Sunday 29 November - Goats Cheese Tarts

I decided to have a go at making some puff pastry myself in order to make some simple cheese tarts.

I was surprised to find that it's made with bread flour, and also that there are equal quantities of fat and flour in the recipe. Having looked at several books I went with rubbing a tiny bit of fat into the flour, before adding the water to make a dough. This was rolled out, and folded around that bashed out flat butter.

This was then rested in the fridge, folded and rolled several times, before a final chilling in the fridge.
It actually wasn't difficult, but very time consuming with all the waiting round between rollings.

While the pastry was resting I made some onion filling for the tarts.

Sliced onions, garlic and thyme were cooked slowly in butter, then towards the end as they softened, I added some brown sugar and balsamic vinegar.

I spread this over the rolled out pastry, and topped with thinly sliced tomatoes. For George I added mozarella, and for me some sliced goats cheese.

I scored a border onto the pastry, and glazed this with egg before baking in a really hot oven.

I was pretty proud of this as it rose beautifully, and was really crisp. Would probably leave the tomato off if I did it again though, as it didn't really add much to the flavour of the dish.

Saturday 21 November - Duck in Spiced Orange

We got up a bit late, and while eating breakfast we saw Rick Stein on TV cooking this Vietnamese duck dish which looked delicious. A trip to our favourite butcher to buy a duck, and we were out of luck - they had just sold the last one, so after annoying him greatly buy changing our minds about duck breasts, we ended up with four legs - one of which has gone into the freezer for another day.

This was actually a pretty simple recipe, although it took a while as it had to be braised for quite a long time.

The worst part of the process was squeezing 14 oranges, although we used the squeezer attachment on the food processor for the first time ever to speed things up.

The spices we used were ginger, garlic, fresh lemon grass, chillies (the last from our garden) and star anise.
The other flavours were spring onions, the orange juice and some fish sauce.

First of all the duck legs were browned, and then the excess fat poured off.

 Then the crushed garlic, and chopped ginger were fried gently.

 Then in with the spices, the orange juice and the fish sauce, before adding the duck legs back in.

 After a couple of hours, in went the spring onions and it was finished off for around another half hour.

Before serving the sauce was thickened with cornflour.

There was no suggestion in the book as to what to serve with this, so we added steamed jasmine rice, and a cucumber salad, and a few crunchy spring rolls.