World Cup Cuisine – English Fish and Chips
That was a close one! England scraped though into the next round with a 1-0 win over Slovenia today. We were initially keeping something English to cook for later in the competition given that neither of us were going to be in this evening, but that started looking overly optimistic and as it turned out my night out was cancelled and at the last minute decided to get take-away fish and chips on the way home. Along with some worryingly flourescent mushy peas, which I took a picture of but didn’t actually eat. We’ll try to actually cook something English for the next round if we can!
World Cup Cuisine – Greek Stifado
We decided to go traditional with Greece and opted for Stifado from Jamie Oliver’s latest book “Jamie Does…”. I cooked this on Sunday ready to eat this evening and while it was good at the time, it was even better after two days in the fridge.
It’s a very simple recipe which involves marinating some pork shoulder and some diced beef in red wine, cinnamon, cloves, all-spice, red wine vinegar and salt and pepper for a couple of hours. This is added to some softened onions along with a tin of tomatoes and then cooked for three hours. Lemon juice is added at the end and that’s it.
I was a bit skeptical at first, I knew there was a fair amount of spice in the marinade to add flavour but it just seemed too simple. The onions are softened slightly but then everything else just goes in, without any browning of the meat first. It looked a terrible mess at this point but as ist started to cook down, it began to look more attractive and, more importantly, smell brilliant.
I really need to do some work on my descriptions because I always tend to rely on words like deep, rich, earthy, comforting but that’s exactly what this was. There were complex levels of flavour from the spicing, a strong meatyness from the pork and beef and a lightness from the lemon juice added at the end.
I was worried this would be too heavy on such a warm night but it worked well with a little bread and some simple, steamed asparagus. I’m glad we went with this option rather than the halloumi I’d been craving although it’s a shame Greece didn’t go through last night as that would have given me the opportunity I needed to get my cheese fix.
World Cup Cuisine – Spanish Tapas at Tendido Cuatro
A bit of a break with tradition here; we decided to go out and eat something Spanish instead of cooking. We decided tapas was a good idea, and immediately thought to visit our local branch of Lola Rojo, which we have been to before and really enjoyed. However, it was closed due to it being a Monday. Which was disappointing, but turned out to be a good thing because it forced us to be more imaginative. Initially we thought of somewhere else nearby which we have also been to, but decided that it wasn’t as good. Then we thought of Casa Brindisa in South Kensington which is a little further away, but is really good. Again, we had been there though.
Then Kerri thought of somewhere else in South Kensington that someone had recommended… and as it turned out, they had a branch in Fulham nearer to us too… Tendido Cuatro. It did strike us just how many places there were to get good tapas.
We briefly toyed with the idea of ordering a main dish each or a paella to share but the tapas list was so tempting that we opted to order a selection of small dishes instead. This happens every time we eat Spanish food so it was inevitable really, the food was so good though that we are both determined to go back and try the paella soon.
Shortly after finishing a glass of sherry, we started with some marinated anchovies which were served with a selection of breads. These were beautifully soft and melty with a generous heap of garlic to compliment the intense fishy flavour.
As we were finishing these, out came the jamon. The flavour was good but we both agreed that the slices were a little too thick. Not that we let that stop us clearing the plate. Some Manchego was required here really but we foolishly over-looked that while ordering.
Next up was some tuna tartare with avocado served with an avocado puree and herring roe. This was very good, the avocado worked well with the tuna and there was just enough lime juice to cut through the fatty fish without over-powering it. Not a particularly appetising dish visually but probably our favourite of the night.
Of course, we had to have the pulpo. Stephen enjoyed this more than I did, the heavy-handed paprika felt very dusty in my mouth and made for a strange combination with the oil. I liked the addition of potatoes here to bulk out the dish but Stephen muttered something about authenticity which led me to believe he wasn’t so keen.
And finally, baby lamb chops with padron peppers. A big success, juicy and moist with a great chargrilled flavour and just perfect with the padron peppers. We were going to order a side dish of padron peppers but decided against it when we saw this dish included them. How I wish we hadn’t been so silly as we ended up fighting over these they were so good.
Aside from the good food, the waiting staff were friendly and attentive without being pushy. As we were about to leave they presented us with a tray of liquers from which we chose a complimentary drink. Not a great idea on a school night but a lovely way to finish the evening and a reminder of how things are done in Spain and should be done everywhere.
Tendido Cuatro
108-110 New Kings Road
Parsons Green
London
SW6 4LY
World Cup Cuisine – Italian Minestrone Soup
Seeing that Italy were playing today, I was tempted to use the opportunity to make my favourite Italian dish: lasagne but that felt like cheating really. Part of the point of “World Cup Cuisine” was to find new and interesting things to cook and while this isn’t all that new and exciting, it was something I’ve been wanting to cook for a while.
Most of the recipes I found used cabbage which I’m sure is lovely in winter but it made more sense to use some summer vegetables this time. The bunch of sad looking asparagus in the fridge might have had something to do with that decision too. The broad beans were a last minute addition, I excitedly threw them into the shopping basket yesterday without a plan to use them and I didn’t want them to go the way of the asparagus.
There’s quite a lot of chopping at the beginning of this dish but after that it’s just a case of leaving it to simmer on the hob long enough for the beans to cook. I added some basil at the end which provided a fragrant note to the sweet tomatoes and earthy beans. This makes good use of the interesting summer vegetables that are around while still being hearty enough for the colder ‘summer’ evenings we’re having.
Minestrone Soup – Serves Two
Tablespoon olive oil
2 rashers of bacon, chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
1 large carrot, diced
2 sticks celery, diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 bay leaves
1 stem rosemary, chopped
Teaspoon tomato purree
Tin tomatoes
2 litres vegetable stock
100g dried haricot beans
Salt and pepper
50g spaghetti, snapped into three lengths (macaroni is probably more traditional)
Handful basil leaves
Handful parsley, chopped
Parmesan cheese
Start by frying the bacon until the fat has rendered and then remove to a plate, discarding the excess oil.
Add some olive oil to the pan and gently sweat the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, bay leaf and rosemary for about 10 minutes. Add the tomato puree, stir to incorporate and cook for a minute or so.
Return the bacon to the pan and add the tinned tomatoes, the stock and the beans. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for about two and a half hours, or until the beans are just tender. Keep an eye on the water levels and top up if necessary.
Season and then add the spaghetti. Cook for as long as the instructions on the spaghetti packet tell you to.
About eight minutes before the spaghetti is cooked*, add the asparagus and beans and cook until everything is tender. Add the basil and parsley, stir to incorporate. Serve sprinkled with Parmesan cheese.
*This sounds like a criminally long time to cook young broad beans and asparagus but since there is not much water left at this point, they will take longer to cook than normal.
World Cup Cuisine – Danish Breaded Fish Sandwich
After being out for a couple of nights, we got back into doing our world cup food this evening and chose Denmark. The Danish national dish is meatballs (called frikkadeller) but various types of open sandwiches on rye bread are also popular. Having a look at the Wikipedia page about Danish food, I noticed that there were two pictures of these open sandwich that both contained breaded fish. Once I had seen them, I really started craving breaded fish so insisted on that even though Kerri was in favour of a variety of different smaller sandwiches.
We floured, egged and crumbed two cod fillets and shallow fried them quickly to give them some colour before putting them into the oven for about 15 minutes. We also cooked a few prawns each, just boiled them briefly in salted water before shelling them. When the fish and prawns were cooked, we assembled the sandwich, inspired somewhat by the picture on the Wikipedia page. It included the fish and prawns along with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, sliced lemon, mayonnaise and a blob of lumpfish roe.
It all worked well together and the breaded cod was particularly good, especially with some of the lemon squeezed over it. It would have been relatively healthy too had I not added loads more mayonnaise to mine.
World Cup Cuisine – Honduran Pupusas
So, day six of our World Cup Cuisine series and our first loss: none of the teams that we have chosen so far have lost their games, but when choosing Honduras we figured that that roll was likely to end anyway. I only had a vague inkling where Honduras was before I looked it up, so for those who don’t know, it is in Central America, with El Salvador and Guatemala bordering it to the west and Nicaragua to the east.
Our first idea was a coconut and seafood soup, but it looked complicated and also contained various vegetables that we would have been hard pressed to find, although I am certain that they could have been found somewhere in London had we looked hard enough. Then we found a recipe for pupusas, which are a something like thick, stuffed corn tortillas. They originated in neighbouring El Salvador, but are very popular in Honduras too. As we had masa harina for making tortillas and also some left over Mexican beans that we could use to stuff them, they sounded like just the thing.
We added a little more water to the masa harina than we normally do to tortillas, to make it a bit more pliable. We formed it into four balls, made a little dent inside each ball and filled two of them each with some of the beans and some left over chorizo (from last night) and a little grated cheese. Then we pressed them in our tortilla press (not quite as thin as a tortilla though or the filling would get squashed out) and dry fried them for a minute or two on each side.
Those with the beans inside them were more successful, especially if you bit into a nice cheesy bit. We made some salsa roja, to go with it, which is a cooked tomato, onion and chilli salsa with quite a lot of dried oregano in it. It was a good match to the pupusas, especially since the filling sometimes didn’t get that well distributed inside it and you ended up with half of it being mostly doughy and needing something to make it more interesting.
So a success from the point of view from making something new and interesting, but if we made them again we’d need to work on trying to get a bit more filling into them and getting it more evenly distributed inside.
World Cup Cuisine – Portugese Pea Soup
I’ve been eagerly awaiting the first of the fresh peas for ages so was delighted when Stephen bought these home on Sunday. I’d earmarked them for either a Pea and Mint soup or a variation of this, my favourite new Summer recipe from last year.
And then I realised I needed to cook something Portugese to fit in with today’s game. I was disappointed at first as I’ve waited almost a year to cook the braised dish but, part of the point of this exercise was to challenge ourselves and hopefully find interesting new dishes so, off to Google I went. At first my search was fruitless and then Stephen found a pea soup recipe that sounded interesting so we decided to go with that. In that recipe, the chorizo was boiled and the peas were cooked for two hours which I couldn’t bear to do so I used some of the ingredients and made the rest up as I went along.
I actually cooked this a day ahead and added the fresh peas as we reheated the soup which worked really well. The soup itself was rich and deep but the peas provided a brilliant freshness.
4 small chorizo sausages, sliced
1 onion, finely chopped
Glass of red wine
Teaspoon cumin
Teaspoon cinnamon
Teaspoon paprika
1 bay leaf
4 small potatoes
500g peas, shelled
Start by frying the chorizo until it’s almost cooked through and then remove to a plate.
In the same pan, fry the onions and garlic until soft. Add the chorizo back to the pan, throw in the spices and the bay leaf and season. Stir for about 30 seconds and then deglaze with the wine.
Add the potatoes and stock, bring to the boil and then simmer for about an hour.
Just before serving, add the peas and cook through.
World Cup Cuisine – Japanese Clams and Spring Onions with Miso and Mustard Sauce
Day four in our World Cup Cuisine escapade and we are already a quarter of the way through our target of cooking the food of half the countries! Today we went for Japan, and chose a recipe that at first glance looked a little like a Japanese version of moules mariniere, but turned out quite differently.
We found the recipe in a Japanese cookbook that we have; it sounds quite quick when reading through the recipe, but there are lots of little bits that need to be done separately and then combined at the end, so it took longer than expected. It was worth it though, the flavours all worked well together and it was quite different from the sort of food that we normally cook.
When it came to the wakame (dried seaweed), we found a bag of it in our cupboard that had been there for over a year, so tried to use it all up and ended up with a small mountain of the stuff when it had rehydrated – it expands hugely. Delicious stuff though, and goes well with the clams and the miso and mustard sauce. Not sure why it isn’t wasabi rather than mustard, but that’s what the recipe says. I initially thought that they might assume that maybe we wouldn’t be able to get wasabi, but if they expect us to be able to get wakame then surely we should be able to get wasabi? Anyway.
The recipe goes like this – serves four according to the book – but we did half of this for two of us and found that we needed to cook some vegetables to go with it to make it meal-sized.
900g carpet shell clams or cockles
15ml sake
8 spring onions, green and white parts separated and chopped in half
10g dried wakame
For the dressing:
60ml shiro miso
20ml caster sugar
30ml sake
15ml rice vinegar
pinch salt
7.5ml English mustard (am sure you could use wasabi here…)
Wash the clams and discard any that stay open when tapped. Pour 1cm water into a pan and add the clams, sprinkle with the sake, cover, and bring to the boil. Boil for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and let it stand for 2 minutes. Discard any shells that remain closed. Drain the shells and keep the liquid. When the shells have cooled a bit, remove the clam meat from most of them, keeping a few whole for decoration.
Cook the white parts of the spring onions for 2 minutes in boiling water, then add the green bits and cook for another 2 minutes. Drain well.
Mix together all of the sauce ingredients other than the mustard in a small pan and add 45ml of the reserved clam cooking liquid. Put onto medium heat and stir constantly, then add the mustard when the sugar has dissolved. Check for seasoning and add a little more salt if required. Let cool.
Soak the wakame in water for 10 minutes, then squeeze the excess water out of it.
Mix it all together and serve. The recipe says to serve it cold, but we had ours warm.
World Cup Cuisine – Ghanaian Nkrakra
Ghanaian food is something that we have been planning to try for a while but somehow have never got around to it. One thing in particular that we were keen to try was a peanut soup. But when searching for something to cook for today as Ghana was playing we found Nkrakra, which is a beef and vegetable soup / stew.
This included beef and squash, with the squash cooked with the beef and then taken out, mashed and returned to the pot. It also contained French beans and chopped tomato and was spiced up with dried ginger and chilli. The result was quite similar to what I had expected it would be, but was somehow rather “plain” and felt that it could do with a little more flavour concentration. The simple process of simmering the meat without browning it first and not containing anything like onion, garlic, etc probably contributed to that. However, having said that, I still enjoyed it and felt it was an interesting experiment – always good to try something new and maybe that’s just how it is supposed to taste and doesn’t need to be shoehorned into common European culinary ideals.
World Cup Cuisine – Argentinian Steak with Chimichurri Sauce
When thinking of what to cook for Argentina, we automatically thought of this dish. Having cooked it before though, we felt that maybe we should be a little more creative and try something else, but we remembered it having been particularly tasty and were keen to eat it again. As it turned out, we were at a friend’s barbecue and he kindly allowed us to hijack the barbecue briefly to cook the steak. After cooking it, we sliced it up into strips and added more sauce so that people could share it.
The beef wasn’t actually Argentinian because we couldn’t find any unfortunately. We had put it onto the barbecue first when it was still too hot to cook most things, which gave it a delicious char-grilled taste on the outside after just a few minutes, leaving the middle succulent with a slight sweetness. The sauce was a perfect match and we added it to a few other barbecued foods later on too.