thereby earning major favourite-auntie points.

One month later the magazine has taken up permanent residence in my kitchen, so no points for me. It is packed to the gills with great recipes, including eggs benedict! I bought some smoked ham, english muffins and white wine vinegar between trains the same day, and on sunday morning we had very decadent eggs benedict for breakfast. I've never had them before, and they're very rich so unlikely to be a regular treat, but tasty. Also, it turns out that hollandaise sauce really isn't difficult as long as you pay attention and don't rush.



So, thank you Jamie Oliver.

Incidentally, in case you should be under the mistaken impression that everything I've tried cooking has been a success, we had venison stew this week too. Seriously the most disgusting thing I have ever made.