Salads and summer fitness
Posted by: misplacedperson on: October 7, 2011
Probably, given the number of zombie epics I watched last winter
The alpine winter diet of lard, cheese and beer is undeniably tasty, but it’s a bit hard on the waistline and probably isn’t doing vitamin levels any favours either. In fact if it wasn’t for the skiing and sunshine we’d all emerge in May looking like overfed maggots. Fortunately summer offers the chance to address these pressing health and fitness issues via swimming, cycling and not sitting on your fat arse all evening swilling wine and watching zombie movies.
The summer challenge then was to find appealing lunches which aren’t the seasonnaire sandwich, one of my favourite midday options, but a tad on the calorific side for someone aiming to become less porky, stuffed as it is with cheese, mayo and carbs. I did try fruit at one point, but it was a bit of a non-starter really as I don’t actually like it much in its most convenient forms. Bananas aren’t bad, and grapes, melons and strawberries always appeal, but standard stuff like apples or peaches just doesn’t do it for me unless it’s cooked. And since cooked fruit usually involves pies or those almond tart things you get in the patisseries, it’s not about to feature prominently on the diet and exercise menu.
But perusal of Casino’s tourist-oriented picnic shelves suggested that little boxed salad foods might well be the way forward. Not actually purchased from the supermarket, clearly, but their stock is certainly a useful source of ideas. And after minimal experimentation it transpired that salad in plastic tubs was indeed a winner. Plenty of variety, nice fresh food and appropriately summery. Pity the weather was anything but summery for most of the time, but you can’t have everything.
First favourite was the Indian chickpea salad which proved perfect salad-in-a-box material along with a hard boiled egg and a squeezy pack of apple compote (see, the cooked fruit solution) and I ate it for nearly a week before getting bored enough to branch out into alternatives. And many tasty alternatives there were:
Faux Greek Salad - pasta based, making it very faux indeed on the Greek front. Mix with spring onions, fresh and sun-dried tomatoes, sliced black olives and little bits of feta cheese, then drizzle with garlic oil. Not very much feta or it gets overwhelming, so buying it under oil in little jars turns out to be best value, despite the fact that it looks more expensive.
Rice ‘n’ beans - I didn’t eat much rice-based lunch despite the fact that it’s a favourite, as leaving it in your bag in an increasingly warm hut all morning is just asking for food poisoning really. But given July’s consistently arctic weather I reckoned I could probably get away with it. This one consists of white basmati rice and (you guessed it) pulses, my usual combo being chickpeas and lentils with chopped spring onions and a splodge of soy sauce. Works well with all kinds of pulses, and sweetcorn does the biz as well.
Brown rice & prawns - more lunchbox roulette, this time with brown basmati, prawns, spring onion, sliced gherkins, chopped capers and either cherry tomatoes or pineapple. Add chopped anchovy and Thai fish sauce for more fishiness. I think I ultimately preferred the tomato version, though pineapple worked quite well. It seems you can only buy it in huge tins, but as this gives you an excuse to have sweet and sour pork for dinner it can only be a plus.
Lentil salad - yes it’s pulses again. Gosh I’m such a healthy eco-freak. Mix of tinned puy lentils, spring onion, cucumber and cooked beetroot. I know the beet thing sounds slightly odd, but give it a go – you’ll be surprised.
Rice salad weather
Carrot vinaigrette - flagrantly stolen from the supermarket picnic repertoire, this one, and you wonder how they have the brass neck to charge what they do for a load of grated carrot covered in salad dressing. Fresh and tasty, and you can obviously try different dressings for a bit of variety. Adding raisins gives a bit of extra zing as well, assuming you like raisins.
Celeri remoulade – another supermarket picnic staple, but amazingly bland compared to the home made version. This one thanks to JC, who spent an entire afternoon perfecting the remoulade following a row with his boss over what should go in it. Turns out it tastes best made with three parts olive oil, ditto mayo, one part mustard, some capers and a minced garlic clove. Mix with grated celeriac, but add only just enough sauce to coat the veg. Improves for a day spent sitting in the fridge, so you can make it in advance and use it on days when you get up too late to spend time putting lunch together.
And finally ……
Random generic salad - for the end of the shopping week when you’re taking pot luck with the contents of the fridge. Any carb (rice, pasta, couscous, wheat) plus a bit of protein (chopped chicken, prawns, smoked salmon, pulses, cheese) and whatever vegetable matter is lying about (salad veggies, grated carrot, sweetcorn, gherkins, sundried tomatoes). Drizzle with flavoured oil (the stuff out of the feta jar is a good wheeze), soy, Worcester sauce, sweet chilli sauce, Thai fish sauce etc.
This being part of the annual effort to carry on fitting into the same jeans I didn’t venture into dressings based on mayo or creme fraiche and nor did I get too involved with cheese or bacon, but adding those options opens up a whole further world of salad possibility. I did accessorise a bit though, with hard boiled eggs prominent on the menu along with cereal bars, fruit compotes and the odd banana. I have to confess to being led into temptation by some Nutella muffins at one point as well, but I refuse to feel guilty about what I eat. Besides you can’t expect me to exercise iron willpower all of the time.
Sauce for emergencies
Posted by: misplacedperson on: June 3, 2011
- In: pasta | Recipes | vegetarian
- 1 Comment
Mediterranean weather ....
Lulled into a false sense of security by a week on the Med in 30°C sunshine we stocked up on the old healthy salad options on the last shopping trip and looked forward to vitamin-packed summer-style nosh. Bad move. Our estival eating plans were promptly disrupted by rainfall, plummeting temperatures and snow above 1800m. Not that there’s any real reason why you can’t eat salad under those conditions, but it rather loses its appeal when the rain is hammering down outside and you’re seriously thinking of breaking out the heating again.
Still, having purchased the stuff we dutifully carried on eating it up until yesterday, when it got so parky I was reduced to lurking in a hot bath before hiding in the fleece I’ve been wearing all winter. It’s June, for God’s sake, what’s going on?
I refused to go out and spend more cash on extra food, so we were stuck with whatever was lying around the house, which as usual meant pasta and …….. something. Bit of a challenge, as there’s not much potential for pasta sauce in a load of lettuce and radishes. Apparently other people in this position generally just heat up a tin of tomatoes and stick them all over some spaghetti, but frankly I think salad would still sound more appealing even in the middle of January with a raging blizzard outside.
But fortunately my trusty Sainsbury pocket pasta book came to the rescue. I’ve recommended this tome before and I do so again. (Actually, looking at that post I discover that the weather played exactly the same trick on us last year. Doh.)
....... and spring in the Alps.
Basic tomato sauce
You will need: a can of chopped tomatoes; a carrot; an onion; a clove of garlic.
Chop the onion and garlic, and fry until soft. add the grated carrot, tinned tomatoes and a bit of water. Simmer until the onions and carrot are cooked through, then blitz with a hand blender.
And that’s it, tomato sauce. You can liven it up by using red wine rather than water, adding shredded fresh basil at the last minute, throwing in a handful of lardons or chopped mozzarella ……………. etc. Whatever sounds tasty. It also freezes very well, so you can have a supply of it hanging around for emergencies, and it’s even better with fresh tomatoes so it’s a good way of getting rid of a glut of those, should you find yourself with such a thing.
Breakfast with the yoghurt knitters
Posted by: misplacedperson on: May 6, 2011
- In: Recipes | vegetarian
- 2 Comments
Peace, love and meusli. Man.
Meusli has always had a rather beardy left wing vibe about it, the sort of worthy breakfast sandal-wearing vegan types might eat while reading Guardian supplement articles about women’s fair trade goat-weaving cooperatives in the Congo. Pity really, because if you believe what Wikipedia has to say about it, regular meusli consumption will probably make you immortal. Unfortunately Wikipedia is blatantly talking complete tosh on this occasion – “the presence of manganese in Muesli along with low saturated fats keeps your heart safe” indeed, what on earth is that supposed to mean? My heart will somehow turn aside large serrated knives just because I’ve had my meusli this morning? Excuse me if I don’t put that one to the test.
Meusli has moved gradually in from the health food fringe over the past 40 years or so with commercial brands like Alpen and Country Store and the rise of some kind of toasted crunchy cousin called granola. Which is all well and good but for the fact that they all seem to have more sugar in them than a packet of chocolate Frosties. I’m not about to get all paranoid about sugar consumption, but the fact is that I’m just not a big fan of the stuff, and I definitely don’t want it by the tablespoonful at breakfast.
So having sampled various over-sweetened cereal-and-seed combos, I am reduced to making my own meusli. Now how embarrassingly middle class hippie Guardianista is that? No, I’m not sitting here wearing eco-friendly Nepalese cotton trousers and a beard you could hide an endangered species in, honestly. We’ve even got one of those chavtastic huge flatscreen telly contraptions at the moment, though admittedly it’s not actually ours and for my money it could go back in its box and live in the attic until its owner reclaims it next winter. But it seems churlish to deny convalescing man the pleasures of Playstation, so I suppose it’s destined to dominate the living room all summer.
The big advantage of custom meusli making is that you can have exactly what you want in the stuff. Home meusli evangelists are inclined to bang on about how much cheaper it is, but I suspect they’re eating really very dull and politically correct breakfasts indeed and rejecting all the nice bits as being too bourgeois.
Wholefoods with a sense of humour - that's new.
The starting point for DIY meusli is either the cereal mix which health food shops sell as ‘meusli base’ or (my preferred option) uber-cheap supermarket own-brand meusli. This stuff has none of the luxury nice bits, but it does have a few extra odds and ends over the basic cereal mix and (where I get it from anyway) it’s actually cheaper. Start by emptying it into a big bowl.
You are now ready to embark on the customisation process. Add whatever you like in whichever proportions you please. Herewith a few suggestions:
Nuts: personally I really don’t like nuts in my meusli, though I’ll make an exception for flaked almonds. But nuts are definitely traditional, and remain popular. You mught want to look for pre-chopped ones though.
Pumpkin seeds: tasty addition, and one which livens up the appearance of your meusli, the rest of which tends to look a bit bland and generally oat-coloured. Mainly because it’s full of oats.
Sunflower seeds: also rather oat coloured, but another tasty addition. Get shelled ones, or you’ll be picking bits of shell out of your teeth all day and people will think you’ve been at the gerbil mix.
Linseeds: ‘good for you’ apparently (whatever that means) though they don’t taste of anything much. I’m told they have a laxative effect, so I wouldn’t go overboard with them if I were you. Not if you have to go anywhere after breakfast anyway.
Sesame seeds: lots of taste in these, especially the toasted ones, so you don’t want to add too many of them either or your whole brekkie will taste of burger bun.
Raisins: I know a lot of people aren’t big fans of raisins in meusli, but I think they’re essential. Any old raisins will do, but those fancy packets of mixed ones are nicest.
Tropical fruits: not that keen, I have to say, as I find it a bit chewy, but I can see the appeal. Mixed fruit bags usually give you pineapple, papaya, banana and coconut, along with a few more raisins for good measure.
Cranberries: very sour, but an interesting extra if used frugally.
Red fruits mix: haven’t tried this yet as I only spotted it in Casino this morning, but I will certainly be experimenting with it in the next batch. Looks promising.
Prunes: to be avoided. I tried this once and having chopped up a whole pack of the things I had to pick them all out again because the net effect just looked way too much like the contents of the cats’ litter tray. Too sticky and a bit of a faff.
A Yak. Bloody long walk from Tibet.
Goji berries: a ‘superfood’ allegedly, though I’m not likely to find out what’s super about them because they cost about 50€ for half a dozen. I assume this is because they are transported all the way from the Himalaya by yak pannier.
So there you have it. The original Swiss meusli was served with water or fruit juice, but as this sounds frankly minging I generally eat it with plain yoghurt or fromage blanc and possibly a bit of honey. I did experiment with fruit yoghurts and various flavours of drinking yoghurt, but for some reason both of them were quite horrible, so I went back to the fromage blanc thing.
Seasonal fishfest
Posted by: misplacedperson on: April 28, 2011
- In: fish | Recipes
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Oh all right, it's an axolotl not a fish. But I quite like them, so here he his.
I think may have discussed the importance of culinary compatibility in a relationship before. In fact I’m sure I have. I wonder if Ms Middleton has thoroughly vetted her prince for willingness to eat basic foodstuffs without complaining. Mind you, as a senior royal required to attend diplomatically cruical banquets in exotic locations, he has probably been trained from an early age to look enthusiastic when presented with chocolate-coated sea slug on a stick, so mere liver shouldn’t present him with a problem.
I can’t say I’ve eaten a vast deal of liver this winter, but given that someone else has been feeding the house man for the past five months, fish pie has featured heavily on the seasonal menu.
I first discovered the joys of fish pie when I lived in Southsea, round the corner from a fishmonger. We don’t see much in the way of fishmonging here, what with being about as far from the coast as you can get without ending up in Switzerland. This particular shop used to have a tray filled with fishy offcuts of various sorts and species, priced at something very affordable even for me and probably intended for the cat rather than for human consumption. It was, however, perfect for making fish pie, the whole point of which is to get together as many different sorts of fishiness as possible all at once.
Southsea. Arnold Schwarznegger used to live here, you know. No, really.
Living next to Portsmouth, fish pie was a cheap dining option, but in the Alps it’s rather a different story with fresh fish being limited and expensive, frozen stuff tasteles and expensive and …….. well that’s about it really. However, all is not lost because it’s possible to get your hands on little packets of smoked salmon offcuts at slightly less than eye-watering expense and when combined with tinned tuna this gives you a more than acceptably fishy vibe. It’s not quite the same as filling your pie with half a dozens sorts of fish and a handful of seafood, but nor does it involve an eight hour round trip to the coast and the nearest decent fishmonger.
Alpine Fish Pie
You will need: some smoked salmon; a tin of tuna; two hard boiled eggs; some capers; a bit of anchovy; mashed potato.
Sautee the salmon in a bit of butter than add tuna, chopped capers and anchovy (the anchovy isn’t essential but it adds extra fishiness, as does Thai fish cauce if you happen to have any). Add some flour and milk to thicken the mixture and season with pepper. Chop up the eggs and add them as well. Finally, turn the whole lot into an oven dish and spread the mashed potato on top, then bake at 180°C or so for about half an hour.
And voila fish pie, more or less. For some reason I always feel that this has to be eaten with peas, despite the fact that there are plenty of other vegetables which I like better than peas. I have no idea why this is the case.
Grub on a grant
Posted by: misplacedperson on: December 15, 2010
- In: fish | pasta | Recipes
- 2 Comments
That'd be me then, clearly
Which tells you all what an old biddy I am. Grants, what are they, eh? Ah the golden age of university education, when degrees were difficult, beer was cheap and a bus ride across Sheffield cost tuppence.
Students are still poor though, on the whole, and among the useful things the experience taught us was that a) you can’t live on steaks and takeaway and still have enough money for beer even if it is cheap and b) it’s possible to eat perfectly well on a fiver a week. Or it was then at any rate – it’s probably more like £20 these days, but you get the general idea.
Actually I’m told that modern parents do their student offsprings’ shopping online at Ocado and have it all delivered to their immaculate flats, likewise purchased for them at parental expense. Either that or they pay a fortune for canteen swipe cards so that their delicate little babies can eat in residence cafés all term at hugely unnecessary expense. Where was I when the parents were handed out that I failed to get my paws on one of these drooling idiots with the bottomless pockets, I ask myself? Probably at the front of the queue I suppose, if I’m honest.
I take such stories with a pinch of salt really, since I can’t think of any reason why the average parent should have let its brains run out through its ears all of a sudden. Besides, they can’t all have an MP’s expense account, surely?
... or food? Hmmm, close call.
JC’s experience of student life was the standard one of prioritising beer over food and consequently his culinary specialities run to stodge, potatoes and substances chosen on a maximum calories for cash basis. He is the only person I know who makes bubble and squeak from scratch rather than leftovers (what leftovers?).
But there’s nothing wrong with basic student stodge. Baked spud and beans, spag bol and assorted things on toast still feature largely on the menu even today, mainly towards the end of interseason when things get a bit thin and the arrival of the party season at the most financially inconvenient time possible means that once again we’re all making that food vs beer calculation and at the same time trying to stuff 3000 calories a day just to maintain a sensible body temperature.
And thanks to higher education and our cruel and Scrooge-like parents, we manage it every year. God knows what the seasonnaires of the future are going to do – I don’t think Ocado deliver up here.
Tuna Pasta Thing
You will need: a can of tuna; a small tin of sweetcorn; a spring onion; some mayo; pasta of your choice (though it doesn’t work too well with spaghetti)
Cook the pasta. Meanwhile, mix everything else together in a bowl. Drain the pasta, return to the pan and add the contents of the bowl. Stir everything until the pasta is well coated with the tuna mixture.
If you’re feeling posh you can heat the bowls before you serve it. Alternatively, you could save on washing up and eat it straight from the pan, though I never stooped than low even as a student. I’d be prepared to bet JC did though – every time.
Balls!
Posted by: misplacedperson on: November 12, 2010
- In: meat | Recipes
- 3 Comments
Kitchen essential. Possibly without 'Smeg' written on it though.
Had you ever had the temerity to suggest to your granny that you couldn’t possibly manage your culinary affairs without the benefit of a freezer, she would probably have hooted with laughter, told you you didn’t know you were born and regaled you with tales of such antiquated habits as daily shopping and having all your milk delivered.
Undoubtedly it’s possible to live without a freezer, but when you live next door to a supermarket which knocks its meat down to half price just before it goes out of date (and manages its stock badly) and a load of chalet staff whose stock control likewise leaves things to be desired, the initial investment pays dividends in cheap food.
On the other hand, this sort of blatant pikey scrounging does backfire and leave you with random gluts, which is why I am currently suffering from a surfeit of sausage.
Now, I like a nice length of sausage as much as the next woman, but you can get bored with the same old thing all the time. Bangers and mash is always a good bet, though I favour an English style sausage for this one. Sausage and bean casserole goes down well, and the ever-reliable one-pot sausage pasta is a welcome winter staple. But new sausage suggestions are required.
Which brings me once again to the BBC’s Good Food website, a culinary treasure trove despite its celebrity chef obsession and rather annoying habit of telling you to buy things which you could much better make for yourself.
A brief trawl turns up several meatball suggestions. I believe these used to be called faggots, back in the day, but no doubt you get arrested for using that sort of language in these modern times, which is probably why the BBC calls them meatballs.
Easy meatballs
You will need: a kilo each of beef mince and sausagemeat; an onion, finely chopped; a load of chopped parsley: 100g breadcrumbs; two eggs.
Get all the ingredients together in a big bowl, stick your hands in there and squish it around until it’s thoroughly mixed together (I love a picky precise recipe, me). Roll it into bits about the size of golf balls, then roast them in olive oil for about half an hour at 200°C.
Auntie’s website suggests several possible meatball sauces, which means you can knock up a whole load of these and then use them for a series of different meals. And/or just whack them straight back into the freezer, obviously.
Italian ...
Italian style: fry off some garlic, then add a can of tomatoes, splosh of red wine, teaspoon of sugar, meatballs . Simmer until the sauce is reduced, add some shredded basil leaves, serve with spaghetti and parmesan.
Spanish style: as above, but add chopped chorizo along with the garlic, leave out the basil and add paprika. Serve with roast potatoes.
Moroccan style: heat the oil and add chopped apricots, a diced onion, a cinnamon stick, a can of tomatoes, bit of liquid and the meatballs. Simmer for about 15 minutes until the sauce has thickened. Serve with couscous and garnish with fresh coriander and flaked almonds.
.... and Moroccan
Eagle-eyed readers of the Beeb’s website will spot that their recipe is not precisely the same as mine – this is because I wanted a generic meatball, so I missed out the parmesan on the grounds that it was too Italian. I also did 50:50 beef to sausagemeat, because I have no idea how much meat there is in ‘eight good-quality pork sausages’. And I suspect Auntie hasn’t a clue either.
Suitable skiing snackettes
Posted by: misplacedperson on: October 24, 2010
Wood burner. Nice in theory, at any rate.
Resort is open (all right, it’s only for a week, but what do you want in October?), snow is forecast all the way down to the valley floor and once more I spend evenings wrestling with the woodstove in a bid to get it hot enough to reverse the gale howling down the chimney and filling the house with smoke. Winter, we love it.
One of the plus points of risking frostbite all through January by recklessly stepping out of the front door from time to time is that you can eat anything you like at any time of the day without resisting the temptations of cake or restraining yourself from snacking between meals, because if you didn’t you’d probably implode shortly after New Year. This is why traditional montagnard cuisine consists largely of cheese, lard, starch, lard and bacon. Garnished with lard.
Keeping yourself alive and adequately fuelled whilst actually out on the hill can present a challenge, especially if you wish to arrive at the bottom as a reasonably civilised human being and not a ravening beast in the throes of hyperphagy. I once got through most of an innocent-looking baguette before brain managed to wrest control from stomach and register desperate messages coming in from the taste buds that incoming fodder was actually a cold chicken nugget and pesto sandwich with cheapo engine-oil mayonnaise, and not a food substance at all.
Which more than adequately illustrates the pressing need for a portable on-piste fuel supply. There’s always the mountain restaurant option, of course, but at 7€ for a handful of chips it’s well out of reach of a seasonnaire on £200 a month. Besides, there’s no point in wasting good ski time sitting on a terrace and stuffing your face when you can multi-task and do it on the chairlifts.
That's why they tell you to take it off, fool.
Unless you want to carry a backpack around all day, the key considerations in piste food are size, convenience, resistance to freezing and general wear and tear, and calorie content. Not that there’s anything wrong with backpacks, but I can’t be bothered with the faff of taking it off on the lifts and I’ve seen too many people suspended from chairlifts by their backpack straps to risk leaving it on and suffering the resultant ridicule. Besides, they tend to make me fall over backwards, which is irritating.
The seasonnaire sandwich: probably the most popular munch out there, mainly because it’s free and you just nab one from the kitchen before you leave (free is a big plus for the seasonnaire). Resistant and filling, but doesn’t score too well on the size criterion in my opinion, unless you’re rocking one of those tent arrangements favoured by the park rats.
Kendal Mint Cake: a good high-calorie portable snackette, performs well in extreme conditions, and comes recommended by the likes of Edmund Hillary and Ernest Shackleton, both of whom took stacks of it with them. Invented in 1869 and still going strong. How could you go wrong? Well, there’s the fact that it tastes horrible even at -10°C when most food tastes of nothing at all, and the residual mintiness makes you feel as though your tonsils are about to freeze solid every time you inhale. But top marks if you don’t mind the mint thing.
Another Scottish contribution to haute cuisine
Scottish butter tablet: passes almost every test with flying colours. A sort of fudge arrangement, for those sassenachs amongst you unfamiliar with this nectar in solid form. Compact, impervious to the elements and basically made of sugar stuck together with butter. Half a day’s calorie allowance in every bite. The drawback is a) I’ve never seen it for sale outside Scotland and b) the commercial stuff is a mere ghostlike imitation of the true tablet. Realistically you’d have to make it yourself, an activity fraught with peril as in its liquid form it could be used as napalm. Falls down a bit on the convenience front.
Haribo crocodiles: this recommendation from a friend who used to be a competition rower and is consequently a bit of a connoisseur of energy foods. I was sceptical initially, but actually the crocodiles score well across the board, particularly on convenience, as thanks to the Baltic temperatures involved they can be eaten directly from the jacket pocket without leaving residual stickiness. Fried eggs, smurfs and gummi bears preform equally well.
Mars Bars: not bad on the calorie front, and reasonably convenient and cost-effective, but let down badly by its performance in the cold. Unacceptably high tooth-resistance quotient initially, and when warmed up turns into a tar-like substance liable to ruin any expensive dental work you may have. Avoid.
Fruit: pants. Sorry, I know it’s healthy and good for your teeth and all that, but it’s an awkward shape, it leaves you with pockets full of soggy cores and peelings, and you probably use more energy eating the stuff than you get out of it in return.
Token vitamin
Fruit compote: this stuff, on the other hand, scores quite well on convenience with its handy stick-the-nozzle-in-the-gob-and-squeeze system and while its calorie count is still a bit low it’s small enough to stuff in a pocket along with a second more heavy-duty snack. Allows you to feel virtuous about eating at least one vitamin during the course of the day.
Twix: probably the best all-round compromise, in my opinion. Good low-temperature performance despite the toffee, which somehow manages to avoid becoming rock solid. The twin-biscuit arrangement allows for convenient stashing of half your snackette for later in the day, and the Twix has the advantage of being weight for weight the cheapest thing in its class. Yes, I am the sort of sad obsessive who checks the per kilo price on the chocolate bars.
And the winner is ...!
Compromising in an offal situation
Posted by: misplacedperson on: October 7, 2010
- In: Recipes
- 4 Comments
If you won't eat the fish, I'm going home to mother.
Once again I find myself having to live with the consequences of rushing blindly into marriage with someone who turns his nose up at perfectly acceptable run-of-the-mill foodstuffs. And while refusing to eat anchovies isn’t too restricting – what with them being very small and quite expensive – rejecting cheap and tasty dinner on the flimsy grounds that you didn’t like what your mother did with liver when you were five is just ridiculous.
Admittedly, mothers do have an odd habit of buying ox liver and then frying the living shit out of it for some reason. I know it’s possible to eat shoe leather, but you’d usually wait until you were very much in extremis before you tried it. But succulent and delicious chicken liver cooked in brandy with a dash of cream is hardly comparable, is it?
Anyway, liver remains firmly off the menu, which is annoying when it costs pennies and tastes like something you’d pay 6€ a tub for.
But having seen him eat paté on several occasions, I formulate a cunning plan …
Chicken Liver Paté
You will need: 225g chicken livers; 150g butter; 2 tblsp brandy; spot of mustard; 2 cloves garlic; thyme.
Fry off the livers in a bit of the butter, then put them in a blender. Melt the rest of the butter and pour that into the blender as well. Deglaze the pan with the brandy and pour that in as well. Add all the rest of the ingredients and whizz the whole lot to a smooth paste. Chill in the fridge for a few hours before eating.
Result! Not only does he pig the lot, he asks when we can have it again. You can use this as some kind of fancy starter with salad stuff or you can just plaster it all over buttered toast and scoff it (we went for option 2, needless to say). It gets more alarmingly garlicky the longer it sits in the fridge.
Culinary cock-ups #1 – crumpets
Posted by: misplacedperson on: September 21, 2010
Innuendo. Fnar, etc.
At the risk of being accused of innuendo, I have to admit to being fond of a nice bit of hot crumpet. Well, who isn’t. (Apart from JC, apparently, though he confesses to a weakness for buttered muffins. And that’s all the double entendre I can muster for the moment.)
But while you can buy (frankly rather nasty and overpriced) muffins in the supermarket here, crumpets are off. I had thoughts of buying a load whilst on our annual Blighty outing last week, but for some reason I didn’t bother. We did come home with a big box of Rice Krispies and a year’s supply of Golden Syrup, but completely failed to get decent loose-leaf tea for the parents, a result of going to a distinctly low-rent branch of Tesco rather than shopping in Lewes as usual. This also meant we ended up with some rather average cheeses, as we didn’t get round to going to the cheese shop either, and on top of that we forgot to stop off at Middle Farm for scrumpy, so we ended up with a case of Dry Blackthorn, which turns out to be rubbish. I’m sure it used to taste of something back in the day, but maybe I’m imagining that. Clearly we need to raise our game on the shopping front.
On the plus side, I did manage to acquire a couple of crumpet rings, the better to promote self-sufficiency on the baked goods front.
What do you mean, cooking? Get lost.
Delia maintains that crumpet-making is an ideal activity for a cold snowy day, a ridiculous assertion if I ever heard one. What the bloody hell would I be doing in the house on a cold snowy day? Mind you, Delia is a self-confessed footy fan and clearly wots not of skiing, so presumably that explains it. Strange woman.
Crumpets
You will need: 276ml milk; 55ml water; teaspoon caster sugar; tablespoon dried yeast; 225g strong flour; teaspoon salt; butter
Heat the milk and water until hand-hot, add the yeast and sugar and leave in the warm for 10-15 minutes until it goes frothy. Add to the flour and salt to make a smooth batter, then cover with a teatowel and leave in a warm place for about 45 minutes, by which tim the batter will be light and frothy. Grease the crumpet rings and put them in a frying pan over a medium heat. Put a tablespoon of batterinto each ring and cook for 4-5 minutes until bubbles appear and burst, leaving those little holes you get on crumpets. Then lift out the rings, turn the crumpets over and cook for another minute.
Unfortunately I fell at the first hurdle here – when she says hand-hot, the Goddess means lukewarm, not hot. Hot will kill the yeast, resulting in a definite absence of froth. But the addition of an extra yeast sachet to the now rather cooler milk mixture sorted that out, and froth was duly forthcoming.
The next bit went quite well, and the batter came out of its warm place looking more than adequately risen and smelling reassuringly yeasty.
Unfortunately though, things proceeded to go somewhat Pete Tong in the final stages. First of all the bubbles which are supposed to lead to that all-important holey butter-trap effect were conspicuous by their absence. Then the dough mixture stuck like glue to the crumpet rings, resulting in a wrestling match with knife, oven gloves and red-hot rings.
I abandoned this whole ring strategy for subsequent batches, which wasn’t too bad as the dough was thick enough not to spread all over the place, but once again the entire thing with the bubbles just wasn’t happening.
So the upshot of the afternoon’s activity has been a load of alleged crumpets which look more like scotch pancakes only more rubbery. They don’t taste bad, and are quite nice when smothered in butter and forest fruit jam (though let’s face it, what isn’t?), but they’re not what they should be. So it’s back to Tesco for crumpet again, much to my disappointment. Maybe I’ll try hot cross buns instead.
That's more like it. Pass the jam, someone.
Further forays into cheesecake
Posted by: misplacedperson on: August 12, 2010
- In: desserts | Recipes
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Following my recent cheesecake post, I suddenly found that I could barely leave the house without bumping into further cheese dessert related recipes. A bit like buses, evidently – wait for ages and then three turn up at once. Though admittedly the resemblance between buses and cheescake begins and ends there.
The Franco Phoney - Antipodean in the Alps.
One of the best of these Johnny-come-lately upstart pudding recipes was supplied by the Franco Phoney, an Aussie journalist and blogger who lives in La Clusaz and writes about cheese for a living. And let’s face it, if you’re going to do that at all you might as well do it in France.
All things considered, I think Audrile’s baked cheesecake pips this one to first prize, but having said that, the second one makes a much better summer dessert, as the lack of egg and addition of lemon juice give it a much lighter and fresher taste. It also has the significant advantage that it needs no cooking, a boon when you’re already dealing with temperatures heading for the 30s and have no need to go getting involved with ovens.
Janelle’s vegie-friendly cheesecake
You will need: can condensed milk; 550g cream cheese; 140ml lemon juice; 2 drops vanilla essence; 150g cheapo butter biscuits; 50g butter.
Crush the biscuits, add melted butter and squish the misture into the bottom of a baking tray. Whisk all the other ingredients together and pour over the base. Chill in the fridge for at least four hours or overnight.
There, how easy was that? I might try it with a ginger biscuit base at some point – could be good with the lemon.
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