Sardine and Tomato Risotto

We haven't had any fish for a while, and I was trying to prove some point to the boyfriend (honestly, we have so may fights every day I can't keep really keep track of everything) so I made Nigella's poached salmon again a few days ago. Last time I made it I had to throw the poaching liquid away because it was so oniony, but this time I used quite mild white onions - the fish didn't suffer and I recovered just over a pint of tasty tasty stock.
After all the bad things I said about Sophie Grigson I still find myself crawling back to this fish book, all the recipes I've tried so far work. Another thing I like is the very practical step of providing substitutes for different kinds of fish. Fish, after all, is a seasonal thing and so much depends on where you live or what DEFRA's got to say about it. So for example, this recipe is listed in the book as anchovy and tomato risotto, but anchovies are now on the endangered species list (according to the Marine Conservation Society) so even though I love them I'm trying not to eat them. The alternative listed in the book is sardines, and the other substitutions I'm making are tinned tomatoes for fresh, parsley parsley parsley for all the herbs listed in the recipe and fish stock for chicken stock (why chicken stock with sardines in the first place?).
Oh and clock the fancy vialone nano rice, at £5 a kilo it's the most expensive ingredient I'm using (and that's including the wine, ahem) and I'm lucky I saw some today in a deli near work otherwise I'd probably be using basmati rice... or alphabetti spaghetti or something!
Anyway, you just mill around the kitchen for half an hour or so, stirring and adding liquid. The sardines melt into the sauce and you add the tomatoes just before the end. Ta-da!
Result:
This is plate-lickingly good. There's no cheese in it, so you don't get that sightly rancid melted grease aftertaste. It's mildly salty, very savoury and the best bit is that there's lots of it!

Seasoning a molcajete

A friend of mine got a Kitchenaid mixer for her birthday or whatever a while ago and I got very jelly. It was so big and beautiful and all the TV chefs use one, and it does so much! I've seen attachments you can get for it, to turn it into a meat grinder, a juicer or even a pasta extruder! A fucking ice cream maker!!!! So cool, I couldn't sleep for a week. Anyway, I finally brought myself round to the fact that I can't afford one, and even if I got one I would never use it often enough to stop feeling guilty about the price. So the low tech options for me age going to be the whisk, the mouli, and some kind of grinder.
I've never been able to use a proper mortar and pestle, there's no grip and everything flies out of the bowl and rolls around on the floor like an asshole. I saw some buzz around Thai granite mortar and pestles which has a slightly rougher texture than say, marble, and is meant to be a little easier to use (interesting thing about it here). But for the longest time I've had my eve on a Mexican molcajete. It's a wide shallow bowl on little legs made out of volcanic rock and is essential for making guacamole and salsas. You have to have real volcanic rock, apparently some cheap ones are made with a mix of cement which chips off and gets in to your food (here is a shop that sells the good stuff in London). And really the lava rock chips and gets in your food as well, which is why you have to prepare, or season it before using.
Step 1 is to soak it overnight, this gets rid of the surface grit
Step 2 is to get a handful of rice and grind it into a fine powder. It will start off looking like this, and four fricking hours and bright red and throbbing hand later it will look like this.
Gray powder that's a mix of rice and ground stone. This step will have smoothed the surface down a little and will have ground away the looser particles.
Step 3 is to grind some aromatics - I'm doing peppercorns, garlic cloves, cumin seeds and olive oil, and then you leave the mixture to sit for a few hours or overnight. The point is for the oil to penetrate into the remaining pores and seal them to create a smooth surface but with a coarse texture - does that make sense?
These babies last forever and get passed long from mother to daughter and the flavours of everything you grind in it are imparted into the stone so each successive salsa will be tastier than the last - but it pretty much obligates you to only grind similar things. We'll see when I finally decide to make a pile load of guacamole.

Bitch ripped me off!

No, not really. Even I am not that vain and deluded. But dig this clip from a recent episode if Nigella Lawson's new show where she mentions the black supper scene from A Rebours and then makes a squid ink risotto!

Poulet aux olives

So I got way too much food for the my birthday party (oh and booze too, by the way. But I'm not complaining about that, don't change the subject), so now I have a big ass bowl of leftover olives. My first obvious thought was eeew gross, how many people have had their ratty mits in that bowl? But I found a recipe that suggests blanching the olives to get rid of some of the salt, but will also take care of all the toxoplasma and plague or whatever.
You see, now that I have to spend all my money on stupid things like rent and the electric bill I really can't brig myself to throw food away. Maybe that's how I picked up last week's stomach bug...
Anyway, I picked up this book a couple of years ago, it's kind of a collection of family recipes from Casablanca, North Africa was colonized by France so this is fusion cuisine here. The book is replete with romantic tales of going to the market to buy a live chicken, I mean seriously, believe it or not, they didn't have supermarkets! OK here we go.
You brown the chicken pieces, then stew for an hour or something like that with most of the other ingredients and then shove in the blanched olives 20 minutes before the end and wah-lah!
Result: Aline Benayoun writes that this is the chicken dish she always loved best growing up, and that's exactly what it tastes like - a stew that someone's mother used to make for them when they were little, and they really liked it, and the memory was formed. This is quite an inelegant pan full of random ingredients, every mouthful should have a bite of meaty chicken, a still salty olive and a bland potato to help everything blend in your mouth. It's nice. Smoky from the paprika, savory and sweet, but could do with some lemon. Also, two potatoes is just not enough. Meh.

Birthday loot

So I had a little party a couple of weekends ago, and it's taken me this long to recover - factor in a nasty stomach bug, decorators and the boyfriend's mum moving in for a week. Or maybe I'm making that up.
My friends have all been so generous, and of course they all know me so well that I got a buttload of kitchen stuff. Check it out
A couple of mugs (Mr Happy to counteract Mr Grumpy hahahahahahahahaha)
A really interesting cookbook full of quotes from Zola - more on that later
A set of cute mini quiche tins and a fricking blowtorch! I've wanted one for a while but never had a good enough excuse to get it for myself, but I now see a lot of individual lemon meringue pies in my future.
Funny ceramic pie bird - good excuse to get a nice deep pie dish
A cast iron tortilla pan and a molcajete, both of which need to be seasoned.
Also, a cookbook I borrowed from a girl at work so many times it wasn't even subtle that I wanted it. Bad.
A pretty wooden bowl. When we first moved in to the place and I was looking for nice salad bowl, I saw lots of nice wood ones I wanted and I couldn't afford any of them. This is very welcome (but apparently not welcome enough to photograph)
And a mouli grinder from the boyfriend's brother and his girl. They can't have known that we don't have a blender yet, but I really wanted one of these instead and I don't know if you noticed, but I always seem to get what I want.
And lets not forget the normal human sized fridge that my dad got to replace the tiny loser student one we had.
Thank you so much!
All in all, great birthday xoxo