Posts filed under 'cooking'
The Spice of my life
How was your Easter, then? Spent it with family and friends cooking up tasty dishes and watching family blockbusters from yesteryear on the TV? Well I spent three solid days cleaning, packing and sorting for my move, and, God, it was dull. Now as some of you may know I’ve ‘bet the farm’ on Eating Albion/Channel 4’s Big Food Adventure, and so this weekend I moved out. I never knew I had so much stuff. Eight bags of rubbish, six bags of recycling, and I took so much stuff to the charity shop over the weekend - Cancer Research in Crystal Palace - that the shop began to resemble my house.
Anyway, all that isn’t really about food. What is about food is the the muck-out of the cupboards I found myself doing on Saturday night. Blimey, I never thought it was possible to pack so much stuff into such a small space: vinegars, pickles, sauces, spices, ketchups, herbs. Most of the jars at the back had best-before dates of late 2007. Now, everyone knows that spices are best ground fresh or used as quickly as possible, but unless you eat a lot of curries and such it’s very hard to get through an entire packet of coriander seeds.
Other highlights included an unopened bag of paprika bought exactly two years ago in Budapest, and never used, and a tin of treacle I once bought planning on making some parkin, though I didn’t. On the tin it said discard after expiry, so I did along with all the other stuff. For one moment I contemplated doing a culinary equivalent of George’s Marvellous Medicine and pour, tip and shake everything into a massive bowl to make a ‘MEGA MARINADE’ but it probably would have tasted rank. So it all went down the sink or in the bin and the jars and tubs into the recycling.
I also cleared out the fridge and defrosted the freezer, where I found half a organic chicken I’d forgotten I put in there a few months ago along with the obligatory handful of peas. The peas went in the bin, but the chicken went on to glory as Saturday’s tea in what I’ve just christened…
‘Gipsy Hill Spicy Leftover Moving Soup’
1/2 a free-range organic chicken
1 sweet potato
1 onion
1 carrot
1 parsnip
hand full of chilli flakes and one fresh green chilli
half a star anise
clove or two of garlic
knob of ginger
handful of dried curry and or lime leaves
Method: Break down chicken into leg, breast, and wing, so that it fits in a casserole and cover in boiling water from the kettle - about a pint. Add all the other ingredients and simmer for 30 minutes. Lift out the chicken and set aside to cool. Lift out and discard lime leaves and ginger.
Shred the chicken when it’s cool enough, then blitz the remaining liquid down to a smooth soup with a hand-held blender, adding the chicken after the first couple of pulses. I like to have a smooth spicy base with tiny chunks of chicken in, but you could chop it by hand if you like bigger bits.
I found a packet of instant noodles and thought about adding that, but for me these work best in clear soups rather than opaque smooth ones like this. I was planning to dunk in the last of the sesame seed loaf I’d bought, but on closer inspection it seemed to be ‘on the turn’, so I just had two bowls of the soup instead and threw the bread out. Given that the weather was so poor this weekend, almost winterly in fact, this soup hit the spot with filling root veg and some chilli warmth.
1 comment 24 March, 2008
Oh, Delia, what can the matter be?
All the noise about Delia Smith’s comeback extravaganza has been like when Dylan went electric - the shock, the horror! Mainstream media highlights include an interview with Lynn Barber in this month’s Observer Food Monthly, a journalist well known for being dropped deep behind ‘party lines’, and she takes no prisoners in this either. I bet you could have cut the atmosphere in the room with a butter knife. Nigel Slater, being a more effete soul, chose to sit on the fence a bit in his leader article. Also, for reasons best known to the Guardian Art Director, the Guardian decided to Photoshop Delia’s face onto Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. Eh?
Anyway, what’s interesting is that Delia’s comments have dealt food media a sucker punch – in short, I think most of them feel betrayed. It’s a case of ‘et tu Brute?’ And this recipe is bordering on food blasphemy. As with the Rt Rvd Rowan Williams’ recent controversial speech, bits of what she said have been broken off and fashioned to fit other people’s agendas and opinions. Some people see it as a voice against the ‘food fascists’, the organic lobby, global warming - such is the modern multi-strata media space.
Delia, by her own admission, says she is ignorant of the politics of food. But oh dear, Delia sweetheart, that’s where the discourse now is! A lot has changed since the late 90s. There’s now a large part of the population that actually do care about how their food is produced and want to know about that, not just how to prepare it and how it ‘looks’. Providence is as important as preparation to swathes of today’s consumers. You can do a small test of this by looking at how many supermarket higher-end brands have a picture of the farmer who (may) have produced the product on the packaging. It may be poorly cooked, but at least it’s poorly cooked Gloucestershire old spot.
David Cameron spoke rather well on the subject of food on Farming Today last week, in a piece that the Radio 4 website soundbited as ‘hug a foodie’. Listen here (towards the end). He even name-checks his local butcher Martin Slater in Chadlington. Natch, being a Westminster man he managed to cover all bases, tickling the foodie trouts, value shoppers, local businesses and supermarkets at the same time. But at least he seemed clued up on the issues and had a genuine passion for well-produced British products and an understanding of what the consumer wants and how what we buy is a statement about our beliefs. Delia, if anything, is a throwback to a time when people were more ignorant of these issues; when it was all Abigail’s Party and the home was an impenetrable fortress unaffected by the outside world.
A foodie friend who I met for dinner last week said, “Have you tried the recipes? They’re awful. It’s not cooking, it’s just assembling your own ready meal from ready-made ingredients at twice the cost of the raw ingredients,” and the shepherd’s pie recipe above bears this out. Look, everyone cheats a bit - shortcuts, tips and tricks and such have been used in cooking since day one - but follow this to the extreme and you could say that even using recipes is cheating because someone’s telling you how to do it rather than finding out for yourself. But I just can’t shake the feeling that Delia’s cheats are somehow more… well, bordering on lazy.
I’ll end with an analogy for the young ‘uns. Most computer games come with cheat codes: infinite ammo, invulnerability, the ability to skip to any level, God mode, etc. From Commodore 64 pokes to Playstation’s secret combos, you can always cheat. The point is, if you’ve ever played a computer game with all the cheats on, it’s the most boring thing in the world. I think the same applies in cooking.
4 comments 24 February, 2008
What a tea/dinner/supper*
*delete as appropriate, depending on perceived class status. For me it’s tea.
I’d never boiled a chicken until yesterday. I’d fried, sautéed, wrapped in parma ham and made soups from leftovers, but why boil a whole bird when you can roast it, right? Wrong. I’d got a chicken in for the weekend, but as you found out in yesterday’s post, I ended up having a Christmas Sunday lunch. So, having got home at around 8ish on Monday night with the chicken still in the fridge, I was hungry and wanted something fast. Boiling rather than roasting is quicker due to the direct contact of the hot water. It also gives you a ready-made stock, and that means soup.
Here’s what I did. Kettle on, and whole chicken into my largest stockpot with chunkily chopped-up carrot, celery, and parsnip. To that I added a bay leaf, four cloves of garlic, one segment of star anise, and a few sprigs of parsley, plus a peppercorn. The chicken was cooked in about 30 mins. Just like with roasting, use the juices from around the thigh as a guide to whether it’s cooked through. A word of warning here, though - take great care when lifting it out of the boiling water as it can drop back into the pot easily and splash hot stock everywhere. You might be better chopping it up raw and cooking in sections (this improves speed, too). You can go anywhere from this basic recipe. Add fresh chopped chillies and udon noodles and you’re in the Orient, a handful of pasta takes you to Italy, and the addition of leeks sets you on the high road to Cock-a-leekie.
I added cubed potato chunks to thicken the base, and after the chicken was cooked I let it cool before shredding the breast meat and straining off the root veg. I ate this too, but you can chuck it if you like. Into the still-hot broth I threw the shredded chicken meat and some very finely shredded pointed cabbage and put it back on the boil. Mmmm.
So that was yesterday, and today was the left-over soup. I also had an English Camembert that needed eating up (I ‘ve spoken about the joy that is hot cheese before). So far, so naughty, but the addition of half a head of raw broccoli ought to bump up the goodness value…
This is good for me… honest.
2 comments 5 February, 2008
Lasagne, a British classic
Last Wednesday I met up with Toby, aka Gastropunk, to talk food, blogging and coding, and a very enjoyable evening it was too. His CSS skills might well be improving the layout of this very page soon.
Over a couple of pints of Spitfire, we chatted about this project, memorable restaurants, our attitude to food, favourite dishes, working at the Beeb, and other such things. We also touched on lasagne - one of my favourite dishes. It was a great, cheap, crowd-pleaser in my student days, and my mum would always make it for when I arrived home for the holidays, as it could sit in a warm oven and wait for the extra hour for my inevitably delayed train.
Last year, The Money Programme compared the true cost (in pence, flavour and health) of ready-meals - particularly lasagne - to home-made versions. The reporter followed a family who microwaved pasta meals for their two kids, which they took and ate in their rooms, and their own two lasagnes, eaten in front of the TV with a bottle of wine. The following week he asked them to make it from scratch, including shopping for the ingredients. Needless to say, with quite a lengthy preparation time, they didn’t sit down to eat till after 8.30pm, but their son did say it tasted nicer.
You’ve really got to want to make a lasagne, as you’re essentially making three different dishes. First the bolognese sauce, then the béchamel, then there’s the time taken to assemble it, then cook it again for a short while. Because of this, it’s not the sort of thing you’d be wise attempting from scratch at 7pm on a weeknight after struggling home on the Northern line. Well, you could, but it’d be rushed. No, like a nice long soak in the bath, I think making a good lasagne is all about taking the time to enjoy each stage. It’s a three-act comedy; a journey, the result only improving when time is a key ingredient.
So, coming back to my conversation with Toby. He confessed to liking a drier lasagne, with not much sauce, while I professed a love of a sloppy one. I’ve had lasagne in your average high street Italian that’s a sort of loose assemblage of the key ingredients - more a pile of loose leaves of pasta with alternate meat and cheese layers finished under a red-hot salamander. Anyway, home ones don’t turn out like that. They fill a large tray.
And why is it a British classic? Well, a few years ago this story surfaced concerning a recipe for Richard III’s court, called Loseyns. Anyway, here’s how I do it, and if you’ve any other additions or tips for improvements, please do let me know.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
1 stick of celery, 1 carrot, 1 onion, and 3 cloves of garlic, all finely chopped and sweated in a knob of butter and a glug of oil. Then add one pack (500g) of organic beef mince, and brown. Don’t just chuck it in, mind - break it up with your hand into strands and keep stirring once it’s in so that it doesn’t clump together. Once that’s nicely browned, add a tin of chopped tomatoes, 300ml of passata and some chopped basil. (As an aside, if you really want to make a proper old-fashioned (i.e pre-Columbian) Italian one, leave out the tomatoes and just use red wine and milk and cook it for a whole day!) The sauce can sit on the back burner at its lowest setting, slowly getting darker and more… broody. It’ll happily sit there all afternoon until you need it, slowly hissing and bubbling like the crater of Mount Etna.
Sometime in the afternoon, do the béchamel. Dead easy. Very forgiving, is a béchamel, as long as you keep stirring. Melt the butter, add the flour in small amounts, and ensure the roux is cooked through. Add the warm milk, stirring all the time, and then put in some grated parmesan.
A word about the lasagne itself, or, as Americans call them, ‘lasagna noodles’. There are three types, but which one is authentic and does it matter? Well, the organic one is made in Italy, but I favour the opaque one because it swells up a lot more and takes the sauce better due to its rough texture.
Construction depends on how big your dish is, and the higher the better. I start with pasta, then meat, sauce, pasta, meat, sauce, pasta again, which is about all my lasagne dish can take. End with a final load of sauce, a few shreds of mozzarella, and a pair of basil leaves. You can keep it like this for a while, even overnight. Just pop it in the oven for 25 minutes until the top goes brown and tasty.
And that’s how I like it.
2 comments 23 January, 2008
Being Gordon Ramsay
Last night was Gordon Ramsay’s Cookalong Live, which brought Channel 4’s Big Food Fight season to a culinary close. (If you missed it, it’s on again this Sunday at 8pm.) It was a great way to round off a successful season, mainly due to TV, online, and marketing all working beautifully together.
To encourage user feedback and to create a buzz, we set up a Flickr group and a Facebook event for people to contribute to, and this was the most interesting aspect for me. 1,192 guests, 439 wall posts and 253 photos on the Facebook page, and 65 members and 339 images in the Flickr group. Bags of online content, downloadable instructions, tool tips, counting down print ad campaign, and even some handy advice from me on how to take better pictures.
The above numbers might not seem huge compared to the TV audience (and we’ll have to wait till Monday for that figure 4.2 million people watched it), but let’s just think about what’s happened here. All those people bothered to spend their hard-earned money on the ingredients, invite friends round, do the cooking, and take time to photograph and comment about it. That’s a massive ask and a brilliant bit of viewer and TV event interactivity. Also, as of yesterday afternoon, 3,500+ people had signed up to the Cookalong map, including one guy in Denmark.
Some other things of interest are the discussions and comments. Some people found it went too fast, some wanted fewer film bits in between and a recap on what they’d just done, and others wanted a more complex menu. Channel 4/Optomen and Gordon would be mad not to make it an annual event.
Finally, Ross Anderson in The Times said:
‘It’s reprehensible enough that hardly anyone these days can cook without a recipe book, but Gord’s Cookalong heralds an Orwellian culinary dystopia…’
Hmmm, are those grapes sour, Sir? Anyway, below are some of my favourites pulled in from Flickr and Facebook. And just you try telling the lady with the rolling pin she’s part of an Orwellian culinary dystopia!
2 comments 19 January, 2008
Some chicken leftovers
A few final thoughts, facts and tips concerning chickens. In Channel 4’s chicken-related schedule last week, Hugh’s Chicken Run got 3.5m viewers three nights running, Thursday’s Dispatches on food labelling got 3m and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners got 4m. With such good figures, it’s clear that food provenance is something the public is desperate to find out more about - which is good news for Eating Albion and this whole project. To put those figures in some sort of context, around 800,000 tuned in to see Jade’s eviction on Big Brother’s Celebrity Hijack (anything BB is seen as ‘an earner’ for the channel).
I’d like to end this chicken escapade (for now) with a recipe and how I cooked the chicken from my weekend ordeal. To recap, I had one chicken, some carrots, leeks, onions, tarragon, thyme, and potatoes. I stuffed the chicken with half a lemon, some tarragon and thyme, and four crushed garlic cloves, and rested it on a base of the chopped vegetables. I tried Toby’s ex-girlfriend’s sister’s French boyfriend’s tip (phew!) of popping a crust of bread in the bird’s rear. You can’t use any old ‘coggy-ender’* of Mother’s Pride, however - it’s got to be something like the end of a baguette, something with a crust that can take it. I had a small walnut and onion loaf from the Blackbird bakery, so used the domed end of that.
I roast my chickens upside down for the first 30 minutes, then flip them over. It’s then that I up-end them and drain off a little of the garlicky-lemony-fatty-herby goodness from inside the cavity into the gravy tray. With this particular chicken, the bread crust acted like a bath sponge at this point, letting the juices through, but taking them on as well. But because the end stuck out for the rest of the cooking time, it crisped up too. I pulled it out while the bird rested and ate it with the carrots and parsnips the bird was roasted on. Oh my god, it was good! Good interesting bread, augmented by all the juices. I think out of the whole meal, I enjoyed shoving hot, gooey-yet-crunchy, chickeny, nutty bread in my mouth with some caramelised parsnips the most. It was a great appetiser, in the sense that it stimulated my appetite - a lot.
The second off-the-internet tip I tried was dusting my parboiled roasties with polenta. This tip came from the BBC food message boards. They turned out OK, but tasted a little like those frozen McCain home-style roast potatoes. They did crunch up my poor-quality spuds from Berwick Street Market, but I should have just bought better spuds. Having said that, I think they’d be really popular with kids. But if you don’t try, you’ll never know.
Anyway, here’s the finished result - and yes, I did overcook the leeks. Below is the other meat and 1.5 litres of stock that I got from the rest of the bird. Enough for tea on Sunday, sandwiches for Monday, two tubs for the freezer, and stock for risotto and something else. That’s not bad from a £10 bird.
* This is what my mother and grandmother called each end of a loaf of bread. Apparently the official name is the heel, but I like coggy-ender better.
4 comments 14 January, 2008
My Food books
Left to right - Top row
Silver Spoon
Japanese Cooking
BBQ fFood for Friends
Fish
Last food of England
Les Halles Cookbook
Last Chance to Eat
Julie and Julia
Food in England
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Englishman’s Food (1957)
A Cook’s Tour
Culinary Pleasures
Heat
Kitchen Con
Cookery Illustrated (1914)
Seven Centuries of English Cooking
Londoner’s Larder
Tarts With Tops
Morocco: World Cuisine
Trolley Wars
Left to right - Bottom row
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
Traditional Foods of Britain (this is a new Harper Collins reprint in 5 vols)
Food Mania
Feast: A History of Grand Dining
Food: A History
Not on the Label
Tasting Tuscany
The Accidental Connoisseur
Choice Cuts
The Potato
Fast Food Nation
Everything I Ate
Kafka’s Soup
The Perfectionist
Beef and Liberty
The Devil’s Picnic
Cutting it Fine
Cookery in England
The Amateur Gourmet
Eating for England
The Land that Thyme Forgot (not pictured as it’s on loan)
A small collection but an interesting one I feel. As you can see, there’s a strong lean on British/English cooking. Of particular note is Drummond’s ‘The Englishman’s Food’ which was a Christmas present a few years ago, and I now see Amazon is offering for £65. Drummond led an interesting lift having been a top nutritionist during the war he worked hard to try and improve the nations health. Sadly he was murdered along with his second wife and child in France in ‘52. There was talk recently of him being a spy and the case still provokes discussion in France today, perhaps due to the way his 10 year old daughter was murdered. Instead of being shot like her parents, her head was smashed in with the butt of the rifle. Grusome.
As you can see I don’t really go in for modern celeb recipe books too much, I’m more of a ‘history of’ kind of a guy. Why? Well, most recipes you can now find on-line nowadays. Not only that, but if I want to make say Thai green curry, do I need Delia’s recipe or some Thai teenager who’s blogged about her Gran’s recipe? And this is my problem with a lot of recipe books today, the question of authenticity.
Ayrton’s ‘Cooking in England’ and Hartley’s ‘Food in England’ are my desert island books. Hartley also lead an interesting life, she once came home to find a burgler, unfazed she sat him down and gave him something to eat, before sending him on his way and calling the police. He later gave himself up. ‘Food in England’ contains some fantastic illustrations too. More on her here and here.
And last and by all means least. Dick Emery’s cookbook, a birthday present from a friend. Some of the recipes are terrible however!
If you’re after expanding your collection of books on food rather than just £25 celeb cookbooks from Waterstones, you should head to Books for Cooks in Notting Hill. There is one other unique old book in my collection, but more on that another time.
Add comment 3 January, 2008
