Poached Salmon
After last night’s culinary adventures, we felt we should make the effort to be healthy this evening. We settled on poached salmon (salmon cooked in boiling water with wine, onion and mixed herbs) and green vegetables. I think it needs a little work as not a lot of the flavours made their way into the salmon.
I did appreciate just how much this piece of salmon actually looks like a fish though!
St John
Last night, Stephen and I went to St John for dinner. It’s my second visit there and, once again, the food was excellent.
We arrived slightly early and had a drink in the bar, their house Champagne (Jean Milan brut) which is brilliant and then a glass of Muscat Sec which smelt a lot like sweet Muscat but was actually dry.
We started with a selection of dishes because we couldn’t decide what to choose: cured beef with celeriac, shrimp salad, bone marrow and a gull’s egg. The beef had a real sweetness to it that went very well with the celeriac, which had a horseradish dressing on it. The shrimp were also quite sweet and served with sliced white cabbage, an unusual combination but one that worked well. The gull’s egg, according to Stephen, was tasty and more delicate than a hen egg. I’d not had the bone marrow before but I enjoyed it, it tasted a lot like gravy to me.
We followed this with just one main course each, I had the pot roasted Gloucestor old spot with prunes which was perfectly tender and full of flavour. Stephen had the smoked eel and bacon with the best-mashed-potato-in-the-world-ever which, although good, didn’t have a huge amount of flavour.
Even though we were full, we ordered some honey and whisky ice-cream and some cheese to finish. The ice-cream was brilliant and the cheese was good too, although we forgot to find out what we were eating.
We drank a very good Jurancon Sec, which we bought another bottle of to take home.
It was a struggle to walk to the tube station afterwards, but well worth it 🙂
G
Lamb Chops
A quick dinner this evening of lamb chops, marinated in garlic and rosemary, fried and served with some leftover tabbouleh and pitta bread. Tasty but two chops each would have been better.
Le Creuseted Chicken
On Sunday, we use our new casserole dish to roast a chicken.
We began by browning the chicken on all sides and removing if from the pot. Next, we sweated off some carrot, celery, onion and garlic. We then added the chicken back to the pot with some sage, thyme and bay. We added about a pint of water, a little stock, some wine and salt and pepper. The chicken cooked for about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Once the chicken was cooked, we removed it from the pan and reduced the cooking liquid until it had thickened. We added three types of mustard and a little cream to make a really tasty sauce.
We served the chicken with crushed Jersey Royals, and some baby vegetables.
Cinco de Mayo
Being Cinco de Mayo today, we decided to have something Mexican.
So we started with Margaritas:
Which we drank with some tortilla chips (Poco Loco brand which taste much more like real Mexican tortilla chips than supermarket brands do) with some slightly too wet (even though I’d drained it once) but still tasty tomato salsa and some guacamole (which was really hot if you happened across a chilli seed, but again tasty):
Then main course… Mole Poblano de Guajolote! Lots of preparation. The recipe called for four types of chilli: Mulato, Ancho, Pasilla and Chipotle. The only one of these that we managed to find was Mulato, so we substituted some Kashmiri dried chilli for the rest of them. The result was good, but could do some some adjustment before it’s brilliant. It is on the right here, along with some rice and some black beans:
The Mulato chillis warrant a picture of their own, looking like a mutant crossing of chillis and giant prunes:
F
Carpet Picnic
On Friday night we had a “picnic” at home with a mixture of Italian nibbly things and some French cheese. Marinated olives, tricolore salad (with really nice mozarella), San Danielle prosciutto, Napoli salami and Munster cheese.
Linguine with Prawns and Asparagus
A lovely friend of mine bought me the lovely Falling Cloudberries by Tessa Kiros recipe book for my birthday. I read the whole book cover to cover on the train home and I’ve read it a couple of times since, and marvelled at the beautiful photographs, but never cooked from it.
Tonight, in order to check the “using asparagus in more interesting ways than just steaming and serving with butter” and the “cook from the birthday book” boxes, we chose this recipe.
It was good, if a little complex; not least because we went via the pub on the way home. I really liked the fact that you boiled the asparagus then chopped off the tips, pureed the stems then mixed it all together with the prawns. I like recipes that use all aspects of the ingredients, maximising their different flavours in different ways.
We tweaked it slightly, adding lemon juice and more seasoning. I’d cook it again…maybe sans wine on the way home though 🙂
G
Presents!
Can you even begin to imagine how excited I am? This beautiful object you see before you is ours and will be happily living in our kitchen in less than four hours!
Please send me your casserole recipes!
G
Thai Red Curry – again
We last had this on Thursday and it was brilliant. Stephen had very cleverly made up double the amount of paste we needed so tonight, all we had to do was add a little extra chilli (it was brilliant last time but not that spicy) and voila, a brilliant, spicy Thai red curry.
We remembered to use the pretty paper placemats we bought in Chinatown too.
G
Roast Lamb with Anchovies and Garlic
Today we had a leg of lamb for the first time in ages. We inserted little pieces of anchovy and garlic into it before roasting. The anchovy melted away and gave the lamb a lovely flavour without being fishy at all. It was a good thing too because it wasn’t the best lamb – next time we have lamb we need to plan in advance instead of just buying it from Waitrose. Waitrose with their irritating “lamb imported from the other side of the world only” policy.
We served it with roast potatoes, parsnips, spring greens, peas and gravy. And some home made mint sauce that we’d done in a rush and was not very good: another thing to plan in advance next time.
On the subject of mint, our mint plant is doing well and we repotted it to a larger pot today. Mojitoes for all!
