Goose eggs

Sometimes village life is surreal.

Last weekend in a neighbourly fashion I took a few slices of ginger cake over to our neighbour. In return I got to meet the 1 week old puppies his terrier has just had, and I also came home with these:

That's a normal sized pudding bowl they're in - ie these eggs were HUGE! Apparently there's a farmer nearby whose geese lay for a couple of months a year.

Well, it had to be eggs for breakfast. Bob (the neighbour) suggested soft boiling (8 minutes). That actually resulted in a slightly harder-set yolk than would be my preference, but they were tasty and very filling!

Daring Cooks November Challenge

First things first - an apology and excuses for lack of posting recently. Two reasons - I just ran a half marathon, so the last few weeks of training didn't leave much energy for cooking anything fancy, and also I've been sewing a lot. Nothing's finished and worth a post yet, but expect lots of sewing posts coming up.

Anyway, onto the Daring Cooks Challenge. This month's challenge was an intriguing one: cooking with tea.

I chose to make Chinese Tea Eggs - a recipe I have often flicked past in my Asian recipe book but never made. They turn out quite pretty with their marbeled whites.



The method was simple but it was quite a long process (although most of the time it doesn't really need any attention). The taste was interesting and less subtle than I had expected, but as you can see from the snap above one egg did split and that was the one I ate - so it may have been a little stronger flavoured than a perfect one would have been. Lightly flavoured with soy, tea, and star anise this was a novelty, and it was pretty good with the crab cakes and peas I paired it with. I'm not sure I'll be repeating this recipe to be honest - its an awfully long process for a hard boiled egg!

Here's the method if you fancy having a try:

Chinese Tea Eggs

2 or more eggs
30ml dark soy sauce
1/2 star anise
2 tea bags
1/2 teaspoon salt

Place the eggs in cold water, bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain, rinse in cold water and leave in cold water until cold. Roll the eggs so that the shells crack but don't break.
Add the soy, salt, tea bags, and star anise to the water. Replace the eggs and bring to the boil again, cover the pan and turn the heat down. Simmer for 1 1/2 - 2 hours then remove from the heat and allow to cool in the cooking liquid.

Shell immediately before eating, which its best to do within 24 hours.


Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.

Omelette

A brief word on eggs. They're brilliant. Any way you cook them.



So here's a recipe for a tortilla-esque omelette. Its a Russian/Eastern European recipe called Drachena. Its dead-easy, quick and healthy. It takes about the same time to make as it takes to boil up some new potatoes. Serve the omelette with the afore-mentioned potatoes, green salad or veg. I fried up some chorizo for Dan and scattered it over the top which he liked.

Drachena (slightly adapted, as ever)
Serves 3-4 as a light meal

2 tspns olive oil
6 spring onions - white parts sliced
1 garlic clove
100g tomatoes - diced
50g rye flour
4 tablespoons water
150g yoghurt
4 eggs
2 teaspoons of pesto
1 tablespoon fresh parsley
10g butter

Fry the spring onions in olive oil over a moderate heat for about 3 minutes, then add the garlic and fry for a further minute. Add the tomatoes and fry for a couple more minutes. Remove from the heat.
Mix the rye flour to a paste with the water. Add the yoghurt and pesto (I used my wild garlic pesto) and mix it thoroughly together. Break the eggs into another bowl, beat them, then add them to the flour and yoghurt mixture. Mix well, season, and add the parsley.
Heat the grill to a medium heat.
Put the tomatoes and spring onions back on a medium heat, add the butter. When the butter has melted add the egg mixture. Leave it on the heat until the bottom starts to set, then place it under the grill until it starts to colour on the top and is set. It should puff up slightly.
Cut into 3 or 4 wedges and serve warm or cold.

NOTE: If you have more time you could put the mixture into a lightly greased oven-proof dish and bake the omelette for about 45 minutes at 180C instead of fryinging and grilling it.

Pancake Day!

I love pancake day: Pancakes for every meal should be the rule of the day.

Handily, I found a pancake recipe that used egg whites, so I could use up the remaining whites from my icecream making at the weekend. I feel a bit bad actually, because I was terribly sniffy about Sophie Dahl's cookery/life style programme when it was on the BBC, but it was an adaptation of her Buckwheat blini recipe that I ended up using this morning. It was pretty good too. I still don't think she was particularly skilled or inventive, but the girl can come up with a decent breakfast pancake.

So, this morning's menu was Buckwheat blinis (basically a fluffy American-style Buckwheat pancake) with smoked salmon and scrambled egg. A very decadent start to the day.

Buckwheat Blinis (for 2-3 people)

85g buckwheat flour
1 tspn baking powder
150ml milk
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
salt and pepper
Chopped chives
2 egg whites - beaten until they hold soft peaks

Mix together the flour, baking powder, milk, mustard powder, chives. Beat well and season with salt and pepper.
In a separate bowl whisk the egg whites, then gently fold them into the flour batter using a metal spoon.
Heat a non-stick frying pan over a moderate heat, add a little vegetable oil to the pan. Ladle in a scoop of pancake batter and allow to cook for a couple of minutes until bubbles appear on the upper side and the underneath is a toasted brown colour. Flip the pancake and cook for a couple of minutes on the other side. Keep warm while you cook the rest of the batter.

Sophie Dahl also added cheese to her pancake batter, but I thought that was a bit heavy and greasy for breakfast. It might be good at lunchtime. If you omitted the mustard powder you could add fruit to these and serve them just like American pancakes.

Daring Cooks December Challenge

This month's challenge: Jenn and Jill have challenged The Daring Cooks to learn to perfect the technique of poaching an egg. They chose Eggs Benedict recipe from Alton Brown, Oeufs en Meurette from Cooking with Wine by Anne Willan, and Homemade Sundried Tomato & Pine Nut Seitan Sausages (poached) courtesy of Trudy of Veggie num num.

So, poached eggs....I didn't feel inspired, I confess. I do poach eggs rather a lot anyway, so it wasn't a challenge which pushed me to make something I wouldn't otherwise have thought of. On the otherhand, Dan is always a happy man when eggs benedict are on the breakfast menu, so he was in heaven!

So, ta dah! Eggs Benedict feature again.



I won't bother to describe the method again, but I did realise that I had been overly cautious with the butter the last couple of times I made hollandaise sauce, and that was probably the reason for it curdling. It worked better this time.





So that I'm not totally cheating (and that would not do!) I am planning to make chorizo and potato hash with poached eggs later this week - that will at least be a new recipe including poached eggs.

UPDATE: I have been poaching away, and eating lots of eggs. I think eggs might just be my favourite fast food. I tried out the Chorizo and Potato Hash recipe, and it proved to be a massive hit with Dan. I liked it too, so thumbs up all round for that one. Find the recipe on the BBC Good Food site here.

Daring Cooks November Challenge

So... here we go with another Daring Cooks Challenge.
Dave and Linda from Monkeyshines in the Kitchen chose Soufflés as our November 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge! Dave and Linda provided two of their own delicious recipes plus a sinfully decadent chocolate soufflé recipe adapted from Gordon Ramsay’s recipe found at the BBC Good Food website.

However, I'm not really a chocolate puddings person, and the challenge did say that any sweet souffle was OK as long as it was a true souffle and you hadn't made it before. So instead I made rasberry souffles.

I followed this method (enough for 2 people):

Take 130g rasberries and heat over a gentle heat. Once they start to release their juices add a splash of water and 10g caster sugar. Cook, stirring occasionally for about 10 or 15 minutes until the sugar is dissolved and the rasberries have disintegrated. Set the pan to one side to cool.

Once the rasberries have cooled slightly push them through a sieve, discarding the seeds and pips. Allow the rasberry puree to cool.

Grease 2 ramekins with a little butter and then place about a tablespoonful of rasberry puree in the bottom of each.



When you're nearly ready for pudding preheat the oven to 200C.

Whisk one egg white until it holds soft peaks:



Then add 40g of caster sugar and whisk again until the mixture is glossy.

Next gently fold in the remaining rasberry puree using a metal spoon:



Spoon the egg white mix into the ramekins. Some people like to smooth the tops flat, but personally I like them a bit imperfect and blobby on the top:



Put them on a hot baking tray in the centre of the oven to cook for 10 minutes. Serve straight away.

Mine got scorched a bit on the top, but that didn't seem to adversely affect the taste.



Yum.



Souffles are a marvellous Recipe-of-the-Week discovery. They are pretty easy to make, quick to cook, delicious, and (depending on the kind you make) surprisingly low-fat.

Argentina

My Dad tells an interesting story about being on a ship that docked in Buenos Aires. They were carrying coal, but the next cargo was to be grain. After unloading the coal in Buenos Aires they had about 48 hours to the next port in which to completely clean the hold of any trace of coal dust.
However, red wine was super cheap in Argentina, and the sailors got so drunk on it that they gave themselves alcohol poisoning and were completely incapacitated. Dad and the other officer cadets worked round the clock to clean the ship, staying up working for the full 48 hours straight. He was 17 at the time and had only been in the navy for a year. He swears that it was the hard physical work like that experience, as well as the poor food once you'd been at sea for more than a week, which meant that he stopped growing almost as soon as he joined the merchant navy.

But anyway, I digress. This week I made an Argentinian dish - Empanadas. Hence the musing on my Dad's tales of his travels. They're the South American version of Cornish Pasties! The filling was a combination of chicken, onion, leek, paprika, cumin, stock, pear, and peach. My fear was that the pear and peach chunks would make these wierdly sweet for a dinner dish, but the stock and spices balanced out the sweetness of the fruit remarkably well. I cheated and bought ready-rolled puff pastry for the outside; the ultimate in convenience! I baked the empanadas in the oven and served them with green vegetables and a few new potatoes, but if you made smaller portions they would work well with a salad for lunch.

My other recipe this week was to take advantage of the last of the wild blackberries which I had picked at the weekend; Blackberry and apple souffle.
I actually made blackberry, apple and pear souffle as I already had some stewed apple and pear in the freezer so it seemed sensible to use that rather than starting from scratch!

Here's the recipe (enough for 2 souffles):
Blackberry and Apple Souffle


(Sorry for the horrible picture - souffles sink fast once they're out of the oven so you have to 'snap' and serve!)

120g blackberries
1/2 apple
squeeze of lemon juice
10g sugar

1 egg white
30g caster sugar

butter for greasing the souffle dishes

Grease the souffle dishes with a small amount of butter.
Preheat the oven to 200C and place a baking tray in the oven to warm.
Peel, core and dice the apple. Place in a saucepan with a squeeze of lemon, 10g sugar, a splash of water and the blackberries. Heat gently until the apples break down to a pulp, then take off the heat and allow to cool a little. Press the fruit mixture through a sieve to make a fine puree.
Put a tablespoon of fruit puree in the bottom of each souffle dish and put the rest to one side.
Whisk the egg white until stiff, then add the sugar and whisk again until it is a glossy meringue-like mix. Gently fold in the remaining fruit puree with a metal spoon, then spoon it into the souffle dishes.
Put the souffle dishes onto the preheated baking tray and bake for 10-15 minutes until golden brown on top.
I suggest serving this with vanilla icecream.

For a man who claims not to have sweet tooth Dan does seem to have a definite enthusiasm for fruit puddings. This one was declared to be a keeper. He almost licked the plate!

Moroccan Pancakes, completely ignoring the written recipe!

We had a vegetarian dinner tonight and Dan didn't even complain. I'm getting there - I'll win him round eventually!

It was a Moroccan recipe of stuffed pancakes, but given that I amended every constituent of the recipe I'm not sure if I should be counting it. Still, it was rather tasty, and I think the filling could be used for other dinners too, maybe mixed with rice for a pilaf style dish.

The filling was 1/2 onion chopped and fried gently until soft, then I added 150g spinach and let it wilt. I then chopped that all up finely and mixed it with some mashed up chickpeas (a 200g can should do it), a good handful of coriander leaves, 1 grated courgette and 1 beaten egg. Season to taste and add a shake of ground cumin and ground coriander.
I used 4 gallettes (which I have posted about before) and spooned the mixture in, wrapped them up and put them in a baking dish. I spooned 100g sheeps milk yoghurt over the top and baked them for about 15 mins at 180C.

(The original recipe used a bechemal sauce rather than yoghurt, no spices in the mix, and normal pancakes instead of gallettes.)

Eggs eggs eggs

Guess what I've been cooking this week?.....

Yep. Eggs indeed.

Having acheived the roaring success that was Eggs Benedict (with a little help from Mr Oliver) it this week seemed like it was time to go beyond the omelette/fried/scrambled egg options once more.

So after a trawl through the recipe shelf two interesting options presented themselves. Although both billed themselves as breakfast dishes I thought they would do very well for week-night dinners.

And so, we have had Rick Stein's pithily titled Mildly spiced potato curry with cumin, black mustard seeds and coriander, topped with a poached egg, which was what it said really. A pretty good, quick, mild curry. I added a couple of handfuls of spinach (got to get in those 5-a-day somehow!) and I think it would be better with chopped boiled egg rather than poached.
And also Silvana Franco's Saucy Eggs and tomatoes.

Both were pretty good options for Veggie dinners, but I did prefer the Tomato Eggs.

And see - it even looked like the picture in the book!


Here's the method for the tomato eggs (for 1 as a dinner)

Take 1/2 can tomatoes and put in a heavy saucepan or deep frying pan
Add 1 clove of garlic (finely chopped)
Also add about 100ml boiling water, salt and papper, and a pinch of cayenne pepper.
Heat through stirring frequently until the tomatoes start to break down a bit.
Then add about 3/4 of a red bell pepper, cut into strips.
Allow to heat through on a gentle heat for about 15 mins, or until the peppers start to soften (the recipe directs you to grill the peppers then peel off the skin - I couldn't be bothered).
Make to hollows in the sauce mixture and break in the eggs. Leave on the medium heat until the eggs are cooked. I had the oven on anyway, so just finished off the eggs for 5 mins at 180C which sped things up a little.
Serve with bread or toast.

PSB

Purple Sprouting Broccoli.

It appeared in our veg box this week. I am finding my veg box educational!

This year I have had jerusalem artichokes, celeriac, purple kale, and now PSB only because they appeared in the box. I don't think I would have picked any of them up otherwise. Also, red cabbage with apple and sultanas has become a favourite, and I only tried making it because of a glut of red cabbage when it started appearing every week.

Successes? I find purple kale and purple sprouting very useful and yummy.

I'm less keen on celeriac and jerusalem artichokes. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that I am heartily sick of them.

To celebrate the arrival of PSB, and my lovely egg selection from the farm shop, and the spring sunshine, we had a salad dinner on monday night; a tasty collection of semi-hard-boiled egg (just the yolk a little bit runny in the centre), chorizo, new potatoes, and purple sprouting.

The suggestion came from lovely Hugh's River Cottage Every Day cook book, and was a tasty, lively-flavoured little number, with just enough spice from the chorizo to keep it interesting.

The recipe is on the River Cottage website here. Enjoy!

Next season I am looking forward to? Asparagus!

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.

Torta (sorta!)

I had (whisper it) a vegetarian over for lunch.

Dan doesn't understand the concept of vegetarianism. So I had to try and create a lunch where he wouldn't notice the lack of meat or fish.

He does have a weakness for courgettes, so when I came across a Torta Verde recipe I thought that might do the trick. This Torta Verde recipe was basically a rice, courgette and parsley pie, so I adapted it to make a courgette-y quiche.

Here's my adaption of the recipe:

Anwen's Courgette and Parsley Quiche

100g white flour
100g wholemeal flour
3 tablespoons olive oil
warm water (about 60-80ml)

450g courgettes
2 garlic cloves
1/2 onion
2 eggs
30g gruyere
Large handful of parsley

salt and pepper

Pastry:
Mix the two different kinds of flours together, add a pinch of salt. Make a well in the centre add the olive oil. Stir to mix. Slowly add the warm water, mixing with your hands to make a soft, but not sticky dough.
Wrap in clingfilm and put in the fridge to rest for 20 minutes.
Put the oven on to heat to 180C.
Make the filling: Chop up the courgette, garlic, onion. Put everything into a food processor, season, whizz. Add a handful of parsley. Whizz again.
Roll out the pastry , lightly oil quiche dish and line with pastry.
Blind bake for 15 minutes (10 with baking beans and then remove them for another 5 minutes).
Beat two eggs, add to the courgette mixture and mix. Grate the cheese and fold in.
Fill the pastry case with the courgette and egg mixture. Return to the oven for about 25-30 minutes, or until the courgette mixture is slightly puffed and set.
Remove from oven and allow to cool.



Interestingly, last time I made pastry using olive oil instead of butter I didn't think it was a good method, but it went well in this context.

We also had tomato soup, sourdough toast, olives, and a selection of yummy cheeses from the farmers market. Then a good old hearty country walk in the spring sunshine, with a picnic of scones and jam halfway.

What a lovely, chilled out sunday.

Dan didn't moan about the lack of animal protein.

Not once.

Which means that I won this one.

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.

Souffles

I thought souffles were meant to be tricky beasts, but this recipe was super-simple. Naff photo - sorry about that! Once again, I was hungry, so it was just a quick snap before I gobbled my dinner!



I love the fact that it seems so impressive, but was actually easy to make. I had extra high levels of smugness for this dinner as they were goats cheese souffles made using my very own home-made goats cheese. Oh my goodness, even I hate me when I read that sentence back!

We had them with smoked haddock and leeks, but that could be changed depending on the season - I think they would be lovely with tomatoes in the spring, or with prawns, white fish and peas for a lighter fish pie.

But seriously, SO EASY!

Goats' Cheese Souffles
Enough for 6 small souffles or 4 larger ones

150g soft goats cheese
1 teaspoon cornflour
3 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
Salt and black pepper
Freshly grated parmesan (optional)

Butter 6 oven proof ramekins. Set oven to preheat to 200C.
Mix the goats cheese and cornflour together thoroughly with a wooden spoon (don't know why it has to be wooden, but figured I should obey the commands!).
Separate 2 of the eggs and mix the yolks into the cheese mixture until it is smooth and well amalgamted. Put the whites into a large bowl and set aside for now. Add the oregano to the cheese mixture, as well as the salt and pepper and stir in.
Separate the 3rd egg and put the white in the bowl with the other 2 egg whites. (You won't be usig this yolk, so you could just use it in some other recipe or have an extra egg yolk in your scrambled eggs the next day.) Add 1/2 teaspoon salt to the egg whites and then whisk them with an electric whisk until they form soft peaks. Fold them carefully into the cheese mixture with a metal spoon. Don't be too heavy handed or over mix or you will knock all the air out of the egg and the souffles won't rise properly.
Spoon the mixture into ramekins, sprinkle the tops with parmesan chees if you want (I didn't for mine but did for Dan's, both were tasty). Place the ramekins on a baking tray and bake for 10-12 minutes until well-risen and slightly browned.
Serve immediately. They start to sink quite quickly once they come out of the oven, so you need to dish them up and get them on the table reasonably fast for the full impact of perfectly risen souffles.

PS I'm realising that the recipes that I've been most excited by as I've progressed through the weeks have definitely been the ones which I think are going to cause problems and then are easy. They must appeal to my lazy side - maximum impact with minimum effort.

Cuban cooking

I've been going on and on about wanting to go to Cuba for ages now, so this year Diane bought me a fantastic Cuban recipe book for my birthday. It is packed with lovely photos of the country and the people who live there, as well as some exciting sounding recipes.

I've had the book sitting on my shelf since August, and although I'd looked longingly at the pictures I hadn't actually cooked a single one of the dishes until this week. The recipes seem pretty authentic, which I think is fantastic as it gives a wonderfully evocative sense of how people might actually cook in the country, but it does make some of them quite tricky to do in the UK as we obviously don't have all the same ingredients readily available.

This week I was determined to use the book for its intended purpose, and flicking past whole roast piglet (a little impractical I felt, although maybe I'm being unambitious?!) I decided upon pork meatballs stiffed with quail eggs in tomato sauce.

Have you ever had a quail egg? I hadn't, but I found them in the shops fairly easily, and I was charmed by their prettiness - a lovely blue tinge to their shells and speckled all over with brown freckles.


The recipe called for them to be hardboiled and peeled. They were fiddly little buggers to peel! I got there in the end though, and they were certainly a lovely added touch to the meatballs. I did adapt the recipe slightly from the one in my book. A year or so ago I made this recipe for lemony meatballs which suggested just cooking the meatballs in tomato sauce without pre-frying them. It tasted good and cut out an extra step in the cooking (I'm all for simplifying) so I always do that with meatballs now. If you want to fry them though, go ahead!
I served this with rice and some spinach. It might work with pasta, or just a chunk of nice fresh bread. Please don't be daunted by the fact that this recipe looks long - its actually easy!

Here's the recipe (including my changes); enough for 2 people:

9 quail eggs (hardboiled and peeled)

For the meatballs:
1 garlic clove (crushed)
1/2 onion (sliced)
200-225g pork mince
1/2 beaten free range egg
1 slice of white bread (crusts cut off)
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
pinch ground cloves
about 1 teaspoon dried oregano (or a tablespoon of fresh if you have it)
salt and black pepper to taste

For the tomato sauce:
400g tin of plum tomatoes
100g passata
1/2 onion (sliced)
1 garlic clove (finely sliced)
salt + pepper to taste, plus a teaspoon dried oregano

Put all the ingredients for the tomato sauce in a pan together and cook over a low heat while you make the meatballs. The sauce can happily cook away for anything up to an hour (not that it will take that long to make the meatballs!)as long as you give it the occasional stir, and perhaps add a little water if its getting a bit too thick.

Turn oven on to heat up to 190C.

Put all the meatball ingredients for the meatballs into a food processor and blitz them to combine. Then take a small handful at a time (about the size of a golf ball), flatten it in the palm of your hand, place a quail egg in the middle and wrap the meat mixture around it. Repeat until you have 9 meatballs and have used all the mixture.
Place the meatballs in an oven proof dish and spoon over the tomato sauce which you have had cooking away. Its best to use a dish of the size where the meatballs fit reasonably snuggly in the base rather than having lots of room around them. Cover the dish and place into the preheated oven. Bake for 40 minutes.

The taste test:
I loved the flavour of the cloves in this - I would never have though to add that myself, but it enhanced the flavour of the pork.
The quail eggs were beautiful - a richer taste than hens eggs, but so small that it definitely didn't overwhelm the other flavours.
I realise that the pictures below do not make this look appetizing! What can I say? I was hungry so I just took a quick snap and ate! Don't be fooled by my poor photography - its delicious!




The meatballs could be roasted or fried and served cold as part of a picnic meal, a bit like scotch eggs, or served warm with or without the tomato sauce as part of a tapas-style dinner.

All I've got to do now is actually make it to the country! I've got my eye on this tour. I even have some vouchers. Fingers and toes are all crossed for the hope I might finally make it this spring.

Also this week: Dauphinoise potatoes with obscene amounts of double cream. Dan was a very happy boy!



They didn't last long.

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.