Spaghetti Carbonara
Having spent most of the day in the kitchen yesterday, today we wanted something quick and easy that didn’t create lots of washing up. Stephen suggested carbonara so, after a quick dash to the shops for some eggs, we put this together in about 20 minutes. You do need good bacon though as there are so few other ingredients, we used lardons from Waitrose that are usually pretty good but weren’t brilliant this time. Next time we’ll put up with the extra washing up and chop up our own.
Pasta
1 packet lardons
2 eggs
1 small carton single cream
Parmesan
Salt and pepper
Put the pasta on to boil and fry the bacon until the fat has rendered. Combine the eggs and the cream with the parmesan and season with salt and pepper.
Drain the pasta, add the bacon and the cream and egg mixture. Combine and eat.
Thai Green Papaya Salad, Mackerel Braised with Green Papaya, and Pork and Green Bean Red Curry
The title is a bit of a mouthful, but it needs to be to cover everything that we ate. We have been on a bit of a Thai theme for a few weeks now and it culminated in dinner with friends last night. One of the big points about Thai menus is that they should contain a number of dishes that complement each other and can be served together, so we deliberated over this for quite a while and eventually came up with these three dishes. Curiously enough, we have never cooked with green papaya or with dried prawns before, and each dish contained at least one of these ingredients.
We started with some prawn crackers of course, while we finished off the cooking…
The green papaya salad had as its base a lot of green papaya obviously. Tasting it plain, it doesn’t taste like very much. There is a just-detectable taste of papaya, but it seems closer to a firm but bland cucumber in character. When mixed with other flavours though, it does combine very well and absorb a lot of flavour, transforming it. We shredded ours using the julienne sized setting on our mandolin and it did look rather like noodles when all mixed together.
To make the dressing, we made a paste from dried shrimp (which we boiled quickly first as the instructions on the packet said to cook them), garlic, peanuts and chillis. To this paste we added lime juice, palm sugar, fish sauce and tamarind water, mixed it all up well and then dressed the shredded green papaya with it. We added some chopped cherry tomatoes and blanched green beans to it to add some colour and then served it on lettuce leaves. The flavours all worked together to give a well balanced salad with a slightly crunch to it and the exotic edge of involving two ingredients that we haven’t used before.
The braised mackerel was a very interesting dish, and different to most other Thai food we have cooked. The recipe is from Thai Food which we use often and the author points out that Thai people would boil this until the flavours were correct, but that tends to make the fish tough, so he prefers to braise it gentle over a couple of hours. So we braised it.
Ingredients
1 small to medium mackerel whole or filletted (we actually used two medium to large whole mackerel without increasing any other quantities in the recipe and it worked out well)
lime juice
salt
3-5 long red or green chillis (we didn’t have long ones, so just used two birds eye chillis)
10 slices galangal
2 stalks lemongrass
5 thick slices ginger
2 coriander roots, scraped
5 red shallots, peeled
5 garlic cloves, peeled
5 pods fresh tamarind or 4 tablespoons tamarind pulp
1 very small green papaya
2-3 cups stock or water (usually chicken stock in Thai cooking, but I imagine that fish stock would go well in this dish)
4 tablespoons palm sugar
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoons coarsely ground white peppercorns
Garnish:
3 red shallots, finely sliced
1 tablespoon coriander leaves
pinch of ground white pepper
First gut and/or fillet the mackerel if it has not already been done. Wash the fish very well and rub it with the lime juice and salt, then rinse again and pat dry. This removes any loose bits which would cloud the stock.
Bruise the chillies, galangal, lemongrass, ginger, coriander roots, shallots and garlic in a mortar and pestle and set aside. Peel the green papaya and cut into 1-inch square pieces. Bring the stock to the boil in a flameproof casserole, then add tamarind, palm sugar, soy sauce, fish sauce and white pepper. When this is dissolved, add all the bruised aromatics and the papaya and simmer for several minutes. Add the mackerel and some water to cover it, then bring it back to the boil, cover it and put it into the oven for two hours at just 80 degrees Centigrade. This will ensure that it does not quite boil and will gently braise the fish. If you don’t have a flameproof casserole, prepare the stock in a saucepan and then pour it into a casserole with the fish when you are ready to put it into the oven.
When it is ready, serve in a bowl or deep platter sprinkled with the shallot and coriander garnish and with some of the cooking liquid poured around it. The white pepper gives it a pungency and the aromatics penetrate the fish very well over the long cooking time, giving it a lot of flavour. The green papaya also soaks up loads of flavour and is a treat just on its own. The broth itself is very well flavoured too and can be eaten as a soup. In fact I am planning to add some noodles to the left over broth and have it for lunch soon. All in all a winning dish. Apologies for the rubbish photograph though…
The pork and green bean dish is one that we have cooked before and we loved it then and loved it this time too. The paste contained 15 dried red chillis, which gave it a fair amount of heat. We didn’t use the dried prawns in the paste last time though and from that post it didn’t look like we substituted with anything either. The prawns were a real pain to crush into a paste; I should have chopped them first instead of just throwing them into the mortar and pestle whole.
The three dishes were all quite different in style and complemented each other well, especially seeing as they had some ingredients in common. We served them with some jasmine rice and some steamed pak choi.
Lamb Cutlets
Lamb chops, steamed broccoli and some roasted butternut squash. The lamb was good, crunchy on the outside and perfectly pink in the middle. The butternut was roasted for quite a while but stayed quite soft and the spices we roasted it in (left over from last week’s oxtail) didn’t work very well. The broccoli was steamed and past it’s best but needed using up. Not very interesting, not very cohesive and not enough of it. This is what happens when you’re hungry, tired and haven’t planned your dinner properly.
Rabbit Ragu with Pappardelle
As Stephen mentioned yesterday, we planned this dish when we knew we would be in receipt of a rabbit which meant we could start the preparation while cooking yesterday’s dinner. After removing the meat we needed for the curry, we were left with the bones and the legs; the bones went into the stock pot and we decided to add the legs too so that the meat would be cooked and ready for tonight. Once the leg meat was tender, we removed them from the stock, shredded the meat and threw the bones back into the pot to continue cooking.
We made a simple ragu by frying onion, celery, garlic and carrot which we deglazed with a glass of white wine before adding the rabbit stock, some tomatoes, tomato paste, herbs, salt and pepper and some milk. In went the rabbit and there it sat for about three hours until the whole lot had reduced and thickened.
After about an hour, I tasted it and it was too sweet. I’d forgotten that we had sundried tomato puree which is a lot sweeter than ordinary and I’m not sure the carrot helped either. I added some Worcestershire sauce and a little more salt which helped to balance it but it wasn’t perfect.
We didn’t have any parsley so chopped up some rocket instead which worked quite well, not so much that it over-powered the flavour of the rabbit but just enough to lift the dish. Just before serving we added a drizzle of truffle oil which added another flavour level and further addressed the sweetness issue.
It was good and we both enjoyed it but not as much as the ragu we made last year which didn’t involve tomatoes (and was one of our favourites of 2008). There’s another rabbit waiting for us in my mum’s freezer though so we can hopefully re-visit that dish soon.
Thai Rabbit Curry
Last year when we visited Kerri’s mum one weekend, she had bought a rabbit for us really cheaply. When she recently asked if we wanted another one, we of course said that no, we wanted two. So we picked them up this past weekend. As we have a tiny freezer, we left one there and brought the other home to eat this week.
Based on past experience, we figured that we should be able to get two dishes out of one rabbit. We had a good idea about what we were going to cook for one of them, but were struggling to think of what to do for the other. While I was paging through Thai Food looking for something to cook over the weekend, I happened across a rabbit curry recipe which seemed like an excellent idea.
Coincidentally, last night we had watched a Masterchef The Professionals episode on iPlayer and the contestants had been set the task of jointing a rabbit. I don’t think any of them managed to do exactly what Monica the mouthy sous chef had asked, but then they didn’t actually show any footage of her explaining what she wanted, so it was a bit confusing. Bad editing. Or maybe they left that bit out on purpose so that they could fit in a bit more shouting. I think most of them managed a passable attempt at removing the legs, which I managed too, and then they removed the fillets from the body which I don’t think is what she wanted because she had said that she wanted five pieces rather than six. Anyway, I went with the fillet removal because it seemed like it would be easier to mince the meat afterwards, which is what our recipe required. We don’t have a mincer, so I chopped it very finely with a knife, which took quite a while and didn’t mince it as fine as a mincer would have, but it was good enough.
This is a curry in which the paste is dissolved simply in boiling stock rather than being fried first. It is a simpler and less refined method than the fried curries, but is versatile and still produces a satisfying dish. They are popular in the northern region of Thailand. This particular curry can be adapted to include almost any meat or fish and any green or leafy vegetable, preferably one that is slightly bitter. As the main recipe included rabbit and we had rabbit, that is what we did.
For the paste:
6-12 dried long red chillies, deseeded, soaked and drained
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons chopped lemongrass
1 tablespoon scraped and chopped coriander root
1 teaspoon chopped red turmeric
2 tablespoons chopped krachai
2 tablespoons chopped red shallots
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 teaspoon shrimp paste
Make the paste in the usual way by pounding all the ingredients together in a mortar and pestle (or use a blender…). Start with the hardest, driest ingredient and a little salt, pound it until it is broken down, then add the next hardest ingredient, etc, ending with the softest one. This can be a long process and you’ll see by the little red bits of chilli floating in our soup that I didn’t quite get ours as fine as I should have.
Then for the curry:
3 cups stock (the recipe says it should ideally be made from the rabbit bones, but we didn’t have time to do that and used some home made chicken stock instead)
pinch of white sugar
2 tablespoons fish sauce (the recipe suggests using fermented fish sauce (nahm pla raa) if you can find it, which is more pungent than the regular fish sauce (nahm pla) but we couldn’t find any)
1 bunch Chinese broccoli, cut into 1cm lengths
1 cup minced rabbit meat
Bring the stock to the boil, then season with the sugar and most of the fish sauce. Dissolve 3 tablespoons of the paste into the stock. Add the broccoli and let it boil for several minutes until the colour begins to fade – the slight bitterness will improve the curry. (Obviously if using spinach or other leafy vegetable here instead then don’t cook as long) Add the meat, stirring to prevent it clumping and cook until it has just changed colour. Taste and season with the rest of the fish sauce if necessary, then leave it to stand for five minutes before serving.
It was really tasty, with the shrimp paste giving a lovely earthy flavour to it which mingled well with the heat from the chillis and the aromatics from the other ingredients in the paste. And all that flavour without any coconut milk, which means it probably had half the calories of yesterday’s dinner. I think we cooked our meat for longer than the recipe intended as it was slightly tough, but it was still easy to eat as it was in small pieces and gave an interesting texture to the dish.
Thai Prawn Soup Again
We were planning on cooking moules mariniere tonight, but neither of the shops that we visited had mussels, so we scrapped that idea. Then we thought we would do some sort of spaghetti with prawns, so we bought some prawns. When it came to discussing exactly what sort of “spaghetti with prawns” we would have, we strayed from that plan too and decided to have a Thai style soup with rice noodles, similar to Nigel Slater’s one that we cooked recently.
However, we didn’t have all the ingredients that we used last time so just made it up as we went along. We didn’t have lemongrass, but gave it a lift with a squeeze of lime juice and some lime leaves. Also, we played around with the method and did it more like we usually do our green curry – cook the thick part of the coconut milk until it splits, fry the paste in that, season it with fish sauce, and then add the rest of the coconut milk and simmer. It turned out rather well; next time we fancy something similar we will probably just make it up completely rather than follow a recipe at all.
A Tale of Two Roasts
We spent the weekend at my mum’s in Kent and, knowing that we had a busy day ahead, decided on slow roast shoulder of lamb for Sunday’s lunch. One of the great things about this dish is that it cooks on a low heat for a long time which gives you plenty of time to get on with other things.
We eat this a lot and usually serve it with the caper and mint sauce, this time we decided to make a simple gravy from the cooking juices and serve it with roast potatoes. We did stud the lamb with some whole anchovies this time but should have cut them up as, even though the meat cooked for three hours, the anchovies stayed rather large.
One of the not so great things about this dish is that the whole house inevitably ends up smelling like lamb which can be painful when you have to wait so long before you can actually eat it. By the time the food arrives at the table you generally end up eating far too much and can’t move very well by the time you’ve finished. We got over this in the traditional Sunday fashion though, by laying on the sofa watching James Bond until it was time to head home, via a friend’s house for a cup of tea.
We thought our friend’s were out when we arrived as there was no answer at their door. The reason there was no answer is because J had found an old CD and was busy listening to the Pet Shop Boys at high volume while he prepared their dinner of roast beef. Unable to just stand back and drink our tea while there was action happening in the kitchen, Stephen and I quickly armed ourselves with various knives and peelers and leant a hand. It was at this point that J said we should stay for dinner. Still completely full of lamb and not wanting to intrude, we declined and continued to do so until J suggested he and Stephen went for a traditional Sunday-night pint at the local. Then he produced a selection of very interesting wine and told us they had plenty of food for a mini-roast for the two of us. A quick call to my mum to tell her we would be back later and off they went to the pub while the other J and I stayed behind to keep an eye on the dinner.
So, about four hours after we’d eaten roast lamb for lunch, we sat down to a (mini) roast beef dinner*. None of us could think of a time we’d eaten two roasts in one day and, as lovely as they both were, I don’t think we’ll be doing it again any time soon. We did all think a whole day of roast dinners, starting with breakfast, was a good idea though so who knows, we could make it to three next time.
*The picture above is not the mini-roast Stephen and I ate, our portion was much more restrained.
Sausage Pasta
Neither of us felt very inspired when it came to Friday night’s dinner and there wasn’t much to work with in the cupboards or fridge either.
Having found some sausages in the freezer we excitedly considered sausages and mashed potatoes or toad in the hole but we didn’t have any eggs or potatoes, it was late and we were hungry. What we did have was spaghetti so we ended up with sausage pasta which wasn’t particularly pleasant but was our own fault really for being so disorganised and lazy.
I could type up the method we followed but I wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally eat this when they could be eating toad in the hole instead so I’ll leave it.
Thai Muslim Oxtail Soup
Kerri was out having lunch with a friend today and I volunteered to find something for dinner. After all the soup that we have been eating lately, Kerri said that she wanted something quite hearty and not soup-related for dinner today. I set to work looking through the excellent Thai Food by David Thompson, which has loads of little bookmarks sticking out of it to remind us of dishes that we thought sounded good. One of these was the Muslim oxtail soup. Only once I had planned everything for it did I realise that oops, it was soup again. Regardless, I was sure that it would be hearty and would try to make it thicker, into more of a stew than a soup.
I bought an oxtail at Sainsbury’s; they sold all the pieces of one whole tail tied up together with string, which I thought was an interesting way of doing it. And there was one that was just a little larger than the amount that we needed, which was convenient. As it needs four hours to cook and quite a lot of preparation beforehand, I set about the task well ahead of time.
This recipe is from the south of Thailand, where many dishes are heavy influenced by the proximity to Malaysia. After the recent discussion on how common turmeric was in Thai food, I can confirm that this one definitely includes it because I managed to turn a lot of the kitchen yellow with it. The dish is made using a curry powder rather than the pounded paste that is used in so many Thai dishes. I made half of this recipe and it served three of us quite well, with a little left over. The quantity of curry powder seemed to be double what the recipe actually needed.
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
3 tablespoons coriander seeds
3 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 tablespoon cloves
1 tablespoon fennel seeds (I thought we had these but we didn’t, so I used a small piece of star anise instead)
20 Thai cardamom pods (I just used green cardamom)
15 long pepper – optional (I didn’t use these)
3 tablespoons chilli powder
2.5 tablespoons ground ginger (or 5 if you are using your own home-dried ginger)
3.5 tablespoons ground turmeric (or 7 if you are using your own home-dried turmeric)
Briefly dry fry the whole spices, then grind and combine with the powders. Sieve the mixture to get rid of any husks or bits that weren’t ground small enough. This powder was lovely and aromatic, and as I said above, we only used half of it, so we have kept the left over powder and will try to find another use for it.
3 kg oxtail, cut into pieces
5 white or brown onions, chopped
5 cups ginger water (details on this below)
pinch of salt
a few chillies (bird’s eye if you can get them), to taste
pinch of ground white pepper
1 tablespoon chopped coriander leaves
3 tablespoons deep-fried shallots
lime wedges (I completely forgot about these actually… just realised now!)
Start by blanching the oxtail twice from a cold water start, rinsing it in between and replacing the water. This cleans the meat and reduces the cooking time, which is good because it is still rather long. While you are doing this, make the ginger water too. Chop up and bruise some ginger, then add it to some water with a little sugar and bring to the boil, then simmer for several minutes. These two steps and making the curry powder do lead to quite a long prep time for this recipe.
When that is all done, add the onions and the blanched and rinsed oxtail to a large pot. Add 4 heaped tablespoons of the curry powder, the ginger water and salt. Add some more water to cover the oxtail, bring to the boil and simmer for 3 to 4 hours. Skim occasionally, and I found that I had to top up the water every now and then to ensure that the oxtail remained covered.
This bit is optional, but it is what made this richer and heartier: Remove the cooked oxtail from the liquid and let it cool, then pick the meat off the bones. The recipe said that the onions should have been completely dissolved by this point, but they weren’t so I sieved the stock and then pushed the onions through the sieve, then mixed it all back up together with the picked-off oxtail meat.
Season with the chillies, pepper, coriander and deep-fried shallots, and serve with lime wedges on the side. Of course, we didn’t have the lime wedges because I forgot. I imagine that a squeeze of lime juice would have balanced out the rich flavour well. It was indeed rich and hearty and was more like a stew than a soup. And Kerri really enjoyed it, which was the main thing!
It seems a little boring in comparison, but we had a simple cucumber salad to start, which was simply dressed with coriander leaves, fried dried chilli, Schezuan peppercorns, salt, sugar and rice vinegar. Having had the pomelo salad recently, we decided always to try to have some sort of simple, refreshing salad when we have time to prepare it.
With the “soup” we drank a New Zealand Gewurtztramminer which was off-dry and lovely and fruity and aromatic and went with it very well.
Sweetcorn Chowder
As a child I used to love the sweetcorn chowder that my mum cooked and when she made it, I usually ate it until I was too full to move. Kerri and I have been in soup-making mode lately and the topic of sweetcorn soup came up, so I was keen to try sweetcorn chowder. Whenever I think of chowder I am reminded of a Simpsons episode (part of the brilliant Season 5) where Mayor Quimby’s son takes exception to the way a French waiter pronounces “chowder” and an argument ensues. Which of course means that I almost always pronounce it in the “French” way now, just to be silly.
I always think of chowder as containing potato, which many of them do but it isn’t mandatory – some are thickened with crushed crackers or biscuits. We stuck with potato though. Traditionally, bacon or pork fat is fried in the pot first in order to release fat to enrich the soup but we fried ours separately and then removed it from the fat and added it in at the end in the name of reducing calories.
My mum did actually write down her recipe for me, but we didn’t follow it very closely on this occasion as we found a Gordon Ramsay recipe that looked interesting, so combined the two and made use of what we had at hand. Gordon Ramsay’s recipe actually included crab which we didn’t have. Just after I had added the ginger and cinnamon, we figured that the reason that they were in there was to go with the crab. Too late by then of course, but they did work well and gave the soup and gentle spicy warmth.
Milk is often used in chowder, but we had some crème fraîche that we needed to use up, so we added that along with some weak chicken stock instead. My mum’s version uses creamed corn, which melts in to the soup and gives everything the flavour of corn, whereas we used fresh corn kernels which had a nice texture to them, but their taste didn’t blend into the rest of the soup. Next time we’ll blend / purée at least half of the corn and leave the rest of it whole as a balance between the two styles. We didn’t have any leeks, but they would have been good in this.
Our recipe:
2 tbsp olive oil
2 small onions, finely chopped
1 large garlic clove, crushed or finely chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
2 large potatoes, about 600g, diced
½ tsp celery salt
½ tsp dry English mustard
Pinch of ground cinnamon
Pinch of ground ginger
1 bay leaf
2 sprigs of thyme
Salt and pepper
700ml chicken stock
250ml crème fraîche
200g sweetcorn kernels
Parsley, chopped
Pancetta or small slices of bacon
Sauté onions for 4-5 minutes until they begin to soften and become translucent. Add the garlic and celery, stir well and cook for another 3-4 minutes.
Add the potato, celery salt, mustard, cinnamon, ginger, the bay leaf and the thyme leaves and season with salt and pepper. Stir and cook for 3-4 minutes, then pour in the chicken stock and crème fraiche. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for about 15 minutes until the potatoes are tender.
While the liquid is simmering, fry the pancetta and set aside.
Add the sweetcorn and simmer for 2-3 minutes until the corn is tender. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. Stir in parsley and serve topped with pancetta.
