Tuesday 11 October 2011

Soup of the week: Tomato, Fennel & Feta

Lunch: it’s a strange one. Firstly, I do not approve of packed lunches, for the following reasons:

  1. Sweaty bread. The sandwiches I had as a child were wrapped in cling film because this was cheaper than tin foil (which does sort of make sense - wrapping sandwiches in metal is a very extravagant affair) but the cling film did result in what can only be described as sweaty sandwiches.
  1. Eating in a car. This effect has also been felt with Opal Fruits (as they then were). I remember driving to Wales as a very young child because my Grandfather had had a heart attack whilst on holiday. Perhaps it was the general upset of the event that compounded my travel sickness but to this day, I find an orange Opal Fruit makes me feel queasy. The same can be said for wrapped up sandwiches.
  1. The “cool” factor. This is probably where a psychiatrist would pinpoint my underlying dislike for packed lunches. I wonder if anyone has ever actually been to a shrink for a packed lunch related problem. No, probably not.
It always seemed as if the cooler kids had school dinners and us geeky ones got the packed lunches. 

By way of example, at one point in my junior school career, I had an obsession with chocolate mouse and on one particularly grim day, I realised that I had forgotten the teaspoon for my chocolate mouse. So, off I went to the communal cutlery tray and grabbed a grimy spoon. Feeling pretty pleased with myself for using such initiative, I sat back down on my seat defiantly, only to hear a pop and a squelch. I slowly stood up, the realisation of what had just happened slowly dawning on me. Yes, you can guess, I am sure. My arse was covered in chocolate mouse because some clown had thought it would be funny to pop the unopened pot down onto my seat. It doesn’t take a genius to imagine how this looked, smeared all over my bum.

Scuttling to the toilet, red faced and teary eyed, I muttered under my breath that this would never have happened to a school dinner kid and that was it; the fate of the packed lunch was sealed.

Since then, I have mainly lived on “bought lunch”. This habit has been especially embraced since my move to London. I work in the City and there are tons upon tons of places to eat. Even if I don’t eat out at Spitalfields (Poncho No.8 is a current favourite), I invariably float into Pret or Itsu. The problem is that this costs money and as nice as a crayfish and avocado salad is (it’s very nice), it does become tiresome after a while.

Alas, the powers that be do not make bringing your own lunch easy. Given that I have tired of the grown up version of the school dinner and have finally shaken of my inferiority complex relating to packed lunches, I am now convinced that my office has a secret pact with all of the local eateries. You see, we are not allowed a microwave. Apparently, it will probably cause a fire.

The less said about this the better. Everything that can be said about this ridiculous rule has been said thirty times in our office already. Not one to be pessimistic though, I called my mother.#

“It’s fucking ridiculous not having a microwave at work. How the hell am I EVER going to be able to bring my own lunch? I better find a new job!”

“Why don’t you buy a flask?”

And so it was born: my love affair with soup.

I have also purchased the New Covent Garden Food Co.’s “A Soup for Every Day – 365 of our favourite recipes”. `The ingredients used in each soup are considered in light of the season, which is always good, I think. The soups range from the normal (Leek and Potato) to the ones I doubt I will ever try (Haggis, Neeps and Tatties).

Since there is only one of me, I am clearly not going to make a different soup every day but I will aim to try a different one each week. I might even try to create a feature: “Soup of the Week”. Although, that has potential to go wrong when I am too lazy/sick of soup. Ah, sod it. SOUP OF THE WEEK, WEEK ONE.

Tomato, Fennel & Feta – September 13th – serves 4

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 fennel bulb, finely sliced (couldn’t find a bulb in my supermarket, so had to use seeds. Apparently this is a faux-pas but it tastes fine!)
1 small potato, diced
1 table spoon tomato puree (I used an entire small tin from Asda)
1 small onion, diced
1 close garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon caster sugar (had to use granulated – made no difference!)
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
300g tomatoes, chopped (bough whole tomatoes and chopped myself, not a tin of)
1 tablespoon sun-dried tomato paste (didn’t bother – used extra tomato puree instead)
450ml water
50g feta cheese (I chucked the entire 200g block in. I love cheese and feta isn’t too naughty is it? 
Definitely recommended – it makes the soup extra tasty).

  1. Heat the oil in a saucepan, add part of the fennel (“only 40g at this stage” says the book. I chucked in a fair amount of seeds, enough so it was pungent in the kitchen!), followed by all of the potato, tomato puree, onion and garlic. Cook gently for 8-10 minutes until the vegetable are soft and without too much colour. My vegetables didn’t go soft and I couldn’t tell if they were colourful or not because they were covered in tomato puree.
  1. Add the sugar and white wine vinegar, then reduce by half. My mixture was already pretty solid and was sticking a bit. It didn’t really need reducing all that much.
  1. Once reduced, add the chopped tomatoes and sun-dried tomato paste (this sounds heavenly but I couldn’t find it. It seems to work fine without), then cook for a further 5 minutes.
  1. Add the water, cover, then cook gently for a further 30 minutes. Yawn, did a bit of washing up.
  1. Blend until smooth, then add the feta (which doesn’t really melt much, meaning you get beautiful cheesy bites) and the remaining fennel (a few more seeds). Season to taste, then cook gently for a further 10 minutes and serve.
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Saturday 24 September 2011

Toad in the Hole




It’s coming up to the end of September and at work this means only one thing: it is time to start organising the Christmas party. In years gone by (when I have not been with the company) the Christmas do has been a thing of legend.

The other day, my boss (aka the Boss – he looks nothing like Bruce Springsteen but for obvious reasons, I will use the name regardless) boasted that last year’s Christmas party had cost a whopping sixty five THOUSAND pounds. However, much like the number of women men claim to have slept with, you are always advised to half the Boss’s claims and just to be safe, half them again. And again. Anyway, all exaggerations aside, the event was clearly lavish and plush and everything else that is wonderful.

Naturally, I was expecting big things this year. The line of business I work in doesn’t really get affected by recession and so there was no risk of the excuse that it had been “a bad year” or anything else like that. So, it was to my surprise when the Boss declared that we would not be having a party this year. Instead, we would go for a nice, hearty meal with drinks to follow.

The Boss said he wanted to go to a restaurant that was a “reeeeally good gastro pub that was reeeeally nice and very British and very Christmassy”. My colleague correctly pointed out that the only place that was really Christmassy at the moment was the Harrods grotto. Apart from that, pretty much every restaurant is going to be at least vaguely Christmassy come December 23rd. So we decided to discount that requirement.
The first and only idea we managed was Rules but after calling up and being a little underwhelmed by the Christmas menu, we were already feeling defeated! The Christmas party plans are all still up in the air. However, I was feeling inspired to create my own British feast.
I’ve recently realised that I hardly ever eat British food. Since I moved out of my family home, I never have a roast and when I eat out, it is invariably Pakistani, Arab, Indian, Thai, Chinese, Greek, Italian etc cuisine that gets my vote. In a bid to alter this, my colleague and I took things into our own hands and decided that a good toad in the hole would not go amiss for the evening.
We used the BBC Good Food recipe and I honestly think that we did a pretty good job! My friend is so daring, that she actually GUESSED measurements. This was something that made me feel incredibly nervous but I somehow managed to stay calm and resist intervening (probably because I was at her flat, in her kitchen). The result was tremendous and delicious.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that ours looked BETTER than the toad in the hole on the website. As my friend pointed out, the toads aren’t really in their holes on the recipe photo, whereas our toads are all cosy and wrapped up.
The onion gravy was also spectacular and really easy. We averted major disaster with careful planning. The recipe for the gravy required soft brown sugar which we didn’t have! Luckily, I had cannily stolen a sachet of granulated brown sugar from the kitchen at work earlier in the day. Excellent preparation and highly recommended for cost cutting.
Try this recipe – there is no reason not to. It is easy and it tastes amazing. We ate half each and couldn’t move for the rest of the evening; now that is what I call a success.
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Sunday 11 September 2011

Fruity lamb tagine

I am terrified by everything. This ranges from the normal: flying (I have alerted the cabin crew on two separate occasions to suspicious looking possible terrorists) and being attacked (I carry a rape alarm and a small can of hairspray with me at all times) to the things that normal people do worry about but are hardly terrified of: going to a hairdresser, eating rare meat, failing at writing a blog, getting to the train station late etc.

It also doesn’t help matters that my boyfriend is more cavalier than your average. He would get to an airport twenty minutes before departure if he had his way. In fact, as I said in my last post, we recently flew to New York on a service that did actually allow its passengers to check in to the airport twenty minutes before departure. As I had sorted the flights out, I was toying with the idea of not telling him, hoping that he would assume we were on a normal flight. Obviously I am far too honest to keep something from my beloved and after a little erm, debate, we thankfully agreed on forty minutes. I was a wreck.

This general cautious nature also means that I worry about spending money. I am not one of these people who think nothing of spending five hundred pounds on a neck scarf. Although in a moment of madness a long time ago, I did happen to purchase a Luella jacket from Net-a-Porter, which I have never actually worn. I’m too scared that I might damage it.

Nevertheless, this week I grudgingly spent over ONE HUNDRED POUNDS on pots, pans, baking trays, hand blenders, wooden spoons, knives and so much more. Until today I did not cook because I was too tight to buy any cooking stuff. This meant I happened to eat out a lot (every day), which cost a lot of money. I was stuck in the most vicious of circles.

Thankfully, that stress is all behind me now and with my new found set of pans, I plan to revolutionise my life. Not surprisingly, I am normally a pretty safe cook eg: chicken or fish but usually vegetarian. In an attempt to loosen up, I chose a crazy, zany dish for my first act: a Fruity lamb tegine from the BBC Good Food website

Firstly, I doubt I had ever cooked lamb before and secondly, the idea of having FRUIT in a savory meal was simply something that was beyond me. Nevertheless, the recipe had five stars and it would be stupid to ignore something like that.

The browned lamb, taking a well earned rest.

I did have a few incidents along the way, so please take the following as a guide of what not to do.

Firstly, I was unable to find the Ras el hanout spice mix, which from the reviews seems to be pretty vital. To make matters even worse, my own attempt at blending the particular spices that the mix apparently contained did not really work because I had no cardamom and I just didn’t put enough of the other stuff I did have into the pot. My meal wasn’t spicy. At all.

As I am really quite poor at the moment, I was also unable to buy the full amount of lamb. I used about 250g (half!) but I still used the full amount of apricots, meaning the meal was a little bit too sweet. In fact, it was a lot too sweet and the only positive point I can draw from the apricot fiasco is that it was one of my five a day.

The introduction of the pesky apricots. If only I had take a couple of them out.

As I poured my stock over the mixture, I realised that most of the cube (yes, sorry – not at the stage of making actual stock yet!) had not dissolved. In a panic, I just sort of threw the gritty bits left in the bottom of the jug into the mixture. Not sure if this is okay to do or not. Presumably it is not advisable; otherwise why waste your time dissolving the stuff in a bloody jug beforehand.

The final result of all the risk-taking. Kind of worth it.

All in all, when you taste a spoonful of the meal with the correct proportions eg: one piece of apricot, a big piece of lamb, a big bit of carrot and lots of chickpeas, it really is quite delicious and it is true that the apricot does bring out the taste of the lamb quite beautifully (I feel so sophisticated saying that!).

So, do try this at home but probably stick more rigidly to the recipe than I did. It will probably take me the rest of the week to polish the leftovers off. Apparently it tastes better a few days after it has been made. Let’s bloody hope so.
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Sunday 4 September 2011

Nigella's Devil's Food Cake

Just over a week ago, I went to New York with my boyfriend. In fact, I went to New York just before Hurricane Irene descended on the city (yes, I know it was downgraded to “Tropical Storm Irene” but I am trying to be dramatic here) but more on that another day. Amid the excitement of organising the trip, one thing that struck me was that I was going to miss an episode of the Great British Bake Off.

I had begrudgingly accepted this devastating news only to see, to my sheer delight, that there was a repeat of the missed episode showing this morning! Things like this never happen to me, so please excuse my elation over a television programme that most people probably miss anyway because they are living actual lives.

The first episode of this gastronomic orgy was themed around “cakes”. For me, baking is exactly that: cakes, buns, cupcakes, brownies and everything so irritatingly bijou in between. So, in week two when the theme was pastry (snore), I had big old hopes for week three. So, on I turn the telly, ready to be yanked out of my sugar lull, only to find that this week’s theme is bread. BOR-ING*.

Now, I like baking (cakes and brownies, not bread and pies) and I think this is because my parents, like many well-meaning parents, used baking as an introduction to real cooking. You know, we will show our thirteen year old how to make butterfly cakes and then once he has mastered that, we can get him started on a Sunday roast meaning he will actually be useful to have around the house!

Only, much to my mother’s dismay, I never actually graduated from baking school because really, I thought that that was the most exiting part! You see, you don’t give your child their pudding before they’ve eaten their main because as every good parent knows, you use the pudding to BRIBE the child to eat their main course first. Following this logic, I should have been made to learn the sensible stuff first ie: actual useful, nutritional cooking and then rewarded for my new skills with baking classes.

But you can only work with the skills what you was given, right?** So, for my first act I would like to introduce to you Nigella’s Devil’s Food Cake. This is what I like to refer to as Proper Baking. I must confess that I have not made this cake recently and it was only when I was flicking through pictures on my BlackBerry desperately trying to find something I had once baked that actually turned out well that I remembered this little dishy dish. Let me tell you though, this should not lessen your enthusiasm to go right out and bake this cake.



I like this cake primarily for these two reasons:

1. It actually comes out looking in some way similar to the picture on the recipe. This should of course be the case with all recipe book photographs but I bet a tenner (bit broke, sorry) that I am not the only wide-eyed beginner cook who has been brought back down to earth with a bump; an unrecognisable mush appearing from the oven while you rush frantically back to the page in the recipe book, re-reading the measurements and directions and making sure you have not accidently stuck two pages of the book together like Rachel in that episode of Friends. Yet everything looks fine and so you just resign yourself to the fact that you obviously do not have the skill required to make excellent looking food.

2. It is actually rich and chocolaty. Many bakers, I am sure, have mastered this concept before. However, I have always failed to make a proper chocolate cake because my usual method has just been to replace a bit of flour with some drinking chocolate. This results in a cake the colour of dishwater which I smother in chocolate and pass off as chocolate cake.

I am taking Nigella’s recipe verbatim from here (it also has a very nice picture, much better quality than mine). Many food blogs I read take a famous chef’s recipe and then post their amended versions with an extra pinch of this or a little less of that. I am not too proud to say that I am definitely not at this stage yet. Any amendments would, I am confident, end in disaster.

Please, if you try this, do let me know how you get on.

INGREDIENTS

• for the cake:
• 50g best-quality cocoa powder, sifted
• 100g dark muscovado sugar
• 250ml boiling water
• 125g soft unsalted butter, plus some for greasing
• 150g caster sugar
• 225g plain flour
• 1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1⁄2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
for the frosting:
• 125ml water
• 30g dark muscovado sugar
• 175g unsalted butter cubed
• 300g best-quality dark chocolate finely chopped
• 2 x 20cm sandwich tins

METHOD

Serves: 10 - 12

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.
2. Line the bottoms of both sandwich tins with baking parchment and butter the sides.
3. Put the cocoa and 100g dark muscovado sugar into a bowl with a bit of space to spare, and pour in the boiling water. Whisk to mix, then set aside.
4. Cream the butter and caster sugar together, beating well until pale and fluffy; I find this easiest with a freestanding mixer, but by hand wouldn’t kill you.
5. While this is going on – or as soon as you stop if you’re mixing by hand – stir the flour, baking powder and bicarb together in another bowl, and set aside for a moment.
6. Dribble the vanilla extract into the creamed butter and sugar – mixing all the while – then drop in 1 egg, quickly followed by a scoopful of flour mixture, then the second egg.
7. Keep mixing and incorporate the rest of the dried ingredients for the cake, then finally mix and fold in the cocoa mixture, scraping its bowl well with a spatula.
8. Divide this fabulously chocolatey batter between the 2 prepared tins and put in the oven for about 30 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.
9. Take the tins out and leave them on a wire rack for 5–10 minutes, before turning the cakes out to cool.
10. But as soon as the cakes are in the oven, get started on your frosting: put the water, 30g muscovado sugar and 175g butter in a pan over a low heat to melt.
11. When this mixture begins to bubble, take the pan off the heat and add the chopped chocolate, swirling the pan so that all the chocolate is hit with heat, then leave for a minute to melt before whisking till smooth and glossy.
12. Leave for about 1 hour, whisking now and again – when you’re passing the pan – by which time the cakes will be cooled, and ready for the frosting.
13. Set one of the cooled cakes, with its top side down, on a cake stand or plate, and spread with about a third of the frosting, then top that with the second cake, regular way up, and spread the remaining frosting over the top and sides, swirling away with your spatula. You can go for a smooth look, but I never do and probably couldn’t.


* Despite my mini-strop, I still watched these episodes in awe. Of course, I am only being bitter about bread and pies because I have never tried to make them. Hopefully this will change now I have a blog to MAKE me cook.

** I am in no way criticising my parents. I have a very sweet tooth and my mother has attempted to teach me to cook many times but I have always been an ungrateful child who has preferred to gorge on sticky toffee puddings in a corner somewhere.

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