Festive Food

Merry Christmas everyone!

Now is the time food laden with festive symbolism.

We have the festive Moussaka representing the sheep in the stable.

We have festive Tagine representing…

Erm.

The tagine wasn’t actually invented until the 8th century and is kinda associated with a different world religion, so we’re going to struggle to shoe horn this one into the Christmas story.

It looks like a roof? A roof over their head?

C’mon.  It’s about as good as the tortured allegories in the christingle!

Anyway we made a Chicken Tagine.  Partly because it’s warm and tasty, but mostly because it used up half a jar of preserved lemons we had lying around.

Basically we just jointed a chicken (the cheaper option that buying the separate parts) and browned them in some olive oil.  Then we removed the chicken and replaced it with a chopped onion.  Once that was looking nice and soft we added in 3 chopped garlic cloves, a tsp ground ginger, half a tsp coriander seeds, and a cinnamon stick.

We cooked that just enough to be aromatic, and then we returned the chicken to the pan along with 600ml of chicken stock.  Since we were feeling decadent we added a pinch of saffron to the stock about 5 minutes before we needed it, but that’s an optional luxury.

The tagine then simmered, covered, for 45 minutes, before we added 200g of green olives and half a jar (about six?) of preserved lemons, quartered, and let it go for another 15 minutes.  We took the lid off here to allow it to reduce, but your mileage will vary depending on how good the seal on your lid is.

Obviously serve with couscous.

Grown up food out the way, we’ll now move on to the true reason for the season; dessert.

It does seem slightly odd that an entire swathe of cakes and desserts are associated with one winter feast, but this is the culture we’ve been raised in so…*shrugs*

We’ll start with the Christmas cake – which is essentially just fruit cake tarted up for the occasion and given a glass of booze.  We had initially planned to do a marzipan free cake, since neither of us is much of a fan of either marzipan (outside of stollan) or fondant icing, but the cake didn’t even get that far.

It was sadly under-cooked in the middle.  Usually we’d just blame this on El failing to read the recipe properly (which was definitely part of the problem), but this was the second cake failure we’d had in a short space of time.  And both had been very dark on the outside, but squidgy inside. Hmmm.  Side-eyeing the oven a tad.

Anyway, the cake didn’t go completely to waste as we discovered that sticking slices under the grill and serving with butter made a wonderfully festive breakfast.

Continuing the festive theme we made mincemeat for the first time ever. And then, logically, we had to make Mince Pies.

Still full of suspicion for the oven, we stuck a digital thermometer in there to see if there was much difference between the settings and the actual temperature.  Turns out there’s a massive difference.  The digital probe was reading 200°C when the oven was swearing it was still at 150°C. Hmmm. 2019 may be the year of the new kitchen.

However, after I very carefully made vegetarian mince meat, Dan decided to use the blessed Delia’s pastry recipe which uses 50:50 lard and butter.  I can’t complain too much though, as the pastry was phenomenal.

We had a little bit of left over mince meat so we stuck it in the bottom of an apple crumble.  It worked rather well.

 

I also took advantage of the festive period to inflict trifle upon my friends.  Dan doesn’t like soggy bread so this rules out such delights as trifle and  summer pudding in our house.  However I had seen a recipe for Lemon Syllabub and Passion Fruit Trifle and I really wanted to try it out.  Fortunately I attend an annual xmas gathering of school friends and they are somewhat used/resigned to my ways.

 

It was…okay?  The passion fruit declined to turn up flavour-wise and it mostly just tasted on lemon.  In fact it tasted like lemon tart.

Next time I’ll just make a lemon tart.

Finally, we repeated last years Christmas Pudding recipe, took it to my Dad’s and served it on Christmas Day.  (Along with a slightly overcooked turkey and some not very crispy roast potatoes, both of which were ENTIRELY my fault).

And on that delicious bottle of champagne we hope everyone has had a fabulous winter break and hope everyone has a fantastic 2019

 

TV Inspiration

So last post we alluded to a Netflix show called “Ugly Delicious”.  We thoroughly recommend it.  We also recommend watching Chef’s Table, but for completely different reasons.

Chef’s Table looks at the very top end of food porn.  Each episode is a one hour documentary on a famous chef, some of whom are only really famous within the very narrow world of Michelin starred food.

We both love it.

However, we also found ourselves creating our own mini drinking game to go along with it.  Especially for training in Paris (Drink!).

This really highlighted the sort of cultural monochrome that very fancy food has, and Ugly Delicious does a fabulous job of tearing that all down.

It is because of Ugly Delicious we ended up making Keralan fried chicken using the TV show recipe as a template and also bits of this.

And then, because we’d just watched an entire hour of fried chicken in the america cultural context, we stuck it on some sweet waffles.

It was pretty bloomin’ tasty.

We think this was the trigger that led us down the path to curly fry silliness.

We took a perfectly grown up dish of pan-fried pork chops, pancetta, chestnuts, and savoy cabbage, and then we stuck a portion of curly fries on the side.

It was an excellent example of why we usually don’t do the food shop together.  On our own, neither of us would have bought a bag of curly fries.

Together we succumbed to nostalgia.

Continuing along the Ugly Delcious theme of cultural appropriation, we also made Sticky Soy Beef in Do-Fo Ru with Garlic Mushrooms. If it makes anyone feel better, we had no idea what Do-Fo Ru was either. There was a significant amount of wandering around the Chinese supermarket with phone in hand trying to work out what was fermented bean curd.

We found it in the end though.  And were then congratulated by the cashier for buying such an unusual product.  Go us I guess?

We made up for it the next time by just buying packs of frozen dim sum and a box of beer.

Now we just need to work out what to do with the rest of the jar.  We’re sure the internet will help.

 

Ugly Delicious

Tis the time and the season for really unphotogenic food.

It is nigh on impossible to make stew look pretty.  Even if it does taste like a warm hug in front of a log fire,  it still mostly looks like a bowl of brown.

It will also be very squash based.  Dan has covered the top of the wardrobe with the orange bastards.  Apparently they really liked the hot weather and being very attentively watered by someone utterly paranoid that everything was going to die without Dan.

Having forewarned you of this, let us commence with the blogging.

On the squash side of things we made our favourite of Butternut Squash and Goat’s Cheese Gnocchi, using the oven time to cook a little bit extra squash for the next days lunch.

We’re frugal like that.

Lunch the following day was a River Cottage Veg dish of  a Squash, Blue Cheese and Walnuts Toastie.

Except being River Cottage, the recipe then allows you to use any kind of cheese (the left overs from the tartiflette) and any kind of nuts (leftover pecans from the tart).

Beautiful, tasty AND frugal.

We then made a lovely soup by Angela Hartnet.  It was Pumpkin soup with Parmesan. i.e a big bowl of orange.

It all starts off very frugal using the rind of the Parmesan to add flavour, and then blows in completely out the water by drizzling the soup with truffle oil.

We’re not usually fans of truffle oil, but this was really rather good.

Finally we made a huge batch of Guinness, Mushroom and Sausage Stew.

This is just fried onions, celery and bacon.  Add in a little flour and tomato puree, then add a bottle of Guinness. This gets reduced a little bit before adding stock and a load of browned sausages and some mushrooms.  Cook until sausages no longer pose a threat.

Serve with whatever carbs you have going.

We made black eyed beans work with this one.

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Catch Up

Summer seems so long ago.

Apparently when it’s hot we make salad.  Lots of salad.  Lots and lots of salad.

We genuinely can’t recall what these all are.

So have a wall of salads with our blessings.

Salad does seems to be prettier  than stew.

Hosty McHost Face

So it seems people don’t quite believe I’m alive.  Or at least they have to come and see me in person to check.

Not sure if they think Dan is somehow faking my existence or if I’ve become a member of the undead.  The second is genuinely more plausible as Dan is extraordinarily bad at lying.

First to arrive was the Sproglet.  She turned up on the Friday night after a long day in the Big Smoke so we fed her an extraordinary quantity of pork fat.

Dan picked Lombo di Maiale alla Spiede (Pork and Rosemary Kebabs) from the Italian section of Around the World in 120 Recipes.  Mostly, I think, because the kebabs use big sticks of rosemary instead of skewers, and our rosemary plant(s) is more than up to that challenge.

Mostly it is bits of pork tenderloin and rosemary-infused-lard-soaked-ciabatta alternately threaded onto rosemary twigs and then chucked in the oven.

We served it with rice with a little sundried tomato paste mixed in.  Both were okay.  The best bit was (unsurprisingly) the ciabatta soaked in salty herby fat and then roasted.

Dessert was provided by the Sproglet.  I’d requested she bring a certain type of fancy french patisserie from a certain London based company (they only deliver to Zone 1.  I checked. And even that is not cheap).  This was at the urging of an old school friend who raves about them.

So, in a brief deviation from our usual rule of only showing our own food, we present Canelles by Babelle.

They are delicious.  Caramel custard chewiness. Now I must try and make them…

The following day we were joined by H, who is another member of the metropolitan elite.

We decided to use up the left over Master Stock and serve the usually very dependable Beef Croquettes.  Obviously we made them the day before, so Dan got to bring them out the kitchen with apparent effortlessness.

You may note the extra word of “usually” in that description.  For reasons we still don’t understand the pot boiled dry whilst cooking the beef.  This did not occur the previous two times we did this dish.  Plus it was cooking in the large Le Creuset with the lid on.  Usually we struggle with the seal on this lid being too good!

Anyway, we recovered it with boiling water and time, but the sauce was slightly more bitter than usual.

It was also lovely to introduce two anti-coleslaw ladies to freshly made, mayo free coleslaw.  They raved about it quite a bit much to our amusement.  We do similar things for lunches so frequently it genuinely hadn’t occurred to us it would be novel.

Dinner was a bit more down-to-earth.  We made Tartiflette, a delicious Swiss combination of potato, cheese and smoked pig.

It is an excellent exercise in self-control.  You definitely should eat it for at least 10 minutes after it comes out of the oven.  Not for any flavour development reasons, but because it will melt your face like the Arc of the Covenant.

H made an excellent GIF of it.  And it is terrifying.

Continuing on the theme of dangerous foods, we served Anna Jones’ Brown Sugar Tart.  This is a vegan cross between a treacle tart and a pecan tie.  It is all kinds of tasty, plus it actually gave us something to do with the coconut oil in the back of the fridge.

The crust, soaked with the caramel/treacle filling and baked in an oven, becomes a tooth breaking nightmare.  Tasty, but could be used to stove a man’s head in.

The next day we had leftovers for lunch.  The tartiflette did not have any left overs.

Once everyone had returned to their respective homes, we made ourselves a store cupboard staple (ish) dinner.

First we made Gnocchi.  This is actually surprisingly easy. It’s just mashed potato mixed with egg and flour to make a dough.  500g of potatoes usually needs half as much flour and one egg.  We made the dough into four ropes and cut those into gnocchi sized pieces.  Then boil until they float.

Gnocchi done.

Except we took in another level and fried them in butter until crispy.  Seriously, don’t judge us. If you want weight loss recipes come back in January when we will inevitably doing some kind of health kick.

Then we added sun-fried tomatoes and olives heated it a little, before tearing a ball of mozzarella over it and putting it under the grill.  Once nicely melty we drizzled it with a little basil infused olive oil.  We had originally intended to use fresh basil, but a couple of frosts had, quite literally, killed off that idea.

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Catch Up

Very quick baking orientated one here.  Since we were still dealing with a courgette glut at the time Dan made a Courgette, Walnut & Cinnamon Layer Cake from Hummingbird Bakery.

He loved it.  Which is good, because I was pretty unmoved by it all.  I felt the flavours weren’t particularly great and there was too much frosting.  However, I have complained about the frosting with every Hummingbird cake we’ve made so the problem may be me.

In retaliation to his butter/sugar monstrosity I also made cake. A Coconut and Passion Fruit tray-bake with a nice pastry base and a super zingy custardy top.

It is a recipe massively aided by having passion fruit on £1 a bowl on the market and having a Daniel to make your pastry.

To start get your oven up to 180ºC, and grease and line a 30cmx20cmx4cm tin.  We used a roasting tin.

Then make the pastry by beating 125g of butter with 110g caster sugar until it is creamy. Beat in an egg and a tsp of vanilla extract, then stir in 225g of plain flour, half a tsp of baking powder and a pinch salt.  Press the resulting sticky dough into the base of the tin and bake about 15 minutes, until golden.

To make the topping, whisk 4 eggs and 225g of caster sugar together until pale.  Then mix in 100g desiccated coconut, 50g plain flour, 375g single cream, 160ml coconut milk, the pulp of 8 passion fruit, and the juice and zest of one lemon.

Blob that on top of the pastry base and bake for a further 40 minutes.  Cool in the tin then cut into however many squares seems reasonable.