Bouillabaisse
I had some really good bouillabaisse at my local pub recently and wanted to try making it myself. Stephen found a recipe and after we’d bought some fish (gurnard, sea bass, clams and langoustines) we started to put it all together.
Firstly I made the rouille which is garlic, salt, chilli, bread and oil. This is served on toasted French bread with the bouillabaisse. It was very garlicky but good nonetheless.
We made the bouillabaisse by sweating off some onions, leek, garlic and tomatoes. Next we added tomatoes, fish stock, tomato puree, bouquet garni and saffron. Once this had cooked for a while we added the fish and cooked it through. The fish is then removed and the seasoning adjusted to taste.
It’s a relatively quick dish to make and doesn’t require much preparation, the end dish though was sadly lacking in flavour and quite watery. I think I’d like to try it again, perhaps with a different recipe and a different selection of fish.
Pizza
We used to cook pizza quite often but haven’t done so for a while. We recently bought an electric whisk which came with dough hooks so we were keen to try them out and see if they made the dough preparation any easier; I tried them today and they didn’t…I ended up kneading the dough by hand, rather unsuccessfully. Stephen managed to save the day though and we put together one rather large pizza that included all the toppings I’d bought for two: chorizo, Parma ham, roasted red peppers, red onions, mushrooms, basil and mozarella.
The result was good, a slightly thicker base than normal but lots of flavour from the interesting toppings. Some of the peppers were slightly charred due to a situation with the wine we were opening but this actually added another, different flavour. All in all, a good Friday night dinner.
Spaghetti with Bacon and Cabbage
When I arrived home this evening, I arrived to the wonderful smell of lardons frying. Kerri was making spaghetti with lardons and cabbage. When the lardons had fried for a while, we added sliced red onion and crushed garlic with a good grind of pepper. We cooked these until the onion had softened, then added a splash of wine and let it cook until the alcohol had evaporated. Then we added shredded cabbage to the pan, stirred it up a bit and put on the lid, allowing the cabbage to steam.
While that was all happening, we cooked some spaghetti, then drained it and added the cabbage and lardons to it. The result was tasty, but could do with a bit more sauce to coat the pasta; some cream would go well if added to the lardons, onions and garlic to soak up the flavours and spread them around.
Halibut with Capers, Olives and Tomatoes
Stephen found a recipe online which we loosely followed to create this dish: fried halibut with a caper, olive and tomato sauce. The sauce was made up of the following:
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
1 teaspoon chilli powder
2 tomatoes, chopped
1/2 cup chopped pitted Kalamata olives
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
1 tablespoon drained capers
1/3 cup bottled fish stock
1/4 cup dry sherry
The halibut was dusted with seasoned flour and fried. Meanwhile, the sauce was made by sweating off the onion and chilli for a few minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients and cooking for a further five minutes.
It worked out well, it was quick and easy and the sweet, sharp sauce (similar to Puttanesca) complemented the meaty fish. There was rather too little sauce though unfortunately.
Thai Odyssey Part 2 – Hot and Sour Soup of Shredded Chicken and Lemongrass…
… accompanied by Vermicelli Salad.
Phew, rather a long title for two relatively simple (but delicious) dishes.
I really love this picture that Kerri took of the soup; the coriander leaves floating on the surface look a little like lilly pads on the surface of a pond:
This picture of the salad turned out well, but I think it needs some carved vegetables around the edge to complete it; we’ll have to get practising this weekend:
The soup recipe is from the pink Thai Food book that started off our Thai Odyssey and is translated as “tom jiw gai”. Only after we had decided to cook it did I notice that the translation wasn’t “tom yam gai” as I had expected. I started worrying that it wouldn’t turn out as hoped since I had really wanted to cook tom yam, but checking the ingredients put my mind at rest, as it contained the main tom yam components of chillies, fish sauce, lime juice, lime leaves and lemongrass. The pink book is usually very good at providing interesting facts, but it was uncharacteristically silent on the reason for the difference in the name; perhaps there is something in the method that differentiates it.
We started with some chicken stock, but only had half the required amount of home made stock so had to make it up with shop stock. Brought it to the boil and added a pinch each of salt and palm sugar. (We have loads of palm sugar after I was let loose in a Thai supermarket and I’m doubting we’ll ever use it up unless we start to make lots of desserts). In the stock we simmered a couple of whole peeled shallots, a couple of lemongrass stalks, a couple of torn up lime leaves and a few slices of rather sad-looking galangal which still managed to add a bit of flavour.
After a few minutes, we added three sliced chicken thighs and simmered until they were done. We drained the stock, discarded the aromatics and kept and shredded the chicken. Into a bowl (sadly we don’t have a real Thai soup dish) we put four bruised birds eye chillis and a few tablespoons each of lime juice and fish sauce. We added the shredded chicken to the bowl and then poured over the hot stock. Into this we added finely sliced lemongrass, shallots and lime leaves before topping with some coriander leaves.
The result was a lovely hot, salty and sour soup, made very aromatic by the addition of the lime leaves and the lemongrass. I found it very interesting that three ingredients were present both in flavouring the stock and also added raw at the end: lemongrass, lime leaves and shallots. Mixing in the lime juice at the end and not cooking it keeps it fresh and the lime leaves and lemongrass add a wonderfully zesty perfume. The texture of the crunchy bits of finely sliced raw lemongrass was really good too.
The soup reminded both of us of a light, non-coconutty version of green curry. Some tom yam recipes add chilli paste which gives the top of the soup a red sheen; this one didn’t, but then it wasn’t called tom yam anyway. The verdict from both us was that the soup really good, especially as it is relatively quick to make and doesn’t require lengthly pounding of ingredients to make pastes as some Thai recipes do.
We were a bit remiss in taking ingredients pictures this time, so here is just one including the bruised chillis and the finely sliced shallots, lime leaves and lemongrass, ready for adding to the soup at the end:
After the soup we had vermicelli salad, which was from the cookbook released by the Blue Elephant restaurant. We had been there last week and eaten something similar and decided to try it ourselves.
After soaking bean vermicelli in cold water for 15 minutes, we drained them and cut them into 10cm lengths before briefly cooking in boiling water and draining again. To the vermicelli we added a long red chilli and a garlic clove that had been pounded together. Then we mixed in grated carrot, finely chopped celery, red onion and shallots and some cashew nuts and crushed peanuts. Over this we poured a couple of tablespoons of light soy sauce and a tablespoon of oil in which a sliced clove of garlic had been fried (along with the fried garlic itself). Mixed it all up, served it on some lettuce leaves and topped with coriander.
Although the salad contained chilli, it was not as hot as the soup and was good for cooling down our mouths. The chopped vegetables and nuts all mixed in well with each other and hid away in between the vermicelli to provide nice crunchy bits. The Blue Elephant book concentrates mostly on recipes rather than history and culture, so doesn’t give much in the way of history and context for this dish. I assume that as it contains noodles, it originated from Chinese influence. Also successful and relatively easy to make, so we’ll make sure we always have some vermicelli in our store cupboard in case we fancy it again soon.
Steak and Sauteed Potatoes
A perfect Friday evening meal cooked by Stephen, steak, lots of lovely sauteed potatoes, mushrooms and some yellow-sprouting-brocolli.
Pork Chops, Mashed Potatoes and Roasted Parsnips
Bit of a mish-mash (geddit?!) tonight as we were trying to use up vegetables from the weekend. We had lots of leftover potatoes, leeks and kale so Stephen suggested pork chops with mashed potatoes and the vegetables. I thought it would be more interesting to mix the vegetables up so I did that while he fried off the chops.
It turned out well, the kale was a little past it’s best but hidden amongst the mashed potatoes and sauteed leeks it wasn’t too bad. A good way to use up the leftovers and quick too.
Puttanesca
After the elaborateness of last night’s Thai dish, Stephen made us a simple puttanesca for dinner this evening. It was delicious and even better because he washed up afterwards too!
Thai Odyssey Part 1 – Sour Orange Curry of Trout and Vegetables
While on holiday last week, I ended up reading a lot of what I call the Big Pink Thai Book by David Thompson. We’ve had the book for a while but I hadn’t read that much of it in the past, which is why I took it on holiday with the intention of reading it.
The book covers the culture and the various regions of Thailand as an introduction to the food itself. It also gives a history of the development of Thai food and how it changes depending on the ingredients that were available in the different regions. I found all of this very interesting indeed and planned to set out on a mission to cook various Thai dishes that we hadn’t cooked before, cooking a new dish every week. Monday is a good day because if there are pastes to make then we can make them on the weekend.
So for the first edition tonight, we tried Sour Orange Curry of Trout and Vegetables. This is a fairly simple boiled curry from the Central Plains region. It was quite a change from the Thai food that we usually cook in that it didn’t contain coconut milk, lemongrass or lime. Coconut is actually quite common in the Central Plains along with the South, but less so in the North and North East.
The finished dish looked like this:
Not great presentation, but we were hungry!
To make the paste, we started off with:
5 long dried red chillis, deseeded, soaked in salted water and drained; 1 tablespoon chopped galangal, 3 tablespoons chopped red shallot, 2 tablespoons shrimp paste and a large pinch of salt. These were pounded into a paste, starting with the chillis and galangal and salt, then when they were smooth, adding the shallots and finally the shrimp paste. Which gave a paste looking like this:
The recipe said to use 100g of trout (or other freshwater fish) but we used about double that. We poached a quarter of the fish in three cups of fish stock (apparently Thai people rarely use fish stock and would probably have used chicken stock, but we used fish stock) and then broke it up and mixed it into the curry paste. This will act as a thickening agent when the paste is added to the curry.
To the stock, we added three tablespoons of tamarind water (tamarind pulp soaked and dissolved in water), a pinch of sugar and two tablespoons of fish sauce. Then we added the curry paste and simmered for a few minutes before adding a few yard-long beans, cut into sensible lengths. When these were almost cooked, we added some kale and then a minute or so later, the rest of the trout, cut into pieces. A couple of minutes later and it was done.
It tasted, as the book said it should, salty (from the fish sauce), sour (from the tamarind) and hot (from the chillis) in that order. I had expected it to taste a bit hotter than it did and thought that maybe our dried chillis were a bit old, but afterwards my lips were definitely tingling so the heat was certainly there, just in the background amongst the other flavours. Overall, it was rather good, which I was pleased about because I’d been a bit apprehensive about the fact that it contained no coconut milk and no lemongrass, which are the Thai ingredients that we both like most. Also, being a “boiled curry” rather than a “fried curry”, there is no frying of the curry paste in the beginning, which is the most exciting part.
The book gave a list of recommended accompaniments, but we were boring and just had it with rice. In a formal Thai meal, there should be various different styles of dishes served together and something like this would have been accompanied with a relish, a soup, some vegetables and probably some grilled or fried meat or fish in addition to the rice.
When making green curry as we have done on many occasions, the recipe that we use calls for some shrimp paste which we usually leave out. But having used it successfully here, I think we’ll put it in next time to give a bit more body; I usually find myself adding a bit more fish sauce than the recipe states anyway.
I’m not sure what we’ll be trying next Monday yet, we’ll have to wait and see.
Roast Chicken
It has become something of a tradition for us to have roast chicken when we get back from holiday. So, having been away in Scotland last week, we had roast chicken today. Kerri realised recently that we haven’t cooked the same thing twice so far this year and we were worried that having roast chicken would break our run of different dinners, but as it turned out we have been strangely lacking in roast chicken so far this year, so the run is intact.
Yesterday I worked on a roasting time calculator, which you might or might not have noticed in both the sidebar and also on its own separate page. It doesn’t look very pretty yet, but I’ll fix that soon. Of course, roasting a chicken today meant that I got to use it properly rather than just testing it. Which was very exciting of course.
The chicken turned out to be nice but not brilliant, not sure why as they usually turn out really well. The potatoes were really good though, as were the parsnips. Stuffing was good and the carrots were nice and carrotty and not too sweet. Lemony baby leeks were good but a little too lemony in places. Kale was okay. Gravy was really good when I tasted it in the pan but seemed to have lost some flavour on the plate for some reason.
