Good Friday 2018

Ah Nopi.  Nopi, nopi nopi.

There are so many ways in which we love your overly ambitious ways.

We totally get your supposed to be a coffee table book, and we have completely missed the point of you.

We decided to do a stand out recipe for the Easter weekend, and, since our favourite butcher would probably require a pre-order, we decided to buy some ridiculously expensive beef in the fair town of Ampthill (population: one Waitrose).

I needed to double check the quantity of gold plated cow so I did a brief google.  The Nopi website has a lovely habit of providing an ingredients list, but no instructions.  Which is perfectly fine when just shopping.

What was more interesting was a little Guardian article that came out when Nopi was first published.  It has a number of recipes in it.  We are pleased / ashamed / amused / smug we have done every single mains recipe in it.

But only one of the desserts.  Clearly we need to up our pudding game.

Although Daniel points out the slackers don’t specify homemade ricotta.  Obviously we are playing on an advanced level.

Anyway we made Roasted Beef Sirloin with Cucumber Kimchi and Fresh Plum.

Beef sirloin is…really expensive.  Like the best part of £40.  But it is the holidays and this is our main hobby. It could be worse.  We could support a football team.

The marinade for the beef should be hotter than fire given the quantity of Gochujang.  But is perfectly delicious.

To be perfectly honest, the cold finely sliced version we had the next day was even better. The superfast cheaty Kimchi perfectly offset the spice and stopped it from being to heavy or rich.

Speaking of rich and heavy, Daniel tried to make Croissants.  This was using the Breadmaker dough recipe for croissants, then doing a more rough-puff laminate and baking.

They looked amazing.

But were incredibly dense and not quite cooked through.  Like, “what are these made of?!” dense.

I really regret eating two before an exercise class.

We will investigate this further at a later date.

GGPC- Feb 2016

So a little bit of a delay here, but I felt I kinda needed to update on the last Greedy Guinea Pig Club before I started promoting the next.  This was a very small one, only four people, using a Chinese New Year menu by Ching He-Huang.

MIL and FIL were our very lovely Guinea Pigs for this one.

We started with a Cinnamon, orange, honey and rosebud tea.  Right out the gate Dan and I modified this one to reduce the quantity of orange.  The recipe requested a very delicate 4 strips of zest, but then the flesh of two entire oranges.  This seemed a little excessive.  As in we weren’t sure there’d be room for hot water in the mugs if we did that. So we reduced it to one orange.

Then we had the dried rosebuds that we had to order from ebay as even our local Chinese supermarket didn’t stock them.  All in all the tea was a faff.

And not that great in the end.  FIL was the only person who liked it, the rest of us were pretty unimpressed.

Next we moved onto a Pork and Prawn Wonton Soup.  Wontons are such a Dan job.  Lots of very finely minced ingredients tied up in Wonton wrappers.  Yeah, we totally bought frozen wrappers. These then get poached in a very light vegetable stock.

These were absolutely lovely.  The biggest complaint we can make is that the recipe said the filling made a total of sixteen wontons.  We made closer to 40.  Totally worth it.

Next we served a Red Cooked or Hong Sao Beef stew with Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Carrots spiced with cumin, fennel and coriander.

In deference to Dan we reduced both the fennel seeds and star anise by half for both recipes.  The roast veg was pretty much as described, but the Hong Sao Beef was pretty incredible.

Glossing over the fact it thought 2kg of stewing steak was needed to feed four people (maybe four tigers?), it was incredibly intense sauce.  It gave the Nopi stock a run for its money, then made it extra exciting with Lapsang Souchong teabags.

We’ve not really used those for cooking before.  Well, we’ve used them for smoking food before, but not in a sauce.

Stop looking at us like that.  You knew what we were.

Unsurprisingly the beef stew fed us for a few more days than planned what with us not being actual tigers.  However, it was all very tasty and went very well with the veg.

Finally we finished with Chocolate chip cookie and Rolo Sticky Rice Dumplings.  Which were  rice dumplings stuffed with a rolo and rolled in crushed chocolate chip cookies.

The flavours were lovely.  The textures not so much.

Comparisons to Play-doh were made.  Also to chewing gum.  If we are being completely accurate the texture was like Mocchi.

And we just haven’t developed an appreciation for Mocchi yet.  Not that we are actually trying.

 

Miss Me Puddin’?

So work continues to be crazy and, no offence, I’d rather cook than write about cooking.

We’ve been experimenting with British Puddings lately, so that’ll be our main catch up.  I am aware there’s been a Greedy Guinea Pig Club whilst we’ve been so quiet, so we do need to update on that.  But, for now we’ll focus on nice hearty puddings.

Dan and I are usually dessert  people rather than pudding people.  Most of this is because dessert can usually be made in advance whilst most (good) pudding occupy the oven while you are eating your mains.  So our apparent snobbery is mostly just laziness.

We started with Sticky Toffee Pudding, which was absolutely phenomenal.

We even have a third party opinion on the awesomeness of this dessert, as snow somewhat screwed over the Bratlings skiing holiday, and our overnight guest stayed a little longer than expected.  In fact it was Sprog and Dan who made those desserts.  We served her Moroccan Meatballs on the first (planned) night.  But then defaulted onto Meatloaf (new for the Brat), Sticky Toffee Pudding and local showings of Black Panther.

The following weekend we did yet more hosting.  This time with the MIL and the FIL and Queen of Puddings.  This represented a proper division of labour between me and Dan.  I made the custardy base and smeared it with jam, and then Dan stepped it to make the Swiss Meringue that sits on top.  It is the perfect pudding for our separate skills (although the custard is ridiculously simple…although I might just be saying that because I’m so familiar with custard I can easily take shortcuts).  In was a showstopping delicious pudding.

We served it after the pork with chestnuts we did for the last Greedy Guinea Pig Club.  Hey, it was easy and tasty.  Clearly we’ll do it again.

After that we employed all our new found Christmas Pudding knowledge to make a Syrupy Marmalade Steam Pudding.  Which just wasn’t as good as the Lemon Steamed Pudding in River Cottage Everyday.

In the pudding’s defence, neither of us are huge fans of marmalade.

Finally, and after an epic week of international travel,  cancelled flights, and extreme overtime, we made Eve’s Pudding.  Unsurprisingly this contains apples, cos a girl makes one mistake and you never hear the end of it.

This was also delicious.  Closer to a Lemon Surprise, but with apples.

In conclusion, the traditional British desserts are pretty freaking tasty.  Queen of Puddings will definitely be recurring.  Sticky Toffee Pudding will also, eventually, reappear, but it is a Mum classic (no seriously she kept some in the freezer in case on guest emergency) and we might need a bit more temporal distance on that one.