Liver and Bacon
For a while we’ve been wondering if there was anything particularly Halloweeny that we could cook tonight. Eventually, we gave up and decided to have liver and bacon. Kerri picked up some calve’s liver from the butcher as well as some rather nice bacon. We fried the bacon first, then cooked the liver in the same pan. An old recipe from Mrs Beeton told us to put the bacon next to the fire while we were cooking the liver, but we skipped this step, hoping it wasn’t too important.
We served it with mashed potato and the result was good. I particularly enjoyed the bacon and resolved always to buy bacon from a butcher in future and never from a supermarket. As it turned out well, I assume that resting the bacon next to the fire wasn’t that important a step and we were right not to start a fire purely for the purpose of doing so.
Lamb Chops with Red Onion Reduction
That sounds a bit “cheffy” doesn’t it but I don’t know what else to call this. We bought some lamb chops to eat last night but weren’t hungry enough and ended up eating cheese instead. We’d planned to have them tonight with sauteed potatoes but a friend of mine suggested this instead. Sautee some onions and garlic then added red wine, balsamic vinegar and some tinned tomatoes before reducing the sauce for about 20 minutes. It worked well with the lamb, a good mix of slightly tart onions balanced by the sweet tomatoes and balsamic vinegar.
We served this with mashed potatoes, roasted parsnips (which, although good, didn’t work) and runner beans – I think that’ll be the last time we eat runner beans this year though as they were quite tough. Not the last time for the reduction though, I think that has a lot of potential.
Things en Croute
Last night we had an informal dinner party of sorts. I had four consecutive vintages of the same wine that I’d bought on trips to South Africa and wanted an excuse to open them all at once and do a comparative tasting. So this was the excuse for it. More on that later.
We started with a couple of bottles of sparkling wine from a little closer – Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2000 and Denbies Greenfields Cuvée 2004, which was kindly brought by our guests. We’d had the Nyetimber 1999 and really enjoyed it; the 2000 was similar but tasted a bit riper and slightly sweeter. The Denbies was really good too – less toasty and more floral and aromatic than the Nyetimber. With these we had some roasted mixed nuts. We’d been discussing roasting our own nuts, but didn’t get round to it.
Starters were two pates – chicken liver and smoked mackerel. We’d made them both the night before and they certainly tasted better for having time for the flavours to blend; the mackerel had a bit of a kick from the cayenne pepper. I think the chicken liver was a bit under seasoned though and it’s a bit hard to add seasoning to it afterwards as it solidifies.
Next up was “things en croute”. Both salmon en croute and beef en croute have been our list of things to make for a while, so we did them both at once. The beef was surrounded by a layer of mushrooms and onions cooked down almost to a paste. The salmon was done in two layers, with a filling of cream cheese, spinach, rocket and watercress between them. I was rather pleased with the way these two turned out. I’d asked the butcher for a longer thinner piece of fillet but he recommended the fat piece as it had a better flavour. It certainly did have a good flavour, but the wideness of each slice of beef meant that the ratio of pastry and mushroom filling to beef was quite low. And I did leave it in for a little too long – should have used the meat thermometer!
Then apple crumble, which we’d made earlier in the day and reheated. Kerri was a bit worried about the topping not being quite right, but it tasted good. And the custard. Mmmmmmm the custard. We made real fresh custard for the first time and it was brilliant. We might have to make custard every day in fact. We certainly need to get our blow torch refilled so that we can make crème brûlée, or make them under the grill.
We had three cheeses – stilton, lancashire and stinking bishop.
Back to the excuse for the dinner in the first place – the wine. It’s not wine that was made to be kept for ages, but I happened to have four consecutive years of this particular cabernet sauvignon so just ended up keeping them for fun; it certainly wasn’t made to be kept for 11 years. We started with the 1996, which disappointingly had quite a lot of cork taint. So rather musty and hard to tell how the wine would have been but from what we could make out, it seemed a bit over the hill. Needless to say, we opened the 1997 shortly afterwards. This was immediately better in that it was clean. It still had some fruit but was a little past its best. The 1998 followed and this was good; lots of cabernet fruit flavour with smooth tannins and generally well balanced. We didn’t get to the 1999 as we’d had a fair amount of wine by this point. It was an interesting experiment, but next time I’ll try it with wine that’s designed to be kept for a long time.
Spaghetti with Parma Ham, Tomatoes and Mozarella
Another looong day at work today but I came home to find Stephen busy in the kitchen. I’d had an idea that the combination of roasted tomatoes, mozarella and parma ham would work well with spaghetti so we picked up the ingredients and put it together tonight. Neither of us had much time to think much further than throwing the ingredients into the pasta and unfortunately it showed in the end result – the flavours worked well but the components should have been smaller. A work in progress I think.
Dinner Diary – One Year On
I had a loooong day at work today and Stephen went out so there was nothing of note happening chez Stephen and Kerri (unless a much-needed glass of wine and a slice of Marmite toast counts?)
So, as I’m sitting here I thought I’d post anyway and started thinking about one of my favourite things about Dinner Diary….the fact that I can look back and see what I was eating this time last year. It turns out we didn’t post anything on this precise day but not long after we did make this not very interesting fish and pasta dish. When I wrote about it I mentioned “if there was a next time” but it turns out there wasn’t a next time.
Sea Bream Marinated in White Miso
A few weeks back on Saturday Kitchen, Nic Watt cooked Sea Bream Marinated in White Miso. I have been obsessing about it ever since and we ended up buying white miso and mirin when we came across them in anticipation of making it. Last night I made the marinade and put the badly filleted sea bream (really should just ask the fishmonger to do it next time) into it to marinate overnight. The recipe says two hours, but that wouldn’t have fitted into our schedule very well.
So when we got home tonight we cooked it under the grill. And almost burnt it. Which is part of the plan really; Nic Watt was saying this is best done on a barbecue but that wasn’t likely to happen on this rather cold and windy night. We served it with some sesame mushrooms and pak choi. It wasn’t as good as I was hoping. Not sure what went wrong – maybe the extended marination had made it too sweet, but somehow the flavours just didn’t seem to complement each other well. And the mushrooms didn’t taste like much either. Anyway, at least I’ll stop obsessing about it now.
Lamb Stuffed with Couscous
It was only last week that we tried lamb stuffed with couscous, but we decided to try it again as we had enjoyed it so much.
Much the same this time: lamb fillets stuffed with a mixture of couscous (hydrated with chicken stock), pine nuts, parsely and mint with a sprinkle of cinnamon. We didn’t have spring onions this time, so didn’t include them but I did add some chopped dates into my half. Served on a bed of roasted cherry tomatoes, red pepper and orange pepper, it was good but not quite as good as last time somehow; maybe the spring onions made the difference or maybe we overcooked it a little this time.
The recipe goes something like this, if I remember correctly. The amount of couscous actually makes twice as much as we need for stuffing two neck fillets, so we just eat the rest of the couscous as an accompaniment.
2 lamb neck fillets
125g couscous
200ml hot chicken stock
one large or 2 small spring onions, chopped, including white and green parts
small bunch parsely, chopped
small bunch mint, chopped
handful pine nuts, roasted or dry fried until light brown
dash of cinnamon
pinch of salt
Add the spring onions, parsely, mint and pine nuts to the couscous in a bowl. Add the hot chicken stock, stir up and cover with a plate for 15 minutes. Fluff it up with a fork when it’s ready.
Cut open the lamb neck fillets and flatten them out. Place a line of couscous down the middle and wrap the flattened lamb around it, tying it up with string. Brown the wrapped fillets in a frying pan, then put into a 180 degree oven for 20 minutes (actually maybe 15 minutes as we did 20 this time and it was too long, last time it was moister and slightly pink inside).
Slice and serve with whatever takes your fancy.
Guinea Fowl Casserole
As we seem to have been having chicken a fair amount lately, when the urge to cook chicken again struck us, we figured that guinea fowl would be an interesting alternative. We cooked this yesterday to eat today – a fairly standard casserole with the jointed guinea fowl, onion, celery, chicken stock, a dash of garlic and some thyme and bay. We put in the carcass in with everything else too in order to flavour the stock a bit more as it was cooking.
Served with some crushed potatoes and some brussels sprouts and cauliflower. It was good, but as Kerri said, it would be nice to have fewer little feathers floating around in the sauce.
Rice Pudding
I made a rice pudding yesterday and almost burnt my mouth in my hurry to taste it as soon as it came out of the oven. Although it was hot, it wasn’t long before I realised I’d forgotten to add the sugar. I managed to rescue it today though by re-heating some with some extra milk and a sprinkling of sugar. It was perfect, rich and creamy with a lovely nutmeggy ‘skin’.
Toad in the Hole
Today was the last day of British Sausage Week, so we obviously had to have sausages as we haven’t had any yet this week. We bought some herby pork sausages from our local butcher and made toad in the hole. From what I can remember, it’s the first time we’ve made it. It turned out well, even though our oven doesn’t really get hot enough for Yorkshire pudding.
We had it with onion gravy and brussels sprouts; the first time we’ve had them this year… very exciting. Also parsnips and cauliflower, but they were less interesting.
