Food heroes

I have just started reading Elizabeth David's 'French Provincial Cooking'.  What an absolute inspiration that woman was!  Born with a silver spoon in her mouth she renounced it all, became an actress and then ran off to Europe with a married man - writing some revolutionary and inspiring cookery books along the way.  More than anyone else she was responsible for educating us into the delights of day to day French and Mediterranean food - kudos I say!!

Even in the introduction she makes sense.  Quoting Escoffier she writes...'two of the most valuable words he ever wrote were these: faites simple.  What a Frenchman intends these words to mean may not be quite the same as what an English cook would understand by them.  They mean, I think, the avoidance of all unnecessary complication and elaboration:  they do not mean skimping the work or the basic ingredients, throwing together a dish anyhow and hoping for the best.  That is the crude rather than the simple approach.'

Buy great ingredients, cook inspirationally and love your food and your life.  Live the dream!

Chilli and potato bake

We're trying to use up some of the older stuff out of the freezer at the moment and yesterday evening I took out some steak mince for supper this evening.  The Woo and I decided on a nice hot chilli.  We also have some new potatoes to use up so I've decided to do a sort of chilli and potato bake.

First I'll talk about the rest of the day.  I did a bit of running around this morning after dropping The Woo off at work then took the hounds or a good long walk over the fields.  The mushrooms are starting to appear all over the place and I have big plans for some of the parasols whose locations I've made a mental note of already.  I keep revisiting the site where I found a lovely puffball a couple of years ago but so far no joy.  Fingers crossed if this weather keeps up as it is!

This afternoon I spent a couple of hours on the allotment.  I have now dug up, root by root, all of the three foot high docks.  The rest I will strim and either compost or dig in ready for next year.  I have a couple of virgin beds that I might try and put a few bits in over the autumn/winter but I'll see what the weather does first. Apparently we're due a fairly harsh frost next week so that should help beak up the soil if I can get it all dug over before then!

The frost is good news on the foraging front, though, as it means I can collect some rose hips and haws for some rose hip syrup and haw-sin sauce.

Now back to the food!

I have made the chilli from all the odds and sods in the fridge.  That's the beauty of food like this; you don't have to rigorously stick to the same old recipe all the time. Tonight it's onion, carrot, celery and garlic softened in a little oil.  Added to this were a few chopped mushrooms, some tomato puree, oregano, half a dozen chopped birdseye chillies and some salt and pepper.  All cooked for a bit then in went a good lug of Dr Pepper (well it's worth a try and there was no wine about!), a carton of chopped tomatoes and the same amount again of water.  In went the browned mince, stirred in the get it all mixed up and then brought to the boil and left to simmer covered for a while.

I often add a lug of balsamic vinegar to mine and then balance the flavour with a cube or two of dark chocolate.  I did this today as there was chocolate in the fridge (Sam's not home!).  It gives the chilli a bit of depth I think.

After it had cooked out for a while I added a chopped yellow pepper as there was one knocking about that needed using and a small tin of cannellini beans.  Any beans will do.  I'm not a great fan of kidney beans as I think they tend to go a bit soft and pappy but this is all about using what's in the cupboard.

Once the potatoes were cooked I crushed then gently into a shallow dish, added a few spots of butter and a small carton of single cream, sprinkled a liberal amount of grated cheese over the top and then covered this with the chilli.  More cheese grated on top and then into a 180* oven until hot through with lovely golden brown melted cheese on top!

This worked really well.  The Dr Pepper gave it a bit of a barbecue back flavour and the potato and bean combination was a good carb hit.  This would be a great dish for bonfire night maybe?  It's good, old-fashioned warming autumnal comfort food.  I think next time I will use pumpkin or sweet potato as a base to make it even more seasonal.

Easy carbonara

Cathy's round for supper this evening.  She's fresh back from a holiday in Italy so we're treating her to an easy but authentic spaghetti carbonara.  Picked up some scallops at work as well so we had them to start with.

For the scallops I made a sort of mushy pea puree.  Enough peas for a good portion each were cooked for a couple of minutes in boiling salted water with a good handful of chopped mint thrown in as well.  Once cooked they were drained, roughly crushed with a potato masher, seasoned and liberally dosed with loads of good olive oil to loosen them up.  The scallops were pan fried in butter for just 30 seconds either side.

I served these with a sauce made from a white wine, shallot and lemon reduction with the scallop roes chopped and added at the last minute.  Seemed to work well.

I've had many a cabonara over the years and, in this country, we seem obsessed with adding cream or some other non-eggy dairy product to make the sauce.  Here's how to make a reasonably genuine version from a recipe shown to me by an actual Italian!

Whilst the spaghetti was on the go in a nice big pan I gently fried about 100g of diced pancetta with a couple of whole peeled garlic cloves in 50g of butter for about five minutes; until the pancetta was starting to crisp up.  I then removed the garlic as it had done its job by infusing the buttery pancetta with loads of flavour.  In then went the cooked pasta with a little of the cooking water.  I did this by transferring the spaghetti with a pair of tongs as I wanted to save the water in case needed to loosen the sauce.

In a bowl I had beaten three eggs and added 50g each of finely grated parmesan and pecorino cheese.  I seasoned with black pepper only as the cheese mix was salty enough already.  This cheesy mixture was added to the pasta/pancetta and the whole lot stirred through to coat all of the spaghetti with the sauce.  I added some of the water from the spaghetti pan a little at a time to make sure the carbonara retained its saucy consistency.

Served with a little more of the grated cheese mixture for sprinkling at the table.

Semplice!

Tabitha

We lost one of our lovely old cats, Mrs Small, last autumn and have had a fairly crap time of it since then as some of you may know.  Recently we've been discussing getting another one to add to our animal collection so yesterday I drove to the Isle of Sheppey to pick up our new kitten.  We've called her Tabitha and she settled right in on her first evening in her new home.  She's eleven weeks old and I'll be adding her to my bloglist.

Sunday roast

Claire and Joe stuck around for food so I decided to do us all some slow roasted lamb shoulder.  Popped to the shops and picked up a carvery joint which worked really well in the end.  It was almost completely boned out and literally fell apart when it came to carving.

With this I did some roast potatoes, yorkshire puddings (always a family ask!) and a version of my creamed leeks with mint and peas added.  This seemed to go well with the lamb in all its anchovy, garlic and rosemary goodness...but I still prefer the sweetcorn version that I do with chicken.

Try them both and let me know your opinion.  The recipe's the same as the sweetcorn version that I've blogged about before but obviously add frozen peas instead!

Cheese and wine

Yesterday Joe and Claire came up for the evening and to stay overnight so we had a bit of an impromptu cheese and wine gathering.  Joe and Lisa came over with their girls as well and there were a few of Sam's mates around.  Dress of the day for those who had them were Shite Shirts; sadly on the night this was restricted to The Woo's brother, Joe, my Joe, Sam and yours truly.  These shirts are amazing and well worth a look at the web site if you're struggling for an unusual gift.

We all posed for the camera so you can get a good view of the shirt backs!
Everyone brought some unusual cheese and the beer and wine were certainly flowing.  Once the drinking games started it all began to get a bit blurry, though, and those of you who know me on Facebook may well have seen the end result!!

Vacherin cheese

Was doing some deli training at work yesterday and tasted the most amazing cheese that had just come in.  It's a French mountain cheese called Vacherin du Haut-Doubs.  It's only available between September and March, apparently, but well worth trying if you get the chance.  It's like a really creamy brie with an almost citrus after taste which is probably down to the fact that it comes wrapped in spruce

 bark.  Be warned though...it's an unpasteurised cheese so should be avoided if preggers etc.  If in doubt maybe try the Swiss Mont d'Or variety.  It's made using the same process (in fact it's the subject of a dispute between the two nations as to who came up with it first!) but the Swiss use pasteurised milk.

Man of all hats today as I started out at 6.30am laying out the fish counter, then another spell on the deli and finishing by doing an hour or two of the baking.  Home and taking it easy now with The Woo and looking forward to some of her mussels later on.  We bought those after I finished work; Scottish rope grown ones which are small, sweet and juicy...can't wait!!