Foody Birthday Swag

I got a couple of nice little items for the kitchen for my previously mentioned birthday. The first is a lovely Santoku from my gran; German carbon steel, ice hardened, glass finished and forged in the fires of hell. Oh, and the tang is fan-tang-stic (o-ho!). I’ve never really been able to slice and dice (in the kitchen, I don’t slice and dice at all outside of it) with a proper knife before. Silly pressed knives that go blunt at the drop of a hat were all too common in my past. I blame it on being poor and not having enough cash to drop on a knife. But no more! Seriously, this thing is beautiful. It’s even more fun to chop than it was before.

If you don’t have a nice knife, then you should really treat yourself. Or have a birthday. Throw a fake party and get some friends (that don’t really know you) round and get them to club together for some expensive knives. It’ll be inconvenient when they find out your actual birthday is months away and you used them for knives, but who cares; you can always cook them something to apologize.

I also got the phenomenal On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. The thing is an information goldmine, plus the shiny new modern front cover means it looks nice on the shelf. And it’s a thick book. Thick books are well known to make you look four times as intelligent than a thin book. It doesn’t contain any recipes, but it has so much etymology, history and science in that I’ve been getting a quick read in at any opportunity. I also recommend it and advise a purchase if you are into the kind of stuff it is teaching.

So, all in all, this was definitely not a bad year. I could have got a food processor, but I traded the idea in for a Playstation 2. Childish, yes, but entertaining nonetheless.

IMBB #18 - Pancakes!

[ Note – I told this thing to auto publish on Friday but must have made a mistake somewhere, so it’s actually being published on Sunday evening. Let’s cast our mind back and just pretend it’s Friday 26th, ok? ]

This months IMBB comes from Linda (via her blog, at our table). I like reading Linda’s blog, although my mind always reads it as A Tour Table. I don’t know why. I’m trying to shake it off, but I just can’t. I think my subconscious hates me. Today is also my birthday. Super! Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret, I’m not writing this on Friday 26th August. Oh no. I’m actually writing it on Monday evening, sitting at my computer in the dark tapping away on my black plastic keys and I’m going to pretend that I’m doing this all on Friday. I normally would, but since Friday is my birthday I’m not going to be on my computer, I’m going to be making an attempt at the world drinking record down at some pub somewhere.

I think now would be a good time to divert attention back to the matter at hand, which is frying. Frying is an especially good term because it rhymes with dying, and therefore you can pun it up with a variety of classic movie titles; Fry another Day, Romeo Must Fry, Live and Let Fry. It’s all good. Bonus points for that, then. As you might be able to tell, what with it being my birthday and all (and with it being my little brothers birthday the week before that, and then me going out a lot the week before that), I have not thought much about IMBB this month. I regret it, yes, but I still wanted to contribute something. Anything, really. Anything fried.

So, what do we fry? Chicken? Too common (and undoubtedly will be done to perfection by a host of other bloggers, which would have made my poulty (ha-ha!) attempt look a bit, well, crap). Stir-fry? No, there’s about a billion people that would make me look terrible at that, too. I figured i’d settle for something nice and common, a good old fashion pancake. Then I decided to make a savoury filling because I’ve never had a savoury pancake before in my life.

The thing I did pick, the pancakes, were originally printed in Good Food magazine, which is a nice little magazine printed off and sent straight into the brains of middle class housewives looking for something to read before having an affair with the pool boy. The trouble, I find, with Good Food magazine is that the food is not actually that good and therefore the title of “Good Food” is actually a bit of a misnomer. Even more of a stretch is their implication that it is the good food magazine and therefore, by a process of negating the others, suggesting that any other food magazine does not include good food. So, whenever I see the wildly overpriced charade of a cookery magazine I’ll leave it up on the shelf as I am not in need of weak, tame recipes that I’ve read before a million times, alongside “Taste Tests” where they buy a ton of food from various supermarkets and say what’s nice and what’s not, like I couldn’t do that myself.

This doesn’t mean I can’t read it now and then when I’m occupying various waiting rooms (doctors, dentists, proctologists etc) and stumble across things like “Sizzling Chicken Pancakes”. Now, what these basically want to be are chicken fajitas – anyone from areas that specialise in Mexican food, please don’t kill me, I know you can’t technically have chicken fajitas – but in a pancake instead of a tortilla. Hey, this is good food magazine; they can’t really embrace foods from other countries without slapping on something we’ve had for years in it. Still, it does have coriander in it and coriander (cilantro in America?) is delicious. The pancakes themselves are quite nice, but to be honest I’d prefer a tortilla most of the time. Still, I think they look pretty.

Chicken Pancakes

Ingredients

Salsa:

• 4 ripe tomatoes, de-seeded and finely chopped
• 1 ¼ tbsp coriander (cilantro?), chopped fine
• squeeze of lemon (or lime) juice
• 1tbsp olive oil
• 2tsp high quality tomato paste

Pancake Filling:

• 4 chicken breasts, sliced into strips.
• 1 medium-sized onion, also in thin strips.
• 1 red and 1 green pepper, (surprisingly) in thin strips.
• Some shredded iceberg lettuce
• Sour Cream
• Some good oil (for frying)

Method

1. To make the salsa, throw together all of your salsa ingredients and stir about a bit. I like making salsa, it’s not hard at all.
2. Put half of your oil into a hot frying pan and fry the chicken about a bit until it’s good and done. That should take about 5 minutes. Remove and put somewhere for a bit. Then heat the rest of the oil and fry the onions and peppers until they’re done too, about another 4-5 minutes. Return the chicken to the pan, season with a good bit of salt and pepper and keep warm.
3. To assemble, put a bed of lettuce at the edge of a pancake. Then spoon a generous helping of your chicken filling inside, too. Not too much, mind you, otherwise the whole thing will collapse into a goopey mess. Then top with some sour cream and salsa (hey, and maybe a little cheese!) and garnish with a little leftover coriander.

Cakecrafting

It’s always been a regret of mine that I haven’t spent enough time making cakes because there’s nothing that can inspire the feeling that a cake brings other than, well, cake. How the cake does this without actually telling everyone what (or why) it’s doing it is clearly one of life’s many mysteries. Is it the presentation? The look of a cake? The way the cake tastes? Whatever it is, there’s something about it that manages to captivate and hold the attention of an audience like no other dish can. Perhaps something, well, magical happens when the cake is baking in our large metal heat machines.

But, like I said, I do not make many aforementioned cakes. Regret? Yes. This regret is doubled when birthdays roll around. Then I wouldn’t find the whole process of trying to not only put together a satisfactory cake but to prepare a cake that will dazzle all my relatives. It’s the relatives that are the key – if they’re not dazzled then I’ll slip down a couple of places on the family league tables.

Like most of my kitchen escapades, this one started with some cookbooks. I figured that Cadbury’s would know a thing or two, so fetched a cookbook I had from them. I was right; they had a good looking “Easter Nest Torte” on one of their pages. I’d remove the mini eggs off top and replace them with Smarties; I figured I would get double points if I used a Nestle product to garnish a Cadbury’s recipe. The torte is basically two layers; one a chocolate sponge and the other a mousse. This cake in particular had a chocolate coat around the edge, made by slathering melted chocolate across a pre-prepared strip of greaseproof paper and then leaving the paper (wrapped around the cake) to set. The top was sprinkled with chocolate flake-like (go mad on a block of chocolate with a chef’s knife and you’ll basically make flake) thing (this is the nest part of “Easter nest torte”) and those mini-eggs (which I wasn’t using)

I promised myself that I would not leave the cake to the day of the birthday again this year, but cocked it all up and had to do it on Friday morning. Even worse, my first attempt at the cake was a miserable disaster. The sponge layer baked fine and tasted great (just moist and springy enough thank you very much) but when I came to wrapping the chocolate coat around the sponge the whole thing fell apart. I’d folded the greaseproof paper over until it reached two inches, and this left me with a piece of paper that was far too stiff and rigid to possibly want to wrap itself around the sponge in a nice circle. After the chocolate was set I was left with an oddly hexagonal shape. Well, a hexagon that had just been repeatedly smacked around the head with a baseball bad, but a hexagon nonetheless. Into the bin (a horrible waste, I know, but I can’t leave the calorie-packed cake lying around tempting me) it went, then a quick walk back to the supermarket for more butter. Oh, running out of ingredients sucks, by the way.

Second attempt, much better. The sponge was, once again, delicious and the chocolate coat was manageable. The single layer of greaseproof paper was fraught with problems too, it wasn’t strong enough to hold the chocolate and stand up straight, but I managed too fix this by getting it into the fridge quickly and holding it in place with my hands until the chocolate firmed up a little bit. The mousse was easy to make, but time consuming.

I started the second attempt at about 5pm, when I knew that the cake needed to be ready for about seven. I would have done it earlier, but I had to go to the opticians for most of the afternoon. This was not nice, and the extra element of being against the clock probably meant that some of my cake suffered. This is also why I have no photos of it. As soon as it set, it was sliced and eaten. If I hadn’t of messed up the first time I would have done some, I promise.

But, even with all that adversity, the cake went ok. Everyone was impressed. It looked good. I know I could make it look better if I had a second attempt, but I certainly didn’t let myself down with it. And my little brother enjoyed his flashy chocolate cake for his fourteenth birthday – most of his friends have to make do with a basic vanilla sponge with a bit of jam and some royal icing bought from the local supermarket.

Paper Chef #9 - Flowers and Chillies?

Dang, it’s time for Paper Chef already? It only feels like it’s been four weeks since the last one! Can you believe how time flies by? Still, it’s amazing how exciting Paper Chef can be. I like the whole angle of working around a set of predetermined ingredients. I like it a lot. For instance, Lavender (well, Edible Flowers was the idea but who could resist Owen’s alluring suggestion of lavender?) is something I’ve never really cooked with before. Hell, I’ve barely even smelt lavender. And I’ve got news for you; lavender smells good. It also tastes good.

Lavender is a member of the lamiaceae family, or ‘mint’ to us non-botanist types. Other members of this wonderful family are basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage and – this is the shocker – mint. The word Lavender comes from the latin “lavandus”, meaning “to be washed.” It’s shot to fame thanks to it’s perfume and medicinal properties. The flowers are full of top quality nectar, which can be used to make honey that sells for mucho dollar. Lavender also was used to fend off the plague by the glove makers of Grasse (the lavender fends off fleas). This little purple plant is (or was) native to Greece, France and Spain and it believed to have been taken to England by the Romans, where it has become a staple flower in every self-respecting Brit’s garden.

But, still, looking at the ingredients list; lavender and dried chillis? What on Earth can I possibly do with that? Surely that’s a taste combination that makes no sense! Of course, as I was totally unaware as to the taste of lavender I didn’t really have a foundation to base this claim on. Such is the beauty of the Paper Chef event. The other ingredients on the list were Peaches, Dried Chillies and a local ingredient of your own choosing.

An extra spin on the proceedings this month was the promise of bonus points to anyone that made an effort to get all their ingredients locally. Well, this luckily coincided with my local farmer’s market on Saturday morning. A quick trip up there and I had managed to score myself some beautiful coriander, pork and onion. I already had some locally produced honey at home, and I managed to get (ok, steal) some lavender from both my grandma and my girlfriend’s gardens (god bless ‘em). The chillies proved a problem; I was hoping to procure some from Peppers by Post, a chilli company – who also provided the inspiration for my mousse - just down the road from where I am. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get around to this and had to settle for a bag of dried whole chilli that my girlfriend got from a local Asian food store. I’ve also used tinned fruit for the mousse, and my spices and condiments have come from god knows where. Still, it was nice shopping around locally. People are a lot more interesting at Farmer’s Markets than the 16 year old sod that’s ringing your food through the till at Tesco’s.

Now that I’ve got all my ingredients, it was time to get cooking. But, what to make? I had my (local) pork, peaches and chillies and – a quick ferret about in the internet later – I decided to make a salsa out of the peaches and use the chillies and lavender to marinade the pork.

Lavender and Chilli Pork with Peach Salsa

Peach Salsa

Ingredients

• 4 Ripe Peaches
• 1 Small Red Onion
• Jalapeno
• Lemon Juice
• Coriander (Cilantro?)

Method

1. Finely chop red onion and jalapeno and mix with coarsely chopped peaches and coriander. Cover and refrigerate for a minimum of a couple of hours. The salsa is best served on the day it is made.

Chilli and Lavender Pork

• 500g Pork Tenderloin (my local ingredient of this dish)

For the brine:

• 1 cup white wine vinegar
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 1 cup sea (or whatever you like) salt
• 1 tbsp whole black peppercorns
• 2 cups cold, cold water

For the marinade:

• 6 dried whole chillis
• 1 and a ½ tsp dried lavender
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1 tbsp rapeseed/vegetable oil
• 1 tbsp ground cumin
• 2 tsp sea salt
• 2 tsp black pepper
• ½ cup honey

Method

1. For the brining stage, mix the sugar, salt and peppercorns and pour over some hot vinegar. Leave the flavour to infuse for 5-10 minutes, ensuring that the sugar and salt are dissolved. Pour over cold water and leave for another 5-10 minutes, or until the water is cold.
2. Add the pork, cover and leave in the fridge for 3-4 hours.
3. Now it’s time to add the marinade. Mix the chillis, lavender, garlic, cumin, salt and pepper and throw into a blender. Add the oil and honey and mix until you’ve got a fine paste. Slather over the pork and put back into the fridge for another 3-4 hours.
4. Preheat the oven to Gas 4/350 F/180 C about 20 minutes before you heat a cast iron skillet over high heat until very hot. Add 1tbsp of oil to the skillet, then sear the pork until you have a good colour (about 1 minute 30 to 2 minutes).
5. Finish the pork off in the oven until it reaches an internal temperature of about 70 C/160 F. Leave to rest for 10 minutes before slicing thin vertical strips out of the tenderloin. Arrange on plate with salsa and some lavender to garnish.

Was it nice? You bet your bottom lip it was. But, there was still something missing. I wanted a fruity dessert. Peaches taste nice in dessert. So, I made up a second course. Ok, I made the second course up in advance so I could eat it straight after the pork. I like to be prepared.

Hot and Fruity Mousse with Lavender Honey

Ingredients

• 420g Tin of Peaches
• 227g Tin of Pineapple
• 2tbsp Lemon Juice
• 100g Caster Sugar
• 284ml Whipping Cream (my local ingredient. Dorset cream is a wonderful experience, by the way)
• 6 Egg Whites
• 1/4tsp Cayenne
• 22g Crystal Gelatine
• 1/8 cup lavender flowers
• 1 cup honey

Method

1. Simmer lavender flowers in honey over a double boiler for about an hour. Put in a jar and leave to cool. You can store this stuff like you would honey and it tastes great on scones and the like.
2. Wallop the peaches and the pineapple – syrup and all - into a blender alongside the cayenne and lemon juice. Whiz until you’ve got a nice smooth paste. Dissolve the gelatine in as little liquid as possible and add to the mix. Whizz again.
3. Whip cream in a mixing bowl until, well, whipped and then fold into the mixture.
4. Whisk whites until stiff and then, yes, fold into the mixture.
5. Spoon the mixture into eight ramekins. The leftovers can be put in some other bowls that are suitable for serving.
6. Refrigerate for about 4 hours.
7. To serve, drizzle a couple of teaspoons of honey over the top of the mousse and leave for a few seconds for it to cover the dish. Garnish with some fruit or something, or just leave on its own.

This was also nice. Simple and cheap. I love using Cayenne in desserts because it’s like a spicy aftertaste kick. Lavender honey is also unbelievably delicious.