Easter 2012

So let me preface this by saying, too self consciously, that Russian Easter falls later than English Easter so this post is not horribly out of date.
This weekend was spent slaving away in the kitchen to prepare a feast for my brother, dad, his wife and her cousin and wife. Unlike the laughable idea of only giving up chocolate for Lent, the Russian great fast is an exclusion of all animal products. For weeks my family has been lurking around, peering at supermarket shelves with hungry eyes and subsisting on sad little stews and toast with nothing on it, so I wanted to make their return to a balanced diet as decadent as possible.
Or rather as decadent as possible within their every day dietary constraints. My stepmother doesn't eat pork and her cousin's wife is allergic to garlic and onions.
Cooking without onions and garlic is very difficult. Here is what I ended up making:

Borodinsky bread - I've been making this using this recipe for a while and it's never let me down. A delicious malty, rye with coriander. Very difficult to find here, and when you do it's always always stale. My jar of rye starter is about 6 months old now, definitely thinking of writing it into my will.

Olive bread - from Veggiestan. Old friend, so delicious. Should really explore this book further.

French Style bread - from Cookwise. Horrible. I should have listened to Jennifer Reese when she warns (despite her book being called Make the Bread, Buy the Butter) that you will never approximate the standards of a professional bakery and should always buy baguettes. But I had to try and fly too close to the sun! You start with fiddling about with the dough for a nice cozy 7 hours. Coaxing it to rise, adding strange things like ice, vitamin C tablets and lentil flour. It dutifully rises, then there about a page of instructions on how to shape it which I tried very hard to follow, but couldn't (I don't blame Cookwise entirely for this, I can barely tie my own shoelaces). And the baking is really the anticlimax of the whole operation. The crust is almost impenetrably hard, the crumb is an off putting opaque hue and it's extraordinarily bland. As a vehicle for canapes it's ok, but I'm convinced that baguette baking is probably not for me.

Seared Beef with Roast Tomato Salsa - from Marie Claire Food and Drink. This is definitely my favorite party food book. All of the recipes are just on the right side of elaborate and on the whole the food I have made from this book so far has been superb. Incidentally I also made the simple architchoke spread canape from the book, topped with black pudding, and then realized that the marinade for the chokes had garlic in it and black pudding contains onion. It was horrible to realise that I was potentially going to make someone sick though my own ignorance. And not to trivialize it, but I'll take a nut allergy over onions and garlic any day. On the side is bean puree with smoked mackerel.

Aspic - this is a family recipe, you take some veal bones and boil them with aromatics for a couple of hours, then strain, pick off the meat and cover it with the liquid which should set into a thick meaty jelly overnight. You have to use veal because it contains a lot more natural gelatine than say ox tail, but if you can't find any just use a could of sheets of gelatine in the stock. I almost ran into trouble with this as well, after a few hours of cooking the stock still tasted a little thin and watery so I reached for a stock cube and only thought to read the ingredients at the last minute. Seriously onions are in everything!

Olivier salad - Every Russian person makes this, it's a heavy, rich, mayonnaise based salad that is also incidentally served in Spanish restaurants under the name of 'Russian Salad'. You boil some potatoes, carrots and eggs, dice and mix with diced gherkins, tinned peas and cubes or mortadella and cover with mayonnaise. So bad and yet so good. Some people also add apples, but I'm not friends with any of those.

Uzska - with a filling of beef and mushroom

Roast Chicken with Fruit and Nut Stuffing - from Rotis. Boning out a leg joint is exactly the kind of laborious, stressful precision work I like. Stuffed with chicken breast, mushrooms, dates, apricots and hazlenuts and rolled in parma ham. This is then roasted on a bed of peppers. Very flavourful, I omitted the onion from the stuffing with no adverse effect

Marrow with caramelized butter and yoghurt with cumin sauce - from Moro East. Sam and Sam Clark promise than anyone who doesn't like marrow will be converted with this reciepe, and they're right! May it's because butter makes everything more delicious, maybe it's the tangy punchy sauce, but this is incredibly good. Still, marrow hatred runs deep and my brother refused to even try it

Pannetone - Gino D'Acampo's recipe from Cook Vegetarian Christmas magazine 2011. I used far too big a tin for this so instead of rising into a puffy bun this spread out and looked and felt like a dense fruitcake. We were all far too full to try it so I actually have no idea how it turned out. All I can say is that it used up the egg yolks left over from the meringues and smelled really nice.

Pashka - from Elena Molokhovets' Gift to Young Housewives. The Russian Mrs Beeton. Pashka means Easter in Russian and it's basically a dome of dairy. You combine ricotta with sour cream butter and sugar (I also threw in some raisins), then weigh down in a muslin lined colander overnight and you get an extraordinarily creamy, and again, tangy, dessert that will hold it's shape on a plate. In olden times they were weighed down in special molds with the cross and XB (which stands for Christ has risen) carved on the inside, so that when you unmold it it's already decorated. After weeks of depriving yourself of dairy this would probably give you all the calcium you missed out on in one go.

Madeleines and Mini Nutty Meringues - from Coffee Time Treats by Jose Marechal. This is a cute little book, I don't usually buy books with less than 100 recipes but this one can stay. Madeleines are very quick and easy to make, these ones are flavoured with orange and lemon zest. And the meringues are surprisingly easy too. The book calls for walnuts but I used pistachios and freeze dried strawberry powder.
Victor and Oksana, the stepmother's cousin and his wife, live in Chamonix and rather hilariously meringues happen to be his favorite snacks but it's impossible to make them at their altitude, so he has to do without. They just disintegrate into puddles on the baking sheet. Beans won't cook either, apparently. Anyway I had not such problems and they came out just fine (here's a recipe for high altitude meringues, cornstarch is apparently the answer)

Mendiants - From Rachel Allen Entertaining at Home. It's the only thing in her book that I wanted to make and even then I didn't want to use her recipe. She instructs you to place a bowl over boiling water,add the chocolate then remove the bowl to allow the residual heat to melt the chocolate. You are then to drip a little of the melted chocolate onto a sheet of parchment paper and stud with whatever you have handy. It's simple, but not technical enough for me. I want to be told that heating chocolate to over 45C will separate the fats and the resulting chocolate will not snap but crumble. I would lie to be informed that you need to cool the chocolate before dripping, as it will not spread evenly into a nice disk if it's too hot. And it would be nice if she suggested sprinkling it with something home made like long strips of candied peel, or crystallized ginger (which is what I did), I also used freeze dried strawberry powder and pistachios.

Miley Cyrus cocktail - I love this drink, it's like a modern day Shirley Temple. Equal parts of tonic water and apple juice with raspberries, fresh or frozen. My dad can't really drink too much but the tonic in this makes it taste like enough of a cocktail without making him self conscious.

Christmas 2011

Happy New Year!
Christmas was stressful this year. In the last week before the break I got some kind of super flu so on the morning of the 25th I woke up with a fever and hallucinated my way through 8 hours of cooking. This (I assume everyone knows Bidstrup)
The run up to the big day almost killed me, going to work, running around buying presents and getting up at 5am to go to Billingsgate Fish Market was tough, but I don't have kids or any real responsibilities so this was all self inflicted.
Since we had to have seafood because of my family's dietary restrictions, I chose lobsters. It was kind of big deal as it's the boyfriend's and mine first year in our new house and it all of our immediate family would be joining us, so what's fancier than that? I got up early like a good girl on Christmas Eve and made the grueling journey to Canary Wharf to pick up 4, which were are very economical £10 each and ended up feeding all 7 of us.
I'd never actually had lobster before, let alone killed one! Far from the docile, obliging creatures I assumed them to be they were actually pretty feisty. I thought the fish guy would have a box or something for me to transport them in, but instead he put all four in a single plastic bag and told me they would be fine. It was a bit too much fun for me at 7am to return home on the tube with a smelly, writhing bag in my hands, but more on that later.
Because I hate myself (or because everyone else had to fast before going to church on Christmas morning), I decided to make some canapes for people to munch on while I made dinner.
Left to right these are:
-Octopus on butter bean puree, the recipe was from the Marie Claire Food and Drink book, easily my favorite party book
-Salmon roe on Borodinky bread, this is a very Russian thing. The recipe for the bread is here, I can't stop making it, I'll write it up in the next few weeks
-Smoked eel on this wholemeal sourdough, with some horseradish my dad made
-Little choux buns with prawns (Marie Claire)
-Artichoke pate (Marie Claire again)

It's a little difficult to recall exactly what was going though my mind when it was time to dispatch the lobsters but here is my version of events.
I used a recipe from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking for steaming the lobsters, she suggests slicing them open before cooking as humane, or alternatively freezing for an hour. I did neither and opted to just put them in the pots as quickly as possible, close the lid and ask God for forgiveness. This was predictably disastrous. Instead of gamely tucking in his legs and making an effort to fit into the simmering liquid the first one I picked up actually struggled for his life. I was holding him with one hand and the heavy iron lid with the other, the battle was not evenly matched. 'SKREEEEEE!!!!' went the lobster as I finally managed to stuff him into his watery grave and collapsed on the floor. My brother had to do the other 3. Next year, Tofurky. That's a joke, it's difficult to argue with how delicious they were.
I also made Brussels Sprout with Chesnuts (a Nigella recipe, way too sweet), sauerkraut, carrot salad and road potatoes (Jamie Oliver's method, very good). An lots of mulled wine. Did you know that the alcohol in mulled wine doesn't burn off? I sure as shit didn't!
Oh and we had pudding, the boyfriend's mum photographed.

Salt and Pepper Tofu and Crab with Lemon, Parsley and Chilli

My final two dishes from the Marie Claire book are both semi deep-fried and semi really quite fresh. I hate hate hate deep frying crap - it's almost like daring yourself to have an accident, a deadly serious accident.
Anyway, I started by marinading the tofu in ginger, garlic and lemon the night before, then you roll it around in Szechwan pepper, cornflour and salt, deep fry and serve with a cool, sweet, spicy cucumber sauce.
I accidentally made these too salty (that's a serious accident in my book), but they were still pretty nice and I might make them again just to munch on while I'm watching 'my stories'... on a Saturday night.
The second other thing I made was these little fried toasts covered with a mix of crab, lemon and parsley. I use tinned crab and it was meh. It was also one of the few recipes in the book that didn't end with the ominous 'serve immediately'.
There are a few heartier and less fussy things in the book like muffins and salad, there are also drink recipes - classic cocktails and lighter things like punch which looked interesting, but I'm just over it and I want to move on.

More Marie Claire

As the old adage goes, if you want something done - ask a busy person. After the relative relaxation of being sick and in bed all over Christmas I'm back in the saddle and going at it at an alarming pace. There are simply not enough hours in the day to get everything done, I mean, I only managed to find time to throw away our long dead Christmas tree yesterday. Stress, but it means that if anyone asks me to do anything I sigh, add it to my list and stay up until 1am to finish it. Still I prefer this to lounging around on the sofa all day, exasperated because it'll be an hour before Cake Boss comes on. Between running around for work, family and housework I've still had to fin time to eat and this is what I've been having from the Marie Claire Food and Drink book.

Squid stuffed with risotto.
You start off by making the most delicious risotto I've ever had - simply fry onions with garlic and thyme, add the rice and some lemon zest, dribble n the stock and finish with fresh parsley and the juice of the zested lemon. It's really perfect, without the cheese you avoid the slightly cloying aftertaste some risottos have and the caramelised onions have it out with the tangy lemon juice for some sort of sweet and sour battle in your mouth - absolutely delicious, I would have been happy with a big plate of this for dinner. But of course risotto isn't really a party food any more than stew, or leftover soup is, no no no, you must be crazy. What you're actually meant to do is stuff the still warm rice into squid bodies and roast for half an hour. I cannot emphasize how difficult this is, my top tips are to buy really big squid so that you won't have to insert the rice into their openings GRAIN BY GRAIN! And inject your hands with botox before you begin so that you won't feel it when your skin burns off as you plunge your fingers into the molten risotto. This is almost impossible to do with a teaspoon and when I tried to employ a piping bag IT FRICKING MELTED which I had no idea silicone did - that's how hot it was.
Here are the pretty little squid out of the oven
And here they are even prettier cut up into circles ready to serve to all your fancy pants friends.
I will definitely make the risotto again, but will probably not go through the S&M of stuffing it into squid. This really tasted better freshly made, not after half an hour steaming in the oven. Oh and here's a little secret, if somebody serves this to you at a party there is a 100% guarantee that their hands were all up in your risotto up to the elbow.

Roasted pepper tortillas
I had to read the recipe all the way thorugh twice to realize you are meant to hide little bits of tuna in these tortillas. Annoying, but apart from that, this was really simple. You shove a couple of peppers in the oven, and while they roast mix up some sour cream dough sprinkled with cumin. Pinch off little balls and roll out (using a wine bottle still instead of a rolling pin, sigh). Fry in a dry pan for 15 secons on each side, sear the tuna in the same pan and wah lah!
Not nice. The mix or roasted peppers, balsamic vinegar and basil was wierd and a little synthetic, tuna was tasteless compared to it and tortillas were ok but a bit austere. All rolled up together it was strangely bitter.

Pickled salmon
You buy a little tub of sushi ginger, spoon off some of the pickling vinegar and chop a spoon of ginger, add this to freshly grated ginger, lime juice, chilli I think and mint of all things! Then pour over slivers of raw salmon and leave to marinade for 10 minutes. The salmon turns a little opalescent like ceviche and then goes to stuff some chicory leaves.
Quite nice, but tasted a little soapy because of all the ginger. I mean pickled AND fresh? Come on, there are other ingredients you know.

Spiced biscotti
Finally, I rounded off with some little biscotti biscuits. It's the boyfriend's mum's birthday today and since she always insists on no gifts and there is really only so much chocolate you can give someone I decide to make these from the recipe in the book - which turned out o be very very straightforward and hassle free. The spice comes from cinnamon and cardamon, as well as dried figs and apricots and mandatory sprinkling of almonds.
Apart from the ridiculous non-biscotti shape these are pretty good, I munched on a couple as I was carrying them to her house (and am eating another one now), she liked them and I'll make them again (maybe add a little almond extract next time).
Ok that's it, I recon Marie Claire has enough juice in it for another week and then I'll lose interest and move on.

Duck and Marmalade Turnovers and Ginger Hearts

Today is the first day of the rest of the week and I am beginning my new little game of cooking from one cookbook exclusively for a couple of weeks. The first book I've selected is my most recent purchase, the Marie Claire Food + Drink written in 2001 by the Australian food editor for the magazine, it's a fluffy collection of cocktails and canapes. What better way to live my fabulous life than to feed myself finger food for dinner for the next fortnight? Lets go!
The boyfriend and I have been pretty sick during the holidays so missed out on all the crazayzee partying people our age should have been indulging in, so I roasted a duck for us a couple of days ago to cheer us up, and the leftovers are going into cute duck and marmalade turnovers.
It's really simple, you fry up some onions and bacon, add the red wine, duck, marmalade and voila!
Quite a revolting shade of purple, this is the point you will get quite depressed. If you were really preparing this as a party snack for your wonderful friends, at this point you would start crying and drink the rest of the bottle of wine. But actually tastes quite nice. Then you cut out circles of ready made puff pastry (rolled out with the empty wine bottle because you still don't have a rolling pin, deadbeat), tuck the filling prettily in, and bake.
Result:
Very, very nice. Rich and tangy, these are very addictive. I was worried that they might be too sweet, but the marmalade we had is so bitter and disgusting that it actually works very well.
While I was waiting for these to bake I made a batch of Ginger Hearts from the book. I've never made gingerbread before, but compared to shop bought stuff, this is light and fluffy and almost not sweet enough. The ginger doesn't hit you until you've almost swallowed it,subtle is the word you'd use. Quite nice. Also, I didn't have any heart shaped cookie cutters, so these are more like ginger blobs. Oh, and I learned how to make gifs.