Dehesa

I am not the most politically active or informed person in the blogosphere, but I can read cause & effect. And when your cause is global economic meltdown, your effect is a lot of really good price cutting in the leadup to Christmas. I have recently found that my personal fiscal policy ("Credit cards lead people to fake their own deaths; if you haven't got the cash you can't have it") was in fact quite sound and all the people who encouraged me to take out large loans "to improve your credit rating" were talking sheer bull-honky.

Which put me in quite a good position this week when the Carnaby St shopping precinct ran an evening shopping event, with a free cocktail and 20% off most stuff. In the end I only bought a few fancy soaps as stocking stuffers for various female relations before we decided to take advantage of the discount at Dehesa tapas bar.

We ordered a couple of glasses of manzanilla and a plate of boquerones while we gave more attention to the menu. The boquerones were lovely ( I do like a little pickled fish...) in a tangy but not too harsh vinegar dressing with just the right amount of garlic. As much as a love a plate of olives as a bar snack, I will always turn them back if I have boquerones as an option!

Dehesa really emphasises their charcuterie menu. Which is a crying shame, because my friend's only real character flaw is that she doesn't eat pork. Of any sort. So I had to watch plates of gorgeous jamon, and dishes of crisp pork belly with cannelini beans, and succulent chicken liver spiedini topped with crisp prosciutto go to other diners knowing that I would have to skip those options on this occasion.

Fortunately a focus on the other aspects of the menu proved to be no hardship. We ordered some salt cod croquetas with romesco sauce, some crisp calamari with allioli and some crostini with caponata as a first round.

The croquetas were amazing - hard to believe that something based on mashed potato and deepfried could be so light. The romesco didn't add much. I wanted it to be punchier to add some contrast but, while pleasant, it wasn't punchy. The tiny, crisp baby squid were perfectly fried. Beautifully crisp outside, completely buttery inside, and the allioli was magic with them. Wonderful! The caponata was extremely good. You could taste that each element had been cooked carefully and separately before being combined. It didn't have as much of a sweet element as when I make it, and I think it was better. It was very finely diced, so it sat very nicely on the very thin crostini (which in days gone by could have been called melba toast and no one would have known the difference).

After sitting and savouring that pile, we decided to order a couple more dishes and some more manzanilla.

A selection of Spanish cheeses was good but not great. I loved the cubes of slow- cooked quince as a fun variation on membrillo, and the cheeses were very good, but they tasted like they'd been cut a while back and the walnut bread they were served with wasn't the best accompaniment. We also tried a slow cooked lamb shank with mint & carrot puree. It was lovely - as good as it gets - but somehow the very Australian Sunday-roast flavours of lamb, mint and carrots was jarring against the Spanish and Italian flavours that had gone before.

I justified ordering a dessert because if we'd been at a normal bistro, we'd probably have eaten 3 courses of fairly substantial food. Despite the variety of dishes we really hadn't eaten that much! So we shared a Santiago tart with apricot puree and cardamom icecream. Sublime. Slightly warm almond tart with a filling that wasn't too moist and heavy, or too dry, or too custardy, but just right. A thick but not stodgy puree of slightly tart apricots. The richest and most intensely perfumed of cardamom icecreams. Entirely wonderful!

The 20% off our meal was a welcome bonus, and we skipped the opportunity to shop further in favour of hoarding our remaining cash and going home for another glass of wine.

Baked Beans

One of the by-products of curing your own bacon is a bag full of rinds and bones in the freezer. And call me crazy, but to me that says "beans".

Now, I could have pulled some duck confit out of the freezer, grabbed some sausages and made a big cassoulet, but I wanted something a bit less refined. I wanted baked beans.

I read a lot of recipes and realised that pretty much whatever I wanted to put in I could put in, because almost certainly someone's grandmother used to do it that way. So instead of following any particular recipe I made it up as I went along.

My USP for this one is that I used a bottle of stout as the cooking liquid. Most of the recipes I looked at called for brown sugar and/or molasses, but I decided that I wanted the sweetness to come from the stout.

Baked Beans

1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
500g pinto beans, soaked over night, drained and rinsed
Bacon rinds and bones
1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup smoky bbq sauce
1tbs hot English mustard
375ml bottle of stout

Into a cast iron pot, brought to the boil, reduced to a slow simmer, covered and left for 3 hours or so.

The first night we had it as was, in a bowl with a bit more bacon and a little grated cheese. Next day it reappeared as breakfast with crisply fried bacon and eggs. The bits of bacon rind had disintegrated into the most unctuous, gelatinous sauce with lots of rich flavour. The meat had fallen off the bones and added delicious little bites to the beans. And there is still a good amount for me to jar for another time. I may never send another penny Mr Heinz's way.

Making Bacon II

You may recall that a couple of months ago I made bacon. It was a huge success and made me much beloved of my husband. Until we ran out. So for the sake of my marriage I had to make a second batch.

The cure I used before was fantastic, so I made no changes to that (except I pounded the spices in the mortar and pestle because my darling mini-processor went to appliance heaven during my pinenut macaroon experiment).

What I did differently was smoke it. Paul was given a smoker for Christmas about 7 years ago and has never taken it out of the packaging, so I decided that the time had come.

Turns out that it is a pretty nifty piece of equipment. And it occurs to me that I could use it to make the mother of all fondues...

A pair of spirit burners sit in a rack, with a tray sat over it. Smoking dust (fine wood chips - in this case oak) go into an indentation in the tray, a drip tray covers the dust to avoid flares and then a rack goes over that, the cured, rinsed meat goes on the rack, a lid clips over all and in 2 hours (as my crazy aunt used to say) Bob is your aunty's live-in lover.

This is hot-smoking, so you are heating the meat at the same time. Cold-smoking (like for smoked salmon) is a trickier proposition involving all manner of piping and whatnot. But because the pork-belly is a big, thick piece of meat it certainly wasn't heated to the point of being cooked (if we'd been doing fish fillets they would have been well cooked).

The downside to this method is that it didn't "set" the protein as well as the slow bake in the original recipe did. So it was a real bastard to get the rind off and debone it. And I ended up with very thick, ragged slices instead of tidy little rashers like my previous effort.

Next time I will certainly smoke it again - the flavour penetrated beautifully - but I will debone and remove the rind before it goes into the cure, and probably smoke it for longer.

Stay tuned for the next episode "How I used the bacon"...

Normandy Apple Pie

When I saw this recipe of Francois-Xavier's for Normandy Apple Pie I was smitten. It wasn't just that his photography was so stunning, it was also the idea of an all-in-one apple tart.

I love the sort of French open-faced apple tart that has a rich shortcrust shell, a smear of apple puree and then slices of apples and an apricot jam glaze, but that sort of thing is a bit involved. It takes lots of bowls, a lot of time and quite a bit of patience. And as I have mentioned before, my pastry isn't my most attractive feature.

So this recipe really is genius. It is almost like an apple toad-in-the-hole (or, more attractively, an apple clafoutis).

An eggy, vanilla-y batter is mixed with sliced apples and baked. Then a frosting of butter, sugar and egg is spread over the hot pie and returned to the oven.

Then you eat it. Warm.

It was good. I used Granny Smiths, but it was amazing how their flavour got swamped by eggyness. I think a sharper apple would be better, but the texture of Bramleys would be wrong. Not sure what the better option would be.

I used muscovado sugar in the frosting, which cooked to a magnificent caramelly glaze - very happy with that.

I think making it again I would probably add a grating of nutmeg to the first batter - it just needed a little something else.

You could serve icecream or custard with it, but I don't think it needs anymore sweetness or egg. All it needs is very cold cream, in the quantity recently referred to on Dexter as "A metric fuck-tonne".

Cheddar & Leek Biscuits

I promised Paul bacon & eggs for breakfast. But I wanted to make something a bit more interesting...

So I adapted Kat & Matt's Buttermilk Biscuits with Cheddar & Green Onions. Some of the adaptations being that I didn't have any buttermilk or green onions!

Cheddar & Leek Biscuits

1 baby leek, finely chopped
1/4 cup grated strong cheddar
2/3 cup wholemeal flour
1tsp baking powder
2tbs butter
1/4 cup low fat Greek yoghurt

Combine the leek, cheddar, flour and baking powder in a bowl. Rub in the butter until it forms coarse crumbs, then bind with the yoghurt, mixing very lightly.

Form into 2-4 square-ish biscuits and bake at 220C for 15 minutes.

Serve with hot soup for lunch, or split with bacon, eggs and fried tomatoes for breakfast.

Good steak

A weekend trip to Costco produced a whole rib eye for a couple of £/kg less than supermarket steaks. With the definite advantage that Paul - chief steak chef in our kitchen - got to cut them to requirements. I just had to do side dishes.

So I glazed some halved shallots in red wine and beef stock until they were sweet and the sauce was syrupy.

Then I melted some butter in a pot, added sliced baby leeks and whole baby carrots, tossed them in the butter and added washed, shredded baby leaf greens, pepper & grated nutmeg and clapped a lid on them to wilt down.

A couple of minutes a side in a very hot frying pan with a small slick of oil. A seasoning of salt and pepper. And there it was. Perfect, butter-soft, medium-rare steaks. Unbeatable.

Moules, frites & aioli

I am a bit tempted to launch a new blogging event - CBF Friday. What is the absolute minimum effort you can expend for Friday's dinner without actually just calling for pizza? I have had Friday nights where I have chosen my wine by the presence of a stelvin closure because I CBF finding a corkscrew... and someone who may or may not be me has been seen eating tuna straight from a ring-pull can because anything else is just too hard.

So last Friday's dinner wasn't exactly a personal best, but it did show all the signs that I was a bit over the week.

I had a couple of bags of mussels in garlic butter sauce, just waiting to be plunged into a pot of boiling water to reheat. I had a box of par-cooked oven fries. I had a box of par-cooked roast parsnips.

All I needed was some nice garlicky mayonnaise. And quite frankly making mayonnaise is therapy, not cooking. The clop clop noise that a wooden spoon makes in a bowl of mayonnaise is right up there with dog snores for being a calming influence. Don't look at me like that - dog snores are lovely.

Friday night aioli

2 cloves of garlic
1 egg yolk
1tsp white wine vinegar
100ml mild olive oil
1tbs boiling water
Freshly ground black pepper

Mix the crushed garlic with the eggyolk and vinegar. Very slowly, stirring all the time, drip the oil into the egg mixture. When the oil has all been used and the mayonnaise thickens add a spoonful of boiling water to help stablise it, then season with black pepper.

Makes just enough for 2 greedy people to dunk their chips in.