Coq au Vin
This is something I thought we ate fairly often but looking back through the archives, it seems we haven’t eaten it at all since we started blogging. We’re definitely in Autumn now so this seemed like the perfect Sunday afternoon dish.
Previously, I think we’ve always used the Delia version but today we made it up as we went along, borrowing from both Delia and Nigel Slater along the way.
Serves Two (generously)
2 chicken legs and 2 chicken thighs
125g bacon, chopped (or lardons)
1 large onion, chopped
1 stick celery, finely chopped
350ml red wine
150 ml chicken stock
2 cloves garlic, crushed
150g chestnut mushrooms, chopped
2 bay leaves
3 sprigs thyme
Salt and pepper
Season the chicken pieces and then brown them. Remove from the pan and set aside.
Fry the bacon until the fat has rendered. Remove from the pan and add to the chicken.
Fry onion and celery until softened. Remove from the pan and add to the chicken.
Put all ingredients back into the pan and deglaze with the wine. Add the chicken stock and all the other ingredients and bring to the boil. Season with salt and pepper and then simmer for 40 minutes.
Just before serving, remove the chicken, bacon etc. from the pan so you’re just left with the liquid. Add in a paste of flour and butter, bring to the boil and cook for a few minutes to thicken the sauce.
Nigel suggests using something other than a non-stick pan so that a crust forms on the bottom during the initial frying. This seemed like a good idea so we used our Le Creuset casserole.
All the recipes that we came across during our “research” suggest cooking the mushrooms separately and adding them near the end of the cooking time, we’ve never bothered with this before though and have always been happy with the result so didn’t bother with that this time.
Next time I think I’ll either stir in some flour before adding the wine to help with the thickening process or coat the chicken in seasoned flour before frying so as to avoid adding the flour and butter paste at the end to thicken. Wikipedia suggests adding blood but we didn’t have any hanging around 🙂
Nigel commented that when he’d eaten this in France it was served with long, flat noodles. That seemed a little odd to us so we ignored him and had mashed potatoes, cabbage and beans instead. I can’t imagine the dish with noodles but it might be something to try in the future.
It turned out well but, as happens often, was better once it had been left to stand for a little while. It’s a relatively quick and easy dish to make and is a lot like Beef Bourginon…another dish I thought we ate quite recently but the archives tell me differently. Look out for that soon.
Pizza
It’s been another busy few days with not a lot of cooking going on. Stephen and I went to visit my mum yesterday and spent the afternoon making pizza with my niece. We used a variety of toppings including artichokes, olives, salami, parma ham, peppers, mushrooms and onions. They turned out well but the best thing was having a small pair of hands to help.
Steamed Fish
We have cooked this a couple of times before, once with tuna and once with sea bass and tonight we tried it with cod (Icelandic of course, so as not to make the poor fishies extinct). We marinated the fish in oyster sauce, soy sauce, garlic and black pepper. Then topped it with sliced onion and ginger and steamed it, adding pak choi half way through the steaming.
That all sounds rather good, and it gave really tasty results previously. Something went wrong this time though and it didn’t work out that well. The fish was overcooked and didn’t taste of much. Perhaps it was the all-important green peppercorns that we’d omitted this time. Or we just screwed it up. And we overcooked the noodles too, which made them rather sticky. I doused most of it with loads of soy sauce to give it some flavour.
Pasta Puttanesca
Like yesterday’s green curry, this is something we eat a lot so finding something interesting to say about it and making it look attractive on the plate is a challenge. Every time I eat it though I can’t help but wonder why it took us so long to discover it, how can you go wrong with the combination of anchovies, olives, capers, garlic, chilli, basil and tomato? I guess we’re making up for lost time, hence its regular appearance.
We made it up on Sunday because although it’s really easy to make, it does benefit from a long and slow simmer. Our version is based on Delia’s, it’s the first one we tried and we both love it so see no reason to deviate. We did add some extra chilli this time though and left the capers whole which gave a lovely ‘bursting’ sensation in the mouth.
And we weren’t quite as stingy with the sauce as this photograph would suggest, there was some left in the saucepan that made it’s way onto the plate pretty soon after the photograph was taken.
Thai Monday – Green Curry with Chicken
We last had this only two weeks ago but since we’d made double the paste we needed to use it up today so it didn’t go to waste. As it was, we think the paste had lost something from sitting in the fridge as it wasn’t quite as zingy as normal. It was still very good though and the Barts organic coconut milk was really thick and creamy.
We used our normal recipe but speeded everything up, hard to tell what difference it made to the flavour because the paste was old.
Roast Lamb with Caper Sauce and Boulangere Potatoes
We don’t seem to have had roast lamb for a while, so chose it for today. Kerri cut little pockets into our lamb leg and stuffed them with garlic, rosemary and anchovies.
We also cooked boulangere potatoes, which are thinly sliced potatoes layered with thinly sliced onions and herbs and then cooked with milk and stock. The top layer got a bit scorched; we probably didn’t have enough liquid. But the rest of it was really tasty. We followed Delia’s recipe but next time we’ll cook it for longer and cover it with foil for most of the cooking time to prevent the stop from scorching.
We served the lamb with caper sauce from this recipe, with just a little white wine vinegar added.
The lamb was really tasty and full of flavour and the caper sauce went well with it, but had to be used sparingly as it was rather strong. As described above, the potatoes were also really good except for the burnt top layer. We also had leeks, broccoli and green beans.
Steak!
Kerri was out tonight, so I selfishly treated myself to some steak. Actually, I’d been to gym on the way home and was really very hungry when I went shopping for dinner afterwards. So steak and mustard mash it was. There was also tenderstem broccoli, but that didn’t make it into the picture.
The blob sitting on top of the steak is anchovy and parsely butter. Kerri had suggested it to me when I’d called her to tell her I was having steak for dinner and it sounded like a good idea. I didn’t follow a recipe, just bashed up four anchovies and about 25g of butter or a bit more in the mortar and pestle before adding a grind of pepper and some chopped parsely. The result was good but a bit salty – either I should have washed the anchovies before using them or used fewer of them.
Summer Pudding
We’ve made summer pudding twice recently and took a number of photographs while we did so, so here are some step-by-step, illustrated instructions in case anyone is interested in making it and hasn’t done so before.
Summer pudding is quite simple to make, but it does require some forward planning. In fact, it needs to be made the day before so that it can live overnight in the fridge.
We made ours from Delia’s recipe and it seemed to work rather well.
Take 450g raspberries…
… and 225g redcurrants and 110g blackcurrants.
Place them into a saucepan with 150g caster sugar…
…and cook over a medium heat for just 3 to 5 minutes; any more and they’ll taste stewed.
Lightly butter a 850ml pudding basin (we used a similarly sized Pyrex bowl rather than a pudding basin – don’t tell Delia) and then line with slices of white bread…
…then pour in the cooked fruit, reserving 2 thirds of a cup of juice (the recipe says this amount, but we found that we didn’t need that much).
Cover the top with more bread, then find a saucer or dish that just fits inside the basin and put a weight on top. And make sure that all of this can actually fit into your fridge of course (PS the arrangement above required some re-arrangement before it fitted, as I’m sure you can imagine). Put this into the fridge overnight.
When it’s ready to serve, you’ll need both luck and skill to get it out of the basin. You might need to run a knife around the edges to help it out and/or bang on the bottom of the basin a bit while it’s overturned. Pour the reserved juice over it to colour any bread that hasn’t been soaked through from the inside (as mentioned above, we didn’t need all the juice that we had reserved). Arrange a few berries on top and around it if you have any left, then present and slice, serving with cream.
It seems to me to be a bit like cheating to use bread rather than pastry, but that is how the recipe goes and it does work rather well. The fruit can be a bit sharp, but the bread and cream do well to dilute the sharpness and bring it all together rather deliciously.
Crunchy Pork Chops
We first ate these at a friend’s house and really enjoyed them so decided to cook them ourselves. It’s a fairly straightforward recipe by Nigella who suggests eating them with garlic spinach and a tomato salad. We had them with mustard mashed potatoes and runner beans. The mustard in the mashed potatoes complimented the chops really well, the beans however were a bit tough.
Baked Mackerel and Poor Man’s Potatoes
Yesterday we bought some whole mackerel and planned to do something interesting with it this evening. We have loads of thyme growing in our garden so we thought we’d use up some of that and Kerri found a really good sounding recipe. However, when we got home and started making it, we found that we didn’t have nearly enough onion for the recipe, so we simply stuffed them with thyme, lemon and garlic, wrapped them in foil and stuck them into the oven.
The reason that we’d run out of onions was that we were also making “poor man’s potatoes”. This is from a Spanish cookery book called The Real Taste of Spain and we’ve made it before. This time we didn’t put any red pepper into it though, and cooked it for a bit longer and it turned out rather like a potato and onion rosti of sorts. Really tasty.
