Barley Risotto with Root Vegetables
Looking at our “this week last year” list, there is only one entry this week – Scotland. Because that’s where we were on holiday last year. A quick browse through the pictures revealed ballotine of pheasant with barley risotto. I remember that barley risotto as being rather good, but it was normal (i.e. rice) risotto with some barley added to it. We decided to try one that was only barley.
Ingredients:
150g barley
1 medium onion, finely diced
1 stalk of celery, finely diced
1 carrot, diced (not quite as finely as the onion and celery)
1 parsnip, diced (same size as the carrot)
2 gloves of garlic, crushed or finely chopped
herbs – we used the leaves from several stalks of thyme, but sage would be good too
1 bay leaf
125ml white wine or vermouth
500ml chicken stock
parmesan cheese
This is cooked in much the same way as a normal risotto, except that it took a bit longer to cook. Add some oil to a saucepan, over medium heat, and add the celery and onion and soften. After a few minutes, add the carrot, parsnip, bay leaf and other herbs. Stir a little, season with some salt and pepper, then turn down the heat and put the lid on the saucepan to let the vegetables sweat. After a few more minutes, add the garlic, stir, and leave to sweat for a few more minutes.
Meanwhile, heat up the stock in another saucepan. Now turn up the heat and add a little more oil if it has dried out. Add the barley and stir. We found that it didn’t start to go translucent in the way that rice does, but after a few minutes it did start to brown a little. At this point, add the wine and stir until it has almost all boiled off. Turn down the heat and add a ladle of stock. Stir until it has almost all been absorbed, then add some more. Keep going until the stock is all incorporated. If the barley is still not cooked after adding all the stock, then keep adding water until it is cooked.
Stir in some grated parmesan, check for seasoning, and serve. This didn’t seem like that much when we served it, but it was very filling and did feed us both quite well.
Slow Roast Pork Shoulder
I know, it looks dry doesn’t it? It was a little dry but not quite as bad as the photograph suggests. We didn’t follow a recipe for this and really should have as it didn’t turn out as well as it could have.
We slow roasted the pork on top of some vegetables for six hours. What we should have done is slow roasted it and added the vegetables for the last hour, then we would have been able to make some really good gravy. As it turned out, the vegetables burnt and dried out so we had to throw them away and make the gravy from scratch which wasn’t as good as it could have been.
We didn’t even have any crackling to make up for it because we felt a little disillusioned by the time the pork was cooked and ended up throwing the potentially crisp and juicy skin away.
Don’t let this put you off though because, if you follow the “should-have-done” method, you’ll get deliciously moist pork with great crackling for very little effort.
Cottage Pie with Three Cuts of Beef
After our big success cooking shepherd’s pie with more than one cut of lamb, we decided to try the same with beef using minced beef, beef shin and calve’s liver. We topped it with mashed potatoes with a little mashed cauliflower mixed into it for some extra flavour, and brushed with egg wash to give it a golden top. Served with some broccoli and anchovy butter.
It turned out well, but not as brilliantly as our shepherd’s pie had previously. It could be that the kidneys just gave it a lot more flavour last time than the liver did this time, or the stock we used last time was better. Or we just cooked it better somehow last time.
The recipe goes something like this:
500g beef mince
250g beef shin, diced
250g calves liver, diced
a handful of flour seasoned with salt and pepper
1 onion finely chopped
2 stalks of celery finely chopped
1 carrot, finely diced
1 tbs tomato puree
500ml beef stock
250ml red wine
Ground nutmeg
Salt and pepper
3 anchovies (optional)
A few springs of thyme, leaves only
A small bunch of parsely, chopped
4 medium sized potatoes
Half a small head of cauliflower (optional)
1 egg, beaten
Add a little oil to a medium sized saucepan and add the onion on a low heat. Stir it around a bit, then put on the lid and let it sweat for a few minutes. Then add the carrot and celery, and replace the lid, letting it all sweat for about 15 minutes, stirring often.
Season the mince with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Heat some oil in a large saucepan on a medium to high heat and brown the mince. When it is brown, drain off any fat that has cooked out of the mince and reserve the mince on a plate. Deglaze the saucepan with a little wine, reserve the wine, and add more oil to the saucepan. Coat the diced beef shin in the seasoned flour, then brown that. When that is done, remove it to the plate and deglaze, again keeping the liquid. Add a little more oil, coat the liver in seasoned flour and brown that too.
Once the liver is brown, turn the heat down to low and return the rest of the meat to the pan, along with the reserved wine from deglazing. Add a little more salt and pepper, the bay leaves, anchovies, thyme and parsely and add the sweated vegetables too. Stir this around a bit to incorporate it all, then add the tomato puree too and stir it in; this usually gives it all a nice sheen.
Pour in the rest of the wine and the beef stock and cover. Simmer for two hours, stirring occasionally. If it dries out, add some more water. Then remove the lid and simmer for another half an hour to an hour to cook off any excess liquid. During this last period, peel and chop the potatoes and chop the cauliflower. Steam or boil them both, then mash together with butter, salt and pepper.
Check the meat mixture for seasoning, then spread it all into the bottom of an oven dish. Cover with the mashed potato and cauliflower, then brush this with the beaten egg and put into an oven that has been pre-heated to 180C. Cook in the oven for about 45 minutes until nicely brown on top, then remove, leave it to cool for a while, and enjoy!
When thinking about wine to have with this, I was after something quite full and earthy and thought it could take a fair amount of tannin too. However, I’ve got a cold at the moment and can’t smell or taste that well, so decided not to go overboard with it as I wouldn’t really be able to tell how well it went that well. I ended up with a bottle of Cotes du Rhone Villages Cairrane, which wasn’t what I had first had in mind (I somehow don’t generally imagine southern Rhone wines with beef for some reason), but as far as my impaired senses could make out, it went quite well. It was big (14.5%) and fairly tannic (ripe though, so not astringent) with a good mouthful of grenache fruit and firmly on the dry side.
Pan-Fried Tilapia with New Potatoes, Spring Greens and Salsa Verde (of sorts)
Kerri had one of her wisdom teeth taken out today, so she’s not really capable of eating much and had mashed potato for dinner. I wasn’t sure what to have, but given that we had planned to have fish at some point this week and hadn’t yet succeeded in doing so, thought that I would try that.
I ended up with tilapia because it looked interesting at the fish counter. Not always a good indication of whether or not it will taste good, but in this case it wasn’t too bad. I simply seasoned it and pan-fried it in butter. The new potatoes were steamed and then very quickly sauteed in a little butter. For the spring greens, I melted some butter in a saucepan, then washed the greens and put them in without drying them too much. The butter and water emulsify, giving a lovely texture and taste. So butter all round today; James Martin would be proud. Butter in Kerri’s mashed potato too of course.
For the salsa verde, I chopped some mint and some parsely and combined with some chopped capers and anchovies and some olive oil. Then I added some lemon juice with a little too much enthusiasm. Result: Too sour. So I added a tiny dash of sugar to balance it out. Not quite enough, so added more. Result: Too sweet. So I added some salt to balance it out. Result: Sort of okay but not quite what I was after. I didn’t think I would eat much of it as I didn’t like it much, but once it was on the fish and potatoes it was a lot nicer than I thought it would be, so ended up eating quite a bit of it.
Franco Manca
I’ve heard a lot about Franco Manca since it opened last year so was looking forward to my visit with Niamh and Lizzie . It’s only open at lunchtime and its in Brixton which has made it difficult for any of us to get there before. Despite meeting at the tube station at the arranged time, it was still difficult for us to get there as none of us had thought to look up exactly where it was. Luckily, the friendly local flower seller knew where we wanted to go so directed us there and even provided a shortcut.
Althought I’d previously read a couple of reviews, I hadn’t paid much attention to references to the restaurant itself so I was surprised to find myself in the middle of one of Brixton’s many covered market areas. The restaurant occupies two units on either side of the market, both with a small indoor seating area. As it was lunchtime, it was busy inside so we had to sit at one of the outside tables and it was freezing. Many people believe Franco Manca to make the best pizza in London, some say the best pizza outside of Naples, so we weren’t about to turn around and go home.
One of the things that cropped up in all the reviews I’d read was how cheap it was I don’t think anyone could argue with that, just £5.40 for my choice of pizza with anchovies, olives and capers. The wine was also cheap at just £6.80 a bottle but unfortunately it was so bad that we left most of it behind.
Luckily, the pizza was much better than the wine. The picture below doesn’t show the size but they were certainly generous and well cooked. The thin, sourdough base is left to rise for 20 hours and then cooked at 500 degrees for just 40 seconds. This results in a thin, crispy base and allows the cheese to melt slightly but not completely. The short cooking time also means that the anchovies remained incredibly fresh but combined with the capers, I found them to be a little too salty.
As for whether it deserves its title as best pizza in London, I’m not sure yet but I think I still prefer Marine Ices. It’s warmer in there too.
Red Lentil Lasagne
For someone who previously said they’re not a big fan of lentils and beans, I seem to be cooking with them a lot lately. Now I understand them a bit better, I’m really starting to enjoy the flavour and texture they bring to a dish. The other great thing about them is that it’s so easy to whip up a meal without needing to worry about going out to the butcher for meat. They’re healthy too, I guess that’s another good thing.
Last week, we made lentil cottage pie and loved it. It was the first time I’d used red lentils and their versatility was immediately obvious. Needing something quick and easy for tonight’s dinner, I remembered my resolution to try the same lentil recipe as a lasagne and, as luck would have it, we had just about the right amount of everything required….apart from one vital component: lasagne. There turned out to be just enough to fill one, small dish. Just enough lasagne that is; as you can see from the picture, there was plenty of everything else!
As we suspected last week, the lentil ragu did indeed work well as lasagne. The tomatoey sauce is a lot like a meat ragu which, as lasagne lovers will agree, is the perfect partner to pasta, bechamel and cheese. The stuck-on pieces, while not particularly attractive, added a definite extra level of flavour.
Top tip: soak the lasagne sheets in cold water for 20 minutes prior to layering with sauce and bechamel. This will allow you to trim the lasagne sheets to easily fit your dish and prevent your kitchen from being littered with jagged pieces of pasta.
Chicken Stir-Fry
As happens pretty often on a Monday, we planned to eat leftovers from yesterday’s roast only to find that there wassn’t actually anything left over. A quick scramble through the freezer revealed very little in the way of inspiration, other than one, small, sad looking chicken breast. I braved the rain this afternoon to buy another one so that we could make a quick stir-fry.
I started off by marinating the chicken pieces in some lime juice, soy sauce, fish sauce and sesame oil. I also added some garlic, lemongrass and chilli. Looking back at other posts, I realised I should have made a paste with the dry ingredients but it was too late by that point. I got round this by removing the chicken from the marinade after about 45 minutes and frying off some minced garlic and finely chopped chilli instead.
Next in was the chicken, some more lemongrass and some ginger. After that had cooked through, we removed it to a plate before adding the vegetables (baby corn, red pepper and spring onion) and cooking for about five minutes. In went some additional soy sauce and fish sauce too.
It worked out well considering it wasn’t very well planned, we need to increase the lemongrass next time though and perhaps throw in some lime leaves at the end.
Roast Pork Belly
Kerri has been saying for a while that she has been craving pork belly. We did have it at friends last weekend, but still decided to cook it again today.
We looked back to last time we’d cooked it, which was more than a year ago! The rub that we used had given it really a good flavour, so we did that again; it included bay leaves, garlic, salt, pepper and butter. This time though, we used fresh bay leaves and used our nice granite mortar and pestle to grind it up, with the result that we ended up with a thick green paste rather than the version we had last time that had bits of crumpled dried bay leaf in it.
When it was cooking, I thought it smelt rather like snails. It must have been the combination of butter, garlic and herbs. It even tasted a little like snails, apart obviously from the fact that it was pork rather than snail! Looking at our previous post, we cooked it for 30 minutes on 200C, then 30 minutes on 180C and then another 15 minutes on 160C. It sounded a bit strange and I’m not sure where we got that recipe from, but we did it that way again. The pork turned out tender and succulent, with a lovely flavour from the rub.
We also had some steamed cabbage and some roast potatoes. The potatoes were a bit disappointing because they were a bit burnt but still not that crispy. The strange recipe that we followed for the pork belly (i.e. we started the oven high and then slowly turned it down) might have had a bad effect on the potatoes because that’s the opposite to how we normally cook them. It’s a shame that the potatoes are at the mercy of whatever else we are cooking. Clearly we need two ovens.
The Narrow
On Saturday, I had luch at The Narrow, Gordon Ramsay’s pub in Limehouse. We were in a large group and were seated in the conservatory which was lovely as the sun came streaming in through the windows, not so lovely half an hour later when we were all overheating and there weren’t any blinds to be drawn. Aside from that, the venue itself is lovely, the main attraction being the fabulous views across the Thames.
It was all a little haphazard on our part with people arriving at different times, the staff were happy for to order the children’s food first and let us keep the table for as long as we needed which was good as both the restaurant and pub was full. The children’s fish (hake) and chips were served first and they looked and smelt so good that six of the seven of us ordered the same! I didn’t taste it but everyone seemed to enjoy theirs, I would have been disappointed by the chips though as they were the enormous variety that everywhere seems to be serving at the moment.
The menu mostly consisted of traditional pub food with the odd, interesting twist like braised pork cheeks. I ordered the “lamb neck fillet with root vegetable pie” which I assumed would be a serving of lamb with the vegetable pie on the side. When it arrived however it was a complete pie with a portion of mashed potato on the side. I enjoyed it, the lamb was well cooked and it was perfectly seasoned, but found the filling to be a little on the thin side. The mashed potato had been mashed to within an inch of it’s life and there wasn’t much of it, in fact none of the portion sizes were that generous which is probably why the majority of us ended up ordering dessert too. Good old Gordon.
I shared the chocolate marshmallow brownie which was probably the best chocolate brownie I’ve ever eaten, the perfect combination of crunchy top and sticky inside. It was incredibly rich though and definitely needed the ice-cream to cut through it. I tasted the bitter orange tart and it was good, more interesting than the normal lemon tart and probably made with Seville oranges which are still in season so bonus points for the use of seasonal produce.
I enjoyed the food and I really like this style of dining, it’s proper British food served in a pub but I was disappointed by the portion sizes and can’t help thinking that there must be plenty of other ‘gastropubs’ around serving similar food that is just as good and probably cheaper.
Roast Chicken and Potato and Jerusalem Artichoke Dauphinoise
When I arrived home this evening, I was greeted by the wonderful aroma of dauphinoise cooking. This wasn’t just any dauphinoise though; along with the potatoes it contained jerusalem artichokes. Also there was a roast chicken. Yum. So that all made for the second really long title as many posts.
The jerusalem artichokes added a nutty, earthy note to the dauphinoise. Due to their waxy texture they were fairly quite easily identifiable from the potatoes; I think it might have been more fun if it was more uniform. Kerri kept saying that she didn’t think that she had put enough cream into it, but I found it rather good.
Also we had cabbage. Which isn’t usually that interesting, but this one turned out rather well; it was a pointed “sweetheart” cabbage, which was steamed just the right amount of time so that the leaves had softened but still had some texture to them rather than just going completely floppy.
The chicken was a slight disappointment though in that it wasn’t as tasty as it should have been. It was a Sainsbury’s “Taste the Difference” chicken which we have had some really good and flavourful examples of in the past, but this one wasn’t as good. Also, they have started branding them “Woodland”. Maybe the extra branding is to make up for a drop in quality? I know their eggs have said “Woodland” on them for a while and 1p per dozen (wow) goes to the Woodland Trust, but it’s new to the chickens.
Being a Friday, we decided to open a bottle of interesting wine. We have had a couple of bottles of Meursault on our wine rack for a while, so we opened the 1996 Meursault “Les Tessons”. But the cork was looking a little green and the wine had a slight off odour to it. For a while, we tried to convince ourselves that it was okay, but eventually gave up. Disappointing. So we opened the other, which was a 2001 and in better condition and developed nicely in the glass. White Burgundy is my favourite accompaniment to roast chicken.
