Puttanesca
There’s not much we can say about this that we haven’t said before and we toyed with the idea of not posting it at all but, given that this is a diary of our dinners, here it is.
We both got home late this evening and didn’t have any plans for dinner. This is very quick to make, doesn’t require any precise measurements and can easily be made from the contents of the kitchen cupboard. It never disappoints either. We ate it in front of Masterchef.
Chicken Casserole
We’ve not had this for a while, which is odd considering it’s so cold outside and this is perfect comfort food. It’s relatively healthy too which is appropriate as we are both trying to be more conscious about what we eat.
Stephen jointed a chicken yesterday and I used the carcass to make stock today, the chicken breasts are in the freezer for use at a later date.
We mostly stuck to the original recipe but left out the bacon (pesky healthy eating) and it was very good. I should have remembered to skin the chicken first though as it was slightly too oily and I think I prefer it with mashed potatoes on the side instead of potatoes cooked within the dish.
Chicken Casserole
Serves four
2lb chicken pieces with bones (skinned!)
2 tablespoons flour
Salt and pepper
Oil
125g lardons (optional)
2 medium onions, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, crushed
One large carrot, diced
500ml chicken stock
300ml white wine
4 sprigs thyme, chopped
Six sage leaves, chopped (optional)
Bay leaf
Two medium potatoes, chunked (optional)
If using bacon, start by browning until the fat has rendered and then remove from the pan.
Coat the chicken in the seasoned flour. Heat the oil and brown chicken on all sides (in batches if necessary) – about ten minutes. Deglaze the pan with some of the wine and reserve the juices.
Remove the chicken and add more oil if necessary.
Add the onions and cook slowly until translucent. Add celery and carrots and saute for a further five minutes. Add the crushed garlic and cook for a minute or so longer.
Stir in the excess flour and cook out for a couple of minutes. If you’ve used bacon then add that back to the pan. Return the chicken to the pan, add the stock, reserved juices, wine and herbs.
Season and cook for one hour on a low heat.
Check for seasoning, add diced potato (if using) and cook for a further hour (without lid if necessary to reduce liquid).
Check for seasoning and serve with extra vegetables and/or bread.
The Thai
As I mentioned at the start of the year, Stephen and I have resolved to post more about restaurants as well as food we’ve cooked ourselves. Last night, we went for a quick dinner at The Thai which has been open for a couple of months near where we live (I can’t find a homepage but there’s a restaurant in Ealing too).
We first visited just after Christmas and really enjoyed the food, I chose the green curry that time which I think is always a good test. Their version was a lot sweeter than I’d had before but it was good and pretty well balanced overall, plenty of creamy sauce which is important.
Last night, we both made slightly healthier choices. I chose the Pad Prik with beef and Stephen the steamed seabass. I enjoyed mine, again it was sweeter than I’m used to but it worked well with the intense heat of the chill and there was plenty of iti. Stephen’s was also good and came with a huge amount of interestingly flavoured broth and some tasty fermented soy beans.
We were only looking for something quick (both of us being keen to get home for Masterchef and Big Chef takes on Little Chef) and were impressed by the speed of the service. Very good value too, particularly for such large portions.
Shepherd’s Pie
As regular readers will know, lamb features regularly on the Dinner Diary menu. We’re both big fans and it’s a versatile meat. Simply fried with rosemary and garlic and served with sauteed potatoes, it’s a quick mid-week meal. Shoulder, cooked long and slow in a casserole is a wonderful treat on a wintery Sunday. Lamb mince however doesn’t fill me with such culinary joy.
We went through a phase of eating a lot of lamb kofte, trying different spice mixes until we got the seasoning just as we wanted. However, one fatal evening these lovingly prepared Turkish treats found their way from the freezer and into what was supposed to be an Italian style dish of (beef) meatballs with spaghetti and tomato sauce. The shock of tasting lamb when I was expecting beef and the clash of flavours put me off them completely and I haven’t eaten them since.
However, we recently had lunch at the Hinds Head in Bray which is owned by Heston Blumenthal. We were pretty certain that we would both enjoy the food (the famous triple cooked chips definitely lived up to their reputation as the best chips in the world) but neither of us expected to find a dish that would rank as one of the best we’ve ever eaten and, had I given it any thought beforehand, I wouldn’t have expected that dish to be Shepherd’s Pie. It was a joy to taste (sadly Stephen had ordered it while I opted for the steak so he got the lion’s share), the different cuts of lamb all leant different textures and the sauce was thick and full of sweet, earthy flavours.
Trying to create something similar at home was no easy task: lamb belly is hard to find and lamb shoulder generally comes in large pieces. We were almost lucky with the sweetbreads, the butcher assured us he had some but on arriving at the shop he realised they had already been saved for some other lucky shopper. So, what we ended up with was some lamb mince, neck fillet and kidney:
We started by seasoning the mince with salt and pepper. We then cut the lamb neck fillets into cubes, then skinned and cored the kidneys before cutting them into small cubes and then coating them and the neck fillet cubes in seasoned flour. We browned the meat in batches and then removing it from the pan. We deglazed the pan with some red wine and reserved those juices. Next in went the onion which we sweated off before adding the celery and carrot, last in was the garlic. When that was all cooked through, we returned the meat to the pan and added the rest of the ingredients.
The pan simmered away on a low heat for two and a half hours before we spooned it into an oven dish and topped with mustardy mashed potato. Into the oven so the potato could brown and served with a selection of vegetables.
I had some reservations about trying to re-create something that was so delicious and wondered if it would be best consigned to memory, I’m really glad we did though because this was a real triumph. Not exactly the same as the Hind’s Head version but rich and sweet and lamby nonetheless. We loved it.
Serves Four
500g lamb mince
150g lamb’s kidney, diced and dusted with seasoned flour
250g lamb neck fillet, diced
1 onion, finely diceed
1 large carrot, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
salt and pepper
1 sprig rosemary
1 sprig thyme
250ml red wine
Tablespoon tomato puree
500ml lamb stock
Tablespoon worcester sauce
100ml milk
1kg potatoes
Butter, to taste
Milk, to taste
1 tablespoon mustard
Liver and Bacon Mash
Having watched Masterchef again last night where two of the contestants cooked liver and bacon, we both really started to crave it. We had to give it a bit of a twist though, so we put bacon into our mashed potato rather than having separate rashers of bacon. You can’t see a lot of it in the picture, but it was definitely in there, along with a dollop of wholegrain mustard.
We simply coated the slices of liver in seasoned flour and pan fried them. For the gravy, we cooked some onions down slowly until they started to sweeten, then stirred in some flour before adding some red wine, beef stock and the smallest splash of red wine vinegar and simmered away for a while.
All in all it was a really tasty dinner, especially considering that two portions (i.e. four slices) of liver cost the princely sum of £1. So credit-crunch (bleah) friendly too.
Spaghetti with Anchovies, Chilli, Garlic, Brussels Sprouts and Walnuts
After quite a long run of successes and almost-successes, we were due for a dismal failure some time soon and this was it. In a strange series of coincidences, we had arrived at the idea for the dish by instant messenger conversation and had typed each of the ingredients at exactly the same time as the other had.
The main drivers were that we fancied pasta with something light on it, we had brussels sprouts that needed to be used up and we’ve had a lot of success with anchovies and chilli on pasta before. But looking at the ingredients list now, it looks like one of those very badly conceived Masterchef dishes where there is at least one too many ingredients and none of them really seem to fit together.
I managed to salvage mine by pouring sesame oil and soy sauce onto it and converting it into a pseudo-Chinese style dish, which seemed to suit it better. Kerri had crumpets.
Lamb Chops with Salsa Verde and Rioja Beans
I know, a big pile of lamb chops and a big pot of beans aren’t really on the strict path of the straight-and-narrow with regards to the healthy eating that we are trying to do over the next few weeks, but we need to ease ourselves in slowly. The beans were quite low in fat, so they did balance out the big pile of lamb chops to some degree.
The Rioja Beans recipe is from The Food of Northern Spain by Jenny Chandler. It’s a traditional dish that is made shortly after the bean harvest and should contain fresh pocha beans. But we used dried haricot beans, so not very authentic. Also, we added some unspecified vegetable stock and tomato puree to give it a little extra flavour, which worked well. Apart from the beans, it contains green pepper, red pepper, onion, garlic, carrots, tomato and paprika.
The lamb chops were simply seasoned with salt and pepper and then pan fried. We just made the salsa verde by whizzing up some anchovies, capers, parsely, mint and lemon juice and didn’t follow a recipe. We didn’t quite get the ratios right though; next time we’ll look for the recipe that we’ve used before.
Chicken and Braised Lentils
Today marks the first day of our new, healthier eating plan. To ease the pain, we spent some time with our cookery books over the weekend and came up with some interesting, low-fat options.
Stephen bought me Skye Gingell’s “A Year in my Kitchen” for Christmas, a book that’s been on my wishlist for a while. The braised lentil dish is one that stood out on the first read; I really like puy lentils but don’t use them very often because I’m never really sure what to do with them. The lentils, combined with the simple chicken (the healthy-eater’s favourite) seemed like a winner for our first day and, conveniently, we had everything we needed….or so we thought.
The lentils were easy to cook but took longer than the recipe stated. I’m not sure whether it was purposefully or not but there was no instruction to season the lentils while cooking. I’m glad I checked because, despite the other ingredients (garlic, ginger, chilli, parsley, coriander root, onion, carrot, bay leaves), after 20 minutes of cooking there was very little flavour happening.
The next step was to add soy sauce, sherry vinegar and sesame oil. I did so and then left the lentils to soak up the flavours while we cooked the chicken. These added ingredients certainly helped to impart some much-needed flavour but I wasn’t entirely sure about the combination. The sherry vinegar added warmth but the soy sauce and sesame oil seemed harsh against the other, very subtle flavours.
At this point it all went a bit wrong. The idea behind the lentil dish is that it’s a “toolbox” recipe, something you have in your fridge and can use with other ingredients…like the chicken. We were supposed to add some chicken stock to the lentils but forgot. We were also supposed to use other “toolbox” dishes to compliment the chicken and lentils but we didn’t. They were oven-dried tomatoes (I realised too late that I didn’t have any tomatoes and it was raining), basil oil and garlic aioli. We’d already decided to skip the oil and aioli in order to maximise the healthiness which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake. We did re-hydrate some sundried tomatoes and used those instead which worked OK but I can see how the oven-dried tomatoes would have improved the dish; the chicken stock would have made the dish less dry too.
So, all in all, not a great start to the plan. This does have potential though and we may re-visit it at some point, taking care to remember the stock and the tomatoes.
Roast Pork and Crackling
For our last day before some healthy eating begins, we decided on roast pork. Kerri poured boiling water over the skin before roasting it and then rubbed it liberally with salt, resulting in sublimely crisp crackling that didn’t even need to go back into the oven after the pork was done.
The meat itself was tasty and succulent. We took it out of the oven shortly before our meat thermometer got to the pork setting, because we wanted to make sure it didn’t dry out. It worked well; it was cooked all the way through but not at all dry. We roasted potatoes in a mixture of goose fat and vegetable oil, which we have tried before with varying levels of success, but this time they worked really well. We also had gravy, stuffing (a simple but very tasty one with breadcrumbs, onion, sage and seasoning), brussels sprouts and kale.
All in all, a very successful dinner!
Ginger Cake
Having a birthday is a good excuse to make a cake. I made this on Friday and left it for a couple of days before eating to mature. That sounds incredibly restrained, the reality is that there just wasn’t any time to eat it before today!
I found the recipe online but couldn’t find the treacle when I came to make the cake (Stephen of course found it within seconds of arriving home) so substituted it for golden syrup. I toyed with the idea of making lemon icing this morning but I don’t really like icing so didn’t bother.
It was a good cake for so little effort but I can see how the treacle would have improved it.
Recipe below, it was probably the easiest cake I’ve ever made, which is a good thing for a baking doofus like me.
350g self raising flour
225g caster sugar
1 egg
3 teaspoons ground ginger
100g soft, unsalted butter
3 tablespoons black treacle
1/2 teaspoon bicarb
2 tablesponns milk
225ml boiling water
Put all ingredients into a bowl and mix until combined.
Pour into a 2lb loaf tin.
Cook until skewer comes out clean – 50 mins in 2lb loaf tin.
Leave to cool before removing from tin.
