Crumpets - too salty

So i remembered to put the salt in this time. But now they're too salty! Hmm.
I had a fair bit of trial and error with these:

a) trying to cook them in the oven.
Resulted in the batter leaking out from the rings entirely. Don't try it.
b) cooking in a stainless steel pan.
Talk all you want about 'greasing' the pan. Its going to stick majorly.
c) cooking on silicon paper, in a pan.
the silicon paper will burn.
d) don't fill more than 1/2 inch - there's no way its going to cook all the way through.
e) don't try to bake uncooked crumpets in the oven.
It will just make them lifeless.

Overall - the batter is fine, altho' it needs less salt, nice and bubbly.
The equipment needs some refining. Anyone got a spare cast iron griddle or non-stick pan??

Sticky toffee pudding

Its a classic. I wanted some. Bingo.
Toffee sauce was brilliant: brandy, butter, demerara sugar, double cream - boil it all up to thicken, and you're done.
The pudding itself was just lovely. Prue Leith all the way. A real winter treat.

Sausages Michelin

Farmer's market trip at the weekend. Found out that the magic sausage/venison chorizo/sea beet man used to be a michelin starred head chef. No wonder his sausages are amazing. Its a gem.
This week -
Venison and apparently red wine, but there were some berries in there - either juniper or elder, not sure.
Mutton, feta and oregano were brilliant. Just gorgeous.
Bratwurst - beautiful.
Matt made shallot gravy with some marsala to go over the ubiquitous steamed potatoes, spring greens and carrots. Am trying to keep some veg on the table.

Breakfast

Castellano's bacon, egg, homemade sourdough. Fry-up.

Oxtail

6 hours later.
It was pretty tasty. There was a point where i thought the 'meat' (ligaments, sinew, bone) would never ease up. Served up with rough mashed spuds with skins on, carrots, braised cabbage (with apples, onion, garlic, spices) which also took 2+ hours. Very tasty in the eating.

Crumpet overflow

SHE SAID: Fill them to the top.

Fish-finger sandwich

Fish-fingers in Bertinet bread with some greens and carrots for health and some sauted leftover potatoes for not health.

Panettone bread and butter pudding

Ok - so this is related to this: Night Bakery

There was too much bread product for Matt and I to manage, so I wanted to find a way to not let it go to waste. On Monday night we had the bath buns pretending to be savoury bread - with soup. It worked very well. Let them eat Brioche...
But the panettone I wanted to use properly - so made up a custard and made bread and butter pudding with it.
Its fantastic. The smell from the kitchen was superb. The custard set really nicely and the bread was light with good flavour. At last it found its millieu.

Lamb, pearl barley, carrot stew

Bought some cheap as chips stewing lamb. Remembered how nice pearl barley is, and decided on this stew.

I sliced and fried some onions very gently in olive oil and butter.
Coated the lamb in seasoned flour, and browned it gently in the onion pan.
Added stock (just veg bouillon - i haven't got round to the veal stock yet ;)
Added pearl barley and let cook for several hours.
On reflection adding the barley just one hour before the end would be better.
Sliced carrots, added them about an hour before the end.
All in all cooked it slowly slowly for about 3+ hours.

By this time, the meat is falling apart and everything is sweet and unctuous.

I didn't want to cloud the stew with other veg - potatoes and parsnip - so i cooked them separately. I've got a thing for steamed potatoes at the moment, so i did those and chiffonaded some spring greens. Wanted some fresher carrots than just those in the stew, so finely julienned them and steamed alongside the greens.
Also sliced up some parsnip and gently boiled for a few minutes, finished it with butter and salt.

All in all very satisifying on a cold early winter evening. Especially when we had the next post for pudding!

Salammbos

These are from Michel Roux's brilliant "Pastry" book. They are choux buns filled with chocolate creme patissiere and topped with caramel.

I'd made the choux buns on friday, so they were ready to go.

I made up a small amount of creme patissiere (250ml), added chocolate. Then whisked up some double cream and blended the two together.

Then I made the caramel - 150g sugar to 25ml water - so it was very thick. I boiled it up til it started to turn amber, then as directed, plunged the pan into cold water. This stopped the cooking process, but also hardened the caramel very fast. In order to dip the choux buns in and for them to come out smoothly, i had to keep returning the caramel pan to the stove to melt again - without over-cooking it. I got there in the end, with only a few blisters on my hands where the caramel got me.
Once the choux was coated with caramel, I piped the creme patissiere in.
They were really delicious - very light - not at all heavy feeling, which is surprising with all that sugar, pastry, cream ;) I liked the almost smoky deep flavour of the caramel, with the soft choux bun, and creamy chocolatey middle. Yum.

Plaice

Forgive the presentation - this was a late night meal - but was surprisingly delicious, in fact one of my favourites so far. The plaice was just superb - a total treat. I didn't know it was such a gorgeous fish. After so much rich food, I wanted something very simple: roasted fish with a little lemon, butter, bay, seasoning; steamed potatoes with their skins on; steamed spring greens with a little butter.
The flavours had enough space to work and it felt unforced. Humble, surprising, and generous.

Night bakery

I wanted to try a panettone. After some research on the web, I selected what I thought was a sensible recipe, and gave it a go - wondering how i'd get that amazing panettone taste. And - sorry to disappoint - but I'm still wondering.
I made a very nice fruited bread - but its a bit too airy, bit too dry - though its got 5 egg yolks in it!!
On reflection, (sitting here munching it) it just needs more fruit and candied peel, and slightly (3 mins?) less time in the oven to sort the dryness. Easy enough to fix.

I also knocked up some more Bath Buns - they're a bit popular.

All this bakery takes a huge amount of hours tho'. I'd started at around 4pm - got these done, (and the choux buns and my dinner,) through the night til 1am, when the buns were done, then set the alarm for 5am to get the proved panettone in the oven. Set the alarm again for 40 minutes later to pull it out of the oven.
Then get my ass down to work for a cafe day. I thought of it as conditioning training. This bakery shizzle isn't for the wussy hearted.

Ribs

Home alone, I dug out some ribs we had in the freezer. They were sweet cured, and picked up on offer.
I marinaded them in the usual: garlic, ginger, soy, honey, sesame oil.
Then cooked up some veggies to go with noodles, only to realise there were no noodles. So I had a pad thai kind of thing, but ended up with rice  : /
Slightly odd - but pretty tasty nonetheless. If you chuck enough fish sauce, garlic, soy, coriander, sesame oil - its never going to be that bad.
The quality of the ribs was disappointing tho'. They were ok, but nothing super.

Choux buns - better

After feeling very low and ill on thursday, I cheered myself up with some Choux buns on Friday. These turned out lovely.
I only did one tray this time - to avoid the choux mountain i created before - and they cooked so much better in the oven. The oven struggles with two trays - and cooks very unevenly and weirdly across them both.
There's a terrific Michel Roux recipe for these covered with caramel and filled with chocolate creme patissiere. Watch this space. (update: Salammbos made 21 Nov)

Lyonnaise potatoes

After making these in college, slaving over the hot flames, roasting my face, i decided the Lyonnaise potatoes looked so good I'd make them at home.

We conveniently had a lovely lovely waitrose pie - beef and horseradish - so i steamed my potatoes, glided the skins off, sliced thickly and sauted. Meanwhile, I thinly an sliced onion (a red one needed using up) and slowly sauted til browned.
I steamed some spring greens and topped with a bit of butter.
We were both starving and wolfed it down. It was very good.

The sauteing wasn't half as good on a home cooker, compared with the heavy black saute pans and fires at college. They produce so much heat, that the potato caramelises within a few seconds, and you have to keep moving them around. You're able to get a really even beautiful golden colour across all the potato. Much harder at home. Still, saving up for that £2k range to slot in at home ;)

Leftovers and pantry

Whilst making new things is really exciting, having good food - just in store - is immensely satisfying, and really why I cook.
Today I came home from college and work (finishing off the promised ricotta cheesecake), after forgetting my keys at the Cafe, and not having had anything to eat but toast in the morning - and thought I didn't have any food in the house. But - I actually had:
- homemade broccoli soup, just enough for a decent portion,
- home-baked sourdough, soft, sweet and delicious,
- wet walnuts from the shop round the corner, with figs from Pallone di Fichi, and greek yoghurt.
That is a meal fit for kings - and all appeared from 'nothing'. It reminded me that while i don't have much in the fridge/cupboard - what there is, is very good. And cost me very very little.
This pleases me a huge amount. This is why i cook.

Two loaves

I've been making loaves since the Sourdough Success, with varying degrees of OK-ness. One I forgot to put salt in. YUK. Super-yuk. One was fine, but not great - I'd been making the ferment with white flour, no rye, and it lacked flavour a bit.

So rye back into the ferment, I thought I'd give two smaller loaves a try - and they're really nice, much softer crust. I didn't make these as salty as the first loaf either, so all in all a nice very nice batch. But i do want to make them rounder, and make the dough with more structure. Needs practice.

Eaten up with leftover Controversy Broccoli soup.

Baked ricotta cheesecake

The entire cheesecake is represented here by some little stars i made with the excess that wouldn't fit in the tin.
The Cafe changed the menu, and still had a quantity of ricotta, so I offered to make a cheesecake that we could sell. Duly made, i decided to see if you could make cheesecakes in christmas cookie cutters. You can.
And are they any good? I don't know. I gave them to the chef to taste - and they were gone pretty quickly. Good enough?

Quick summary of ingredients:
ricotta, marmalade, orange zest, brandy, vanilla, eggs, flour.

This is one of my favourite desserts - delicate orange vanilla aroma.

Leftovers: puds

One of the nicest things about cooking so much and trying new things, is that we have kick-ass leftovers. Sunday night - and look. We have apple, caramel, rice pudding and some chocolate macaroon. Ker-CHING!

Present: pallone di fichi, parmigiano

Matt got me a present :) a Pallone di Fichi - which is figs preserved in a ball in fig leaves, and some Parmigiano-Reggiano. Happy happy days!

Controversy Broccoli

This started life as purple sprouting, that was going to be salad in the Cafe. But I overcooked it.
Rather than chuck it, I volunteered to take it home to make soup. And all hell broke loose, "We've got to watch you, Mckeever - oh i cooked this wrong - can i take it home?" etc etc etc. Fair enough. I learnt a lesson, well two: don't cook it wrong, don't have any further part in your disasters.

So while my double ineptitude created some heat, I did get a bloody nice meal from it. I guess that's why there was a verbal price to pay.

I turned to Jamie Oliver - At Home for a pasta and broccoli dish.
Melted parmesan, pecorino, cheddar into some greek yoghurt with a little double cream. Plenty seasoning.
Cooked pasta.
Added cut up, pre-over-cooked, broc to pasta water just for a few seconds to warm, then drained everything and mixed iwith the cheese sauce.

Also made broccoli soup - fried up an onion, added veg stock, added cut up, pre-over-cooked broccoli, cooked briefly, then whizzed up. Added milk. Done.

Served both together with some bread soldiers (who doesn't like soldiers?)

It was really satisfying. Hot, oozy, cheese, pasta - warm soup, bread. Great stuff. We're deep into Autumn territory now.

Apple caramel rice pudding

To go with the Three Rice Salad, I added a fourth rice: pudding rice.
Got this recipe from Food from Plenty, Diana Henry and she credits French Laundry in California. Good pedigree.
And it was gorgeous.

Gently slowly cooked apple slices (i was using windfall from Matt's parents) in cider, so they kept their shape and took on amazing flavour.

Gently cooked the rice in water for 4 minutes, then drained and washed. Then cooked for 25 in milk, stirring occasionally.

Then made caramel - always my favourite bit. I love the burnt colour slowly developing and having to rescue it before it ends up a burned mess. So made that, then added 8 tbsp of cold water, and stood back as it spattered and sput. Then stirred in the caramel to eventually get a thin caramel.

Then assembled the dish in glasses. Layer of apples, spooned on caramel, layer of rice, repeat.

All in all the deep umber amber richness of the caramel deepened a creamy, appley pudding, seeping through it bringing all the flavours and aspects together and enhancing each. Just divine.

It went down a storm :)

Three rice salad

Back to Otto Lenghi to sort out the leftovers from the roast chicken. This sounded brilliant on paper - and was f***ing A in the eating.

Three rices are: basmati, brown rice, wild rice.
Prepped the rice - steamed the basmati, plain boiled the others.

Then comes the flavours:
Dressing: lemon juice, toasted sesame oil, fish sauce, olive oil. KAPOW.
Salad: mint, coriander, rocket, spring onion, chilli. ZAP.
Marinade the roasted chicken in the dressing, then bosh it all together with the rice.
Zing!

Martin was round for dinner, and I just served it plain on its own. There was enough going on for me not to worry about under-delivering for my guest.

Roast pork

Roast pork. Roast potatoes. Small whole carrots. Crackling. Bit of salad. Done.
This was actually from 7th November - with the first batch of chocolate macaroons, but got left out in the macca excitement.

Hot chicken salad :)

I've always been a fan of the 'hot salad'. And after Matt's cri de coeur for veg, I responded with this - on a blustery, wet, gale-y night.
Roasted the chicken with butter, thyme, rosemary, garlic and lemon (juiced over the chicken, and put into the tray to roast). Placed the potatoes in the same roasting dish - no par-boiling.
The salad was one of those living salads (baby leaves in soil trays), added rocket, and blanched broccoli and finely ribboned spring greens. Spring greens are amazingly cheap and delicious.
Dressed salad with olive oil and sherry vinegar - I thought it would go well with the lemon/thyme on the chicken.
Also sauteed some mushrooms until juicy, and cut up some room temperature tomatoes.

All in - it was rocking. Really deep chicken flavour in the potatoes, with syrupy lemon in there too. Chicken was lovely - i got a really good one, and it really showed. Money well spent. The spring greens gave the salad depth to match the chicken and spuds, as they really liven up with olive oil and salt. Mushrooms were succulent, and toms juicy and fresh. Everything was seasoned to the hilt. Beautiful. A top hit - I think we'll be seeing this again.
So we got veg, and much tastiness besides.

Bruschetta - butter bean and slow cooked tomato

This was an attempt at an imaginative cheap meal. I soaked butter beans and cannelini beans overnight. Cooked them up and added the tomato sauce (made for last night's pizza). We had cheese and ham hock, and I baked the sourdough bread the night before.
It was nice, but felt a little too 'useful' rather than delicious, and Matt was crying out for some vegetables by this point.
Cue next dish...

Pizza!

I decided to have a go at pizza dough. And asked matt what topping to do - the answer: rocket and proscuitto, and goats cheese and oven roasted tomatoes. Good answer.
So - made the dough, and it all passed pretty much without incident. Shock.
The tricky bit was getting the dough cooked. I failed to heat the baking trays which was a mistake. Ideally I'd have a slab of granite, but that's a long way off.  The bases need a lot of heat.
The end result was super tasty. I made two. Matt and I had one each :)

Chocolate macaroons

I had a lot of seized chocolate and a lot of egg whites (blame the choux paste) to use up. So found this Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe for chocolate macaroons which went some way to using it up.
The macaroons didn't develop the smooth coating of the petit macarons - maybe I ground my almonds too coursely. I hadn't any pre-ground, so resorted to peeling and grinding plain whole almonds I had in a bag.
Had fun with the piping bag for the second time this weekend (first was for the choux buns). And was pleased with the uniform roundness of the macaroons.
Made ganache with the seized chocolate and cream, whipped it up, then spread onto the macaroons to sandwich them.
This combination seemed to transform the cakes - in the centre they were deeply chocolately but supremely light, and the nuttiness of my (course) almonds was very very good with all that chocolate. Interesting how the sum of the parts was greater than the whole on this one.

Profiteroles with Sauternes poached pears

Digging into the previously mentioned choux mountain, I decided to fill the buns with a mix of cream and creme patissiere - from my abandoned pear tart plan.
I decided also to rescue the sauternes poached pears and serve alongside.
The plan worked deliciously in the end - via two rounds of ceased/siezed chocolate, which drove me nuts.
Making the chocolate go grainy and separate out was ok once, but when it happened again I got cross. Resorted to internet for advice.
Seemed that recipe that said put 'chocolate, butter and water' over a pot to heat - was madness as the chocolate and water together would always make the chocolate seize. So ignored that bit and it worked lovely.
All in all it was a day of seizures and splits : /

Hollandaise

Hollandaise was meant to go with a leisurely breakfast of poached eggs and ham on toast. But I ran out of time on Saturday morning, leaving it half done.
Came back - made a beautiful sauce, which passed right through beautiful to split. And had to be chucked.
Round two - remembered not to overheat it, and it turned out lovely.
Matt had it with poached egg, ham and sourdough as intended on Sunday morning instead.

Chilli

I was totally influenced by Heston in Waitrose on this one. I walked in and there were big promos for 'Heston's Rich Winter Chilli' - and I thought that was a good idea.
Hemmed and hawed a bit about the meat. Ultimately rejected mince for a slab of feather steak, and a slab of sliced leg - both 'forgotten cuts', so pretty cheap. I knew we'd cooked the chilli for at least 2 hours, so they'd have a chance to get tender.
So - sliced the meat into strips - the feather steak much much softer than the leg meat, browned it, then fried onions, then added tins of tomatoes, returned the meat, added chilli powder - and let it cook for a few hours.
Towards the end, added beans, grilled peppers (deskinned and sliced) and its done.
Got rice, grated cheese, sour cream salsa (tomatoes, sour cream, coriander, lime) and even a green salad to go with.
It was very very hot - but very good.

Wet walnuts

 I found these in the little greengrocer around the corner, advertised as 'Local wet walnuts'. They sounded great. I didn't know straight away if you could just eat wet walnuts - checked on the web and of course you can ;)
Cracked them open to have with greek yoghurt and honey. Of course.
They are very delicious - soft, creamy textured, as they haven't been dried out yet. Lovely.

Sweet paste melt

Another disaster. This sweet paste was meant for a pear tart. I made the pears gently cooked in Sauternes, and the creme patissiere, and was going to assemble it all in the pastry case. Nope. The pastry case decided to melt down the sides of the tin instead and look like a horror film mask. Rubbish.
It went in the bin.
I took a day to consider my options with the pears and creme patissiere.

Choux mountain

I decided to make profiteroles as I like them and have never done choux paste before.
Results were OK - the varying heat in the oven was very apparent - the top right corner being a real hotspot, which meant rotating the trays. This I think disturbed the buns a bit. Also - the oven needed to be hotter when there were two trays in there. The more heat - the more they rose.

Sourdough success!!

Enough photos to give you the idea :) Its lovely. Very very tasty - good sourdough flavour, slightly sticky, sweet. Only criticism is that its slightly too crusty. Will work on spraying the oven more to slow down the creation of the crust.
But overall, I'm delighted. This is exactly what I was trying to do.

I set the alarm for 07:15 to bake it off, after proving for 17 hours. Sprayed the oven, baked for 25 minutes - tapped underneath and it wasn't done enough. Back in the oven for 5 minutes. Tapped again, still not done, back for another 10 minutes. By this time, I had to hand over to Matt, as it was time for me to go to college. Then I zipped back at lunchtime to check what it's like inside! Very excited to see a really open crumb :)

I refreshed the ferment this morning, so will be able to run and run with this.
In the end, it had potato and a little rye flour in the ferment. Now keeping it going with just plain white bread flour.

Late night Bath Buns

Bath buns (large) were made last night - finished up at 01:45. Good job there was plenty of Masterchef on iPlayer to keep me up - Doma in Copenhagen got me impossibly excited - the whole foraging thing and the insistence on looking super-locally for ingredients makes huge sense. They will have the flavours that are even in the air - as well as earth and water - that all come together. And they were friendly! and had the chefs serve to the customers, breaking the usual terrible construction of miserable, tense, stern kitchens delivering to overly polite people pretending that this food has joy. It hasn't. Doma instinctively knew that model was bollocks. Superb. We are going to save up and go. It was amazingly inspirational.

Back at base - the Bath Buns were trickier to time because they are so large, and getting the oven to cook them evenly required some interruptions and rotations. But I went to bed happy - they were cooked evenly, golden and fragrant.

Set the alarm to get up to bake the sourdough...

Flour delivery!

KOOL.

That's 5kg Spelt, 16kg Organic White Bread flour. Man, this is really exciting. After all the sourdough starter failures, i got fed up with running to the shop for flour. And, the sourdough is going to work, and we'll need to get cooking :)

Also - there are Bath Buns to make, and more bread products to research and make. I've ordered Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery from the library for the princely sum of 60p for the transfer. That should have some gems. And there's Richard Bertinet's Crust which is my new BFF, and inspiration to work through. He is fantastic at teaching what to look for and doesn't cut any corners, but neither creates unnecessary faff.

Vension & Red Wine and Rabbit & Wild Mushroom sausages, Cauliflower cheese

The sausages are made by a very nice man who sells them at the farmer's market. This weekend I got Rabbit and Wild Mushroom - which were a very dark colour due to the mushrooms -fantastic flavour. And Venison and Red Wine - which were very red inside and super delicious.
That stall is fast becoming my favourite: the venison chorizo, the sea beet, the crazy mushrooms, the amazing sausages - all made by hand (where applicable). I chatted to him about where to get Sea Beet. I want that to be my first trip in the new car :) Can't wait to go foraging!!

I also made a cauliflower cheese - because really what else can you do with a cauliflower? I was niftily upsold it at the market whilst getting some carrots, "Cauli and a cabbage for £1.20?"
Cauliflower cheese? Hmm, not made that before.
"A nice January King?"
I've never had a January King before.
"They look great. Yes please. Very good upsell." Smile.
"Well, there's no good growing it, if you can't sell it!" Job done.

Matt was very nice and said it was delicious but there was only so far he could go with cauliflower. I asked when I should cook with it next: response, "At least six months" :) 
It was lovely tho' - bechamel cooked with bay leaf gave a lovely savoury flavour, and mustard is fantastic with cheese. I cooked the cauli for 10 minutes with some lemon juice in the water, so it was nice and white. And not overcooked, thank god. There is no rescuing an overcooked cauliflower : /