Steak and Chips
I’ve been going on about steak for a while. So when I started a new job on Monday, Kerri decided to buy some steak as a “happy new job” present. We had it tonight with chips (Marks & Spencer ready-made oven chips which were pretty good) and green beans and some cherry tomatoes roasted with garlic and salt and pepper and olive oil.
The steak was good; cooked quite rare and the “cheating” chips worked out well too. The tomatoes might actually have stolen the show though, they were brilliant; garlicky without being overpowering and having just a bit of pepper to counteract the sweetness that the roasting had given them.
Barbecue
The weather report claimed that we were going to have sun yesterday and it didn’t work out that way, but we had planned to barbecue so we went ahead.
We started with prawns which we’ve done a few times before and we marinated them in oil, lemon, garlic and chilli as we usually do. Then we had spatchcocked poussins, marinated in oil, lemon, garlic and parsely. The first one that I put onto the barbecue, skin side down, caught alight straight away (which is apparent from the photograph) so I took them off and put them on again a bit later.
With these, we had some potato salad made from Anya potatoes and a dressing of really nice olive oil, parsely and two types of salt – both granulated salt and crunchy rock salt (mmmm crunchy salt) and also a simple garden salad.
We’ll definitely try the poussins again, as they were tasty and moist and it’s great to have a whole bird to yourself. The potato salad was a great success too (mmmm crunchy salt!).
Carrots!
So, we tried to grow a lot of our own vegetables this year but sadly, while we were on holiday, there was a freak hailstorm and almost everything died. One of the things that survived was the small pot of Chatenay carrots. We didn’t think much would happen with them but we’ve continued to water them every night just in case.
Today, while I was outside willing the barbecue coals to turn ashy I noticed a little carrot head poking out. I thought I’d give it a little tug and just see if maybe something exciting might have happened underneath the soil. Lo and behold a perfectly formed baby carrot appeared in my hand. I tugged on a few more and they’re all ready! We now have six (don’t laugh) perfectly formed Chatenany carrots ready to eat. How exciting!
P.S. That’s my hand you can vaguely see in the picture, I spent about five minutes running around the garden holding my tiny bunch of carrots shouting “Look! They’re ready! We grew something! And Stephen took my picture 🙂
Beef and Water Chestnut Stir Fry
Kerri wanted to cook water chestnuts tonight and we didn’t have any and Waitrose didn’t have any when she went shopping there. So I volunteered to get some on the way home. I visited about 10 shops on the way home and only found them in the last one. I hadn’t thought they’d be that hard to find, but for some reason they were.
The chicken and basil stir fry that we cooked a few nights ago was really tasty, so we decided to do something similar to that and just add the water chestnuts. It was of course a Thai recipe and the water chestnut is Chinese, but this lack of authenticity wasn’t bothering us as we were both rather hungry. It turned out well, but not as well as the chicken and basil even though the recipes were very similar (apart from of course the chicken vs beef and the water chestnuts vs no water chestnuts).
Salmon Pasta
I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food site today while looking for a simple dessert. It sounded interesting: salmon, lemon juice, horseradish and creme fraiche. Stephen is out tonight so simple seemed the way to go.
It was ok but the flavours were just a bit wrong. I like horseradish with fish but this just didn’t seem to work. It was slightly too sweet and it all went a bit claggy. The telling thing about it was that I didn’t finish what was on my plate, didn’t go back for seconds and threw away the remainder from the pan.
Chicken Stir Fry
As is typical of most Mondays, we went for something light for dinner in a vague attempt to atone for the extremeties of the weekend. This was pretty much our usual chicken stir fry but with the addition of basil at the end which lifted the whole dish and made it much more fragrant.
We got to use our new chopsticks too, aren’t they pretty?
Not suitable for Vegetarians
Yesterday afternoon we went to a friend’s barbecue but it wasn’t just your average barbecue, this one has been organised for months and required a substantial amount of planning. An ordinary grill wouldn’t have been appropriate, what was needed for this occasion was a handcrafted spit made to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s design. A few sausages and a couple of hamburgers were not on the menu, instead we ate a 45kg Suffolk pig, collected the day before from the farm on which it grew. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Geraldine:
Geraldine took ten hours to cook and produced some of the tastiest and most tender meat we’ve ever eaten. The flavours were simple which allowed the flavour of the pig to really come through: five bulbs of garlic inside the cavity of the pig and a mix of salt and thyme rubbed into the skin which produced no end of very crackly crackling.
Unsuprisingly there was quite a lot left over. Stephen and I are now the proud owners of one of Geraldine’s back legs which is cooking away in the oven as I type. I think pork is going to feature heavily on this week’s menu.
Monkfish
We bought two rather large monkfish tail fillets from our fishmonger today. Our attempt at griddling them wasn’t too successful, so we have decided to buy a new griddle pan; it must be the pan rather than us! That said though, they were really good. Meaty fish with a distinctive flavour. The brown bits were good too; like fish crisps.
With it we had two types of beans (English “french” beans and runner beans) sauteed with shallots and garlic and also some roasted tomatoes. Last week’s attempt at doing something fishy didn’t work very well, but this week all the flavours worked together really well. One of our favourites so far.
Moorish Skewers with Tabbouleh
We used a recipe from the Moro book to marinate some pork fillet before frying them off in the griddle pan and serving them with some tabbouleh. The marinade used saffron, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, oregano, garlic and olive oil. The meat was very tender but the marinade itself was rather heavy. If we do it again then we’ll need to use less saffron.
Chicken Basque
We’d planned to have this yesterday but as the weather was good we barbecued instead. Stephen whipped this up yesterday afternoon and we reheated it when we got home from work tonight. It was tasty but didn’t take that well to being reheated.
