Chilli
I’m still not completely happy with this, hence the re-appearance after only a couple of weeks as I try to perfect it. I think we need to replace our hot chilli powder as it’s probably quite old and also use more, fresh chilli. It definitely tasted better the next day so next time I’ll try to be patient enough to wait 24 hours!
4 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
500g lean minced beef
2 tbsp tomato purée
1 large red chilli, deseeded and chopped (leave seeds in next time or use two chillies)
3 tsp hot chilli powder
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp ground cumin
750ml beef stock
400g tin chopped tomatoes
2 tbsp cocoa
Salt and pepper
300g red kidney beans
(You’ll need to remember to soak the beans overnight. The kidney beans should be boiled rapidly for 30 minutes then rinsed thoroughly before being added).
Heat the oil in a pan. Add the onion with some salt and fry gently until soft (about 15 minutes). Then add the garlic and continue to fry for two minutes.
Next, add the mince and fry until browned. Now, add the chilli, tomato puree and spices and fry for a further five minutes, stirring often to incorporate the spices into the mince.
Add the stock, tomatoes, kidney beans and cocoa and season. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for two hours minutes until the meat is tender.
Spaghetti with Crab, Chilli and Rocket
Quite a while back we went through a phase of cooking crab and chilli pasta quite a few times. We haven’t done it for a while, but when we were wondering what to cook for a quick Saturday lunch on an almost-spring-like day just as we were passing a fishmonger, we popped inside to get some crab meat to try it again.
It’s quick to make; waiting for the spaghetti to cook is the longest part of it. While it was cooking, we fried some garlic and finely chopped chilli in a little olive oil. Then when the spaghetti was ready, we drained it and stirred in the garlic and chilli before flaking in the crab meat, adding some rocket leaves and finishing with a grind of black pepper, a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil.
It was nice but not brilliant and there was a little too much chilli which pushed the delicate flavour of the fresh crab into the background. We discussed just leaving the crab out next time and adding loads of parmesan cheese, since the general combination of the other flavours was good.
Salmon and Leek Fish Cakes
When I arrived home this evening, I was greeted by the lovely aroma of fish cakes cooking, which I find rather alluring in its combination of mashed-potato richness and poached-fish lightness. Then when they go into the oven, the fish aroma changes to roasted fish instead.
They were quite small and also contained leeks, which we think made them a little soggy. They were very tasty though, if not as firm as we’d have liked. Kerri had mixed some horseradish into the mashed potato too, which gave them a lovely mild background warmth. Served with some steamed cabbage, which wasn’t interesting enough to make it into the picture.
Pork Chops with Herbed Lentils and Mustard Sauce
We don’t eat pork chops a lot and when we do we stick to one or two favourites.
Tonight I thought I would try something different and decided on a mustard, cream sauce. We cooked the pork chops first and while they were resting, deglazed the pan with some sherry. Leave to bubble for a few minutes before stirring in some mustard and some double cream. The sauce had a touch of sweetness from the sherry but was balanced by the vinegary mustard. It was a really good contrast to the slight charring on the pork.
In an effort to break away from our usual mainstay of mashed potatoes, I cooked some puy lentils which turned out really well.
75g puy lentils
1 onion, diced
1 stick celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
Bay leaf
Rosemary
Thyme
Sage
Salt and pepper
125ml white wine
200 ml chicken stock
Start by covering the lentils in cold water and bringing them to the boil. Rinse and reserve.
In a separate pan, sweat the onion, carrot, celery and garlic with a bay leaf for about five minutes. Add the lentils and herbs and season.
Deglaze the pan with the white wine and leave to bubble for a few minutes.
Add the chicken stock, bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer for 25 minutes or until cooked.
The two dishes worked reasonably well together but weren’t a complete match, I think mashed potatoes would have been better but I’m really pleased with how the lentils turned out.
Green and Blue Wine and Chocolate Tasting
Last Thursday we were invited to Green and Blue for a wine and chocolate tasting along with Gourmet Chick, Food Stories, Cheese and Biscuits, Around Britain with a Paunch and Chocolate Chilli Cupcakes. Green and Blue is a wine shop, bar, deli and cafe in East Dulwich. Good principles are at the heart of what they do; they source their food as locally as they can and as responsibly and as ethically as they can and don’t slap too high a mark-up on it. We weren’t big fans of their light fittings, but were of pretty much everything else.
We arrived a bit early and tucked into a meat and cheese platter while we waited for the others to arrive. The ham was lovely; really good, tasty ham that had the sort of texture that makes you feel as though you knew the pig that it came from. I despise wet, mass-produced ham; dry ham with a proper meaty texture really excites me. Along with it was some bresaola and a couple of cheeses. One of the cheeses was an aged Wensleydale (much better than the boring supermarket version I’d had before) with a long-lasting flavour. The other I can’t remember the name of – it was white and soft and tasted slightly blue but didn’t have any visible mould and was very good too.
Anyway, on to the wine and chocolate tasting. I have had wine with chocolate only a few times before and the wine has always been fortified – Banyuls or Port in particular. Banyuls with a chocolate dessert is actually one of my long-lasting wine matching memories, but I haven’t tried wine with chocolate much since.
So it came as a surprise that none of the four wines that we tasted on Thursday were fortified. We started with light reds and light milk chocolate, then worked our way to a heavier varieties of both, before skipping back to white chocolate and white wine as the “dessert course”. All of the chocolate was Montezuma’s chocolate, which was very good indeed. The lady who ran the tasting was Kate Thal, one of the owners of Green and Blue, and her knowledge of wine is admirable, having been a sommelier in a previous life.
The first “course” was a light milk chocolate (I can’t remember the cocoa percentage) with a New Zealand Pinot Noir – Amisfield 2006 to be precise. This pinot is from Central Otago, which is a one of the coolest wine production areas in New Zealand, being particularly suitable to pinot noir. It wasn’t a shy flower of a wine though, being 14% alcohol but well balanced enough so that the alcohol did not seem overpowering. Although the area is cool, it still gets a lot of sunlight, which contributes to this high alcohol content.
According to Kate, this match is a bit of a “no-brainer” with a lot of people who come to do the wine and chocolate tasting. It didn’t resonate quite that way with us though; the chocolate and wine didn’t quite seem to marry up on the palate that well. To me the combination tasted a bit like a cherry flavoured chocolate, but you had to have a little chocolate, then a little wine, then a little chocolate, then a little more wine to bring that combination about. The wine was a good example of a New Zealand pinot noir, with a lot of fresh red fruit and just a hint of a savoury note with a touch of tannin to balance it.
Next up was a slightly darker (57%?) chocolate, served with a South African Merlot (Radford Dale 2005 Merlot from Stellenbosch). Along with the higher cocoa content in the chocolate, we got a higher tannin content in the wine. The wine was also more savoury, with leathery and coffee notes alongside the plummy fruit. This all worked out rather well and for most of us (including me), this was our favourite match of the evening.
Next up was a further step into the world of cocoa and tannin. The chocolate was a 73% dark chocolate and the wine was a Bandol from Provence in southern France. The depth of the chocolate with the tannin and depth of flavour in the wine went well together, but not quite as well as the previous pairing. This wine edged its way ahead of the Merlot for me and I enjoyed the chocolate the most, but the match between the two was slightly less successful.
Finally, we ventured onto white chocolate. This was probably a nicest white chocolate I’ve tasted; normally I refer to white chocolate as “solid fat”, i.e all cocoa butter and no actual chocolate content, but not this was certainly worthwhile and a good few steps ahead of mass-produced versions. The wine to accompany it was a Moscato d’Asti, which had a lovely floral and fruit nose from the Muscat grapes, along with a bit of sparkle. The wine is low in alcohol, slightly sparkly and tastes a lot like floral grape juice and isn’t to everyone’s taste. I have grown to appreciate muscat over the past few months as a result of my foray into fortified wines for my exam, and although this isn’t fortified and isn’t particularly to my taste, I can still appreciate it objectively.
For me, the match was along the lines of the first pairing – give it quite a bit of time and many nibbles of chocolate and sips of wine and you can get there. I got the impression that others thought it better than the first pair but not up to the standards of the middle two.
After the tasting, we were treated to a couple of platters of their deli specialties and along with the aforementioned meats and cheeses, there were some lovely almonds, olives, tarramasalata and pieces of smoked salmon wrapped around fennel. Delicious. The lovely olive oil that they serve is available to take away in your own bottles too.
So quite an adventurous evening; a foray into hitherto unexplored food and wine matching. At the same time, a great opportunity to chat to fellow bloggers and also to have a look at what Green and Blue are doing out in Dulwich.
Kate Thal, who was born in South Africa, mentioned their scholarship winner from South Africa who was working with them and it reminded me of an article I’d read about a London-based wine distributor running a scholarship program to bring over disadvantaged young people from South Africa who were interested in wine and showed great aptitude in it. I found a familiar-sounding article and it sounds like it is just what I remembered.
Braised Ox Cheeks with Mashed Potato
At the threat of angering our vegetarian readers even further (not that I realised we had any until today), today we cooked some ox cheeks.
I first saw ox cheeks in Waitrose a few weeks ago and had wanted to use them in a pie but they didn’t have any left when I went back to buy them. It’s taken me a while to track them down since and, having already satisfied our craving for pie, we decided to casserole them. Today actually felt much more like barbecue weather than the winter-warmer that is casserole but since we had been marinating these since last night we continued with our original plan.
We found this recipe which includes ox cheeks but paired with beef fillet. The recipe also called for the use of commercial vaccuum bags, litres of veal stock and a smoker, none of which we had so we ignored all of that and simply did the following, which is a cut-down version which turned out very well. There is still a requirement to marinate overnight though, which meant some forward planning. Also there is a the small matter of 3 and a half hours cooking time.
Ingredients:
2 ox cheeks
1 stick celery, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
a few peppercorns
375ml port
500ml red wine
1 litre beef stock
Pour the port, wine, celery, carrots, onion, bay, peppercorns and thyme into a large bowl. Add the ox cheeks, then cover and marinate in the fridge overnight.
Then remove the ox cheeks from the marinade and strain the marinade, keeping both the marinade liquid and also the vegetables and herbs. Heat some oil in a flameproof casserole or large, heavy-based saucepan and brown the ox cheeks all over. Then remove them and fry the reserved vegetables for a few minutes. When they are softened, add the marinade liquid and boil until it has reduced in volume by half. Then add the beef stock and the ox cheeks and bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer. Simmer for 3 and a half hours.
After this time, the ox cheeks should be really soft. Remove them and turn up the heat to reduce the cooking liquor. This took ages for us and didn’t thicken at all, so when it had reduced enough to concentrate the flavour a bit, we thickened it with some cornflour. After the waiting for the sauce to reduce, the ox cheeks were cold too, so we added them back into the sauce for a while to warm them back up before serving.
The ox cheeks were really good; the meat had a nice crust to it from the initial browning and the slow cooking meant they were meltingly tender. The sauce had a huge amount of flavour too considering there were very few ingredients used. The picture shows just one of the cheeks, we actually ate two between us although the second was smaller. A definite winner and would be perfect in a pie.
Halibut in a Cream and Saffron Sauce with Fondant Potatoes
You could call this a disaster, given that it didn’t turn out anything like we expected it to. It wasn’t brilliant but it was definitely edible and, with a little tweaking, could be a good dish.
We started off by making the fondant potatoes, using this Gordon Ramsay recipe. It’s quite a lengthy process and I’m not sure we got it completely right; the potatoes were cooked through but didn’t seem to take on much flavour from the stock. The texture was rather reminiscient of boiled potatoes which I found a little off-putting.
Next came the sauce which was straightforward: soften some shallots in butter for around three minutes, add some saffron and deglaze with dry sherry. Cook for about three minutes, add about a glass of wine, cook until the alchohol has evaporated, add a small pot of cream, some salt and pepper, some cayenne pepper and then keep warm until needed. At this point we added some cooked mussels (we couldn’t find raw), for decoration purposes really. Not entirely necessary as they didn’t add anything flavour-wise. Somewhere along the way, Stephen decided it was too thin so tried to thicken it with cornflour which turned it rather gloopy. The flavour was good though so I think the essence was right.
The fish was dusted with some paprika and salt flour before being fried for around 10 minutes. This was the best part of the dish, the fish was perfectly cooked and had a good crust thanks to the flour.
So, not a bad effort but sadly not perfect. We also forgot the vegetables which didn’t help.
Cannelloni
To my astonishment, it seems that it’s been almost a month since we last ate pasta. For a pasta lover like me this is practically unheard of and explains the craving I’ve had for most of the week.
A simple puttanesca or carbonara really wouldn’t have been fitting in these circumstances so I started thinking of dishes that required a little more time and energy. Lasagne was my first and obvious thought, it’s my favourite pasta dish and I particularly love the extra depth of flavour that the ragu takes on from baking in the oven.
I had a whole day to devote to cooking today though so decided to make the most of the opportunity and explore something new. I initially opted for a lasagne made with a veal ragu but sadly the butcher only carries Dutch veal which we both avoid.
After further consideration, I decided on cannelloni. We’ve only ever made spinach and ricotta cannelloni (although this early DD entry was based on a cannelloni recipe which, helpfully, I omitted) so I was keen to do a meat version and explore some different flavour combinations, settling on a combination of minced beef and pork.
Serves Four
Ragu
1 onion, finely diced
1 carrot, chopped
1 stick celery, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper
3 cloves garlic, crushed
700g minced beef and pork
Generous scraping nutmeg
2 tablespoons chopped herbs (I used sage, thyme, parsley and rosemary)
200ml beef stock
200ml Madeira
100ml milk
2 tablespoons worcester sauce
2 tablespoons tomato puree
Tomato sauce
Bechamel sauce
Cannelloni
Parmesan
To make the ragu, start by sweating the onion, carrot, celery and garlic with some salt and the bay leaves. I do this gently, with a lid on, for about 10 minutes – basically until it’s just about to start browning. Remove from the pan and set aside.
In the same pan, add a little more oil, add the meat, season and brown. When this is done, add the reserved ingredients back to the pan and combine. Season lightly with a little more salt and a generous twist of black pepper.
At this point, I’m not sure if it matters a huge amount what order the ingredients go in but I like to add the dry ingredients like the nutmeg and the herbs first so the meat can really absorb them. Then I’ll add the worcester sauce and the concentrated stock (unless you’re using fresh stock, obviously!) and allow the meat to suck up those up for a few minutes before adding the really wet ingredients.
So, if you’re using the same (non-scientific!) method, the next step is to deglaze with the Madeira (you could of course use wine or sherry) and allow it to bubble for about 30 seconds before adding the water (that makes up the 250ml of stock) and the milk.
At this point it looks like a huge amount of liquid and, as happened today, sometimes the milk will look as if it’s curdled. Don’t worry about the appearance; once it’s reduced down then everything will combine and you’ll be left with a rich, velvety sauce. I had plenty of time today so left the sauce to reduce down on a very low heat for four hours. I think if you’re using milk then it really needs this amount of time to combine properly and for the milk to properly tenderise the meat. Using milk makes a huge difference to the texture and I think it’s really worthwhile, if you don’t have that amount of time then it’s probably best to leave the milk out.
Tomato Sauce
The recipes I consulted varied drastically on the use of tomatoes; I love the combination of meat ragu, tomatoes, pasta and bechamel though so decided to include them. I used my normal method and chopped up six large tomatoes, added them to a saucepan with some oil and salt and cooked them down until I had the consistency I wanted. This took about half an hour – after about 20 minutes I added some tomato puree just to thicken slightly.
Bechamel
I use an all-in-one method for bechamel. There are plenty of other versions, the longer ones usually including bay and nutmeg but I didn’t think that was necessary today given all the other flavours that were going on. I’m also not very good at making proper bechamel and I know the all-in-one method works for me.
25g flour
40g butter
425ml milk
salt and pepper
Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan, stir continuously until the contents have come to the boil and thickened. Cook for a further three minutes.
Assembly
Luckily, Stephen was home by this point as this is really a two-person job. We blanched the cannelloni tubes in boiling water for four minutes before filling with the ragu sauce. This part is tricky but we improvised with a Ziplock back that had been snipped at the bottom, in place of a piping bag. The tubes were then layered in the bottom of the dish and topped with the remaining meat ragu and the tomato sauce. The bechamel sauce was then poured over the entire contents of the dish and topped with plenty of grated Parmesan before baking in the oven for 30 minutes.
That all sounds incredibly labour intensive but it really wasn’t, although it is very much a two-stage job. I cooked the ragu and made the tomato sauce this morning and then made the bechamel sauce and stuffed the pasta later on in the afternoon (with Stephen’s help). It could all be done reasonably far in advance and then left in the fridge until needed if you wanted to get ahead.
It’s definitely worth the time and effort although you’ll need plenty of patience as well. The smell of the ragu simmering away all day was glorious but a real testament to my willpower! As I said before, I’ve no idea how authentic this version is as the recipes I found varied so much, from the use of tomatoes to the combining of the ragu and bechamel before filling the cannelloni tubes. I simply took the elements I liked from each recipe and combined them to come up with this recipe. It worked out well though and we were both happy with the result, the ragu was intensely savoury from the herbs but the Madeira and nutmeg added a sweet note too.
Port, Sherry, Madeira, etc…
As part of my studying for the fortified wines module of my wine diploma, I’ve been tasting a fair number of fortified wines as you can see. The exam is tomorrow, after which a lot of these will be thrown away (some are empty or almost empty, some are past their best for having been open for too long and some are just rubbish) and only certain of them kept, so it seemed like a good time for a family portrait.
One of the interesting discoveries for me was Madeira. Not the cooking-quality Sainsbury’s Madeira at the front, but the decent examples behind and to the right of it – Sercial, Verdelho and Malmsey. Another wine that I had never tasted before is the lusciously sweet Rutherglen Muscat from Australia which is over on the right next to the comedy bottle of Commandaria.
Out of all that lot, the ones that I’ve bought normally in the past are the various dry styles of Sherry and maybe the occassional Port (the reason there is no Tawny Port in the picture is that is always disappears quickly and was recycled ages ago!). I might explore a few different types in the future once this lot is a memory 🙂
Chicken wrapped in Parma Ham
I wasn’t particularly excited about this but we had two leftover chicken breasts following yesterday’s green curry and were stuck for something else to do with them. I’d love to say that it turned out brilliantly but unfortunately it didn’t. We seasoned the chicken breasts with pepper and parmesan cheese before wrapping them in Parma ham and baking them in the oven for 25 minutes. They weren’t dry but just a bit dull, even with the parmesan and the ham it still felt like eating a boring chicken breast. The sauteed potatoes were good though.
