Category Archives: ideas

The larder in the freezer

I go through periods where I don’t really want to cook very much, as everyone does. I don’t really enjoy takeaway food that much, so I like to keep stocked with some shortcut ingredients that help me make things quickly, and means I can avoid a lot of processed foods. I would call this a larder, except that these mostly live in the freezer. I have developed something of a rhythm with these things over time, and although (like everything else I do) my commitment to this waxes and wanes, here is the list of things I continue to return to.

So when your weeknight cooking degenerates to pasta with tomato sauce, fried rice and curry, as mine often does, having these things in stock will keep you going with cheap, good food until you can get back into the kitchen properly.

Muffins

I have a snacking problem. A serious need to nibble while at my desk. I have recently re-subscribed to Graze, which is helping somewhat. I also like to have some muffins in the freezer. The recipe is based on a Gordon Ramsay one, and uses mashed bananas, a little oil and wholewheat flour for a wholesome and not too sweet muffin. I don’t think I’ve made the same flavour twice with these. Ones I have tried include: raspberry and white chocolate; espresso banana; ginger coffee walnut banana; chocolate and cherry; cherry and almond; apple and walnut – I could go on.

I can get one out of the freezer in the morning, pop it into a ziplock bag and into my handbag and take it to work. By the time the munchies kick in about 10:30 (OK, sometimes it’s 9:30), it has part defrosted. A minute in the work microwave and I have a warm, fresh muffin to have with a cup of tea.

Breadcrumbs

I know, you don’t need a recipe for breadcrumbs. It’s great to have fresh breadcrumbs in the freezer, and that helps assuage my guilt about all the times I buy bread and let it dry out in the bread bin. I use them occasionally for baking, but mostly I toast them to put on pasta, or use them on top of a gratin or pasta bake. But the real revelation came from Ruth Reichl’s website. She suggested making and freezing toasted breadcrumbs, and even giving them as a gift. Pre-toasting them means they can be put right onto the pasta, and speeds up the creation of a crisp topping on a baked dish. And there are times when it’s good to have yet another shortcut.

Stock

I became a stock convert with Nigella’s How To Eat, and haven’t looked back. It does sound like the sort of thing only absurd housewives do, and I don’t often admit to it in public. But I like doing it. There are endless recipes and tutorial on proper stock, and it will be better if you do it really carefully, but a simple method will still be good. I generally freeze chicken bones from roast chicken as they appear. When I have two or three in the freezer, I put them in a pot, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Barely simmer for 2 hours then add roughly chopped carrots, celery, onions and/or leeks, bay leaves and some peppercorns. Cook another hour, then strain. Chill overnight in its bucket, remove the fat from the top, and then boil hard to reduce it a bit. Freeze in small containers.

You can use the stock for risotto, soup, to moisten curries and sauces, and importantly for gravy. And if all else fails, when your heating breaks down, nothing heats the kitchen quite like a big pot of stock on the stove.

Tomato sauce

Tomato sauce is incredibly useful. A really good tomato sauce is the best thing to have with pasta. You can also use it for baked beans and grains, curries and chilli. It shortcuts that long simmering period you need to get the sweetness out of tinned tomatoes and onions. The easiest and best version is Marcella Hazan’s (and others agree). It needs only tinned tomatoes, an onion, butter and salt. I also use some passata, and you can add herbs if you want to make it fancy.

Bread

There are three basic bread recipes that I’ve been making semi-regularly. All are minimal effort recipes. I generally slice and eat whatever we want immediately, and then slice and freeze the rest.

The first is the original no-knead bread recipe from Jim Leahey in the New York Times. Although this is low effort, it is a long project, needing about 24 hours start to finish, so I more often make:

A Michael Ruhlman-style 5:3 ratio recipe: 400g flour, 240g water, dried yeast, a tablespoon or so of oil and a teaspoon of salt. This makes a smallish loaf that can be made either in a loaf tin, or freeform on a baking sheet. It can also be baked in a pot like the no-knead bread. After reading Azelia’s incredibly helpful post on how she makes bread, I often don’t knead this at all,

Finally, if I want bread in short-order, such as for Saturday lunch when I’m starting from not-very-early on a Saturday morning, I make soda bread. I like Deb’s soda bread, which is a little sweet with raisins, and so a nice thing to have with cheese or with butter and tea. I also like Lorraine Pascale’s soda bread recipe, which uses wholewheat flour and treacle to make a rich-tasting loaf that is particularly good with soup.

2010 in review – year of chocolate, tortillas and courgettes

The WordPress fairies reminded me of the New Year by sending a little summary of how this blog fared in 2010. They offered to put it up as a post, but the stats don’t seem to tell the story of the year very well, so I’m going to have a go myself.

Mexico

The year kicked off in Mexico, where we went for a holiday in February while our back garden was being renovated.

It was a great break, and the best food was eaten on the beach, with pelicans diving in front of us. Tortillas for breakfast, lunch and dinner is a seriously underrated diet. When summer and my birthday arrived, I got hold of Thomasina Miers’ Mexican Food Made Simple and had a go at tacos at home. The main problem seems to be finding good tortillas in the UK – although apparently Thomasina is working on that problem too. I also bought masa harina this year, but haven’t found the time to try making my own tortillas yet. A project for 2011 instead.

Eating out

It seems that there has been more eating out this year – maybe having a new job, and a bit more time has helped. I also have access to a huge amount of great lunch food in my new location. Following the mexican theme, I have had many good burritos this year, but Daddy Donkey is still the favourite. Konditor & Cook and Fleet River Bakery are other great lunch spots in EC4.

As far as restaurants go, I particularly enjoyed the vegetarian Vanilla Black, the all-booth, all-day dining at Bob Bob Ricard, traditional hotel dining at Hix at the Albermarle, the pizza bianca at Polpo, gelato from Gelupo and a family dinner at Middlethorpe Hall in Yorkshire.

Chocolate

This has been a very chocolatey year, and I have found a whole new group of fellow twitterers to share this with. I saw demos by Paul A Young, William Curley, Micah Carr-Hill and Angus Thirlwell. All really inspirational and passionate people, who are really excited to be working with this strange material every day. The biggest eye-opener was probably William Curley’s raspberry ganache, made from just raspberry puree and melted chocolate.

I’ve tempered chocolate at home twice, with help from Katie at Matcha Chocolat, and made truffles and caramels. I even entered a brownie competition – and won even more chocolate!

I’m looking forward to trying lots more chocolate baking in 2011 with my stash, and maybe extending the repetoire beyond brownies…

Garden

This year is the first one in which I’ve had a proper garden, rather than narrow borders and pots. I took full advantage by planting a Rocket Garden, with tomatoes, beans, courgettes, chard, spinach, strawberries, lettuces and peas. I’ve learnt a lot about how the plot works, which I’m hoping to put into practice this year. I’ve also learnt that, despite good intentions, I just don’t pick or eat lettuce, so I should stop growing it.

The four courgette plants were very enthusiastic, giving a glut, as they always do (I saw in a seed catalogue today the words ‘heavy cropper’ next to a courgette variety, as if this was a good thing!). It did mean that I was able to make Clotilde’s eponymous Chocolate & Zucchini cake this year, which was really good, and will be coming out again.

Baking

Other baking adventures included making a lot more bread at home than I remember doing in previous years. I think this comes partly from finally adopting a more relaxed attitude to it, and an acceptance that using dried yeast, not massively wet dough and not kneading it is all fine, and even beneficial. For this, I have the wonderful Dan Lepard and also Azelia’s Kitchen to thank.

I also got to grips with macarons, caramels, many muffins as well as marmalade, jam and chutney.

Well, that’s about it for 2010. Further posts to come on my Christmas truffle making exploits, and plans and challenges for 2011. Happy New Year!

Learning (more) about chocolate

I’ve been on an uncharacteristic splurge in the last couple of weeks, and been to two different chocolate evenings. Although I consider myself a keen chocolate consumer, some would even say a chocolate snob, I surprised myself by how much I learnt on these two evenings.

The first was a demonstration session at Divertimenti, given by Paul A Young. I know him only by reputation, and because I got his beautiful book, Adventures with Chocolate, for Christmas. I haven’t even been to his shop, although it’s now on the list. This was a great evening – Paul’s passion for chocolate came through vividly, and was completely infectious. He started with a short run-down of how chocolate is made, and a tasting session that started with roasted nibs, and went through to several types of chocolate. Then he started the recipes, and elaborated on a few topics that he’s really keen on – using herbs with chocolate, and pairing chocolate with unusual ingredients, in this case a white chocolate sauce with sole. He spoke about flavour matching a lot – choosing which chocolate goes with what, whether it will overpower, what else to match with it to balance the flavours. The fish with chocolate was actually really good – not unlike fish with vanilla, if you’ve ever had that combination. Shallots, creme fraiche and aniseed notes from dill and Pernod balanced out the sweetness of the chocolate really well.

Inspired by this evening, I started browsing around seventypercent.com and came across their Chocolate Tasting Workshop. This was at the Scotch Whisky Society (who knew that existed?) and was really a series of tools to equip you for tasting chocolate. We looked at the way chocolate’s flavour changes over time, the many different notes you can distinguish, particular qualities that make chocolate ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – things like over roasting, a coarse texture, lack of length (the persistant chocolate aftertaste in the mouth), or a bad aftertaste. It covered quite a few things I knew, but also some new things. Most of all, it was good to put aside some time just to sit down and contemplate nothing more than the flavour and smell and texture of the chocolate you’re tasting. It might have been good to taste a wider range of chocolates, including some rubbish ones, but I can see how your palate would start to get overwhelmed very quickly.

Here are some things i’ve learnt from these two sessions:

  • I really like fruity chocolate – and I’m most likely to get that hit from Madagascan beans, hence my preferences for Valrhona Manjari and Malagasy Mora Mora.
  • I am pretty tolerant of all sorts of chocolate, equally happy to eat caramelly, biscuity (probably cheap ones) as the dark and bitter sort (although we’re still talking fine chocolate here: Galaxy is scum, and Dairy Milk is fine but gives me an unpleasant sugar-comedown).
  • Chocolate is ground down into very varied granule sizes, and some are much smoother than others. Brands like Amedei feel especially smooth and liquid. Green & Blacks is much coarser.
  • Water ganache is a revelation. I’d read about it before, but never made it, and tasting Paul A Young’s fresh mint ganache, made with just water, mint, sugar and chocolate has totally converted me. I’m now really keen to try this with tea – guinea pigs wanted!
  • The thing I most want to learn about next is tempering. I’ve done it a couple of times at home, but I would really love to be able to do it without having to clear the whole day – to make it something that I can contemplate doing in smaller quantities.

Some useful chocolate links that I’ve been collecting:

  • Seventypercent – a chocolate blog and (very comprehensive) review site for fine chocolate.
  • Paul A Young – lovely man, and great chocolates: the salted butter caramel I tried was indescribable, and has won 2 Gold medals. In Islington and the City.
  • Rococo – chocolate shops in Marylebone and Chelsea and also a chocolate school offering tempering and truffle-making classes.
  • William Curley – shops in Richmond and Belgravia.
  • Melt chocolates – little white boutique shop in Notting Hill and also available in Whole Foods
  • Matcha chocolates – recommended by Shuna aka eggbeater, so must be good 🙂

My chocolate books:

Ugly Baguettes


Ugly Baguettes

Originally uploaded by louise_marston

Aren’t these the ugliest baguettes you’ve ever seen? I think not careful enough punching down, and incomplete shaping are to blame. However, I’m hoping the big ugly bubbles on the surface are a promise of nice big irregular holes in the crumb. I’ll find out when we eat them next weekend (going into the freezer today).

Other things that came out of the Marston kitchen over the long Easter Weekend:
– Brasato (beef pot roast) from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook
– Fairy cakes with orange icing (How to be a Domestic Goddess)
– Banana splits with ice-cream and chocolate sauce (like on the Sainsburys ad)
– Camembert baked in the box
– Roast chicken, potatoes roasted in duck fat, spring cabbage
– Chocolate gingerbread from Nigella’s ‘Feast’
– Italian Spinach and Ham Tart from Jamie at Home (but without the ham… or the spinach..)
– Chocolate Granola from Orangette

A tale of two beef dishes

I was in an English Food mood this weekend, partly due to Sam’s ‘English Food is not a joke’ challenge (and see previous post for more on that). I had bought a couple of packets of braising beef last week, with a vague plan to make some stew over the weekend that would act as an easy ready meal this week when I knew there would be a couple of late nights. In the end, I split the packets up and used them two different ways, both very satisfying and highly English. First on the agenda was pasties – good lunch food for those painting and decorating all weekend. The second packet went into a version of Jamie Oliver’s dark sticky stew, a basic beef stew enriched with Guinness and marmite – highly flavoured comfort food for a Sunday night.

I also made a batch of scones with the heat from the same oven as the pasties. It’s easy to forget how easy scones really are, with their connotations of an elaborate Victorian tea. But it took only 30 minutes from deciding to make them to taking them out of the oven. The finishing touch to a very English weekend (even if we did eat them with Creme Fraiche and jam).


Cornish Pasties
I adapted this from Gary Rhodes’ recipe in ‘New British Classics’, my only significant aberration being to substitute carrots for the traditional swede (which I didn’t have any of). I also substituted some strong white bread flour in the pastry, to help make it a little tougher and more robust. This only partly worked – my pastry was still a bit fragile. I have also specified a smaller sized pasty – Gary suggests only 4 from this mixture, but I found these too large, and therefore tricky to eat in one go.

For the pastry:
200g strong white bread flour
200g plain flour
100g butter
100g lard

450g braising beef (chuck, flank and rump could all be used), cut into 1cm cubes
2 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into 1cm cubes
2 carrots, peeled, halved and sliced
1 medium onion, finely chopped

Make the pastry. This is made as normal shortcrust pastry – make sure you season the flour well. My preferred method is to put the fat and flour into the freezer for 5 to 10 minutes, then use the food processor to cut in the fat, and add cold water to bring the pastry together in the processor. Turn the dough out and knead it lightly to make a stronger pastry, then wrap in cling film and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, cut up the meat and season well with salt and pepper. Prepare all the vegetables, and divide each type into 4 piles.

Once 30 minutes has passed, remove the pastry from the fridge. Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces, and, taking one piece at a time, roll each one out into a circle about the thickness of a pound coin (around 3mm). Arrange 1/8th of the meat and vegetables in layers down the centre of the circle, first the potatoes and carrots, then the meat and finally the onions. Season well with salt and white pepper (if you have it). Brush the edge of the circle with water all the way around, and bring the edges together. Press the edges together and then crimp the top to seal it well. Place on lined baking sheet and repeat with the remaining pieces of pastry dough.

Chill for 20 minutes, then bake at 180C for 1 hour. Allow to cool a little before eating.

A Dark Sticky Stew
Adapted from Jamie Oliver’s Dark Sticky Stew in ‘Jamie’s Kitchen’.

450g braising beef steak
2 tablespoons flour
2 sprigs thyme, finely chopped
2 small onions, chopped
3 large carrots, cut into batons
8 – 10 mushrooms, quartered
1 rib celery, finely chopped
125ml Guinness
500ml chicken stock
1 teaspoon Marmite

Preheat the oven to 170C. Combine the thyme and flour and toss with the beef until it’s coated. Heat some olive oil in a casserole dish, and brown the beef really well in two batches. Remove the beef and put to one side. Soften and brown the vegetables in the same pan. Then add the Guinness, reduce and add the chicken stock, Marmite and add the beef back in. Cover with a lid and put into the oven for 1 hour, or until the beef is tender. Serve with boiled potatoes (or even better, mash) and some cabbage or broccoli.

Periodic Table of Desserts

Via Bob del Grosso at Michael Ruhlman’s blog comes this gem:

Periodic Table of Desserts

“You’ve seen those charts that say, like, “Periodic Table of the Vegetables” or “Periodic Table of the Sausages”?
They annoy me. Because they’re not periodic. They have no vertical or horizontal correspondences. The actual periodic table of chemical elements has structure — that’s why it’s cool.

As Bob’s post says, this is very cool – the exact poster that inspired this effort hangs in Tante Marie’s cooking school, above the Pastry table in the back, and looking at it used to annoy me too! The thing is, cooking is about science and structure, so why take an important diagram like the Periodic Table and put some unstructured information into it!
I think this is brilliant – I may even order the poster…

New house

We have just moved house to a new place in Chiswick near the river, and I’m really looking forward to exploring all the new foodie attractions down here, including:

FishWorks – near Turnham Green tube
This chain of fish restaurants with fresh fish counters is very popular, but I’ve yet to make use of one. Fish is a real cooking blind spot for me – I’m so seldom inspired to do something more interesting than fry or bake it – so I’m going to try and branch out a bit.

The Old Ship – on the river
A nice pub that was hired for work’s summer drinks a few weeks ago. Great river views, and they do decent food too.

Duke’s Meadows’ Farmers’ Market (do you think I got all the apostrophes right there?!)
Duke’s Meadows is a great piece of common land, with playing fields, allotments and gardens. There is a small farmers market on Sundays – I went last weekend, but right at the end, and much of the produce was gone. Will try and get up earlier next time 🙂

Midsummer House on a summer evening

For my birthday last week, my rather lovely husband booked us a meal at Midsummer House in Cambridge, with a mutual friend of ours who was visiting from the States. Despite a 3 year stint in the town on the banks of the Cam, I had never been there, but I had heard good things, so I was excited to see what it was like. It should also be noted that there is a considerable dearth of restaurants above the cheap student level in Cambridge.

We arrived a touch late for our table, but the staff displayed not a hint of irritation. The dining space is a small conservatory area and one room in the house, but the tables are well spaced out, the restaurant focusing on quality in small quantities.

There was a tasting menu, but we ordered from the a la carte menu, which was equally interesting. I ordered a fennel gazpacho, on the recommendation of the waiter, followed by turbot. Before our starters, we were treated to 2 amuses bouche (or amuses bouches??). The first was a pink grapefruit and champagne foam, presented from a siphon – like a soda siphon, but round – at the table. It was sharp, dry, and very refreshing.

The second amuse reminded me a lot of a dish that we had at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Las Vegas last year (oh, the jet set lifestyle!). It was a little glass jar, with a green pea foam, in which were lurking little tiger prawns, cubes of seaweed jelly, and peas. The foam was good and savoury, and really brought out the sweetness of the prawns.

The fennel gazpacho was poured into an elabourate plate of bits and pieces, including some sort of caramel used to make a little tube, which was filled with a yoghurt mousse and topped with little chips of freeze dried yoghurt. There was also delicate pieces of fennel and cucumber in there, and a quennelle of yoghurt sorbet. The flavours went beautifully together – all cool and delicate. And a chilled soup was the perfect thing for a hot, sticky evening.

The mains then came. My turbot came with a peanut and pistachio crust, a smear of squash puree, crisply wrapped asparagus, little broad beans, and a squirt of essence of vanilla added at the table. At first I thought the peanut and pistachio overpowered the fish, but taken with the sweet puree and vanilla essence, it helped to balance out the sweetness with the salty peanuts, and the fish was strong enough to stand up to it.

Although we were pretty well filled at this point, we weren’t strong enough to resist the dessert menu – especially when the chocolate fondant came with a particular recommendation. I ordered this, but before it came, we had another amuse. This was a strawberry with a little diced strawberry and cubes of strawberry jelly (they were very keen on little cubes of jelly). It looked like a standard cheesecake in a little mould, but at the table the moulds were removed to reveal a barely-held together cheesecake foam, on top of biscuit crumbs. It was like a cross between a cheesecake and a cloud – one of the better uses of a foam I have come across.

After a suitable pause to digest (which I was very grateful for) the chocolate plate arrived. As well as a really good, properly liquid-centred chocolate fondant, there was also a scoop of walnut ice-cream, a dark chocolate sauce with cubes of amaretto jelly and a long chocolate wafer with cacao nibs in it. It was a stunning plate of food, but the fondant was so rich that I barely tackled half of it. A smaller fondant would have allowed a better balance, but then it would probably be too difficult to get the baked outside with the liquid centre.

All in all, it was an excellent meal, only enhanced by the opportunity to catch up with a friend.
And as a postscript, I would like to wish Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini a Joyeux Anniversaire! as it’s her birthday today.

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Sport Relief

If you’re in the UK, you can’t have missed the Sport Relief publicity in the last few weeks. Being somewhat off the wagon, fitness-wise, we nevertheless decided that we could probably manage to run/walk/wheeze for a mile, so have signed up for the the Sport Relief Mile on July 15th.

Sport Relief is part of the long-running charity Comic Relief and aims to help people in the poorest countries in the world as well as vulnerable people in the UK.

For this gargantuan effort of making it to the end of a 1609 metre course, we are asking for sponsorship. Please visit my sponsorship page to donate. Alternatively, you could provide helpful suggestions for costumes or other themes in the comments – no promises though!

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Turkish Delights

bazaar

Stall at Spice Bazaar
Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

I have just come back from a long weekend in Istanbul. Everyone told me before we went that it was an incredible city, and I wasn’t disappointed. We heard the muezzins calling people to prayer at lunchtime while overlooking the Suleyman Mosque. We cruised along the Bosphorus and had a special performance from one of Turkey’s foremost belly dancers (apparently – I mean, how would we know?!). We watched the red moon rise over the city from a restaurant in the hills. We saw the inside of the Haghia Sophia, a sight so awe-inspiring that it caused both a Roman Emperor (Justinian) and an Ottoman Sultan to prostrate themselves and thank their respective Gods the first time they saw it.

I also (inevitably) visited the Spice Bazaar in the Old Town, where Istanbullus still come to buy their supplies for the week. I looked around at the spice stalls, shops selling fresh feta and other cheeses, stalls with Turkish Delight, ropes made of dates, baklava and all types of nuts and dried fruit. I settled for buying some spices and pomegranate molasses from a kind looking man in one of the hidden-away spice stalls. He was quite bemused that I would want the molasses – not something he sees many Europeans buying, I suspect. I also bought some Turkish coffee from Mehmet Effendi’s stall – freshly roast and ground that morning. It smelled too good not to.

Sumac
This is a dark red berry that is coarsely ground and used in Turkish cooking. It has a sour, lemony taste and is often sprinkled on meat (such as kebabs) or fish just before serving.

Pomegranate Molasses
This is a dark, syrupy liquid made by boiling down the juice from the sour pomegranate (rather than the sweet pomegranate whcih is usually used for juice). It is sour, as you might expect, but also has a slight sweetness which makes for a very interesting flavour.

I used my brand-new pomegranate molasses to make one of Claudia Roden’s recipes (which also appears in her new book, Arabesque), Muhammara, a walnut and pomegranate paste.

muhammara

Muhammara
Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

Muhammara
100g walnut pieces
2 small slices of white bread, stale
1 tbsp pomegranate molasses
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp chilli flake
3 tbsp olive oil
4 tbsp water

Soak the bread briefly in water and then squeeze it out. Grind the walnuts in the food processor, then add the rest of the ingredients and puree, adding a little more water if it’s too stiff.

This was much tastier than I had anticipated – bitter from the walnuts and pomegranate but with a little sweetness from the molasses. Next time I would add a little more chilli (Claudia also suggests stirring in some harissa), and maybe toasting the walnuts and cumin to bring out their flavours more.

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