Clearing the freezer - we're getting there, honestly

"Baguette" more or less

Well, this is all inordinately stressful. The builders went quiet on us for a couple of weeks as the date we have to vacate this house got closer and closer and we weren't getting any answers as to when we would be able to move in to the new place. We have, finally, more or less got a plan. Not a very good one, but it may actually be workable.

charcuterie platter

And emptying the fridge/freezer/pantry carries on apace. I can't remember if I posted about the 5kg bag of chapatti flour that I bought, mistakenly thinking it was 500g. Anyway, there is still quite a lot of flour in it. I followed my usual King Arthur baguette recipe, but using a mixture of strong white, plain light brown and chapatti flour. It ended up with a tighter crumb than usual, but it was just the thing with a charcuterie plate (which also used up some potted wild boar from the freezer and pickled cherries from the pantry).

Teacakes - using up flour, dried cherries and sultanas

Basically I am refusing to cook anything at the moment that doesn't clear out a jar, packet or freezer bag.

More robust than the bought ones, still good to convey butter

Porky stew, using pork jowl, chicken stock and lentils

Thai-ish mussel stew using frozen mussels, sambal paste, coconut milk and chicken broth

Calamondin iced tea - using lots of frozen calamondins

This biryani was actually inspired by the book I am reading at the moment - Chasing the Dram. Rachel makes a pretty solid argument for drinking whisky and soda with curry meals and includes Mallika Basu's venison biryani recipe. And it just so happened that I had some venison in the freezer. Not enough, though, but I also had some goat steaks in the freezer, so mine was a mixed goat and venison biryani. Honestly, I couldn't taste any difference between the meats. It was very good - although next time I will cook the rice almost completely before I layer it. There wasn't enough liquid included to cook the rice properly, so I had to add more and the bottom bit ended up a bit mushy.

Game biryani

Trifle - using chocolate cake trimmings from the freezer and finishing a bottle of Chambord

Sort of Chinese claypot affair, using up chicken, Chinese sausage, pudding rice and chestnuts

Cherry pie

Using the final bag of frozen cherries, the remnants of the bag of dried sour cherries and a jar of cherries in brandy

Purple kale, sausage and bean stew

This was inspired by a Portuguese caldo verde - but it turns out purple kale doesn't lose much colour when it's cooked, unlike a lot of other purple veg, so I guess it is caldo roxo?

Anyway, this is a one-pot meal that requires very little in the way of preparation. But the kale really does take a solid 45 minutes to become tender. I don't think it would have suffered to have an hour and a half.

This isn't a proper recipe. I just sauteed 4 or 5 whole cloves of wet garlic in olive oil, then added a couple of sliced Montbéliard sausages and a small diced potato that needed using up. A good slosh of vermouth, the washed and shredded kale and then I put the lid on for it to steam on a low heat for about half an hour. A tin of cannelini beans, a stock cube and enough boiling water to make it stewy but not soupy. If I was making it for three people I'd add an extra tin of beans but keep the rest the same.

Summer pork hotpot

vegetable bed

 This is another slightly heartier dish that in no way acknowledges that summer is over. It's a one-pot meal but full of light, bright, Mediterranean flavours. It's also a nice way to cook pork rib chops so they are tender and delicious, and if you are a courgette grower, this uses a few up.

Summer Pork Hotpot (serves 2-3)

1 onion, halved and sliced
3 courgettes, cut into chunks
150g cherry tomatoes, halved
3 cloves garlic, peeled and halved
Thyme
100ml white wine or vermouth
2-3 potatoes, peeled and sliced
4 pork rib chops (lean-ish but not super lean)
salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 160C.

In the bottom of a casserole or ovenproof pan with a lid, spread the onion slices. Scatter over the courgette chunks, cherry tomatoes, garlic and some thyme. I used dried, but fresh would be nicer. Sprinkle with white wine or vermouth and season with some salt and pepper.

Top the vegetables with a layer of potato slices, then the pork chops. Season with more salt and pepper.

Cover with the lid and bake gently for an hour, then remove the lid, turn up the heat to 200C and cook for another half hour to get some colour on the spuds. Needs no other accompaniment.

Lamb shanks with borlotti beans and gremolata

It's only the first week of September, but apparently summer is over. There is a chill in the air, and although it's quite sunny today it rained all last week and it was cold enough that I had to get the winter duvet out. Mostly it's just been folded over my feet in bed, to the cat's delight, but I needed to know it was there.

I'm really not quite ready to embrace the colder months. I haven't had my fill of summer salads and fruits, lightly grilled fish and well-chilled white wine. But the other night I was cold and lamb shanks were discounted.

Lamb shanks with borlotti beans and gremolata (serves 2 with leftover beans)

200g dried borlotti beans (or 1 400g can cooked beans if you don't have time/can't be bothered)
2 bay leaves
olive oil
2 anchovy fillets
3 fat cloves garlic, peeled but whole
1 onion, finely diced
2 sticks celery, sliced
2 lamb shanks
white wine or vermouth
chicken stock
2 sprigs rosemary
Bunch flat leaf parsley
Zest of 1 lemon
1 fat clove garlic, extra

Boil the beans and bay leaves hard in lots of water for about 45 minutes or until just tender - this does away with the need to pre-soak them. Drain.

In a flameproof casserole, warm a good slug of olive oil and add the anchovy fillets, garlic, onion and celery. Cook over a medium heat until the vegetables soften, then turn heat up, add the shanks and brown on all sides. Add a healthy glassful of white wine or vermouth, and allow to bubble for a couple of minutes to reduce a bit. Then add the drained beans and enough chicken stock to just cover them. Add the rosemary, cover with a cartouche and the lid and allow to simmer over a low heat. Depending on the age of the lamb and how long you have in hand, it'll be OK in an hour and better in two. Taste for seasoning and add pepper and additional salt if needed.

Mince together the parsley, lemon zest and extra garlic, and use most of it as a garnish, stirring the rest of it into the beans to give them a lift and a small reminder of summer.

Diana Henry's A Bird in the Hand

Chicken with leeks, apples & cider (p 192)

A couple of months ago I posted about Diana Henry's chicken with leeks, apples and cider, the first dish I'd made from her new book, A Bird in the Hand. Well, since I bought the book, we've been eating a lot of chicken. A LOT of chicken. I'm not done with it yet, but I had to draw a line in the sand somewhere, so I thought I'd run through the recipes we've tried so far. I haven't been particularly methodical - I just cooked things I felt like eating rather than strategically providing a broad view. It's worked out pretty balanced, I think, although the recipes I've cooked have veered more towards Asian flavours. I think that is a seasonal thing - I tend to cook more European dishes in winter, so I have lots of things bookmarked that probably won't happen until October.

It's been produced by Diana's usual team, so the design and photographs are typically beautiful. The only real qualm I have with the book is the index, which I only found useful if I remembered the exact name of the dish I wanted to cook. For something like this where chicken is in everything, having dishes indexed by major secondary ingredients or cooking methods would have worked better, I think. I found myself using Eat Your Books a lot for this, once it was indexed.

Turkish-spiced chicken in a wrap with Greek yoghurt

Turkish-spiced chicken with hot green relish (p 32) was one of the dishes served at Diana's book launch party. It's incredibly delicious. Not super hot, but spicy and spiky with salty, herbal, acidic flavours. We don't have a griddle so I cooked the chicken in a cast iron frying pan - it didn't need extra oil for cooking because of the oil in the marinade.

Thai chicken burgers with Asian slaw

I couldn't get minced chicken for the Thai chicken burgers with Asian slaw (p 20), so I put chicken thigh fillets, the lemon grass, onion, ginger, lime zest and coriander through the mincer, then added the breadcrumbs and other seasonings. As you can see from the disconcerting purple speckles on the burger, I used a red onion. They were succulent, with a pleasant lightness from the breadcrumbs and had a very good flavour. The Asian slaw was excellent - just the thing if you find a mayonnaisey slaw cloying.

Royal chicken korma with chapattis and tomato katchumber

The book is divided into sensible (the starter/main/dessert structure doesn't really work with chicken!) but overlapping chapters - every day dishes, comforting dishes, salads, feasting dishes for when you have more time and so on. The Royal chicken korma (p 146) could easily fit into The Spice Route: scented, perfumed, hot chapter, but really it is in the right place in Feast: let's celebrate. It is a fiddle. I have a well-stocked spice cupboard, so I only needed to buy the perishables but even so when I looked down the lengthy ingredients list and read the method my heart sank. But take courage! This is probably the best curry I have ever, ever made. Disgorging and deep frying the onions for the spice paste gives an extraordinary depth of flavour. It is not a dish for every day but it is sublime. And I say that as someone who would never order a korma in a restaurant because I find them bland, sweet and dull.

Vietnamese lemon grass and chilli chicken - served with sauteed cabbage

Infinitely quicker and simpler, but still utterly delicious, was the Vietnamese lemon grass and chilli chicken (p 22). The red chillis I have been getting recently have no heat at all, so I used two without de-seeding and still needed to add a slosh of hot chilli sauce to give it a boost.

Roopa's lemon grass and turmeric chicken

Roopa's lemon grass and turmeric chicken with potato salad and date and tamarind chutney (p 50) is in The Spice Route chapter, but could so easily have fit into Feast. Not that it's particularly involved or that time consuming, but the potato salad accompaniment makes it taste extremely special. I used ground turmeric instead of fresh so my spice paste wasn't very pasty, but it still stuck nicely to the chicken. The potato salad with the chutney ends up tasting a bit like an aloo channa chaat, which is a very good thing for a potato salad to taste like.

Rice cooked in the fragrant chicken juices

The lemon grass and turmeric chicken also produced vast quantities of juices, far too much to serve with the chicken. So I saved it and cooked some basmati rice in it to have with a mutton methi curry later that week. It was so luscious I would do the chicken again just to make some more rice.

Balinese chicken, bean and coconut salad

This Balinese chicken, bean and coconut salad (p 112) was another one from the book launch party. Deliciously fresh and zingy, with a creamy underpinning from the coconut, it's lovely fresh and even though the herbs wilt a bit and lose some crunch, it's very tasty as leftovers.

Soothing North Indian chicken

So far, there has only been one dish that has really disappointed. The soothing North Indian chicken (p 185) just didn't work for me at all - very bland, and the yoghurt split even without boiling the sauce after adding it. The following day I turned the leftovers into a sort of biryani, stirring it through rice seasoned with cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and turmeric, which was much more to my taste.

Negima yakitori cooking

I've made negima yakitori before, so I was very interested in Diana's version (p 172). Mine were not the dainty morsels of her method, because I wanted to use my big, flat, metal skewers, but the flavour was excellent. I particularly appreciated the instruction to start grilling the seasoned chicken before basting with the sauce - so many recipe writers don't seem to understand how quickly things burn if they are marinated in a sugary sauce before cooking. The skewered spring onions add a lot of moisture and flavour to the chicken, and the little sprinkle of shichimi togarashi at the end adds a nice spicy kick.

They were very small aubergines - which we also basted with some of the yakitori tare

For Easter we decided to do something really extravagant and indulgent. Not just the indulgence of Roast chicken with truffles (p 150): we made it with a 3.95kg cockerel.

Steam rising from Roast cockerel with truffles

Obviously we ignored the cooking times for the massive beast, following the instructions on the box instead. We also ignored the serving suggestion of sauteed potatoes and watercress, going instead for Sunday lunch accompaniments of roast potatoes and sweet potatoes, and some peas. The buttery truffle sauce meant that no butter was needed on the peas. This was lovely, definitely worth getting a slow-grown chicken for, and we still have half a jar of black truffle slices left, so we're considering doing it again at Christmas (which is probably the next time fresh cockerel will be available).

Extravagant Sunday roast

Clearly an almost-4kg bird left us with a good supply of leftovers. Which amongst other things got turned into Vietnamese chicken and sweet potato curry (p 204), a super quick, fragrant and delicious use for leftover cooked chicken. And I think it would be very good with leftover pork too. Because of the sweet potato in it we decided we didn't need any other starch with it and just had generous bowlsful. I had a couple of courgettes that were slightly past their prime, so I chucked them in for a complete one-pot meal.

Vietnamese chicken and sweet potato curry

Chicken piri piri (p 156) is a Portuguese dish, but there is a pretty big Portuguese community in South Africa and a couple of South African piri piri chains, so Paul has very definite ideas about it.

Piri piri

I used a bottled piquillo pepper instead of roasting my own. And I used 2 of my home grown pickled habanero chillis because of the aforementioned problem with red chillis being really mild at the moment. The marinade had kick. Rather than using bone-in chicken portions or spatchcocked poussin, I spatchcocked a large chicken - because the weather was beautiful and we wanted a long, slow cook in the Weber.

Marinaded spatchcocked chicken

South African barbecuing is usually done over wood, so Paul added hickory chips to our charcoal, which added a really deep brown patina to the skin as well as a strong smoky flavour. As well as smearing the piri piri on both sides of the spatchcock, I lifted the breast skin and smeared some under it, so the flavour and heat of the chilli really penetrated. Another very, very successful dish.

Chicken piri piri, grilled sweet corn and tomato salad

Other bloggers' dishes

I'm a bit surprised to realise I haven't done an "Other Bloggers' Dishes" post since February. I knew it had been a while, but the year really has slipped away from me a bit. And actually, what with one thing and another, there haven't been that many dishes from blogs, or dishes I was alerted to by bloggers, that I hadn't already written about.

This pumpkin pangrattato with merguez was absolutely gorgeous, although I didn't do the method as written. I blended the garlic, rosemary, bread, coriander, the calamondins I was using instead of orange zest and the gouda I was using instead of taleggio to a chunky paste with some olive oil. I roasted the butternut for 20 minutes, added the sausages for 15 minutes and then topped it with the crumbs for 20 minutes. I really must make it again soon - it's definitely the weather for this kind of one-pot dish!

Pumpkin pangrattato with merguez

My take on the stacked pig sandwich was less stacked, less green and less beautifully photographed. But more mayonnaisey. This is another one that I need to make again, to try and capture the stacked green magic.

Stacked pig sandwich

I used pork escalopes instead of chicken for this dish of escalopes with tomato, olive and caper dressing. Surprisingly, with all those salty ingredients, it wasn't as punchy as I was anticipating, but it was a very nice fresh-tasting sauce/salad hybrid.

I really loved this salad of lettuce, peas and ham, not just for the story about driving down the road with a spoonful of mustard clutched in one hand. I think it'll be a good one to revisit over the Christmas season, where there are odds and ends of cheese, ham and bread about the place, but a lighter dish is called for.

And finally, a dish from Meemalee, although from her book, not her blog. Taiwanese beef brisket soup, garnished with preserved vegetables and, of course, habanero chilli. Fragrant, warming and hearty.

Two one-pot dishes with Kikkoman soy sauce

Cure for the salmon

Kikkoman, the soy sauce people, are running a blogger recipe competition (which closes tomorrow - I'm scraping in under the wire). The fun twist that captured my imagination, was that the recipes had to be one-pot dishes that were not Oriental in flavour.

Using soy as a seasoning in Western-style dishes isn't exactly a new idea - M.F.K Fisher was advocating using it as a steak marinade in the 1950s, and in French Provincial Cooking Elizabeth David records a sauce for lobster containing "10-12 drops Chinese soy sauce" dating back to the 1870s. Yet somehow as soon as I hear "Kikkoman" my mind leaps to Asian dishes and flavours. Getting myself out of that mind-set was quite a challenge!

I ended up coming up with two different dishes, a light but satisfying fish supper that involves hardly any effort, just a bit of preparation the night before, and a rich, comforting mutton hotpot for weekends when you can stick something in the oven and ignore it for hours.

Soy-cured salmon with lentils and basil gremolata (serves 2)

2 skin-on salmon fillets
50ml Kikkoman soy sauce
1tbs muscovado sugar
1tbs olive oil
1 shallot, diced
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 400g can Puy lentils, drained and rinsed
200g baby plum tomatoes, halved
1tbs Kikkoman soy sauce, extra
Juice of an orange
80g baby spinach leaves, washed
50g blanched almonds
Grated zest of 1 orange
large handful basil leaves
1 clove garlic, extra

The night before, combine the Kikkoman soy sauce and sugar in a small ramekin, then smear it over the flesh of the salmon fillets. Put the salmon in a plastic box and pour the remaining soy cure around it. Cover and refrigerate over night.

Preheat oven to 200C.

In a shallow, ovenproof pan, saute the shallot and garlic in the olive oil until soft, then add the drained lentils and tomatoes, and season with the extra soy sauce and orange juice. Add the spinach leaves, washed and with the water still clinging to it (to create steam).

Remove the salmon fillets from the cure and pat dry with kitchen paper - the soy mixture will have penetrated the flesh and drawn out some of the liquid, making it a bit firmer.

Place the salmon on top of the spinach leaves and bake in the oven for 10 minutes, until the fish is cooked and the spinach wilted down.

Basil gremolata

While the fish is cooking, make the gremolata by chopping together the almonds, orange zest, basil and raw garlic.

When the salmon is cooked, lift the fillets onto your serving plates. Stir half the gremolata through the lentil and spinach mixture, then use the rest as a garnish.

Kikkoman soy-cured salmon with lentils and basil gremolata

Mutton hotpot (serves 4-6)

125ml red wine
75ml Kikkoman soy sauce
125ml water or light chicken stock (unsalted)
1tsp sugar
8 mutton chops
200g cubed lean mutton leg
1 tsp plain flour
2 small onions
2 fat cloves of garlic
2 carrots
3 parsnips
3 sticks of celery
4 Maris Piper potatoes
Thyme, bayleaves, freshly ground black pepper

In a small saucepan, combine the wine, Kikkoman soy sauce, water or stock and sugar. Boil rapidly to reduce by half. Allow to cool while preparing the rest of the dish.

Preheat oven to 170C.

Stand the mutton chops (trimmed if they are very fatty) in the middle of a large casserole dish.

Dredge the cubed mutton in flour, seasoned with freshly ground black pepper.

Cut the onions, carrots, parsnips and celery into chunky dice. Slice the garlic thinly and combine the vegetables and garlic with the cubed mutton. Pack the vegetables and mutton around the chops, distributing the pieces evenly. Sprinkle with some thyme leaves.

Cut the potatoes into thick slices and put them in an overlapping ring around the chops. Pour the reduced wine and Kikkoman soy sauce evenly over the potatoes, ensuring they all get a bit. Tuck a couple of bay leaves into the chops. Season generously with freshly ground black pepper.

Cover the casserole tightly and bake for 3 hours, until the meat is meltingly tender. A little mustard is nice on the side.

Baked chicken with chickpeas, spinach and rice

On a Tuesday, I get home late and hungry from dancing. Because Paul has been working long hours recently, the easiest thing has been for me to make something large and substantial and tolerant of reheating so he can have his tea when he wants it and I have an instant meal waiting for me when I get home.

We've been eating a lot of pasta.

And there is nothing at all wrong with that. But I've never wanted to be the sort of person who ate on a set rota of dishes, if-it's-Wednesday-it-must-be-meatloaf. I decided to mix it up a bit and make a rice-based dish.

This is inspired by Delia's Moroccan baked chicken dish, but with some changes to streamline it and make it a more complete one-pot meal.

Baked chicken with chickpeas, spinach and rice (serves 3)

olive oil
4 chicken thighs (skin on, bone in)
1 large onion, sliced finely
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 pinch saffron stamens
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup white basmati rice (approx - it was how much was left in the bag and I didn't weigh it)
1 can artichoke hearts in water, drained and halved
200g spinach leaves, roughly chopped
1 cup vegetable stock
75ml dry sherry
handful coriander leaves
1 small preserved lemon, skin only

Brown the onion and chicken in a good splash of oil in a casserole dish. Add the garlic, cumin, coriander and saffron, then the chickpeas, rice, artichoke hearts and spinach leaves. Pour the vegetable stock and sherry over everything and put the lid on the dish. Bake in a 180C oven for about 30 minutes. There should be a lot of extra liquid in the dish and the rice should be cooked. Give it a bit of a stir and fish around with a spoon to bring the chicken pieces to the surface, then return to the oven for another 10 minutes just to get a more appetising colour on the chicken. Garnish with chopped coriander leaves and shreds of preserved lemon.

This would also be very nice without the chicken as a vegetarian main course or substantial side-dish with grilled meat.

Gumbo

When I posted my fried chicken, Faux Fuchsia asked whether I was on a deep South jag. I realised that the answer to that is a resounding yes. I've been craving food I've only ever heard about - shrimp & grits, collard greens, shoofly pie and beignet.

And a couple of weeks ago I made gumbo. I followed Felicity Cloake's recipe.

Roux

After 45 minutes I got bored with the roux, so it wasn't as dark as it should have been, but it still added a nutty flavour as well as thickness to the stew.

The trinity

I followed the recipe fairly closely - using 125g of okra since that was the size package it came in. I realised once I'd made it, looking at the fairly meagre shreds of chicken, that when she said "chicken legs" she probably meant chicken marylands, or drumstick and thigh portions, whereas I had just used drumsticks.

Even so, it made a rib-sticking meal served with a good portion of rice. Basmati, not from Carolina. My mother was astounded when I said I'd made and intentionally eaten something with okra in it, but somehow the mucilaginous texture which normally sends me screaming just works well in this. It definitely needs a good slug of hot sauce to brighten the flavours though.

Now to go in search of hominy grits for my next Southern culinary adventure.