Apologies for the radio silence, but we’ve been busy with work/passport disasters/knitting for Christmas.
Speaking of that most wonderful time of the year, we’ll start with Xmas 2016 #1. This is when the niblings descend on our tranquil home and we exchange gifts, eat food and drink wine.
Well not the niblings. We’re not quite that bad with miniature humans.
Last year we did the full Turkey roast thing, and, since it was so close to Thanksgiving, finished it off with a gluten free pumpkin pie. It seemed more small person friendly than Christmas Pudding and it worked bloody brilliantly.
So, the Friday before everyone arrived we did a lot of cooking. We made vanilla ice-cream, we made soup, we made dessert, we made cauliflower cheese, we made a gluten free loaf and we made Chicken, Pumpkin & Borlotti Beans from Leon Ingredients.
We’ve just checked the blog archives, and we cannot believe we haven’t made this dish this year!
It’s a lovely dish that takes marinated chicken thighs, borlotti beans, tinned tomatoes and leeks and turned it into a hearty stew. This is further improved by stirring in some chunks of roasted pumpkin (or squash in our case).
We made double quantities, with the intent that it would feed us Friday night and then get reheated Sunday lunch for the six of us.
Oh, the best laid plans etcetera.
As we sat down to eat on Friday night we realised it was both delicious and slightly spicy… This led to a frantic exchange of text messages to determine how much spice a three year old and five year old could take, before we admitted defeat, froze the remainder and quickly reorganised.
For Saturday we took the entire day’s menu from a Rick Stein Sunday Lunch Menu that appeared in an ancient copy of Delicious Magazine. We tweaked it a fair bit in order to make everything gluten free and we served the soup as a lunch instead of a starter.
Tiny folks have tiny stomachs and we thought a three course dinner might defeat them in an upsetting “can’t fit in ice-cream” way.
Thus lunch was Pea and Ham soup.
Ham soup is always a favourite in this household, mostly due to how bloody cheap a ham hock is. It’s about £2.99 in our local butchers and it’ll happily feed six.
To make a ham soup, first you must make a ham stock. This is done by putting a smoked ham hock (ideally about 800g), a large quartered onion (don’t bother peeling), 2 large, halved, carrots, 3 thickly sliced celery sticks, 3 bay leaves, half a tsp. of black peppercorns and a pinch of dried chillies. This is an ideal recipe for using all those bits in the fridge that have gone a bit soft. Especially the celery.
Cover everything with 2 litres of cold water and bring to the boil, skimming off any scum that rises to the top. Reduce the heat and simmer, lid off, for about an hour.
Strain the stock and chuck out everything except the ham hock. Check the quantity of stock and, if required, reduce in a clean pan until you only have 1.5 litres.
In a large saucepan melt 75g of butter and gently cook 225g of roughly chopped onions for about 10 minutes. They should be soft, but not browned.
Stir in 2 tbsp of plain flour/corn flour and cook for a little bit, with constant stirring.
Gradually add the stock, again with constant stirring, then bring to the boil. Add 900g of frozen peas, return to the boil and simmer for 3 minutes. Blend until smooth.
Returning to the ham hock, discard the skin and break the meat into bit size pieces. If at this point you discover the ham hock hasn’t cooked properly because the butcher didn’t have anything as small as 800g, swear gently under your breath, break it up as best you can, and boil for another half an hour.
Once you, finally, have a large pile of cooked ham, stir it into the soup and season with black pepper.
Warm gently and serve with some good quality bread.
Yes, Dan will add hot sauce to anything.
For dinner we served a very large chunk of cow with roasties, Yorkshire puddings, gravy and cauliflower cheese.
We were particularly impressed with the roast beef and roasties recipe as it allowed us to do both with only one oven, even if Dan side-eyed the recipe throughout.
The potatoes get par boiled, cooled a bit, and roughed up as per usual. Equally the fat get preheated in a hot oven, before the potatoes are coated and put into roast. So far, so Delia.
Where it deviates is that they go in with the initial browning step of the beef. So they get 30 minutes of hot hot heat and then come out ant sit around the kitchen for most of the remaining two hours as the beef cooks at a lower temperature.
Half an hour before the beef comes out the potatoes go back in the oven, still at the lower temperature.
When the beef comes out it all becomes much more familiar. The potatoes get turned, the oven temperature get wacked up, and the Yorkshires and gravy get made.
That is a crazy 1.5 hours of roasting for those potatoes, but it worked remarkably well.
Our only slight fluster was that the cauliflower cheese was demanding a grill when everyone else was demanding an oven, and we don’t have separate ones of thoses.
In the end we grilled it the day before and reheated it by using any spare oven shelves and copious amounts of foil. Fortunately it was still hot when it got to the table.
The beef is slightly more well done than we’d usually have it, but, niblings.
Dessert was a mini disaster. Lured into a false sense of security by the success of last year’s gluten free pumpkin pie we didn’t pre-trial this treacle tart. We had failed to remember that the pumpkin pie uses a pastry that you grate and press into the tin. This is infinitely more forgiving than a pastry that is rolled. This is further not helped by pissing around with the ingredients to make it gluten free. Fortunately we made it on the Friday so all our undignified kitchen flapping was done without guests present.
The pastry cracked. Badly.
Then we discovered that “Gluten Free Breadcrumbs” are more for breading fishfingers than making treacle tart. Think powder.
So there was a quick trip to the shops to buy some gluten free bread to turn into breadcrumbs.
At this point we were making snide comments about the recipe not actually containing treacle. In our defence we had done a lot of cooking by this point.
In a move that surprised no one, the filling leaked.
We would like to say we shrugged gracefully and decided to serve it anyway, with a back up of pre-bought gluten free brownies with vanilla ice cream. I mean we got there eventually, but it involved considerably more ill will.
The tart was eventually quite tasty, but with more of a chewy flap jack texture than it was probably supposed to have.
Lunch on Sunday was the ever comforting, mostly child friendly, Tomato & Mozzarella Risotto.
And with all that done I magically flew away.
Well. EasyJet. To Edinburgh.
Close enough.
thegreedyguineapig 