There were definitely times when I wondered if it would ever happen, but we've finally, after 11 years of marriage and several ups and downs, bought a house. We've bought off the plan in a new development in a very pretty town a bit north of London, and in the next month to six weeks we will be moving.
I bloody hate moving.
We've lived in this house for 9 years, which is about as long as I have lived anywhere, and have accumulated all the possessions that you would imagine a pair of packrats would accumulate over that time. So the process of sorting through our stuff and figuring out what actually needs to come with us is underway. Part of that process is, of course, clearing out the freezer and pantry.
Flapjacks, waiting for another layer of oat mixture
My cooking is likely to become increasingly eccentric over the next few weeks as I try to run down stocks of things. But this weekend it is relatively sensible. Barbecued pork ribs (with a glaze incorporating a couple of sad apples and the remnants of a jar of jelly), flapjacks (reducing stock of various baking bits) and soup (using up all the odds and ends of poultry wings and giblets in the freezer).
Flapjacks ready to eat
My flapjacks are based on this recipe from Sue from Mainly Baking. I kept the amount of butter, sugar and golden syrup the same but used 130g unsweetened dried sour cherries, 200g oats and 40g desiccated coconut. I pressed half the mixture into the tin, scattered with a few chunks of leftover dark chocolate Easter egg and then added the rest of the mixture. Very successful.
We've tried barbecuing pork ribs before, but I think these are the most successful so far. I made up a rub of salt, pepper, fennel seeds and smoked paprika and let them sit in that for a couple of hours, then we slowly smoked them for 3 hours before adding the apple puree mixture.
While they cooked for another couple of hours the apple dried down to a thick, rich glaze without burning. The racks unfortunately were not the same size - the smaller rack was perfect but the larger could have done with another hour. Of course, they were so good that Paul now wants a rematch, which will necessitate buying more of the ingredients I was trying to see the back of.
The leftovers, pulled off the bone and chopped, are providing me with very nice lunches.
When I started ferreting in the freezer for poultry bits for making stock, I had no idea quite how much there was. Chicken, cockerel and duck giblets, chicken wing tips, cockerel backs. Loads of stuff. It made a very good broth. And tonight I flavoured some of the broth with lime juice and fish sauce and cooked pork meatballs and some veg in it, then added coriander leaves, chopped chillies, slices onions and more lime juice.
We haven't done anything for Chinese New Year this year. Paul reckons not to like Chinese food very much and couldn't be persuaded to go out for it. But I kept seeing people talking about delectable Chinese meals, so I made dinner at home, from dishes that I knew he'd find acceptable.
Crabmeat & sweetcorn soup to begin. It's always Paul's starter of choice, but not all Chinese restaurants do it. We actually had it at about 5pm, to fortify us to wait for our main course. Not exactly fancy or refined - a can of creamed corn, that can filled with water, a stock cube, a couple of sliced spring onions and some grated ginger, simmered together for 5 minutes, then a tub of pasteurised white crab meat, some light soy sauce, a teaspoon of cornflour slaked in Shaoxing rice wine, simmered another couple of minutes until pleasingly gloopy, and a beaten egg stirred in. Seasoned with white pepper.
Then red braised pork belly, fried rice, and bok choy with oyster sauce and a lot of garlic.
This week I Heart Cooking Clubs is taking some time to stand alongside Deb, one of the hosts of the event, supporting her as she grieves the loss of her mother. As well as IHCC, Deb hosts Cook the Books and her own Souper (soups, salads and sammies) Sunday event: she's a blogging powerhouse. Anyone who has read her blog more than once knows that she is a great eater of soup - which she says she got from her mother, so it really could only be a soup.
Deb avoids meat and dairy products, but I decided that this laksa, from Diana Henry's A Bird in the Hand, was just the thing. It's basically this recipe, with the addition of shredded cooked chicken. I used some of the leftover piri piri chicken mentioned in my last post, and even without the skin it gave the broth a deep, smoky richness. It was a very comforting meal in a bowl, with a beautiful colour to lift the spirits.
What with one thing and another I have missed a couple of rounds of Cook the Books Club - I don't enjoy Annie Proulx's books so I skipped That Old Ace In The Hole, and I read Sustenance and Desire but didn't find it at all motivating to cook. Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me With Applesgot me back in the saddle.
Funny, warm, occasionally devastating and moving, it's part of Reichl's memoir, charting her rise from Berkley co-op restaurant cook and commune dweller to respected restaurant critic. It's an impressive accomplishment in a memoir: at times she manages to portray herself as unlikeable but it doesn't come across as false modesty.
Unusually for one of the Cook the Books Club challenges, I had no trouble at all deciding what to cook. Among the many delicious-sounding meals she describes, Alice Waters' famous garlic dinners stand out.
The mention of garlic soup reminded me of the delicious, pungently wine-flavoured garlic soup we'd had in Switzerland, back in 2007 when I was but a baby blogger. I've tried a couple of different versions but I've never quite nailed the combination of fresh-tasting but cooked garlic and dry wine that I remember.
This time I tried a version from one of my favourite defunct food blogs, FX Cuisine. Such a great blog but no activity since 2009. Anyway, in his version you roast the garlic with quite a lot of oil, then use that garlic and oil to make a roux before adding stock to make the soup. He also adds noodles to it. I used some dry white wine as well as the chicken stock, and used sourdough olive bread croutes (nothing says "San Francisco" to me like sourdough!) smothered with gruyere cheese to make it substantial enough to be a meal.
It was completely delicious, but still nothing like the one we had in Wengen.
I'm also sending this over to Deb for Souper (Soup, salad and sammie) Sunday.
It's reasonable, after Christmas, to swear off roast dinners for a while. Many people seem to end up having three or four fairly similar meals within the space of a week and then shudder at the thought of another plate of roast meat, potatoes and greens.
That was pretty much the position I was taking, but Paul still wanted a Sunday roast. Although we had it on Monday because we weren't that hungry on Sunday night. Anyway, Gressingham ducks are half price at the moment, which made them cheaper than any of the higher-welfare chicken options on the supermarket shelf, and roast duck is always nice.
I decided to move it away from usual British Sunday roast flavours and give the meal some spice. The one possibly unusual piece of equipment you need for this is a gravy separator. It's not absolutely essential, but it means you'll be able to pour the delicious juices over your dinner without swimming in fat. Not that there is anything wrong with swimming in fat if that is what you are into.
I found this recipe on Joanne's blog, which as well as sounding enticing was pretty funny for her firm "I couldn't be a vegetarian" stance, when she's been vegetarian for years now! So a similar soy caramel was my starting point, flavouring the vegetables and glazing the meat.
Soy Chilli Caramel Roast Duck (serves 2 with leftovers)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
3 tbsp soy sauce mixed with 3tbs water
4 cloves garlic, peeled and grated
2 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1 hot red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped
1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into chunks
1 large aubergine, cut into chunks
1 whole duck, giblets removed
1tbs five spice paste
Mix the sugar and water in a heavy based saucepan over a low heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Increase the heat and bring to a fast boil, swirling rather than stirring until it turns a rich golden brown and smells caramelly but not burnt. Remove from the heat and add the soy sauce and water mixture. It will bubble and spit and the caramel will start to seize. Return to the heat and add the garlic, ginger and chilli and stir until it makes a smooth sauce. Turn off the heat.
Place the sweet potato and aubergine in a large-ish bowl, pour most of the caramel sauce over the vegetables (keep back 1tbs or so to glaze the duck) and mix well.
Preheat the oven to 180C and line a roasting tin with baking parchment. Spread the vegetables in the base of the tin and place the duck on top of them. Prick the duck all over with the point of a knife and smear the skin with the five spice paste. Roast for one hour.
At the end of the hour, remove the duck from the oven, spread with the remaining soy caramel sauce and return to the oven for another 15 minutes.
At the end of the cooking time, remove the duck and vegetables from the tin and keep warm. Pour all the juices into the gravy separator and allow to settle while you prepare some greens. I stirfried some shredded cabbage with garlic and chilli and a spoonful more soy sauce.
Carve the duck and serve with the vegetables, pouring the de-fatted juices over the top.
With the carcase and leg portions I made a spiced broth following Mimi's chicken pho recipe in Noodle! to which I added a bag of stirfry mix and poured it over rice noodles.
I know, it's 2015 now, Christmas is behind us. But I was so delighted with our Christmas dinner I wanted to show the world.
We had a beautiful goose crown from Turner & George, which we simply seasoned and roasted - goose is fatty enough that it doesn't need much extra done to it, and the way the crown was cut it sat up on its bones and didn't need to be on a rack to stay out of the rendered fat.
We kept the accompaniments few and simple but delicious - a celeriac and potato gratin and Diana Henry's stunning persimmon, chicory and hazelnut salad. We omitted the cheese from the salad - with the rich meat and gratin we didn't need the extra fat or salt.
It was celebratory and festive but at the end of the meal we didn't feel ridiculously bloated. We didn't have a dessert - I'd bought some figs stuffed with chocolate truffle and coated in chocolate, but they lived to see another day too.
I stripped the remaining meat off the goose and used it in a hearty bean soup, along with a smoked pork shank and some vegetables. That saw us through a couple of meals, getting thicker and richer each time we boiled it up. As we went from very mild weather on Christmas Day into a hard frost that lasted through to New Year's Day, it was very welcome. The rest of the goose carcase joined some chicken wings, duck giblets and veg to make a nice poultry stock, most of which is now in the freezer.
I'm a bit surprised to realise I haven't done an "Other Bloggers' Dishes" post since February. I knew it had been a while, but the year really has slipped away from me a bit. And actually, what with one thing and another, there haven't been that many dishes from blogs, or dishes I was alerted to by bloggers, that I hadn't already written about.
This pumpkin pangrattato with merguez was absolutely gorgeous, although I didn't do the method as written. I blended the garlic, rosemary, bread, coriander, the calamondins I was using instead of orange zest and the gouda I was using instead of taleggio to a chunky paste with some olive oil. I roasted the butternut for 20 minutes, added the sausages for 15 minutes and then topped it with the crumbs for 20 minutes. I really must make it again soon - it's definitely the weather for this kind of one-pot dish!
Pumpkin pangrattato with merguez
My take on the stacked pig sandwich was less stacked, less green and less beautifully photographed. But more mayonnaisey. This is another one that I need to make again, to try and capture the stacked green magic.
Stacked pig sandwich
I used pork escalopes instead of chicken for this dish of escalopes with tomato, olive and caper dressing. Surprisingly, with all those salty ingredients, it wasn't as punchy as I was anticipating, but it was a very nice fresh-tasting sauce/salad hybrid.
I really loved this salad of lettuce, peas and ham, not just for the story about driving down the road with a spoonful of mustard clutched in one hand. I think it'll be a good one to revisit over the Christmas season, where there are odds and ends of cheese, ham and bread about the place, but a lighter dish is called for.
And finally, a dish from Meemalee, although from her book, not her blog. Taiwanese beef brisket soup, garnished with preserved vegetables and, of course, habanero chilli. Fragrant, warming and hearty.
On Thursday I had dinner at The Savoy. This is not, it pains me to admit, a normal sort of weeknight activity. But it was the British Turkey Awards, where I found myself crowned (no crown actually involved, but I got a trophy and a certificate) British Turkey Blogger Recipe of the Year for my turkey b'stilla.
Trophy
It was a very grand event. Champagne reception, grace, Loyal Toast, the whole shebang. There were several women in floor-length gowns and opera-length gloves and all but one of the men wore a dinner jacket. Paul, the notable exception, looked like Columbo.
I felt very lucky to be seated next to Robert Clark and Karen McQuade, veterans of the British Turkey Awards, who were able to explain some of the elements of the night. Like the bizarre "heads and tails" charity collection game and the boo-ing at some of the award nominees. Every group has its traditions! Anyway, unfortunately we had to hurtle off mid-ceremony, to catch the last train. Everyone else seemed settled in for the duration, so I suspect The Strand was populated by very hungover turkey farmers and retailers on Friday.
It only seems appropriate for me now to share a turkey post.
One of the things that British Turkey is trying to do is get people to see turkey as an every day meat and not just a Christmas thing. Which means that fresh turkey is increasingly available outside the Christmas season.
At Easter, in fact, we bought a 5kg fresh free-range Bronze turkey at a 50% discount, so it was £22. Clearly, for a family of two people a 5kg bird is a ridiculous size, so I assembled poultry shears and a sharp knife and watched a couple of youtube tutorials on jointing poultry and set to work. I vividly remember laying out the pieces on the board to take pictures of them, but I can't find any pictures of the completed butchery.
We ended up with a turkey crown, 2 wing portions, 2 thigh portions and 2 drumsticks, and the carcass, wing tips, leg joints and giblets for stock. All but the crown went into the freezer for later consideration.
Roast turkey crown
The crown, which weighed 2.2kg, we ate roasted. I lifted the breast skin and smeared the flesh with a compound butter, flavoured with lemon zest, garlic and anchovies. I gave it 30 minutes at 200C, then 45 minutes at 170C. We had it hot with roast potatoes and peas and it was just delicious - crisp-skinned with moist, flavourful flesh. The potatoes were also some of my better roasties.
Of course, 2.2kg is still a big roast, even if that includes a fair amount of bone. It left 700g meat to be stripped from the carcass. That meant two portions of a warm noodle salad with a chilli peanut dressing...
My 6" springform tin pays for itself again and again
... and three portions of pie. The pie was very Christmassy, really, with bacon, sage and onion, some of the jellied juices from the roast, a couple of tablespoons of dried cranberries and 50g Stilton, broken into chunks.
As you can imagine (or have experienced at Christmas), after that turkey-filled week we were quite happy to leave the rest of the pieces in the freezer for a fair while after that. But eventually, we were ready to face turkey again.
I boned out the wings and stuffed them with minced prawns and waterchestnuts, then pan-fried them. They were delicious as part of a dim sum meal, but would have made a good supper just with rice and vegetables.
The thighs I also intended to bone-out and stuff, but I ended up with much more stuffing than would fit. I butterflied them and made sort of a sandwich with the stuffing (which was rice, spinach and 'nduja) in between and baked it.The dark thigh meat has enough flavour to stand up to robust 'nduja without being completely overpowered.
Turkey thighs sandwiched with rice, spinach and 'nduja.
Then the drumsticks got a Mexican-inspired treatment. They were barbecued with a lot of smoke so that the skin was crisp and lacquered, and the meat falling off the bone, and served with a spicy peanut mole sauce.
That just left the bag of bits for stock. I added the turkey trimmings and giblets to a couple of roast chicken carcasses and the usual aromatics and simmered them to a rich broth. Some of the broth I then reheated with a couple of dried porcini mushrooms steeping in it, while I made some dumplings filled with minced turkey, more dried porcini and herbs. I roasted cubes of butternut and some sage leaves. Then I cooked the dumplings in simmering water before serving them in the broth with Asian mushrooms and the butternut - and there were three portions of that. My freezer is now empty of turkey and I am ready to start planning Christmas (I know it's still September!). We might have turkey this year.
It does occasionally feel like I am the last food blogger in Britain not to have a book deal. I am OK with that: I don't think I bring anything new to the table with the recipes I write. But I am very interested to see what other bloggers are bringing out, and was absolutely delighted to attend the book launch for Mimi Aye's first book, Noodle!. It was a fun party - the wine flowed, the snacks were noodly, the publisher was really late and arrived soaked to the skin. I got to put faces to twitter handles, catch up with a few people I hadn't seen in a while and gossip in more than 140 character bursts.
Mimi had a pile of books for sale, so I bought one and took it over to her for signing. It took a remarkably long time and I assumed she was checking facebook to see how to spell my name, BUT NO, she was drawing me this adorable little picture of Urchin eating noodles.
The following day I sat with said cat, a cup of coffee and some book marks, and had a flick through the book:
Sticky page tabs are the best things in the world
Having identified one or two dishes I liked the look of, I had to narrow it down a bit. Quite a few of the recipes call for speciality ingredients; those were going to have to wait until I went into Chinatown. Fortunately the thing I wanted most to eat was doable.
Mimi's Bún chả - the photography in the book is lovely
Bún chả was one of the dishes she'd served in little teaser-size portions at the launch, and the combination of pork, noodles, pickles and firey sauce is absolutely perfect. I was pretty impressed to discover that Ocado stock daikon, so there were no barriers to making this dish. Other than, of course, the fact that I totally forgot to get fresh herbs. I decided to persevere, using frozen chopped herbs, which gave some of the flavour, if not the spirit of Vietnamese cooking.
My Bún chả
It was seriously good. The pickles are sweet, crunchy, gently pungent, and addictive. I ate... quite a lot of them before the meal. The pork mixture is very wet, and I couldn't really see how it would hold together, but after resting the excess liquid gets absorbed. The patties end up with a deep flavour even if, like mine, they were just cooked in a frying pan and don't have nifty grilling stripes on them.
Next I turned to one of the quick fusion dishes - ham and pea shoot noodles, a cute summer take on pea and ham soup. I always love a pink and green pasta dish, so I was very well disposed towards it just because it was pretty. I felt there was something lacking in the flavour, so I added some chopped spring onions, which added the oniony brightness I was looking for. Very quick, very simple, and I suspect this is something children would eat without too much of a fight.
The teriyaki salmon was also really quick to throw together and the sauce was much nicer than any of the commercial ones I have tried. I would usually have teriyaki dishes with rice, but the noodles and bok choy were very good with it. I still have some leftover in the fridge, which I think will cuddle up to some chicken fairly soon.
Having then made a trip to Chinatown, I was able to make a couple of the more complex dishes. The curry laksa had a really authentic flavour (and by "authentic" I mean it tastes like the ones we used to get in Sydney). I forgot about the eggs on the stove, so they were boiled to buggery, but the combination of tastes, temperatures and textures made it such a pleasure to eat. Even if you think you don't like tofu, I urge you to try this with the fried tofu puffs - the way they hold the thick gravy is heaven.
The last dish I tried before voluntary admission to noodle detox was Hong Kong-style wonton noodle soup. I was starting from behind with this because instead of picking up wonton wrappers (thin, square, white) I picked up dumpling wrappers (thicker, round, yellow), so the description of how to fold the dumplings made not a lick of sense to me.
Mimi pointed me towards this video of how to fold round dumplings. I watched it about ten times before taking a deep breath and heading into the kitchen. I was very happy with how they turned out! I think they look quite professional, although I confess it did take me quite a lot longer than the girl in the video. I used just egg yolk to seal them, because I used the white for the week's batch of spiced nuts, but that was plenty to hold the dumplings together.
Now, Mimi claims that she isn't an expert, just an enthusiast, but from the point of view of another enthusiast, this book contains considerable expertise. She has an engaging writing style and explains the origins of her dishes really well. There are a lot of authentic recipes (in this case, "authentic" meaning containing ingredients that might scare your honey-chicken orderer in the local Chinese restaurant) without being overly didactic. I think it's a really valuable resource.
It's available from Amazon of course, but if you buy it directly from her, she'll sign it and you might get a little picture with the dedication. If you are really lucky, she might draw you an Urchin of your own.
We had a slightly higher wonton-to-bowl ratio than is traditional.
For the last couple of months, ever since the weather started to warm up and the foody universe started to bring forth a multitude of wild garlic recipes, I have had something in mind. Another attempt at garlic soup, but this one given a springtime lift with a swirl of fresh wild garlic puree and the contrasting porky chilli kick of nduja.
Alas, it was not to be.
I had planned an assignation with a garlic pusher, but through a miscommunication didn't manage to meet up with him. Then I bought, at terrible price, a small plastic punnet of the precious leaves. When I opened the punnet to make the puree I discovered that the gastropods on board had taken full advantage of their situation - there was more slug than leaf and what leaves were there were too damaged to use.
My springtime garlic soup became an anytime garlic soup.
Aside from the nduja, the only ingredient that may be a little hard to find is the goats double cream. This is a new discovery for me, and if you are a goats cheese naysayer then you will not like it but for those of us who love that goaty tang, this cream adds a little extra savour and complexity to the mellow garlic soup.
Roasted garlic soup with nduja swirl (serves 2-4 - it's very rich)
3 large garlic bulbs
1 onion, chopped
A knob of butter
4 small potatoes, peeled and diced
250ml dry white wine
250ml chicken stock
100ml goats double cream
salt, pepper and nutmeg
50g nduja
Preheat the oven to 180C. Wrap the heads of garlic in foil and bake for 45–50 minutes, then leave to cool.
Saute the onion in the butter in a medium saucepan until translucent. Squeeze the flesh out of the garlic cloves into the pan. Add the potatoes, wine and stock, and simmer for about 20 minutes.
Once the potatoes are soft, blend the soup until smooth before adding the cream and seasoning with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Warm the nduja until it is soft and runny (I do this in the microwave). Pour the soup into bowls, add blobs of the nduja and give it a bit of a swirl.
My soup is going to Deb for Souper (soup, salad & sammie) Sunday - she has a good year-round appreciation for soups!
While I've not been enormously creative in the kitchen lately, I haven't stopped cooking (or eating). So it's either been tried-and-tested meals (fish tacos, roast chicken) or dishes that I have spotted on other blogs.
Eatori's "slow carb" toad in the hole, featuring chickpea flour. Couldn't get cevapci, so used venison sausages instead. Tasty and extremely filling
Meemalee's Burmese-style gong bao chicken. This was SO delicious I am recommending it all over the place. The spinach and mushroom side dish was her idea too. I added a handful of cashew nuts which weren't in the recipe but added a nice extra crunch.
I had to make a few modifications, because I couldn't get dried tamarind peel, laksa leaf or prawn paste, and it turned out we didn't have quite enough tamarind paste. But this soup was so delicious - and much lower in calories than the more commonly found coconutty version.
I used some lovely Artisan Kitchen raspberry and chocolate jam, which Paul got for his birthday, although there wasn't quite enough of it. And because the sweetened moist coconut that the recipe calls for is hard to come by over here I just used desiccated - next time I'd add an egg to help bind the base, I think. It'd also be delicious with fresh raspberries or sour cherries added at the same time as the condensed milk, I think.
