Since I don’t have a cook-book, am using my imagination somewhat.
Yesterday I baked chicken in red wine with onions, garlic, black pepper and cayenne pepper. Medium heat for an hour… Worked out well. Also made curry mash – standard mash (with lots of butter and milk), but with two teaspoons of Korma curry paste. Delicious!
A walnut and wild mushroom soup: not such a success. Somehow, the walnuts didn’t come through (I’ll re-heat the remainder for tonight, adding some walnut oil — this may do the trick). The mushrooms were only as wild as our local Waitrose (UK supermarket) could produce, so not very.
But, the main course was a winner, albeit something that is tried and tested in our house. I’m not a vegetarian, but my wife is. A nut loaf is something I’m usually happy to leave to her to … enjoy. However, Joyce Molyneux’s great book, The Carved Angel, contains a recipe for one (see page 122) that’s very good. This is how she introduces it:
There’s nut loaf and there’s nut loaf. It can be, and all too often is, leaden and worthy. This is the other kind, light and delicious with a herb or vegetable filling at its heart.
To finish, left over from Christmas we had two ices: Rosemary Sorbet and (the half-off-puttingly entitled) Rice Ice Cream with Rum-Soaked Fruits — both from Liddell and Weir’s, Ices: The Definitive Guide. Both are highly recommended.
So, that was that for New Year’s Day evening, and one son now gets ready to go back to university, the other to start his gap year. Left to the two of us, we won’t be eating like this every evening …
Tonight, a mushroom risotto. A couple of years ago I read Pot on the Fire by John Thorne, and there (pp 68f) is the best guide to cooking a risotto I have ever come across. His recipe uses portobello mushrooms and he cites Jack Czarnecki who, in A Cook’s Book of Mushrooms, says ‘portobellos are the only (supermarket mushrooms) that possess the size and succulence of the larger wild mushrooms, such as porcini’.
It was John Thorne who taught me to let the rice cook a little before adding any stock: ‘sauté the rice until its coating of starch has turned clear and the rice itself releases a toasty aroma’.
