Well hello there, apologies for the silence for so long. I've been laid up with the dreaded swine flu, as well as both kidney and chest infections. Vileness indeed.
It seems to be that time of year when everyone starts thinking of their favourite albums and singles of the year. One of the best early list I have seen is Rough Trade's top 60 albums of 2009. There are - of course - some albums that they have missed out that I would have put in. But there are also lots of albums that have passed me by. Some of them - Local Natives and Atlas Sound - I'm so glad to discover before the year is out. Another such band is Jonsi and Alex, the side project of the singer from Sigur Ros.
Whilst digging around finding out about these bands I found the lovely Jonsi and Alex doing a little cookery demonstration, of a strawberry pie. Do take a look, that is as long as you are not too worried about hygiene. There is a lot of licking of fingers, blowing in bowls to clean them and yes, that does seem to be a rabbit in the pie dish...
Jónsi & Alex Recipe Show - Raw Strawberry Pie from Jónsi & Alex on Vimeo.
The F Word returns
http://www.aoltv.co.uk/2009/11/03/tv-dinners-the-f-word/
I also noticed this video of Marco Pierre White cooking for Albert Roux which features a very young Gordon Ramsay helping White with his ravioli. More here.
I cook a Masterchef dish
No, as I mentioned in the previous post about Masterchef winners and runners up, where are they now? Lots of the people who have featured in Masterchef have really nice blogs where they share recipes. One such chef is Andy Oliver, now at Nahm, The recipe is a roast aubergine and courgette salad with a yoghurt and tahini dressing. I added some grated carrot to it too. Here's Andy's original recipe and a photo he took.
I am only adding to my love of aubergine with this dish. I've tried so many different ways of cooking it and it's always great.
Sunday Lunch - the good, the band and the X Factor
Come Dine With Fe and I have just spent a total of seven hours in the kitchen. With notable and natural pauses to watch When Fearne met Peaches and X Factor, we toiled over a hot stove - and mostly over a kitchen sink it seems, so much washing up! But we made a feast and managed to use up loads of ingredients we had leftover, including 1.5kg of pumpkin.
We started off with spicy pumpkin soup, which was adapted from a recipe from BBC Good Food but we added a little bit of chilli powder - this chilli powder is loads stronger than the last pot I used which meant the soup packed a lot of punch. I also removed a portion of stock before blending or else the soup would have been too watery. All in all it was a success though.
Next on the menu was a full roast, with a joint of beef we rescued from the depths of the freezer and the duck fat for the roast potatoes and Yorkshire puds saved from the duck legs earlier in the week we made a surprisingly successful attempt at our first roast. The roast potatoes were perfectly roasted and fluffy, the Yorkshire puddings looked really professional and tasted great and the extra stock from the soup was used to make an incredibly tasty gravy. I think my gran would have been proud of my roast, which is some going.
After a pause for X Factor, we then made a halloween pumpkin cake. The cake looked great as it went in the oven and rose well. The comments on the recipe said it needed cooking for 45 minutes rather than 30, so we were prepared to cook it til a skewer was clean.
And that was when our trouble really began.
We were way overkeen and turned the first cake out on to the cooling rack too early. Which meant half the cake stayed in the tin and the other half ripped apart on the cooling rack. The bit that did make it on to the cooling rack was so moist it starting sinking through the metal bars of the cooling rack, effectively cut into slices by the metal bars of the cooling wrack. Rubbish.
Then we tried to ice it..
It was a total disaster. We tried to get cream cheese from the local shop, but as the majority of visitors to our local store are Polish, all the dairy products in the shop are in packaging written in Polish. So we struggled for ages trying to work out which was the cream cheese, amid the yoghurt, cream and vegetable spreads, twice getting all the way to the counter before turning back. What we eventually bought was sour cream...
Maybe it was because we used sour cream, maybe I added too much butter, who knows, but the icing separated terribly, making it look gross, it also tasted dreadfully of margarine. I kept adding more and more icing sugar and mixing it more and more heartily in a forlorn attempt to thicken it up, but nothing worked.
I don't know why, maybe it was that we were quite exhausted by then but we decided to plough on and add the "icing" to both cakes anyway, ruining the soft, moist and gently spiced caked with a vile separated yellow oily devil-icing. What a mistake. We now both feel a little bit sick.
Even if the icing was a disaster and we ruined two perfectly tasty cakes. At least we have amazing leftover roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings for the rest of the week.
We started off with spicy pumpkin soup, which was adapted from a recipe from BBC Good Food but we added a little bit of chilli powder - this chilli powder is loads stronger than the last pot I used which meant the soup packed a lot of punch. I also removed a portion of stock before blending or else the soup would have been too watery. All in all it was a success though.
Next on the menu was a full roast, with a joint of beef we rescued from the depths of the freezer and the duck fat for the roast potatoes and Yorkshire puds saved from the duck legs earlier in the week we made a surprisingly successful attempt at our first roast. The roast potatoes were perfectly roasted and fluffy, the Yorkshire puddings looked really professional and tasted great and the extra stock from the soup was used to make an incredibly tasty gravy. I think my gran would have been proud of my roast, which is some going.
After a pause for X Factor, we then made a halloween pumpkin cake. The cake looked great as it went in the oven and rose well. The comments on the recipe said it needed cooking for 45 minutes rather than 30, so we were prepared to cook it til a skewer was clean.
And that was when our trouble really began.
We were way overkeen and turned the first cake out on to the cooling rack too early. Which meant half the cake stayed in the tin and the other half ripped apart on the cooling rack. The bit that did make it on to the cooling rack was so moist it starting sinking through the metal bars of the cooling rack, effectively cut into slices by the metal bars of the cooling wrack. Rubbish.
Then we tried to ice it..
It was a total disaster. We tried to get cream cheese from the local shop, but as the majority of visitors to our local store are Polish, all the dairy products in the shop are in packaging written in Polish. So we struggled for ages trying to work out which was the cream cheese, amid the yoghurt, cream and vegetable spreads, twice getting all the way to the counter before turning back. What we eventually bought was sour cream...
Maybe it was because we used sour cream, maybe I added too much butter, who knows, but the icing separated terribly, making it look gross, it also tasted dreadfully of margarine. I kept adding more and more icing sugar and mixing it more and more heartily in a forlorn attempt to thicken it up, but nothing worked.
I don't know why, maybe it was that we were quite exhausted by then but we decided to plough on and add the "icing" to both cakes anyway, ruining the soft, moist and gently spiced caked with a vile separated yellow oily devil-icing. What a mistake. We now both feel a little bit sick.
Even if the icing was a disaster and we ruined two perfectly tasty cakes. At least we have amazing leftover roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings for the rest of the week.
Saint Hugh's Ratatouille ( care of RGB )
Mr Barnes of Barnes introduced me to this marvellous ratatouille recipe via his blog Barnes Cubed. It is originally from the recipe book of utterly lovely TV Chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. Or as Mr B likes to call him, Saint Hugh. The recipe calls for you to cook all your vegetables in separate pans, which initially sounds like utter madness, think of all the washing up? It does mean however, that you have a bit more control as you can turn off the pans individually once each vegetable are cooked. Which to a novice like me is most useful. Prevents burnt onions, which seems to be the main flavour in most of my soups. Plus you need to put a garlic clove and herbs in with each pan, so the lovely garlic-herb flavourings still run through the whole dish. (I nearly used the word infused then, but stopped myself just in time.)
Another good thing about using so many pans is you can make absolutely loads of it and have it on the side of with all manner of dishes. And it's got loads of veg in, your five a day on a plate, surely?
So over the last week I have eaten Saint Hugh's ratatouille in the following ways...
Ratatouille with roast leg of duck and streamed broccoli (see above, terrible photo, I will never be a food stylist, that broccoli looks like the Loch Ness Monster on the plate). Ratatouille with salmon and sweet potato fish cakes and steamed broccoli
and finally
Ratatouille on granary toast with lemon infused (infused? DAMMIT) grilled halloumi
and there's still a load in the freezer. Massive win. Thanks RGB.
Happy Halloween
It's Halloween, I'm going to spend the day running around trying to assemble the props in order to try and make myself look like a nine year old boy that no-one knows anyway. It's Max from Where the Wild Things Are - or as it's delightfully called in France - Max et les Maximonsters. The soundtrack is amazing too.
I'm also going to try and make some Halloween inspired food. But what?
Halloween always makes me think of being a Brownie and bobbing for apples which got me thinking of trying to make some Apple Turnovers.I found a recipe here, found via Design Sponge.
Also, I'm going to have three pumpkins worth of pumpkin pulp (is it even called pulp? What is it called? Anyway I'm drawn to this Pumpkin tray bake cake, as I have most of the other ingredients and it looks pretty simple and has lots of positive feedback.
Will take some pictures if I manage to make either tomorrow. Definitely no picture of me dressed as Max though.
Some more Halloween inspired blurry iPhone snaps after the jump, (although why you would want to bother I'm not sure.
A bit obsessed?
There was a point today where I worried a little about myself.
It was just as I sat down to watch Julie and Julia, (a film about a New Yorker hitting thirty and her food blogging obsession). I made myself comfortable, still full from the rather extravagant lunch break I took at Gordon Ramsey's Boxwood Cafe. I was also carrying a Good Food Channel canvas bag, in which were the remnants of home made banana bread I had taken into work.
As the trailers flashed up my mind drifted to whether I could feasibly get to the Slow Food market and demonstrations in my lunch break on Friday without being missed at work, which then made me wonder when exactly was that butchery course that I had booked myself on the previous day?
Further examples are all too easy to mention... In the last week I have done a Nigella, (get up in the night to have a little bit more of the Banana Bread I cooked earlier). I have become Nigel Slater-style obsessed with cooking dishes with apples and figs whilst they are still so plentiful and cheap (in season, I believe it's called) after missing out on masses of cheap corn on the cob last month. I have also saved duck fat to make the perfect roast potatoes on Sunday - Nigella again.
I am really, really enjoying learning, thinking and writing about food and food TV. I just hope I'm getting enough of it down on here to avoid boring my friends and work colleagues too much.
Now is there a Channel 4+1 channel these days so I can watch the Big Chef Little Chef follow up programme...
It was just as I sat down to watch Julie and Julia, (a film about a New Yorker hitting thirty and her food blogging obsession). I made myself comfortable, still full from the rather extravagant lunch break I took at Gordon Ramsey's Boxwood Cafe. I was also carrying a Good Food Channel canvas bag, in which were the remnants of home made banana bread I had taken into work.
As the trailers flashed up my mind drifted to whether I could feasibly get to the Slow Food market and demonstrations in my lunch break on Friday without being missed at work, which then made me wonder when exactly was that butchery course that I had booked myself on the previous day?
Further examples are all too easy to mention... In the last week I have done a Nigella, (get up in the night to have a little bit more of the Banana Bread I cooked earlier). I have become Nigel Slater-style obsessed with cooking dishes with apples and figs whilst they are still so plentiful and cheap (in season, I believe it's called) after missing out on masses of cheap corn on the cob last month. I have also saved duck fat to make the perfect roast potatoes on Sunday - Nigella again.
I am really, really enjoying learning, thinking and writing about food and food TV. I just hope I'm getting enough of it down on here to avoid boring my friends and work colleagues too much.
Now is there a Channel 4+1 channel these days so I can watch the Big Chef Little Chef follow up programme...
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