Tarts and Liquors– 30/07/2016

The sun is shining, the husband has returned and we even have some Estrella in the fridge to go with our latest lunch outing from Barcelona.  All is good.

Especially since we remembered to put the salt cod on to soak last night.

Numerous fuck ups have taught us that you can’t oversoak salt cod, but you can definitely undersoak it.

This recipe is “Piquillo Peppers Stuffed with Brandada de Bacalao”. Wikipedia tells me that last bit essentially means “salt cod with olive oil, maybe with potatoes”.  When it comes down to it, we would describe the filling as fishy, salty, mash.

It turns out it’s quite tedious on its own.  Like a fish pie without any sauce. Or peas.

The reason we found out exactly what the filling was like when flying solo was the lack of details in the recipe.

It asks for “a tin or jar of piquillo peppers with at least 16 pieces in it.”  Have you ever tried counting peppers in a jar?  In the aisle in Waitrose?

Since Waitrose was the only place we could find that stocked Pequillo peppers (the Spanish swear up and down these are not the same as pepperdew), and they cost more than £2 a jar, we risked only buying one.

There are eight of the little buggers in a jar.

So that is why we got four delicious stuffed peppers and a ramekin of disappointing naked filling each.

The peppers really make this dish.  The sweetness combines wonderfully with all the salty savouriness of the mash.

For those wishing for a taste of Barcelona at home, the mash consists of 175g salt cod, 400g potato, 4 tbsp olive oil, 3 finely sliced shallots, 2 minced cloves of garlic, a couple of pinches of smoked paprika, 3 tbsp of double cream or crème fraiche and a squeeze of lemon.

Potatoes get cooked, fish, garlic, shallots and paprika get fried in the oil and everything gets mashed together.

Once it’s cool enough the filling gets spooned into the peppers, brushed with water, and baked in a medium oven for 10 minutes.

They are a little too floppy for finger food, but go wonderfully with beer.

Still can’t quite decide if they’d make good party food or not.

For dinner we had a tasty veggie tart using some of the rather pretty baby leeks from the allotment.

I’ve wanting to use these in something for ages, but Dan only declared them sensible enough for eating last week.

Because Dan had been away, and I didn’t know how tired he would be, I bought ready-made short crust pastry.  A first for us that taught us three basic lessons:

1. You really need to bring ready-made to room temperature before you start playing with it.
2. Raw ready-made is a different beast to home-made – Dan quote; “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not pastry”.
3. The end result is still tasty.

We would like to point out that we have a lot of experience with ready-made puff pastry.  Life is generally too short to make puff or filo pastry.

We’ll probably try it someday though.  Puff, not filo that it.  Definitely too short for filo.

So we blind baked this strange corporate pastry then laid down a layer of sliced boiled new potatoes.  The ones that were too big to really do anything else with.  We used about 500g.

On top of these we placed about half that mass in blanched baby leeks.

Finally we poured a mixture of 3 eggs, 2 tbsp of crème fraiche, a tbsp. of wholegrain mustard, a crushed garlic clove and about 75g of grated gruyere.

Whilst this was baking until golden we ate the rest of the gruyere.  And drank more beer, but real ale this time.

Once baked, we allowed the tart to cool before serving.

It technically serves six, but we only need it for five portions so Dan had a full third of that bad boy.  Definitely tasty.

Nopi Fun– 22/07/2016

You know it’s Nopi when you have to do three different cooking methods for a potato salad.  Worth it though.  But more on that later.

Lunch was that seasonal favourite of beans on toast.  Like we warned, it happens a lot.

We also made some Butter nut squash crumble to boost our dwindling number of freezer meals.  With Dan out of town so much I have been storming through them.  It also used up the  last squash of 2015 just as the new batch are sprawling their way across the earth..

The crumble freezes very well.  Plus it combines nicely with a whole variety of left over sauces that need finishing.  Sweet chilli sauce goes splendidly.

Still looks awful though.

But back to the Nopi!

We made “Crushed New Potatoes with Caper Berries, Pink Peppercorns and Roasted Garlic” and it was exceedingly nice.  Plus it used a whole heap of homegrown; New potatoes, bay, thyme, rosemary, mint and parsley.  All dug up/picked that day.

It is a herb adventure.

As you may have guessed, we had to roast some garlic for this dish.  In gallons of oil, with a bay leaf and a ton of rosemary and thyme.

Then the potatoes got boiled, also with loads of herbs.

We promise there are potatoes in there somewhere.

We fried the potatoes in the garlicky oil until delicious and golden. He we stirred in the roasted garlic cloves, capers and butter.  We said “salad”, not “healthy”.

Finally we added some lemon zest and juice, parsley, mint and pink peppercorns.

We served it with some giant slaps of grilled plaice. The capers and parsley in the salad screamed out for fish and it suggested something simple to accompany.  I actually wanted to serve it with fried Dab, but Morrison’s were out.  So instead we got Plaice so big it wouldn’t fit in the pan, so we had to grill it instead.

It was sadly disappointing.

The potatoes on the other hand are well up to Nopi standards. Exceptionally good in fact.

It used up the last of the new potatoes and we cannot wait to do it again next year.

We finished the day with Blueberry Sherbet.  A frozen dessert using home grown blueberries and buttermilk.  It tastes like a good blueberry yoghurt.

There are better things to do with blueberries.

No Capes!– 16/07/2016

Things that are incredible:

• The Hulk
• The Incredibles
• The Shrinking Man
• The Journey

Things that aren’t incredible:

• Celine Dion songs
• Jamie Oliver’s Incredible Smashed Peas and Broad Beans on Toast

Which was odd, because the interwebs were going mad for this dish.  There is blog after blog, waxing lyrical about this dish.  Which is essentially smushed raw peas and beans, with cheese, on toast. Two types of cheese even.

After a certain amount of hard thinking and reading, Dan spotted a pattern.  Nearly everyone was raving about the sweetness and novelty of raw peas.

We have an allotment.  We grow peas.

It is rare that the peas actually make it home since they are usually consumed straight out of the pod.  They are tasty little buggers, but this meant much of the excitement of this dish was lost on us.

There was also a certain element of “this isn’t as good as the beans on toast we had yesterday”, and it was considerably more effort.  We’re glad we did it, but we won’t be returning.

Dinner was more of the same from last night, but with lamb steaks rather than cow steaks.

Incredible.

Home Grown A-Go-Go– 15/07/2016

This was a home grown heavy day!

We started with the ever delicious Broad Beans on Toast.  We’ve mentioned this in a previous blog, but, OMG, we could eat this every week with no problem.

In fact, we’ll probably have it next week as well.

We also had quite a lot of these:

New Potatoes on the Allotment

And a heck of a lot of these:

One of many cucumbers in the greenhouse

Seriously.  Cucumbers are as bad as courgettes…when courgettes are successful (Sorry Dan).

So we used the cucumbers to make the Cucumber and Poppy Seed Salad we made in this blog post.

And we roasted the new potatoes as we had done previously, but instead of using paprika, we used the spice mix we usually use for wedges.

This involves equal measures of garlic salt, paprika, black pepper and dried thyme, a half measure of ground cumin and a reasonable dose of cayenne.  The cayenne volumes vary with mood and the age of the spice.  We have to be extra careful when starting a new jar, much in the same way we have to treat tabasco.

Finally we added some delicious steak.

Currently Dan likes steak from M&S.  He goes through phases like this, sometimes it’s Waitrose, sometimes it’s the posh butchers in Bedford, but he usually returns to our normal butchers after a bit.

The eventual meal was exceedingly good.

Faff & Fugly– 12/07/2016

We so very nearly gave up on this recipe.  It was a lot of (frankly unnecessary) work and it looked crap.  I can’t seem to find a photo of it, but I will update if Dan has one.

The recipe was “Tagliolini with Courgettes” by Giorgio Locatelli, and it used many courgettes, passata and tomatoes.  It was all kinds of homegrown win…and then the courgettes failed.

So we had to buy some courgettes.  Six in fact.

Six courgettes which Dan had to carefully slice into 5mm strips and then discard the entire interior in an effort to make a green taglionini look alike.  Taglionini is just essentially just square spaghetti.  Yes, we substituted it for spaghetti.

Next time we’ll just slice up two courgettes and proceed from there.

These fancy courgette strips then get heavily salted and left in a colander for ten minutes until floppy and, well, spaghetti like, before getting rinsed and left to drain.

A lot of olive oil then gets heated up.  We’re talking in excess of 3 tbsp.  And two finely chopped garlic cloves get gently fried.  The courgettes get added on a high heat and fried for about a minute.  Then we added a small glass of white wine and gently bubbled for 5 minutes.

Contents of the rest of the bottle was be disposed of as we saw fit.

We reduced the heat back down to minimum and tipped in most of a tin of anchovies, gently stirring, so they dissolved rather than fried.  Once those were gone we added about 50ml of passata and 4 quartered tomatoes.

Then we cooked until everything seemed hot, cooked, and a sensible consistency for a pasta sauce.  Finally we stirred in some cooked spaghetti (about 300g dried) and dosed it heartily with  EVOO.

This made two Dan sized portions and two El sized portions and looked awful.  There was serious talk of chucking it a getting a takeaway.

It was actually really tasty and we think we’ll revive it in a slightly modified form when we next have a successful courgette season.

They seem to be very boom or bust these courgettes.

Planning Wins– 10/07/2016

Bit of a let down today on the dinner front.

Confronted as I was with a mass of cucumbers and lettuce, plus a small reminder from the back that we still had some squash left over, I bodged together a quick meal.

I’d also like to point out that I was originally told I would be eating alone, but Dan somehow failed to be in Wales that night.  Or indeed that week. Hence the general pulling of food out of thin air

We made a rough approximation of “Cucumber Satay Crunch Salad” from a modern way to eat, but substituted fresh spinach for whatever-random-lettuce-Dan-has-grown.

We topped this with some roasted squash, mixed up with some left over Massaman Curry paste.

The white stuff on top is coconut flakes.

It was not inspiring.

Fortunately, what I had originally planned for my dinner, and what got hastily re-purposed into lunches for the rest of the week, was much, much nicer.

Moving back to the “Around the World” Barcelona section, we made Catalan Sausage Tortilla, which was delicious simplicity.

Boiled potatoes, fried, sliced sausages (Cumberland in this case. Sod authenticity) and fried onions.  Encased in beaten egg, with a few sliced tomatoes on top and cooked in the oven for 40 minutes.

Slice when cool and enjoy with gusto in the office. Nomming noises optional.

Candy Striped– 09/07/2016

We have baby beetroot on the allotment.  Clearly they must be consumed!

Actually that is a very small lie.  Because Dan is a giant fancy pants we have baby Chioggia on the allotment.  Chioggia are what happen when you let beetroot mate with a candy cane.

When they get big they are utterly spectacular sliced and fried or raw.  Babies on the other hand want roasting.

You can interpret however you want, but I have never eaten an actual human baby.  Just saying.

These babies were individually wrapped in foil and roasted in a 200°C oven for 30 minutes.  Then we allowed them to cool.  This is an important step.  Sure, you can push the skins off while their still hot, but you will burn your fingers.

Listen to the voice of experience children.  Those fingers will get burnt.  Drink a glass of wine and leave them the heck alone.

When you think they are cool, still don’t touch them and make the marinade instead.  This is just a mixture of a couple of finely sliced shallots, a tbsp. of capers, two tbsp. of balsamic vinegar, three tbsp. of olive oil and a tsp. of Dijon mustard.  Finally you can start opening those foil packages.  Slip the skins off, trim the roots, cut into bite sized wedges and stir into the marinade.

Abandon everything for 30 minutes and let the marinade work.  Then serve with a handful of watercress (a bag should feed four), a hardboiled egg and a scatter on anchovies.

It is a very tasty, very chilled lunch.

Salmon Potato Thing– 08/07/2016

We do this dish every year.  Sometimes we do it sooner to make use of home grown new potatoes.  Sometimes we do it later to make use of home grown cherry tomatoes.  This year it’s the former.

We’ve called it many things, “Salmon with pricey bacon,” “Salmon with roasted tomatoes,” “Salmon with pesto potatoes,” and even “Salmon, bacon, basil, cheese and nuts.”

We don’t think we’ve ever made the pesto for it, but it’s not outside the realms of possibility.  We could have this year, since we have a very good basil crop, but Dan had only just got back from Wales and was bloody shattered.

So a jar of pesto it was.

We heated the oven to about 180°C and started prepping everything whilst it was making it’s slow thermal climb.

You want about 200g of very new potatoes per person, cleaned and quartered.  If the potatoes are very small only half them and if they are absolutely tiny leave them whole

Wrap a salmon fillet with a prosciutto slice per person and place in a gently oiled tray.  Dot around some cherry tomatoes.  We use on the vine tomatoes, but that probably isn’t totally necessary.  You probably want about 75g per person, but, again, we just used a pack from Tesco.

Yes I know, it’s all very disappointing isn’t it.

Drizzle everything with some olive oil and season well.

Bung in the oven for about 12 minutes.  We did 12 and then another 2 because we messed up the timing on the potatoes.   It was fine.

Speaking of which, the potatoes get cooked for 8-10 minutes in a pan of boiling water, drained and then returned to the pan.

While this is all going on, prep and cook some greens.  Any greens.  We often use green beans (or yellow in our case as Dan likes to grow Sungold Dwarf Beans).

Stir a generous portion of pesto into the potatoes.  About half a jar will do it.  Sometimes we stir the green beans in, sometimes we don’t.

And serve.

It should really take less than half an hour from fridge to plate and it is really tasty.  We suppose you could do it with chicken breasts, or normal bacon, but it wouldn’t be quite as good.

Plus it would take longer and there would be more concern about undercooking.

Sod that and pass us a glass of wine instead.

Panic Stations! – 05/07/2016

On the plus side Dan hasn’t buggered off to Wales.

On the downside I had planned for Dan buggering off to Wales.

He buggers off on Thursday.  We run out of meals before then, hence the modicum of panic and the emergency food situation.

Fortunately I can scramble when required, so we ended up with two really rather good meals.

We have a fridge full of home grown cucumbers and, fortunately, we had a tin of tuna so we made a slight variation on soba noodle salad.

We were out of noodles so we just cooked some pasta, soaked some chopped onions (seriously takes the bite out of raw onion and salted some slice cucumber.  Then we mixed it all together with the tuna, some mayonnaise and some soy sauce.

We garnished Dan’s with some jalapeños, and mine with some sweet Japanese pickled cucumber.

For dinner we made a very fast potato curry, using allotment new potatoes, some stray carrots from the bottom of the fridge, a random sweet potato we found at the back of the cupboard and the remains of a jar of curry paste.

After it bubbled for a bit we added some greens to lift it.

 

If in doubt make curry.

Even More Watermelon – 03/07/2016

We promise we don’t usually consume this much watermelon, but having made the pickled watermelon rind, we wanted to use the pickled watermelon rind.

We’re sure you’ll understand.

This is the “Watermelon and Feta Salad with Marinated Olives and Preserved Lemon” from Nopi which we had for work lunches on Monday and Tuesday.

Most of the effort went into making the marinated olives.  A pleasing blend of Kalamata olives, chilli, garlic, thyme, rosemary and preserved lemons that were left to co-mingle overnight.

After that it was just a case of combining with everything; watermelon, feta, pickled rind and an absolute crap load of herbs.

We took a photo before and after adding the herbs, because otherwise you see nothing but mint and basil.  Both home grown of course.

To be honest the watermelon soup was better.

Which was a statement we never thought we’d say.