Week 5 - Halloween!

Saturday 31st October

This week:

Ghoulash with Eyeballs from Delia's Complete Cookery Course, p. 166.
Blood Red Soup from Leiths Simple Cookery, p. 89.

Accompanied by: lots of garlic bread, and festively decorated cupcakes (courtesy of my wife).

Liquor: Hobgoblin Ale, naturally.

Difficulty: A brisk run.

The Blood Red Soup was, in fact, a delicious cherry tomato and basil creme fraiche recipe, and eyeballs in the Hungarian Ghoulash were hard-boiled quail's eggs. Waitrose, eh?

Unfortunately, due to the time interval between cooking and posting I cannot remember much about the cooking process, but I will attempt to recall it with some photographs.



First, I browned the meat quickly a few at a time. I then fried the onions and returned the meat, throwing the paprika and flour in, and stirring thoroughly so as to form a uniform coating on the meat.

In hindsight, I should have done two things: firstly, I should have coated the meat with paprika and flour before browning it, and secondly, I should have browned the meat more quickly. In the final dish, the meat was both tough and lacking in paprika flavour.

I did use a heavy-based dish (vital when cooking at high temperature), but I'm still too afraid to really let the oil heat up enough to brown the meat without cooking it too much. On that note, if anyone could tell me how to throw meat into a sizzling pan without getting spattered with hissing and popping oil as the moisture escapes, please tell me. My eyebrows will appreciate it.

After this relatively easy start, I simply put the tin of Italian tomatoes into the mix, brought all to a gentle boil and then covered and simmered it, allowing me to get on with the cherry tomato soup.


Another simple recipe, this was really the winner on the night. The fruity cherry tomato flavours in the hot soup contrast beautifully with the more subtle basil flavours of the dollop of cool creme fraiche.

I'm not sure we served it exactly as we were supposed to, but it tasted very good, so I think we'll continue to go off-piste in future.

I basically fried up the cherry tomatoes with some basil stalks and the red onion:


After they'd begun 'to release their juices' (in the words of the recipe-writer), I liquidised it all with a hand-held blender to a fine consistency and forced it through a sieve into another pan.


The basil creme fraiche was easy to whip up, just requiring 8 shredded basil leaves some seasoning mixed with four table-spoons of creme fraiche. I didn't know what shredding meant exactly, so I just tore it up by hand. Much as I do on a fret-board. In my dreams.



Meanwhile, the ghoulash was ready for red-pepper and cream ...


... and most importantly, the eyeballs!



I tried to make dark pupils with black food colouring, but failed miserably, achieving a kind of marbled affect and staining my figures and the work surface.

Meanwhile, my wife had tricked out the table halloween style, and we were ready for the starter: Blood Red Soup (with Pus?)



After which, we had the Ghoulash with Eyeballs (with precautionary garlic bread).



All of which was washed down with tasty Halloween-edition Hobgoblin Ale (at least in my case):



We finished with a selection of home-made-and-decorated cupcakes, with which I had nothing to do, which is why they look so good.



Then we turned off the lights and hid from trick-or-treaters.

In terms of success, the soup was really quite good, the ghoulash was okay, but a little tasteless and tough, and the cupcakes were, of course, brilliant.

Week 4 - Chicken Tortellini

Saturday 24th October

This recipe comes from The Big Book of Pasta. More like 'The Big Book of Bullsh*t'. I looked briefly for an author name, but there was none, which is a clue in itself. If you're unfortunate enough to own a copy, you'll find the offending recipe on p. 310.

Accompanied by: Garlic Bread

Liquor: Ale again. Plenty of.

Difficulty: Hamburger Hill

Having been inspired by Masterchef: The Professionals, I decided I wanted to try home-made pasta this week.

I mentioned this vaguely to my wife, and she selected this recipe while doing the online grocery shopping, to which I made no objection.

The first step in this recipe is to make the fresh pasta dough, because it needs to rest for half an hour before you use it. The book has a handy 'Basic Pasta Dough' recipe on pg. 8, two quantities of which are called for by the tortellini recipe. Since the dough recipe says a single 'quantity' serves 3-4, and the tortellini says it serves 3-4, I glossed over this inconsistency and only made one portion. A good thing too, for more than one reason.

The first reason was this:


Now, you can clearly see what I've done wrong here, can't you? That's right, I've followed the bloody recipe! And I quote: "... make a well in the center with your fingers. Pour the eggs and oil into the well then, using the fingers of one hand, gradually incorporate the flour into the liquid." How is that ever going to work?

Oh well, I guess I should have used a little common sense and mixed it in a bowl the first time, like Cousin It here:


It then says, and here's the key to the whole debacle, 'Roll the pasta dough on a lightly floured surface to a rectangle 2-3mm thick'.

Conservatively, I'd estimate that it should be at least 3-4 times thinner than that!

Ours, however, were fat little biscuits:



The filling, such as it was, was trivial to put together: poached chicken, parmesan and spinach in a food processor with a little seasoning.


We then proceeded to ladle this out onto our squat little dough-turds with merry abandon.



Fittingly, a stormtrooper watched over the carnage as I rolled out another little pebble, oblivious. I also put too much filling in each one, which we'd discover later. That was entirely my fault though, and due to the fact that I'd made too little dough for the recipe. Even after over-filling the tortellini, we still had half the stuffing left.

When we then tried to fold the dough over and seal the pouches, stuffing squirted out, necessitating several rear-guard actions. Another problem was that the dough had gotten a bit dry and crusty around the edges, making manipulation difficult.

In the end, we had a haphazard, but potentially meal-making little cluster of stomach-grenades:



After letting the little bastards dry, sorry, stand for an hour, we boiled them for ten minutes as instructed. The trivial sauce of single cream, garlic and sliced mushrooms was at least edible, possibly even tasty. Although we should have had some chopped parsley to offset the corpse-like pallor of the dish.



Mmmm... You see dodgy pasta. I see the Vietcong.

I've never before had a hangover from dough. I swear the act of digesting this crud gave me a migraine the next day.

The problem was the dough was essentially uncooked. So the tortellini were flavourless, hard nodules of raw, dry dough. Thank goodness we had a garlic bread, which went well with the sauce.

The key error here was, I think, the thickness of the dough, by a factor of four. Also, we should perhaps have rolled out the dough only when just about to use it.

Next time, I shall follow this man's sage advice.

The next day, we made some tasty and warming risotto with the left-over ingredients (we had everything but the sundried tomatoes).

And finally, I managed to feed our Christmas cake. So it wasn't a total loss.

Next week: Something Halloween-related

Week 3 - Chicken, Pea and Mushroom Pie

Thursday 15th/Friday 16th October

This recipe comes from Leiths Simple Cookery by Viv Pidgeon and Jenny Stringer, p. 224.

Accompanied by: N/A

Liquor: Ale, of course!

Difficulty: Touching your toes. While you're sitting on the couch.

This week's meal had two requirements:

1) Can be done in two parts
2) Can be done quickly

My wife had some friends coming over for the weekend, so my usual window was curtailed, and moved earlier in the week.

Fortunately, this simple pie has the "filling" part, which can then be cooled, and the "baking" part, where some puff-pastry is placed over the filling, and it's all cooked together.

My wife handled the puff-pastry, as she likes making it pretty with stars and what-not, and I handled the filling because, well, that's the cooking bit.

It was also a perfect recipe to use up the dribble of chicken stock I'd gotten from the roast chicken: the recipe calls for 200 ml, and I had about 250.

Of course, a pie isn't a pie without "qualiteh" ingredients.

Finest Iberico, rare-breed ham-in-a-can:


With liberal splashings of a fine White:


Collected together, everything you need for tonight's fine pie:


The actual making of the pie was really quite straightforward, and proceeded largely without incident.

Largely.

If you'll remember from the roast-chicken post, I only had an onion to reduce with the chicken.

Well, that was evident in the final pie filling. Onion-y. Really onion-y. I thought I'd over-seasoned (as I often do), but it was simply the overwhelming flavour of onion.

Fortunately, I added a fair amount of milk to get the consistency right (the recipe called for a good coating-consistency. This is the point at which the sauce will coat and cling to the other ingredients in the pie. A simple rule-of-thumb is that when it sticks to the back of the spoon, and leaves a clear line on said spoon-back when you draw your finger across it, it's ready. The milk had the added benefit of working to dilute the onion flavour a bit, I think.

Next time, if I have onion-y stock, I won't use a whole onion in the recipe. Also, I do think pepper in preference to salt may affect the balance positively next time.

When it's done, you sould have something like this (note we don't have a proper pie-tray):


And after your wife or other artistically-inclined cohort/personality is done with the puff-pastry, and you've baked it (in our case, the next day, after refrigerating the filling overnight), it should look something like this:


Finally, the perfect plate of food:


Although, as I said earlier, it was strongly onion-y. Tasted better hot than cold, but that's just a niggle, since cold pie is goood.

Next week: Home-made pasta!

Week Two - Hedonistic Christmas Cake

Sunday 11th October

The recipe is actually available online from Delia Smith's website as The Classic Christmas Cake.

Liquor:

• 350 ml bottle of "French Brandy" from Waitrose

Difficulty: Medium-rare

I've actually made this cake once before, and was a roaring success with the less than five people who tried it, in my presence, while I was holding a knife (strictly for cutting the cake, of course.) What I like about it is that it's rather moist, but made even more moist by generous lashing of brandy both before and after baking.

I "fed" it armagnac for about a month before my wife iced it, and it turned out great. I made a few changes to Delia's recipe, and I've made a few changes since, so it remains to be seen whether or not this one works out better than, or at least as good as, the last one.

I've made changes to the dried fruit components and their relative amounts in both recipes, and I've gone for cheap brandy this year, rather than armagnac like last year. I felt that the subtlety of the armagnac was overwhelmed by the rich fruit cake last year, but I think I may have erred to far in the "BRANDEHH!" direction. Last year's cake was delightfully tipsy, but not especially brandy-flavoured, whereas I fear the balance may be a little off this year. Oh well, time will tell.

The first thing I should cover is what I've done to the relative fruit portions. Currants are fiddly. Last year, I couldn't get the huge numbers demanded by the recipe (450g!) and had to individually pick out a consolation-prize-worths from a mixed vine fruit bag, so substituted at least some of the remaining bulk with dried and sweetened cranberries. At the time, and after tasty the results, I thought it was an inspired idea. Others trying the cake agreed. Gesticulating with sharpened cutlery to make your point helps.

So, let's go over the exact proportions:

Ingredient	Delia	Me 2008	Me 2009
currants	450g	100g	170g
sultanas	175g	220g	150g
raisins	175g	300g	320g
cranberries	0g	170g	160g

In the end, my 2009 proportions were dictated simply by the relative amounts of currants, raisins and sultanas in a 500g bag of vine fruit and mixed candied peel. At 34% currants, 29% sultanas and 24% raisins, it was well short on raisins, so I made up the difference with an extra 200g of those.



The important thing to remember, when trying to make this dish on a weekend (and why I failed to make it last weekend) is that the dried fruit components need to steep in brandy for at least 12 hours before you make the cake. Delia recommends three tablespoons of brandy, but she's obviously a little bit uptight. Double it. Also, I put the chopped glace cherries in with the dried fruit to steep. It's not explicitly suggested in the recipe, but it makes sense. Similarly, the candied peel goes in because it's in the same bag as the mixed vine fruits, and I can't be arsed to pick them out.

The other thing to note is that it takes a long time to bake. Count on 4.5-5 hours. In my fan-assisted oven, it took four. Although I may have overcooked it. Which is why I'll need to soften it with whisky, repeatedly.

Otherwise, it's a pretty straightforward operation, following her instructions almost to the letter. Check you have all the ingredients before you start. Then check again. You'll need a real 20 cm cake tin too. I greased both it and the baking parchment before-hand, but this probably isn't strictly necessary. It doesn't hurt though.



You've also got to be really careful spooning the egg into the sugar and butter mixture. Mine curdled. I let it rest a bit and whisked the hell out of again, and it seemed to cream up nicely. Also, folding the aerated flour into the mix. What the hell is folding I hear you ask? Wonder no longer. Folding in the brandied fruit, though, is a b*tch. The cake seemed to rise, so I'm happy.



Some notes on nuts and zests: first off, choose only firm, fresh citrus fruit. If the lemon feels like a flabby bum, it will be hard to get any zest going. Also, almonds are divisive. Some people don't like the texture. I compromise and blend them to a fine powder. At least they're there in spirit. Or is it spirits?

Also, do cover the cake with a double layer of greased baking parchment. I imagine Delia intends that this cover the top of the baking tin (with a hole to allow some steam to escape), but I have used the "contact" method shown below both times. The top layer did get blown off by the fan though.



Bake, cool, and then feed with a few teaspoons of brandy on both sides (I only fed one side in 2008, as I left it in its baking parchment for a month). Then wrap in two layers of baking parchment, put in an airtight container, and feed it as much as you think it'll stand for a month or two.



Finally, hand it over to the wife to make it pretty (to be done.)

Well, that's it. I'll let you know how it tastes in December!

Next week: Chicken pie using the stock made in week one.

P.S. Opposite-boiling an egg. How cool is that?

Week One - Roast Chicken

The Premise: To cook a non-trivial meal every week, and record the results and reception, as well as what worked and what didn't.

The Reality: Well, given that this first post is already 3 days late, and from memory, expect a weekly dose of garbled recollections, weak excuses, and outright lies.

Saturday 3rd October

The Recipe comes from John Burton Race's Flavour First, p.187 - Roast Chicken with a Lemon, Thyme and Garlic Butter.

Accompanied by:

• mashed sweet potatoes and parsnips
• roast, quartered carrots

Licquor:

• generic 2008 Chablis

Difficulty: Little Big Planet

Right, let's get to it.

The first sign it might be tasty was that the butter/lemon zest/thyme/garlic mixture smelled amazing while I was making it.

I ran into my first spot of bother when the recipe called for the skin to be loosened "working from the neck end" and the butter to be packed beneath it against the breasts, and then pressed down firmly. (Steady...)

I reasoned (rightly I think) that the butter mixture was to keep the meat moistened and seasoned, while allowing the skin to crisp. It is important, however, to loosen the skin far enough back that you can both put all the butter under it, and also completely cover the breasts, otherwise you get the slightly lop-sided effect characteristic of bad cosmetic surgery, and evident below. Also, it's easiest to pack the butter in while the chicken is standing on its arse-end, rather than lying flat.

Of course, you have to close up the back of the chicken too, otherwise all the moisture escapes that way. One option is stuffing. Here, we just economically push in the two halves of the lemon one grates for the zest, after lobbing the squeezed juice into it, to keep the moisture content high. I think I managed to effect an airtight seal, which had the small potential to go horribly wrong, come to think of it.

I think I need a cold shower.

After a little seasoning (not too much salt), I blasted it for 10 minutes at 230 C. I took the chicken out after this, and lay the quartered carrots in the juices, with a little seasoning.

I then put the chicken back in the oven, intending 40-50 minutes at 180 C (I have a fan-assisted oven, the recipe called for 50 minutes at 190 C, but also called for a 1.8 kg chicken).

The chicken was pretty much done after 40 minutes (I basted it in its own juices regularly, and turned the carrots once). At least that's when the juices ran clear. To be honest, it was a little pink in places, and could have been crispier/browner - much like an English suntan.


Oh well, the breasts were loverly.

While the chicken was going, I cubed 250 g of sweet potatoes and 250 g of parsnips, and boiled them. I think I may have overcooked them a little, and didn't add anything to the water before boiling. When they were boiled, I drained the water (not entirely effectively) and mashed them with unsalted butter, salt and pepper and some milk.

I should have left out the milk, and added something else, like herbs. The result was bland and watery.


I think my wife's plate says it all.

The carrots, on the other hand, were fabulous. They picked up the chicken's seasoning, and natural flavours, and had a really tasty carroty bite to them - almost sweet! Definitely the win.

The chicken skin was a bit loose, but I don't think there's anything you can do about that.

The Chablis was, I think, the perfect accompaniment. I'm biased though. And not very knowledgeable. I should work for Rupert Murdoch.


Of course, the whole point of roast chicken is roast chicken left-overs.

On Sunday, we had cold chicken with bisto gravy and roast carrots (courtesy of Wife), and I boiled down the remains (minus meat and skin) for stock, with a single sliced onion, some thyme, some peppercorns and some coriander we had lying about. This took about 4 hours of simmering, and required removing the oil from the surface periodically, then straining, and finally reducing to about half.

It made about 300 ml of stock. 1.4 kg chickens are not the win.


Next week: Hedonistic Christmas Cake ...