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.

Sunday 25 October - Crab Gratin

After Saturday nights fishy disaster, I was slightly anxious about doing anything with the crabs we had also picked up at the same time as the monkfish, but as it's a favourite I thought it should be ok.

This was a Valentine Warner recipe for a starter, but we padded it out by serving some boiled potatoes and salad with it, and also making some bread rolls to dunk into the crab mixture.

The recipe called for a greater proportion of white meat than brown, but having bought dressed crabs we had this the opposite way round - I would probably add more white meat, for texture if I made this again

This was made a bit like a basic roux sauce, with the addition of some flavourings, and unusually alcohol as well as milk.

Once the roux sauce was made, the crab meat was folded into it.

Poured into gratin dishes, and topped with a breadcrumb, gruyere and parsley mix before baking.

We made some crusty brown rolls topped with oats to serve with these.

Pleased to say, that this was absolutely delicious.

Saturday 24 October - Monkfish

I've decided to blog this, as it was something new, however, I really disliked it, and ended up eating the potatoes and artichokes, and moving the very expensive fish to one side.

We had gone over to the fish sheds hoping to find scallops, but they didn't have any. I spotted a monkfish, and realised I've hardly ever cooked this before, so we went for that.

First problem was that it came as it was, skin and all, so we had to watch a video on how to fillet and skin a monkfish tail.

For a first attempt, I think we actually did rather well

A stuffing was made from herbs, garlic and toasted pine nuts, all whizzed up together

This was then sandwiched between the fillets of fish,.

The fish, was then wrapped in parma ham, and tied with cooks string, before browning in oil, and it was then finished off in the oven.

This was served on a bed of cubed roasted potatoes, cooked with some rosemary, and some artichoke hearts that I had picked up frozen in the Turkish Supermarket, and some homemade tartare sauce.

I was really pleased with presentation, and how the fish was cooked, but sadly, it just wasn't to my taste.
The spare bits of fish are in the freezer, and will be used in a fish pie later this week.

Friday 2 October - Ham, Leek and Cider Pan Pie

Although we were not going to buy any more recipe books, a copy of Pie by Angela Boggiano for £4 was too good not to bring home.

The first recipe to catch my eye was a very simple one for Ham, Leek and Cider Pan pie - all cooked in the one pan, so very little washing up. As there were only two of us, I didn't splash out on a gammon joint, but bought a couple of steaks instead - unsmoked here, which is unusual for us as we always have smoked gammon or bacon by preference.

Simple ingredient - carrot, leek, the gammon, a potato and some fresh thyme from the garden.

The leeks were chopped and fried in butter, then in went all the rest of the ingredients, and fried gently for a few minutes.

Then, in with a spoonful of flour, and a can of cheap old Lidl cider. This was then all simmered for around half an hour - the recipe said to add creme fraiche at this stage, but I added that right at the end of this stage.

The pie filling, still in the cooking dish was topped with a suet crust pastry  - the easiest pastry in the world to make

Unusually, the cooking of pastry carried on on the stove top, with a tight fitting lid on top - I popped it all into a hot oven for 5 minutes right at the end to brown it off.

The pastry came out quite light and flaky, and was delicious - we just served this with broccoli as there was already plenty of veg in the pie filling. For something so simple, this was absolutely delicious, and will become a bit of a favourite in this house

Sunday 27 September - Finnish Pea and Ham Soup

Spotted this on The Hairy Bikers programme last week, and George said he liked the look of it. I can't often get him to eat either peas, or soup, so thought this was worth a try.

I started by soaking the gammon hock, as I find they can be rather salty.

 

The peas were also soaked, and then boiled for 10 minutes.

The Gammon was then simmered for an hour with some mace, an onion studded with cloves, and a couple of bay leaves.

Then in with the soaked peas, and some chopped onion and carrot and it was cooked for another hour or so until the peas were soft.

The meat was shredded, and the peas and broth blended together ( it took a while to locate the cloves to remove them as the whole onion had broken up during the cooking). As it was blended a big spoonful of English Mustard and a dash of cream were added. I'm not keen on mustard, but this really lifted the flavour of the soup.

This made a delicious thick soup - nothing else really needed for a meal, although we served it with some home made rolls.

Friday 29 August - Crab Cakes with Chilli Jam

I've always wanted to make crab cakes, but most recipes I've looked at include just silly amounts of white crabmeat. However, I found a lovely looking recipe in a Sarah Raven book that just called for crabmeat, so I bought a couple dressed crabs, plus a few extra claws.

We started by making the chilli jam to serve with them, this also had the advantage of using up lots of our homegrown tomatoes.

Our own chillies also went into this-they are lovely and hot this year.

Chillies, garlic and ginger were processed along with half of the tomatoes.

Red wine wine gar and fish sauce were added, and then the rest of the tomatoes roughly chopped, along with some sugar. Then it was all cooked until lovely and thick and sticky 

Plenty of this left over for another day too.

For the cakes, the crabmeat was mixes with mayonnaise, breadcrumbs, hopped herbs and chillies, and some Worcester sauce and lemon juice.

It was all bound together with an egg yolk, before forming into cakes and into the fridge to firm up before we coated them in egg and breadcrumbs.

They were then shallow fried, before being served with chips and the chilli jam.

Tuesday 25 August - Swedish Meatballs

We were inspired to make these by a visit to IKEA . Although we've never had meatballs there, they seemed to be popular there so we thought we'd have a go. Although there were frozen ones on offer, we decided to have a go ourselves, although this vital accompaniment was purchased on the way out

I googled lots of recipes, and the main differences were whether to add dill or not. I decided to add it ( a decision that George wasn't happy with.

Lots of dill and parsley were finely chopped.

These were added to a fairly basic meatball mix- pork, eggs, dried breadcrumbs, some milk and salt and pepper.

I rolled this mixture into fairly small balls, and they were fried in olive oil.

The sauce was made, by adding flour to the fat left in the pan, along with a spoonful of the jam, some beef stock, cream and lemon juice.

then the meatballs went back in, and were simmered for a while to heat through.

Served with mash, and more of the jam, and I thought they were delicious - teenagers may prefer them with no dill though.