Jamie’s Lamb
Stephen’s family came to visit on Saturday and we’d originally planned to barbecue a leg of lamb since we’d enjoyed it so much last time. Unfortunately, the weather let us down so we opted to cook Jamie’s lamb shoulder again. This time, as there were so many of us, we got to use a whole shoulder which we picked up from our local butcher.
We didn’t do anything different, we didn’t need to as it was so brilliant last time. The only slight change we made was to serve it with crushed Jersey Royals, our first of the season and leeks, as I’m slightly obsessed with them at the moment. It was as brilliant as last time but sadly no leftovers this time 🙁
Deja Vu… times two…
Since cooking the spaghetti with anchovies on Wednesday, we’ve eaten it again twice. Stephen cooked it on Thursday with asparagus and then I had the original version again on Friday. We’ve tweaked it slightly by using better anchovies and more chilli but the basic recipe remains the same. This doesn’t make for very interesting reading though, hence the short intermission 🙂
Not wanting to eat pasta three times in a row, Stephen opted for a Higgidy pie that we found in Sainsbury’s for dinner on Friday. He was originally tempted by a sausage and mash pie (a shortcrust base topped with sausages and mashed potatoes, what a genius idea!) but eventually settled on the slightly healthier lemon chicken, thyme and lentil pie. What I tasted was really good, if slightly too lemony for me.
Spaghetti with Anchovies, Garlic, Chilli, Lemon and Basil
I had a spaghetti craving last night and while thinking about what to cook for dinner this evening, we came up with this.
While the spaghetti was boiling, Stephen fried some garlic and chilli. After a few minutes, he added the anchovies and cooked them down. When the spaghetti was cooked, we threw the garlic, chilli and anchovy mixture into the pasta; added some lemon juice, torn basil leaves and parmesan and then finished with some oil, black pepper and pine nuts.
It was really tasty, particularly considering how quick it was to cook and how few ingredients were required. The variations are endless too, I think capers would work instead of anchovies and some roasted cherry tomatoes would be brilliant. Asparagus or broad beans would be a great addition too. I’m sure we’ll be eating this again soon.
Thai Monday Part 7 – Beef Panang
Being a bank holiday today, we took some time to make something for another instalment in the recently neglected Thai Monday series. We chose Beef Panang this time, which is a Thai curry that includes peanuts as well as both coconut milk and coconut cream.
We started by making the paste as usual; this one contained:
Coriander root, salt, dried red chillies (which we de-seeded and soaked), garlic, lemongrass, galangal, red shallots and nutmeg. And peanuts, which weren’t in this picture because we were busy boiling them. These were all ground to a paste, but I think possibly the peanuts weren’t ground quite enough as there were little bits of them in the finished dish.
The finished paste:
The recipe specified stewing beef, which it said to blanch and then simmer in coconut milk for two hours until tender and then slice. So we did. Afterwards, I re-read it and realised that it also said that you could use a more tender cut of beef, slice it thinly and add it at the end to cook through quickly. The latter would have been a much quicker way of doing it, since most of the cooking time for this dish involved waiting for the beef to simmer.
When the beef was cooked and sliced, we heated up some coconut cream until it split, then fried four tablespoons of the paste in it for ten minutes before seasoning with palm sugar and fish sauce. Then we added the beef cooking liquid and the beef itself to warm it through, before adding some deseeded long red chillies, torn lime leaves and torn basil leaves. Served with steamed baby corn and mange tout.
The result was tasty but a bit too sweet, especially for Kerri. We had put in less palm sugar than the recipe specified, but should have reduced it further, knowing that it is usually one of the sweeter Thai curries. It certainly has potential, so one to try again with a few changes – less sugar, bash the peanuts a bit finer, and certainly use the thinly-sliced-beef-at-the-end method rather than the simmer-for-two-hours method.
It did turn out a lovely orange colour though, and with the green of the lime and basil leaves and the red of the chilli, it looked rather a lot like the picture in the book, which doesn’t always happen.
Cheese Salad
Kerri was out tonight and I was in the mood for something healthy. Mostly due to a late night last night. We did have rather a lot of salad at home waiting to be eaten and on the way home I was thinking of cooking something interesting and having salad with it. The more I thought about it, the more I fancied the salad itself rather than anything else. So salad it was, with some cubed cheddar.
Not a particularly exciting salad: lettuce, cucumber, red pepper, carrot, celery, avocado and cheese. Cut into pieces slightly larger than Kerri usually likes them. Then drizzled with olive oil, a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of salt. At the last minute I added some pine nuts too, but not very many.
It definitely satisfied my craving for something healthy and the avocado was really good; just the right ripeness. Yum.
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 🙁
