Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

Five years on from starting River Cottage, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall up-scales, buying himself a much larger farm and a second one that he converts into the River Cottage HQ – a field kitchen, cookery school and vegetable garden all rolled into one.

It’s an irritatingly cool thing to do. Starting up a business or project is always an exciting thing to do, let alone the opportunity to be unjustifiably pretentious about food.

It’s also nice to see a human side to Hugh. In the first set of River Cottage series, he tends to succeed at everything. Turning up to livestock and vegetable shows and winning prizes with no experience. There is still plenty of that, but he also struggles from time to time. He burns his toffee and gets caught out in the judging. He runs out of oven space to cook all his chickens, and Gill has to save the day.

His ten bird roast was also very impressive. Goose, farm duck, mallard, chicken, pheasant, guinea fowl, partridge, pigeon and woodcock, all stuffed inside a turkey.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s third TV series, his most famous, is River Cottage. There are actually lots of them but so far I have watched the original ones, Escape to River Cottage, Return to River Cottage and River Cottage Forever.

This follows him packing up his life in London and moving to Dorset to live as a smallholder – that is someone who has a small farm, primarily used for self subsistence. Each series follows a year.

He seems to be well versed in rural life already. While he clearly isn’t a livestock expert, he does manage to keep them alive and seems familiar with a lot of activities I would not be, such as diving, butchery, smoking meat and wielding a gun. He also manages the first two years in a soft-top classic sports car, before finally giving in and buying a Land Rover (also a soft-top).

I did wonder how real it was. For example he talks about going to do a farmers market to raise some cash for a little project he has on. But was does the £100 actually cover? Presumably not his rent, his vet’s bills, or the large amount of food he buys in to supplement his own stocks. Fun to watch, but I got the distinct impression that undertaking such a project was not actually in the reach of us plebs, despite Hugh’s assertion that we could all do it.

It’s not really a cooking show. He cooks things obviously, but I did not come away with any recipe ideas. It’s just fun to watch (and it is very entertaining), and possible dream.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s first TV show was called Cook on the Wild Side. In his first series he converted a truck into a “gastro van”, which the back folded out into a complete kitchen for him to cook from anywhere. He then drove round the country foraging for food and cooking it up.

There was a surprisingly amount of illegal activity in it, which was amusing. He tried poaching, trespassing and raiding supermarket bins. He went everywhere from inner city London to the highlands of Scotland. In seemed quite realistic in that a lot of his attempts, especially fishing, just did not work.

In the second series he used a boat that he sailed up the canals and even included a bike with a pedal-powered stove so that he could leave the water whenever he needed.

While the series was highly entertaining, I also took away two practical tips. The first is that you can eat common garden snails. Literally you can just pick them up and fry them. Though you may also want to cleanse them for a few days before doing this. Gorden Ramsey has a great video on this as well:

Secondly Hugh recommends a book called “why not eat insects?” and then goes on to gather up woodlice from a wood and then fry them too. Apparently they taste like shrimp. I like shrimp…

According to the cover, Linda McCartney provides meals that are both “simple and inspiring”. My friend Alan lent me a number of cookbooks and this was my favourite one (which he then very kindly gifted to me!).

It should be noted that Linda does not seem to have been a fan of spicy food. I’m not either, I usually get my Nando’s medium, but I’m developing a taste for a little bit of kick. Even at that level, I found myself regularly scribbling “leave the chilli seeds in” or “use two chillies, not one” next to recipes.

Good points

It does keep things simple. Most do not take too long to make or involve complicated steps. So far, they have all been tasty.

The photos that there are are very large.

There is also an excellent section at the back breaking down how to make a selection of sauces and dressings.

Bad points

It feels a bit dated. Most of the recipes call for chilli powder or dried chillis. I could be entirely wrong about this, but my guess is that these days that would all call for fresh chillies (Hugh certainly would).

Just less than half the dishes have photos.

Finally a lot of the recipes rely on a meat substitute. Many of the recipes are existing meat dishes with vegetarian mince instead. This is unfortunate because vegetarian meat usually tastes terrible.

I wanted a good book on cooking with vegetables over Christmas and I eventually settled on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s “Veg Every Day!” book. It has quickly become my favourite cookbook.

Good points

I got it in hardback format which helps keeps the book open and protects it. There is a photo of pretty much every single recipe – a recipe on one page and a full almost-A4 size colour photo on the other. That is probably the best feature of the book.

It is also really good food. All of the dishes are interesting and tasty. None of if uses meat substitutes; there is a real focus on cooking with interesting vegetables rather than making dishes with meat alternatives.

It was only £12 for the hardback.

Bad points

Just one really, though it is a big one. Everything takes ages to make. Ages! If you are a vaguely competent chef, you can probably work a lot quicker than me, and might be able to do most of the recipes within an hour. Me, not so much. I normally budget an hour and a half, maybe even longer, to make each one.

Just your average dinner of roast pork, Yorkshires, ratatouille, refried beans, new potatoes, mashed potatoes, three types of vegetables, Asian inspired coleslaw, seafood platter, cheese and tomato tart, salad and five different types of bread.

The real achievement was that we managed to eat almost all of it. Or at least will have by the time this is published…

I recently bought myself a copy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Vegetable Cookbook and I have been using the downtime over Christmas to working through some of the recipes. I’ve had mixed results.

Disastrously Sainsbury’s online do not sell Swiss chard – this is figuratively a middle class nightmare. It is also difficult because every single recipe seems to start with “chop and then fry a large onion”…

Chakchouka

Mostly made of peppers and tomatoes, then you bake a couple of eggs in it. The egg was good. It also smells increasingly nice as you cook it.

Pinto Bean Chilli

A bit of a hassle to make because you have to soak the pinto beans overnight. You also need to add plenty of chilli. The first one I did I had deseeded the chilli and it was a bit bland, whereas the second one that included the seeds was much better.

North African squash and chickpea soup

Barely looks anything like the picture.

Pearl barley broth

To really get the croutons right you need to let the bread go stale.

Beetroot soup

Nicer than it sounds. But that is a fairly low bar to beat.

Squash and fennel lasagne

This is also a pain to make. You have to bake the squash while sautéing the fennel and boiling the sauce before combing it all together and baking some more. Very nice though, probably due to the quantity of cheese in it. I think I actually prefer fennel cold.

What do you do when you slow-cooked a pig’s tongue, have some left over sausages and half a jar of Thai cooking sauce left? You make a Thai gumbo…

For those that are interested, here is what I did. To be honest, it’s a lot less clever than it sounds, and it doesn’t sound that clever. But anyway…

I boiled a pig’s tongue the day before to make it really tender. I also pre-cooked two sausages. I then chopped the sausages thinly, cut slash ripped the tongue into pieces and chopped up a shallot and a red pepper too.

Heat some oil in a wok, then throw in the shallots for a minute or two until they cooked. Then put in 3-4 tea spoons of thai cooking sauce and stir it all together for another minute or two.

Finally throw in the meat and the red pepper along with 400ml of coconut milk, bring it to boil and then let it simmer for a few minutes, just until it gets up to temperature basically.

A few weeks ago we had a dinner party that was similar to the previous one, except with slightly fewer people and a little bit more food. Or so I thought. Turns out, I did a lot more food.

Thus leaving rather a lot of food left over.

Worked out quite well as I didn’t have to buy sandwiches for a week.

We’ve gradually been working our way round the seafood we haven’t tried in the market.

Winkles are delicious. They’re also very small however, so you don’t get much meat. You also have to extract them with something – we used Elina’s crocheting hooks, size 1 or 1.5 does the job.

Scallops I was a little disappointed with, although maybe I just didn’t cook them right. I fried them in butter, but the pan might not have been hot enough. They’re a cross between prawn and chicken really.

Whelks provide quite a lot of meat for such a small shell, and are big enough to get out with your fork. Not as tasty as winkles though.

Cuttlefish is quite nice, though again you have to get the cooking right. It’s very similar to octopus and squid, given they’re almost the same thing. Apparently you’re supposed to find the ink pouch and carefully remove it, but I just dived in.