Courgettes Again

It is unusual for Nopi to let us down, but this appears to be one of those occasions.

There is a recipe in the Brunch section called “Courgette and Manouri Fritters”.  This was doubly exciting as it both used 580g of grated courgettes and introduced us to a new ingredient; Manouri.

Manouri is a semi-hard, Greek, sheep’s milk cheese.  Available at Waitrose fortunately and quite nice.

The fritters also come with a lime and cardamom sour cream dipping sauce, which, we admit, was very pleasant.

But theses fritters just weren’t as nice as our bog standard courgette and feta fritters.  So back to that one then.

I had much better success with Courgettes when cooking for one.  Again, this is an old dependable favourite from River Cottage Everyday.  Lemony Courgettes on Toast.  Sliced courgettes fried in some oil with garlic, thyme, lemon juice and lemon zest added.

Saturday night was the usual adventure in BBQ land.  We did chicken wings from DJ BBQ, which, although not oversalted this time, were nothing to write home about.

Far better was the nice bowl of fresh fruit we had afterwards.  Garnished with copious amounts of smugness because we grew everything in that bowl.

Sunday was a much more successful cooking day.  We started by making a frankly lovely Roasted Shallot, Mushroom and Chorizo Tart.

And then we finished on an utter climax.

We made Nougat.  It was incredibly good fun, and the perfect recipe for us to cook together.  Dan’s chopping and whisking skills (I definitely would have given up earlier than him), and my roasting and sugar work skills.  Obviously sugar work when it’s 30°C plus outside is a sensible and logical choice.

It’s not difficult, but does require confidence and two people.  I would not attempt pouring sugar at 160°C whilst simultaneously whisking egg whites.  Sugars burns are horrific.

That aside…LOOK UPON OUR SWEET AND STICKY WORKS YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!

 

Fire and Tart

It’s too hot.

It is far too hot.

You will always find me in the kitchen, but this time I will be lying on the cold un-insulated concrete floor.

All cooking involves fire, but it is too hot for fire.

It is hotter than fire.

It is also far too hot to be faffing around with pastry.  Dan has, previously, made pastry in these kind of temperatures.  For which he deserves a medal.

But that was a fresh cherry pie in a French villa whilst on holiday.  A French villa with a large granite work top that helped cool the pastry down.

We do not have such things.  Our kitchen is made of plywood and grout and aspirations.

So rather than even attempt pastry in this frankly obnoxious heat, we used pre-made ready rolled.

Sometimes it is fun to make absolutely everything yourself.  Sometimes it is doomed to failure.  This would be the second.

So this is a tart that looks fancy as fuck, but contains pre-made pastry, tinned crab and frozen prawns.

Oh and home grown rocket.

Because the heat will never truly defeat us.

Obviously we combated the furnace like heat of the sun by lighting our own fire.  This time ribeye steak kebabs from DJ BBQ.

The steak was marinaded in miso, whilst the accompanying veg and fruit (yes fruit, there’s pears in that pile) had a slightly oversalty rub.

Turns out the recipe had the same oversalting issues early Nopi, but this time it was their fault not ours.  The recipe clearly states “1 tbsp of salt”.  Not a “1 tbsp sea salt”.

Sadly every other recipe in the book uses sea salt, so we can only assume this is a typo.

Finally we attempted to address our increasing courgette problem by making a courgette and ham bake.

It uses 650g of grated courgettes.

It barely made a dent.

We are doomed.

Courgette Feta Fritters

Gosh it’s mighty warm!

We’ll cover the insane temperature impact on our cooking in our next post, because this one actually covers last weekend.  Y’know, back when we liked the sun.  Also, despite evidence to the contrary, this was actually quite a chilled cooking weekend.

Due to the all or nothing nature of courgettes, we now have ALL the courgettes.  Currently I’m still liking this, but I can definitely see it wearing off.  As wonderful as it is to do some of our favourite recipes I am mostly just cooking for one.

I can only eat so many courgettes on my own.

But, while we are still in the honeymoon period, we did one of the best courgette recipes of all time; Courgette and Feta Fritters.  We will almost certainly do this at least one more time this summer.  Although, if we have time, we might substitute the feta for some home-made haloumi.

This is supposed to feed four, but Dan and I scoffed the lot in one night quite happily.

We grate about 4 courgettes, toss with a very hearty pinch of salt, and leave in a colander over the sink for 20 minutes.  Then we squeeze out the excess water and pat dry with a paper towels.

This gets combined into a batter with a grated onion, a crushed garlic clove, 100g of crumbled feta, 2 eggs, a small handful each of chopped parsely and mint, 50g plain flour, 30g rice flour, and a tsp of sumac (can use lemon zest if your spice cupboard doesn’t run to this).   Then we just make this into 12 fritters, usually in two batches.

For some reason, despite it’s obvious Greek/Turkish influence, we always serve this with ciabatta.

This weekend the sproglet was visiting.  She had a midday appointment so we fed her brunch.  We went for the tried and tested Nopi recipe of Ham Hock with Baked Beans, Fried Egg and Sourdough.  Although for reasons of time availability we used hens eggs and bought the sourdough from an amazing charitable bakery that has popped up locally.  Good deeds and good bread.

I ate the left overs for lunch for the rest of the week.

That evening we had a BBQ (obviously), where we cooked a whole leg of lamb on the grill.

We butterfly boned the lamb to make it a sensible thickness and then we stole heavily from Levi Roots for the marinade.  Having already headed down the Caribbean flavour branch we also cooked some sweet potatoes in the coals and served them with some lime.

Before he left Dan helped me roast some baby beetroot from the allotment.

Then, once everyone abandoned me for either Wales or Essex, I constructed a pleasingly antisocial salad.  Beetroot, shallots, capers, balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, watercress, anchovies, and boiled eggs.

Pink, pungent and dinners for the rest of the week.  Although I did fresh boil an egg for each day.