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.
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.
