Creamy Mushroom and Bacon Pots with Hedgehog Potatoes

So far this week we’ve eaten very healthily (and keeping our resolution to eat fish at least once a week), but today we were both in need of some comfort food. I tried to think of something that felt like a real treat, but was still not that naughty. TLM got me a set of ramekins for Christmas and instructed me on Christmas day that he wanted food that was made in them (!) Quite the brief for this evening’s late late late late meal (TLM at surgery till late then at revision).

I chopped up two big flat mushrooms, half an onion and two lean bacon rashers (just the top oval bits) and fried them with thyme, salt and pepper. Once softened, I put about a tablespoon of double cream and stirred in to the released mushroomy juices. I immediately decanted the creamy mushrooms/ bacon/ onions into the ramekins and placed two more large flat mushrooms on the top to fit as a lid. I then grated a little cheese on the top. A blast under the grill and they were done.

The ‘hedgehog’ potatoes are really Ms. Lawson’s hasselback potatoes, but TLM re-names most of our food. They are made from baby potatoes (new or Charlotte) which you sit in a big-ish spoon and then slit by pushing your knife down onto the potato – the spoon stops you slicing all the way through the potato. You then put a little oil on them and bung them in at 200 celsius for an hour and a half. They’re easy to prepare as you don’t have to peel them and they’re difficult to burn (but I did manage once).

Scrummy – one of our new favourite suppers.

Beef in Oyster Sauce

On Saturday we went to our local farm shop and picked up some wonderful ingredients, including beef and brocolli. I love beef stir frys, but I’ve never cooked one at home before. So with the coupling of an excellent piece of meat (I trust cooking it quickly if it’s good quality) and a super sharp knife I set to work.

Ingredients (marinade)

• 1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 1/2 tablespoons mirin (or dry sherry/sake/white wine)
• 1 1/2 tablespoons water
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• good grind of black pepper
• 1 red chilli, deseeded and sliced
• 2 garlic cloved, sliced
• 1 cm piece of ginger, diced
• 1/2 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1/2 tablespoon vegetable oil

How to make it 

Slice the beef as finely as you can and then marinate the beef for at least 20 minutes, or overnight if you’ve thought ahead. Then stir-fried the lot: onions first, then take them out, followed by beef, then take it out, then the green veg, then re-add the beef and onions. If I were to do this again I would cut the beef even thinner so I could cook it in 2 minutes rather than 5 (approx).

 

Pear Kulfi

Each month, held alternately by Julia and Scott, there is an ‘in the bag’ challenge where three ingredients are suggested and you come up with a recipe including them. Initially I didn’t have the confidence, but after a little thought and settling on what I could do, I was really quite excited. January 2007′s ingredients were: pears, lemons and nuts of your choice. I sort-of imposed another requirement on myself: I wanted to offer it as the pudding for a coeliac friend who was cooking dinner, so it had to be gluten-free.

I wanted to do something sweet but the nuts really threw me off. I found some interesting pear/chestnut icecream recipes but they all required an icecream maker. Consulting my musty but trusty Marguerite Pattern book I found a recipe for kulfi, a rich almond icecream of Indian origin, which could be made wholly in the freezer. This recipe instantly gave me a good way to use nuts, and I could transform it by adding pear puree and the juice of a whole lemon. So I present my pear kulfi concoction, with slight pride that it throws up no other google results.

It is a little bit fiddly, but only in that it uses up a lot of bowls and so generates a bit of washing up. I strongly suggest rehearsing this recipe in your head to make sure you have all the pans to hand.

Ingredients

• 600 ml milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 100 g caster sugar
• 50 g ground almonds
• 1/2 teaspoon almond essence
• 300 ml double cream
• juice of 1 lemon
• 4 pears

How to make it

 

First, you make an almondy custard. Put the eggs, egg yolks and caster sugar in a heatproof bowl and whisk together until evenly blended. Put the milk in a pan and bring to the boil. Add the scalded milk slowly to the egg mix, stirring throughout. Stand the bowl over a pot of boiling water and stir until the custard thickens and coats the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat and leave to cool. Once cooled, stir in the ground almonds and almond essence.

 

Secondly for the pear and lemon puree. Peel, core and chop the pears. Dice into 1 cm squares or so and cook them until soft in a pan with a dash of water. Drain, then puree the pears. Squeeze the juice of one lemon into the pan and stir.

 

Whip the cream to soft peaks, then incorporate the pear puree. Finally fold the cream/puree mix into the cool custard. Pour into a container (make it a 2 litre tub) and pop in the freezer to do its thing.

 

Take the icecream out about half an hour prior to serving, so it’s easier to scoop. Add some lemon zest and flaked almonds or pistachios to garnish.

Overall, the pear kulfi was absolutely delicious. The fruity/zestiness of the pear and lemon cut through the otherwise rich almond custard cream. The kulfi is smooth and the crystals turned out fairly small, but as always they could be smaller.

Rainbow Salad

I do love rainbows. I was chopping up some salad for a nibbly dinner (to have with chicken and bread) and I couldn’t resist doing this:

Very yummy it was too, and some extra for tomorrow’s lunch box.

Sunshine Fluffy Eggs

This is my mum’s speciality, and when I went home this Christmas I got the definitive recipe and history of the Sunshine Fluffy Egg. Apparently, my mum always cooked them for my dad when they had very little money but then they were just called Sunshine Eggs. She said I added the ‘Fluffy’ in at a later stage (just as I stole and renamed her childhood teddy to ‘Old Bear’). She’s adamant she never learnt it from her granny (who looked after her) so where these come from is a mystery. I’ve searched the internet and can’t find any other egg quite the same as the way this is done. Maybe someone out there also knows this type of egg?

How to make it

Toast a slice of bread. Separate the egg white from the yolk and beat the white to stiff peaks. Scoop the white onto the toast, make a little hole in the middle and pop the yolk into it (not too deep, it should be near the surface and not buried). Grate some cheese over the whole thing and stick it in the middle of a medium-hot grill. It’s ready when the cheese is all melted and crispy (as picture).

When you cut into it the white is cooked but puffy, like a souffle, and the yolk is runny. Tasting one takes me back to Sunday teatimes (other Sunday teatime fare includes: Welsh rarebit, sardines on toast, crumpets – are you also seeing a grilled theme? – Battenburg cake, shortbread and cress).

Solomon Islands Food 3

Last summer (2007) I spent a few months in the Solomon Islands, teaching on a remote island with no electricity or running water. See my post here for more.

Part One Here
Part Two Here

Rice and noodle meals

These seem to be the staple meals we ate. We usually had some fish, with rice and green peppers, spring onions and a generous amount of soy sauce.

Red snapper and rice

Other days it would be rice with tomatoes, aubergines, tuna and spring onions. Others it would be rice, green peppers, onions, aubergines and tuna. You get the picture.

The noodles we had were usually put into a pan uncooked, with a sliced onion and then a tiny bit of water added and then covered and stirred every now and then for about 10 minutes. Soy sauce was thrown on top along with some spring onions and chilli. It took ages for me to work out how they’d made the noodles cooked yet so dry and the trick was using the noodles from an uncooked state. This was delicious with fish, and one time we were cooked for oysters were added which made a tasty change.
One thing I really liked on the island was fish cooked in cocout milk with cabbage and spring onions. It was particularly good with barracuda, but the best was with giant clam (which was so soft it melted away in the mouth).

Pudding

Unfortunately not a sweet course. If you wanted sweet, you choose between papaya, pineapple, banana, star fruit, melon with bush lime (the weird orange on the inside one) squeezed on top.

Pudding seems to be applied to a dish where a vegetable has been boiled and mashed and then baked. We had taro pudding with baked tuna at the custom dance (below).

Taro pudding and baked tuna

The other sort of pudding is cassava pudding which is usually served with reef fish. Cassava is a type of sweet potato that grows on Santa Cruz Island and again the potato is boiled then combined with coconut milk and baked. Cassava pudding was an improvement on taro pudding as it had a far more agreeable texture. I mentioned to my students I’d had pudding and they were very impressed – you’ve not had the island experience till you’ve eaten pudding and fish. The reef fish, unlike the deep sea fish, are baked whole and you pick the flesh from the bones. The deep sea fish (tuna, snapper, barracuda) are lopped into portions and cooked in a stew usually.

Cassava pudding and reef fish

One day Julie (the doctor’s housekeeper) cooked something she called ‘Pumpkin Cheese’ in front of me and I took notes. It seems like a pumpkin pudding, using the island definition of pudding. Because I watched and it was cooked in a way very different to how is possible at home it’s taken a few tries to get it 1) right 2) authentic. I’ll post up the recipe when I get it right!

Solomon Islands Food 2

Last summer (2007) I spent a few months in the Solomon Islands, teaching on a remote island with no electricity or running water. See my post here for more.

Part One Here
Part Three Here

Coconut Crabs

Before and after

One thing I was dying to see (and eat) on Lata was a coconut crab. They are strange creatures: the largest land crustacean on earth (only those giant scary deep sea crabs are bigger, and of course they are sea-dwelling), they climb coconut trees and can open up coconut with their giant claws, and they drown in water. They only live on tropical islands and can take 20-40 years to grow to full size. Like I said before, they are only caught during the waning of the moon (natural conservation or strange phenomenon I don’t know). The doctor’s housemaid found a couple at the market for us and bought them. They’re bought fresh (alive!) with rope on them and you tie them up in the house until you want to eat it. We kept ours overnight (:() and the rotten thing escaped and climbed up the mosquito netting outside out room with its giant claws. We heard much commotion at 4am with the girls trying to catch it again without having their fingers chopped off. The coconut crabs absolutely scared me, and when Julie put it on the lawn for me to take a picture of I was terrified it’d come and get me!! They had to be killed, of course, which involved boiling a massive amount of water and pouring the boiling water over the crab. It died fast (if you boiled enough to kill it in one go). I didn’t enjoy seeing its legs slowly seizing up, but I wanted meat and I needed to take responsibility for the fact that whenever I eat meat something has been killed. After a minute the crab was well and truly dead, at which point you grab hold of it, yank off the legs and pincers and throw them and the abdomen/head into the pot with some salt and pepper. You boil, it’s done.

The crabs are so hugely muscular and strong that they have absolutely tons of meat in the claws and legs: it’s like gobbling a crab lollipop, no weedling around with cutlery. Obviously the white meat was amazing, delicious, crabby, musky, juicy… mmmmmm. The other part of the crab was the abdomen/thorax which you cut open with a sharp knife. Inside were the entrails and the all important fat. There is so little fat in the Solomon Islander’s diet that for them this is the best part. I had a little spoonful of the fat/entrails – it’s delicious when you dip one of the charred, dry potatoes in to moisten it up. The fatty entraily bit is extremely strong tasting, and I couldn’t stomach more than a spoonful or two in a sitting. Given the chance, however, the local girls would sit with a spoon and gobble the entire lot.

The meat in the claw, with a spoon to give some scale – A close up of the claw: looks like teeth, no wonder they can have your fingers off

Social Eating

All eating in SI seems to be social. Whenever they cook dinner, they make an enormous surplus as there are always visitors and you should always offer food to visitors. (Likewise, if you go to someone’s house for food, you should always bring something. Traditionally a fish if you were ‘salwater fella’ or sweet potatoes if you were ‘bush fella’, but a melon or papaya went down well from whitefellas) Feasting traditionally consists of pikpik (pig) alone, and it’s a huge faux pas to include vegetables even as a side dish. A Kiwi on the island discovered this when she made a casserole with some pikpik for a ceremony – they locals were mortified! Hehe! The islanders make a big deal of eating: fresh flowers are collected every day for the hut/table, grace is said before each meal, there is a specific order of who should be invited to help themselves (usually us, as we were guests, followed by elder members of the family, and finally children).

The Barbecue

A popular way of social eating, especially of fish when the event isn’t high status enough to merit a pig, is the barbecue! The fish are cooked on a metal table with a fire burning underneath. If only we could recreate this at home – it’s so much better than the charcoal space pods we use to barbecue with. Oh, barbecued reef fish are DELICIOUS!! Pulling away the flaky flesh and gobbling, with the sea they were caught in close by!

The barbecue in full swing

The Buffet

When we first visited the hospital, and on our departure, the hospital put on a wonderful (and very western) buffet for us. The bread alone must have been quite an outlay, not to mention the biscuits! You can see the tuna and spring onion sandwiches, the giant discs of cucumber and the triangles of melon and papaya:

We didn’t eat an awful lot, but we saw people ferreting away sandwiches away for later/family. It was very touching for them to put on such a spread, but so scary being the first to help themselves (especially on the first day).

The Feast

On our final day we went to see a custom dance at a local village and although we were unexpected they, naturally, had food to offer. We were ushered over to a covered area and given some food. The dancers, being even higher status than us, convened in a separated leaf haus (I wouldn’t have been allowed in on account of being a woman!) and I believe they had pig. We were offered baked tuna and potato (silver bowl) and ‘taro pudding’. Taro is greyer than it looks in this picture. It looks like wallpaper paste and it tastes like it too. I couldn’t really get to grips with it, but scooping some up and slapping it on top of a torn off piece of tuna seemed to work. Obviously, we couldn’t have left the taro pudding even if we hated it because it’s quite the delicacy. They make it by baking the taro, then grating it, then binding it with coconut milk. It’s extremely good for you (and Dr Gunter tried to make us eat it more often!)

Above: taro pudding, baked tuna and potato

Below: the dance in motion

In the final installment, I’ll tell you about some of the things we ate on a day-to-day basis and will try and give you a recipe for pumpkin. I have a butternut squash (best I could do) and will be experimenting with it today.

Solomon Islands Food 1

Last summer (2007) I spent a few months in the Solomon Islands, teaching on a remote island with no electricity or running water. See my post here for more.

Thought I’d post a bit about eating in the Solomon Islands. Although the Solomon Islands are technically a third world country, there is plenty of food around. The food is of course available seasonally – e.g. you can only really get crab during a new moon and when it wanes, and there are times when ‘breadfruit’ (vile vile vile) is the only thing available. We were lucky in our time of going when there was relatively a lot of selection about. Unfortunately due to the extensive logging on Lata there had been a huge increase in the amount of rainfall and the locals fear that come April 2008 there will be nothing to harvest. I’d never really thought about food like that before.

Part Two Here
Part Three Here

Solomon staples at the market

We lived on food from the market: green peppers, aubergines (eggplants), snake beans, spring onions, cucumber, cabbage (leafy things, not in heads like at home) coconuts, pineapples, bananas, star fruit (5 corners is the local term), papaya. We got few supplies from the shop: soy sauce, rice, biscuits, sugar. A woman in the village made bread, which was too expensive for the majority of the locals to buy, and it was strangely sweet and chewy. I wasn’t a fan, but TLM liked the odd roll. The market was always interesting – you could go at 5am (everything is sold by 6am) and there be nothing there, or could mosey along at 11am and find a whole load of stuff. After a matter of days I got savvy about when a truck came along from out-lying villages with fresh vendors. The only vegetable of note really were the cucumbers that you had to peel, were about 3 times the diameter of our cucumbers and had enormous pips you could crunch on. With everything being organic and fresh the fact that the food is pretty bland didn’t matter so much.

varieties of potato/sweet potato: cassava, kumara, taro

We tended to avoid the ‘sweet potatoes’ as they were fibrous, chewy, dry, tasteless and pretty much horrid. nothing like our ‘yams’ (which I insist on calling now to make the distinction). The only time I liked the potatoes was when they’d been baked in a traditional oven and were practically charred black. After much conversation, it seems that their sweet potatoes are roots, rather than tubers and there was a heated discussion in the staffroom about what an English potato must be like.

Our first fish was a very very small red snapper which we bought from the fishermen just as they were stepping out of the boat. They laughed that we whitefellas were having such a small fish for tea, but we were content and they were glad to have it off their hands. We had to sort of swing it on the way home (the locals use a bunch of leaves) to keep the flies away. It was the first fish I ever.. dismembered. It was delicious, added to the fact that I bumped into one of my students on the way home and she gave me a ‘lemon’ to have with it. The lemon was in fact green on the outside and orange on the inside and tasted like a cross between all the citrus fruits (lemon/lime/orange) but was surprisingly soft and smooth tasting. We loved picking these and having them in water to jazz it up.

The first fish I ever ‘dealt with’ (scaled, gutted, beheaded, filleted)

no wonder they were laughing at how small our red snapper was!

The cooking facilities were terrifying. We were lucky to have a modern gas stove and pans, but they scared the crap out of me every single time I cooked. This was not helped by the fact the gas canister was a mere centimetres from the naked flame. The hobs themselves had a setting of puny or violent (you can almost see that on the photo) so it made cooking an experience!

The modern and extremely scary cooking facilities – just out of shot on the left right next to the cooker was the enormous gas canister

The traditional oven – where they cook the potatoes – was a much more sedate affair but a lot more effort. I can’t say I ever managed to cook in one, but I sat in the hut it was in and chatted while the potatoes cooked (I remember telling them about Henry VIII and his many wives, each time I mentioned a new one they gasped and couldn’t believe England had such a naughty King). The tongs are just made from snapped bark – simple but effective.

A traditional oven

As you’d probably expect we did a bit of fishing and ate a LOT of fish. There are two distinct varieties: reef fish and deep sea fish. Reef fish are rather fishier and flimsier than deep sea fish. Reef fish tend to be barbequed and then pulled to pieces by greedy fingers. I did feel a bit guilty for eating some parrot fish (the cute ones with the beaks that nibble on coral) but they tasted so good. The deep sea fish are the ones you troll for (string a line out the back of the boat on your way somewhere) and are things like red snapper, tuna (skipjack and yellowfin) and barracuda. They are the ones you tend to put into soups and stews and they are meatier. I was a bit traumatised by how long the deep sea fish lived for in the boat, flapping around for almost half an hour if you don’t whack them dead, bleeding, alternately lying still and fitting violently. I was shocked at how big the barracuda’s teeth were and just how deft the fishermen were at removing the hooks, smacking the fish dead and dropping the line out again. I was in awe when we were in the storm and they were trolling out the back or clambering over the front of the boat.

I also ate giant clam which was a bit like oyster, but so so soft it melted in the mouth (it’s also endangered but that doesn’t seem to make a difference). I missed out on turtle (phew) but loved the coconut crabs – though again I didn’t like killing them very much. I’m so glad I missed the killing of the pigpig (Rosie, RIP) but they live a fine life eating themselves fat and lying in the shade of the trees they’re tethered to.

next time I’ll post a bit about what food was actually made from all the raw ingredients.

mmmmm fishy

Almost too pretty to eat!

Christmas: Take Three

I know Christmas take two fell a little by the wayside, but it was fantastic to watch my nieces and nephew open up their presents. I also got given a beautiful bonsai tree by my brother et al which is so cool, I think it won’t be long before I’m obsessed with it.

I got lots of lovely gifts for Christmas, including some brilliant kitchen things: primarily a wonderful knife (yes!) and a Cuisinart mini food processor, which I can’t wait to use!

One of the most important things about Christmas is of course the food. We had a lovely Christmas Eve tea. I adore seafood, so I was in heaven with the smoked salmon, prawns and crayfish tails. Lovely brown bread and butter, rocket salad and the M&S seafood sauce (with pink peppercorns) that I am evangelical about.

Christmas Cake

I’ve made a Christmas cake for the past 5 years and I think this year’s is the best ever. I use the recipe from “How to be a Domestic Goddess” by Nigella Lawson and it always turns out well. This year it’s just gorgeous, and I have to show it off!

The nude Christmas cake

The decoarted cake: I usually go for sophisticated white/gold/green/red sparkly icing paint and use little icing cutters but we forgot them so we got coloured icing and made little characters for the top

It’s all about the eating and hum-ah-nah, this year it’s so gooooooooooooood and moist

Christmas Pudding

Boring as I am, I always use Nigella Lawson’s pudding recipe from “How to be a Domestic Goddess” (though I have photocopies of the recipes in the Christmas section of my cooking folder for ease of use). It never fails to be moist and tasty (until this year I’d never eaten a Christmas pudding I hadn’t made myself and I was able to try a shop-bought one and it was black and treacly and heavy and I will never stop making my own!)

Hope everyone had a lovely Christmas time and don’t forget that you can still leave the decorations up and pretend it’s Christmas till the end of January.

Chocolate Swirl Shortbread

The secret of making these is to 1) keep the dough cold 2) not over cook them. They look really pretty and taste great. This dough makes about 20.

Ingredients (Shortbread 1)

• 150 g plain flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 50 g caster sugar
• 125 g unsalted butter

Ingredients (Shortbread 2)

• 125 g plain flour
• 25 g cocoa powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 50 caster sugar
• 125 g unsalted butter
• 100 g dark chocolate

How to make it

Preheat the oven to 150 celsius.

To make the first shortbread, sift together the flour, salt and sugar. Rub in the butter (you really need to have taken it out of the freezer or it will take FOREVER!). Knead it, wrap it in cling film and put it in the fridge for a good half hour. Do the same for the second shortbread, including the cocoa (it’s messier!)

When the doughs have been in the fridge for long enough to become managable, lay out a piece of greaseproof paper and roll the plain shortbread out into a rectangle type shape about a centimeter thick (and so about 25-30cm long). The brown shortbread is always stickier, so I squidge it into a cylinder then spread it out over the plain base using my fingers (you can see where I’ve done it below). Chop up the chocolate and sprinkle somewhere in the middle. Use the greaseproof paper to help you roll the dough up like a swiss roll. Try and do it as tightly as possible, it doesn’t matter if the chocolate pokes through.

If the dough has got warm, put it back in the fridge as it makes cutting it up a lot easier. Use a sharp knife and slice the roll into about 1cm slices. Lay onto greaseproof paper on a baking tray. Bake for 25 minutes in the middle of the oven. It’s better to undercook them than overcook them. Lift the greasproof paper off from the baking tray and put onto a wire rack. Don’t try and pick them up before they’re cold or they will fall to pieces.

There were two batches like this: