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

Crocked Tortillas with Chicken and Beans

I'm ill so I have time for all kinds of crap at the moment. Just for fun (FOR FUN!!) I decided to compare some of my charity cookbooks. What's the name for a really boring fetish? That's what I have for charity cookbooks. They're like a preserved moment in time, sometimes a badly thought out moment, and you can usually find them in a charity shop. I've bought brand new full price ones in the past (like East Eats) but you don't really see them very often.
They almost always recruit the same hoard of high profilers to pad these out. If I wanted to I could make a three course meal out of the Tony Blair recipes. I have a lot of spare time at the moment so I'm imagining some intern opening up the post at 10 Downing Street and receiving hundreds of requests for recipes, and then what? passing these on to the chef? The press secretary? Making something up themselves?

Today's recipe is from Help for Heroes, which invites each contributor to introduce their own personal hero. This is what sets this book apart from others and makes it an entertaining read. One poor chap's hero is Jonny Wilkinson, his recipe for a hearty pasta is dedicated to him. A few pages later, just like the Missed Connections section of Craigslist, there's Jonny himself with a recipe for chicken salad, saying he doesn't eat carbs.
Dave Grohl is someone's hero. Probably because he's so brave? This is nestled between Ghandi and Martin Luther King, so seems legit.

This chicken and (baked) bean thing tastes exactly how you would expect. It's the kind of ridiculous food you get a craving for when you're sick and the opposite of what you should really be eating, also, you probably have the ingredients for this in your house already.

Congolese Chilli Peanut Chicken

Oh dear, moving house, settling in at work, couple of holidays, all that stuff.
I'm back in the saddle though, for the last couple of months I've been reading a lot of exciting recipes and definitely realised how calming and enjoyable cooking is for me. Yes, it looks like I'm stressed out when I'm chasing the boyfriend out of the kitchen with a knife, or setting my hand on fire, but no, it's very calming.

The area around my new office is very picturesque, posho yummy mummy territory and has an insane concentration of charity shops. Last week I had some kind of crisis and ended up buying six cookbook for about £20, a very good deal I think, all almost new and one with an RRP of £45. More about that later, the one I'm really excited about is this
About a year ago I got into some kind of a charity cookbook frenzy and decided that I really wanted this title. Lets face reality, nobody is going to learn how to cook by reading cookbooks. You probably Google a recipe or your mum teaches you how or you force yourself to learn by trial and error somehow. Cookbooks are fun with pretty pictures, and in the case of charity cookbooks you get 'celebrities' throwing their pearls of wisdom before us swine. I'm planning on making a couple of things from this book, but lets start with something easy.

When I was younger I used to watch a lot of Changing Rooms, it was so retarded but I didn't know any better. Basically a pair of neighbours or friends or whatever would pick a room in their house and allow a 'designer' to redecorate it overnight. The priority was always on doing some kind of weird paint effect on the walls and ruining the room as irreversibly as possible. The homeowners would be asked if there as one feature they would like to keep in the original room, and that was always the first thing that was ripped out or painted.
Anyway, one of the designers was Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.
I thought for sure he was gay, the Little Lord Fountleroy outfits were only the first clue. I'm not prejudiced, this was just something so absolutely apparent from his appearance and mannerisms that it never even occured to me that there was a possibility he wasn't.
And then I saw his wife on TV, a chubby, sexy blond. I'm telling you, this rocked my world. I had a very sheltered childhood.
And this is her recipe, based on the food that she used to have when she lived in Congo as a child. It's very simple, onions, chillies, chicken, tomatoes and peanut butter. The peanut butter, of which there are two jars, is not in the ingredients list. A simple mistake to make, but very annoying. And two jars? I used one jar only and this is the result
A pot of bubbling molten lava, with a thick sheen of melted peanut oil on top. The taste is ok, but not amazeballs, and I can think of a better way of getting 1200 calories into my system.

Cooking with Coolio: Finger-lickin', Rib-stickin',Fall-off-the-bone-and-into-your-mouth Chicken

Yes, this is my new book and I don't feel the need to explain my decision.
But I will say this - you know when you get really drunk and wake up the next day covered in bruises, or next to some random dude, or to find that your facebook status says something like KJJJ/R#'23-8923JM9HSDJK. Well I bought this cook book, so lets just get past it.
At the risk of sounding redundant, Coolio is so cool. I had no idea that he had his own catering company or book until I saw him on Market Kitchen a few weeks ago, the book is uber-rad - when Coolio is not referring to himself in the third person he's cooking dishes that makes women's underwear disappear and tastes better than your mother's nipples (I swear to God you guys, srsly!!!).
Now, tell me, what common dish these random ingredients all feature in?
I couldn't find any chicken wings in the supermarket so had to get thighs instead, chopped up a couple of peppers, garlic and an onion, and started weighing out the wet ingredients. I've never bought cream of chicken soup before and in the can it looked like this
-like fricking custard! And you know what? IT TASTED LIKE CUSTARD TOO!!!!
Anyway, you mix all that stuff up and shove it in the oven for a while.
Result: The sauce was way too water, it didn't thicken up at all, if anything it got more and more diluted which I think happened because thighs have more fat than wings would have done. Oh, and it makes your whole house reek of vinegar.
The taste is very nice, but more so the next day when you can smear a piece of toast with the jellyfied sauce and make yourself a chicken sandwich.
Just in case you were wondering, I checked, and my panties did not dissolve from eating this. I asked the boyfriend if it tasted better than nipples and he said no. So there you go, as comprehensive as you can get. Here's Coolio cooking the dish and messing about with some fat kid.

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.

Shawarma dajaj, Muhammar, Shakshoukeh

Well I'm back, I don't want to gross anyone out, but I was pretty sick. Nasty! I spend New Year's Night playing cards with the boyfriend and watching whatever fireworks we could see out of the window. I heard that the way you greet the new year is the way you're going to spend it... so I'm in for some fun, I guess!!!!!!
Anyway, back in the present, I'm using Maria Khalife's Middle Eastern Cookbook again. I'm not sure what the extraordinary appeal of this book is that has me running back to it, but I suppose it just seems very exotic. So first off is shawarma - the slightly dodgy meat you buy in small tiny pieces from the kebab shop after getting crazy drunk on a school night! I always assumed that this was a Turkish dish. but this recipe is from Lebanon. Funny enough the serving suggestion in the book is to plate this up with pitta, salad, garlic dip and french fries (and maybe crank up the old Billy Idol CD?) I don't have any of those things so I'm making a couple of side dishes, to you know, go on the side.
You're meant to marinade this stuff overnight, but I think we all know that that stuff doesn't mean anything, right? Who's with me? I gave it an hour and in the mean time started in on the Muhammar which is from Bahrain and translates as Golden Rice - not as sexy as it sounds, perverts ;). It's the perfect opportunity for me to use up some of the funny ingredients that have been cluttering my cupboards, saffron, which I don't like, rose water, which tastes like soap, and cardamom which I just have way too much of. Interestingly there is also almost a cup of sugar in this, don't believe me? How about if I also told you that instead of just adding sugar to the rice, you're meant to melt the sugar until it turns golden brown (texture like sun) then pour in the water and cook the rice in that!
While the chicken is marinading, the oven is heating up and the rice parboils in caramel water, I start making the Shakshoukeh which cooks very quickly but is meant to be served cold. Despite the fancy unpronounceable name, this is just bell peppers julienned and fried with garlic, chilli (I used Birdseye, and you couldn't even taste it!) tomatoes and coriander seeds. I also threw a tin of chickpeas in. For some reason this simple assembly is attributed to Jordan.
Result: Well feast your eyes, this lot made my kitchen smell really nice :)
The Shawarma took about 40 minutes longer in the oven than the book claimed if would. This might also be the reason why it was pretty dry by the time it came out. My excuse for overcooking it was the totally unrealistic and bizarrely brown shawarma pictured in the book. For most part, mine stayed a uniform anaemic pale, and neither looked anything like the richly basted, moist stuff you get in the kebab shop. The only dominant flavour was the onion - there was enough of it! You almost couldn't taste any of the stuff I was expecting to make the meat lovely fragrant and delicious, the garlic, oregano, allspice, clove, nutmeg and sumac. If I ever make this again I'll definitely be a lot more heavyhanded with that crap.
The Muhammar didn't come out as yellow as in the book either, I must have not used enough saffron, oopsie! Still, I was expecting a stong sugar hit, (Pow! Right in the kisser!) but while this was definitely treading the line between pudding and side dish, the taste was amazing. Rich but mild enough to be a good base for the chicken, besides sweetness of the sugar you get a slight dustyness from the saffron but the cardamom and rose are just aromas. And I loved the method of parboiling the rice and then steaming it in the frying pan, I've never had such fluffy results!
The Shakshoukeh was alright, pretty good. Who cares?

Pollo en Pepitoria

This book is called Tapas, but it's full of recipes that I wouldn't expect to be a tapa, so I'm really getting an education here. The authors are London restaurateurs who are childhood friends from Spain. I've never heard of their place, but apparently it's always full of celebrities - la di da.
They don't specify which beer to use so my decision was influenced by what was on sale at Asda, so Kronenberg. I'm not really particularly descerning in regard to beer, I don't want to listen to a bunch of junk about the brewing method. Nobody really 'likes' the taste of beer, you drink it to get gradually drunk and be sociable - as opposed to gin, which you drink on your own to drown your misery. Mother's ruin!
Anyway, personal asides aside, you start preparing this dish by coating the bottom of the pan with an inch of oil. Someone once told me that they find Spanish food too greasy, and it is, it really really is. Well, to be honest, I've made four different things today and I'm kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of florid witticism to bark at nobody in particular.
So you fry a bit of this, and a bit of that, but one at a time in a creepy OCD way, of course, then you put all the chicken back in and pour in enough lager to cover. The recipe calls for 2 cans but I had to use a little more, much to the dismay of the vultures cirling around looking to pick up the scraps leftover from the sixpack. Animals... birds?

Result: Maybe it's my body trying to tell me to stay in my retarded childish frame of mind, but this is too beery, I don't like it. This is really a dish for grown-ups, it's like the punishment you have to endure to get to the dessert. There is a depth of flavour beyond the bitterness, but it tastes a lot better when you mix it with the other things on your plate. Dad suggeted that I use a sweeter beer next time, what's the story with all these tips? And in case anybody was about to volunteer, I don't want to know anything about the offside rule either. It's not that it was bad, it just tasted bad.
But look what we had for afters!

Ginger Chicken

I'm back in business, baby!
Today, that business is using up whatever in the fridge is about to go off which was chicken and steak. I couldn't find any recipes for steak that didn't necessitate a trip to the shops, and doing this blog has made me so perverted that I don't really want to cook anything that doesn't require the use of a recipe. So just like, you know, frying the steaks to make - steak - for dinner was out.

So taking all of that into consideration I decided on the rather simple looking Ginger Chicken from Keith Floyd's book of Great Curries. Great!
As I have written earlier in the Biryani post, I don't really trust Westerners trying it with asian food, but Floyd gets special dispensation because he's so cool! To be honest, alsmost none of the stuff he made on his shows looks that tasty, but I still want to try all of it. As far as I can tell the idea of his programs was to make international food accessible to English people. I remember one bit where he cooked something in France and the woman he gave it to to taste told him, in French, that it was kind of OK, but not that great. I think that's the point, you make it for yourself and everybody else can go jump in a lake!

OK look at the picture and see if you can tell where my downfall is going to come from. The recipe calls for the juice of 2 lemons or 2 limes. I figured that since the citruses we had were soooooooooooo small that I should use both the lemons and limes. Ha.
The method is pretty simple, you fry the chicken, then season it, and then simmer in the liquid. Hey, how is the flavour supposed to get in to the chicken meat? Shut up, that's how.

Perhaps another way in which my misguided self assurance sealed the doom of this dish is that I didn't use the entire bunch of spring onions. Come on, look at the size of that thing! We got it in the Turkish supermarket up the road and it's pretty big, yeah?

I also made Raita, but you don't hear me bragging about it. Check out the recipe below, though, I wouldn't have been able to do without it!

Result: 'Yeah, you can definitely taste the ginger' generously offered my stepmother. Everybody else was a bit more honest about the meal. Ahem.
All you could taste in the sauce was the lemon :( having said that I'm not sure if you would be able to taste anything significant in the absence of the lemon. The raw spring onion was supposed to provide the heat - um, maybe I didn't put enough in, or maybe it just tastes like onion. Or maybe I'm in the Twilight zone, up is down, left is right and this recipe is really authentic and delicious. Lets just say if I fed this to an Indian he would die of shock.
Raita was good.

I kind of have a cold today, so just leave me alone

Chicken a la Marengo

There is an absolute glut of Italian cook books out and about, ooh a bit of tomato,mozzarella and pasta and you have a light and nutritious lunch! Yum yum! Yeah and it's all along the same lines, which is when I saw " Not only spaghetti!" in a charity shop my first thought was 'No shit!'

It was written by 'a family cook in Italy' in 1980 so you know there's probably a Mafiosi connection! Exciting stuff.

The recipe is for a dish that was allegedly a favorite of Napoleon, he first 'visited' Italy a few days after his wedding to old Josephine, but you know, on his own.

I'm cooking at the boyfriend's this time as a kind of a romantic gesture. I explained to him that my old mate Bonaparte had pretty plain tastes and this isn’t going to be necessarily conducive to any particular amorous pursuits - more like a big bit of gristle. He was game and even volunteered to sponsor the purchase of the Madeira that his recipe requires. Supermarket own brand £2 sherry would have been just as good (probably), but now we're stuck with a nice bottle of Duke of Clarence Rich Madeira.

This thing is called Chicken a la Marengo and is truly fit for... an Emperor of the French. Seriously, this requires the use of three separate pans to prepare something that consists of 4 main ingredients. No thank you. I used dried mushrooms because i though they would have more of a concentrated flavour, instead of soaking and frying them I just soaked them and added them to the chicken later. There are no measurements in this recipe, it's probably meant for fairly experienced cooks who know exactly what measurement 'add dry white wine' refers to. I confess, I wasn't 100% sure and thus the resulting chicken bath.

I then took the chicken out to create the sauce (ignore the lumps of flour - all cats look the same in the dark) before combining all the ingredients for a final few minutes.

Result: I love Napoleon. Local boy done good, 'A throne is just a bench covered in velvet' and all that stuff... He famously had pretty basic, peasant tastes and maybe that's the reason this dish looks and tastes a bit like a plate of mud. I'm not sure what the Emperor would have as a side dish in Italy, but I've decided to serve it with Rigatoni. The chicken is pretty much fried chicken with an earthy, warm flavour of mushrooms and Madeira. It's thick because of the flour but still feels really light, I found it delicious. I would make it again maybe to use up the rest of the Madeira, however I would balk at using almost half a bottle of wine for cooking instead of drinking ;)

Saliq Dajaj

Alright? So this is my er... exciting journey into the unknown. I suppose I'm a competent cook, but not particularly adventurous. I stick to a few things I know how to cook, and depend on the staples in the cupboard for the usual tomato sauce/stew/risotto/pastabake kind of dishes. I wonder if I can pick up some new culinary skills by you know, using cookbooks. I can't really bake either, but that's totally not my fault, out oven is 'not really good'. Will I learn? Can an old dog change their spots? Are you calling me a dog?

I suppose people who don't cook very often can follow cookbook instructions to the letter, but I'm always tempted to make substitutions or additions to the ingredients list and have my own special way of timing everything. I'm now mature enough to know that all that stuff is there for a reason, and who the hell do I think I am to try and improve it? Anyway, so here is the first fairly cautious experiment. It's from the Middle Eastern Cookbook by Maria Khalife, I've Googled her and she is now a life coach in Bahrain, so she must know what she's talking about. The dish is Saliq Dajaj from Saudi Arabia. I doubt whether I will ever have the opportunity to visit the region personally, what a shame! But at least this should be a fairly authentic sample of the kinds of delights that await if I finally decide to run off with a genuine Mills & Boon sheik.

This looks pretty simple, everything is cooked in one pot and there are only 10 ingredients (I forgot to buy butter). Because I'm not sure anyone will join me for the forthcoming gastronomic treat I've decided to substitute the chicken for a small poussin and halved all the other ingredients.

Everything goes in the pot and we play the waiting game. It smells quite nice, I guess, but I'm a little worried that I've used too much water and the stock will not have enough flavour, especially since I'm drowning the whole thing in milk later on too. Well whatever happens I will have to take it with me to work for lunch tomorrow, and if it really doesn't taste of anything I can always put buttloads of Tabasco on it...

I tried the stock and it would be fair to call the taste MILD! If I was cooking for someone else at this point I would be tempted to throw a bunch of salt and other condiments in, but that would be cheating and just so arrogant! Lets see how it turns out.

Result: Soupy kind of rice pudding with chicken. Next time I would definitely not halve the spices and add a lot less liquid, but the poussin has a lot of flavour and overall it's not as bland as I thought it would be. Maybe a better word is 'delicate' and I only have reservations because I'm so used to burning the roof of my mouth off with very heavily flavoured food. My bother called it very nice, like Thai Green curry diluted in a pan of water. The boyfriend is a muy caliente Spaniard so this is pretty far from the kind of thing he would choose to eat. It's so frustrating when you have to prick and prod a prude to eat something that looks not even that bad! Anyway, he finished a bowl, and when I went to pack some up for lunch the next morning there was barely a portion left. The rice had soaked more of the liquid up overnight and it was more of a risotto than a soup, the taste was also intensified, I guess that's the benifit of leaving the bits of seed and bark floating around instead of fishing them out at the end of cooking. I also don't get the point of pouring melted butter on top to serve, the dish was already greasy enough thanks to all the schmaltz that came out of the poussin during cooking. So yeah, the punchline is that I would make this again, it's super easy and now that I have a half a kilo bag of cardamom seeds, should be a pretty cheap midweek meal.

And nobody got sick!