Casa Brindisa
It’s my birthday today and one of the wonderful presents I received from Stephen was a camera. We resolved to take more pictures of the food we eat in restuarants so we can post about it and today came the first opportunity.
We already have plans for dinner but as we were in the area it seemed foolish not to pay a visit to Casa Brindisa. We agreed not to eat too much and ordered a selection of food to share. Or so we thought.
First out was the ‘Regional Charcuterie Selection’ which included Teruel ham, loin, chorizo and Salchichon. As you can see from the picture, there was a lot of it but it was really tasty. The meats were all beautifully seasoned and full of flavour while remaining delicate and velvety in texture.
With this we had some ‘Aged Payoyo ewes cheese, special reserve’ which was similar in both taste and texture to Manchego but lighter and not as sharp. It went brilliantly with the meat selection.
We then moved on to some warm dishes: ‘Baby chicken and romesco sauce’ and ‘Iberico pork cheeks and butterbeans’. The pork cheeks were my favourite, it was hard to pick out the flavours but the sauce was rich and deep in flavour. We’ve made romesco sauce in the past but ours had a much finer texture than the one we had today which was coarse with lovely chunky pieces of almond in.
The waiting staff were lovely and the menu changes daily which means there will always be something new to try. The restaurant didn’t seem to have the same vibrancy as the original Brindisa in Borough Market and they served the wine in water glasses but, other than that, we had a really enjoyable lunch.
Pizza
Lasy year, we got into the habit of eating pizza fairly regularly on a Friday night so, when stuck for something to eat last night, it seemed natural to revert back to our old habits.
We didn’t really do anything exciting this time, just salami, peppers and mozarella but ran into some problems with the dough. It was too sticky which made it difficult to transfer onto the stone (hence the enormous crusts!) and we had trouble getting the yeast to rise.
For referecence (and in case you haven’t seen any of our previous 293 pizza posts) we use Jamie Oliver’s pizza dough recipe and make a simple tomato sauce by gently frying some cherry tomatoes with salt, pepper, basil and tomato puree until soft.
Chicken Tikka Wraps
We have cooked a few dishes from Anjum Anand’s Indian Food Made Easy lately, and tried another one this evening. I’ve taken to calling it Indian Food Made Irritating because of the pseudo-Nigellaness of her presentation style on her television programme. However, we have had a fair amount of success with the recipes in the book.
This evening we cooked Chicken Tikka Wraps, leaving out the cheese from the marinade. They were a little hard to wrap (probably due to lack of practice) but we got there in the end and they were tasty. The marinade did impart a lot of flavour to the chicken despite looking a bit pale, and the tomatoes and lettuce added freshness to it.
Smoked Haddock, Saffron Mussels and Mashed Potato
Last night on Masterchef, the “invention test” involved creating a plate of food from ingredients which included smoked haddock, potatoes and leeks. As usual, some of the contestants did a good job and had an opportunity to change their life and some didn’t. And as usual we started thinking of what we’d made with the same ingredients.
So this is what we came up with. We cheated of course, because there were no mussels in the ingredients that they had. Initially, we had planned for clams but couldn’t get any, so mussels it was. There ended up being loads of components to this and had we been doing it on Masterchef I’m sure we would have run out of time. There was also a lot of washing up. The various components were:
Poached haddock. Simply poached the haddock in half milk, half water, with a bay leaf, a shallot and a few peppercorns. Simple but tasty, especially when eaten with the mash and the sauce from the mussels.
Mashed potato with leeks. We chopped up the leeks fairly finely, then softened them in some olive oil, then sweated them for about ten minutes. We steamed some potatoes, let them dry out, them mashed them with some cream and salt and pepper before stirring in the leeks. It’s been quite a while since we have had cream in our mashed potatoes and it was delicious.
Mussels with Saffron Cream Sauce. This had a bit more of a recipe to it and I hope I can remember how we did it. This turned out very well, especially for something essentially made up on the spot. It went something like this, I think:
Ingredients:
3 medium shallots, finely chopped
1 glove of garlic, finely sliced
60 ml white vermouth (or dry white wine or dry sherry)
100ml single cream
small pinch saffron
salt and pepper
squeeze of lemon juice
1tbsp chopped parsely
olive oil for frying
6 large mussels or more small ones, or however many you like really
Method:
First discard any mussels that are already open and don’t close when tapped. If they have “beards” on them, pull these off and if they are muddy or dirty then give them a scrub.
Heat the olive oil in a saucepan (one that has a lid as we’ll need that later) over a medium heat and soften the chopped shallots and the garlic in it. We don’t want the shallots and garlic to brown or even go particularly golden, just to soften a bit; so if they start to colour then turn down the heat. After a few minutes, add the vermouth (or wine or sherry) and let it come to the boil for a minute or so.
Turn down the heat and add salt and pepper to taste and the small pinch of saffron. Be careful of adding too much saffron; I often do and it can be very strong. Then just a squeeze of lemon juice, stir, and add the mussels. At this point I added a dash of water too because the sauce was too thick, but you may not need to. Put the lid on and let the mussels steam for a few minutes until done, shaking the saucepan from time to time. They are done when they open and throw away any that refuse to open. Add some chopped parsley and give another shake to mix it in.
Then arrange the mash, haddock and mussels on the plate however you like, spoon over some of the sauce and enjoy!
Christmas Pudding Ice Cream Revisited
When doing some clearing out of our rather small freezer compartment, we found the leftovers of the Christmas pudding ice cream that we had made for our pre-Christmas dinner. We left it out for a bit to soften and then had some. It was still good and it struck me again just how much it tasted like Christmas pudding with custard. In fact it actually tasted rather like Christmas pudding with brandy sauce because there was so much brandy in the pudding itself.
Lasagne
My love of lasagne is well documented, probably the only reason we don’t eat it more regularly is that it takes such a long time to put together. I’ve been craving it for a little while though and thought it would be a nice meal for Stephen to come home to after his first day at work.
I use our bolognaise recipe to make the meat sauce and an all-in-one method for the white sauce. It’s time-consuming but once the sauce is made then it’s really just an assembly dish before baking in the oven for about 45 minutes. I accidentally made double so I think we’ll probably be having this tomorrow too. Shame!
Cobnut Meringues
We picked up a bag of cobnuts while we were in Kent over Christmas and so far have just used them sprinkled on salad. We wanted to do something with them that gave them more of a starring role and decided to use them in meringues – the added bonus being we could strike those off the “cook soon” list.
Stephen has had some success with meringue in the past but mine have always been a disaster, I got on with these while Stephen did the ironing and offered support from the background.
I like a chewy centre to my meringues and a little research suggested adding some cornflour and white wine vinegar to the mixture, I don’t know if that’s cheating or not but it certainly provided the desired effect. The meringues were crispy on the outside and deliciously chewy and marshmallow-like in the centre.
Originally I’d planned to sandwich them together with cream but they came out too large for that so instead we just had one each dipped into some cream flavoured with Amaretto liqueur and more crushed cobnuts.
Serves Four
50g chopped cobnuts (or hazelnuts)
135g caster sugar
2 egg whites
1/4tsp cornflour
1/4tsp white wine vinegar
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
Combine the cobnuts and 35g of the sugar in a pan on a medium heat until the sugar has caramelised and you are left with a sticky mixture. Remove from the pan, spread the mixture onto a tray and leave until cool. Once cooled, chop into smaller pieces.
Whisk the egg whites until they have formed firm peaks and then start to add in the sugar, a tablespoon at a time. Once all the sugar has been incorporated, add in the cornflour, white wine vinegar and vanilla extract and continue whisking until combined.
Fold half of the crushed nut mixture into the meringue with a spatula.
Spoon the meringue mixture onto a baking sheet lined with parchment and sprinkle a quarter of the remaining nut mixture on to the top of each meringue.
Bake at 140 degrees for 45 minutes. When cooked, turn off the oven and leave the meringues inside until they have completely cooled.
Serve on their own or with cream. We stirred the remaining quarter of nut mixture into some whipped cream flavoured with a splash of Amaretto liqueur.
Roast Beef
We’d talked about having roast beef on New Year’s Day but settled on chicken instead, neither of us had been able to get the idea of beef out of our heads though so decided to have it today.
Stephen went sale shopping today so while he was out I started the preparation. I like to coat the outside of the beef in a mixture of flour and mustard powder, it’s a Delia tip and one that works well. It helps to create a good crust on the outside of the beef and the mustard adds a peppery note. We have a surplus of shallots so I halved a couple of those and used them to create a base for the meat to roast on.
Yorkshire pudding is firmly a Stephen job but since he wasn’t here I got on with it, adding a teaspoon of horseradish to the mixture for a change. It leant another peppery flavour to the finished dish but was rather too subtle; we’ll double it next time.
The roast potatoes were roasted in a mixture of goose fat (there’s still loads left!) and vegetable oil, as much as I like the flavour the goose fat brings to the potatoes it can be a little over-powering and it also means the potatoes don’t crunch up as much as they usually do. This method was fairly successful, adding flavour and reasonably crunchy potatoes. I added some parsnips to the dish too.
We also had some savoy cabbage and used the James Martin method of sauteeing in butter and water, it worked well. The cabbage retained its bright green colour and was full of flavour.
Lastly was the gravy, most definitely Stephen’s domain. He was home from his shopping trip by this time and created a thick and tasty gravy by using the juices from the pan and the shallots the beef had roasted on mixed together with some red wine, a dash of port and some beef stock.
Sadly the beef was a little over-cooked but luckily it didn’t detract from the flavour too much. We both had seconds (Stephen may have had thirds actually) and ate in almost complete silence, a sure sign that we both enjoyed it 🙂
Panettone Bread and Butter Pudding
We were given a panettone for Christmas which we’ve been enjoying but they’re rather large for two people and as it’s been open for a little while we thought we would try and use it up in a different way. The obligatory Christmas leftover recipes in magazines always suggest using it instead of bread in bread and butter pudding so that’s what we did.
It’s not really a recipe as such but here’s how we did it in case you want to do the same, this serves two:
Slice the panettone and cut so that it fits into your dish. Layer it up, pour over custard and leave for about 15 minutes so that the custard soaks into the panettone.
Sprinkle with sugar and then bake at 180 for about 45 minutes.
We left ours to cool so it went very firm but still retained a lovely buttery texture and vanilla flavour. I think it would be at its best served warm with lots of leftover custard.
Thai Red Curry with Chicken and Vegetables
The peanut sauce we made on Wednesday required one teaspoon or red curry paste which seemed like a lot of mortaring and pestling for such a small amount. Luckily Stephen remembered that we’d bought some paste at Oriental City before it closed down so we used that instead. There was obviously lots leftover so we used last night’s remaining chicken to make a curry.
We followed the recipe we use for green curry, adding some peppers, baby corns, tomatoes and spring onions. It was good but not as spicy as our own paste. Certainly much quicker though.
