Orange Bread

I've been watching a lot of Great British Bake Off (who hasn't), and while I always assumed that it was a great motivator to get in there and 'experiment' in the kitchen. But honestly kittens, I don't think I have the personality for it. This is why I will always cook from recipes.

I made Orange Bread from Caribbean Cooking which was easy, cheap and tasty. I'm not a fan of very sweet sweets, so the slightly challenging, sophisticated (lets face reality) bitter taste of the orange rind is a winner for me. I actually used lemon rind instead, but that is as far as I'm willing to 'customise' the recipe. After the forth or fifth loaf I got cocky and attemted to swap out the orange juice and rind for strawberry pulp and powder - nasty. I can't eb bothered to type out Lambert Ortiz's recipe, but a ery similar method is here, with pictures.

Also, I'm taking some time off, I need to focus on a couple of other projects which frankly means I've stopped cooking. I might come back once in a while to give a scintillating account of some bloody sandwich I ate for dinner, but don't count on it.

Steamed Chicken Salad with Sesame Dressing

I wrote a somewhat vitriolic version of this post dealing with food intolerances, and the nerve people have, daring to dislike certain ingredients. But honestly, I don't care. What happened was that this weekend I served some food that could have made someone sick, but didn't. That's why there are no pictures, I'm not proud of this.
My stepmother is on quite a strict diet, so I'm always on the lookout for recipes that conform. I came over to their house this Sunday arms laden with dishes I though were safe, but was blindsided by their house guest.
I made sesame dressed chicken salad from Harumi's Japanese Cooking, Uzsca-which are dumplings filled with beef and mushrooms, tomato salad and herb bread from Theodora Fitzgibbon's Making the Most of It.
Harumi uses the microwave as the primary method of cooking almost everything, which I found incredibly annoying because I have issues and can't shake the feeling that that's 'cheating' and also because my microwave was purchased at a car boot sale in 1995 and I'm always expecting it to explode and splatter me with microwaves? Having said that, it's undeniably incredibly efficient - you bone some chicken thighs and cook on a covered bowl (Harumi thinks this should take 4 minutes, but was more like 15 for me) then make a dressing using the chicken juices, tahini and soy sauce. Serve with cucumbers. It's delicious, unfortunately soy was one of the things my parent's friend couldn't have - a fact she chose to disclose at the end of the meal, wtf?

The herb bread is also good, I've made this so many times this week that I actually have a picture of it - see? You mix a decidedly unfrugal amount of milk and butter into the dough, sprinkle with dried rosemary, fennel seeds and dill seeds (delicious), and serve to someone who is secretly freaking lactose intolerant.
Next time I'm just staying in bed.

Vegan cookies

God I'm tired - and lazy - its very difficult in the warm summer months to move beyond some kind of pasta to be eaten from the pot, prostrate on the sofa. A lot of birthdays this month, also I went on some kind of Amazon frenzy and didn't quite leave myself enough for interesting food this month.
My brother's birthday was a bit of a quiet affair - he's observing a religious fast and could only have vegan food. Are vagetables shorthand for quiet? Lets say they are. I made the plov from Veggiestan which I though was super bland (it's really supposed to have lamb in it) but which mysteriously disappeared between the 6 of us. Some stuff from Moro East, I think, shallots in sherry and mushrooms with rosemary, and the most celebratory tomato salad I could muster. Meh. For dessert I made this chocolate cake which is brain numbingly simple to do, but unexepctedly delicious.
I'm actually developing a pretty solid repertoir of vegan desserts, in a way inventive sweets are more difficult to come up with, especially if you don't have any fruit lying around. I have one or two vegan cookbooks and they rely very heavily on delicious things like strawberries or disgusting things like soy cream. I've tried a few egg replacers over the years and they're all pretty grim prospects. I used to have another, terrible, blog for a while and did a taste test with batches of cupcakes and you could absolutely tell that some sinister, synthetic ingredient had been added to the batter - in some cases the cupcake would not cook all the way through, in some cases it would collapse in on itself or crumble away like an old weathered brick and they were all disgusting. There are also some homespun version of egg replacer (flax seeds, mashed banana etc.) but I've always found that fucking around with an existing recipe is not as good as making something that was specifically developed to be egg and dairy free.
A surprising source of thrifty, vegan recipes are WWII cookbooks, I have a few Marguerite Patten compilation books (it's where I got the idea for vegan lemon curd) and the recipes are mostly terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. Snoek.
A book that is kind of languishing at the bottom of my Wishlist is Ratio which aims to take the guesswork out of substituting ingredients, which makes total sense. The thinking is that once you know what proportion of fat to starch to sugar to use, any baked good can be endlessly adapted, the only downside is that it takes the responsibility for a dish's success or failure away from the recipe writer and onto me!
I made WWII carrot cookies using vegan margarine and honey cakes from Cretan Cooking using olive oil. It's interesting that while I've found the Russian brand of Orthodoxy to be focused on denying yourself the little pleasures, and treating the fast as a time of quiet reflection, Greek Orthodox work around limitations and have developed a range of recipes for cakes and pastries that fit the specifications (on another note, apparently octopus is not considered to be an animal and is fare game during fasts!).

Both of these are fine, but you couldn't describe them as moreish or decadent, you can definitely taste some kind of an agenda in the slight blandness and dryness. Maybe the message is that if you want delicious biscuits, don't go on a fast.

Paneer and Vegetable Curry

The boyfriend and I went to a Hindu wedding a couple of months ago and were fed  the best Indian vegetarian food I have ever had. I came away with a craving for Paneer, the firm, non melty Indian cheese, which luckily a lot of supermarkets sell now. The incredible Pakistani restaurant near our house makes their own and it's sublime, I normally love a challenge but I'm a few steps away from that at the moment.

There was a surprising dearth of paneer recipes in my all my curry cookbooks, in fact the only two I found were in Keith Floyd's book of curries. I went for the more substantial Paneer and Vegetable Currry, and should have listened to my misgivings when I realised that the only vegetable called for was peas.

Mummy's very angry and doesn't want to look at you at the moment!
Why must I continually write 'bland as balls' next to all of my recipes?

Roasted Garlic Polenta with Sauteed Tomatoes

I always find it interesting that vegans are portrayed as hemp wearing, salad eating bitches, I've known some pretty hefty vegans, believe me - it's a myth. I've also met some who use veganism as an excuse for picky eating (chips and ketch, beans on toast).
The problem is that it always seems boring and austere, even I'm guilty of it - I was getting brownies for the office once at the local coffee shop and was told that all their brownies were vegan, even though I know better I immediately assumed that this was at the cost of omitting some delicious ingredient.
But vegetables have so much flavour and texture, as long as you don't append the dreaded V word to your dish, it;s entirely possible to enjoy a meal of 'side dishes'.
I'm pretty feeble though, I have to ease myself in, like getting into a hot bath. Here I'm using polenta and tomatoes as a vehicle for the leftover roast beef. I hate heating roast beef because I usually have it quite rare and hate to overcook if for leftovers.

I need to give this book a few more goes before saying something cruel like how boring and thoughtless instead of how safe and approachable it is, but The Joy of Vegan Cookery isn't really killing it so far. It doesn't have any pictures, which isn't very joyful and doesn't help to explain how 125g of polenta is meant to serve 4 people. You sprinkle the polenta, eccentrically, through your fingers into some boiling water and cook while two heads of garlic roast. Then mix half of the garlic into the polenta and the other half into a freaking kilo of tomatoes! and sautee, long enough for the tomatoes to release their juices and turn into a watery mess, but not long enough to cook down and thicken. Serve.

I don't know if you can tell, but I was disappointed. There were two of us, but had I planned to feed 4 people it would have to be with a sad solo tablespoon of polenta swimming is a sea of tomatoes. Flavor wise this would have been ok without the beef, but on the strength of this recipe, I'm not buying it!

Tentacles of Surrealism

So for the last three weeks I've been manically preparing for the Alternative Press Fair, because lets face it, it's only fun to do things when you give yourself an impossible deadline and have to shun all social interaction in order to research, write and illustrate a whole freaking book (booklet).
The fair was pretty cool, I'm not really in the 'scene' so the organizer very kindly put me on a table next to my friend David Greene. I remember when I first started going to zine fairs and felt really out of place with my little comic book, but in this environment I felt comfortable enough to come out of the closet and let everyone know that my sexual preference is cookbooks. Here's my little baby, a book of recipes by or based on the Surrealists.

Someone very interesting came up to talk to me, and something very exciting happened, but I don't want to jinx it by saying anything yet.

One of the recipes in the book is from Carolyn Burke's Biography of Lee Miller, Coca Cola and Marshmallow Ice Cream. I'm totally obsessed with Lee Miller, she's what started me on the idea of doing a whole book of surrealist food.
The ice cream, by the way, is very nice and easier than the usual humiliation that I go thorough with my Fisher-Price-esque ice cream maker. It tastes exactly like coca cola, and if you substitute Coke Zero, sugar free marshmallows and single cream in this recipe, it's practically good for you.
While doing research for the book I discovered that there is already a Lee Miller cookbook in the works written by her son Anthony Penrose and friend Johnny Scott, the PR for this thing is terrible, as far as I can tell it'll be out in 2012, or 2013, or whatever, but I can barely wait!!!

And now to bring this thing full circle, yesterday my dad and brother came round and I made them roast rib of beef from Sunday Lunch, the book Johnny Scott co-wrote with Clarissa Dickson Wright. Gooood, so good.

Busy

I've been insanity busy with a project for the last two weeks, only allowing myself time off to go and watch some Olympic football which in my (wrong) opinion is more interesting than Premiership football.
Here's what I managed to cook before I lost my mind and delegated the kitchen to the bf.

Southern Fried Chicken, from the I Love Elvis Cokbook

Maybe I do love Elvis, but this was gross.

Tuna Empanada from The New Spanish Table via Tipsy Baker

This was better than good, although at the bf's insistence I omitted the raisins. He brought a piece to his Spanish mother and she gave it the ultimate seal of approval, this one is getting copied into my sacred recipe book.

French 75, again via Tipsy Baker

Incredibly delicious and makes cheap Cava seem decadent, a fine way to use up some turpentinesque Gordons gin we had left over from a party, can't wait to try it with a nicer spirit.

I also ordered the Mourad cookbook because Tipsy Baker featured it and I'm curious about the fig leaf ice cream. So curious that I've already identified the neighborhood tree I'll get the leaves from and met the neighbor who's permission I need.
I'm completely obsessed with Tipsy Baker, in case anyone hasn't noticed. Jennifer Reese has the exact same taste I do, if she makes a recipe or recommends a book I'm on it like a car bonnet (really). Her blog made me want to start my own blog - not for notoriety, but to document experiments, broaden horizons and keep track of dishes I like.
I also like the fact that she occasionally submits articles to Slate, comparing things to other things. Love

What to do with an entire salmon

My dad brought be a big fish as a 'just because' present. We're tight like that, yo.
The first thing I did was to cut off and clean the tail to prepare gravadlax. I've done this before and it's a great simple way to preserve something as big as a salmon when there's only you and and fish-picky bf in the house.

The recipe I used came from Everything Raw which a dated book with a liberal interpretation of what raw food is. The only reason I bought is is because it's looked amazeballs in this Flickr set, I love the drab, morose food styling of old Penguin Books, hopefully something that will become more of a trendy thing to do (check out these shots for German food mag Essen und Trinken).

This preparation highlights just how oily and rich salmon is.Very good.

Next, I decided to teach myself a lesson against experimentation with When French Women Cook. It's a sweet memoir which I read on the tube for a week and tried to pretend I was back in Chamonix. I tried a recipe from the Alsace region which called for reducing a glass of wine and onions to a tablespoonful to make the sauce for basically fried salmon. A delicious syrup which would have been nice as salad dressing, rendered the colour of a filthy rag you use to clean a blackboard by the addition of cream. Alsace Rouge, called for in the recipe, is apparently not red but rose wine. White would have been even better. The visual element of the dish was actually a big turn off for me, but the taste was fine. get it into your head that red wine and cream = vomit. I'm not happy, Maurice :(

Finally I made a stock (fume from the Paella book) with the head and bones and used it to make a paella. I really follow a recipe, but referred to 1080 Recipes for the rough proportions of ingredient. Incidentally, 1080 has a recipe for a paella made entirely out of tinned ingredients. I love the idea since it's such an expensive dish to make and it's difficult to concentrate on proper technique and timing when you're worried about preparing vast quantities of expensive, difficult to obtain ingredients correctly. Essentially it's an all in meal and fiddling about with a tin of tuna here or frozen cod steak there is a good way to get confident before you move on to one of the excruciating recipes in the Paella book.

What was that? Throw some shrimp on there too? You got it, pal.

Double Cheeseburger with Pickled Onions

I'm renewing my commitment to put to use all the silly, gimicky cookbooks I pick up a the charity shops by the arm load. ALL the silly cookbooks, which brings us to the I Love Elvis Cookbook.
I'm not sure a cookbook inspired by a man who died eating a sandwich on the toilet is the best tribute, but then I'm not morbid like that. I am morbid enough to notice the lack of a recipe for this disgusting thing.
Here's an Amazon review of this book, in case you're on the fence about getting yourself a copy.

Thrilling.
The best part of this recipe are the pickled onions, which are thin slices of red onion left in sugar and vinegar overnight. These were great and I sprinkled the leftovers in a salad the next day.
The burger itself is two patties of seasoned beef squashed together over a couple of pieces of cheddar to make one fat wad of meat, which you grill and place in (home made) buns. Also, this cooking method invites the hot beef fat to splatter the heating element of your oven, meaning that when you try and bake some cookies the next day they will come out tasting and smelling like meat. That's what is know as a twofer.
A single sad leaf of lettuce and sprig of parsley are the garnishes.
This was ok, but not as delicious as going out for a burger. Personally I like my beef cooked medium rare and in order to do that safely you either have to grind your own meat, which is time consuming and messy, or go to a good burger place, which is fun and enjoyable. What would Elvis do?

Cherry pie

Some family came to visit this Sunday. The boyfriend and I went to an all day extravaganza wedding the day before, so thankfully they were nice enough to come along at 4pm which gave me enough time to lazily roll out of bed at the crack of noon, shop for cheese and charcuterie, bake some bread and make a cherry pie with some of the cherries that haven't been eaten by the snails.
The real reason I like having people round is that it forces you to to clean your house before they show up. You curse yourself for past laziness, ever dumping the entire contents of your bag onto the dining table, leaving piles of laundry lying around the living room and vow never to do those bad things again. If you're really lucky you can get your boyfriend to do this while you leisurely prepare the meal.

I used the same crust recipe for this pie/ tart as I did for the rum and raisin pies last week, and this amazing and simple filling from Ideas in Food. I also made the lemon and olive biscuits from New Portuguese Table again which completely failed to impress me the second time around, but kind of went well with the cheese.
Here's the pie, it's absolutely gorgeous but had a few faults. I still like the dark chocolate taste of the crust but will never make it in a ceramic dish again because no matte how well you grease it, it will stick to the sides like cement and instead of pretty slices you will serve your guests cherry compote with gravelly shards of crust studded in. Metal pie tins only. It also improves from sitting with the filling for a few hours, the combination of flavours is better and because it's so hard to begin with it doesn't get too soggy.
And final lesson, don't buy anymore plates with pictures of faces on them.

Rum and raisin pie

Before I moved in with the boyfriend I never experienced any kind of beyond-the-basic TV. The idea of paying for extra channels was ridiculous to my dad, damn kids spending too much time in front of the box anyway!
Now of course I tape all of my ridiculous shows to have on in the background while I play with my Tumblr machine
Parenthood is one of 'my shows'-so incredibly flat and featureless that you get the sense that all the dialogue was written by one guy talking to himself in the mirror. High drama is story lines featuring vegetarianism *GASP*, black boyfriend *SWOON*, and being punched on a boat *PLOP*. Don't judge!
I was watching the Thanksgiving episode a couple of days ago which featured the perfectionist of the family, Julia, making some pies. I really love Julia, she is the character I can identify most in the show because she brings home the bacon and cooks it in the pan while her husband deals with most of the childcare.
Anyway, so she's making all these pies in random weird/traditional flavors, like pumpkin and potato or whatever and her kid walks into the kitchen and knocks the rum and raisin pie off the counter.
I've never heard of rum and raisin pie before, but it sounded immediately delicious and alcoholic.
Here's what I did
Pie crust is from Brave Tart and is incredible. Her blog is amazeballs enough that I don't mind the fact that she doesn't update very often. Its a very good example of the fact that a food blog should have beautiful and creative photographs, ahem.
The rum and raisin filling is from here (basically a custard with rum and raisins added)
And the Italian Meringue topping is by Monica Galetti

Chocolate pie crust - this makes enough crust for 8 mini tart tins
3.75 ounces sugar
1.25 ounces brown sugar
scrapings from half a vanilla bean
1/2 tsp instant coffee powder
1/4 tsp kosher salt
4.5 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
2 egg yolks
9 ounces all purpose flour, sifted (use white rice flour for gluten free)
1.75 ounces cocoa, sifted
Mixture for rolling
2 ounces cocoa plus 2 ounces powdered sugar, sifted together
With a hand or stand mixer, combine sugars, vanilla bean seeds, coffee powder, salt and butter on medium speed. Mix only until ingredients are thoroughly combined, but by no means light and fluffy. Add in the yolks, one at a time then reduce speed to low. Add in the dry ingredients all at once and mix until homogenous.
If you’re comfortable with dough and a pin, you can roll it right away. Otherwise, form the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate about 15 minutes to make the it easier to handle.
You can refrigerate the dough for up to a week or freeze for several months. Before rolling, set the dough out and let it slowly come to room temperature over a few hours.
Preheat the oven to 350° and prepare a set of 4” tart shells by greasing very lightly with pan spray.
Dust the counter with the prepared cocoa/powdered sugar mixture. Don’t use flour, it will toughen the dough and dull the richness of the chocolate color. Divide the dough in half and roll to 1/4” thickness. Use a knife to portion the rolled out dough into squares just slightly larger than each tart shell.
Set a dough square over the tart shell and use your thumbs to press the dough into the corners of the pan. Press the overhanging dough against the edges of the tart pan to trim off the excess and leave the dough flush with the edges.
Repeat with the remaining dough until all tart shells have been filled, then dock each tart lightly with a fork. The dough is extremely forgiving and can be rerolled two or three times.
Bake for 15-18 minutes. After 7 minutes or so, check on the tarts. Some may have formed an air bubble; use a fork to gently poke a small hole in the bubble to deflate it. Continue baking until the tarts have become firm and dry to the touch.

Rum and raisin filling 
2 cups golden raisins 
1/4 to 1/3 cup dark rum 
1/2 cup sugar  
3 tablespoons cornstarch 
1/4 teaspoon salt 
2 large eggs 
1 1/2 cups milk 
3 1/2 tablespoons butter  
1 teaspoon vanilla extract 
1 1/2 cups frozen fat-free whipped topping, thawed

Soak the raising in the rum for 2 days
Combine the sugar, cornstarch, salt, and eggs in a large bowl, and stir well with a whisk.
Heat milk over medium-high heat in a small, heavy saucepan to 180° or until tiny bubbles form around edge (do not boil). Gradually add hot milk to sugar mixture, stirring constantly with a whisk. Place mixture in pan; cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly (about 10 minutes), stirring constantly. Remove from heat; stir in butter.
Spoon custard into a bowl; place bowl in a large ice-filled bowl for 10 minutes or until custard comes to room temperature, stirring occasionally. Remove bowl from ice. Stir in raisins and vanilla; spoon mixture into prepared crust. Spread whipped topping evenly over filling. Loosely cover and chill 8 hours or until firm.

Italian Meringue topping
2 egg whites (leftover from the crust)
125g caster sugar

Dissolve the sugar in 35ml of water then heat to 121C (use a thermometer).
Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks and in a slow steady stream whisk in the sugar syrup. Continue to whisk until the meringue is cold and smooth.

Pipe the meringue over the pies and colour with a blowtorch or under the grill. And then omnomnomnomnom

What the fuck is this?

Yeah, zoom in. It's a snail that's sick of eating all of our herbs and decided to climb a fucking tree to get to our cherries!
I called my dad infuriated and asked 'Can they do that?', like it's against the rules or something! Pathetic

Focaccia x 2

More bread. I'm very hormonal about cooking, by which I don't mean that I want to cook myself a chocolate cake, but that I swing form wild optimism to crushing self doubt.
I'm currently convinced that baking bread is actually very easy and virtually foolproof, but I know myself well enough to realize that self confidence can and will be taken away randomly and quickly, so I just had to ride the wave!

Here's an example of what I am talking about - on the day we arrived back in London I dropped my bags in the doorway, strolled into the kitchen and mixed a batch of focaccia dough from Supper Club cookbook. I was in a great mood, all sunburn tingly and still slightly drunk from the plane. The recipe is for focaccia shots, so you are meant to divide the dough into little balls, but I didnt do this and instead made a couple of really big balls. Yes to big balls, this is what you get
Not really focaccia, the texture is moist and light but too soft to be what I consider to be focaccia. Having said this, it's delicious - the bottoms, which have been resting on an oiled tray in the oven are crispy and unctious and there is a light, fresh taste of olive oil throughout. Definitely getting copied into my little spiral bound recipe book.

Fast forward to the next day. I stumbled home from work, kicked my handbag under the table and crawled in to the kitchen to make Antonio Carluccio's focaccia from Complete Italian Food. The main difference with this recipe was that the dough was only given one rise. I don't know if that's because nobody bothered to test the recipe or if the resultant 'loaf' is really meant to be a hard, dense cracker, but it totally killed my buzz. No more bread making. Go away and leave me alone.

Back in business - Cretan Bread

I'm back after some time visiting the boyfriend's family in Seville. Seville is too beautiful for words, but also hotter than the surface of the sun, so being welcomed back to London by a wall of rain was very refreshing.
We ate everything, from tripe to caracoles, and everything was delicious and cheap. I definitely need to stop spending 3/4 of my salary on food, so more home made everything.
Perversely getting a breadmaker for Christmas has made me more interested in learning how to make bread from scratch. It's not necessarily more economical to do this, but there's something very calming about kneading bread and waiting for it to rise (and it cleans up the fingernails a treat).

This recipe is from Cretan Cooking, which looks like one of those awful recipe books that you buy on holiday at the airport, but unlike usual tourist fodder there is a lot of useful information here.
Cretan bread uses leven (like a fortified yeast) as a raising agent, but because I'm not organised enough to start something 12 hours before I know I want to do it I used yeast and some of my awesome sourdough starter. The recipe also calls for mastic, which I didn't have, and mahlep seeds which I did. Their presence in my cupboard is a testament to how much of an impulse buyer the bf is. We live in a Greek/ Turkish part of London and on a whim he decided to bring these back to me from a local deli - not knowing what they were. Exciting stuff, every day's a really mild adventure around here...

The recipe doesn't tell you how long to prove the dough for or what temperature to bake it at, which is either annoying and unhelpful or empowering. Whatevs. I think the suggestion is that this recipe is robust enough to  adapt to variations.
Chewy and slightly sweet. Not an every day bread, but amazing as toast for breakfast.

Oishinbo Style Ramen

So I suppose an argument could be made for comic books not being the best source of reliable recipes, but I've built my life on blindly believing virtually everything I read so I doubt I could be convinced.
I trust the research that goes into producing the incredibly detailed dish descriptions in the Oishinbo series, and just thinking about it now is making me hungry.

A couple of days ago I started re reading the series, and it's impossible not to get inspired. Luckily every issue has a recipe or two at the beginning of the book, and for the Ramen and Gyoza volume it was for Osihinbo Style Ramen.
The book follows, in a few separate episodes, the protagonists dissection on the ramen scene in Japan. Ramen is seen as a low class, fast food, and as such has fallen foul of the short cuts and questionable practices that famously plague the food industry in the West. This was quite a surprise to me, I'm sure a lot of people see Japan as some kind of mythical culture where everyone is nice and everything is above the dodgy standards we live with, but apparently not so. The prevalent use of MSG and kansui is criticized, which I found particularly interesting as I thought both of those were typical ingredients in noodle dishes.
Kansui is also known as lye water and is a strong alkaline that is substituted for expensive protein such as eggs in cheap noodle recipes. It gives a distinctive 'tingly' taste to the noodles - here's an interesting post about how to make normal dry pasta taste like ramen by adding baking soda to the water (it works).
Anyway, the point is that I assumed that this was an integral taste and texture element authentic noodle making, but apparently using it is just a short cut, and flavor is developed by aging dough. God love comic books, if you were looking at the pictures right now, instead of my boring synopsis, it would all stick. If only all educational materials were available in comic book format, everyone would know everything! Just imagine!!

Here's the Oishinbo Style Ramen, pork mince fried with onions, garlic, miso and sake, on top of shop bough noodles in dashi. It was... ok, nothing to write about.

4 Hour Potatoes and Pig's Ear

Look at that post title, could be the name of a new cop drama, couldn't it? 4 Hour Potato is the nickname of the tough guy, because he's hard boiled! and Pig's Ear is his sidekick, because he's so ugly. Don't steal my idea.
Over the weekend I decided to tackle these two projects since they both take a long time, but hardly any effort, so I could get on with unpacking some clothes that have seriously been in boxes since we moved into the house a year ago.
I have a fascination with offal and 'variety meats' in general. I love that you can buy tripe and trotters in some supermarkets now - for absolutely different reasons, mind. Tripe is sold in my local Morrisson's which is in a largely Eastern European part of London, and trotters are cool and sexy now so the Sainsbury's near my office in Westminster has started carrying them. But for everything else Chinatown will always be ahead of the curve, none of it will be organic or lovely, but at least it's there.
Loon Fung Supermarket on Gerrard Street has a huge butcher counter with a fierce female butcher peeking out from behind piles of odd joints, hearts, ears and feet. Occasionally you can find something like beef eye of round for a fraction of a supermarket price. There are always live razor clams, and sometimes crabs wriggling around, it's a great place to explore. I always overspend here.
This is what the ear looks like when you get it home, exactly the same colour and texture as my own skin, which is incredibly unsettling. Larousse instructs you to burn off the hair with a blow torch which really tests your resolve because it fills the room with a rancid stink and makes you feel like a murderer disposing of your victim.

You braise the ear slowly in wine and stock and carrots in a covered dish in the oven and after an hour it emerges a completely different color. Instead of an unsettling hue of human skin it is now brown and purple, like the bruises on a cadaver someone left out in the rain.
That's my internal monologue, if I was writing this up for people to read I would describe that shade as 'caramelized' and 'unctuous'. Better?
Anyway, you let the ear cool and then smother in a sauce you had been making all this time and leave for an hour to let the flavors develop, I guess.
The sauce is something else, I love Larousse Gastronomique for including this ridiculous recipe, because I doubt anybody else would invite you to make this with a straight face. The sauce you want is called Villeroi, which is just Allemande sauce diluted with stock and mushrooms (didn't you know that?), you obligingly flip all the pages of the book back from the V section to the A section and discover that the basis of the Allemande is the Veloute. Back to V, and thankfully the beginning of the shrubbery maze, and begin. A Veloute is Bechamel made with stock instead of milk, to make Villeroi you thicken your Veloute with egg yolks and cream and then add more stock and mushroom essence. On it's own this was delicious, rich and creamy. I stopped taking photographs of the pig's ear by then, but if I had to describe it as it sat in the thick, yellow, congealing sauce for the requisite hour... I would choose not to.
After an hour it's finally show time, you take the sliced ear out of the sauce, roll in breadcrumbs and fry.
The end result is spectacular. It's incredibly satisfying to add value to an essentially valueless thing, and even though I will never be able to justify the time commitment to make this again, I'm glad I tried it.
The boyfriend and I had pig's ear at a Szechuan restaurant in King's Cross a few years ago, I loved it, he hated it, we would both describe the dish as spicy, slimy and crunchy, which I think I'm in the minority in thinking of as a delicious description. My pig's ear was meaty and crunchy, which has more of a universal appeal and cost very little to produce.

Accompanying my folly above was the 4 Hour Potato, for which I got the idea from Oishibo, the Manga about food that has frustratingly not been fully translated into English. The particular storyline is about a guy who has to eat a potato, but had a bad experience with potatoes once so can't do it. But if he doesn't do it, he will be a laughing stock, so the main characters set about producing a potato dish he will eat. I'm making is sound stupid, but it's really really good!

The technique they describe involves simmering a peeled potato in dashi and butter for 4 hours, a method that I would have though would result in a mush but instead produces a soft, tender potato floating in a golden soup. It tastes nothing like a potato, the typical earthy flavors are inexplicably replaced with sugar so the whole thing is oddly sweet. In the book this is described as the 'true essence' of the potato, but honestly, I can't recommend this. I like the idea, but if I'm going to be extracting potato sugar it will be to make my own vodka.
And this concludes my report on how I spent my weekend.

Oat Lace Cookies and Rasberry Twists

Ridiculous, but I'm giving The Nordic Bakery a couple of more chances to redeem itself and prevent me from depositing it bitterly at the local charity shop. That would probably be the kind thing to do, because I'm sure it would sell quickly, and when the unfortunate who buys it cracks it open at home they will, I know, be very happy with following one word reviews I have penciled in next to some choice recipes 'pointless', 'stupid' and 'bad'.
The boyfriend, incidentally, is very vocal about how unfair it is to judge a recipe after only one attempt, but since the things I have made from this book so far were all both time consuming and spectacular failures, I have no desire to try again. I was only following directions, after all, and if the recipes are designed to keep you away from the secrets of Nordic baking (which most seem to be) no technique of mine will fix the problem.
So much bitterness for such a small book, maybe I'm having problems at home? You'd think that I would know about it.
I made the Oat Lace Cookies and Raspberry Twists and then later a loaf of bread, which meant keeping the oven on for most of the day, which warmed up my house enough to turn the heating off, which made me feel very frugal and practical.

The oat cookies use an obscene amount of butter, most of which melts away during baking, leaving you with a very delicate and fragile (and in my case a little burnt) disk that crumbles and melts in your mouth and feels light and airy despite being loaded with nuts, chocolate, raising and oats.

The Raspberry Twists use an even more incredible, immense amount of butter, which doesn't melt away during baking, imagine shortbread with veins of jam that have burnt into a tasty, chewy caramel and you've got it.
The recipe instructs you to prepare the dough and chill in fridge for at least an hour, but since my kitchen was so warm by then, the dough began to melt and sag while I was rolling it. That's the reason my cookies have mysterious veins instead of neat spirals of jam. I will make these again, and next time will try the recipe's suggested variation of using marmalade instead of jam, which sounds a little bit more delicious and grown up to me.
My brother and stepmother arrived just as I was taking these out of the oven and I managed to persuade them to take half of them home with them, which is a good thing because I wouldn't feel safe in the house with so many sweets.

The final thing I made, since the oven was already warmed up, was this sour cream bread, which exceeded all my expectations and persuaded me to order the book it came from.
Nordic Bakery lives to fight another day.

Quiche

I wasn't going to post this because it's so boring. I made a quiche - woo hoo, lets have a parade.
I made a quiche to use up a bunch of slimy mushrooms and to take for lunch at work (really economizing here, must have saved myself at least £5).
On the previous two whole times that I've made a quiche I always used shop bought pastry, but since it's basically butter and flour I decided that even I couldn't mess it up. The recipe I used is from I Know How to Cook, which is a book I hate quoting because of the silly title.

Slightly annoying that the recipe doesn't tell you that the longer you handle the pastry the more gluten will develop and the tougher it will be. I barely combined all the ingredients, the resultant pastry is very 'short', by which I mean flaky and crumbly, almost like thin shortbread - and absolutely delicious. This is why I'm posting an ugly photograph and an update about quiche, because it's simply too good. I'll never buy shortcrust pastry again, because while this is definitely a little too full of butter, pastry is never going to be part of any diet food anyway, so you might as well have your unhealthy food be delicious.

Sausage with Sauerkraut, Quick Rolls

I found a new bread recipe to make me forget the nightmares Nordic Bakery's 'rye bread' induced last week.
It's available online so I don't feel guilty about publishing the recipe. Delia, say what you want but she know what she's doing.
I made the roast Sausage with Sauerkraut from Nigella Express to use up the jar and a half of sauerkraut my dad gave me a couple of months ago. He makes amazing sauerkraut and is very generous, but there is only so much of it you can eat 'straight'. You tip the kraut into a baking dish, sprinkle with slivers of onion and juniper berries (I used dill seeds), rest the sausages on top and drown the whole thing with German white wine.
While that was cooking I made ketchup and prepared the dough for the bread rolls.
Here's the thing about ketchup, the reason you should probably never bother making it yourself - everyone likes the ketchup they grew up with, so if your parents always bough Heinz, or Tesco own brand or whatever, you'll prefer the idiosyncrasies of that brand. It's true! Ketchup loyalty runs deep.
I actually didn't grow up eating ketchup, I was always a mayonnaise girl, so I haven't been spoiled forever and can make passable stuff for myself. In fact the boyfriend doesn't like to have it in the house because it makes him go off on one about how much sugar is hidden in EVERYTHING these days.
This is actually how idyllic our relationship is, we have nothing bigger than to argue about than condiments. Sweet, or sad?
Here's how I make ketchup for myself - pour a certain amount of tomato puree into a pan, add however much brown sugar, salt, pepper, malt vinegar and celery seeds as you like and cook on low for 20 minutes.

Here's the incredible roll recipe that takes less than 1 hour to make. I adapted it from this to make 4 small rolls.

225g bread flour
1 tsp salt
145ml hot water from the tap
1 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp fast action yeast
1 tsp butter

Mix the sugar and yeast into the water in a jug. Mix the salt into the flour and rub in the butter, pour in the water and mix into a ball, Knead the dough on a flat surface for about five minutes then shape into four rolls and leave covered in a warm place for 35 minutes. Start heating the oven at 220C.
When the rolls have risen sprinkle with flour and bake on a high shelf for 20-25 minutes.

The rolls are a little denser than hot dog rolls, but they still make amazing hot dogs. Very amazing.

Rye Bread

Remember the difficulty I had with the Nordic Bakery cook book? I happened to be in the neighborhood on Saturday and popped into the cafe. The coffees are nice, the cakes look pristine (I had just had lunch and want hungry) but the book is challenging. Not challenging as in hard, but challenging as in there is nothing extraordinarily tempting about the recipes, probably because I am very aware that they will not live up to my expectations.

Is that harsh? Fair enough, does this look like a loaf of bread? I don't think so.
I followed the Nordic Bakery's recipe for rye bread to the letter. Through the fussy step of fermenting the yeast the night before, using almost a kilo of rye flour and spending almost 5 hours coddling it. The yield is supposed to be three loaves of bread, if I had tampered with the recipe I would have accepted that this thick leathery pancake with a gummy glue filling is my fault, but I resisted temptation. Incidentally why give a recipe for three loaves, why not one? Under what circumstances would you need to bake this in bulk, like maybe if you wanted to open up your own bakery? Is that the lesson of this failure, that I should buy my bread in the future because the I'll never find out the secret of making it?
There is something aggressively hateful about a recipe that fails on such a grand scale. I have a rye bread recipe that works every time, I didn't need to use all my flour up on this.
I just read some reviews of the book and they are all predictably gushing, so maybe I am just an idiot, but even an idiot occasionally manages not to screw up, right? Normally I would get rid of a book I have no further interest in cooking from, but this was a gift I'd specifically asked for so I'll suffer on for a while longer. Until the next disaster.

Potato Pizza, Aubergine and Carrot Salads

I had a potato pizza at Story Deli in Shoreditch once. This isn't it. Story Deli serves their paper thin crusts topped with a few slices of potato, rosemary, pine nuts and dried apricots, it's really incredible. Silver Spoon wants you to cover the generous topping of potato and rosemary with an obscene amount of pancetta and plenty of creamy cheese. It's very nice too, but not life changing. The biggest issue I have with it is that the crust turns into a cracker and is redundant to the whole thing, but I suppose a recipe for just potato slices covered in bacon and cheese wouldn't make it into the Silver Spoon (and if it had I wouldn't be making it) that's how they get you.

Baby aubergines get you too. They're nature's great joke, absolutely beautiful and very tempting when raw, and brown and muddy when cooked. But I can't resist buying them every time I see them. I made the Warm Aubergine Salad from Harumi's Japanese Cooking, which takes less then 10 minutes to make since all the cooking is done in the microwave. The taste is grown up, (that's a euphemism for there's booze in the dressing) smoky, nutty and a little sweet. I doubt that I will make this or the Carrot and Tuna Salad from the previous page again, but I love Harumi. All the recipes in this book are easy and she gives substitutes for hard to find Japanese ingredients. This is something I would have bristled at a year ago - I mean, how inauthentic! But now I appreciate as both of these salads were assembled from ingredients I didn't have to travel all over London to find, I already had them.

I don't know if it's a sign of maturity that I now deign to follow recipes that have less than 10 ingredients. Maybe it's being the main bread winner, or general exhaustion but I just can't face dishes that take a week to plan, layzeeass. I'm doing everything I can to snap out of this funk.