St George's Day Ale Dinner

April 23rd is St George's Day - England's National Day. It isn't a public holiday (which is galling to a lot of people since St Andrews Day is a holiday in Scotland and St Patricks Day is a holiday in Northern Ireland) but there are some festivities. The pub decided to do a special dinner with English food and matched ales to celebrate.

As a starter, I had a fabulous rabbit, black pudding and egg salad. The mixed leaves it was on were a bit on the fatigued side, but the mustard dressing had enough zing to stand up to the rich black pudding, and the flavours of the egg, crumbled black pudding and rabbit worked beautifully together. The ale to accompany it was Robinsons Squires Gold - which was very nice really.

For people who can't come at the idea of eating bunnies or blood sausage (or don't like eggs) there was a roasted portobello mushroom filled with tomatoes and bechamel. Which looked pretty good too.

As the main course there was what was described as "Rump of Salt Marsh Spring Lamb served with Grilled New Season Asparagus, Crushed New Potatoes and a Port & Cranberry Jus". Well, for one thing I am fairly sure that it was a leg steak, rather than a rump. And the jus was the most god-awful, ill-conceived and poorly executed sauce I have eaten in ages. Completely acid, with no sign of port, it threatened to overwhelm the lamb and lovely vegetables. And from the comments at the other tables, we weren't the only ones who thought so. The chef can't possibly have tasted it.

The ale for this course was Charles Wells Bombadier. Which isn't a bad beer, but I just couldn't be bothered with it, so I moved onto wine for the rest of the evening. The waitress very kindly packaged up the undrunk beers for us to take home.

The dessert was a classic Eton Mess. The combination of berries, meringue and cream is so, so good! I could have had seconds. The beer to accompany that was Innis & Gunn Original. I was quite interested to see how it would match with the dessert, but not interested enough to actually drink it. Instead, we had it at a barbecue last night. It was very pleasant - quite light and delicate. I think it would have been OK.

Torrijas - Spanish French Toast

I've been absolutely craving one of the dishes I tried in Spain last year. Torrijas. This Easter specialty is like boozy French toast and was absolutely delicious. You could have it as a dessert, but I made it for a leisurely brunch with many cups of coffee.

Torrijas (for 2)

2 eggs
1/4 cup sherry (I used a dry amontillado)
4 thick slices of good but stale bread
butter for frying
1/4 cup maple syrup
2 tbs more sherry
sprinkle ground cinnamon

Beat the eggs with the sherry. Dip 2 slices of the bread into the egg mixture on both sides.

Heat a frying pan and add a knob of butter. When the butter froths, add the first slices of bread and add the second slices to the egg mixture.

In an ovenproof baking dish, mix the maple syrup, extra sherry and cinnamon. Turn the oven on to 140C.

Now it is time to flip the first 2 pieces of toast in the pan, and flip the second 2 in the egg mixture.

Put the kettle on for the coffee.

Flip the first 2 pieces of toast into the dish of syrup and put it into the preheated oven.

Add an extra dab of butter to the frying pan if you think it needs it. Put the second 2 pieces of toast into the frying pan.

When those are done on both sides, get them onto your plates. Pull the warm, syrup-soaked ones out of the oven and put one of them on each plate too, and pour the rest of the warm, cinnamony, boozy syrup over them.

If you were serving this for dessert, some cream would be a good thing.

Prawn & cashew spring rolls

This was supposed to just be a light snack - but it ended up being a bit more substantial so we didn't end up having the main course! It's a big cop-out really, lots of bits from the supermarket thrown together to be greater than the sum of their parts. These would be great for a summer lunch party.

Prawn & Cashew Rice Paper Rolls

1 packet cooked king prawns in chilli and coriander
1/2 pack roasted cashews
1 bunch coriander
1 bunch basil
10 rounds of rice paper

Put the prawns in a bowl, chop roughly together the herbs and cashews and add to the prawns. One at a time, soak the rice paper rounds in a bowl of warm water, put a couple of tablespoons of the prawn mixture on one end and roll up firmly. Serve with dipping sauce.

Vietnamese Dipping Sauce (from Bill Granger)

2 tbs hoi sin sauce
1 tbs balsamic vinegar
2 tbs soy sauce
a couple of drips of roasted sesame oil

Mix all the ingredients in a ramekin.

Kleftiko for Greek Orthodox Easter

ΚΑΛΟ ΠΑΣΧΑ! Which I have reason to believe means Happy Easter in Greek. Now, you know how I love appropriating other people's holidays, so I thought I would extend the Easter love and do something Greek to commemorate Easter in the Greek community.

I made tsoureki once years ago and the red eggs exploded in the oven and it didn't rise very well, so I decided to play it safe and make kleftiko. I hope that it is recognisable to the knowledgeable as kleftiko...

Kleftiko

1 shoulder of lamb, on the bone
8 cloves of garlic, peeled but whole
1 tbs dried wild oregano
2 tbs olive oil
1 lemon
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 130C. Put 2 very long sheets of greaseproof paper at right angles in a medium sized roasting tin (you are making a parcel, so you want the paper to enclose the meat completely) and sprinkle it with half of the oregano and half the olive oil.

Put the lamb shoulder into the tin. Squeeze the lemon over the meat and tuck the squeezed halves into the tin. Put the cloves of garlic around the meat. Sprinkle with the cinnamon, the rest of the oregano, the olive oil and a goodly amount of salt and pepper.

Fold the paper up into a parcel, leaving some room for air to circulate.

Seal the parcel with a wooden clothespeg.

Put in the oven and leave for 5 hours.

The meat falls from the bone in sticky, tender shreds. I made a sort of sauce from 100g feta, mashed, 1/2 clove of garlic, chopped, 1/2 tsp chopped chilli and the juice of a lemon, which I sort of blobbed on the side. I also sauteed some baby courgettes with garlic and tomatoes, and zapped some mangetout in the microwave.

Serve with the best red wine you can muster - which in this case was a 2002 Gartelmann's Merlot, from the Hunter Valley in NSW. This wine has been through several house moves with us, and is drinking extremely well now. Light, still quite fruity, delicate but with enough oomph to get through the feta and chilli. It warranted getting out the good glasses.

School holiday treat - St Johns

Yes, it is that time again. The school holidays. So Jude and I have been racking our brains for the last month or so on where to go for our treat lunch. We finally settled on St John. Allow me to suggest that the squeamish run away and play, and come back in a couple of days when I will have something non-confrontational for you.

St John does offal. It does game. It does unusual cuts of meat that you are not particularly likely to see in other places. And it does them really very well.

I tend to think that the condition of the loos tells you a lot about a restaurant. The loos at St John are immaculately clean and white tiled. The hand soap is from Cowshed (which I love) and the hand dryer is a Dyson Airblade (which is so good it has actually given me an opinion on hand drying). So what we are seeing is simplicity and minute attention to detail.

Best to get the downside out of the way fast. The lovely sourdough bread that Jude nibbled and I wolfed while we read the menus would have been much better served with side plates. I thought that was the only wrong note for the day. I hate buttering my bread on the table, and with slices of bread it isn't like rolls where it is easy enough to break off bits and hold them in your hand to butter them. Pet hate of mine.

Moving on...

The starter they are noted for is the bone marrow. Simply roasted, presented with beautifully grilled toast, parsley salad and damp grey salt, you are instructed to scoop the marrow onto the toast, sprinkle with the salt and top with a little of the salad. The little bite I had of that one was fatty, rich and delectable. Jude said that she would never eat another starter if it was on the menu.

I had quite a hard time choosing a starter. They had brown crab on toast, which I adore, and anywhere else it would have been a certainty, but I thought I should try something else. They had grilled razor clams, and I have always said I wanted to try razor clams, so I gave them a go. Having seen this footage of Rick Stein catching them, I somehow thought they would be a bit rubbery. They weren't. The texture was more like a scallop than a clam, sweet, meaty and yet delicate, set off very nicely by the salsa verde and the slight charring of the shells. I borrowed some of Jude's toast to mop up the juices.

I found it much easier to pick a main course. I thought the pigeon, cabbage and bacon sounded fabulous. And it was pretty good. The cabbage was slightly over salted, and the way it presented I was looking for the tang of sauerkraut which wasn't there. Not the fault of the dish, just my expectation when seeing finely shredded, slowly cooked white cabbage. It had the mouthfeel of sauerkraut, just not the flavour. The big lardons of tender bacon through it made up for that though! The pigeon breast meat was lovely and gamey, cooked just a bit more rare than medium, which is how I like it, but it meant the thighs and wings were just a bit too tough to be edible.

I think on the main courses Jude made the better choice. Her lamb sweetbreads with peas and mint were just lovely. I have had sweetbreads before - and not been particularly wowed by them. These were delicious. Tender and creamy, rich but not cloying with the mint, peas and onions.

We shared some tiny little potatoes, cooked in their jackets. I could have eaten those potatoes all day.

With our meals we shared a bottle of a very nice Minervois. A red wine, but quite light and (I thought) well suited to our food. Something I really liked was that the wine list is arranged in order of prices, so it was quite easy to draw my line in the sand of what I wanted to pay for a bottle. And there were quite a few bottles for less than £30, which was very pleasing!

The dessert menu was too hard to resist. Our plan to share half a dozen freshly baked madeleines came to nothing. I was very tempted by the raspberry ripple icecream. And then I was very tempted by the treacle tart. And then I thought it would be nice if there was someone willing to share the marmalade sponge for 2 with me. And then I thought eccles cakes with lancashire cheese would be good.

Jude was much more focussed. She spotted the lemon sorbet with Russian vodka and ordered it with a minimum of fuss or vacillation. It was a wonderful sorbet! Just nudging at the edge of being too sharp without going over it; perfectly smooth without a hint of icyness.

I opted for the buttermilk pudding with prunes: Jude thought you'd have to have a nursery food fetish to be interested in that. Which I do - but I was actually thinking more of my mother's sublime buttermilk pannacotta. This was a softer set than a pannacotta, closer to yoghurt really. I couldn't believe they managed to turn it out! It was vanilla-y and lemon-y and lactic-y and gorgeous. The prunes were good. They would have been better if they'd been plumped up in some Pedro Ximenez or armangac. The shortbread fingers showed just how short it can be. Just lovely.

The classiest moment of the meal came at the end. When Jude's starter was cleared, she'd asked if her marrowbones could be wrapped up to take home for her dog. At the end of the meal she was presented with a bag containing about 10 of the bones. He is going to be a very happy puppy!

Oh - and I forgot to say that Fergus Henderson was there, chatting to a couple of people and dealing with suppliers. That is very, very cool.

Eisbein and Sauerkraut

Does anyone else remember the Richard Scarry story of Brave Pierre Bear? Brave Pierre Bear lives way up North, he fishes, he builds canoes, he snowshoes and he shoots moose. And after shooting a moose he makes moose pies, moose cakes and 13 jars of minced moose meat.

I have been feeling very much like Brave Pierre Bear every time I opened the fridge this week. It seemed that there were pork products everywhere I looked. I had a tray of pork skins in salt, waiting to be made into scratchings, a tub of pork belly in a cure for bacon, and another tub of pork hock being cured for eisbein.

Eisbein isn't one of my culinary traditions. I've had it a couple of times in South Africa and thought it was delicious, although far too big a portion! So I decided one hock between the two of us would be plenty. I sort of followed this recipe, using a dry rub of salt, pepper, garlic and juniper berries. Then I slowly roasted it for 2 hours, basting it with a dark ale as I went, until the meat was meltingly tender and the skin was dark and sticky.

I served it with sauerkraut cooked with apples and white wine, and some spatzli. Now, spatzli ARE part of my culinary heritage, and I fear Grossmami would turn in her grave at the sight of them. For one thing, I used a ricer, instead of cutting them from a board into the water the way she did. And I had the ricer too far away from the water, and my water wasn't deep enough, so they clumped together a bit. On the other hand, they were light and the flavour was very good.

The other downside, of course, is that I produced a dismally beige plate of food. Even using red apples and leaving the skin on would have helped! The tiniest sprig of parsley, perhaps? Good, rich comforting flavours, even if it looks unappealling.

Home made pork scratchings

Ever since Alex posted about his homemade, baked pork scratchings, I have been wanting to do them. My favourite bar snack, in the privacy of my own home, and what could be simpler?
You just salt some pork skin, leave it in the fridge for a couple of days to dry out thoroughly, and roast them until they crackle. Right?

Well, my first problem was getting the pork skins. Our local butcher isn't a proper butcher - they get pre-wrapped cuts of meat from some sort of central depot, and they have no idea of the provenance of any of the meat, so I don't shop there.

What I ended up doing was ordering a couple of nice, organic rolled pork belly joints from the Well Hung Meat Company, with the intention of making bacon from the meat, and using the skins for the scratchings.

I cut the skins into pieces (using kitchen scissors - much easier to handle than a knife), salted them and put them uncovered into the fridge for a couple of days.
Then I carefully wiped off the salt and water that had leached out of them, put them in a baking tin, dusted them with fennel pollen and roasted them, according to Alex's instructions. This was my second problem. Alex said it should take about 90 minutes, starting at 180C and reducing the heat to 140C. Well, after 2 hours at 140C I put the heat back up to 180C and it still took a total of 4 hours to crisp properly!

The end result was fabulous - the perfect texture and a wonderful aroma from the fennel pollen, but having the oven on for 4 hours just for this is a bit too extravagant. Still - if you can find something better with a glass of German wheat beer, I would like to hear about it!