Daring Cooks August Challenge

So this was this month's Daring Cook's Challenge:
Mary, who writes the delicious blog, Mary Mary Culinary was our August Daring Cooks’ host. Mary chose to show us how delicious South Indian cuisine is! She challenged us to make Appam and another South Indian/Sri Lankan dish to go with the warm flat bread.

I had mixed success with the dishes. Sadly I couldn't get my appam's out of the pan in one piece! They kept sticking (not sure why; I'll have to try again to find out). Most of them came out like this:



Not exactly flat breads! The flavour was lovely though, so definitely worth another try in the future.

I did manage one partially successful flatbread on the final attempt. Even though its a bit rubbish it felt like an achievement!


The Shrimp in Coconut milk curry that I served with the appams was delicious. I added spinach and sweet potato to the recipe provided by Mary to make it go a little further. That recipe's definitely a keeper.



Now if only I could master those dratted Appams!

Daring Cooks March Challenge

This month's challenge from the Daring Cooks was a Peruvian speciality; Ceviche.
What a treat! I love fish and seafood and adore sushi and sashimi. When I think about it its strange that I'd never thought to try Ceviche before, so it was brilliant to have it suggested.

Ceviche is fish or seafood cured in citrus fruit rather than cooked. I chose scallops and cured them in lime juice, nectarine and tarragon. I sliced each scallop into 3 or 4 rounds so they were pretty thin, and they took just 20 minutes to cure in the fridge.



I served them up with some salad leaves and toasted pecan nuts as a starter:



I took the idea of adding the tarragon and nectarine from a recipe I found on the BBC website, and they were definitely tasty additions. I also enjoyed having the earthiness of the pecan nuts to balance out the sharper citrus flavours. I think walnuts would also work. I spooned the marinade liquid over the top of the scallops when I served them, and I would caution against this - in future I will drain it off before serving as otherwise the dish does become a bit too sharp.

All in all, this recipe is definitely one I would do again, but its best either as a starter or a light meal on a hot day.

The monthly challenge did suggest that we could also try Papas Rellenas, which are a kind of potato cake - stuffed with a meat mixture (typically beef) and fried. They sound delicious and I'm sure I'll give them a go at some point, but this month was a bit busy so I decided to stop at one Daring Cooks recipe.

Kathlyn of Bake Like a Ninja was our Daring Cooks’ March 2011 hostess. Kathlyn challenges us to make two classic Peruvian dishes: Ceviche de Pescado from “Peruvian Cooking – Basic Recipes” by Annik Franco Barreau. And Papas Rellenas adapted from a home recipe by Kathlyn’s Spanish teacher, Mayra.

Sushi

Using an amalgamation of techniques from my new Fish cookbook by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and the Japanese cookery book I've had for a while, I finally had a try at making one of my favourite dinners - sushi.

I don't think my efforts matched up to the sushi from my favourite place, Yoshino Sushi on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, but I was still pretty proud of my efforts.

I made california rolls with smoked salmon, spring onion, cucumber and a hint of wasabi, wrapped in nori (seaweed):

Step one, assemble the roll on the sushi mat:


Step two, roll the roll and allow the nori to seal at the edges:


Step three, slice the column into pieces:


Finally, serve with soy sauce, pickled ginger, some wasabi, and a little extra cucumber and spring onion:


I also made nori with a streak of wasabi paste and smoked mackerel on the top, which you can see in the last couple of images. The mackerel could have done with being a little thinner, but it was a great flavour.

We had some chilli marinated seared tuna and jumbo prawns with the sushi. We dipped the prawns in lovely homemade garlicky mayonnaise. Fab dinner - probably our fish quota for the week!

Presents!

I do like presents. Particularly unexpected ones. I did well this week: Dan brought me home the River Cottage Fish cook book. Just my kind of thing. Good gift. Then through the post arrived a jams and preserves book - a 'just because' present from my sister. Aaaahhh.

My Christmas bread bowl is yet to materialise, so I also got a consolation gift of an icecream maker. Totally unnecessary kitchen equipment really, but I have been lusting after one for quite a while.

So, this weekend I just had to use at least 2 out of 3. Jam seemed like I needed a bit more planning so fish and icecream were on the menu.

Dan & I very democratically went through the Fish cook book and agreed on a recipe to make for Sunday dinner to Christen the book: Mussel, bacon and spinach gratin.
It is a time consuming dish, so only really appropriate for a day when you have plenty of time.

First up, clean and cook the mussels.



Remove them from the shells, cook bacon & garlic, make bechemal sauce, wilt & chop spinach. Mix together, sprinkle with breadcrumbs & parmesan, bake.



Totally worth the effort - very delicious indeed.

And for pudding.....Mexican Chocolate Icecream.

It was a bit of a gamble, but I couldn't find quite the recipe I wanted, so I took the basics from a couple of different recipes and adapted it to suit me. Maybe a bit silly for the first attempt, but it seems to have worked out OK.
So this is what I ended up with:

Mexican Chocolate Ice-Cream

150ml double cream
570ml goat's milk
125g caster sugar
100g dark chocolate
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves
4 egg yolks
1 teaspoon corn flour
50g almonds - chopped

Put the double cream and milk in a pan with the cinnamon stick (broken in half), 25g sugar, cloves. Warm over a gentle heat until it comes to a simmer. Take off the heat, cover, and leave to infuse for 30 mins. Strain.
Beat the egg yolks and 100g sugar together until a pale lemony colour. Put the egg yolks in another saucepan, add a ladleful of the strained milk and stir to mix. Put over a very gentle heat & gradually add the remaining milk, stirring to amalgamate. Cook gently, stirring frequently until the mixture starts to thicken. Add a teaspoon of cornflour if needed to help thickening.
Strain again through a fine sieve.
Grate the dark chocolate and stir it into the milky custard. Stir until completely melted. Sieve again.
Place in a jug, cover with clingfilm (let the film touch the surface of the liquid to prevent it forming a skin), cool, then chill in the fridge for at least a couple of hours.
Churn in an icecream maker according to the machine instructions, adding the chopped almonds 5 minutes before the end of the churning time.



Transfer to a freezer container and freeze for a couple of hours
Et voila...spiced chocolate icecream with almond chips.



Dan and I both thought that this was yummy, but the addition of a note of citrus would elevate it to stupendous - so next time I will also add some mixed peel when I add the almonds.

Daring Cooks February Challenge

This month's Daring Cooks Challenge got me excited - it was a Japanese recipe. Perfect as I have a Japanese cook book which I rarely use, and that makes me feel a little guilty. The challenge was to make a cold soba noodle salad and some kind of tempura. Tempura has been on my wishlist for quite some time, so it was great to have the push to finally attempt it.

So as to assuage my cookbook guilt I tried a recipe from my own book rather than taking up one of the suggestions given by Daring Cooks, but I kept in the spirit of the challenge. I made soba noodles with a dipping sauce made from shoyu (japanese soy), mirin, water and bonito powder, and served them garnished with nori (crisp seaweed), with spring onions and wasabi paste on the side. For my tempura I chose a mix of green beans, prawns, and baby corn. It all made a fantastic lunch.



I had been confident that Dan would like the tempura (its deep fried - a no brainer!), but I was surprised and pleased by how much he enjoyed the noodle dish too. Definitely one to do again. Although, I made a massive mess in the kitchen!



The February 2011 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by Lisa of Blueberry Girl. She challenged Daring Cooks to make Hiyashi Soba and Tempura. She has various sources for her challenge including japanesefood.about.com, pinkbites.com, and itsybitsyfoodies.com

Pad Thai

The BBC is a marvellous thing. I had half a pack of scallops and half a bag of prawns, as well as some red curry paste left over from a thai curry I made last week. Hmmmm...what to make? I didn't have any bright ideas. But then I typed those three ingredients into the BBC food website, and it delivered up Queen scallop Pad Thai.

Here's the work in progress:



It was the perfect quick dinner - I cooked the noodles and chopped most of the vegetables the night before and then it was a matter of 15 minutes to throw it altogether when I got back from my run. I did cheat my using bought curry paste, and I substituted beansprouts for green beans.

It was yummy. Here's the recipe.

Sweet or sour?

Over the last week I have made it my mission to discover if I do actually like Sweet 'n' Sour. For the last 31 years I have always thought I didn't, but I'd only ever had it out of a jar or from a dodgy takeaway. It seemed like time to discover if the real thing was more palatable.

I started out with a Thai sweet and sour recipe. It was subtle - basically just pineapple added to a prawn stirfry - and a good introduction to the concept for someone like me (ie someone who doesn't like gloopy sauces or pineapple very much!).
It was manageable, didn't put me off, but I wouldn't bother to make it again. It was just a little unexciting.

So, next up I thought I'd best go for the real deal - a Chinese version, complete with more pineapple (still not that keen), ketchup (don't like it), sugar and vinegar. It wasn't boding well, but I couldn't give up now! The trusty BBC came up with a recipe I thought I could handle; Simon Rimmer's Sweet and Sour Chicken Balls (find the recipe here).

The verdict? Definitely edible, but just not really my bag. I really liked the chicken meatballs, so I'll make those again, but sweet and sour sauce is not going to become a fixture in my life.

So there you have it. I tried it, and my Mum always said as long as I tried something I didn't have to eat it again if I really didn't like it.

And thinking of childhood things, I also made proper, baked in the oven Rice Pudding at the weekend. Such a childhood favourite for me - served with a spoon of homemade rasberry jam of course! Dan had never had the real deal. His rice pudding had always come out of a tin, which is frankly a horrible travesty of the concept!

Portuguese

I have never cooked Portuguese food before, but I came across a recipe for clams with pork the other week which sounded intriguing.

One of its main appeals was how speedy it sounded. Simply marinate the pork in a tablespoon of chilli sauce, some crushed garlic and a little salt. Stirfry it, add a squeeze of lemon, then a couple of handfuls of clams and cook (with a lid on) over a high heat for a few minutes until the clams have opened.

This was a Two Fat Ladies recipe. Well it was until I figured they were Fat ladies for a reason and cut the butter, oil, and lard down to just a little bit of oil.

We had this with noodles and a bit of kale. Tasty, zingy, quick.

Shame Dan had gorged himself on sausages (6 of them at 4pm - how greedy?!And what's wrong with eating lunch at lunchtime?) only a couple of hours before and hardly ate anything. That kinda pisses me off!

Clams and jams

I had a weekend off! Hurrah!

That meant I had time to do some slightly more interesting cooking.

First up: clams. So much prettier than mussels and so much easier to prep (no scrapping off nasty beards and barnacles).
I steamed them with a combination of chilli, garlic and coconut milk and served them with noodles.

We'll gloss over the fact that I nearly gave Dan a heart attack because the (one) chilli was so hot. I'll be cooking these again next time I see them in the fishmonger. I'll try not to make my boyfriend cry next time (wuss!).



Then since I was a lady with far too much time on my hands this weekend, I made jam. Pear jam with dark chocolate sprinkles. Oh yes. I am a culinary genius. It was gorgeous!

Actually, I am not a culinary genius at all... this lady is.



I'm inspired to have more lazy weekends, and each one will start with fancy french bread and home made jams for breakfast.

When's the weekend? Is it here yet?

Lobster - at last!

Week 52 of this project seemed to call for something extraordinary. Who'd have thought it would last a year?
And so, given that Lobster Thermidor was the first recipe onto the list it was time to finally cross it off.

Lobster is not a meal that you can just throw together easily - it required planning and skiving off work early to make it to the fishmonger before they closed. (I didn't think my colleagues would appreciate live lobsters crawling round the communal fridge all afternoon if I bought them at lunch time!)

So lobsters procured, I headed home to start the preparation.
Fortunately Dan had been away for a few days, so he wasn't there while I was preparing the lobsters. Which saved me from enduring him laughing himself silly when I jumped about 6 foot from shock when one of the lobsters wriggled as I picked it up. I'd put them in the freezer for an hour and expected them to be alot more lethargic than they were!

I decided to go with the Hugh F-W version of Lobster Thermidor, which uses bechemal sauce instead of double cream. I made a good thick sauce, then fried some shallots in a little butter until they were softened and added a glass of white wine. Once the wine had mostly reduced I added the bechemal and some tarragon, stirred everything together and allowed it to bubble for a minute or so. After that I seasoned it, added a pinch of cayenne pepper, and a small handful of grated gruyere. This can be set aside until needed.

So to the lobster.....I plunged it straight into a pot of rapidly boiling, heavily salted water, slammed the lid on and felt like a murderer.



It died fairly fast though, so I wasn't too badly traumatised. I don't imagine the lobster appreciated it much though. 12 -15 minutes later...voila...cooked lobster.



Then I had to dismember it - twist off the claws, crack them, and haul out the meat; cut the lobster in half, fish out the inedible bits; Mix the edible parts (including the claw meat) with the sauce made earlier, then pile it back into the lobster shells. Grate a little more gruyere over the top then whack it under a hot grill for 5 minutes.

I served it with crunchy bread and salad.



The occasion seemed to demand a fire in the room and a glass of champagne...




And then a treat for pudding. I have to confess that I didn't make it, but it was all the better for that. Passionfruit mousse cake from Patisserie Blanc.



Yum.

How does my garden grow?

We came back from a week in Wales to some very bedraggled looking tomato plants in our little vegetable plot. However, they are still covered in a hundred weight of green tomatoes. Having fried our green tomatoes a week or so ago I decided to have a try at doing something else with them. If they all survive to ripeness I will be very pleased and surprised, but we will also have a ridiculous number of tomatoes. Using some up early on seems like a good plan!

Its preserving time of year, and Dan loves a chutney with his curry, so I decided to try my hand at Green Tomato Chutney. I started from Mrs Beeston's (ripe) tomato chutney recipe, but added a few small chillies to give it a kick and some sultanas for sweetness since the green tomatoes are a bit less sweet than their ripe version.

Initial 'licking the spoon' taste tests seem positive; its got quite a kick from the cillies, but the flavours are good. This could go with curry or as a dip with poppadoms.



I've also had a go at green tomato salsa, and we've had the fried green tomatoes again, but with chorizo instead of smokey bacon this time, which was a better combination.

In other news, we had mussels cooked in cider rather than the traditional wine. Pretty good, but I think wine is ultimately the better choice.

A little trip to Devon

A couple of days in Devon last week was the perfect antidote to the 9-5 blues.



The scenery was quintissentially English, all summer prettiness and hazy lazy sunshine.

We ate fish and chips and too much icecream.



We walked along the seafront and picked which boat we would have if we were the boating types.



We went to concerts in the impressive Great Hall at Dartington.

I ate my first ever whole crab - cracked the claws myself and everything!



We napped in the afternoon. And had bacon for breakfast.

We discovered that we were only a few miles from the Riverford Farm shop - the recipe for rhubarb and strawberry crumble which I made in May came from their website - so we stopped by and bought some fruit and veg on the way home. Yummy. Their website is here.

Aahhhhh.....if only it had been more than just a couple of days.

My take-home treat? I have aquired a copy of the Riverford Farm cook book, which is chock-full of brilliant ideas for vegetables; something which I think is overlooked in the majority of recipe books. This week I will be putting them (and myself) to the test when I attempt Fried Green Tomatoes. My monster tomato plants are currently covered in not-quite-ripe tomatoes, so this seems the perfect recipe to get a sneak preview of whether they're going to be any good.

A fishy norwegian weekend

Why don't we eat more fish in this country? Its so tasty!

Considering we're really quite a small island I find it quite surprising how unavailable good fish is. I know I live about as far from the sea as its possible to get in the UK, but nonetheless you would expect some good outlets for fishy things. Even the supermarkets have aisles of meat and maybe a tiny section at the end of one for all of their fish. Its really quite odd.

The Norwegians don't have this problem. We just spent a fabulous weekend in Bergen. Its a cliche to say it, but it was amazingly expensive (Dan was horrified - a beer cost about £8!), but really when the food is of good quality you don't resent it too badly. I don't think we could have afforded to stay for more than a weekend though!

So here's a brief tour of our gluttony...

We started at the fish market on the harbourside:




Where we bought a massive smoked salmon, crab, prawn, and crayfish salad for lunch. It may have been pouring it down with rain but we were quite happy:


The next day we decided to head up into the mountains for a good long walk. Of course, we couldn't possibly go for our expedition without a picnic. The bakery across the street from our hotel provided wonderful seed and dried fruit rye bread, and the fish market also came up trumps. We were deeply indulgent, and lunch consisted of a langoustine each and a massive bag of prawns. Yum Yum Yum.....


That night we went out for dinner to a fish restaurant near the harbour. And yes, we spent more than I ever have before on a meal.
But what a meal...
Fish soup
Crayfish, salmon and angler fish with layered potato and sweet pepper
Blackberries marinated in schnapps with vanilla icecream
I know it doesn't sound all that exciting, but it was delicious because it was beautiful ingredients, perfectly cooked.

The next day was our last day. We went in search of fish and chips, but in the end this looked more interesting:


Spicey kebabs of scampi. Massive meaty prawns. Delicious.


We couldn't resist buying some smoked wild salmon to take home. Its buttery textured, smokey flavoured, and melt-in-your-mouth perfect.


So there you have it: We went to Norway, we ate more fish and seafood than you would ever believe, we walked, and saw the sights and the countryside, we had a lovely time.

And came home feeling distinctly poor!

Risotto (its getting obsessional)

I made Jamie Oliver's asparagus, mint and lemon risotto. Perfect summery food.

Serving it with pan-fried scallops gave it an indulgent edge, although to be honest I think that big, meaty, garlicky prawns would be a better match.

My childish side was satisfied by serving the risotto in the scallop shells. It amused me.



Find the recipe here.

Yum yum; a few of my favourite things. Seafood, asparagus, risotto.

Cooking with yoghurt

Dairy products and me do not get along well.

Particularly cheese, cream, and yoghurt. Not a fan, and they always seem to make my stomach hurt. (Although occasionally its worth the risk for a nice bowl of icecream or a slice of cheesecake!)

However, I have been gradually trying to introduce small quantities of milk based products into my diet. With the amount of running I do each week I think my bones probably need a little extra help from the increased calcium.

I've found that goat and sheep products don't give me the same problems as cows' milk, so have been using small amounts of sheeps yoghurt, goats milk, and sheep and goat cheeses.

Although I still wouldn't eat a bowl of yoghurt, not being keen on the taste, I do find it a very good cooking ingredient, particularly with fish. I've been using this fairly regularly of late:



This week I came over all ambitious with a smoked fish lasagne from my 'Nearly Vegetarian' cook book (really old-fashioned but fantastic recipes) - using yoghurt, milk AND cheese in the sauce. Goodness me. Tempting fate.

But hurrah - no tummy ache!

I aquired the cheese at the Chipping Norton Farmers Market a couple of weeks ago - a lovely smooth and creamy cheese. Not too strong flavoured for a cheese novice like me, but nonetheless not mass-produced and flavourless.

I followed this minor miracle with an improvised fish pie along the same lines a few days later (we still had the pot of yoghurt & it needed using!). Again, no problem...

The yoghurt gave the pie a nice tang, and it was lighter than using a traditional white sauce or cream. The cauliflower is in there because we had a load in our vegetable box, but it was a good addition.

Prawn and Cauliflower Pie
enough for 2 fairly generous portions

250g raw king prawns
50g smoked salmon (Dan filched some fom his parents' fridge when he went home for a visit so I threw it in)
100g chopped leek
175g cauliflower
2 cloves garlic - crushed
150g yogurt
25g hard sheeps cheese - grated or finely sliced
Small handful chopped parsley
Sprinkle of chopped dill
Squeeze of lemon
Salt and pepper
300g potatoes

Peel the potatoes. Cook in salted water then mash. Use a little of the yoghurt sauce from the fish mix (see below) to moisten the mash so that it binds together rather than adding extra butter. (You can use butter & milk if you prefer, but this makes it slightly lighter on the calories.)
Chop the cauliflower into bite-sized pieces and cook in salted boiling water. Drain and put to one side to cool slightly.
Chop the leeks and poach for a few minutes in boiling water until softened. Drain and put to one side.
Chop the smoked salmon into strips.
Mix the yoghurt, garlic, herbs, raw prawns, smoked salmon together in a bowl. Add the leek, cauliflower and a squeeze of lemon. Mix again, then add the cheese, season and stir.
Put the fish mixture in the bottom of an oven proof dish. Top with an even coating of mashed potato.
Bake in a preheated oven 180C for half an hour.

I served it with green beans, but peas would be nice too.

Crab cakes

A bit more experimenting making up my own recipes this week.

I had some very nice crab cakes at The Crazy Bear pub last sunday. They were salmon and crab and I had them with fat chips and rocket salad. They were just what I needed having done a hilly, muddy cross-country race that morning!

I decided to try re-creating something similar at home this week, and I had a tin of white crab meat left over from making the crab and linguine recipe (in a previous post) so it fell into place quite nicely. Instead of salmon I used smoked trout, and I served the fishcakes with new potatoes, cabbage and a poached egg.

I feel a little fraudulent calling this a 'Recipe of the Week' as I have made fishcakes plenty of times before and these were only slightly different, so I will have to do another recipe this week to really count towards the weekly target!

Here's the what I did:

Crab cakes for 2
200g potatoes - peeled, boiled and mashed
1 small tin of white crab meat (drained weight 120g)
125g smoked trout fillets
Juice of 1/2 small lemon
A small bunch of finely chopped parsley
Salt and crushed Szechuan pepper

Mix everything together in a bowl. Using your hands form the mixture into 4 equal sized balls and then flatten them slightly to make fishcake shapes.
Grill for about 5 minutes on each side, or until slightly golden on top.
Serve.

Easy!


And here's the Crazy Bear website.

Very tasty food (and they didn't mind me being in bare feet having forgotten to bring clean shoes to change into post-cross country run!)

eek

This is week 26.

That means the 6 month marker.

Which means I have to do lobster.

Which will be very yummy indeed.

BUT very expensive indeed.

And where on earth do I buy live lobsters?
Actually, I do know the answer to this - the fish stand in the covered market in Oxford. BUT, that means buying them at lunchtime, putting them somewhere at work for the afternoon (I wonder how my work colleagues will feel about 2 small live lobsters crawling around the communal kitchen?), then cycling back to my car with them. Hmmm. That may not work.

And will I really have the heart to plunge them live into boiling water? (Maybe I'll make Dan do that bit.)

And if I do so, will I then want to eat them?

So many questions....

Still, lobster's very tasty.

And I think we have a nice bottle of fizz tucked away somewhere. We will be having a very decadent friday fish supper this week.

As long as I can obtain lobster.



UPDATE:
Dan has a tummy bug, so lobster has been abandoned for this week. So there we have it: a stay of execution for the lobster and if I'm honest, a slight element of relief for me! Lucky old lobster.
Next opportunity will be Dan's birthday at the beginning of May. I feel that lobster should be cooked to mark a milestone or a celebration; its too expensive to do for no reason! Anyway, according to the BBC lobster is in season May and June, so that seems to work out well.

Nigella's crab pasta

Tuesday night is running club night, so I always get in at about 8:30pm starving hungry and physically pretty much knackered. Dinner has to be quick, extremely easy, and warming (particularly when its snowy out like it was last night!).

This week I finally made a pasta recipe which I'd been recommended by my friend Alana AGES ago (sorry it took me so long to get round to it Alana!). It was a recipe for crab and linguine by Nigella Lawson.

As ever, I did adjust the recipe a bit as I went along, but you can find it here in its unmessed-around state.

These were my alterations:
I used a tin of white crab meat instead of fresh crab and added a handful of prawns to bump it up a bit. I used a lot less olive oil - about 1/2 or 1/3 of the quantity in the recipe. It just didn't seem necessary to make it that oily! Also we had a bit of red pepper and some cherry tomatoes in the fridge so I threw those in. No linguine in the cupboard, so penne instead. And finally, a mixture of rocket, baby spinach and watercress instead of just watercress.



Very easy, very quick, very tasty. Hurrah!

Thanks Alana!

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!

Oysters and rhubarb

At the end of the summer Dan and I moved house, and we've been slowly getting to know our new area. Last night we decided to treat ourselves to dinner out instead of cooking. And to up the ante a little we chose The Plough at Kingham as our venue of choice.

I've been keen to go there for a few months. Its run by a lady who trained with Heston Blumenthal, and although she doesn't go in for some of the extremes of oddness that he likes to create I figured that the cooking would be good and the menu imaginative. I also really liked the fact that they don't publish a menu online as the menu depends on what ingredients look good on any given day.

So, a table was booked, we got out of our DIY outfits, dammit I even wore perfume! I was possibly looking forward to it a little TOO much!

Now, usually when you build somewhere up like that it disappoints. The Plough didn't.



It was oyster night. Have you ever eaten oysters? Neither of us had. They do seem to get rather bad press, and I’d consigned them to that category of “not worth paying the premium price to try something that will probably be nasty.”

However, last night curiosity got the better of us and so we asked if we could try an oyster each. (It seemed like the kind of place that wouldn’t be snooty about that sort of request.) They arrived on a bed of salt with a little shallot vinegar and the barman-proprietor suggested a little dab of the vinegar then just suck the oyster down, a couple of chews if you fancy it, and gulp to swallow (sounds a bit obscene doesn’t it?!). I went first….Dan looked a little apprehensive.

But actually, it was lovely.

When people say oysters taste of the sea I’d always thought that sounded disgusting. I mean, the taste of sea water is revolting – it burns your throat and makes you feel nauseous. But now I understand. Oysters are mildly salty, but with a light seafoody freshness. They taste like summer holidays at the seaside - Cornwall, not Blackpool!

I followed my oyster revelation with halibut. A very nice piece of fish served with a crab bisque and some kind of leafy green veg that I didn’t try very hard to identify. But the thing that made this dish memorable was the fennel bread that accompanied it. The slight aniseed flavour was a surprising but inspired compliment to the fish.

And then the pudding.

I find desserts are often a bit of a let-down in restaurants. All too often its just the same old choices of something chocolatey (which I always find too rich for the end of a meal), icecream (too cold for winter), crème brulee, maybe sticky toffee pudding. What I want at the end of a meal is something fruity.

The Plough came up trumps with Rhubarb cheesecake with rhubarb icecream. This turned out to be beautiful slices of rhubarb in a light syrup arranged on a crispy biscuit, with a cheesecake-textured goats curd mousse on the side (I know that doesn’t sound all that appetising, but trust me, it was), a scoop of homemade rhubarb icecream, and a little rhubarb jam to finish it off. Light, tangy, interesting but not alarming.

I was seriously tempted by some of the icecream flavours on offer – all homemade. Dark chocolate, elderflower and raspberry sounded intriguing, as did banana and stem ginger. Obviously, we’ll have to go back to sample some of the other delights on offer. I think we made need to save up a little first though. Its not overpriced, particularly given the quality of ingredients, the excellent service, and the well trained, imaginative chefs, but I can’t afford to pay £70 for dinner for 2 every week!

Here's the pub website.