Italy

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There’s no doubt in my mind that first and foremost I’m an Italophile (yes it’s a word – I checked). Forget France or Spain – It’s got to be Italy every time, for so many reasons: the people, their innate style, the organic (and terrifying) approach to driving, the lack of cynicism and abundance of friendliness, the ability to enjoy life without doing so in a state of inebriation and, most of all, the best food in the world. By far. For me, it’s the way Italian dishes employ ingredients in such an incredibly simple, sympathetic way and with great respect. No fuss. No mess. No overly rich sauces. Food where everything on the plate contributes to making the dish perfect, with nothing in there that doesn’t need to be. I’m actually salivating right now (although maybe that’s because someone just shoved a chocolate brownie under my nose).

Anyway, I recently started regularly cooking risotto and after a few attempts, I think I just about have it down. To be honest it’s not so difficult, just more time consuming than you would expect. Here goes…

Mushroom risotto

You need a litre of good chicken stock for this dish, which I suggest you make, but if you have to you can buy ready made.

Start by chopping a few handfuls of whatever mushrooms you fancy (I used organic chestnut mushrooms) and take a small handful of dried porcini mushrooms and pop them in a glass of hot water for a little while. Fry the mushrooms in butter with plenty of salt and pepper and set aside for later.

Next, finely chop an onion and a clove of garlic, and fry gently without taking on any colour in butter and a little olive oil. Once softened, add your arborio (risotto) rice (a mug of rice should be enough for two people) and completely coat it in the oniony oil. Add a glass of wine to the pan and gently stir as the liquid reduces. Then add a ladle of the chicken stock and continue to stir.

Each time the liquid reduces, add another ladle and keep stirring. Now just keep doing this until the rice is almost cooked (but still has a bite) and the whole dish starts to look a little creamy. Add seasoning as necessary, remembering that the chicken stock already will have been seasoned.

Stir in all your mushrooms and keep on the heat for a few more minutes before grating loads of good parmesan into the pan, followed by a handful of chopped parsley.

Serve.

Receive praise.

Thai chick

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OK – the prophecy has been fulfilled and the house is a bomb site. Smashed glasses, marbles in every corner of the room (don’t give your five year old access to kerplunk unless you want to be picking little glass balls out of every orifice for the next week) and yes I am in the corner, not weeping, but trembling – they know exactly which buttons to push…

We ate well though – two dishes for the record, neither of which I can take credit for – both of these came from Nigel Slater, who may be a little annoying on the tv but he is a great writer and his food is always brilliant (if you buy any cookery book, buy Good Food – you’ll thank me for it)

Thai Chicken Wings

Easy one this and the best chicken wings I’ve made for a while. Take the wings and put them in a freezer bag with a few finely chopped cloves of garlic, a few seeded red chillies, a few tablespoons of Nam Pla (Thai fish sauce) and of sesame oil, the juice of a lime and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Give it a good jiggle about and leave it for as long as you can (an hour is enough, but a few hours is better).

Heat the oven to about 200 c and roast the wings on a baking tray for about 35 minutes, turning once or twice throughout.

When you take them out, sprinkle them with some fresh coriander and serve with a chilli dipping sauce, made with a simple mix of rice wine vinegar, lime juice, dark soy sauce, sugar, finely chopped red chillies (again seeded) and fresh coriander…

Thai Green Curry

I think this one is probably more strenuous to write than to cook, so here goes…

You start by making the curry paste. Take a blender and put the following in it, all roughly chopped: four seeded green chillies, three cloves of garlic, two lemongrass stems, a big thumb of ginger, two small onions or shallots and a handful of fresh coriander. Then get a pestle and mortar and grind a teaspoon each of coriander seeds, cumin seeds and peppercorns. pop them in the mixer along with the zest and juice of a lime and a glug of Nam Pla. Blend it. That’s it.

You will only need about four tablespoons of this for the curry so you’ll probably have some spare. In order to keep the vibrant green colour, put the remainder in an ice cube mould and freeze – you can then store in the freezer for ages…

Now, about half an hour before you want to eat, take a saucepan and pour into it a 400ml can of coconut milk, half a pint of chicken stock, 8 lime leaves, more Nam Pla, a tablespoon of green peppercorns and a handful of chopped coriander. At this point, I also added the leftover dipping sauce from the wings (which really worked – so if you haven’t done the wings, just add a nice glug of rice wine vinegar – adds a lovely sourness to the dish).

Take a few breasts of chicken cut into thin strips and fry them until golden brown in small batches in a wok, and them pop them into the saucepan. Do the same with  a couple of handfuls of chestnuts mushrooms.

Now cook it all together for about 10 minutes and you’re done…

You can serve this with rice (see the Iranian rice recipe in my archives – I know, I should have done sticky fragrant Thai rice, but I didn’t so you’ll have to make do. Or go to a proper food blog and get the recipe there…). Alternatively, do what I did and serve with rice noodles, boiled and then fried in the wok you used for the chicken and mushrooms, with a little butter and sesame oil.

Oh, and chuck another handful of chopped coriander over the lot just before serving.

A chicken in the oven

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Going to get the shorts later so I’m preparing myself for another weekend of mayhem. The house is in perfect order and quaking in its boots because it knows that it’s only going to last a few more hours before it’s systematically taken apart piece by piece. I’m going to sound ocd here but it’s an unshakable fact that tidiness and order are the first (and most badly injured) casualties of parenthood. I’m trying to think of a good image here – I’m picturing hyenas ripping apart the carcass of a barely breathing and once majestic zebra, or better, crazed looters storming through a post-apocalytic Selfridges, the hitherto paragon of order and style now reduced to a crumbling wreck with ripped-apart agent provocateur undies, butchered chloe bags, smashed bottles of italian black truffle oil and shredded prada strewn about the place and, in the corner, a small perfectly-clad shop assistant hunched up and quietly weeping behind her counter…
I’m the shop assistant I think. Well, a male version of her. It’s not making huge sense really, but hopefully you get the idea..

Anyway, on to food. This is an old one that I just saw a picture of and it’s a good crowd pleaser – especially for the house wrecking entourage. It’s also really easy to do, so well worth a try…

Roast chicken, in a casserole dish, with some onions and garlic.

Start with a whole chicken (splash out and get a decent one – it makes a big difference especially with this recipe) and cut it into pieces (wings, breasts, legs and thighs), putting them all in the dish with the skin facing up. Next, take some small onions or shallots, peel and cut in half, and a few bulbs of garlic also cut in half. Now pour over half a bottle of half decent white wine (with a large spoonful of wholegrain mustard) and some good olive oil –  covering the onions, chicken and garlic. Season it very well with lots of salt and pepper and loads of tarragon.



Shove it in a hot (220 degrees) oven for 40 minutes and you’re done (for the avoidance of doubt this is before it went into the oven…)

In the meantime make whatever veg you like – this time I made mash (with milk and cream and wholegrain mustard), and steamed green beans tossed in olive oil, salt and pepper and chopped garlic – my favourite…

Actually, you can see a mushroom in the pic (you can’t any more because I removed the picture from the post) – I must have added a few half way through the cooking – makes sense – give it a try…

As I think about it, I really need to get some decent lighting for these photos. And a decent camera. And maybe some photography lessons, because they really are quite crap…


Cauliflower

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I’m not sure what it is about cauliflower that turns some people off – it makes a fantastic puree to sit under a slab of beef fillet, or a sweet pan-fried scallop (I don’t think I have that recipe in here, but I’m going to add it for sure). It provides the most important chunky bits in a jar of piccalilli (thinks back to years gone by with his mother forcing dollops of yellow gunk on his plate to go with the cold turkey and ham – actually pretty special stuff, as long as it’s home made – the shop bought stuff is shit, lets be honest). But most important of all, without cauliflower, we would never have the joy of cauliflower cheese. And so I say to those people: you’re all nobs – you don’t know what you’re missing…

This is, I think, the best cauliflower cheese you will ever have eaten – oh yes…

Cauliflower Cheese – for a few people

Take a cauliflower, cut the core in half and pull it into two big pieces. Next, cut out the core and pull the cauliflower into decent sized florets. Keep some of the outer leaves – there’s nothing wrong with them and they deseve to sit alongside the rest of the cauli when it goes into the oven…

Put the florets into a pan of boiling salted water and cook for about 5 minutes, then drain and put them into a casserole dish along with the outer leaves that you set aside.

Chop a red chilli (I know I use chillies all the time, but believe me it really works in here – just gives it an extra depth and a little splash of red), and sprinkle over the cauliflower.

Now make a quick roux – melt a really large knob of butter in a saucepan, add a 3-4 heaped tablespoons of flour and mix together over the heat, add two big glugs of marsala and whisk, then slowly add milk, constantly whisking (I think you’re supposed to use a wooden spoon but it’s far too much work and one of those whisks that has a flat bottom works so much better in my experience). You probably need between a quarter to half a pint. When you’re done, you will have a rich thick sauce. Now pour in a few glugs of double cream, a big tablespoon of dijon mustard and season with salt and pepper. Oh yep – forgot the cheese. Grate mature cheddar (as much as you want depending on how cheesy you want it – I think I used about 100g), and then give it all a good stir.

Now we all have different tastes with regards to how thick things should be, so I’ll let you decide what works for you – what you should know however is that the sauce will thin very very slightly in the oven as the cauliflower loses some of its water during the cooking process (and when it cools it will thicken like mad).

Pour this mixture over the cauliflower and give it a nudge so that it’s penetrated fully. Put it the oven at 180 degrees c and cook for 35-40 minutes.

It will come out golden brown and gloopy – perfect with a crusty loaf!

Enjoy…

Coffee

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I just bought a Nespresso machine.

As a general principle I have a problem with the whole Nespresso thing. It’s akin to expensive ready meals, requiring no skill or effort apart from inserting a shiny little aluminium capsule (M&S meal for one) into the coffee machine (microwave). It goes against my most closely held food principle – don’t get someone else to make something that you can make yourself, better. It also follows the slightly chilling model pioneered by printer manufacturers and games console companies – sell the machine cheap (relatively that is) and make a killing on the ink/games/coffee capsules.

But despite all that, I went ahead and bought one. Mainly because I’ve spent the last two years trying to get a good cup of coffee out of a range of traditional devices and I have failed miserably. I bought stove-top espresso machines and expensive pump-driven Gaggias, yet still couldn’t make a cup of coffee that tasted like anything other than dishwater with a day old fag end stubbed in it.

It took me an age (and countless cups of truly revolting muck) to realise that unless you are making hundreds of cups of espresso every day, a traditional coffee machine will always give you thin, bitter tasting coffee – the same coffee that each morning in a decent coffee shop gets thrown away as part of the machine cleaning process (it’s a bit like the first pancake – sort of. Or the first pint of beer – hopefully you get the idea).

So it was with a heavy, and yet secretly excited, heart that I trudged (maybe I jaunted) along to John Lewis to buy myself a “Nespresso Citiz and Milk” machine. I know – crap name. It’s almost enough to put you off buying the machine, but the competition isn’t much better and with pride duly swallowed, I went ahead and made the purchase.

Bloody brilliant – I think that’s all I need to say – except I love it – apart from the fact that you can only buy coffee through their (wanky) website or at Selfridges (not elitist then), it’s completely perfect. All you do is turn it on, press a button to run hot water into your cup (to warm it), slip in a capsule, drain the water from your cup and press a button again. Done. Then just run it again without the capsule to clean it. Bloody brilliant like I said.

Oh and the result is very, very good – seriously – it makes a really, really good cup of coffee.

It also does cappuccino if you’re so inclined, but to be honest, you shouldn’t be.

And if you want an old Gaggia just give me a shout…

Marrakech

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Had to put a picture from Marrakech in here – it’s a fantastic place, well worth a visit. One thing we got completely wrong however was the food – for some reason we had this idea that we would be sitting there with plates of mezze-like delights in front of us, rich with hummus, aubergines, olives and lightly charred flat breads. Why on earth we thought that we’d get Lebanese food in Morocco I have no idea, but we all get things wrong from time to time. Click the pics for high res views…

In fact, while the traditional food was fun (pastry parcels, tagines, couscous, pastry parcels, tagines, couscous, etc), the properly good nosh was to be found in the colonial restaurants in the new town and the frantic open air food stalls in the main square of the Medina. I urge you to give it a whirl – even for a weekend – it’s a lovely place with really lovely people…(and make sure you stay in a riad in the Medina, not one of those soulless hotels in the middle of nowhere)

Thanks Jon…

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Just want to say a huge thank you to Jon McBoof Marks for generously retweeting the link to this blog along with such kind words…

If you feel inclined to read about Bob Dylan and random thoughts on technology, or if you want to leave a rude comment, then give him a try… http://jonontech.com/

I really mean it this time…

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I’ve tried three times to get back into doing this blog and this time I’m going to persevere. I promise…

After having made my now famous ceviche a few nights ago (yes, I have had people come up to me in the street telling me about how they loved it), I had left over stuff that needed eating and this turned out really well.

Coriander and chilli tuna
Finely chop a handful of fresh coriander and half a red chilli and sprinkle over course ground sea salt and black pepper (with a dash of cumin if you fancy it), then rub a couple of nice thick tuna steaks with olive oil and dip them into the spicy herby mix, covering them all over. Let them sit for as long as you like and then fry in a searing hot pan for 45 seconds on each side. Leave to stand and serve with a green salad with red onion, dressed simply with lemon or lime juice and a good olive oil, well seasoned.


Turns out that last night I still had some coriander left over, so I did the same as above but with beef fillet (and added freshly ground cumin, coriander and fennel seeds) – really really good…