Saturday 23 January - Nopi Belly Pork

I bought myself the Nopi cookbook with some Christmas money I was given, and it is the most beautiful looking book that I own. We had a quick flick through, and found a recipe for Belly pork, on a bed of crushed butternut, with a really unusual sounding apple and walnut salsa. Not a combination I would think of, so thought it was worth a try


The pork was prepared by rubbing lemon into the skin, leaving to dry out, before rubbing with salt - this was supposed to guarantee a crispy skin.

The pork was placed on a bed of aromatics - ginger, lemon grass, thyme and lots of garlic.

It was then roasted at a high temperature initially, before wine and water were added and it was finished at a lower temperature for several hours.

The squash was roasted, before being crushed with the addition of butter, miso paste and rice wine vinegar.

The salsa was a mixture of chopped apple, toasted walnuts, pickled walnuts (provided by The Bytham Kitchen as a Christmas present. chopped tarragon along with Yuzu juice, mirin and olive oil.

The combination of ingredients in the Salsa would never have occurred to me, but worked really well with the fatty, crispy pork.

Saturday 9 January - Circassian Chicken

This recipe is from the new Rick Stein - Venice to Istanbul book. A fairly straight forward poached chicken, but with two sauces.

I started by making proper chicken stock from some chicken legs and chopped vegetables.

 

While that was bubbling away, I roasted some peppers for the chilli sauce.

These were skinned, seeded and then pureed with some tomato puree, chilli powder and olive oil.

I poached a whole chicken in the stock, and the meat was shredded.

The walnut sauce was made by powdering walnuts in the food processor, and adding some fresh breadcrumbs, crushed garlic and some of the cooking liquid from the chicken

 

The chicken shreds were dressed with the walnut sauce, and then the red pepper sauce was drizzled over the top before serving.

To serve with it, I had planned to make 'Spoon Salad', but realised I was missing fresh herbs, so improvisation was called for. I chopped tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, feta and olives, and dressed them with pomegranage molasses, a spoonful of mint sauce and some lemon juice.

I also made some Persian Flatbread, which was brushed with butter and sprinkled with Nigella seeds prior to baking.

This was delicious, and has left us with a big pan of chicken stock for the freezer, as well as some very happy cats who are eating the chicken scraps

Thursday 7 January - Spinach Ravioli with Burrata

After George cooked an amazing meal for us over Christmas, I decided that Thursday nights he is cooking for us. He went through a book and came up with a recipe that needed Burrata -something I've never tried before, and would probably cost a fortune. I agreed to meet him off the bus from school outside Waitrose, and we went in search of this mythical ingredient. Bonus, it was reduced! We snapped up the last two tubs.

The other bizarre thing about his menu choice is that it included spinach - something that he loved as a baby, but has refused to eat for the last 12 years. he decided to go with it, and this was steamed, drained thoroughly and pureed.

I persuaded him that pasta made by hand wasn't worth the effort, and the spinach, eggs and flour went into the food processor to make the dough.

 

This dough was then rested, and rolled out in my cheat Kitchen Aid pasta machine

This is what the dough looked  like, before and after rolling

The plain burrata was made into ravioi, with just a tiny sprinkle of parmesan.

It was left to dry for a bit, on a tray with loads of flour ( we have learned from our mistakes on this!)

The 'Sauce' was butter, pine nuts and fresh rosemary

Poured over the pasta, which was cooked for a couple of minutes, and sprinkled with a bit more parmesan.

Saturday 2 January - Chilli Beef Rendang

We were planning on making a Chinese Meal, but then spotted James Martin making this on Saturday Morning TV. Although we all love curry, I suffer a bit with eating lots of onions, so it's rather dropped off the menu recently - this looked like something that we would all enjoy without too many after effects!

The recipe started with a paste of shallots, garlic, lemon grass, ginger and chillies.

This was stirred into beef cubes and it was left to marinate while we went shopping.

After a few hours, some whole spices were fried, before adding the meat.

The liquids were then added, coconut milk, fish sauce, some beef stock, tamarind and palm sugar, and it was all left to simmer for a few hours.

Once the meat was tender, some lime juice was added to finish the curry off.

We served this with a pickled carrot salad, prawn crackers, rice, and some little prawn spring rolls.

Thursday 31 December - Burgers

We decided to have a burger New Years Eve Supper, but the challenge was to make the whole lot from scratch.

I started with the buns - I've never made brioche before, so thought it was worth a go. It was similaar to my normal burger buns, but with the addition of eggs, some butter, and a bit more sugar than I'd normally use. The dough was very soft, and quite slow to rise, but I managed to shape it into 8 burger style buns.

Next onto one of the side dishes - I made a simple coleslaw, using yoghurt mixed in with the mayonnaise, as I find it a bit too oily without.

For the other accompaniments I made thin cut potato chips, and also some beer battered onion rings.

Burger sauce was made from scratch too - basically mixing together all the sauces you would put on a burger anyway.

Now for the burgers themselves - we minced up some rump steaks, and added a little fried onion, and lots of salt and pepper.

I moulded the meat around some sliced emmenthal cheese to make an inside out cheeseburger.

Finally the burgers were fried, we were aiming to have them slightly pink in the middle.

Once they were ready the sandwiches were assembled - toasted rolls, mayo, burger, sliced tomato and blued cheese on top, along with some crisp pancetta slices.

Served with the coleslaw, fries, onion rings and of course a giant pickle. This was easily the best burger I have ever eaten, but such a lot of work to have everything ready at the same time, so will be reserved to have for a special treat.

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.