Jude's thighs again

Seriously - these are so good I made them again! Twice in a week! This time I partially roasted chunks of butternut for about 15 minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients. It looked pretty and cooked to a perfect caramellyness.

A bit of asparagus on the side and there it is. AND we weren't hugely hungry last night so we've still got a lovely piece of chicken in the fridge, bathed in rich jellied juices. I can't decide if I am just going to eat it as is or turn it into something else!

Jude's Thighs

My friend Jude went to visit her dad over the weekend, and came back raving about this Diana Henry chicken dish. Now, I like Diana Henry and I like chicken, so I thought I would have a go.

So, my interpretation, for 2 people, via Jude goes like this:
1 onion, peeled and cut into 8ths, a head of garlic cloves, peeled, the leaves of a couple of good stems of rosemary, 3 chicken Maryland pieces (skin on), a slosh of olive oil, a double slosh of balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper and into the oven for 45 minutes at 190C. Served with a pile of steamed veg tossed with a little butter and torn basil. Just delicious! It is very interesting really, the balsamic doesn't taste either sweet or vinegary, just rich and dark and fantastic. If I hadn't smelled it cooking I would have thought it was maybe soy sauce based.

Now I want Cook Simple, so I can see what other delights the book has in store.

Spatchcock

Just a couple of pics from the weekend. We'd bought a spatchcocked chicken and BBQd it over some hickory chips soaked in red wine. Salad and BBQd asparagus on the side. Delicious! But chicken really is not the meat to do hickory smoke justice... There is pork in our future!

Dim Sum

Yesterday afternoon my husband came home with a bottle of Bollinger. Which was very nice, but I was very hungry and it totally scuttled my plans of going for a late lunch to the pub.

So I ferreted around for something quick to eat. A friend on a forum had posted a recipe for her lup cheong omelette and since I had eggs, lup cheong and spring onions, I threw it together.

Bob's Lup Cheong Omelette

Slice your lap cheong finely on the diagonal, chop the spring onions (including the green parts, do NOT discard!). Beat the eggs, season with fish sauce, soy sauce and pepper (I like white but you could use ground black). Get the wok smoking hot (yeah baby), quickly stirfry the lap cheong and onions but don't let them burn. Then add the eggs, swirl them around the pan so that they don't get thick, move the edges into the middle and the middle to the edges so that it's nice and wrinkly and thin, and the sausage gets distributed evenly. Roll it/fold it over when the top is still slightly runny so that the centre will be soft. Serve. It all takes about 2 minutes.

The only variations I made were mixing the sliced spring onions with the eggs, so they stayed quite raw and fresh-tasting, and added a couple of sliced green chillies. It didn't roll particularly well because I used loads of sausage, but it tasted brilliant.

But after hoovering down the omelette, we were both still hungry, so I stayed with the dim sum theme (can't really call it yum cha, since we were drinking champagne) and put some frozen dumplings in the steamer. We had prawn har gau and pork shao mai left from the last Wing Yip visit, so even though there were more than we really needed, it would have been rude not to finish them. I did my usual soy, red vinegar and sesame oil dipping sauce, but instead of adding chilli sauce for heat I added a spoonful of roasted chilli oil. It added a wonderful smokey flavour.

As you can imagine, the planned BBQ chicken dinner did not take place.

Duck breast with marmalade sauce

The other night I thought I would have another crack at Nix's Thighs. But not using chicken and really doing it entirely differently to make duck breasts in a marmalade sauce...

So I dry-fried some Szechwan pepper and ground it finely with some salt, slashed the skin on the duck breasts and put them skin side down in the hot pan and let them crisp up. I smeared the flesh side with a paste of marmalade, dijon mustard, ginger and garlic and then flipped the breasts skin side up on a rack over a pan of water, sprinkled them with the salt & pepper mix and finished them in a hot oven, while using the rendered-out duck fat in my pan to stirfry a bag of "rainbow stirfry mix" with some sugar snap peas.

It worked really well, but I think I should have kept back some of my marmalade paste, heated it and let it down with a little orange juice as a sauce. It's all a learning experience!

Pork, pumpkin & peashoot stirfry

The other day I was in the super-market and saw peashoots. I straight away thought of Heather's wonderful-looking pork dish from a couple of weeks back (although I did get sidetracked by memories of a delicious Chinese peashoot in crab sauce).

In the usual way of these things it ended up nothing like hers (and a good deal fussier than I usually like a stirfry), but I was happy with it.

Pork, Pumpkin & Peashoot Stirfry

Cut half a butternut pumpkin into small pieces, rub with a little olive oil. Add a lot of whole cloves of garlic. Roast at about 180C for 30 minutes or until cooked through and starting to get a toasted edge.

While the pumpkin is roasting, marinate chunks of aubergine (optional, but I had a lovely violet and white streaked one that a friend brought me from France that wanted using) and thin slivers of pork loin in a combination of yellow bean paste, shao xing wine, soy sauce & red rice vinegar.

Soak a few dried shiitake mushrooms in boiling water, drain and slice finely.

When the pumpkin is very nearly done, drain the pork & aubergine, reserving the marinade. Stirfry in hot oil with a couple of sliced chillis, then add the sliced shiitake, the pumpkin and garlic, a good handful of sugar snap peas and some peashoots. Add a bit of sugar and some cornflour to the reserved marinade and pour into the pan, stirring to cover everything with the sauce, which will boil and thicken rapidly. Stir through coriander leaves and sliced spring onions.

Strangely, the aubergine in yellow bean marinade tasted like banana.

If/when I do this again I'd use basil instead of coriander.

Good food, bad photography

Yesterday morning the postman rang the doorbell to get a signature for a parcel. Inside the parcel - without any sort of accompanying letter - were our passports and all the documentation we had provided the Home Office. And inside my husband's passport was the stamp giving him indefinite leave to remain in Britain.

Clearly, we were delighted and decided that a celebration was in order. So I booked a table at Mon Plaisir, the first restaurant we had been to in London when we arrived 2 years ago. It seemed fitting. I've blogged about Mon Plaisir before but my husband is now terribly concerned that if I say too many good things or make it look too wonderful it will be inundated and we won't be able to get a table anymore and the quality will suffer. Fortunately, my photography does not do any of the dishes justice, so the murky brown pictures can stand in the way of the atmosphere being destroyed.

We ordered champagne - Laurent Perrier brut - and settled to the serious business of eavesdropping. The table behind us were a pair of sisters and one's husband, who were very drunk and very loud and made extremely unnecessary comments about the transgender woman in the elegant pink suit at the table nearby. And harassed the waitress (whose name is Maria) telling her that she wasn't pronouncing her own name properly (she puts the emphasis on the first syllable - like Mario - instead of the middle and end the way you do in Britain). And said "I don't really like pudding. I wonder if they have cheese?". Do they have cheese? It is a French restaurant, of course they have bloody cheese! Anyway, they left eventually.

I started with Tomato and olive terrine with roquefort icecream. It just goes to show what a difference someone who really knows what they are doing in the kitchen makes. The terrine itself wasn't anything special, but combined with a scoop of intensely flavoured tapenade and the sweet, milky roquefort icecream it was magic. The icecream was amazing - the flavour of the blue cheese hanging back at first and then coming in with a punch. The foie gras parfait, topped with passionfruit gelee and served with toasted brioche was, I am told, delicious. He thought the gelee was a bit distracting from the foie gras but the presentation, on a triangle of slate, was a winner.

We moved on to a bottle of chablis. I had Roast scallops with cauliflower puree, he had Dover sole meuniere. The scallops were perfect! Caramelised and brown outside, sweet, firm and juicy inside. The cauliflower puree was smooth and rich. Wafers of raw cauli and a peashoot salad added a bit of textural interest. Not too sure about the morel vinaigrette dressing - it wasn't really sharp enough to call it a vinaigrette and the morels were more of a textural presence than a flavour. I think if you are going to use an ingredient like that it should be allowed to shine. The sole was wonderful too - much meatier than you usually get, a nice amount of caramelisation on the outside gave a charcoal edge then the flesh inside was delicate and creamy.

We shared some cheese to finish - a nice piece of goat, a pretty boring hard cheese, a gloriously gooey Epoisses de Bourgogne, a creamy strong blue and something else that has slipped my mind. And then the joy of an uneventful Tube ride home because all the idiots were on the Circle Line drinking themselves sick.