Winter Recipes

In this weather one's mind turns to good sustaining food so here I present a couple of favourite recipes for this kind of weather. One is a proper recipe, the other is an out and out cheat...

The first recipe is derived from a baked mushroom recipe that I first saw on 'The Victorian Kitchen' cooked by Ruth Mott. Her recipe was simply Portobello mushrooms baked with butter salt and pepper for about 20 or 30 minutes depending on the size of the mushrooms.

Delicious though the recipe was, I thought of a few things that I could add to it.

Robert's Portobello Mushrooms.
Ingredients:

• 4 or 5 large Portobello Mushrooms.
• A cup of pearl barley.
• 2 rashers of back bacon per mushroom.
• A large nob of butter per mushroom plus one.
• Salt & Pepper.

First cook the pearl barley in boiling water for about 45 minutes to an hour (untill cooked and lightly fluffy). Drain and keep the water if you want to make barley water. Pearl Barley once cooked can be kept in the fridge for a few days or even frozen for a few weeks.

Place a baking tray in an oven at 155 - 175 degrees centigrade to pre-heat.

Remove the stalks from the mushrooms trim them and add to a stock pot if you have one available.

Place the mushrooms with their bottoms up so that they then can be filled with the cooked pearl barley. Place a nob of butter on top of the pearl barley filling the mushrooms and season to taste. Be light with the salt as the bacon will add a lot of flavour.

Allowing two rashers of bacon per mushroom, halve the rashers so that you end up with 4 pieces per mushroom. Lay the first two pieces next to each on top of the mushroom. Then at ninety degrees to the first two pieces lay the next two pieces next to each other. You should end up with the pearl barley mostly covered by the bacon. Of course if you have massive mushrooms you may need to use whole rashers to do the covering.

Take the baking tray out and place the extra nob of butter in the bottom, allowing it to melt and cover the base. Place the filled and topped mushrooms carefully in the baking tray and return it to the oven.

Allow to bake for about 40-45 minutes.

Serve and eat...

I like to put the mushrooms in the oven before I go out for a brisk walk outside so I have a hot snack when I get back.

Cheat's Luxury Scotch Broth
This recipe depends entirely on the availability of certain products in the supermarket. Baxter's Scotch Broth is excellent, but is identifiably not a 'home made' Scotch Broth. Waitrose and a few other supermarkets have been selling a range of foods called 'Look What We've Found'. Basically stews, and casseroles in pouches that just need re-heating; the quality is excellent. One of the recipes that they do is 'Herdwick Mutton Stew'. It is delicious, but I find it a little heavy sometimes.

What I do when I'm feeling extremely lazy and want to have a delicious Scotch Broth or to impress someone is mix a pouch of the mutton stew with a can of the Baxter's soup and heat.

You end up what tastes like a brilliant home made Scotch Broth that will serve 2-3 people.

Milk and Paprika Fried Chicken with Citrus Sauce

One of my recipes that my sister has wanted for ages.

The ingredient list is per person and can be scaled up appropriately.

• Chicken Breast
• 1/2 pint of milk
• 50g Corn Flour (Corn Starch in the US)
• Seasonings
• 1 tsp. Paprika - Smoked for preference.
  
• 1 pinch Salt
• 1/2 tsp Dried garlic powder.
  
• Alternatively use Schwartz Season All - 1 1/2 tsp.
  
• 1/2 lemon
• Good quality vegetable oil (sunflower or avocado are good)
  

Chop the chicken breast into strips and marinade at least overnight in the milk in the fridge. You can marinade for up to 24 hours but take care past that.

Remove the chicken from the milk shaking off any excess liquid. The milk will have sweetened and tenderised the chicken due to an interaction between the enzymes in the milk and chicken.

Pour a goodly amount of oil into the bottom of a frying pan and start to heat.

Put the corn flour and seasoning in a plastic bag, shake. Add the chicken pieces and shake until they are well coated in the corn flour and seasoning.

Take the chicken pieces out allowing the excess corn flour to fall back into the bag.

When the oil in the frying pan has got hot enough to have a shimmer above it (but not catch and burn) add the chicken pieces. Cook them for about 5-10 minutes depending on how large they are so that the outside is crisp and the chicken cooked.

While the chicken is cooking it is time to make the sauce.

Put the marinade into a saucepan and heat. Bring it to the boil and you will notice it start to clump. Add the juice of the lemon and a little zest and bring back to the boil. Reduce the heat so it simmers gently.

The sauce will curdle further.

Finally, depending on how thick you want the sauce, take some of the coating mix from the plastic bag, add a little water to form a smooth emulsion and add to the simmering sauce. This adds the flavours of the seasoning to the sauce. Allow the sauce to thicken. If you want a smooth sauce - blitz it. I personally quite like the texture of the sauce as is without blitzing.

Serve the chicken on a bed of noodles with a crisp side salad and pour the sauce over the chicken and noodles.

A New Combination of Flavours

Well, my time off has given me back my leisure time and I have been pursuing a number of projects. All of which will be blogged here some time soon. The first and simplest one is a new combination of flavours that I have found that works really, really well.

• Fennel Seed
• Szechuan Pepper
• Garlic (smoked if available)
• Avocado Oil
• Lime Juice

It work brilliantly well either as a marinade for fish, poultry or quorn or as a salad dressing.

First grind about a teaspoons worth of fennel seed with the same amount of the pepper in a pestle and mortar Then chop a large clove of the garlic roughly and grind together with the fennel seeds and pepper. Scrape the micture out in a bowl and add the juice of one lime before pouring in about three times as much avocado oil.

If you're going to use it as a marinade; it can be a good to add a tablespoon of corn flour (corn starch as the USA has it) and beat thoroughly to help it coat better.

As a salad dressing use sparingly as it packs a punch.

Twice Cooked Lamb

I decided to cook up some leg of lamb the other day and inspired by the way that hams are made I did a two part cooking process: Poaching the lamb before roasting it.

I poached the leg of lamb for about 2 hours in a liquor made up of:

• Enough lamb and vegetable stock to cover the leg.
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed.
• A cup of good quality red wine vinegar
• A bouquet garni, made up of thyme, bay, marjoram and rosemary
• 10 or so whole black peppercorns

I turned the lamb over about half way.

I then took the lamb out of the poaching liquor and placed it in a baking tray. I poured a little teriyaki and sunflower oil over the lamb before putting it in an hot oven (200c) for about half an hour.

Skim and boil the poaching liquor down to about a third to one half of it's original volume, allow to cool a little before tossing in some chopped mint.

Serve sliced with steamed vegetables and the starch of your choice - I like brown rice or quinoa - pouring the liquor and mint combination over.

The lamb will not be 'pink' in the modern idiom, but will be tender and very delicious.

Smoked Cod and Chips

When I lived in Ireland one of the great pleasures in life was to adjourn to a local chippy called Caffola's and devour a beatifully cooked smoked cod and chips. The cod was only lightly smoked, more to give flavour than preserve and added a delightful high note to a wonderful dish. It was a truly great way to prepare for an evening out at Rocky's followed by Badger Brown's.

I've always loved smoked fish; salmon, mackerel, haddock etc.

I've recently found smoked cod becoming available more widely in the UK so I decided to attempt to recreate the experience.

In consulting various cookery books and looking online I discovered an argumentative group of people who either create or collect frying batter recipes and my goodness there are a lot of them.

In the end I settled on a batter recipe that was a synthesis of several of the others and so here it is:

• 2/3 cup of strong flour
• 1/3 cup of cornflour (For Americans that is cornstarch)
• 1 generous pinch of salt
• 1 spoonful of castor sugar
• 1 cup of good water (mineral or filtered)
• 2 egg whites whipped to soft peaks

Sift the dry ingredient together in a mixing bowl and add the water gradually, mixing until a smooth paste is formed - I would normally expect to have some water left over. Fold a little of the egg whites into the paste to loosen it, fold about half the remaining egg whites in and finally fold the remaining egg whites in.

To batter and cook the smoked cod I cut it into nice fillets, dried them with kitchen towel and coated in a little flour.

I had a wok with combined sunflower and avocado oil ready heated - I tested the temperature by dropping a small piece of batter in and checking that it puffed and crisped within a few seconds.

I passed the prepared cod through the batter and slowly lowered it into the wok so that the batter in the oil had a chance to seal and puff before it came into contact with the base or sides of the wok or other cooking pieces. For a large piece of cod I allowed 12 minutes cooking time and for a smaller one I allowed 9 minutes. The cod floated as it cooked so I turned it over every few minutes to ensure that both sides cooked evenly.

For a first pass I didn't do any chips, I just served it with a herb salad and a large piece of lemon.

It was really quite good. In fact it was bloody delicious.

I'm going to take a little more time on the batter to get it absolutely perfect but so far, so good.

Mock Gravy

I think that it's time for another culinary discussion.

I love gravy. To me gravy is one of the great culinary delights and adds immeasurably to the right dishes.

The trouble is that I hate all instant gravies and have never felt that gravy recipes that did not involve the juices from roasting were really gravy.

In the end I resolved to come up with a way of making a good 'mock' gravy. It turns out that with the right tweaks it can make a really superior vegetarian gravy.

The fundamental idea is simple. To emulate the roasting process and produce the same flavours.

To do this I put oil (as a substitute for fat) in the bottom of a pan. Depending on whether I am trying to make a chickem, pork or beef 'mock' gravy, I use more or less oil.

To the oil I add a tablespoon of vegetable bouillon and two tablespoons of the appropriate other bouillon. I add a tablespoon of soy sauce, a drop of mushroom ketchup and a couple of tablespoons of lemon or lime juice.

You can optionally add some of the herbs that you would use for roasting, a little garlic and/or onion powder. If I'm making a beef gravy I will often also add a teaspoon of beef Bovril.

The next job is to heat the ingredients in the pan over a medium heat, stirring frequently. The intent is to recreate the process that in the bottom of a roasting tin.

The oil will stay somewhat separate from the other ingredients. You are looking to end up with the oil separated from a thick, glutinous liquor after cooking the ingredients. This should take a few minutes only. If you end up with a gritty mixture that will generally mean that the ingredients have been overcooked.

Now add enough flour to absorb the oil, mixing thoroughly.

Cook the flour and oil mixture for a minute or two. You want the flour cooked but not burnt so stir it continuously. The pan should now look to contain very dark brown bread crumbs.

Add 100-150 ml of cold water to the pan and stir hard. The flour will absorb the water and start to come together.

Now start adding the stock to the mixture a 50 ml or so at a time. Each time stir until the mixture (roux) has become smooth again and there are no more large lumps. The pan remains on the heat throughout this process.

When enough stock has been added the roux will have become runny and the rest of the stock can be addded.

Bring the pan back to the boil and taste. Season if desired. One can either add gravy granules/cubes or boil the gravy down (stirring frequently) until the desired intensity of flavour is achieved. Other flavours such as redcurrant jelly can be added at this time.

The gravy is now ready for serving. Pour it over a large helping of bangers & mash, a bowl of couscous or anything else that takes your fancy.

To make the vegetarian version simply use all vegetable bouillon and stock. This recipe scales up very well.

Ingredients

• Oil (vegetable, olive or something similar)
• Bouillon (I tend to use the Knorr 'Touch of Taste' bouillons)
• Soy Sauce
• Mushroom Ketchup
• Lemon or Lime Juice
• Roasting Herbs (Optional - Rosemary, sage, thyme etc.)
• Garlic Powder (Optional)
• Onion Powder (Optional)
• Beef Bovril (Optional)
• Flour
• 100 - 150 ml Cold Water
• 1 Litre of Good Stock
• Salt and Pepper

Dulce de Leche

Despite my grandparents living in Argentina, my mother was born in Uruguay as they did not want her to be conscripted if she were a boy. As I understand it the Argentines are not always well liked in South America so my mother is often quite firm on the fact that she was born Uruguayan.

Despite largely growing up in England I was exposed to a fair chunk of another culture for which I will always be grateful. A significant part of that is South American cuisine. Dulce de Leche (Milk Jam) is one of the elements of South American cooking that plays no small part in a number of my family's stories.

The recipe for Dulce de Leche is deceptively simple:

• Two cups of milk.
• One cup of sugar.
• A pinch of cream of Tartar.
• Vanilla.

One can use vanilla sugar, good vanilla essence or infuse the vanilla into the milk before cooking the rest.

Simply place all the ingredients into a thick pan over a low heat and cook until the mixture turns a medium caramel brown and thickens, stirring occasionally. This can take anything up to an hour and a half.

The resulting concoction can be eaten with a spoon, used in cake and pastry fillings or just spread on bread.

A rather more simple way of preparing it (not without its own risks) is to boil a can of sweetened condensed milk for 2 and a half hours. Remember to keep an eye on it and top up the water if necessary. Do not open the can in any circumstance until it has had a chance to cool. If the can starts bulging while cooking take it off the heat immediately and stand well back.

The Dulce de Leche produced in this way tends to be a little coarser and less flavoursome.

An english cousin was shown the simple recipe once but unfortunately forgot that it was cooking. 6 hours later the pan had boiled dry and the can had exploded spraying hot metal and hot overcooked Dulce de Leche everywhere. As it was my mother's kitchen and it still smelled of Dulce de Leche 3 months later she was less than pleased.

Another time a very old friend of my mother's was living in the States and started to crave real Dulce de Leche - just like grandmother used to make. She had been using the condensed milk recipe but this time it just wasn't good enough.

She called her Argentine friend in the next town, who after some deliberation said 'No I don't have a recipe for it, but if you take a tin of sweetened condensed milk...'.

My mother's friend then called an Argentine friend in the next county, who said, after some thought, 'Well if you take a tin of sweetened condensed milk...'.

Calls were placed to assorted Argentine friends throughout the Eastern Seaboard. Who without exception replied: 'I don't know the proper recipe but if you take a tin of...'.

My mother's friend not being one to give up without a fight said to herself 'Right, I'll call up the Argentine Embassy in Washington D.C.'.

The operator receiving her call was more than a little surprised by her request and had to reply that she didn't know but if my mother's friend would hold then the operator would ask around in the embassy.

Twenty minutes passed and the operator returned to the call.

'Well I asked everybody, even the Ambassador's chef and the Ambassador's wife and none of them had the recipe, but if you take a tin of...'.

A few weeks after, my mother received a letter from her friend telling this story and my mother was able to send back her own grandmother's recipe as I have recorded above.

Apple and Bacon Omelette

I was visiting with some friends the other day, enjoying a very pleasant evening catching up. As I was just heading out the door to go home and cook myself supper, Henry jokingly asked me whether there was anything that he could do with some apples that he had in front of him for his own supper. In short order we had determined that there was some bacon in the fridge and in front of the bemused eyes of his mother, we had rolled up our sleeves and proceeded to cook a new omelette.

We used two to three rashers of salted rindless back bacon, two to three eggs, half a cup of milk and a quarter of a Pink Lady apple per person. The bacon was cut into lardons and the apple was finely diced. The eggs and milk were beaten together with a generous pinch of black pepper. A nob of butter was placed in the bottom of a very large pan and gently melted, we then added the bacon and cooked it through slowly, avoiding frying it to crunchiness, the apples were cooked with the bacon until soft and the egg mixture was added. The low heat was kept on until the eggs were nearly cooked through, the omelette was folded over with a palette knife and then cut into portions and served.

It was extremely delicious.

Scrambled Eggs - My Way.

Well, this is going to be my first cooking post; I've been cooking since I was 7 when my mother first came down with M.E., it was only baked beans but I have come a little way since then.

It has taken me quite some time to perfect my scrambled eggs recipe. The quest began when I realised that the white of an egg and the yolk of an egg need quite different cooking regimens to achieve perfection. Undercooked whites are slippery and unpleasant, overcooked yolks are dry as dust and taste vaguely sulphurous.

So here is how I cook my scrambled eggs now:

Ingredients:

• Eggs, 1 or 2 per person depending on famishment and size of egg.
• Milk, about 50 ml per egg. I prefer organic full fat for this but it does work with semi-skimmed.
• Vegetable oil (I prefer sunflower oil).
• Seasoning

Put enough vegetable oil into a small saucepan to cover the base and swirl around the sides. Separate the egg whites from the yolks, putting the whites in the saucepan and the yolks in a bowl with the milk.

Place the saucepan containing the whites and vegetable oil on a low heat. The intent is to cook the whites without frying them to crunchiness. While the whites are cooking whisk the yolks and the milk together.

When the whites have solidified, you can take the opportunity to pour away any excess oil from the saucepan. A little oil gives sheen and prevents sticking, too much oil is just plain greasy.

I now tend to use the edge of a wooden spoon and break the cooked whites down into pieces. The size tends to reflect how 'refined' I'm feeling. Now add the yolk / milk mixture to the pan and return to the heat.

How high I now have the temperature tends to reflect how much attention I am prepared to pay to it. If I'm in a hurry and am prepared to stir continuously I will up the temperature; if I want to pay attention to cooking other things, I will leave it on the lowest possible temperature and stir occasionally.

Before long the scrambled eggs will start to go 'blop' and steam slightly, this is the signal that you have to pay attention and stir to stop it sticking to the pan. Hereafter it is up to you as to how thick and well set you want your scrambled eggs, the longer you cook it the harder they will get. Don't forget that they will continue to thicken slightly after you take them off the heat.

Serve the scrambled eggs and only now apply seasoning. If you add salt any time before this you risk the eggs curdling and separating giving you a texture of grit floating in tasteless water.

I personally like my eggs served either on wholemeal pitta bread or a nice malted wholegrain toast. Cooking up a few bacon lardons and sprinkling them on top can look really smart too.

The final thing to do is enjoy eating them!

The Torre del Mangia, the 'Eating Tower' in the Piazza del Campo, Siena.
 

An inlaid granite floor from Siena's cathedral. 

One of Siena's medieval streets. 

Salt cod. 

More good food: Aubergines, tomatoes, red onions and garlic. 

A view from the breakfast room at the Fattoria Montelucci, 

The front of Florence's Cathedral. 

The tower of Florence's Cathedral. 

A glass of Selvapiana vinsanto. 

Wine in the Selvapiana cellars. 

A view across the valley from the Selvapiana Vineyard.