Scallops and Samphire and Pheasant, Chestnut and Chanterelle Soup
Yesterday was Stephen’s birthday and, as is only right and proper, he got to choose how we spent the day. Luckily for me, it involved a trip to Charing Cross Road to look at cookery books, followed by a visit to Borough Market, a quick stop off at the Tate Modern before returning home to drink some good wine and cook dinner. Anyone would think it was my birthday.
We hadn’t planned anything for dinner but had a few ideas based on browsing some new cookery books (kindly provided by Quadrille Publishing) the night before. Mark Hix’s British Seasonal Food is the follow-up to British Regional Food which we received as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. It’s an interesting read but not a book we use to cook from very often, more of a bedside read than a kitchen companion.
Having only just received the latest offering, I’ve only had time for a quick browse but already a number of recipes have caught my eye. I particularly like the fact that the book is organised by month as I tend to use recipe books when I’m looking for inspiration and have no idea what to cook, this makes it easy to see exactly what’s available and means I don’t waste time paging through the salad section in the middle of winter.
One of the recipes that caught my eye was this Pheasant, Chestnut and Chanterelle Soup. We didn’t have the book with us when we went to the market but luckily enough we managed to remember what we needed and were able to find them everything easily. I popped into Borough Market a couple of weeks ago on a Thursday and was surprised at just how many stalls they were, it’s also a bit quieter on a Thursday which makes browsing easier and more enjoyable. I know it’s largely dismissed as touristy and over-priced by many but I still enjoy wandering around looking at the produce, particularly at this time of the year when he seasons are changing and everything looks new and exciting.
Having bought the pheasant and everything else we needed, we decided that we ought to get some scallops to go with the samphire we’d seen and serve them as a starter. A quick stop for lunch at the Ginger Pig (who make the best sausage rolls ever) followed by a glass of wine and off we went to the Tate Modern. We checked our bags in when got there and had an amusing conversation with the employee who told us we wouldn’t be able to leave our bags if we’d bought cheese as they’d had ‘an incident’ recently – something particularly ripe and smelly had found it’s way on to someone’s jacket which led to all manner of complaining.
I felt quite embarrassed that we didn’t have any cheese actually, (what sort of person walks past Neal’s Yard Dairy and doesn’t buy cheese?) but at least it meant we weren’t denied access to the gallery. Although, after about five minutes I was back to wishing we did have the offending cheese: Tate Modern + Half Term = many, many Bugaboo and iCandy pushchairs which = incredibly bruised ankles.
So, we didn’t stay long which was probably for the best as our over-priced ingredients had been hanging around in their designer jute shopping bags for long enough and it was time to get on with the really important business of the day.
Conscious of the disaster that occurred last time we attempted to cook scallops and game birds, we gave ourselves plenty of time for preparation and drank our wine slowly. This forward thinking served us well to begin with as the scallops turned out as we intended: just cooked with a good crust and a great match for the salty samphire.
This was of course followed by the Pheasant and Chanterlle Soup which we managed to get almost completely right until we lost focus (or, had drunk too much wine) at the very last moment and forgot to add the cream. I’m not sure just how much this contributed to my disappointment in the dish but I’m guessing it was a fairly vital ingredient. While the pheasant had a really good depth of flavour and wasn’t at all dry like it often is, the flavours in the dish didn’t really come together for me which is really my own fault for not reading the recipe properly. Luckily, Stephen didn’t have the same complaint so his birthday dinner wasn’t entirely ruined. Would have been nice to finish with some cheese though.
Mexican Bean Stew
We’ve been talking a lot about Mexican food lately and while we’re waiting for some new books on the subject to arrive, we’ve been searching online to find recipes that appeal. We’ve both struggled with authenticity though and given there is no information available on the origins of this dish, it’s probably safest to assume that it’s not all that authentic. Hopefully our books will arrive soon and provide the answer.
There isn’t any chilli in the recipe (aside from the garnish on top) but the generous helping of cumin added a background warmth which was complimented by the lime juice. The further garnish of spring onion and coriander added a lightness and a real burst of flavour that brought all the flavours together.
We didn’t deviate from the recipe much but I didn’t find it that easy to follow so I’m reproducing it here for next time. We didn’t use as much water as the recipe suggested which resulted in a thicker dish that’s more of a stew than a soup. I’d like to try this with a selection of beans next time and perhaps leave out the bacon for a meat-free version.
Mexican Bean Stew
Serves Two
250g pinto beans
1 packet lardons
1 onion, finely chopped
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
1 large carrot, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, sliced
Olive oil, for frying
Bouquet garni of parsley sprigs, thyme sprigs, bay leaf and rosemary
1 tin chopped tomatoes
2 tsps cumin seeds
1 tbsp dried oregano
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 lime, juiced
1 avocado, diced
Coriander
2 spring onions, sliced
1 red chilli, sliced
Start by soaking the beans for four hours (or overnight) in a bowl of cold water, then drain.
Fry the lardons until the fat has rendered, remove from the pan and blot any excess oil.
Add the onions, carrots, celery, garlic and bouquet garni to the pan and cook with the lid on for 15 minutes until the vegetables are tender.
Return the lardons to the pan, add the beans and cover with water.
Bring to the boil and boil hard for 10 minutes, reduce the heat and simmer gently, covered, until the beans are very tender (about an hour).
Add the tomatoes, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper and lime juice.
Simmer for another 30 minutes, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon and crushing some of the beans against the side of the pan.
Remove the bouquet garni, check for seasoning and serve with avocado, coriander, spring onion and chilli. Placemats in the colours of the Mexican flag optional.
Chicken Casserole
With the clocks going back yesterday, it seemed the right time to start thinking about proper winter food. And that means casserole. And pie. But casserole if you’ve eaten a lot of rich food over the weekend.
We had some chicken stock that needed to be used up so, chicken casserole was the obvious answer. This is quite a straightforward recipe that doesn’t take too long to prepare (unless your kitchen light bulbs start exploding while you’re trying to skin the chicken pieces) and can then be left to simmer without needing any other attention. Despite the short ingredient list, it’s fully flavoured but not so rich that you can’t afford a decent serving of buttery mashed potato alongside!
Chicken Casserole
Serves Two
Chicken pieces with bones (we used two thighs and two legs)
3 tablespoons flour (2 tablespoons to be mixed with the salt and pepper to make the seasoned flour, 1 tablespoon to be stirred in before the chicken is returned to the pan)
Salt and pepper
Oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 carrot, diced
250ml chicken stock
75ml white wine
2 sprigs thyme, chopped
4 sage leaves, chopped (optional)
Bay leaf
Coat the chicken in the seasoned flour. Heat the oil and brown chicken on all sides – about 10 minutes.
Remove the chicken and add more oil if necessary.
Add the onions, celery, carrot and garlic and cook slowly until soft – about 10 minutes.
Stir in the excess flour and cook out for a couple of minutes. Return the chicken to the pan, deglaze with the wine, add the stock and herbs.
Season and cook for one hour on a low heat.
Check for seasoning and serve.
It’s not easy to make this look attractive. We normally serve it on the bone but had a little time today while waiting for the mashed potatoes to finish cooking so stripped the meat and added it back to the liquid. It was easier to eat but still didn’t make it look very pretty unfortunately. It tasted good though which is the main thing.
Five Courses for Eight People
Last Saturday, Kerri and I cooked dinner for some friends; there were eight of us in total. We eventually came up with a five-course menu. Which could be called seven courses if you counted nuts and a little shot of watercress soup that we served between the starter and main course.
At some point we had decided that this sort of dinner was a good idea, and then the conversation had turned to wine. As these things often do, the result was a competition: old world vs new world. We would have two wines with each course – one old world and one new – and would vote which matched the food the best. So Kerri and I did some organising and preparation and then arrived at our hosts’ lovely house at 2pm to start preparations and cooking.
Due to a lot of rushing around and cooking and serving, etc, the pictures aren’t great, but do give an idea of what the food was like.
First up was smoked mackerel pate, served on a little piece of melba toast and a slice of prosciutto. These were inspired by something similar that we had eaten at the Bull and Last, except with the toast instead of soda bread; we tried both and our pate went better with the toast. These toasts didn’t turn out quite as melba-ish as we’d planned, but time was too short to start again. We had tried to find air dried Cumbrian ham to use instead of the prosciutto, but it was hard to find in London and ordering from a web site would have meant paying twice as much in postage as for the ham itself. These worked out very well and tasted great; they were served as pre-dinner snacks rather than as a formal course.
The Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc which was the new world wine choice went very well with these. The Donnhoff Nahe riesling which was the old world choice was really good, but wasn’t the best match for the food. 1-0 to new world.
Next up was the main starter. Slow roasted pork belly, which had been roasted at 140C for four hours. Afterwards we removed the skin and put it back into the oven to crisp up, which worked very well. That and the salting it the day before and pouring boiling water over it before cooking… we tend to take the crackling quite seriously! With this, pan-fried scallops and some lightly cumin-scented cauliflower puree.
The new world wine choice for this was Fromm Clayvin pinot noir – another New Zealand offering and a nice wine and went well with the pork belly. The old world wine was a white Chateauneuf du Pape from Domaine Chante Cigale which was a better match for the dish as a whole. 1-1 draw.
The quick between-courses course of watercress soup didn’t have a wine match with it.
Next up was “lamb two ways” which was a roast shoulder with garlic and rosemary, along with a pan-fried cutlet. The lamb was from Dorset and really good. We should have taken a picture of a neater plate for this dish though. The lamb was perched on top of dauphinoise potatoes, and was served with baby carrots and some green beans with hazelnuts. There was a sauce made from some of the rosemary-and-garlic lamb juices with mint and capers added to it.
The new world wine choice was Kanonkop Paul Sauer, a South African Bordeaux blend. This had a lovely nose and went very well with the lamb, the tannins balancing out the richness of the lamb shoulder and the potatoes. The old world choice was Fattoria le Sorgenti Gaiaccia which is an Italian blend in the “super Tuscan” style, i.e. traditional sangiovese blended with international grape varieties, in this case merlot. This also went very well with the lamb and developed some lovely savoury flavours in the glass that complemented the sauce. When voting on this course, it turned out to be a draw, with four votes each. So still on a draw overall…
Dessert was lemon posset with blackberries and shortbread. We had planned to make tuile biscuits to go with this but had failed in our attempts, so made shortbread instead, which worked out well.
New world wine was Essensia Orange Muscat from the USA, which almost matched the lemon, but had quite an orangey note to it that didn’t quite go. The old world wine was Chateau La Tour Blanche Sauternes, which was voted as the better match; its flavours and sweetness matched the lemon posset and its full body matched the creamy texture. Could only afford a half bottle of it though, sadly. 2-1 to old world.
The final course was a selection of British cheeses, which we sadly neglected to photograph. The cheeses were Stichelton (similar to Stilton, but made in a slightly different way to produce a fuller but gentler taste), Keen’s cheddar, a goat cheese that might have been Ragstone but I can’t remember now, and of course Stinking Bishop.
The new world choice was a Concha y Toro Carmenere from Chile, which went well with the cheese. The old world was a 20 year old Tawny Port, which I enjoyed but most people felt it was too sweet after we’d just had dessert wine with dessert. So the new world won that one, bringing it to 2-2 overall!
There was brief discussion of some sort of tie-breaker, but nothing really materialised. We had a really interesting range of wines across the board, and certainly some that we wouldn’t have chosen had we not been trying to match them up to something in particular. So a good job all round on that front and the draw was probably a fair outcome.
With two wines per course and five courses, there were of course a lot of glasses on the table:
Thai Style Mussels
Lately we have been cooking a number of different Thai dishes and happened to have some curry paste left over that we had made for the rabbit curry. We didn’t want to waste it, so we tried to think of something interesting to do with it. Kerri thought of using it to cook a Thai mussel dish, which sounded interesting, so we gave it a go. It went something like this:
Ingredients
2 or 3 tablespoons Thai curry paste (it probably doesn’t matter what sort)
half a tin of coconut milk
a bag of mussels of the sort that supermarkets sell in mesh bags
1 or 2 tablespoons of fish sauce
oil for frying
small bunch of coriander leaves, roughly chopped
First prepare the mussels. Examine them all and discard any that are broken or do not close when tapped. If they have “beards” on them, remove these and give them a good scrub.
Add a little oil to a large saucepan and heat. When the oil is hot, add the curry paste and fry, stirring occasionally. Season with the fish sauce, stir a little more, then add the coconut milk. When this has come to the boil, add the mussels and put the lid on. Cook for a few minutes, shaking occasionally, until the mussels have opened. Stir in the coriander leaves and serve. Discard any mussels that have not opened of course.
We loved this. With very little cooking, the coconut milk had taken on huge amounts of flavour from the paste, and a lot of this had gone into the mussels too. We just ate the mussels and then ate the coconut milk “soup” with a spoon. It would be good to have some noodles in this too to make a proper meal out of it.
Roast Bone Marrow with Parsley Salad, St John Style
While wandering randomly around a specialist food shop this afternoon and browsing the meat counter, I saw beef marrow bones. It can be hard to find these in today’s modern, fillet-steak-eating-and-offal-hating world and they immediately made me reminisce about the bone marrow salad that I once had at St John several years ago and keep getting flashbacks of. So I had to buy some. And parsley, because I remembered that parsley had featured in the dish.
So I got home, got out our copy of Nose to Tail Eating and thankfully the recipe was in there. It is simple in the extreme. Heat up the oven to quite high (we did ours to 200 which is as high as the stupid thing will go) and roast the marrow bones for 20 minutes. While this is going on, chop up your parsley. But not too much. The book says to chop it just enough to “discipline” it, which sounds a little risque. Then add a sliced shallot, a few capers and dress with a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil. Also make some toast.
When the marrow bones are cooked, serve them with the parsley salad, toast and some coarse sea salt. Spread some of the marrow on the toast, sprinkle with salt and top with the salad. The marrow is gooey and rich and the toast is crunchy, with the parsley adding freshness and the capers, shallot and lemon juice cutting through the richness. Delicious.
Lentils, Chorizo and Cabbage
After having a run of disasters in the kitchen over the past week, I thought I’d stick with something I knew well today in order to restore my confidence and prevent us from leaving the table feeling hungry or disappointed. We had about three quarters of a really good chorizo in the fridge which, combined with some lentils and crusty bread, made for a really hearty and satisfying dinner. This is a lot like the lentil ragu we eat a lot and which usually includes bacon, it’s also quite similar to a soup that Stephen made recently with beans instead of lentils. Basically, this combination of ingredients is incredibly versatile and can be used in many different ways; I wanted to use cavolo nero today but couldn’t find any locally so settled for savoy cabbage which worked well.
Lentil, Chorizo and Cabbage
Serves Four
Chorizo, cubed (about six inches, I didn’t weight it)
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
4 teaspoons paprika
1 tablespoon tomato puree
1 glass white wine
400g puy lentils
500ml chicken stock
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 bay leaf
3 sprigs thyme
Cook chorizo over medium to low heat until fat has been released and the chorizo is cooked through. Remove from the pan and reserve until later.
Cook onions on a low heat with a good pinch of salt until softened, about 10 minutes.
Add garlic and cook for a further two minutes.
Add paprika and stir thoroughly so that powder is incorporated. Add the tomato puree and cook for about a miute.
Deglaze with the wine and allow it to cook out for two to three minutes.
Stir in the lentils and ensure they are well coated with the rest of the ingredients. Add the chorizo back to the pan.
Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil, reduce to a simmer and cook for 45 minutes. Top up with water if necessary.
Just before you’re ready to serve, add the chopped cabbage to the pan and cook for about eight minutes.
Serve with crusty bread or stir through some pasta.
Cumin-Scented Chicken Curry
This evening we couldn’t really decide what to cook, so Kerri went through a few bookmarked recipes in her web browser and found this one. We mostly followed it, although we put in all the specified spices even though we only had a third of the chicken (and half of the onion and half the yoghurt). It turned out rather well and had just the right amount of spice (i.e. thrice what the recipe said), although it smelled very strongly of paprika (we used smoked paprika as we didn’t have sweet, although the recipe didn’t specify either) but luckily still tasted of cumin.
We were just thinking that we have been cooking a lot of Thai food lately and have a few really good Thai recipe books, so tasty as it was, it still seems wrong to cook an Indian dish from a recipe from the internets. Not to say that we haven’t found some really good recipes on the interweb in the past, it just feels like we should have some sort of proper “reference material”. So if anyone has a recommendation for a good Indian cookbook that we could cook a number of dishes from, please let us know. We do have our eye on one of Madhur Jaffrey’s books and might get that soon as a starting point.
I must admit that we do have Anjum Anand’s “Indian Cooking Made Easy” and have cooked a couple of recipes out of it. Having seen her on television since though, she is just far too irritating and we can’t face picking up the book again. Her recipes seem rather toned-down too; lots of putting in whole chillis and then taking them out later on instead of actually eating them. It gives the impression that she is trying to make it “palatable” (and of course marketable) to as wide an audience as possible and therefore pretty much pointless from a culinary interest perspective.
Spaghetti with Chorizo and Butternut Squash
This should have been good and, if I’d stuck to the recipe, then it would have been. Only, the recipe included tomatoes and I forgot them which meant the whole dish lacked something soft and almost liquid to bring it all together. I wasn’t going to post it but I like to keep the diary aspect of Dinner Diary accurate so here it is. I won’t bother with the recipe though because without the tomatoes it’s not worth doing.Â
When we do it again (and we will do it again because it has potential) then I’ll put it up.
Hawksmoor
It’s taken me a while to post this, mostly because it’s taken me a while to process the experience and deal with it. The Hawksmoor has long been regarded as one of the best steak restaurants in London and certainly my previous experiences of dining there have backed this up. A while ago, they introduced the burger to their lunch menu after a long period of researching the perfect recipe, supplier and method of cooking. Stephen and I both love burgers and have been patiently waiting for an opportunity to visit, knowing that if their burgers were anything like their steaks, then they’d be very good.
We went on Monday and were really disappointed. Possibly because we’d built it up so much in our heads but also because what we were served was undercooked and under-seasoned. We’re both big fans of the medium-rare burger but, unfortunately, this was verging on under-cooked. It was only when I got home and compared the picture with Helen and Niamh’s that I realised just how undercooked it was. Not only was the charring on the outside lacking but it was impossible to pick up and eat with our hands as the whole thing just crumbled.
In retrospect, we should have sent it back because I’m sure they would have been more than happy to rectify the mistake but we just didn’t realise until it was too late. Such a shame and hopefully just an off-day.
