improve my cooking skills

Warning: vegetarians look away now! :)

I’ve been wanting to make a terrine for ages but didn’t have a suitable dish. So I asked my dear mama for one for my birthday, which was back in July, and then periodically she’d ask me if I’d made one yet, and the whole thing turned into a dreadful guilt trip so eventually I thought the best way to overcome that was actually to make the damned thing!

The problem facing me was that although everyone (= Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall) says that terrines are dead easy to make, the list of ingredients in all the recipes I could find was lengthy and full of things that would be difficult to get hold of and that I felt somewhat squeamish about, not having grown up in the sort of household that plucked its own pheasants.

But eventually I worked out an ingredients list that I could cope with, and made the terrine, and it was considered to be a great success by my advisor in all matters gastronomic, G. So I’m making another one today. NB it’s the sort of thing you need to make a day in advance.

Ingredients

• 2 duck breasts
• sausagemeat – best to buy sausages and take the skins off. Today I think I had about 450g of sausages
• streaky bacon, about 16 rashers
• prunes, soaked ovenight in armagnac :)
• last time I included duck livers, this time I forgot to get them, duh! Never mind!
• this time I am including pistachio nuts though!

Method

1. heat oven to 160C
2. chop up prunes, and duck livers if using, and combine with sausagemeat and pistachios if using. And anything else you feel like chucking in at this stage e.g. spices
3. cut the duck breasts up into chunks and brown them in a frying pan
4. line terrine dish with streaky bacon
5. layer the sausagemeat mixture and the duck until all used up
6. put lid on terrine dish, put it in a roasting tray and fill up to about half way with hot water, then bung in the oven for an hour and a half to two hours.
7. take it out, take the lid off, weight it down – I covered it with foil and then used some tin cans last time.

Allow to cool and put it in the fridge overnight. When ready to serve, the exciting bit is prising it out of the terrine dish – ta da!

It’s supposed to serve 8-10, and it probably would if you were serving it as a starter. Wonderful hearty rustic fare, excellent with salad, cornichons and a smidgeon of fig chutney. And a bottle of red wine, bien sur ;)

I shouldn’t really be writing this yet as I haven’t finished making it but I’ve made it before and know it’s going to be ace! The recipe is loosely based on one from Nigella, but don’t take against it on that account ;)

Ingredients

• damsons (apparently the things G brought back from Kittenville are actually opal plums according to his brother, but we’ve always called them damsons!)
• sugar
• spices
• double cream

Method

This is inspired!

• Put the whole damsons in a saucepan with 125ml of water and some sugar – am being deliberately vague about quantity because I guess it depends on your attitude to sugar, but you do need a bit.
• I added my spices (star anise and cinnamon this evening) at this stage too.
• Bring to the boil and simmer until the damsons are soft. This took about half an hour.
• Mush the mushy damsons through a sieve.
• Let the mushed up damsons cool (am doing this at the mo).
• Combine with whipped cream. Nigella adds icing sugar to her whipped cream but I’m not going to bother.

Looking forward to eating this for breakfast tomorrow!

Strangely, I don’t seem to have posted the recipe for meringues which have been the hit of the summer, and when combined with strawberries/raspberries and cream, become Eton Mess! I almost wonder whether I should post this recipe as it may destroy the mystique, but in the spirit of public service and all that….

I have been using St Delia’s trusty recipe which is extraordinarily simple and takes 5 minutes. I strongly urge everyone to try making their own meringues as there is no comparison with the shop ones and they are dead easy! But you do really need an electric whisk.

Ingredients

• 2 egg whites
• 40g caster sugar

Yeah, this is my kind of ingredients list! This makes about 8 medium-sized meringues. 2 of these is a perfect (i.e. quite generous) portion size for Eton Mess.

Method

• Preheat oven to 140C
• Put the egg whites in a big bowl
• Whisk on low for 2 min
• Whisk on medium for 1 min
• Whisk on high, gradually adding the sugar, for 1 min.

You should be left with a lovely glossy white mixture. Spoon it out onto a baking sheet lined with baking parchment. Bung in the oven for 30 min, then turn the oven off. At this point you’re supposed to leave them in the oven for 4 hours. However I have frequently succumbed to temptation and begun guzzling well before that ;) They are crunchy on the outside, and gooey on the inside, just bloody wonderful for so little effort!

If you’re going to keep them (e.g. to have for breakfast the next day) then I suggest you store them in a box of some sort – they last at least a day but am not sure how much longer than that as this has never been an issue here at Leopard Towers ;)

_{edit: just discovered I did already post an entry about these a while back! but they’re so good I think they deserve a second one ;)}

Made this a couple of years ago based on a Jamie Oliver recipe a friend gave me (I find him far too irritating to have any of his books, though I suspect his recipes are quite good). This time I also used another recipe here and took the bits I liked from both.

Ingredients

• leg of lamb (think mine was, er, 3kg! lots of leftovers!)
• 3 red onions cut up roughly
• 6 carrots, chopped into largish chunks
• 4 parsnips, ditto
• a bulb of garlic, split into cloves
• fresh rosemary
• 1 bottle white wine

Method

Heat oven to 200C. Chop up veg and lay in roasting tin with rosemary. Lay lamb on top. Roast for 30 min.

Take it out, turn oven down to 180, pour in wine, cover with foil. Roast for another 3.5 hours.

Take it out, take foil off, roast for another hour, same temperature.

The results were magnificent, even if I do say so myself! The lamb was great and the vegetables had caramelised very nicely. The wine had reduced to form a pretty good sauce. Very easy and very good for entertaining. Realistically serves 6 but we guzzled most of it between 4 of us and I have some leftover lamb which we are going to turn into a curry this evening!

The Jamie Oliver recipe includes potatoes and celeriac but not parsnips. The other recipe uses butternut squash and cherry tomatoes. Both use carrots, the parsnips were my own touch as I am something of a parsnip addict. So I guess you can pretty much use whatever veg you like! Highly recommended.

I made this yesterday, so here’s the report.

First I caramelised about 10 small organic red onions – I sliced them finely then slow-cooked them with some butter for about half an hour, then added a dash of the magic ingredient, Belazu balsamic vinegar (this stuff is expensive but worth every penny). Then decided the onions had mushed down so much that I’d better cook some more! Next time I would probably aim to use about 6 big onions. I did this well ahead of time and allowed them to cool.

For the pastry, I used M Roux’s pate brisee recipe, which worked well although it went very hard while in the fridge and was quite hard work to roll out, and I am dreadful at rolling pastry so I ended up with a shape that reminded me of France, as opposed to the perfect circle that M Roux always seems to achieve in his illustrations.

I then baked it blind – a new adventure! – which involved putting the pastry in the flan dish, then covering it with baking parchment and weighing it down with beans (I used dried soya beans) and baking at 190C for 20 min. Then I turned down the oven to 170C and took the beans out and put the flan back in the oven with no filling at this stage, for 10 min. Finally I added the onions and sprinkled some thyme on the top, and cooked at 170C for a further 30 min. We let it rest about 15 min before eating, as apparently tarts are supposed to be served warm not hot.

We ate it with a green salad and although it looked a lot, we finished it comfortably between four of us. I would have added some goats cheese to it had we not also been having a cheese course and also one of my friends doesn’t like goats cheese. I also saw a recipe for caramelised onion tart with feta which sounded quite good so that would be a possibility next time.

In terms of effort v. reward: I have to be honest and say it was quite a lot of effort to make the pastry. The whole thing took about 2 hours from start to finish with a few quiet minutes in between. It was very satisfying though, and it did taste extremely good. I would make it again, but probably only at a weekend when I have plenty of time and people coming round. I’d also say it felt like more of a lunchtime dish somehow. For wow factor, the meringues were much quicker and easier!

My friend LA is coming round for dinner on Sat and she let slip a couple of years ago that she loves meringues, so I thought it would be rather nice to have Eton Mess as a pudding (strictly speaking this involves strawberries, but I shall use frozen raspberries).

I discussed meringue-making with Mum while I was at home – she wasn’t convinced it was worth making my own as the bought ones are quite good these days. A fair point, but the aim is to extend my culinary skills.

I used a recipe from St Delia’s website here. I used 3 organic egg whites and 6 oz (170g) sugar i.e. 1.5 times the amount in the recipe. This made 11 decent sized meringues.

Was very glad I have an electric whisk thingy! Anyway, it all went to plan and took less than 5 minutes! There was a slight hitch when it came to putting them in the oven, as I had 2 trays which meant one had to go higher up.

I totally failed on the “leave them 4 hours to cool” bit. I managed to wait 1.5 hours before I ate the first one, and 3 hours till I ate the second. Wow. I mean, like, wow. These are seriously seriously good. Not only really easy to make but also miles better than bought ones – crisp on the outside, then there’s a chewy bit, then a softer bit. The only question now is how do I not eat the whole lot before Saturday? ;)

The only thing I would change next time is I might try to use less sugar, as it seemed like a lot and they are very sweet.

Yesterday I made my first recipe from M Roux’s book on pastry, as recommended by M. Lupin… cheese straws using rough puff pastry. I’ve never made puff pastry before but it wasn’t particularly difficult – you just have to allow lots of time as it needs to be refrigerated between turns.

They didn’t rise very much to be honest and although they tasted good, bloody H E double hockey sticks I could hardly believe the amount of butter that went into the stuff! It was nice to make the pastry myself as although you can buy stuff in the shops, when you make it yourself you have complete control over the ingredients – essentially finest French flour, finest French butter and Parmesan.

Main points for future reference:

• M Roux says they take 5-6 min to cook. God knows what oven he’s using, as mine took about 20 min! We were waiting impatiently for a long time ;)
• he makes them into twirly shapes. I’m not very dextrous so my twirly shapes were a disaster. Next time I’d leave them flat – that way the cheese goes a nice colour too.
• use more cheese! This was the first outing for the Microplane grater which my mother gave me for Xmas, and it was noticeable what a large volume of cheese it created so there must have been a lot of air in it – I should have grated more.

Gougeres are probably easier to make, but it was good to extend the repertoire, and with cheese straws you can make the pastry in advance, useful if people are coming round and you don’t want the kitchen to look like a bomb site.

In my quest to ensure I get enough vitamin C, and now that strawberry season is sadly over, I turn to red peppers which according to Fitday have a hell of a lot of the stuff. This is a recipe I’ve adapted to make as simple as possible – the original recipe specified fresh tomatoes but sod that for a game of soldiers…

Ingredients

• 2 romano peppers (these are the more elongated ones, and have more flavour than the normal sort, IMO)
• 1 or 2 onions
• tin of chopped tomatoes
• salt and pepper, I use a fair bit as think this is what zips it up.

Method

Embarrasingly simple. Chop up peppers and onions, add tin of tomatoes, salt and pepper and cook for ideally an hour or so, until it’s all mushed down.

This is one of those things that it’s better to make in advance. I really like it cold as a dip or an accompaniment to things.

I have to hope my mother doesn’t know about 43T, as I am about to reveal a closely-guarded secret family recipe: the best pudding in the world. They’re called Petits Pots and are incredibly easy to make, yet fantastically decadent and a real dinner party stunner.

NB there is raw egg involved, so they’re possibly not suitable for the pregnant/elderly depending on how worried you are about that sort of thing.

This quantity makes about 4.

Ingredients

• 6 oz / 150g dark chocolate. I have opted for the supermarket’s 72% cocoa stuff today
• 1/2 pint single cream
• an egg

That’s it! Ok, you can add vanilla essence or booze (armagnac or Grand Marnier perhaps?) but it’s not necessary.

Method

I use my food processor to make it. It might be possible to do by hand if you’ve got a strong arm.

1. Heat the cream, but don’t let it boil.
2. Meanwhile, break up the chocolate and put the pieces in the food processor.
3. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and whiz so that the cream melts the chocolate _{this is the point when the food processor explodes and the stuff goes all over me and the kitchen}
4. Add the egg and blitz again.
5. Pour into ramekins and put in the fridge to cool, which will probably take about 4-5 hours.

I’ve messed up a bit today as was I was requested to make double quantities (!) and ended up with a lower cream/chocolate ratio than normal. Guess this means they will just be gooier than usual. C’est la vie.

_{It goes without saying that they are fantastic for breakfast too ;)}

This recipe was in the Guardian yesterday.

• Third of a tin of coconut milk
• 4 heaped tbsp of desiccated coconut
• Handful of mint leaves, washed and chopped
• 2 handfuls of coriander leaves, washed and chopped
• 1-2 green chillies, deseeded and finely chopped
• A thumb of ginger, washed and finely grated
• Zest and juice of 1-2 limes
• 2 spring onions, thinly sliced
• 2 garlic cloves, smashed and finely chopped
• Sea salt

The method is easy: basically you mix everything together! I’ve just made it – the wet and dry grinder was very useful, although it did give me its trademark electric shock as I unplugged it ;)

I left out the garlic and salt, just out of laziness really. It tastes pretty good – not overwhelming to begin with but with a lovely finish! I think it may need to go in the fridge for a bit so the flavours can develop. We’re going to have it with some salmon, but it’s veggie so would make a good dip for crisps or pitta bread.

_{Pringle-addicts take notice of what goodies are available in London Zoo}