Mexican Feast

Well, sort of anyway.

The Ultimate Chilli Con Carne from DinnerDiary has been on my to cook list for ages and following a recent blogpost there, I decided that it's now high time for it.


Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil
3 red Thai chillies
6 cloves of garlic
2 cans of beans (400 g each)
400 g can tomatoes
1 green bell pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
500 g lean minced beef
salt and pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp hot chilli powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp smoked paprika
2 dl red wine
300 ml beef stock
2 tbsp tomato puree
1 bay leaf
1 tsp cocoa powder

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees. Then wash the chillies and remove the flimsier paper bits off the garlic and place in a small ramekin. Then drizzle 2 tbsp of olive oil, cover with aluminium foil and bake for 30 minutes, then allow to cool.


2. Prepare the beans by draining them and the tomatoes by crushing or even liquidising them. Wash and cut the pepper into small pieces.


3. In a large lidded non-stick pan, heat up 2 tbsp olive oil, season and brown the meat, then set it aside.


4. Heat up another 2 tbsp olive oil and soften the onions. In the mean time, deseed the chillies, peel the garlic and mush up with the oil they roasted in.


5. Add the chilli/garlic to the onions and fry through for a couple of minutes, then do the same with the ground spices.


6. Deglaze with the wine, then add the browned mince, beef stock, tomatoes, tomato puree and beans. Some further seasoning may also be called for.


7. After all has come to boil, put a lid on and reduce the heat to low, then let simmer for an hour.


8. Add the green bell pepper and the cocoa powder and let simmer for another 20 minutes.

Unfortunately living outside of London means I can't get hold of all different types of chillies and I also had some cans of beans I wanted to use up, so as usual I'm improvising a bit. The biggest thing is that I halved the stock, since I don't have beans that require cooking and will soak up a substantial amount of the liquid. Still the chilli was more of a thick soup than a stew when I put the lid on.

So I took the lid off and hoped that most of the liquid would evaporate during cooking. And indeed after 32 minutes I had a lovely looking stew, so I put the lid back on and moved the pan to a small burner on its lowest setting. it smelt wonderfully too, the smoked paprika dominated, with a delayed but distinct hint of sweet cinnamon. Later on in the cooking, the cinnamon took over almost completely.



Doing things on the day before will of course allow flavours to develop. And cooking slowly for longer too, but mainly it is important in order to get the beans cooked through. The time can be reduced when using canned beans, though I'm sure they would change the overall flavour. The Thai chillies turned out to heat up the chilli con carne very nicely indeed - which was a nice surprise, usually we struggle to get it hot enough for our taste. Also I was very excited about the cocoa powder. I've encountered chocolate in game pies and I know on the whole it adds to the richness, but I've never been brave enough to use it myself.

Overall, this was a success, the chilli was very much different from what we normally do, which is an adaptation of Delia Smith's simple recipe. No specific spice or ingredient dominated or even came forward, but instead they all blended to a very rich flavour, though perhaps a bit on the sweet side.

Still the above worked very nicely indeed and we had it with tortillas, nachos, tomato salsa, sour cream and what claimed to be guacamole. The last two helped mellow the heat of the Thai chillies.



The "guacamole" is a very old recipe, one of the first I picked up when I started collecting recipes and I've been meaning to try out for a very long time. Old recipe as in 1988 or 1989 I can't remember exactly. It was one of those info leaflets about new and exotic foods that were beginning to appear on the Swedish market and was to encourage people to give it a try. Actually I think most people were already familiar with avocados, but it wasn't perhaps as popular as it is nowadays. I've no idea who issued this leaflet and what I ended up with is certainly not guacamole as it is known in the UK today, but the mixture was rather tasty anyway.

Ingredients

3 large ripe avocados
1 small onion
1.5 dl sour cream
1 large clove of garlic
salt and pepper
a few drops of Tabasco
1 medium hot fresh red chilli

Method

1. Cut the avocados in half, remove the stone, then scoop out the flesh with a spoon onto a bowl.


2. With a fork, mush up the avocado - the idea is to still have a few chunks for texture.


3. Peel and finely dice the onion, then add to the avocado along with the sour cream.


4. Press in the garlic, season and add the Tabasco.


5. Wash and if needed deseed the chilli, then chop it finely and add to the mixture.


6. Stir in everything well, then chill until needed.

I think this recipe could benefit from dill and possibly swap the onion for red onion or chives to get a more interesting colour as opposed to washed out green. The mixture would work well just as a regular dip and I suspect might be quite nice in a sandwich cake too.

Spanatchnik With Salmon

Dealing with left-overs once more, this time a piece of lovely hot smoked salmon, that just wasn't big enough for a meal for the two of us. So I decided to make spanatchnik and put the salmon in it as well.



However with one significant difference to my original recipe, I swapped some of the grapeseed oil with butter and I have a nagging suspicion that made the big difference, because this time it tasted really nice. Or it could be that I grow impatient and don't bake it long enough or I don't know.

I also had different proportions on the greens, so here's the recipe.

Ingredients

250 g frozen spinach
2 large leeks
3 tbsp grapeseed oil
5 sprigs fresh thyme
1 dl chopped fresh parsley
2 tbsp dried mint
2 tbsp dried dill
2 tsp sage
salt and pepper to taste
25 g butter
200 g hot smoked salmon
75 g butter
540 g filo pastry (2 packets as it happens, there was some left over)

Method

1. Thaw the spinach over a sieve to remove excess liquid.


2. Trim and wash the leek, then slice it thinly.


3. Heat up the grapeseed oil on medium heat and add the leek to get it soft.


4. Once it's softened, add the spinach and the herbs and stir in to mix well. Then season and continue to cook until it feels a bit dry.


5. Take off the heat, then stir in a knob of butter (about 25 g) until it's melted completely. At this point you can put a break into this dish.


6. About an hour and a half before you want to serve the dish, pre-heat your oven to 200 degrees C, then melt the 75 g butter on very low heat, just until it's melted, it should not bubble.


7. Crumble the salmon into the greens and stir to mix well./li>
   
8. Brush some of the butter on an oven-safe dish.


9. Unpack the filo pastry and lay it out. If the pastry seems too thin, use two layers at a time. Also if it's in an awkward shape, overlap pieces to get a decent shape to roll.


10. Brush melted butter onto the whole filo sheet, then dab teaspoon sized pieces on two thirds of it, leaving a third to form the outermost of the roll. Then carefully roll it up and place in your baking dish.


11. Repeat until all the filo and filling have been used up. Any left-over pastry can be used as crunchy decoration. It still needs to be brushed with butter though.


12. Finally brush the spanatchnik with the remaining butter and bake for about 45 minutes, until the filo turns golden brown.


13. Note that if you run out of butter early, just melt some more, it may seem like a bad thing all this butter, but it's necessary to bake the filo pastry and make it crunchy.

The salmon we had was a new type, which in addition to being hot smoked also had chilli flakes and crushed pepper on top, which made it very tasty.

The spanatchnik was accompanied by white sauce, made with whipping cream and chives, instead of double cream and spring onions. I made it in the morning and let the flavours develop in the fridge.

On the whole extremely tasty.

Chicken Cushion with Black Venus Rice

Not being entirely sure what to do for dinner, I noticed that our butcher was open, which is very rare on Mondays. So I wandered in to see if they had anything interesting looking, but they didn't, so off the top of my head I asked for a chicken cushion. They didn't have any, so I got one made up especially and this time it was a whopping big one too.

So that was the meat part of dinner sorted. What about carbs? Well, there was the brown packet of fancy expensive vacuum packed black rice I bought at Harvey Nicks last August. It's called Black Venus Rice and the packet was full of family lore about this rice and a "btw boil for 35-40 minutes in salty water" nicely hidden away in a corner.

I'd not had any suitable opportunity to try this out, but a friend of mine had tried it and said it was great. So, following the instructions I boiled 100 g of the rice in 500 ml liquid. Since I decided to put some mushrooms in for good measure and I only had canned ones, I put in the liquid from them and topped up with hot water to reach half a litre. I also put in salt. After 30 minutes, it looked like there wasn't enough water and the rice would start sticking, so I poured in a bit more. Curiously when I first poured in the liquid, it all went dark purple/red like wine and for a moment I toyed with the idea of chucking an egg in to see if the shell would pick up the colour. I'll do it next time. 40 minutes did it for this rice type.

Given the cost of the 500 g packet, I was surprised that it wasn't cleaner. I rinsed it well, but didn't have the patience to go through all the grains and pick bits out apart from the couple of odd looking things I spotted straight away.

In the mean time I baked the chicken cushion and I gave it 50 minutes as it was bigger, but that was over the top and the meat felt a bit dry.

I'd also quartered the button mushrooms and fried slowly in a bit of butter. As Lundulph came in through the door, I drained the rice, rinsed it well and mixed in with the mushrooms and re-fried it. The rinsing was necessary as it turned out I'd added too much salt to the cooking water and the rice tasted very salty too, but rinsing removed that.

The chicken was stuffed with some sort of sage and onion stuffing mixed with sausage meat and the whole lot worked pretty well.

The rice was certainly one of the tastier I've eaten, so I think it's worth having a packet in the larder.

Easter Baking Part 2

The second thing I baked this Easter was the dessert to go with the Easter dinner and it was again from Susan's inspirational blog - the February 2010 Daring Bakers Challenge. Additionally I decided to try and replicate the cake shape itself and happily ordered the adjustable cake ring from Amazon.

First thing for the Tiramisu was to make the ladyfinger biscuits. Instead of using the recommended recipe for the challenge, I opted to make the one given in Lenotre's "Desserts and Pastries". This is the first recipe I try out.

Ingredients

5 eggs
150 g granulated sugar
125 g plain flour
icing sugar to sprinkle on top

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees C.


2. Separate whites and yolks of the eggs into separate bowls, making sure that the whites go into a metal or glass bowl, not plastic.


3. Set aside a tablespoon and a half of sugar. These are to be used with the whites.


4. Whisk the yolks with an electric mixer at medium speed, then gradually add the majority of the sugar. Keep whisking until the mixture turns pale yellow and reaches the so called ribbon stage - when (the stopped) whisk is taken out of the mixture and the mixture drizzles back in a continuous stream forming a ribbon folding on itself before dissolving into the rest of the mixture in a bowl.


5. On lowest possible speed, mix in the flour just enough to incorporate it, no more.


6. Wash and dry the whisks thoroughly, then add the saved sugar and whisk on high speed until stiff peaks stage.


7. Carefully fold the whites into the batter.


8. Line a couple of baking sheets with baking paper and pipe strips of the mixture. Then sprinkle generously with icing sugar and bake for 18 minutes. Turn the sheets around after 12 minutes, if the biscuits aren't browning evenly.


9. Let cool a few minutes on the baking paper, then prise off and place on a cooling rack. Store in an airtight container

I made a double batch of the above, as it was just not quite enough for the cake. I followed Susan's instructions with drawing three circles on the baking parchment and piping in them, then the strips for the edge fairly close together so they'd flow together during baking and make easier to build the cake. The three circles were 15 cm diameter, the strips were 10 cm long. I only have a 1.5 cm round nozzle, which worked well for this, the batter was perhaps a bit on the runny side, so it flowed well.

Unfortunately I forgot to sprinkle the rings and some of the strips with icing sugar before baking and this is sort of fatal for these biscuits in that the icing sugar forms the typical crust of these. Instead what I had was a sticky sponge for Swiss roll. I rescued by sprinkling even more icing sugar afterwards, to prevent the circles sticking together in the cake box. I also didn't prise them off, but left to cool completely on the baking parchment, then cut around each shape before fitting into the cake box. It sort of worked OK. However, I now know the cake box is not airtight - the rings went a bit soggy, over the two days' storage, but no major harm was done.

With the leftover batter, I piped more ladyfinger strips, but this time well apart from each other and some of them I decorated with chopped mixed nuts and some with dessicated coconut, both very good combinations.

Next I made the two cooked creams - sabayon (zabaglione) and pastry cream. I've never made sabayon before and followed the instructions to the point, however, the instructions were incorrect, which lost me half an hour of constant stirring over a water bath - it should have been whisking, not stirring! I found that out when I looked in my Cordon Bleu book and once clarified, I whisked and the sabayon foamed up and thickened wonderfully. It was extremely tasty too.

Ingredients for sabayon

2 egg yolks
50 g granulated sugar
60 ml coffee
1.25 ml vanilla essence
0.5 tsp lemon zest - about half a lemon

Method

1. Bring some water to boil in a pot.

In a heat-proof bowl, that fits over the above pot for a double boiler/bain marie, whisk together all the ingredients until everything is evenly blended and smooth.

2. Place the bowl over the pot of boiling water and keep whisking for about 8 minutes until the mixture cooks through, foams up and thickens to the consistency of custard. It'll also go quite pale. Then allow to cool and chill in a fridge until needed.

Ingredients for pastry cream

55 g granulated sugar
8 g plain flour
0.5 tsp lemon zest - about half a lemon
2.5 ml vanilla extract
1 egg yolk
175 ml milk

Method

1. Mix all the ingredients in a saucepan until well blended, then place on low heat and cook for about 12 minutes, stirring continuously until the mixture thickens into a custard and bubbles.


2. Take off the heat and transfer to a container, then cover the surface of the cream with cling film, making sure no air bubbles are trapped. Then let cool completely and refrigerate until needed.

Additionally 75 g mascarpone cheese and 235 ml whipping cream, whipped with 55 g granulated sugar and 2.5 ml vanilla essence, are required. Do the whipped cream just before putting the whole cake together and it should be whipped to "stiff peaks stage". The mascarpone should be whisked up too to soften it up and make easier to mix. Some further cold lightly sweetened coffee can be used to brush the ladyfinger circles and fresh raspberries - about 300 g work very nicely. I decided against making mascarpone, life was just too busy this past week anyway.

Note that the mascarpone and the two cooked creams above result in what seems very small amounts, however, it is perfectly sufficient for the Tiramisu cake.

I put this cake together just before beginning to cook the main dinner. My original plan was to make it on the day before, to allow the cake to firm up and the biscuits to soak up some of the wetness of the cream, however I decided against it, in case everything went too soggy and collapsed or went crackling dry and collapsed. Especially since I noticed that the cake box wasn't airtight.

I adjusted the cake ring to 17.5 cm diameter and lined it with baking paper, placing everything on a cake plate. Then I placed one biscuit circle in the bottom, followed by the conjoined biscuit strips along the sides. There was some deformity during baking, but things were soft and fitted together anyway. I then mixed all the creams and the mascarpone together. I hadn't whipped the cream sufficiently hard and the end cream was a bit too soft. Still I scooped some of it into the cake ring to form a 2 cm thick layer, and pushed in some raspberries. Then biscuit ring number two went in and I took off the baking parchment as I needed it, so I had to run and wash my hands several times while building the cake.

When I put in the final circle, I realised that I'd got the dimensions a bit wrong or the cream was just too runny to hold things up, so the edge biscuits stuck out a bit more than in Susan's photos.

I grated some dark chocolate over the cake and put it in the fridge for the few hours while dinner was cooked and eaten. Along with the cake ring for support. I took it off just before taking the cake out to the table.



As soon as my Brother-in-law stuck a knife into my creation the whole thing collapsed and he rushed to cut pieces and quickly slosh them onto people's plates. Although a shapeless mess, it tasted fabulously and there was one little piece left, which Lundulph and I shared for dessert today.

I think next time, I'll do a different pastry cream, possibly also use some liqueur as is more traditional. This time I had to take into account my two nieces who are too young for alcohol and my Brother-in-law's girlfriend who doesn't drink alcohol. Maybe I should be a little cheeky and add some gelatin to the cream to force it to keep its shape too.

I'm very glad I invested in the cake ring though, it's a brilliant tool and I look forward to using it more as I refine my skills at cake making.

I also compared this recipe to the two I've done on previous occasions and noticed that neither of them involves any sort of creams, but just stirring in some egg yolks into the mascarpone and that's about it more or less. Given the dangers of eating raw eggs, this recipe seems a lot better, if a bit on the fiddly side. I certainly thought it was well worth doing.

Easter Baking Part 1

Going away from tradition this year, I did not make kozunak this year. Instead I decided to try my hand at Hot Cross Buns, an English tradition around Easter. Actually very much like the Semla buns in Sweden, these are available on the 2nd of January, when people haven't quite recovered from the Christmas celebrations.

The idea came from this blog entry on the WildYeastBlog. With one modification - I'd mix the dough on the evening of Easter Saturday, refrigerate, then shape and bake on the morning of Easter Sunday, so that they would be nice and warm by the time our guests arrived.

As expected the dough rose nicely despite being in the fridge. I was a bit uncertain about the ground allspice that went into the dough, but the end result was fantastic. What I didn't like was the paste for the crosses. I ended up adding a lot more water than Susan's recipe states, and it was still pretty thick and I had to use a flat nozzle to pipe it in the end and my hands went shaky afterwards.

The other thing I didn't like about the paste was the fact that even making extra wide crosses, I only used up about a quarter of the paste and had to throw away the rest.

Here is what they looked like just before going into the oven.



And here they are after baking and glazing.



As you can see I missed a bit on one of the buns and it has only a stripe rather than a cross.

Oh, and I baked them for 18 minutes on 200 degrees C, instead of starting off at a higher temperature and reducing after 7 minutes.

The glaze remained sticky throughout, but I sort of expected that. I'd bought clotted cream and raspberry jam and that was definitely a winning combination.

So, I'd definitely repeat these once I've found a different paste recipe.

Family Easter Dinner

Over the last week, I've been preparing for yesterday's family Easter get-together, mostly with buying and preparing food.

Ever since our Christmas ostrich, we promised to invite the rest of the family to try out this delicacy. I decided to do the same recipe, however being nine people, I decided to treble everything. Thus three ostrich fillet roasts, three times the mushrooms, three times the gravy and three times the potatoes.

Now since I don't have a restaurant kitchen and staff, I decided to do each fillet roast on it's own. So I made three lots of the spice mixture for the dry marinating. All other things I did in one go.

The potatoes were prepared in the evening of the previous day and were kept in my pressure cooker under water. That made them swell sufficiently to prevent me from fitting them all into the baking tray, a feat I did manage to do after I'd sliced them into the Hasselback shape. So there are two tiny tatties in a bowl of water in the fridge waiting to be cooked. I greased them with goose fat, which I had left over from Christmas and had kept in a box in the freezer. I think I should have seasoned the potatoes before baking them, as the were, they tasted a bit too much of just fat. I think it could be to do with the increased water content of preparing them the day before.

Also on the day before, all the spices were ground, the mushrooms and the greens (baby leeks, French beans and purple sprouting broccoli) were washed and dried. One thing I sort of cheated with was to use ground coriander and cardamom instead of grinding them alongside the black pepper and juniper berries. This is not really a problem, but I made a mistake that I've specifically commented on in other blog posts - if grinding spices before use, the flavour is stronger than if using pre-ground spices, thus amounts need to be adjusted. I completely ignored doing that, very consciously and so the balance of the spice mixture was wrong. In addition, I used up all the juniper berries left in the jar, which were perhaps a tad too few. This resulted in the black pepper completely dominating in the end result, most unfortunate, though most of the family seemed OK with the extra heat.

For the mushrooms, I skipped the butter at the end and just heated up the double cream on low and stirred in the mushrooms briefly.

I prepared the first part of the gravy on the day before as well and as it turned out, the jar of cranberry sauce was a lot smaller than I thought and it was also a lot emptier than I thought. In fact it only had enough for one batch of gravy, so I topped up with lingonberry jam, which I happened to have in the fridge and which tasted pretty similarly. The lingonberry jam was definitely in a big jar and it was almost full. Also I cracked open a bottle of sherry vinegar, which I've been dying to try out for ages. It combined very nicely with the Merlot wine and the port. For some reason not everyone had gravy, so we have quite a lot of it left over now. Hopefully it's good for dipping bread in or something. Maybe I can freeze it.

The greens were just steamed. I had intended to sauté them, but there just wasn't enough time for that.

Now out of the nine of us, two are vegetarians, so for them I made a traditional Bulgarian dish - Бюрек от пиперки, which is "byurek" of peppers and here how it is made.

Ingredients
6 sweet bell peppers, preferably as oblong as possible
400 g feta cheese
4 large eggs
salt
pepper
parsley
breadcrumbs
6 tbsp grapeseed oil

Method

1. Roast the peppers as per instructions here. Then peel, remove the handles and seeds carefully so the peppers remain intact and finally rinse thoroughly.


2. In a bowl, break up 400 g of feta cheese with your fingers, so that it resembles cottage cheese nodules. Then add two of the eggs, season with salt and pepper and coarsely chopped parsley. Be generous with the seasoning, as the peppers themselves won't be seasoned.


3. Fill each pepper with the mixture and make sure they are flattened a bit.


4. In a shallow bowl, big enough to fit a pepper, break the two remaining eggs and whisk together lightly. Spread the breadcrumbs on a plate, then heat up the grapeseed oil in a frying pan.


5. Dip each pepper in the eggs to get it coated on all sides, then roll in the breadcrumbs and fry for 2 - 3 minutes on each side until the coating goes golden brown.

A word on feta cheese. Traditionally feta is stored in brine and that's how you used to buy it in Bulgaria. Then some time before it's needed it can be immersed in water, which draws out a lot of the salt. The amount left depends on now long the feta is soaked, so in extreme cases all the salt will be gone and it'll taste like fromage frais. So for a byurek, a slightly too salty feta is to be preferred. The egg/feta mixture is then to be stuffed into red peppers because their sweetness offsets the feta cheese so very nicely. Unfortunately I've not come across brined feta recently, the packets in the supermarkets are completely salt free. This doesn't really matter, just season the mixture well. I also used low fat feta and had some doubts about that, but it turned out to be very nice indeed and tasted great. It was listed as 11.5%, regular feta is around 25% I believe.

Other types of peppers can be used of course. The ones I used were good for a main course with potatoes and greens, but using small ones, they would make nice finger food at a buffet, hot or cold. The dish is popular in Bulgarian restaurants, though some might be using the Bulgarian hard yellow cheese called кашкавал (kashkaval), which is very similar in flavour to Peccorino Romano or Peccorino Sardo cheeses, though quite fatty and not as hard in texture.

As before, the mushrooms were the first to run out - there were precisely enough for all nine of us and some did make attempts at nicking other people's mushrooms, they were tasty.

Meringue Chicks

My Mum told me about this a couple of weeks ago and sent me the instructions on how to make little chicks out of meringue.

As per usual, I didn't follow the instructions on the meringue itself, but made the one I normally make. Unfortunately I over-cooked it ever so slightly, which is why the white chicks look the way they do. Adding yellow food colouring kind of sorted things out a bit and I also set aside a little and coloured red for their crests.

For beaks, I used two small pine seeds and the eyes were made with melted dark chocolate.

The way they are done is to first pipe a larger ball of meringue (so the mixture needs to be pretty firm). Mine were about the size of a walnut. Then on top of that, a second meringue ball is carefully piped, which forms the head. Generally the top of this second meringue ball will form a little crest, so can be left as is, or add on a red crest with a flat nozzle.

Finally stick two pine seeds in as a beak and then bake as normal, but for an hour and a half or even longer, if the meringues are still sticking to the baking sheets, then leave in the oven after switching it off, overnight is good and will get them nicely dried out. The reason for the longer baking is that they will end up bigger and taller.

Some 10 minutes into the baking, when the meringues have just started to dry out, using a wet sharp knife, cut into the main chick body to shape wings and spread out a little. I waited too long for this - 15 minutes and so the meringues were too dry and cracked badly, so after trying on a couple of chicks, I decide to leave it and let them complete baking without wings.

Once they are done and cooled down, melt a little dark chocolate and dot eyes on them, then place in airtight containers, so they don't go soggy.

I'd made these especially for my two nieces and sadly completely forgot about them yesterday. So maybe I can make new ones with them next time we meet.

Pre-Easter Eggsperimentation

As Easter was getting nearer and nearer, eggs in all colours and sizes kept cropping up more and more and during one shopping trip, I impulsively bought a lonely looking packet of quail eggs. I've seen them around, but have never had them and given our recent escapade into duck eggs, I've been feeling adventurous.

And so as a nice surprise to Lundulph I served them as a starter before our salad dinner.



The instructions stated to carefully put in boiling water for one minute, then take off the heat and leave for another 30 seconds, which will achieve a soft boil. If aiming for a hard boil, let them boil for two minutes, followed by a 30 second rest in the hot water. I went for the soft boil and they turned out perfect, even if I counted the seconds in my head, rather than using a timer. A bit fiddly to peel, being so very tiny, but once that was done, a quail egg was a wonderful bite with a nice firm white and creamy runny yolk. The shells were beautifully brown/grey speckled, slightly blueish on the inside and the flavour was very much like a regular chicken egg, but with a slight hint of sweetness at the end.

When I made a second lot a couple of days later, again I counted in my head, however this time I must have counted faster because the eggs were underdone and had to go back in to the water for a few more seconds.

My third attempt was when half the family came over for the traditional Easter dinner. This time I timed it strictly to the second and they ended up between our previous two attempts, so were pretty tricky to peel and most managed to squeeze them too hard so the yolk erupted out. I worked out that peeling the top third of the egg was sufficient to suck out the creamy yolk, then use the tip of a dinner knife to scoop out the white. Still, they tasted lovely on little nests of baby leaf salad. No need for any seasoning or dressing, I might add.

Which brings me to the second egg of the season, I spotted this in our local farm shop, where I also got the beautiful baby salad leaves for the family dinner. The egg was from a goose and was massive in comparison. I've not seen goose eggs in at least 20 years and I'd certainly never eaten one, so this was all very exciting too.



A quick google indicated that boiling for 10 minutes would result in a runny yolk, so that's what we did. I remembered also that Stephen of Dinner Diary had boiled one for 11 minutes a couple of years ago too.

So after boiling the thing, Lundulph and I started peeling it, realising that the shell was significantly thicker. There was also quite a lot of white at the top and Lundulph began to despair that there wouldn't be much yolk, but this was completely groundless - there was loads and it was wonderfully runny and creamy.

On the whole, it seems that flavour-wise these eggs are pretty similar to each
other, at least to me and Lundulph. The raw white of a duck egg is a lot clearer than
the corresponding chicken one, but behaves in pretty much the same way in cooking too. I've yet to try it out on meringues.

I'm now also pretty curious to see if I can get hold of a turkey egg, I'm guessing it would be of similar size to the goose egg.

The online shop where I purchased the ostrich fillet for Christmas also say they do eggs, when in season, though this season isn't specified. This sounds extremely tempting, but would require the majority of our extended family to come together for a massive omelet for a purchase like this to be viable. Not entirely out of the question for the future though.

One thing to note in the two photos above is that the bowls in which the quail and goose eggs are presented are the same.

Oh, and sorry for the silly pun on the post title, I just couldn't resist.

Omelet and Bread Proficiency

Over the past couple of days, I've been successful in omelet making as well as bread making.

Again, a last minute dinner decision on the omelet, but I decided to try and make it a bit more special, by frying sliced onion in some butter and also slicing and frying some shiitake mushrooms also in butter. I kept them separate, as they'd take different times to cook.



I whisked a couple of eggs together with a splash of milk, salt and pepper, then fried it in a little butter as well. When it was almost ready, I added some onions and mushrooms to one half, then managed to fold the omelet with the help of a couple of spatulas. I don't feel as confident as professional chefs to just flick it into folding. it was difficult to get onto the plate in a good way too, only one of the omelets worked. I decorated with a couple of slices of "Fillet Elena" (филе Елена), which is a Bulgarian cured and dried fillet meat - similar idea to billtong, but not as hard. Together with the tomatoes I bought from our new greengrocer's, it turned into a very yummy mid-week meal.

I've also had success with the latest batch of bread.

Having almost run out of flour (unheard of!), I took out 150 g of my starter "Monty", added to that 100 g strong white flour and 100 g wholemeal flour along with 100 g water, which turned into a fairly stiff starter. I closed the jar tightly and went off to the shops (to buy more flour among other things).

Back some 5 h later and there was pssst-ing and sigh-ing in the kitchen. Turns out, Monty was so happy about the feed, he'd fed intensely and generated such a pressure in the jar that the lid had bent and the starter had run over and was working its way on the work surface. So no time to lose.

I put the starter in the mixer bowl - it was 380 g in total. To this I added 150 g wholemeal flour (all I had left) and 800 g strong white flour. Then topped up with 410 g water. After almost full gluten development (i. e. 8 min kneading in the machine) I added 15 g salt and 0.5 dl olive oil. I let the machine run for another 6 minutes and still most of the olive oil had not been incorporated, so I stopped it before it burnt out the engine and started kneading by hand. This worked a lot better and all the oil went in fine. This is the first time I've added fat to a sourdough, very exciting.

The dough went into the bowl again for a rest of 1 h 30 min, while I took the opportunity to make a tepee over my tubs of potatoes, to protect them from filling up with water from all the rain we've been having.

The dough rose very nicely in the mean time. It weighed just over 1600 g, so I divided it into three and shaped into loaves that went into my three loaf tins. The dough was quite stiff this time, at about 50% hydration, so very easy to work with. I gently pushed each part out onto the surface into a rectangle, then rolled it into a loaf.

Once in the tins, I brushed with more olive oil and sprinkled a mixture of polenta, crushed oat bran, sesame and black onion seeds. Then covered with cling film and left to rise for about 4 h. I could have left it a bit longer, but it was nearing bed time and I didn't want to leave them overnight or the dough would try to escape again.

I baked the loaves for 20 minutes on 250 degrees C, then turned down to 200 degrees C and gave them another 30 minutes.



Lundulph and I had some for lunch today and both texture and flavour was super. I must remember not to use as much water as I have up to now. My previous breads have worked out to some 90 - 100 % hydration, which has resulted in a sloppy dough and not too pretty loaves (though they were quite tasty too). I also resisted the temptation to slash the loaves, though I suspect I would have been more successful than before. Drooling over the photos in The Fresh Loaf, I've noticed that some breads had poor excuses for slashes, just like mine and it occurred to me that it might have to do with how wet a dough is.

So now we're set for another couple of weeks of bread and I'll have to try and make pancakes with the surplus of sourdough I'll end up with when I feed Monty next week.

By the way, Lundulph didn't like my tepee and I had to take it down today and made a more discreet looking poly tunnel. It rained really heavily in the afternoon with a fair bit of wind too, but the thing is still standing, so all is well in the garden, looking forward to some lovely tatties.

Conchas for Mother's Day

Tomorrow is Mother's Day in the UK and to celebrate I decided to have a go at conchas. I first spotted these on Susan's YeastSpotting event on 5th February this year and they looked so intriguing, I put them up on the list of to bake. Quite high up too. Then Susan herself followed suit a couple of weeks later.

Both looked beautiful and reading through the recipes quickly, I decided for the first one, which seemed a bit easier. Sadly I ignored looking up the original recipe it was based on, however, I ended up with something really good anyway and know what I need to do next time to achieve an even better result.

I'm posting the recipe here in metric along with the couple of alterations I had to make on the fly to make things work.

Ingredients
Sponge
220 g warm full milk (2 dl + 1 tbsp)
7 g instant yeast
165 g strong flour

Dough
All of the sponge
290 g strong flour
120 g granulated sugar
1 medium egg
2 tsp vanilla extract
1.25 tsp salt
2 tbsp full milk (if needed)
45 g unsalted soft butter

Topping
120 g plain flour
110 g granulated sugar
106 g unsalted soft butter
0.25 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
15 g unsweetened cocoa powder

Now, I pretty much followed the instructions in the recipe on how to make the conchas, but in hindsight there are a few tweaks to do. I've incorporated these below. I must also measure up the flour next time so I know the weight, rather than the volume.

Method

1. Warm up the milk on low heat to feel warm on the fingers, but not hot, about 40 - 45 degrees C. In the mean time mix instant yeast and flour well, then pour in the milk and mix to combine. I recommend using the bowl of the machine that'll make the final dough. Cover and leave for an hour in room temperature until it bubbles up.
   
2. Add the ingredients to the dough, except the butter, then mix to a shiny and elastic dough. It must be sticky, so if it isn't, add a couple of tablespoons of milk, one at a time, while mixing until it is sticky.
3. When the gluten has developed, add the butter and mix in well, then scrape off the bowl sides and the mixing paddle, cover the bowl and set aside for an hour to rise and double in size.
4. While the dough is rising, mix the ingredients for the topping - it should form a paste like for cookie dough. Then place in the fridge to firm up.
5. Line three baking sheets with baking paper.
6. Take out the dough on a well floured surface and divide into 50 g pieces.
   
7. Take out the topping from the fridge and divide into the same number of pieces as the dough. It may seem like very small pieces, but it should be OK.
8. Either use the palms of your hands to flatten a topping piece into a circle or place the piece between two pieces of cling film and roll with a pin.
9. Roll a dough piece into a ball, then cover with the topping circle. The topping should cover the top and sides of the dough ball. Then place on a baking sheet and press down to flatten a bit. It'll spring back and rise even further during proofing later on.
   
10. Repeat with the remaining pieces. Then use a sharp knife to cut patterns into the topping, reaching the dough.
    
11. Let proof for 30 minutes, while pre-heating the oven to 200 degrees C.
12. Bake the conchas for about 15 minutes, until the topping looks dry and the areas where the dough is visible begin to show a bit of colour.
13. Take out and let cool on a rack, then store in an airtight container.

I made 14 pieces of 70 g each, which resulted in balls the size of a tangerine and after baking, buns the size of oranges, way too big. But they were very tasty and Lundulph suggested that they have some sort of creamy filling in the middle. I think perhaps some custard, I just need to work out how to get it in there, I'd like it to go in before baking, not afterwards. Will have to think about it and experiment.

The dough was not too sweet, but combined very nicely with the topping. I'd expected the topping to be crunchier, though given how thin it was, that might just not be possible to achieve. Still the combination of textures and flavours was very good and I think a centre of custard would be grand. Besides, I rolled the topping into too large circles, so they were very thin and I wanted to cover the whole buns almost. Though with such a sticky dough, once I'd placed it on the baking sheet, I couldn't lift it up again without ruining the ball shape, so I just tucked in the topping as much as I could.

It's very important to cut the patterns in before the dough has proofed too much, so that there is room for expansion without the topping cracking too much. It'll do that a bit anyway from the oven spring.

Lundulph also suspects they will go stale pretty quickly, so a quick whizz in the microwave just before serving would be in order too.

Oh and if you're wondering about why the baking paper looks so messy, that's because I originally tried to make the dough balls without flouring the work surface, but wetting my fingers instead. This became very messy, I couldn't really shape any balls at all and ended up scraping off the ones I'd made back onto the work surface, this time with lots of flour on it. The second attempt worked better.

Update on 2019-10-18:
I finally got round to measuring up the flour, mainly because I didn't have instant yeast and wanted to work out how much fresh yeast I should use instead.

7 dl of strong flour weighed 466 g, though I suspect there is variation depending on how packed together the flour is. For this I used 14 g fresh yeast. The resulting dough divided up really nicely into 18 pieces of 50 g each, which was very pleasing.

Further ingredient swaps were caster sugar instead of granulated, to make the dough a little bit sweeter and also using a large egg instead of a medium one.

Also dividing the dough into 50 g pieces, I reduced the baking time to 10 minutes. Finally, I got to use my new conchas cutters which I bought from Amazon a few months ago. A little bit disappointing, because they are made from hard plastic, which isn't sharp enough, so I had to press quite hard to get the patterns onto the buns and they weren't as defined as when I cut with a knife, but it's so much faster to do and there are some patterns I couldn't do with a knife, so definitely a good investment.

Smoked Salmon Pie

As mentioned the other day, half of the ravioli filling was left over and so I decided to make a pie.



This worked out very nicely indeed, the recipe for the pie crust is from my Cordon Bleu book.

Ingredients
3 dl plain flour
1 tsp salt
1.2 dl unsalted butter
1 egg
2 - 3 tbsp water

Method

1. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl, then cut the butter into thin slices into the flour and rub in. The mixture should look a bit like pale polenta.


2. Add the egg and water (a little at a time) to form a dough. Shape into a ball and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Do not over-work it or it'll become difficult to work with.


3. Roll out to the size of the pie dish and transfer carefully to it. Careful not to stretch the dough during rolling, as that'll make it shrink during baking.


4. Blind bake at 180 degrees C until it develops a bit of colour, duration depends on how thickly it was rolled.


5. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a few minutes, then add the filling. Use any left-over dough for decoration or if the pie dish is small, as a lid for the pie.


6. Bake at 200 degrees for 30 minutes until the pie has baked through.

I only had one egg left and I used it in the dough, so couldn't brush the bottom crust with egg white before the blind bake. Otherwise it's a good idea to do this, it'll protect it from going soggy from the filling. Also the yolk can then be used either in the filling, if doing a quiche or brushing the dough decoration/lid of the pie, which again will make it more attractive visually.

We had it with pickled gherkins, roasted artichoke hearts and pickled roasted chillies. This last lot of the chillies was a bit of a disappointment, since the chillies in question had been picked way too early and had not developed any spiciness to speak of. However, the flavour of fresh chillies came out very strongly and they were still very tasty, I just fancied a bit of spicy heat as well.

Still, the pie turned out very nice and tasted great too and got me thinking that this would be a good way of using up left-overs, especially when there's not really enough for a full portion to freeze. I might just mix a couple of batches of the crust dough and freeze and have ready for such situations.

Lingonberry And Hazelnut Bread

The inspiration behind this comes from TheFreshLoaf blog. Generally I look at the photos only, but ever so often there are interesting posts as well. One was on bread with blueberries and whole hazelnuts.



Not really season for blueberries at the moment, but I have some lingonberry jam that I'm trying to use up. Lundulph wasn't taken with it and the jar is just too big for me to tackle on my own, though I am doing my best.

So this week's batch was to be wholemeal and have lingonberry jam and hazelnuts in it. Since I started my sourdough Monty, I've been improvising heavily, although generally using the same ingredients every time, but varying the amounts. However, I thought I'd write these down.

Ingredients
350 g white flour starter (100% hydration)
350 g strong white flour
150 g strong wholemeal flour
300 g water
12 g salt
150 g sweet lingonberry jam
100 whole roasted hazelnuts

Method

1. Feed the starter a few hours in advance, so that it's at its peak when baking. Monty takes about 5 h.


2. Add the starter, flours and water into the bread mixer and run for 10 minutes to get a nice dough. Or make by hand of course.


3. Towards the end of the kneading, add the salt, then the lingonberry jam and incorporate well.


4. Finally add the hazelnuts and mix just enough to get them evenly spread out in the dough. Then shape the dough into a ball and leave to rest for 2 h.


5. Butter two loaf tins ("pound loaf" size).


6. On a generously floured surface shape the dough into a long sausage, then divide in two and place in the loaf tins, cover with cling film and place in a cool place to proof overnight or a warm place to proof in 4 - 5 hours.


7. Pre-heat the oven to 225 degrees C, then slash the loaves and bake in the middle of the oven for 45 minutes. If the crust goes dark, cover with aluminium foil and turn the heat down a bit.


8. Remove from the loaf tins and let cool on a wire rack.

Lundulph had three slices for breakfast this morning and said it was very nice, though he couldn't notice the lingonberry, only the hazelnuts and mostly because they were whole. This is what I expected, the jam sweetens the bread a bit, so won't perhaps work in a ham sandwich, but mostly it makes it moist. The crumb feels almost a bit sticky.

I haven't had breakfast yet because I'm still full of ravioli from last night.

And yes, I still need to practice on my slashing. I actually went and bought razor blades, in the hopes that they'd work better than the knife I've been using so far, but no. I even tried to wet it, but water doesn't really stick to metal. I'll try dusting flour on the loaves first before slashing.

One thing about improvising with amounts is that I've always ended up with a very wet dough. When I first mixed up the ingredients for this batch, it seemed to turn out rather stiffer than normal, which I thought was good, but two-thirds into the kneading, the dough went just as wet as on previous occasions. But a wet dough gives a nice light shaggy bread and I don't want to lose that.

Smoked Salmon Ravioli

As always when we go to Sweden, we stock up on lovely hot smoked salmon and lately we've not had any at all, so this week I'm compensating for this fact. Besides, this time we got a new variety with chilli flakes on top, which turned out to be extremely tasty.

Last Monday we had it in the traditional way with steamed potatoes, mustard dill sauce and rocket salad. But Lundulph does like freshly made pasta, so I decided to combine the two and make ravioli. Without a pasta maker. Based on a recipe I found here.

The pasta is the one I made for the cheeseless lasagne. But before that, I prepared the filling.



Ingredients

1 medium red onion
150 g chestnut mushrooms
1 tbsp grapeseed oil
300 g hot smoked salmon
250 ml créme fraîche
salt and pepper to taste

Method

1. Peel the onion and clean the mushrooms, then dice both finely.


2. Heat up the oil in a pan and fry the onion until it softens a bit, then add the mushrooms and fry on low heat until they've softened and given off some of their liquid.


3. In the mean time, peel the skin off the salmon and discard. Place the salmon in a large bowl and break it up as finely as possible with a spoon.


4. Add the onion and mushrooms to the salmon and stir in until they've combined well and evenly, then set aside to cool down.


5. Once the mixture is cool, add the créme fraîche and stir in well, then season.

Mix the dough and leave to rest for 15 - 20 minutes, then divide into four parts and roll out one at a time to about 2 mm thickness. Remember to keep the other dough well covered up or it will dry out.

Cut out circles or rectangles, place a teaspoon of the filling in each, the brush the edge with water, fold into a little cushion and press along the edges. Then use a fork to seal the edge by pressing its teeth along the edge. Then set aside for an hour before cooking.



The above amount of filling was far too much for the amount of pasta dough, I used about half of it only and ended up with 33 fairly large ravioli. I could have probably managed to produce one more, but rolling, filling and sealing took about an hour and a half and I made the mistake of saving all the off-cuts for last, rather than use them with the next piece of dough. As a fair amount of flour is used during the rolling, all the off-cuts became stiffer and were a lot more difficult to roll out, not to mention that doing them last meant I was already tired from rolling. So my last couple of raviolis ended up a bit thicker than the rest.

However, the remaining salmon mixture will be fine in a quiche. I'll make that in a couple of days, with the remaining 100 ml of the cream from my mascarpone making escapade and some milk. In fact, I might try and use the mascarpone itself.

I also won't be cooking all the ravioli today, but will freeze most of them, ready to use as emergency food, when I can't think of anything better to do.

On the whole, such a simple dish sure required a lot of effort to make, I suspect it's easier with a machine.

I also think the filling mixture would be good on jacket potatoes, rather like my Mexican style topping.

As for cooking the ravioli, one of the instructions I found on the Internet said place in boiling water and leave there until they float back up to the surface. Well they did after about 20 seconds. This meant that the filling wouldn't even have heated through. So I gave them 5 minutes. And I was using my big pressure cooker, filled two-thirds with water, with a dash of salt and about a tablespoon and a half of olive oil, all of it simmering well before I put the ravioli in. Lundulph was extremely hungry after an hour in the gym, so that was the other reason I rushed things. The ravioli were still well al dente, so I put them back in for another 4 minutes. I think at least 10 minutes is the optimal. The flavour was fantastic and I got the texture right too, the ingredients were just the right size to be noticeable, yet blend in together nicely. We ate 11 of the ravioli, meaning there are two further batches of 11 in the freezer for rainy days. And none of the ravioli split while cooking.

Lundulph was wondering about sauce. I didn't make any, mainly because I couldn't think of what to make. Cheese is obviously completely out of the question here and tomato I think tends to be a bit too sour for fish. Lundulph did a quick search which cropped up some sort of bell pepper sauce. I'm not sure about it, but it might work. We agreed in the end to try some sort of a thin béchamel sauce with lots of dill and a dash of mustard. The idea is to echo the mustard dill sauce that is traditional with salmon, yet make it light and without the vinegariness. But a definite success.

Homemade Mascarpone

Via the WildYeastBlog, I came across BakingObsession, which is another wonderful baking blog. The beautiful photos are quite mesmerising, but there were also a couple of extremely interesting entries - homemade mascarpone and homemade ricotta.



Now, having seen Susan's fabulous Tiramisu cake, I've decided to make one myself for Easter. And thus homemade mascarpone will come in very handy, but better do a dress rehearsal beforehand.

I have this strange idea about cream that more fat is better and so I almost always buy double cream, which is 47.5%. The instructions called for whipping cream, which is around 36 - 38%, but I didn't feel it was enough and went with the double cream this time too.

Then heating it gently over a bain marie. I have a pot and a glass bowl that fit very neatly together, with the bottom of the glass bowl being at most 5 cm deep into the water and well away from the bottom of the pot. Perfect for melting chocolate and making Swiss meringue. However, it turned out that it was not sufficient for getting the cream up to 87 degrees C for sterilisation. I managed to reach 78 degrees C and topping up of the water and increasing the hob made no difference, so after 10 minutes at that temperature, I decided it was ready.

And so I added 1 tbsp lemon juice and the cream went thick almost immediately, but I kept it in the boiling water for a few more minutes, stirring all the time, just to be sure.

I set it aside and lined a sieve with four layers of cheese cloth, which I forgot to dampen. I also didn't wait 20 minutes for the cream to cool before transferring it to the cheese cloth, I figured it wasn't up to the heat it was supposed to, so shouldn't need to cool as long. And besides, it had formed a skin on the surface. It looked very nice - lovely pale yellow colour - and tasted very nice, like a very smooth créme fraîche, but not as sour. A couple of hours later, nothing had dripped in the bowl under the sieve, the cheese cloth was soaked and the cream was cold, so I wrapped the whole thing in cling film and put in the fridge.

That was yesterday afternoon. I've had a peek this morning and it looks great, there's about a teaspoon worth of clear liquid at the bottom of the bowl, the mascarpone has firmed up quite nicely and smells of yoghurt and créme fraîche. I should have bought some from the shop, so that I can compare. Either way, I'm quite looking forward to tasting it tonight. I'm not going to skimp on the 24 h resting time.

24 h later: I took it out if the cheese cloth and it was completely rock solid. It still had the beautiful colour and smell, but tasted of butter with slight yoghurt overtones. I had some créme fraîche nearby to compare and well, I can only say that this mascarpone was a complete failure. I'll give it a go as a butter on my toast before I discard it completely. But I'll need to get whipping cream and try again, it must have been the fat content of the cream I used, nothing else.

A few days after that: I've now had this "cheese" on my lovely lingonberry and hazelnut bread for breakfast a few times and it's beginning to grow on me. Texture-wise it's pretty close to Philadelphia cheese and it's matured a bit, but still butter is the dominant flavour and things work OK. However, I'm struggling with the amount I ended up with, particularly since Lundulph won't help out and will get rid of it and try again with whipping cream and also with single cream, to see what I'll end up with. I'll also change the bain marie arrangement to one where the bowl with the cream rests on the bottom of the saucepan/pot with water, hopefully this will reach the higher sterilisation temperature that's recommended in the instructions.

Super Fancy Lamb Kebabs

Last week, Lundulph and I had a week-end in and I took the opportunity to watch Saturday Kitchen. I find this show a bit hit and miss, some recipes I really don't like, some are fantastic and I can never make up my mind if I should watch it regularly or not. Last Saturday, one of the recipes was for kebabs and when I saw the piece of meat ready to be cooked, I just had to watch it.



The dish was Cyrus Todiwala's Mutton Cannon Ni Seek Boti. That is kebabs and although I didn't pay too close attention, it seemed a good and fairly quick thing to do. I wasn't too excited about the mutton part, I find lamb too strong flavoured on many occasions and I suspected mutton would be even more so, but the piece of meat to use was the best end of the neck and I think "cannon" implies the whole length of the fillet, it certainly seemed to have a cannon shape.

So off to the butcher I went. Unfortunately our butcher doesn't do mutton at all, so I had to get the lamb cannon instead. Lambs being slightly smaller, I asked for both fillets and it was a great joy to watch the butcher bring out half a carcass, snip off the kidneys, peel off the skin on the back and finally pull out a bit machete and carve between the ribs and the spine to get to the two cannons. It looks so easy when a professional does it, but when I try, the piece of meat defies all physical laws so that I end up with an unrecognisable mess. Maybe I don't have the right kinds of knives.

Anyway, out the two beautiful fillets came and amounted to just over 700 g at £25 per kilo. Steep, but it was for Friday dinner, which we try to make a bit more special to celebrate the coming week-end. I did try to get hold of the wine recommended for this dish, but sadly it was not to be.

Since I had a bit more meat than specified in the recipe, I increased the amounts of the marinade a bit as well.

Ingredients

700 g cannon of lamb (best end of neck)

Marinade

2 tbsp minced fresh ginger
2 tbsp minced fresh garlic
1 tsp turmeric
4 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp hot chilli powder
1 tsp garam masala
2 tbsp lemon juice



Salad "Cachumber"
1 red onion
1 small green mango
1 green chilli
2 plum tomatoes
half a cucumber
handful of fresh mint leaves
handful of fresh coriander
1.5 tbsp lime juice
1 tsp cider vinegar
salt to taste



Relish

1 large green chilli
1 tbsp minced fresh ginger
2 large cloves minced garlic
2 tbsp chopped fresh coriander

For frying the meat

3 tbsp grapeseed oil

For the kebabs

Bamboo skewers soaked in water for a couple of hours
1 dl plain flour
2 eggs
pinch of salt
grape seed oil to fill the frying pan to almost 1 cm

Method

1. Trim the lamb if it still has bits of fat or sinew on it, then cut into small chunks suitable for kebabs.


2. Mix all the ingredients for the marinade and coat the lamb well. Set aside at room temperature for a couple of hours, then refrigerate until needed.


3. Prepare the salad by peeling and finely slicing the onion and mango. Then deseed the chilli and chop. Deseed the tomaotes and cucumber and slice into juliennes. Finally shred the mint and coriander and mix everything well, then refrigerate until needed.


4. Make the relish by chopping the chilli finely (deseed if you don't want it to be too spicy). Combine together with the ginger, pressed garlic and coriander and put in the fridge.


5. Just before starting, place the flour on a plate and whisk the eggs with the salt in a shallow bowl.


6. Heat up the oil in a deep frying pan on high heat, then fry the marinated chunks of lamb until they are well browned, about 3 - 4 minutes. Do in batches, so the pieces are not crowded in the pan.


7. Once all meat has been browned, make the kebabs, taking care as the meat should be quite hot still. The pieces can be skewered quite closely together.


8. Heat up the oil to high heat


9. Roll the kebabs in the flour, make sure they're well coated. Then dredge through the eggs, then place in the hot oil and let fry for 2 - 3 minutes, turning the kebabs to get them fried all over.


10. Place the ready kebabs on tissue to drain a bit, then serve along with the cachumber salad and the relish.

Now, the above is what I did, because the recipe wasn't quite clear. Apparently the relish wasn't a relish at all, but was an additional layer of spice for the lamb. After the meat had been browned in batches, it should have been returned to the pan, then the relish should have been stirred in and the whole lot should have been left to the side to cool a bit. On the whole, my way worked just as well and had the benefit of allowing more control of the spicy heat. I'd included the chilli seeds in the relish and they did dominate quite a lot, so won't do that next time.

As anticipated the meat was fantastically light and tender. The marinade was perfect for the lamb, I suspect the mutton would have been more obvious as a flavour.

The salad was a great surprise too. I was not at all sure about having mango in a salad. In addition did Mr Todiwala mean a green mango as in an unripe mango or a specific type of mango that doesn't go reddish when it's ripe? Not that I think there was any choice in the supermarket where I normally shop, but I chose a small firm mango that was green all over, so every sign of not quite ripe.

Deseeding the tomatoes and cucumber was fiddly, but worth it, because it avoided a lot of excess liquid in the salad and everything combined nicely, so no single flavour dominated, but there was an overall nice balance of the ingredients and the texture was terrific.

I reduced the amount of oil required to fry the kebabs by half I think. Lundulph wandered into the kitchen to see what was happening just as I started pouring the oil into the pan and I told him to not to look. Then I just couldn't force myself to pour any more than just under 1 cm depth. It certainly felt like deep frying to me. After the kebabs were fried, I not only placed them on tissue, but placed some on top and patted them a bit, to soak up as much as possible.

Some alternative method for the flour and egg procedure will need to be worked out, because it was not straightforward to roll the skewers. Some chunks of meat refused to roll around and they were a bit different sizes, so some didn't reach to get coated and I ended up sprinkling with my fingers, then the same through the eggs to get a bit of coating and a lot of the stuff was stuck to my fingers, when it would have been better on the kebabs.

Since I didn't manage to get hold of that recommended wine - Papa Luna 2007 from Spain, Lundulph selected an Albali Gran Reserva from 2001 and also from Spain, which was very nice indeed.

You might have noticed that there were no carbs to accompany this meal and I suggested we have some quick toast with that, but Lundulph said we could always have that for dessert and tucked in. We didn't miss the carbs one bit and I can't think what it would go well with in the carb department at the moment.

The amount of 700 g lamb seems to be enough for 4 people or perhaps 5 if you do a starter and dessert. I used up 5 skewers on this occasion, but will remember to cut the pieces slightly differently next time.

Oh and I'd bought baby chestnut mushrooms to serve with the kebabs, but unfortunately I completely forgot about them and they are still in the fridge. I don't think they're needed in this case.

Tandoori-style Chicken

I've finally managed to track down the Gujarat Masala Curry paste required for this Waitrose recipe. Lundulph chose it ages ago and I should really have done one of the other recipes in the collection, but I'd set my heart on this one and so I've not made any progress on Ye Olde Recipe Collection until now.



The original recipe is here. I had twice the weight of chicken in the shape of fillets, so decided to do a double dose of this dish. The chicken is accompanied by a raita, a salad and chapatis. The below recipe incorporates the changes I made to the original recipe.

Ingredients

150 g Veeraswamy Gujarat Masala Curry Paste
4 tbsp lemon juice
0.5 tsp turmeric
0.5 tsp sweet paprika
600 g full fat Greek style yoghurt
1 kg chicken fillets
250 g cucumber
20 g fresh mint leaves
salt and pepper to taste
1 red onion
3 tomatoes
6 chapatis

Method

1. Mix the curry paste, 2 tbsp lemon juice, turmeric, paprika and 400 g yoghurt together well in a non-metallic dish. Place the chicken in the marinade and make sure it's well covered. Cover the bowl and place in the fridge 90 minutes.


2. Peel and dice the cucumber finely. Wash and chop the mint leaves finely. Stir into the remaining yogurt, season, then cover and put in the fridge.


3. Peel and slice the onion finely. De-seed the tomatoes and slice thinly as well, then combine both into a salad and refrigerate.


4. Cook the chicken under a medium grill, that has been pre-heated. Turn every 10 minutes or so, so that the chicken breasts are evenly cooked through and through.


5. Once the chicken is ready, heat up the chapatis as per the instructions on the packet. In the mean time, slice the chicken into small pieces and serve so that the warm chapatis can be filled with the chicken, salad and raita.

As usual, I felt the need to add steamed broccoli to this meal. I also bought some baby chestnut mushrooms, but decided to save for our Friday dinner.

Next time, I think I'll only use 300 g of the yoghurt for the marinade and use the rest for the raita. In fact, the amount of mint and cucumber was not doubled, so what's on the photo of the card is far from what you'd end up with, had you used the listed amounts.

After I'd mixed the marinade, I couldn't resist to have a taste of it. It was very yummy and I think would be excellent as a dip for crisps or tortilla chips just like that.

The de-seeding of the tomatoes was a first for me. I've never had them like that and I felt a lot of the tomato got discarded, but it'll make for a less watery salad. It was a bit of a faff doing it though. I've saved the seeds and frozen for future use.

I also saved the stalks of the mint, I intend to chop them finely and make into tea.

Dicing the cucumber finely made me wonder how advisable this is - cucumber has a tendency to go very watery if cut too finely and indeed this one did. I think it'll benefit from de-seeding too. The raita was very tasty and worked very nicely with the chicken, but the mint was quite dominating, so I'd use a bit less. If I'm to make it for poppadoms, I'll cut the cucumber even finer.

The marinade was quite mild and delicate, once the chickens were ready, I should perhaps have done a bit of basting during the grilling. And the red onion was one of the dominating flavours too, so maybe swap it for something milder, like chives or shallots.

I should do some research on chapatis and see if I can make my own.

Oh, and I had a quick look in my Classic Indian Vegetarian Cookery book, which has a whole chapter on the garam masala spice mixtures and one of these is the Gujarati garam masala from the Western parts of India. It has over ten different spices and is a dry mixture. I might give it a go one of those days.

Time for a Semla once again

Once again Shrove Tuesday was nearing and I asked Lundulph if he wanted pancakes for dinner. To which he replied that we need to start a tradition here - with a semla on the Tuesday and pancakes for breakfast the following Saturday.

Chatting to my Mum, it seems that Sweden is in semla fever already, and these lovely buns have been in the shops pretty much since the beginning of the year. She'd also spotted a recipe that she liked and sent it to me to try out. The amounts were slightly smaller than the recipe I did last year, so that was good too.

In addition, I'd been toying with the idea of duck eggs. They sell them in the supermarket and they look very pretty, but I've never seen anyone actually buy them, so when I went to get the semla ingredients, I bought a packet to try them out.



The yolk seemed to be a brighter yellow and I think the eggs were fairly fresh, as the white was quite dense. I like the shells very much, they look like they're made of alabaster and have some inner glow to them. They are also a bit thicker than chicken eggshells.

What annoyed me a bit about this new recipe was that it called for half an egg. Now that's a tricky one I thought, but resolved the issue by whisking the egg with a fork, then pouring in about half of it. On the interesting side was that the recipe called for "white syrup". It's sold in Sweden and is recommended for baking. I guessed that pure glucose should do the trick too and whisking it together with the butter, I ended up with this fluffy cream



Ingredients
75 g unsalted butter
0.75 dl glucose
2.5 dl full fat milk
25 g fresh yeast
0.5 egg
1 ml salt
1 tsp ground cardamom (0.5 tsp if freshly ground)
3 dl plain flour
3.5 dl strong flour
1 ml ammonium carbonate

Method

1. Whisk the butter and glucose to a light and fluffy cream.


2. Warm up the milk to about 37 degrees C. In the mean time, crumble up the yeast in the dough bowl. Pour the warm milk over it and stir to dissolve the yeast.


3. Add a couple of tablespoons of the butter cream, egg, salt and cardamom and stir in well.


4. In a separate bowl, mix the plain flour with 2 dl of the strong flour an the ammonium carbonate, then add to the dough liquid and mix into a very wet dough/thick batter.


5. Keep mixing until gluten has developed, then set aside to rest for 30 minutes.


6. Add the remainder of the butter cream and some more of the strong flour to get a fairly soft dough. It should just about not stick.


7. Take the dough out of the bowl onto a floured surface and divide into equal sized pieces, about 60 g each. I got 16 from the dough.


8. Shape into balls and place on baking sheets lined with baking paper. Brush the buns with the remaining egg, then cover with cling film and let rise for 40 minutes.


9. Pre-heat the oven to 225 degrees C, then bake the buns until they are dark golden brown on top, the recipe said 7 minutes, I baked mine for 14 and their bottoms were still quite pale.


10. Leave to cool on a rack, then follow the instructions from last year.

The recipe instructions recommended making your own marzipan, but I had some in the larder already and I wanted to use it up. Also the instructions were to just cut off a lid off the buns and spread the marzipan over them, then topping up with cream and putting the lids back on. Wrong, wrong, wrong! I think it's crucial to nip out the middle bit and blend with the marzipan.

My Dad sent me an article from the "Semla academy", where the two writers discuss what is good and what is bad for a semla and here is what they say:

The buns should be hand made and the size of a grapefruit.
The lids should be triangular in shape. They reckon often round lids are cut by a machine, so if they are triangular, this implies that they've been hand cut.
The marzipan should be 50% almonds and 50% sugar.
The whipped cream should not be runny but also not too hard and butter taste is a big no no.
Generosity with the icing sugar on top is also important.

This article was in the Stockholm City magazine on Monday 15th February. Only in Swedish, sadly. Besides, most of the other papers will have some sort of semla tasting and comparisons.

On the whole, I don't agree with everything on the list above.

This new recipe was actually very good, the buns rose from this



to this



and you can see the colour after baking. Some of the buns stuck together on the sides, that's a bit annoying, but I hadn't expected them to swell up so much in such a short time. Good thing I brushed them with egg beforehand too. The cling film came off a bit easier then, but I suspect I would have punctured them, if I'd tried to brush them just before baking.

A note on the ammonium carbonate, this is often also known as hartshorn salt and is a chemical rising agent and part of the mixture known as baking powder. It smells very strongly of ammonium, but this disappears during baking. I have a bag of it that I bought in Sweden, however, if you can't find it, use the double amount of baking powder instead.

The buns were very fluffy and light and quite soft too, I had to be careful not to leave imprints of my fingers when I cut the lids. A serrated knife is the thing to use.

Lundulph and I enjoyed one each yesterday and there are four more to be put together and eaten this week, the remaining 10 buns have been frozen for future use. Lundulph did consider having a second one, but decided against it in the end. After a big dinner, it would have made him ill for sure.

Tom the Tomato

Remember tomato plant that Lundulph rescued from the drain outside our house? It's now taller than me and I'm about 160 cm. The plant is very leggy, which was to be expected in the circumstances. But the plant did set fruit and the first one was promptly named Tom.

Well, Tom went red the other week and a couple of days ago, he fell off his perch, so Lundulph and I ate him in a ceremonial way. He was the size of a regular cherry tomato, but smelt very nice and had a bright warm red colour.



Flavour was very good, but the texture was on the mushy side. Also the skin was very thick and reminded me of my childhood, when I refused to eat tomatoes until my Mum had peeled them for me.



I suspect that whatever tomato seed sprouted, it was some sort of hybrid that didn't come true to form and instead exhibited these undesirable qualities.

However, there is a second fruit ripening as we speak, Tom's brother Dom and there was one new flower yesterday and several other buds coming along, so we may well have more pickings this Spring.

It's good as a proof of concept, but once we have a greenhouse, we'll select a known variety.

Harjinder's Chicken Curry

The other day, I stumbled upon the new cooking show from The Hairy Bikers. I find them quite entertaining, though I've not tried any of their recipes before. The cooking show is called "Mums Know Best" and I watched episode 3 entitled "Simple Suppers". One of the Mums that the Hairy Bikers visited was Harjinder from Manchester, who was amazing. I liked that she cooked in massive amounts and had a pretty fully stuffed fridge and was in awe, when she actually started cooking and just couldn't stop. It seemed that once she'd reached two-thirds into one dish, she just started another one.



One thing that she demonstrated and that was provided in her list of recipes, was the Chicken Curry that just looked lovely and also had the basic Tarka masala sauce that forms the basis for the majority of Punjabi cooking and which can be made in large batches and frozen in decent sized portions, only to have the meat of choice added to make up a quick meal.

I got all the ingredients together, the only thing I wanted to try and couldn't find in my local supermarket was ghee. So grape seed oil had to do. I also had shop-bought garam masala that had a lot more spices than Harjinder's, but looking at her list and the ingredients of the stuff I had, I got away with using just that pretty much.

However, I hadn't read through the recipe very thoroughly and got a few things in the wrong order. Some things I chose to ignore and so I'm writing down what I did, because the end result was well tasty.

I'd originally planned to treble the sauce and freeze for later, but decided against this at the last minute and a good thing too, because I don't have a big enough dish to cook it all in.

Ingredients

600 g waxy potatoes, like Vivaldi
1 dl grape seed oil
3 tsp ground cumin
2 largish onions
1 small head garlic
1 can (400 g) plum tomatoes
1 dl blended fresh root ginger
2 fresh green chillies
3 - 4 bay leaves
600 g chicken breasts
4.5 tsp garam masala
1.5 tsp salt
2 tsp turmeric
0.5 tsp hot red chilli flakes
3 tsp sweet paprika
0.5 l hot water
3 medium sized fresh tomatoes
1 dl chopped fresh coriander

Method

1. Wash and/or peel the vegetables as needed. Dice the potatoes and parboil for 10 minutes, then drain and set aside.


2. Remove the hard stalk bits from the fresh tomatoes and cut a shallow cross at the bottom, then dip into the boiling potato water for a few seconds. Then peel the skin and dice.


3. Chop the onions and garlic. Cut the chicken breasts in largish chunks. Chop the fresh chillies if you want hotter curry.


4. If the canned tomatoes are whole, tear them up into pieces with a fork.


5. Heat up the oil on high, then add the onion, garlic and cumin and fry for a few minutes until they go golden brown around the edges. Keep stirring occasionally.


6. Add the canned tomatoes with their juice, bring to the boil and simmer for 3 - 4 minutes.


7. Add the ginger, fresh chillies and bay leaves and simmer for a further 3 - 4 minutes.


8. Add the chicken and the spices and keep sirring until the meat has sealed/browned. Then turn the heat down to medium, add the hot water and the potatoes, then let simmer for 10 minutes uncovered.


9. Add the fresh tomatoes and the coriander, stir in and simmer for a further 5 minutes, then serve.

In theory the potatoes could go in raw, but with the parboil, they went just a little mushy around the edges and thickened the dish into a stew. The texture was great as was the level of spicy heat - I added the fresh chillies whole. It could have benefited from broccoli both for colour and for taste, so that's a thing to add next time, because this is a definite repeat. Or skip the potatoes and serve with rice, should work as well.

Lundulph actually wanted turkey because he prefers the texture, but a month after Christmas in the UK, there isn't a single turkey to be found, so chicken had to do. He also liked the texture achieved with the parboiled potatoes, he said it reminded him of dishes with dhal - slightly watery, but yet with body, which he associates with Indian food.

We're now set for a week of chicken dishes, since I also made Thai green curry the other day.

Crème Caramel/Brûlée

Once again, this is a thing that Lunduph has been hankering after for ages and since I needed a dessert for this evening, I thought I'd give it a go. I've also recently become the proud owner of Gaston Lenôtre's Desserts and Pastries and thought I'd try it out.



Well, the book only has the Crème caramel recipe and it calls for 4 eggs + 8 yolks. I only had 6 eggs handy and by the way the book calls it Crème à la Vanille Caramelisée, so had to skip it this time.

I've made crème caramel once before, on the first time my parents-in-law came to dinner. Then I used my Mum's recipe and it didn't work quite - I didn't serve it because I couldn't get it out of the bowl. And last night, I couldn't find the recipe either. This is a dish that should be made at least on the night before.

So I had to resort to Delia's Complete Cookery Course. Generally the recipes I've tried from this book, I didn't like much, but it was an emergency.

And this book has two different recipes, one for crème caramel and another for crème brûlée. The former is baked in a bain-marie in the oven, whereas the latter is cooked on the hob, like custard with corn flour as thickener. Whether this is the main difference to these two or not, I don't know. My thought originally was that in crème caramel the caramel goes in the bottom of the dishes, so that it melts and goes runny when the desserts are taken out, whereas the crème brûlée stays in the dishes and has the caramel on top in which case it doesn't melt, but forms a nice crunchy surface.

The crème caramel recipe seemed simpler, so I plodded on with my original idea about these two puds - bake in the oven and do the caramel on top.

I also made the assumption that milk would be involved and I felt generous in the supermarket and bought fancy Jersey milk. Gold top in old money. Delia called for part milk and part single cream. Oh well, that's what happens when you shop before reading the recipe...

Anyway, I'll stop waffling now and get on with the recipe.

Ingredients

425 ml gold top milk
4 medium eggs
40 g caster sugar
2 tbsp medium maple syrup
1 ml vanilla essence
1 dl caster sugar for the crunchy caramel top

Equipment
The mixture will end up about 800 - 850 ml, so either one big soufflé dish or 6 smaller ones.
A deep baking pan into which the soufflé dish(es) are placed.
Hot water to pour into the baking pan so that it reaches two-thirds of the soufflé dish(es).
Saucepan to melt the sugar.

Method

1. Heat the milk on low heat, stirring occasionally.


2. Prepare the baking dish(es) and pre-heat the oven to 150 degrees C. Boil the water to have it ready.


3. When the milk begins to steam a bit, whisk the eggs, sugar, maple syrup and vanilla essence so that they just come together, preferably by hand so as little foam as possible forms.


4. When the milk is about to start boiling, pour it into the egg mixture and continue whisking briskly by hand until it's incorporated.


5. Pour into the baking dish(es), then put the baking tray into the oven and pour in the hot water.


6. Bake for 1 h, then take out and allow to cool completely, before chilling in the fridge until needed.


7. Just before serving, melt the sugar in a saucepan on medium heat. This should take about a minute. Do not stir, just shake a couple of times, then when all the sugar has melted, quickly distribute over the crème brûlée and twist and turn the dish(es) to cover the whole surface. It'll bubble a bit as it meets the cold custard. This must be done quickly or the caramel will harden in a too thick layer.

I definitely need to practice on the caramel. It burnt bit, I wasn't quick enough and the crunchy layer was a bit on the thick side. I initially tried with my tiny kitchen blow torch, but it didn't work at all, I think the blow torch is too small, practically a cigarette lighter and I would have run out of the lighting fluid and overheated it, before the sugar melted. Or I used too much sugar. I tried caster sugar and also icing sugar, but it took forever and I gave up. Delia recommended melting the sugar in a sauce pan and that's what I did.

One thing that Delia recommends is to break up the surface before serving, but both Lundulph and I disagree, it's great to get a little dish with the golden shiny surface and to whack it lightly with your spoon and hear it crack.

The custard was lovely and creamy, but the dark caramel dominated the taste and the finer hints of vanilla and maple syrup didn't come through as I'd hoped. Still, very encouraging for a first try and I'll keep practicing.

However, I made the massive mistake of using an electric whisk for the egg mixture and I kept whisking until it pretty much filled the 2 litre bowl, it was that foamy. When I added the milk it went over the edge and made a good portion of my work surface very sticky indeed. I ended up skimming off as much of the foam as I could into the sink.

Lundulph also reckons if the custard goes up to the brim of the dish, sprinkling thin layer of sugar, then holding the blow torch so that the flame is parallel to the surface would do the trick, whereas my dishes ended up half-full and I had to point the torch down into them, thus perhaps I failed at getting the perfect thin layer of caramel.