The Sunday Roast: A Christmas Feast

Having abandoned the kitchen during November, it continued to be a little scorned through December, and as for the Good Food site; well, I could be accused of neglect there. However, starting Christmas Eve and ending today, there has been a bit of a cooking frenzy going on.

From left to right, starting at the top: putting together the prawn chowder, the surprise winner - braised sea bass with green beans, the little glasses of prawn chowder for the apero, just cooked braised sea bass, pear and cranberry pies, roast beef (french style - e.g. raw!), roast veggies and lentil roast, smoked salmon platter with green salad and prawns and finally mushroom wellington. 

We decided to have fish on Christmas day, but when I went to buy the trout there wasn't any left. I took a risk and bought some bar, which google translate told me was bass. I don't know whether it was the 2002 Masburel that went into the sauce, but I think that this dish was definitely the overall winner as it was a complete surprise and well yummy. Everything else was also really nice, and I think I'll try the pies again, but this time make the pastry too. They are not as sweet as mince pies and there is a lovely mixture of sweet and bitter. The chowder is great as an apero and I might do it again for New Year's as it looks good and is so easy.

I hope you all had a good Christmas. And if you are all full up and can't eat another thing, maybe take a look at the Action against Hunger site, the charity we chose to support this year.

The Sunday Roast: Entertaining

Here in France there is a programme called Un diner presque parfait. Its UK equivalent is Come dine with me. The idea is that five people are brought together. Each night one of the contestants cooks a fabulous meal and the other contestants judge them on the quality of their meal, their ability as the host or hostess with the mostest and the décor of their table. At the end of the week the host with the most points wins. Simple right?

I know for a fact that I would not win. For a start the table decor is well and truly the Frog's job. Aperitifs are provided courtesy of Picard, dessert by one of the guests and I almost always fall asleep at the end of the meal. Sometimes I fall asleep at the table, other times its the corner of the sofa, but usually I am shaken or kicked in time to say goodbye to the guests, or before I start snoring. 


Despite my obvious flaws in the area of entertaining, I still like to pretend that I'm participating each time I have people round to dinner. I try to follow the cardinal rule of: don't spend  too much time in the kitchen once the guests have arrived (unless of course I haven't actually even started cooking by the time they arrive).

My other idea of entertaining is that if it works once, do it again with a different bunch of friends, then move along and find something new.

The following recipe has been tried and tested on a few friends. I think I need to make some new friends so that I can have it again. I usually have it with some roast vegetables: parsnips, carrots and potatoes.

Salmon en croute (ever so slight adapted from this version)

150g mascarpone or cream cheese
about 120g of mache, spinach and rocket,
I found packets of 4 puff pastry squares that I like to use, but you can use short crust if you like
2 salmon fillets
1 egg, beaten

1. Heat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. 
2. Put the mascarpone or cream cheese in a food processor with the mache, spinach and rocket and whizz the lot until you have a creamy green purée. Season well.
3. Take out your puff pastry squares. Cut the salmon fillets in half and put the salmon in the middle. If it has a thinner tail end, tuck it under. 
4. Spoon half of the watercress mixture onto the salmon. Now fold the pastry over into a neat parcel.
5. Brush with the egg glaze.
6. Bake for 30 minutes or until the pastry is crisp and browned. To test whether the salmon is cooked, push a sharp knife through one of the cuts into the flesh, wait for 3 seconds then test it against the inside of your wrist; if it is hot, the salmon is cooked. 
7. Serve with the rest of the  purée as a sauce. 

Prepare up to stage 5 and prepare your roasties before your guests arrive and then you can pop it all in the oven as you finish your apero and just before you have your starter. Sorted.

The Sunday Roast: A shocking surprise.

When it comes to cooking, alcohol makes everything taste GOOD. Now I don't want to come across as an old sot. I don't consume gallons and gallons of drink every day, but I do love a good glass of wine. There is nothing to beat that feeling of warm, pure velvet dribbling down your throat.

The following recipe is a delightful pleasure because it combines some of my favourite ingredients: mushrooms, lentils and wine. It is one of my favourite VEGETARIAN recipes (and sssh, yes I know that wine isn't vegetarian).

As long as things are not completely full of mushrooms I feel that it is OK to give it to the Frog. Normally, I would eat this dish with mashed potato, but the first time I served it up to the Frog, I felt that I needed to give him meat . A sausage I suggested, I don't know why, I just felt a sausage would go well with it. The Frog agreed that a sausage would indeed go well.

I tootled off to Monoprix, picked up the various ingredients and then went off to peruse the sausage shelf. I looked left to right, right to left, and then my eyes jerked upwards. When I had suggested a sausage it wasn't because I had intrinsically known which meat would marry well with the lentils. This was why I knew sausages would go well:

It's because this meal is a French staple! I had been hoodwinked by Vegetarian Good Food magazine! An ex of mine had once said that he felt that all my recipes would taste better with meat. And now here I was seeing that indeed in this case, my recipe usually was with meat.


Despite, the sense of betrayal and upset that the French had invented this recipe first, and added meat, it's still damn nice. Feel free to add the sausage if you must, but I still prefer it with a dollop of mash on the side.

Mushroom and Lentil casserole

400g of various mushrooms (go for it, they all taste nice in this)

2 tbsp olive oil

1 onion

2 leeks

1 carrot

175 g green lentils (puy lentils are especially yummy)

150 ml red wine

300 ml vegetable stock

seasoning

parsley

1. Heat the olive oil in a pan and then add the onion, leek and carrot. Cook until soft. 
2. Add the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes until soft.
3. Add the remaining ingredients (except for the parsley) and bring to the boil. Then cover and simmer for 35-40 minutes. Check regularly that you haven't run out of liquid.
4. Add the parsley and serve with whatever takes your fancy.

The Sunday Roast: Diets and Cook Books

I am one of those people whose weight fluctuates. The only time I start to think about dieting is when I get near the 70 kilo mark. This has happened on several occasions throughout my life. Once when I was doing my A levels and my idea of exercising was waddling to the bus. Another time was after two years of living in Spain and living off tortilla (totally yummy and totally fattening). The first time I gave up giving up smoking I hit the 70 mark and the last time I hit it was at the end of my pregnancy. On each occasion I lost the weight either through boot camp style exercise ( a summer job at the post office) or through some crazy diet my Dad, work colleague or gynaecologist suggested.

The problem with diets is that they are either difficult to follow or the food is horrible. And you don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that eventually the diet is going to fail. After giving up on food combining and The South Beach Diet, I finally ended up trying Weight Watchers, where to be perfectly honest, everything they propose tastes like pants. South Beach on the other hand had well yummy recipes, but an impossible regime to follow. And let's not even go down the food combining road hey.

So, this is where in the end Weight Watchers wins out. You can eat whatever you want. Seriously, I know colleagues who have done WW, stuck within their points, but lived on beer for three months and still lost weight. It's not healthy, but voila.

For me to succeed at WW, I had to eat good food. Tasty food. And The South Beach Diet cookbook is full of tasty recipes, really full. I've tried two, maybe three of them. I'm terrible with cookbooks. I see them, I covet them, I try a handful of recipes out of them. They take up space on my shelf that could otherwise be filled with fiction and in the end they get covered in dust. I have vowed to buy no more. The internet has rendered cookbooks obsolete.  So before I pack the things away for good, I'll share the one or two recipes from each book that I use.

Aubergine Pasta

1 big aubergine sliced lengthways
a tin of tomatoes
loads of fresh basil roughly cut
olive oil
pepper
1 tbsp tomato purée
onion
clove of garlic

1. Brush the aubergines with oil and grill each side for 5 minutes, then set aside until cool (trust me on this one, cutting hot aubergine is painful).
2. Heat the oil and add the onion and garlic. Cook until soft. 
3. Add the tinned tomatoes, purée and loads of fresh basil. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 15 minutes. 
4. Cut up the aubergine up and add to the sauce for about 5 minutes. 
5. Add pepper.

I prefer this sauce with tagliatelli, but we all have our own preferences.

The Sunday Roast: Chilli

When I first became vegetarian I had two staple recipes. If you came and stayed with me for a weekend one day you would get chilli and the next day curry. Both were essentially the same, I opened the cupboard and shoved everything in, including baked beans (yes, there was baked beans in my curry).

So, over the years I have learned a few things about vegetarian cooking. First, less is more. If you really want to savour the tastes then one or two ingredients work much better than shoving everything and the kitchen sink in. Secondly, the baked beans wasn't such a huge mistake after all.

Back in the day, when I was shoving everything in, I spent one summer in a fit of post adolescent pique sharing a flat with a couple of friends, one of whom was a vegan chef. I learnt several things that summer. Vegan cooking is fantastic for weight loss. I caught sight of myself in the mirror one day and realised that I was SKINNY! I also realised that there was no way in hell I could be vegan. While Chef Leatherbarrow conjured up tasty and wonderful meals, it required culinary skills far beyond my capabilities. The other thing that Monsieur Leatherbarrow let me into was the secret of a good chilli: sugar!

Since then my chilli recipe has developed a wee bit. There was a moment there, where I tried a mushroomless version to please the Frog, but that was just wrong, so the mushies are back.

Vegetarian Chilli

Tin of red kidney beans

tin of chopped tomatoes

big splash of balsamic vinegar

1 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp paprika

a few drops of tabasco sauce

1 tsp chilli/chilli flakes

pepper

coriander fresh and 1/2 tsp ground

onion

1 tbs oil

a small punnet of mushrooms

a red or green (or yellow or orange even) pepper

1. Heat the oil
2. Cook the onion till soft.
3. Add the chilli, paprika and coriander and fry for about a minute (or until you can really smell the spices). 
4. Add the tinned tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, tabasco, sugar and big splash of balsamic vinegar. Bring to the boil and then simmer for about ten to twenty minutes (the longer the better). 
5. Add the kidney beans and its sauce (don't drain them in other words). Cook for about five minutes more until the beans are warmed through. 
6. Add the fresh coriander and ground pepper. 

Serve with plain rice or with wraps and creme fraiche, grated cheese and guacamole (that's the fat version, but very tasty). 

The late Sunday Roast: It's all in the sauce

The Sunday roast is a little late this week as I'm not actually at home. In fact I'm not even cooking. My Mum is. I'm sorry to be boasting, but my Mum is actually a very good cook, which probably explains why I love food. I think in a bizarre and twisted way it also explains why every now and again I crave junk food, but never mind that.

Anyway, Mum's cooking was always very international, what with Mauritius being the island where all the nationalities came together (and not just to make a mean curry). Mauritian food is a mixture of traditional African , Indian, Chinese and French food, mix that all together and you get Mauritian creole food (note that the British who did eventually take over the island and ruled it until 1968 didn't have much influence on the cuisine).

One of my favourite dishes as a kid was mein (pronounced min). Now strictly speaking it's pretty much a stir fry, but my Mum's is always so much better than my stir fry. So here for the first time (on my blog) the secret of the super stir fry mein is going to be shared. Mum says the secret is in the preparation, but I know from communing with me and my wok, that it's actually in the sauce.

Mein

Any vegetables you like, chop them thin and diagonally if possible
any meat/fish/chicken/seafood sliced in thin and diagonal slices too (obviously prawns are exempt from this)
so basically you put in whatever you want, right.
fresh coriander
1 or 2 cloves of garlic
a dash of salt
pepper
2 tsp of (meat use) soya sauce/
(everything else) light soya sauce
2 tbsp vegetable stock
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp seasame oil
2 tbsp red wine/port (alcohol - see, oh no maybe you don't yet, but you will)
medium or fine egg noodles

sauce
3/4 spring onions thinly chopped (keep a handful some aside)
1 lemon juice
1 big clove of garlic crushed
2 tbsp of olive oil
a little bit of water to loosen the sauce
1 green chilli
seasoning

1. Prepare the veg and mix with coriander, garlic and a dash of soya sauce
2. Heat half the oil in the wok until very hot.
3. (Fry meat or chicken until cooked).
4. Put the veg that takes the longest to cook in first, when that starts to soften add the rest.
5. If the wok begins to dry add the stock as necessary, a little at a time.
6. (Add fish or seafood now).
7. When everything is cooked remove from the wok and set aside.
8. Without washing the wok add some boiling water and cook the noodles according to packet instructions, stirring all the time.
9. When the noodles are cooked add some cold water and drain.
10. Add the rest of the oil to the wok until very hot.
11. Gradually add the noodles, veg and meat/chicken/seafood in equal portions. At the same time add the wine and soya sauce to prevent sticking. Keep stirring (don't stop).
12. This is a completely optional thing that we're just hearing about NOW! Make a plain omelette and slice it thinly in diagonals and sprinkle on top of the mein.
13. Sprinkle with the set aside spring onions.
14. Make the sauce.

Eat while it's still hot and I hope you enjoy.

By the way, my mother does not follow recipes. She invents stuff that tastes good, and boy is it difficult to write a recipe following her instructions! She also thinks that the main ingredient is good 'ole TLC.

The Sunday Roast: Cheating

When I lived in the north of Paris, there was this excellent Thai restaurant right down the road. I didn't go there too often. Not since the time the Frog and I went there for a little romantic tête a tête. At the end of the meal we asked for the bill and the Frog made some innocent comment about how they were doing a good trade and the next thing we knew the waitress had sunk into an empty seat at the opposite table, her head in her hands and she was bemoaning that fact. "What's the point of making all this money?" she asked. "When all we do is work, work, work." The Frog and I exchanged uncomfortable glances and after that we always got take out.

We also moved south, where a new Japanese opens every month, but there is a dearth of Thai restaurants. So, when I and some fellow mums had the chance to take a Thai cooking course I jumped at the chance. There was only one problem, or four. Babies and cooking courses do not mix. We made Thai green curry paste from scratch. Don't ask me how, I can't remember. We also made Pad Thai and I can vaguely remember what went into it, but I cannot recall if I had any part in making it. At one point all four babies were screaming at the same time and we were simultaneously trying to shove them into baby carriers and fold napkins (don't ask). Anyway, the point is that I still have no knowledge of Thai cooking, but the course was fun and if you don't take your three month old along I'm sure you'd learn something.

Which still left me with the problem of loving Thai food and having no restaurant or take out place close enough. And that's right, you got it, enter stage left BBC Good Food. Now as you may know by now I worship this site, but their Thai dishes, or at least the dishes that take less than 30 minutes to cook, all use curry paste. And I think that paste is cheating. So is curry sauce. My mum always made curries from a mixture of spices. Hell, I used to make curry by mixing my spices. But back then I wasn't so hungry and had longer than 30 minutes to cook a meal, so now I use paste and sauces. But, there is a but. When you cheat you lose out. Curries (be it Thai or Indian) need time. They always taste better the next day because the food has steeped in the spices. And Thai curry paste (unlike its Indian cousins) on its own is not enough. There needs to be a little something else. So although I cook the Easy Thai Prawn curry frequently, the Prawn Massaman Curry is far superior.

copyright, BBC Good Food

And one of these days I may have a crack at the Pad Thai again.

The Sunday Roast: more than one way to roast a fish

I have recently discovered that fish eating vegetarians are called pescatarians. No, not Presbyterian, pescatarian. I'm not sure I like the label. Obviously I haven't been entirely comfortable with the label vegetarian for the last 14 or so years, not since I started ploughing through the underwater population and then some. I discovered sea fish, fresh water fish, prawns of all sizes, octopus, squid and things that come in shells.

When I go to eat at people's houses for the first time, I've had to explain that I'm a sort of vegetarian, but I eat fish. I'm also a person who is absolutely crap at small talk, so the 'almost vegetarian' thing has always been a bit of an opener to me. First I spout off about how I was vegetarian, and that I thought I could change the world by doing so. Then I went to live in Mexico and saw that ... See and then that leads to talking about travelling and so on. But now there's the term 'pescatarian' and my grand conversation starter is gone. When people ask me if there is anything I don't eat, I'll just reply: 'I'm pescatarian'. And they'll reply: 'Oh, OK.' and that will be then end of it.

I suppose I could talk about my discovery of white fish. Up until recently I ate only tuna, salmon or rainbow trout. I believed there was only one way to eat white fish, and that was wrapped in batter* from your local Fish & Chip shop with a heap load of vinegary chips next to it. Apparently this is not so. Originally, I tried to make my own breaded or battered fish to keep up with appearances and that was an unmitigated soggy disaster. Then I discovered BBC Good Food. Like a knight in shining armour it rode onto my web browser and introduced me to 'Tomato & Thyme Cod'. It is so simple that you wonder if there should be more ingredients, but it's so tasty that whenever I don't know what to cook, it just jumps out. It's not my own recipe, I haven't adapted it in anyway. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

copyright, BBC Good Food website

*As soon as I dig up a good batter recipe I will be trying to do this in my new Actifry. Expect a review soon, very soon.

The Sunday Roast: Magic Mushrooms

In the past the thing that I liked about the onset of autumn was that a new series of ER would start, there would be mushrooms in the shops and pumpkins. Well, ER is gone for good and the two vegetables the frog really can't stand are mushrooms and pumpkin. The pumpkin soup is not such a big deal since Covent Garden Soups started appearing in the local Monoprix. They provide lovely winter warmth and far more variety than the 3 litres of pumpkin soup I would churn out. The mushrooms; however, are a bit of a problem. I love them. There are so many varieties, they have such cool names: horn of plenty, pied de mouton, chanterelle, shitake. And they taste so damn nice. The weekend before my daughter was born I was hosting a dinner party for six. Mushroom stroganoff was the main, with a separate chicken dish for the frog. And the reason that I was thinking of mushrooms today was because I still had two thirds of a punnet in the fridge. A friend had come round for mushroom curry during the week, but I won't share that recipe, because it wasn't the recipe. I think I have a much better korma recipe somewhere that I will share when I find it.

So yep, there I was with some spare mushrooms that really needed eating and what could I do? When I remembered my other staple pasta dish, I got so excited about eating it that I forgot to make something else for the frog!

Creamy Mushroom Pasta

1 onion

1 garlic clove

button mushrooms (as many or as little as you want), chopped

3 tbs (or more) creme fraiche/sour cream

1/2 tsp paprika

pepper

a knob of butter

1. Cook the pasta.
2. Melt the butter in a pan.
3. Cook the onion and garlic till soft.
4. Add mushrooms and cook for a few minutes.
5. Add 2 tablespoons of cream, the paprika and pepper, stir and simmer for a few minutes.
6. When the mushrooms are soft and just before serving add the rest of the cream.

Enjoy. 

Picture from the Internet

The Sunday Roast: The quest for the holy arrabiata sauce

The problem with arrabiata sauce (and believe me I have tried many), is that no two places make it the same way. Some places use tomato sauce, others use real tomatoes. Some places use lots of sauce, others lots chilli. For me arrabiata is less a picture in a recipe book, but a vague sensation of tingliness in my mouth with a sweet after taste. It really seems a bit like a quest for something a little unattainable.

Between 2005 and 2007 I worked in a different location. This was cool on a number of counts. I had a different journey into work, I took pictures of the Eiffel Tower every morning for a couple of months, and more importantly, I had different fodder for lunch.

One of my favourite haunts was Deli's a chain of 'traiteurs' in Paris, which unlike other traiteurs, is not Chinese or French. Originally Deli's stuck to Italian, but by 2007 had branched into some curries and Thai food,  but my favourite was the arrabiata.

And then I moved back to my usual workplace and I realised that I was going to have to make my own sauce.

In the end after a bit of experimenting (read that as many, many versions), we (me and chief taster, the frog) decided the sun dried tomatoes were not really that necessary, but the cherry tomatoes were. Penne was nicer than fusilli and you don't really need lemon zest. So...

The Holy Arrabiata Sauce

serves 2

10 - 12 cherry tomatoes

1 tsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp sugar

1 big garlic clove

squirt of lemon (optional)

chilli flakes (1-2 tsp to your taste)

1. Cook pasta
2. Chop the tomatoes in half and heat with the garlic in the oil until warm.
3. Add the balsamic vinegar, sugar and lemon. Bring to the boil then simmer for a few minutes. 
4. Whack in the pasta, twirl it around until the sauce is well mixed.
5. Stick it in a couple of past bowls (plates don't let you mop up the sauce). 
6. Scatter some parmesan if you feel like it.

Voila!

The Sunday Roast: Alex's chocolate cake

A while ago, I had the fortune to eat the best chocolate cake ever. When the frog came home from work, I even told him that I had eaten the best chocolate cake ever. This was cruel on two counts. Firstly, he was engaged in a battle of the taste buds, where the men folk at his work place were trying to create the best chocolate cake ever and I had therefore quashed his dream of ever achieving this impossible task. Secondly, I didn't even save him a crumb, I ate it all.

Fortunately for the frog, the next time I met the chef during the week she handed over a huge chunk of the chocolate cake. She was going away for the weekend and I had obviously enjoyed it so much that she wanted it to go to a good home. Plus, I told her how upset the frog was that I failed to even think about bringing him a slice home.

This second piece provided dessert for a couple of nights and thus became my obsession. It was still soft and spongy despite its age. As you bit into it, every now and again there would be hard chocolate bits that you just let melt on your tongue. It was neither too sweet, nor too bitter. It was quite simply perfect. And the chef promised me the recipe.

I've had this recipe for well over a year now. I have baked other inferior chocolate cakes. I have begun to be able to cook other types of cake, but I just can't bring myself to cook this one. For a start, the shocking thing is that the chef calls it banana bread. "But, but, but..." I remembered myself spluttering. But indeed, it contains copious amounts of banana... and chocolate.

I guess it's a bit like when you find yourself imitating your favourite writer instead of finding your own voice. In the end it's just a pale imitation.

So for now, I'm concentrating on carrot cake and blueberry muffins. I like them, but I have nothing to really imitate, I just need to please myself there. When I get them perfect, or just damn good, then and only then, may I be ready to tackle the banana bread.

The Sunday Roast: Rosti Topped Fish Pie

During my blogging break, I have rediscovered the kitchen. Really cooking is like writing. Like every creative process there are skills to be learnt and knowledge to be gained. Then we begin tinkering. I take something that someone has already created, I read what other people have changed and I adapt as I see fit. Sometimes my adaptations are caused by lack of ingredients: mustard for horseradish, tikka massala paste for harissa. Sometimes at the end, its so far removed from the recipe that about the only thing I've kept the same are the quantities, and then again a few grams here or there.

After tinkering comes eating/editing. Is this good? What if we tried it this way or put more of this and less of that? Like writing, the eating process is best done with a good editing partner. Usually by the time I sit down to eat, I'm so hungry I'd eat anything, but the person I cook for is more exigent.

Then you go back and cook it again.

What you cook is never the same twice and sometimes it is great and sometimes it is terrible.

I have never created my own recipe, but I'm beginning to think that really, it's all been cooked before. Old Gordon, Jamie and the rest are just really recreating. They add something special and maybe spicy, but there is another version of it somewhere. In writing that something special and spicy that you add is your voice and how you mix the ingredients.

So now I am off to mix some ingredients together. I am thoroughly in love with this terribly British site. A smile spreads across my face when the weekly newsletter arrives. This dish is simple, quick (as is everything I try from here) and still tasty and filling.

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