Cod with Chermoulla and Salad
Something quick and relatively easy last night. Kerri clipped a few recipes from magazines recently and we went through them and selected this one.
I don’t have the recipe here, but we combined these ingredients in certain quantities: garlic, fresh chilli, paprika, ground cumin, salt, lemon juice, olive oil and chopped mint. Some of this we spread over the fish and let it marinate for half an hour. Then we grilled the fish (the recipe said to barbecue it but the weather wasn’t that great) and topped it with the rest of the chermoulla.
The chermoulla was tasty, but very garlicky. We’re big fans of garlic, but prefer cooked garlic to raw; and eating large quantities of raw garlic can be quite antisocial too. Served with a green salad which was nice and crisp and fresh next to the garlicky spiciness of the chermoulla.
Spaghetti with Broad Beans, Prosciutto, Roasted Cherry Tomatoes, Pine Nuts and Basil
Kerri thought of this recipe when we recently made some disappointing asparagus spaghetti and we tried it last night.
We roasted some cherry tomatoes, steamed some broad beans, toasted some pine nuts, grated some parmesan, tore up some basil leaves and cooked some spaghetti. When the spaghetti was done, we mixed all the rest of the ingredients into it, added some torn-up pieces of prosciutto and drizzled it with some extra virgin olive oil.
It was rather good; the flavours worked well together and it was a good, light, summery dish.
Lamb Chops and Sauteed Potatoes
We seem to have had lamb rather often lately and in the interests of cooking varied meals, I should have chosen something else when I found myself in an indecisive mood in the butcher’s. But the new season spring lamb was too good to resist and I ended up leaving with two double loin chops.
We seasoned them simply with salt and pepper and pan fried them. To accompany them we made sauteed potatoes, leeks and some steamed asparagus. The potatoes and leeks were really good, but the asparagus was disappointing; we haven’t had much luck with asparagus lately.
The leeks turned out quite well; sometimes we braise leeks in the oven with lemon and it takes about 45 minutes, but we got a similar effect by sweating the leeks until soft, then seasoning with salt and pepper and adding some butter and a squeeze of lemon.
I love the colours in this photograph; reminiscent of old colour printing from the sixties.
Champagne!
… both the drink and the place.
Last weekend we paid a visit to Champagne, on a tour organised by the good people of the Wine Education Service. We’d never been on an organised tour before, but really enjoyed this one. The trip was a combination of visits to Champagne houses, good lunches and dinners and lots of drinking Champagne.
Our first stop was one of the larger Champagne houses, Pommery. We had a tour of the huge cellars; many kilometres of tunnels dug into the chalk deep underground. Chalk is porous and retains moisture well, which is good for the vines growing on the surface and is also good for keeping the cellars at a constant 10 to 11 degrees Celsius and 85% humidity without the need for air conditioning.
The stairs going down into the cellars:
A selection of old bottles of Champagne in the Pommery cellars. Most of these no longer have their sediment in the bottle, so are no longer drinkable because the Champagne loses its freshness. Some do though; all of the 1943 and later bottles do and are still drinkable.
An intricately carved barrel:
After this came dinner in a restaurant in Reims. We ordered Champagne of course (in this case a Cattier Premier Cru Blanc de Blanc) and ate:
Torte Champenoise:
And duck:
And dessert, which was a frozen parfait of sorts:
The next day we were off to visit Moet & Chandon. The sign on the gate was rather bling:
Some bottles in the cellar:
Then we were given a glass of Champagne while we interrogated the guides about various details, such as the destiny of the magnums that we’d seen in the cellars and been told were there for fifteen years. Turns out that they were probably Dom Perignon Oenothèque bottles, which are kept in bottle for longer than regular Dom Perignon, giving them more complexity.
Also, I asked about gyropalettes. Gyropalettes are machines that turn the bottles and tilt them onto their ends bit by bit each day so that the sediment ends up in the neck and can be removed easily. The old fashioned way is to do this by hand, with skilled workers turning (“riddling”) each and every bottle every day, and all the guides explain this because it is the romantic, hands-on, craftsman-like version of the process. But the reality is that most bottles are processed by unromantic, industrial gyropalette machines these days and no tours will show them in action.
After this gruelling morning, we needed lunch. Which started with terrine:
And then salmon with broad beans (and bacon) and a creamy sauce:
And finished with parfait and fruit:
That afternoon we visited a smaller producer, Clouet and were given a talk and tasting by the rather entertaining winemaker who amongst other things demonstrated that you had to pretend to be Justin Timberlake in order to open a bottle of Champagne properly.
This was located in the brilliantly named town of Bouzy:
This is the view down the hill at Bouzy, showing a number of Grand Cru pinot noir vineyards:
That evening we were left to fend for ourselves in Reims. Kerri and I found a semi-interesting restaurant but didn’t take the camera along so no pictures of that.
On our final day we paid a visit to Ployez-Jacquemart:
Which was another small producer, producing Champagnes of very good quality at very reasonable prices. This was probably the most informative tour in terms of how the wine is produced, from pressing the grapes, through to the first and second fermentations, cellaring, riddling, degorgement, bottling, labelling, etc.
Some barrels; empty at the moment unfortunately:
During the second fermentation, the pressure inside the bottles rises to 6 atmospheres, and if there is a flaw in the bottle then it can explode as this one did:
Then lunch, which started with more terrine, this time salmon, which was very good indeed:
And followed by some very tasty chicken with rice and a creamy sauce. I think the chives counted as the vegetables:
There was apple tart for dessert, but I forgot to take a picture of it.
Asparagus Spaghetti
We weren’t sure what to eat tonight so I had a quick look online and this recipe from Waitrose caught my eye; the picture looked good, the flavours sounded interesting and Stephen agreed so we were all set. It was really disappointing though, there was very little flavour and the overall taste was bitter and sharp. We managed to rescue it by adding some oil, lots of salt and pepper and Parmesan but generally, a big thumbs down 🙁
Barbecued Chicken
Last night we planned a quick barbecue in the evening as it was such a nice evening. It turned out not to be that quick due to lighting the fire and waiting for it to be ready and also for choosing chicken thighs, which take a while to cook.
However, when it was finally ready, it was very tasty. We marinated the chicken for about half an hour in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, rosemary and paprika and although the flavours of the marinade came through well, it also tasted very chickeny. Along with the wonderful char-grilled barbecue flavour.
We had some salad as an accompaniment, which was fairly plain except for the addition of some walnuts and some broad beans. We blanched the broad beans and then marinated them in some olive oil, white wine vinegar and salt and pepper for a while before tossing them in with the rest of the salad.
Barbecued Lamb Leg
Because of the the brilliant weather we’ve had lately, we just had to barbecue. Recently a colleague was telling me about a leg of lamb that he had cooked on the barbecue and how good it was, so when Kerri suggested the same thing, it just had to be done.
We had a half leg of lamb, which I attempted to tunnel-bone before butterflying, but failed, so just attempted to butterfly it anyway. It worked out pretty well, and we marinated it in lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, crushed garlic cloves and various herbs:
We cooked it over direct heat for a bit to get it nicely charred, then moved the coals towards the edges and put the lid on the barbecue, cooking it for a while longer. Towards the end we added some aubergine slices too:
The aubergines looked rather good with their stripes when they were turned over when the lamb was cooked and resting:
We served it with flatbread, Greek style salad and tsatsiki:
The lamb turned out very well indeed. Possibly the tastiest thing we have ever barbecued in fact. We managed to cook it just right – nicely charred on the outside without actually being burnt, and still a bit pink and juicy in the middle. We had some left over for lunch the next day too, which was a bonus.
Impromptu Sausage and Mustard Pasta
Ingredients:
See method.
Method:
Wander around the shop wondering what to have until you see some nice-looking sausages. Buy them and take them home without much idea of what you are going to do with them. On the way, mull things over and decide on some sort of pasta-related dish. When you get home, open a nice bottle of red wine while you contemplate further.
I’ve had sausage casserole and sausage pasta before, but I find that if the sausages are cooked in the casserole or sauce from the start then of course all the fat cooks out into the sauce rather than disappearing, which gives me indigestion. So put the sausages into the oven to cook while wondering what sort of sauce to make. Chop up a red onion and a stick of celery and sweat these with a crushed clove of garlic and a sprinkle of thyme.
When the onion and celery have softened a bit, add half a glass or so of red wine (it’s really nice so you don’t want to waste too much) and wait for the alcohol to evaporate. Search through your store cupboard for a small tin of tomatoes. While you are searching, find some slivered almonds. Add the tomatoes to the pan, but keep the almonds aside.
Decide that sausages and mustard are good together, so add a teaspoon or so of wholegrain mustard to everything else. Have another look in your store cupboard for pasta. Wacky shapes are good if you can find any. Add a handful of slivered almonds to the sauce and cook the pasta.
Taste the sauce and season if required. When the pasta is cooked, drain it and add it to the sauce. Mix it all together and watch that you don’t splash onto your shirt. Take the sausages out of the oven and marvel at the coincidence that they are also done. Cut the sausages into bite-sized pieces and try not to eat too many of the pieces, even if they are really good. Mix the sausage pieces into everything else and serve. Garnish with chopped parsley if you have any (I didn’t).
Enjoy. If it’s not that great, blame the impromptu nature of it and add some more salt and pepper. Decide that crushed almonds would be better than slivered. Remember to keep a piece of sausage for your girlfriend if she’s out.
My Favourite Sandwich
It wasn’t exactly a secret since I’ve posted about it before but I suppose it’s one of those things that doesn’t come up in conversation very often and I don’t really mention it either. The truth is though that I love fishfingers. They remind me of being small but I’m not sure why as we I don’t think we ate them very often and I don’t remember having a particular fondness for them back then either. I do remember the time my dad cooked them for me though (very traditional household: mum cooked, dad mowed the lawn so this was An Event), he used the same frying pan that he’d previously cooked hamburgers for my brother in and I declared them the best fishfingers ever (much to my mum’s subsequent dismay).
I re-discovered fishfingers when I was a student and ate a fair amount of them during my three years at University but as much as I love them, I don’t tend to eat them very often now. I guess it’s because there’s so many other things to eat and it’s rare for us to eat the same things twice these days.
Stephen’s been working really late the last couple of weeks and cooking for both of us has been tricky, not a lot of the food we eat works well when re-heated and I’m usually too hungry to wait until 9pm when he comes home so we’ve struggled. It was at some point last week when I sat down to yet another plate of toast that it occurred to me that fishfingers were the answer. I could grill some quickly for myself and make Stephen a proper (and grown-up!) dinner for when he comes home. And that’s what I did today.
I’m quite particular about how I like my fishfingers: grilled until they’re really brown, a small incision made in each one so that I can adminster the salt and vinegar without making the fishfinger soggy, sandwiched between two slices of buttered toast (I prefer white sliced bread but I didn’t have any) and cut into four squares, not triangles which is how I eat all other types of sandwich.
It was delicious and one of the best things about fishfingers is that they still taste the same as they did when I was small. They may have shrunk a bit (but so have Double Deckers and Wagon Wheels) and they may use all natural flavourings now but every time I eat them I remember how much I love them I’m transported back to being eight years old again. There’s seven left in the box, I wonder how long they’ll last now that I’ve got the taste for them again?
Chocolate Brownies
We were invited to a barbecue today and I offered to make cheesecake. When it came to making it though I realised that I’d actually left the base of the tin at my mum’s place so we had to improvise.
I originally made these particular brownies in June of last year and took them in to work, they were devoured in minutes (as anything sugary or chocolatey usually is!) so figured they must have been pretty good and therefore suitable for taking to friends. The added bonus with these particular brownies is that they’re really simple and quick to make. Not quick enough however as we stupidly decided to run loads of errands in the morning and got stuck in the Sunday morning DIY traffic. No matter though as we simply made up the mixture and took it with us to be baked at our friend’s place later on.
I think they were a hit, everyone seemed to enjoy them and there were only a couple left at the end of the day. I did cook them for slightly too long though but I blame our friend’s fancy oven for being too hot!
