Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

I’ve been testing out salted potatoes for running. They make a nice savoury snack when you are sick of gels.

To cook, I boiled them for 10 minutes, coated them in coarse sea salt, roasted them in the oven at 200 degrees for 30 minutes, coated them in a bit more salt and declared them ready. They were pretty good, but I think their appeal will be much greater towards the end of a long run. They’re not bad cold, but not quite as good as warm.

I tested both Jersey royals and British gems. The skin is a bit looser on the Jersey royals and Elina felt they went a little rubbery, whereas the British gems held up a bit better.

I’ve been working through a few of Aine Carlin’s cookbooks that Sarann kindly lent me. They’re not doing it for me, to be honest. They’re not filled with recipes, and many of them just didn’t take my interest or were based around ingredients I couldn’t use. But there were a few nice dishes.

Aduki bean casserole from The New Vegan

Shepherd’s pie with sweet potato mash topping.

Cannellini bean stew.

The Slow Cook Book is a cookbook by Heather Whinney. It contains hundreds of recipes and all of them come with instructions for how to do it in a slow cooker, or using a more traditional method. This feature is great when you forget to put your slow cooker on and need to cook your dinner in a lot less time.

Some of the recipes are a little involved: there is 15-20 minutes of prep and pre-cooking in a pan before you put it into the cooker. However, once you get used to this and plan for it, it’s not too much hassle and comes in a predictable format.

The recipes are tasty. However, as is a problem with most slow cooker recipes, they tend to be very liquidy. And there is a lot of them. We’ve been doing one a week for probably over a year and still haven’t got the end.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with soups a little. Nothing too exciting, but I have decided that rather than working from recipes, I’m just going to throw stuff into a pan and see if I can do it off-script. This recipe worked out well, so I thought I would share.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• Carrot
• Fennel
• Garlic clove
• 1 tsp crushed chillis
• Sweet potato
• 1 litre chicken stock
• 100g sweetcorn
• 300ml double cream
• Flat-leaf parsley
• Chicken breasts

Instructions

Cook the chicken breasts in the oven according to packet instructions: usually around 30-35 minutes at 180-200 degrees C will do it. Put some bowls in a plate warmer.

Meanwhile, heat a large pan with some vegetable oil it in. Finely slice the carrot, fennel and garlic and combine it with the crushed chillis. Season with salt and pepper and cook it for a few minutes.

Peel and dice the sweet potato into any size chunks you like. Throw this in and continue to cook for a few more minutes. Add the chicken stock and sweetcorn and bring to a boil. Leave to simmer until the chicken is two minutes away from done.

When the chicken is almost ready, take a stick blender to the pan and destroy everything until there are no lumps. Add the double cream and stir to heat through. You can take the pan off the heat.

Take the chicken out of the oven and slice. Fill your bowls with some soup, then dump the sliced chicken in the middle. Chop some parsley and sprinkle that around the edges.

The Schartz herbs and spices bottles are better than the Sainsbury’s ones. They’re taller and thinner, meaning that you can fit more of them within the same shelf space. The labels on the top are also clear.

But the Sainsbury’s ones are cheaper. And, in any case, Sainsbury’s have refused to stock the Schwartz ones anymore because they want people to buy their own brand ones. So, I buy the Sainsbury’s ones and re-fill my Schwartz bottle.

What is odd, though, is that Schwartz sell 20g bottles and Sainsbury’s sell 25g bottles. But, when you tip the 25g of Sainsbury’s coriander seeds into the 20g Schwartz bottle, they all fit in.

With a name like The Real Greek, you would expect Tonia Buxton’s cookbook to offer authentic recipes. Does it?

Well, that depends on how accurate greek stereotypes are. Everything had feta cheese in it. So, if that is genuinely all Greek people eat, then yes.

It’s a book of simple recipes. If you want to know how to make a beautiful Greek salad or marinate some spicy kebabs, it is full of that stuff. And often, you do just want to make something simple and delicious, so it works well.

The number of actionable recipes was mixed. I’ve made a bunch of skewers and stuffed some burgers with feta cheese. But, despite a range of other dishes, not much else took my fancy. At first, it felt there was very little, although, on going back through them, I have enjoyed several other recipes, too. It doesn’t match up to the likes of Hugh or Mary Berry, but I have added a handful of recipes to my repertoire.

It’s my first time cooking with Hoegaarden. It is producing some interesting colours.

Since finally giving in and watching MasterChef, I’ve been busy trying to up my game. Poaching pears, for example. And trying to make everything I put on a plate look a little prettier.

Results have been mixed.

This is pigeon breast, served with a sweet potato mash, with croutons, milk gel and chanterelles served two ways: fried and powered. The same ones we picked up in mushroom town, for reference.

Here I have served duck with the skin cooked separately, on mash with an orange gel, fondant potatoes, cranberry foam and a dressing of parsley. There are definitely issues with this dish:

• My fondant potatoes are rather jagged. Do people use a cookie cutter to get perfectly round potatoes?
• The duck skin curled up while cooking. I scored it previous to this to try and prevent that, but without success.
• The cranberry foam was still quite liquidy, which rolled around the plate.

Confit duck on a bed of apple purée served with Asian roast potatoes, coriander and chilli jam.

Lamb leg with parsley, fried potato slices and peas. I like this one because it is simple: plain ingredients, not overcrowded or covered in fancy nonsense, but it still tastes good.

There are some weird combinations going on here. It’s fish and chips, with an added scallop, and some strawberries mixed in with the parsley. I served the chips in a separate bowl to avoid having to cram everything on to the plate.

Conclusion

A lot of the stuff just needs practice: mastering the different techniques, for example, is something I need to work on. But the big takeaway for me is to put less stuff on the plate. It is impossible to be elegant when you are trying to ram too much food on there.

A lot of my cooking revolves around main courses. It is easy to slip into this pattern: I only do a three-course meal once or twice per week. Therefore, a lot of the starter, lunch and dessert recipes get forgotten about.

However, I have been making a conscious effort to expand this. Adding some new canapes to my repertoire seemed a good direction to go.

A lot of the recipes in this book were too fiddly for me to bother. However, there are some firm favours. The Asian pork balls, for example. And the mini-burgers were not that difficult either.

Pancetta and tomato with basil pesto crostini, and a citrus avocado puree crostino.

Filo tartlets with beef.

All in all, I’ll give this the thumbs up. It has provided me with some great little recipes.

Tim Ferriss is a super-star. Jeff Goins nailed it when he said that people didn’t love Tim Ferriss for the message he brings, but just because he’s such a cool person that you want to me like him.

Since rising to fame with The Four-Hour Work Week, he has gone on to push the franchise with The Four-Hour Body and this, The Four-Hour Chef.

It’s quite clever the way he sells it (or sneaky). He sends you the audiobook for free when you join his mailing list. But there are no recipes in it: every 5 minutes the narrator says “please refer to the print or eBook edition for recipe steps and sidebars”.

Ferriss suggests that cookbooks are written for those who can already cook. They are arranged by category and don’t explain what is going on. Instead, this book is arranged by technique, starting from the basics and building up.

It is arranged into five sections: meta, domestic, wild, science and pro. In meta-learning, he talks about how to learn faster and more efficiently. He then takes you through the building blocks of cookery in dom.

In wild, we are treated to a narrative of Tim’s adventures. How to survive a disaster and catch a pigeon, for example. Science is similar: there is some science in it, but also plenty of stories: the time he attempted Ben & Jerry’s Vermonster, for example, or his food marathon: 26.2 dishes in 24 hours. Something I would love to try.

Finally, in pro, he rounds off with talking to some of the best chefs in the world about how they do what they do.

I tried a lot of the recipes in domestic. They’re fun. None have made my regular rotation, but I made the Vietnamese burgers more than once.

I also really enjoyed a lot of the explanations. Why do you need to brown meat? I knew why already, but no cookbook ever takes the time to explain it: it’s more folk knowledge. Why do you need mustard in a vinaigrette? Why do you rest steak? It’s all in here.

The science is a mixed bag. It’s really interesting to learn about all of the different aspects of the cooking process, gels, emulsions, etc. However, I struggled to follow along with the theory. I more felt like I was getting starter points to learn about it on my own. And some of the science in here is a little dubious. Like his original book, I suspect Ferriss doesn’t let the truth ruin a good story.

If you’re a Tim Ferriss fan, this is a no-brainer. Get the hardback: it’s a monster.