365 days: banana muffins, caponata, pulled pork...

Quite a bit of cooking today.   Pulled pork, salted cashews, coleslaw, caponata, verdura cotta, pommes etuvees, etc.

Yesterday's sourdough was, as I feared, a disaster - I let it stand to long - the mixture - and it has become too sour.  Not sure if it's worth rescuing - think I'll make some conventional bread with dried yeast tomorrow for our visitors.  I'll grind up the sour dough into crumbs and use them sparingly... most of them will be in the freeezer for some time.  A shame, but a valuable lesson learned I think.  Perhaps I can dust a new starter with some spores of the old one.

Yesterday's muffins were pretty good - I would have called them buns years ago, but buns aren't fashionable, and as I made these in a 6-hole silicon brioche mould I guess they are more muffin than bun.   This recipe is based on my family's banana loaf recipe, which I have been messing about with for years.  This is also a frugality points recipe - because I used up two brown bananas and some very leftover blueberries.

So:  mash two old bananas, add 2 cups of flour (use basic mugs) or substitute half a cup of flour with dessicated coconut.then add a mug of soft brown sugar, about 4oz soft marge (oh use butter if you want, sprinkle on 1 tsp of bi-carb, add 2 eggs and some lemon juice (just a squeeze, lime is better if you are just doing banana and coconut.  Then mix them all with an electric mixer and add half a punnet (is that about 100g? 75g? ) and fold them in (you can add them before mixing if you like). If the mixture is very stiff loosen if with a little milk (a couple of tablespoons), then put them into whatever you use to make muffins (12 small ones) or buns (20? more?).   Cook in oven at gas 4-5 for about 20 minutes.  Chuck onto cooling rack and devour.

The banana bread recipe made a large loaf - and has an extra banana or two in it.  Also brazil or walnuts - about half a mug full, chopped, or anything else you like.  My mother once disgusted me by adding dates - urrrrgh - how could she?  My sister uses chocolate chips instead of nuts, and I suppose chopped caramels/toffees could be nice too, but these days I like coconut and plenty of lime juice in it.  Rum?

What we ate

Pulled pork, pommes etuvees, coleslaw, verdura cotta
Strawberries, whipped cream.

Drank::  Some very nice Sauvignon de Touraine.

Discovered some nice white tortilla chips, which are cheese flavoured and contain linseeds.
.

365 days Sausage fajita bake

Today I invented a dish, there were a lot of chipolatas in the fridge, so I chopped up 2 red onions, a yellow pepper, half a green chili, half a dozen cherry tomatoes and tossed them in lemon juice mixed with fajita spice and laid them on the bottom of a roasting dish (well, actually, it was an oval, blue Le Creuset dish - so a little more attractive).  Then a layer of sausages - uncooked - on top.   Cover this with some lumps of parboiled potatoes, drizzle with olive oil plus salt and pepper.  Bake at medium to high oven for about 20 minutes, stir it all up to ensure more of the potatoes get crisp and cook another 10-15 mins.

This worked quite well, for people who like fajita spice and sausages and potatoes - I love really good sausages, but this is very much the sort of dish I don't much like.  However the other members of the family like it a lot.  I would have added butternut squash and rather more tomato and pepper and left out the sausages, potatoes and fajita spice... But this isn't really an interesting dish - just a cooking method.  All sorts of ingredients could be substituted.  It would be less oily to toss the potatoes in the oil, rather than add it to the dish.

What I ate
Salade nicoise again, followed by a couple of teaspoons of oreo ice cream, and a bit of the antique strawberry ice at the back of the freezer.

I also made some very sour sourdough bread - and some banana and blueberry muffins.  Recipies later.

365 Days: Salade Nicoise

I don't like salad nicoise as much as I think I do.  Perhaps this is because the ingredients have to be really good to make it a great experience, perhaps it's because I don't like hard boiled eggs without lots of mayo.  Whatever it is, it is something I think I like, but am frequently disappointed by - there are plenty of things like that in life - and not just food!

The salad nicoise yesterday was ruined (no) by a lack of cucumber, I used a tin of tuna, about 5 anchovies, 2 hardboiled eggs, some left over green beans, lettuce,. tomatoes and spring onions.  I squeezed over a lemon and pour on some olive oil.  If you read Elizabeth David she will wag her finger at you about what should and shouldn't be included - black olives and capers and bottle artichokes are all good additions.  I had some of those too.  My first mother in law always put new potatoes in hers.   Maybe if I could find some really excellent tuna fish that would help...  


What I ate

Salade nicoise - the others had chili and rice; followed by Oreo ice cream.

365 Days: Oreo ice cream

I always have trouble with ice cream - it's delicious, but it freezes like granite.  I think this is because it is too rich.  It's especially true with fruit based ices because of all the water in it.  I varied my normal recipe on this one (and it is actually a recipe I just thought up myself) and added some egg white I had in the fridge.  I use an ice-cream maker, but obviously you can do it in the fridge, just giving it the occasional stir.  I loathe Oreos, they seem the epitome of artificial non-food (a biscuit version of the Pop tart).

..

Whip about 400ml double cream until in peaks; beat together a whole egg, about 2 tbsps sugar and an egg white or two, then amalgamate the two bowls, it should make the cream runny.  Put into the ice cream machine and mix until ready.  While mixing chop up one packet of Oreos (as rough or as fine as you like) and put them into the ice cream mix while it is still runny.    Usually you need to finish the ice cream in the freezer.  Take it out 10 mins before you need it.

Add-on goodies:  Brandy, rum, baileys; if you have any spare chocolate peel a few bits into the mix with a veg peeler, or put in some lumps of flakey chocolate.  Grated chocolate is too fine and doesn't really work.


What I ate

3 oatcakes with cheese on, coffee.
Scraps: last scrap of pork pie, a bit of ham, some left over chicken.
Supper:  A tuna steak with tomato, onion, olives, plus green beans.
The others ate egg and bacon pie.

365 days Sunday 12th July: The history of post-war Cook books; Roast Chicken

I look at recipes all the time.  I also have a vast collection of cookbooks.   In the abundant choice we have in the western world, about what we can eat, the ingredients available etc.  one could eat different things every day if one was so minded, but there are some things (such as Elizabeth David's hot strawberry mousse) that are so delicious that one wants to go back to them.

There is a sort of decadence about how we eat now.  Years ago, after the war, say, there was a lot of basic food, and cookbooks that were tentatively reminding younger women how butter was used.  People still tended to use margarine in cake making, and still had some frugal habits; recipies for offal abounded!  Then in the late 50's came Elizabeth David and suddenly the bourgeois housewife was confusing her greengrocer with requests for aubergines and courgettes   (ED suggests substituting "vegetable marrow" in ratatouille I think).  There were soon plenty of spin offs and endlessly simplified/anglicised versions of recipes.  What I shamefully call spaghetti carbonara is one such (it should not have cream in it).  Supermarkets, keen to sell more products, notably Sainsburys, produced little themed cook books "Party cooking"  "Italian cooking" "French cooking" etc.

In the 70s I think, the great Alan Davison was born from the sea-foam and came bearing his magnificent fish books (Mediterranean seafood and North Atlantic seafood) and set up the Oxford Food Conferences - and then there was Claudia Roden's book of Middle Eastern Food, and Jane Grigson writing in the Observer and throwing out the great works on Vegetables, Fruit and Charcuterie - as well as my favourite Good Things which contains the recipe for Biscuit Tortoni, and a number of other delicacies.   At around about this stage, in the early 1980s, I lived in Italy for 6 months and found that ED was shamefully inadequate in her Italian Cookery - fortunately Marcella Hazan, Valentina Harris and Anna del Conte came to the rescue with a series of wonderful books from which I cooked all the time...So, at that stage I was well set up - at the top of my game, still occasionally making something extraordinary, but basicaly revelling in a range of delicious, traditional foods from what used to be the Roman Empire:  Southern Europe, North Africa and the middle east.

Since I had grown up with curry (aubergines too), that was covered, and I'd learned an anglicised form of chinese in my teenage years from a 1960s book of my mothers.   My mother also had a tremendous cookbook collection - and I used to try out all sorts of things from that, but it is certainly true that those earlier attempts at reproducing foreign food were very anglicised.

So - in the 80s we had reached an interesting point - everyone had a potential for accessible, authentic foreign food.  I don't really know what happened in the 90s, since I was trying to persuade recalcitrant children to eat any food at all - and by the 2000s I had given up on any sort of fancy cooking since I was focused on finding things that the children and my slightly picky husband would eat.  If I had had any sense I would have fed them from Delia Smith - but I found her books a bit boring - and her recipies not enormously original - with one or two exceptions.

Meanwhile - back in the cookery books....
The celebrity chefs had arrived.  Some of them were ok and fairly down to earth (I like Jamie Oliver's Italian food book for example) but some of them were getting wild and wacky and while this was all fine for people who wanted to up their game and learn new techniques (I got as far as choux pastry and spun sugar - does humankind really need too much unreality?).  I will sadly never own the kind of equipment that allows me to make an espuma/ecume/foam of crevettes or whatever.  I can do pulled pork, but I doubt whether I will ever start smoking it myself.   Cooking had got harder, and curiously, fewer of us were doing it.

The supermarkets were having a field day - their strategy of taking traditional recipies and adding ingredients to them which weren't originally there, had paid off.  Now you couldn't make a bolognese sauce without someone suggesting it needed a bit of nutmeg, and perhaps a bunch of fresh basil too,.adding another £2.50 to your shopping, without much to show for it.

Today I was looking through this weekend's media  food offerings.  There was much that was familiar, there was an article on kohlrabi - probably the 20th article on why kohlrabi's more exciting than you think that I've ever seen, and I reflected yet again, that I had lived too long.  I cannot buy goat curd in Ramsgate, kohlrabi could be tricky - but I am surrounded by delicious fresh local fruit and veg, so why should I bother?   Like Simon Hopkinson I am going back to basics.   What most people enjoy eating is the delicious familiar dishes that they know; good chefs know what might be a good extra ingredient to really bring something out.  This is an ingredient that is there for a good reason, not added so that supermarkets can sell more of it.  The globalisation of English taste makes people conversant with flavourings they might not have used 20 years ago.  I get through an awful lot of cumin these days, and smoked paprika too.  So we are all jazzing things up a bit, making things nicer, without totally going wild.  Classic British moderation?

When I cook roast chicken I don't do anything radical, just this:

I cut up a lemon and squeeze the juice all over the flesh, then I put one of the lemon halves inside the chicken cavity.  I sprinkle salt and pepper on the bird, then rub it all over with butter.  Sometimes I sprinkle herbes de provence over it.   Sometimes I chop an onion and some carrot and put it under the chicken.   I put it first on a slightly high oven, Gaz 6 for about 20 mins, then I take it out - check that there's enough butter etc, and sling a drop of white (or other) wine over it to baste it.  Then I lower the oven to Gas 4 and cook for another 60-90 minutes depending on size.  I baste it occasionally and add more liquid if necessary.  When it's cooked (when juices run clear when you skewer a leg joint) you simply remove it and carve it.  The juice should be good enough to eat as gravy on the meat and veg, but feel free to mess around with flour if you want to.

There is nothing special about this.  It's just a matter of adjusting and compensating and checking that makes food better or worse.

What I ate

Lunch.  Pork pie - bit of, and cold ratatouille (yes, last week's ratatouille)
Supper:  Roast chicken, potatoes, squash and carrots.

The oreo ice cream wasn't ready.

356 Days - Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Strawberry jam

Oh dear,

as always with diaries, something happens.   This time it was a speed awareness test in Tunbridge Wells, a trip to my father's and a trip to Bath to a  memorial service.   I have not been doing any cooking at all, and am now exhausted and not feeling at all like cooking.

However, I still have one remaining recipie from last week's stockpile of cooking.   The last thing I cooked was strawberry jam.

I found a whole tray of strawberries at the farm shop for £3.60 - and I hulled them (if they are ripe this is preferable to the new fashion for simply slicing the tops of) and chopped up the larger ones.  Then I weighed an equal amount of sugar and poured some of it over them, to cover them.   I left them overnight.  The next morning I brought the now soggy strawberries to the boil in a tall saucepan, and when they were soft I added most, but not all the sugar, plus the juice of half a lemon.  I put the squeezed half lemon into the pan to add a bit of extra zip. If you add equal amounts of berry and sugar it is, to my thinking, too sweet;    I then boiled until I reached the "Jam" mark on the sugar thermometer, and then I boiled and tested and boiled and tested.   The "wrinkle test" is fairly well known, a tiny drop of juice on a cool clean plate, blow on it - see if it wrinkles slightly.  Push it with your finger, does it wrinkle?  Continue doing this until it does.  Then turn off the heat and put rapidly.

Jam making is much less messy if you have a jam funnel.  I usually ladle jam into a large jug and then pour it down the wide funnel into the jars.   My jar preference is to re-cycle old jars, get water soluble labels off with hot water, non-water soluble labels need scourers and all sort, possibly the "Sticky stuff remover" product, or nail varnish remover to disolve the gum.  This is worth doing if you have attractively shaped jars and are thinking of giving jam as presents.   The best way to get the jars ready is to run them through the glass cycle in a dishwasher if you have one, otherwise, wash them, rinse in very hot water and dry them upside down in a low oven.  This almost sterilises them!  Boiling water if you're not faint-hearted.

The jam was utterly delicious - and I think I'll probably make some more.  

What I ate
Thursday:  scraps, then after the course went home via a nice pub and ate a platter of fishy things and a nice seafood risotto.  I had a glass of wine too.

Friday:  I can't remember - bits and pieces mostly.  In the evening I heated up some rice and broccoli left overs and added the last of the mushroom soup making a very satisfactory mush.  I then drove to my father's and had a very strong g&t.

Saturday:  Due at a 2.00pm memorial service we anticipated cake perhaps.  So we had bacon, scrambled egg on toast and mushrooms.  I foolishly put a drop of milk in the scramble- makes if very soft... prefer not to do that again.     At the memorial I ate a cheese and tomato sarni, and 3 egg sarnis.  When I finally got home Ned had chosen snacks for me - sadly all wheatbased - so I ate the couscous to please him, but eschewed the pasta.  I also ate some very nice salmon pate with chili rice crackers and some tomato.  Not the most balanced and healthy diet, but not too bad.

365 days of food; Chicken stock, and others...

This is getting a bit desperate - but without chicken stock I would be lost.  It is true there there are some fairly decent commercial ones, and also that I occasionally make insipid ones, but on the whole there is more depth of flavour in a dish that's used a home made stock, and far less MSG!

So, open the freezer and drag out all the plastic bags full of old chicken bones.   Into a large, deep if possible, saucepan.   Fill it up with water and bring to the boil.   Ideally you should remove any scum that rises at this point and then add some chopped vegetables, typically carrot, onion and celery - but leek, turnip and I've used fennel are also good.  A bay leaf or two, some parsley stalks if available, and a few black peppercorns can be added.  Bring to the boil again, then reduce to a simmer - with or without a lid - but with the extractor fan going hard - for two or three hours.

Additional extras can include, the half lemon you stuffed into the chicken cavity, fresh herbs (thyme is good), bouquet garni is traditional, the last inch of white wine in the bottle on the side, I have seen tomatoes suggested, but I've never tried it (flying in the face of nature if you ask me!).   Anything you like that will add to the flavour without dominating it.

There are vegetable stocks too that can allegedly be made from peels and old bits of veg - I made one once, but since I'm not a veggie, I haven't really bothered since.


What I ate today

Today I had a lovely farewell lunch with my friend Liz in the really nice new Japanese restaurant.  We had a mix of vegetable and prawn tempura (butternut squash, courgette, aubergine, and asparagus), a sashimi salad, which was delicious - with two types of raw fish - and a vast plate of nilgri (which I know understand are the sushi with the fish strip on top.)   It was utterly delicious - and filling.  Now at 6.45pm I am thinking of supper and knowing nothing in the house will live up to it!   I have discovered you can order from there via Just Eat - and you know that I will be doing that soon!