Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

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.

One of the things I was particularly impressed with about the food in Iceland was that everywhere did a good hollandaise sauce. It seemed to be the standard sauce that everywhere from fancy restaurants to service stations did. Perhaps they just mass-produce or buy it in in jars, but it all tasted very good.

I recently picked up Michel Roux’s book on sauces and decided to give hollandaise a go. It is difficult to get right. My first attempt was a total disaster as everything separated. On the second attempt, I combined the book with a video tutorial to better results.

I cooked it over a ban of barely-boiling water to keep the temperate as low as possible. It is hard work. You have to whisk for five or ten minutes, then gradually add the clarified butter while you continue to whisk even more. Next time I might do this final whisking using my stand mixer, but that isn’t really an option while you have it over the heat.

I ended up with a super-thick sauce that could easily have been mistaken for a custard. Next time I might add a little more water.

The result is something special though. We didn’t even have a dinner to eat it with: we just spread it on bread and ate it, and it was delicious.