Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

You probably know how to cook a meal for a group of people. You do not need the many gems of wisdom on offer from Pippa Middleton. Nevertheless, I have a clear and well-defined process for how I prepare for a dinner party, and I thought it might be useful to share that so that we can compare notes.

Decide what to cook well in advance

I do my grocery shop weekly and I don’t really want to have to spend any other time shopping. Therefore, ideally I want to know what I am going to take a week in advance of the event so that I can get it included in that. If I need something fresh I might go out a day or two before to get it, but I want all of the dry and store cupboard ingredients to already be there.

At the planning stage, I make sure everything will work together. Like most people, I have just one oven and four hobs. Therefore everything has to fit on them at one time. This is a limit that is easily reached if you have your starter and your main overlapping.

Draw up a plan

I get pretty detailed with my plan. I tak an A4 sheet and divide it into 5-minute segments. In each of these I can list actions like “turn potato on” and “remove chicken from oven”. If required, I can put multiple columns into the sheet to deal with each part of the meal. This means I don’t have to worry about what I am supposed to be doing while in the heat of battle because I just need to check what is on the plan.

This normally includes two sections before the clock starts rolling: morning prep and evening prep, both discussed below.

The other thing you need is a clock. This is a strange thing to have these days. Many people have replaced their clocks and watches with using their phone to tell the time. However, if you don’t want to be constantly checking your phone every few minutes, you will want a nice big visible clock so you know when each 5-minute segment is up. The solution: more technology. I have an alarm clock on my iPad that I put in a prominent position in the kitchen.

Morning prep

The first stage of prep I do for the party. This is anything that can be done on the morning, or even the day before. This could include baking bread, making a marinade, preparing batter mix for Yorkshires or baking and chilling a dessert.

Evening prep

Second round of prep. This is stuff that I want to do as late as possible, while still doing before my guests arrive. Things like chopping vegetables and pealing potatoes for example. I want to do these as late as possible to keep everything fresh. However, it’s not as important as talking to my guests, so it is stuff I want to get out of the way ideally just before they walk in the door.

This section should include as much stuff as possible, such as:

• Laying the table
• Lighting candles
• Putting some plates in the plate warmer
• Getting all the utensils and making trays out
• Cleaning the kitchen
• Preparing a pan full of potatoes so I can literally just turn the pan on
• Slicing bread

Cleaning

Nobody has a kitchen as big as they would like, so I find it important to keep it as clean and tidy as possible. That means ensuring it is clean and tidy before I start. I make sure that the dishwasher is empty and after it runs its last cycle in the afternoon I tend to wash everything by hand to ensure I have everything I want to hand: the only things that go in there are things I know I definitely will not need.

Then I clean as I go. If I find myself with a spare minute as I bring a pan to boil I will wash something up. Or, when I clear the table I will load it straight into the dishwasher, rather than dumping it on the side for later. This does take a bit of time away from my guests, but also makes for a far less depressing end to the evening when I am left with a far smaller pile of clearing up to do.

Another recipe for the Fish Market cookbook. It is difficult to get the tenderloin cooked all the way through while still keeping the breadcrumbs crispy. The green bits were seaweed, which could do to be smaller too.

To serve, I stole some ideas from Cara’s Anglesey Come Dine With Me.

This is the Thai beef recipe from Le Cordon Bleu’s Complete Cooking Techniques. It’s pretty straight forward and not that tasty. I think I lost some of the flavour having to cook the meat to pregnancy-safe.

Making your own fried rice turns out to be very straightforward. Pre-cook some price, then stir-fry some vegetables and bean sprouts, add the rice, and finally crack an egg into the centre and mix it all up.

The courgette comes courtesy of my sister who has grown the biggest courgettes I have ever seen. They steam very well.

After watching Heston Blumenthal’s In Search of Perfection on making the perfect pizza, I thought I would try and apply some techniques to my own. If anything, I think it made the situation worse.

I tried giving the dough a double rise and heating the pizza stone in the oven for an hour before I put the pizza in. It still did not crisp up very well though. I think I might have to try and build a wood-fired pizza oven on the balcony.

At the top of the photo, there are some Asahi beer french fries from the Fish Market cookbook. I managed to keep them separate by dropping the chips in separately but I think they could do to be thicker: they tasted too much of oil the whole way through the chip.

Speaking of imperfect things, here is my first attempt at spring rolls…

Definitely not a success. It took me a couple of attempts to keep the stuffing inside the spring roll case and even then they did not look very neat. In the end, I took the stuffing and turned it into a wrap.

This recipe is a real winner from Mary Berry. It’s just so simple to do. Fry some fennel in butter, throw in a celeriac, a potato and a litre of stock then simmer for 20 minutes. After that, blend (it blends really easily after you have cooked the vetagables), mix in some creme fraiche and you’re done.

Haven’t got everything perfectly blended? It makes the soup look even more interesting!

They were giving out free seaweed snacks in Anglesey. They look like a packet of crisps and are possibly designed to be marketed as a healthy alternative. I gave them a try. If you are imagining the Mitchell & Webb sketch, that is exactly what it was like.

While in Anglesey we went for lunch at The Lobster Pot. I had the lobster, surprisingly. I don’t think lobster is that good, in general. It is like a very large over-sized prawn, which is fine, but maybe not as good as just having some lovely juicy prawns. However, it improved a lot with their expert hand in preparing it.

Everyone’s food looked good. I think I could have easily traded dishes with most people. Elina had curried mussels and I was most disappointed when she ate them all.

For our holiday in Anglesey, Norman suggested that we take it in turns to cook dinner. This soon turned into a Come Dine With Me style event with teams and menus. Though I will add that we stopped short of scoring!

Sunday

Chris & Cara kicked us off. The starter was roasted tomatoes and honey-and-breadcrumbed butternut squash. This was amazing. Delicately roasting these produces fantastic results. I might have to steal the idea for our next party. The bulgur wheat was also good.

The main could have been better. You might think it was the high level of intoxication that let Chris down, but the biggest problem was that we couldn’t find any fresh fish on Anglesey! The only thing the island seemed to have was frozen cod fillets, that did not defrost in time. The homemade tartar with dill was very good.

Monday

Kieran & Shweta took day two. I might be doing Shweta an injustice by suggesting they were a team of two (or maybe not). She cooked up a kedgeree. Mine have always come out rather soggy, but this suffered no such problems. They even had a paired champagne to serve with it.

Tuesday

Elina and I tackled day three. We started with a hot and sour prawn soup served with a variety of breads and prawn crackers. For the main we did black bean chilli in sweet potato skins and citrous-soy marinated fish with a side of spicy blackberry chutney and cashew nut salad. Finally we finished off with Swedish super-gooey chocolate cake served with homemade ice cream and a sprig of mint.

Wednesday

Wales as shut while everyone watched the football.

Thursday

Norman and Tom took to the stage for the final entry. They slow-roasted a harissa-spiced lamb over the barbecue and served it with cous cous and roasted vegetables. This was all complemented with a yogurt sauce. Dessert was baked apples.

I have recently gone off bagels at work because they taste so bland. However, using some holiday time to try out making bagels for myself, I have realised it doesn’t have to be that way. Homemade bagels are far more delicious than I expected them to be.

There are reasonably easy to make too. It’s a basic bread dough with some sugar added. You then roll the dough out, curl it round, blanch them and then bake them. I coated mine in poppy seeds but plain or other seeds work well too.

I recently picked up a copy of the River Cottage Bread Handbook which has lots of fun recipes in. I gave the breadsticks a go as they are pretty easy to make and complete a wide variety of meals. At first I tried rolling the dough out with a rolling pin and rolling them up, but that doesn’t work too well. Much better to get rolling with your palms and roll it into a long sausage shape.