Barbecue!
It was 20 degrees on Saturday so we thought it was about time we dusted off the barbecue and put it to work. We spent most of last week deciding what to cook but settled on lamb chops since they’re our favourite thing to eat from the barbecue. We marinated them in parsley, mint, coriander, garlic, lemon and oil for a couple of hours before cooking them and they were delicious. The marinade had really penetrated the flesh and the outsides were beautifully charred, just how we like them.
Continuing the middle-eastern them we served cous-cous with the same herbs and we also made some baba ganoush. Both dishes were really good and perfectly complimented the lamb.
Vegetable Stir-Fry
Stephen cooked this for himself on Thursday night, I was out eating steak which was also supposed to go into this dish but apparently it didn’t smell too good. So vegetables it was, and nuts and noodles by the look of the picture.
Chilli Taco
I wasn’t going to post this because I couldn’t get the picture to work but it doesn’t look as bad as I remembered so here it is: Tuesday night’s dinner…apologies for the delay!
Chilli, made to our usual recipe a while ago and frozen for an emergency. Tonight’s emergency being Stephen working late and an empty fridge. We served them with taco shells for quickness. Very tasty but impossibly messy to eat!
Note to self: next time, increase the chilli!
Thai Monday Part 6 – Spicy Minced Chicken Salad (Larp Gai)…
…and hot and sour soup of clams with chillies and lime (tom yam hoi nahm sai).
It’s been a while since we’ve done our supposedly weekly Thai Monday, so over the weekend we hastily chose a couple of recipes and bought what we needed to.
First up was Hot and Sour Soup of Clams with Chillies and Lime:
The recipe describes this as an “austere” soup because of its simplicity. It contains stock slightly seasoned with sugar and salt, and the clams are cooked in the stock until they open. Then add a couple of bruised chillies, a squeeze of lime juice and garnish with coriander leaves. Very simple, and distinct from some of the complex recipes that we’ve used in previous Thai Monday instalments. The chillies and the lime juice add their flavour to the dish, but just enough so that you know they are there.
The soup would be good served alongside something more complex. However, in our haste to choose recipes, we ended up choosing something that was similar in many ways:
The Spiced Minced Chicken Salad is a larp style salad, which generally includes minced or chopped meat cooked in the dressing and flavoured with dried chilli.
This too contained stock (only 3 tablespoons) seasoned with salt and sugar. We finely chopped a chicken breast with some garlic and cooked it in the stock until just cooked, before seasoning with lime juice, chilli powder and fish sauce and mixing in chopped shallots and chopped mint and coriander leaves. We sprinkled it with ground roasted rice and served.
Although we followed the recipe, I think we got the ratio wrong somewhere along the way and ended up with too much lime and too little chilli. I did add some more chilli to mine, which balanced it out a little better, but having two dishes that were both quite heavy on lime juice was a bit much.
So the salad wasn’t that successful, but that’s all in the spirit of what Thai Monday was supposed to be about: we wanted to explore different styles of Thai food that we hadn’t tried before, rather than just cooking green curry every time because as brilliant as green curry is, a bit of experimentation and horizon-broadening is always a good thing and some of these simpler recipes serve as history lessons as they often form the bases from which more complex dishes evolved.
Spiced Lamb Shanks with Olives
Continuing our weekend of Spanish food, we cooked this dish from The Real Taste of Spain. It is a dish from Andalucia in southern Spain, influenced by the Moorish occupation centuries ago, hence its spicy flavours.
Luckily, we read the recipe yesterday and realised that the lamb shanks needed to be rubbed with the spice mix and left to infuse overnight. The lamb shanks that we got were very small ones, which meant that we got two each rather than the usual large one shank per person.
The spice mix was cinnamon, ginger, cumin, coriander and paprika, which went onto the shanks yesterday. Today, when we came to cook them, we browned the shanks in a casserole dish, then removed them and browned some onions in the spicy oil. When the onions were lightly brown, we added whole whole cloves of garlic and a heaped teaspoon of flour.
After these had fried for a while, we added wine and water, adding slowly and stirring until it had all been added. Then we put the shanks back into the casserole and put it into the oven for an hour and a half before adding pitted black olives and cooking for a further half an hour.
I’d made some spiced chickpeas and spinach to eat with it, whereas Kerri made some garlicky mashed potatoes. Much as I liked the spiced chickpeas and spinach, I found myself stealing more and more mash as dinner went on.
The shanks turned out rather well – they had cooked down to become very soft and fell off the bone when prodded with a fork. The garlic had cooked down nicely and melted into the onions, making an excellent sauce.
Spanish Seafood Stew
We decided on something of a Spanish theme this weekend and chose a recipe from one of each of the Spanish cookbooks that we have; this one is from “The Food of Northern Spain”. We’ve cooked something similar before and thought we’d give it another go.
This version contained mussels, and since we could only get them in a bag rather than loose, we ended up with rather more of them than planned:
We first made Romesco, which contained garlic, chilli, hazelnuts, almonds, bread, paprika, olive oil and vinegar. It should have contained ñoras peppers, or possibly ancho chillies if those weren’t available but we didn’t have either, hence the paprika. I bashed all of this up in a mortar and pestle until it was smooth; it smelled and tasted really good, especially the nuttiness of the fried garlic and the nuttiness of the… er… nuts, which were complemented well by the slight heat from the chilli and paprika and the sour notes of the vinegar.
We coated the fish in seasoned flour before frying it, then removed it and fried two tablespoons of romesco before adding wine and then fish stock and potatoes that had been cooked in the fish stock. After this, we put the fish back into the casserole along with the mussels, and put it all into the oven for 15 minutes.
The flavours were good, but disappointingly not quite concentrated enough; I think we might have got the ratios wrong. We were supposedly doing half the recipe, but had more than half the amount of fish stock, so we upped the romesco to make up for it but maybe not quite enough. Or it was our non-purist substitution of paprika for ñoras peppers. That said though, when we were clearing up and I tasted the sauce that was left in the bottom of the casserole (can’t let good food go to waste!) it did taste rather good and a lot more concentrated than when we’d been eating it.
And on the plus side, we have loads of delicious romesco left over, which we can use as a sauce or dip.
Before dinner, we roasted some almonds to drink with some Cava, as another Spanish addition to the evening:
The almonds look a bit shiny there, but they weren’t that shiny in real life. The Cava that we had with them was Gramona Imperial Gran Reserva 2003, which we had bought when we visited Barcelona last year. It really was one of the nicest Cavas we’ve had: full, ripe fruit elegantly balanced and a touch of floral on the nose. And a lovely golden hue in the glass. Rather like some vintage Champagnes.
It’s just a pity that the label on the bottle is a bit boring. We have been collecting labels from wine bottles and putting them into a frame; it’s nice to have labels from wines that we’ve really liked, but it’s also nice to have ones that look interesting.
Chicken Fajita Wraps
Both Stephen and I went out on Thursday night and were feeling rather delicate yesterday, consequently we both fancied something requiring minimal preparation for dinner and Stephen suggested chicken fajitas.
We used our usual marinade for the chicken (chilli, hot chilli powder, cumin, coriander seed, chopped coriander and lime juice) but Stephen added some cloves and we also made guacamole to use up some avocado. It all looks much greener than usual, probably because we bought a huge bunch of coriander during the week which, like the avocado, needed using up.
Thai Beef Salad
A quick and easy dinner tonight. We’ve both been really busy at work lately and this week we were planning to rely on dishes that we’d previously cooked and frozen: lentils, chilli and the like. However, we felt like something a bit lighter, yet still substantial tonight. So, Thai Beef salad it was.
We very loosely followed this recipe, but didn’t have bean sprouts. Also, our beef-to-vegetables ratio was rather higher in favour of the beef.
Kerri chopped up the vegetables while I made the dressing. The recipe said to make the dressing in a blender, but I never pass up an opportunity to do some mortaring and pestling: I pounded the chilli and garlic with some salt in a mortar and pestle until it was broken down to a paste, then mixed in the lime juice and fish sauce.
We fried our piece of rump steak till it was nicely browned on the outside while still rare in the middle, then rested it and sliced thinly before tossing with the vegetables, peanuts and dressing.
It turned out very well: It tasted really good, it was quick and it didn’t result in much washing up.
Harissa Roasted Chicken
We both fancied roast chicken for Sunday lunch but since we eat it so often, we decided to cook it differently. I can’t remember what the thought process was but harissa chicken was about the third suggestion and our most favourite.
We sort-of followed a Moro recipe but since we only remembered to consult our books on Sunday morning, we weren’t able to marinate the chicken for the required 24 hours. Ours turned out well though despite this and resulted in tasty, tender chicken.
Stephen made a sauce out of the leftover juices in the pan by removing the excess oil and adding some lemon juice – this was also from the Moro recipe.
Served with cous-cous which was spiced with mint, parsley, spring onions and pine nuts.
Sushi
A short while ago we decided to make sushi and invited some friends around for the evening. We started planning a few extra things to make apart from the sushi itself, but soon we ended up with loads of extra things with the sushi almost taking a back seat, but not quite.
We started preparing ahead of time and managed to get most of the “marinate this for 3 hours” type preparation done in time, but not quite all of it. When people arrived, there was still a lot to do, but of course we got by with a little help from our friends…
Of course we needed nibbles, which meant Japanese rice crackers…
As the first course, we had miso soup of course. We put in quite a lot of wakame and tofu compared to the amount of soup that we had, but it was good:
We made some rolled sushi and some salmon, tuna and nigiri. Everyone made a roll and did it to their own “recipe”. The chopped vegetables waiting to go into the rolls looked rather interesting:
And the rolls themselves looked not quite professional, but not as messy as we’d thought they might be. They tasted really good too. Although I’ve eaten sushi fairly often, making it myself made me wonder at how something put together so simply can taste so good.
Sadly we don’t seem to have any pictures of the nigiri, but there are a couple of the raw ingredients. Salmon, lovely red tuna and marinated mackerel:
As a “main” course we had chicken yakitori skewers. The chicken was grilled in separate pieces and periodically dipped into sauce before being grilled some more. Then we grilled some spring onion pieces too and threaded them onto skewers with the chicken:
We also made a marinated carrot salad. The carrots were sprinkled with salt and left for half an hour to wilt. Then they were rinsed and marinated in rice vinegar, shoyu and mirin for a couple of hours before being served, sprinkled with sesame seeds:
And aubergine fried with miso sauce:
Also some soba noodles, topped with sesame and some dried and twirled nori:
All in all a great evening with friends and fun food, which was fun both to make and to eat.
