Roasted Cobnut Salad
When staying in Kent with Kerri’s mum over Christmas, we picked up some cobnuts at a market in Canterbury. I’m sure that most people reading this know what cobnuts are, but for those that don’t, they are a type of hazelnut that has traditionally been grown in Kent over the past few centuries.
Last year we bought some green cobnuts and had marginal success cooking them. This year, we bought them after the season had finished, so they were dried and were almost like normal hazelnuts. As we wanted something light this evening, we just had a mixed salad and thought we’d give it some interest with some roasted cobnuts.
Actually, we dry-fried them and then I put them into a bag and bashed them with a meat tenderising mallet, then sprinkled them onto the salad. The bashing turned out well, because there were some large pieces to eat and also lots of smaller pieces that mixed well into the rest of the salad and gave it all a lovely roasty background flavour. It didn’t need an elaborate dressing; just some good olive oil and a grind each of salt and pepper.
We do have some interesting plans for the rest of the cobnuts; hopefully we’ll find time to do some of them!
The Hinds Head
Like most people, we’re a bit fed up with thinking about food. This means that we’ve eaten out most days this week as we’re both lacking in inspiration and motivation to get into the kitchen. We’re also avoiding the leftovers that we know we need to do something with but just can’t summon up the energy or enthusiasm for.
Today, Stephen suggested we drive to the Hinds Head for lunch. We visited the Fat Duck for my birthday last year and resolved to go back and eat at the pub at some point. That was almost a year ago so it was a long overdue visit. Pictures are from Stephen’s phone so are shocking, sorry!
We’d left it too late to get a table in the restaurant but were happy to eat in the bar; despite the whole ‘fed up with food’ thing, we quickly decided that it would be a waste not to have both starters and main courses and had decided on what we wanted to eat within minutes of looking at the menu.
I chose the tea smoked salmon and soda bread, followed by the T-bone steak with bone marrow sauce. Since having smoked salmon last week, I seem to be hooked on it and this was a very good example. The tea smoking was subtle but definitely evident and the texture of the salmon was soft and melty. It was served with some lovely thick sour cream and pickled cucumber, the sweetness of the cucumber perfectly complementing the smoky flavour of the salmon.
I principally selected the steak so that I could sample the famous triple cooked chips which was a wise decision. As you might imagine, they were the perfect combination of crunchy on the outside and soft and fluffy in the middle. There was just the right amount of thick and thin chips too and they were perfectly (for perfectly read generously) seasoned with crunchy sea salt.
After some deliberation, Stephen opted for the bacon and pheasant terrine served with spiced pear chutney and toasted sourdough bread follwed by the shepherds pie. The terrine itself was dense and meaty and spiked with gherkins and picled walnuts which leant a pleasing sweetnesss to the dish, the chutney added another level of sweetness that was perfectly offset by the slightly charred sourdough bread.
The shepherds pie was the highlight of the lunch though, served in an invidual cast-iron casserole dish and topped with crunchy potato pieces (almost like chips) giving way to a sweet and meaty mix of lamb shoulder, belly and sweet breads. Since tasting it, I’ve been trying to think of how to describe it and although it’s a cliche, I can’t put into words just how delicious it was. The meat was tender and melty, with just the right amount of gravy and potato. It was sweet but not too sweet, perfectly seasoned and intensely lamby in flavour. It’s the kind of thing I’m going to wake up thinking about in the morning and not be able to rest until I’ve eaten…which could be a problem since the menu changes daily and the Hinds Head is a 45 minute drive away.
Christmas Dinner!
For Christmas dinner, we had a family dinner with Kerri’s mum and her brother and his family, who kindly allowed us to take over their kitchen to cook it. We had turkey of course, as is obvious from the picture below. When we collected the turkey from the butcher (a free range bronze turkey from Appledore in Kent), it was in a box which also contained several sprigs of rosemary. So having stuffed the neck end with the stuffing, we popped the rosemary into the cavity along with half an onion, half a lemon and a couple of garlic cloves. Always good to leave some space for air to circulate in the cavity to bring the cooking time down. After trying to de-feather the poor bird a bit more, we took it over to Kerri’s brother’s house on Christmas Eve so that they could put it into the oven on Christmas morning.
So when we arrived on Christmas morning, the turkey was already in the oven and turning a delicious golden colour. We had stuffed it the night before with some delicious and very sagey sausagemeat stuffing that Kerri’s mum had prepared. We stuffed the neck end only, as we didn’t want to add too much to the cooking time of the bird and dry it out. That was only half the stuffing though, so we cooked the rest of it separately.
With a glass of bubbly in hand, we set about preparing the rest of it: roast potatoes in goose fat (left over from our pre-Christmas dinner of roast goose), roast parsnips, brussels sprouts with pancetta, steamed carrots and peas.
Sliced stuffing:
Afterwards, we somehow miraculously still had some space for Christmas pudding, which we served with either brandy cream or brandy sauce, depending on peoples’ preferences. We didn’t cater for people whose preferences didn’t include brandy though, as there was loads of it in the pudding too.
And on boxing day we had baked ham with marmalade glaze and of course turkey sandwiches. Even with a smaller turkey than usual, we of course still had loads of leftovers.
And given that we hadn’t brought a mince pie tray along with us, we made one large mince pie lattice instead:
We do have loads of mincemeat left that didn’t get turned into pies and I am trying to think of ways to use it up. There’s no reason that it necessarily needs to only be eaten at Christmas, given that it’s so tasty.
Vacherin
For Christmas Eve, we had some nibbles, including a rather delicious Vacherin Mont d’Or. For those of you who don’t know (and can’t be bothered to click the link :-)), Vacherin is a seasonal French (or Swiss) cheese that, when ripe, has a deliciously gooey centre and a smooth, creamy, but rich and complex taste. It can be baked in the oven for a while if you like, but we’ve never done that.
My first experience of it was at an organised lunch where, instead of the usual sort of cheese course, we had a huge Vacherin that we passed around the table and spooned onto our plates. I fell in love with it then and look forward to it every year.
We do of course have a fair amount left over and its pungency is noticeable whenever anyone opens the fridge. It’s too good to waste though, even though we’re rather full after various Christmas and Christmas-related dinners, and we’ll either eat it as it is or cook something with it.
Goose Pie
Having half a goose left after our pre-Christmas dinner yesterday, we embarked on a goose pie project. Kerri had seen Jamie cooking a turkey and leek pie, which served as partial inspiration. We only had one leek though, so we added an onion. And we didn’t have creme fraiche, so we used chicken stock. And we didn’t have puff pastry so we used shortcrust pastry… etc, etc.
Kerri found my rendition of a flying goose on top of the pie amusing, but I think it added a bit of interest to the pie, given that it was rather messy / rustic – the pastry broke as I was trying to get it on and we didn’t have an egg to brush it with so it doesn’t look nice and golden. We made a valiant effort but only managed to eat half of the pie. We’ll be having the other half for lunch tomorrow.
Pre-Christmas Dinner – Roast Goose
It’s become something of a tradition (if twice counts as a tradition – a tradition in the making maybe) for me and Kerri to have a pre-Christmas dinner with my sister and her husband shortly before we disappear off elsewhere for Christmas itself. Last year we had roast salmon with salsa verde; this year we decided to try our hand at cooking a goose.
I ordered the goose a few weeks ago, when we had decided on it. We liked the sound of Gordon Ramsay’s Christmas roast goose recipe, so went with that having never cooked one before. Because it said to get a 4kg to 5.5kg goose, that is what I asked the butcher for when I ordered it. And he wrote it down on the order form. When I went to pick up the goose, it was 6.5kg. Which is rather large. And the butcher claimed that it was very hard to get smaller ones. I ummed and aahed a bit about whether I still wanted it, but took it in the end because we’d planned everything around having goose, even though having the monster goose meant that we’d have dinner late and have loads of left-overs which we don’t need.
No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, that’s not a goose. But it is goose foie gras on melba toasts that my sister brought along as a pre-starter snack. With some rather inexpertly sliced pieces of pickled walnut on top. The pickled walnuts were an impromptu addition that worked rather well.
Next up was smoked salmon with sour cream and lumpfish caviar, which was bright red and made it all look rather festive.
From this point on, the photography got a bit random and… well… just bad, due to rushing and scalding and various other goings-on. So this is what the goose looked like when it was done. The lemon and lime pieces had burnt, which was unfortunate, but that didn’t really matter as we weren’t planning to eat them:
With the goose we had roast potatoes of course, roasted in a mixture of goose fat (we have a large supply of it now) and vegetable oil. And cabbage with pancetta which was really good – the cabbage was an organic savoy cabbage from our vegetable box and although there was no butter or cream with it (just the pancetta, some finely sliced shallots, the shredded cabbage, a splash of water and a good grind of black pepper) but it had a lovely almost buttery taste to it. And roast parsnips with parmesan on top of them. And Gordon’s date and red wine sauce.
With so much going on, we thought that it might not all work together that well, but it did. The goose was really tasty, I’m glad I took it even though it was huge and we have half of it left over and it complicated our already rather over-complicated cooking schedule.
When we cooked Christmas pudding recently, we ended up with three instead of one. Kerri had the genius idea of making Christmas pudding ice cream out of one of them. We followed Nigel Slater’s mincemeat ice cream recipe, except added crumbled Christmas pudding instead of mincemeat. We were worried that it wouldn’t be sweet enough when we tasted it after mixing it together, but once it was frozen it seemed just right.
Cue rather rubbish picture of the ice cream:
My sister’s husband flambeed some caramelised bananas in rum, then served with a dollop of our Christmas pudding ice cream, it made for a really good alternative Christmas pudding experience.
All in all a really lovely pre-Christmas dinner. Yum.
Carrot Soup
One of my favourite light lunches is a bowl of soup with a slice of buttered toast. When I was a kid, I used to eat gallons of soup whenever my mum made it; I think she despaired of it a bit.
As we had carrots in our vegetable box but didn’t have any plans for them over the next few days, we made them into carrot and coriander soup. We didn’t follow any recipe, just fried some crushed coriander seeds, then sweated a finely chopped onion before adding chopped carrots, chopped coriander leaves and stalks and vegetable stock, cooking until the carrots were soft and then pureeing it with a stick blender before seasoning with salt and pepper.
If we made it again, I’d put the coriander stalks in near the beginning as we did this time, but keep the leaves (or at least some of the leaves) until near the end to give a fresh coriander flavour to it.
Leek Risotto
Having received leeks in our vegetable box yesterday, we decided on leek risotto this evening. We added some pancetta and sage too, not just leeks. We added some leeks in the beginning to cook down and then saved some to add near the end to give a fresher leek flavour too, which worked very well. The recipe went something like this:
Ingredients… serves 2 generously:
2 large leeks, chopped
100g pancetta, cubed, or lardons
1 stick celery, finely chopped (not essential, but we had one so added it)
6 sage leaves, finely sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed or finely sliced
1-2 tbsps vegetable oil for frying
1 glass white wine or white vermouth
250g risotto rice
1l chicken stock (preferably home made, but bought is of course fine if you don’t have any)
good handful grated parmesan (much better to grate your own from a block than to use pre-grated)
Heat up the oil and when it is hot, add the celery. A minute or so later, add the pancetta and fry for a few minutes. Then add about two thirds of the leeks and the garlic. When the leeks have softened, add the rice and turn up the heat. The rice should fry and go a bit translucent now, but if it starts to burn then turn it down. After a short while, add the wine or vermouth (or a mixture of both as we did) and stir while the alcohol burns off.
Turn the heat back down and when the wine has been absorbed, start adding stock a ladle at a time, stirring until it has been absorbed until it has been absorbed and then adding some more. We used some home made chicken stock for this and it does make quite a difference (all the bones from those roast chickens we’ve been eating have not gone to waste). All this stirring brings out the stickiness from the rice. If you run out of stock before the rice is cooked, then just start adding water. When the rice is cooked but still has just a little bite left to it, it is done.
However, a few minutes before it is finally done (judging this takes a bit of experience though), add the rest of the chopped leeks. Try to separate the chopped leeks into separate rings before adding, as they’ll cook through more quickly. Keep stirring of course. Then when it is done, stir in the grated parmesan until it is absorbed and check for seasoning.
Kerri commented that this was probably the best risotto that she remembers us having made. We’ve had a couple of really good ones lately; it might be the nice home made chicken stock that we’ve been using for them.
Vegetable Box
No picture for this post, just a quick note. A couple of years ago we subscribed to a vegetable box from Able & Cole, but stopped it when we moved and never got around to re-subscribing. It was interesting (and sometimes challenging!) to come up with tasty recipes each week to use our mostly seasonal fruit and vegetables from the box.
We have been sent another box this week to review, a “mixed organic” box which includes: onions, potatoes, parsnips, leeks, cabbage, apples, bananas and clementines. This worked out rather well, as we are having a pre-Christmas dinner this weekend and the potatoes, parsnips and cabbage were already on our menu for that, so the delivery will do perfectly. Onions are essential for many dishes, and we do love leeks so will no doubt find something good to do with them. And of course fruit is always good for a healthy and tasty snack and I do tend to take loads of it to work.
I commented that it just happened to match what we were planning quite well. Of course, when I thought about it, the box is mostly seasonal and Christmas cooking is mostly seasonal too, so it should match up to some degree because of that. Nice when that happens without planning it; it makes you think that you must be doing something right somehow.
Quesadillas and Guacamole
Kerri had suggested these a while back and we ended up having them this evening. She looked at a few recipes but decided to make our own quesadilla-like recipe.
We marinated some sliced red peppers, sliced red onions and chopped garlic with some lime juice, chopped coriander and ground cumin. Then we fried this mixture for a while as if we were making tortillas, the piled it onto flour tortillas and sprinkled with grated cheese (just used cheddar, didn’t have any more authentic Mexican style cheese available) before topping with another tortilla.
We dry-fried these on one side, then the other, on a low heat, to get the cheese to melt. With a blob of guacamole, they were rather good as a quick supper. They would of course be good with chicken in too, but the vegetable versions weren’t bad either.
