Cooking With Richard

I’ve been learning all about egg foams from the McGee book. The most famous egg foam is meringue, made with egg whites, but it is also possible (and harder) to foam egg yokes, making both zabaglione and sabayon.
So when Ramsey made this recipe a few weeks ago I was interested and I tried to reproduce it.
The base for this is red grapefruits and oranges, cut into segments:

The sabayon is made with four egg yokes, icing sugar and (in my case) really cheap and horrible Asti Spumante, but one is supposed to use pink champagne. I beat it for 10 minutes over a simmering pan of water, and then beat it for another 5 minutes or so until it was cool:

After using the blowtorch, here is the result:

N-sama and I agreed that the sour fruits did not go well with the sweet sabayon. It’d go better with a pear, or even with ice cream.

Been painting today …

Seared tuna, on shiso (from the garden) with grated ginger on top. I didn’t make it, the wife did!

Today I’m going to try this Gordon Ramsey recipe for stuffed chicken leg.

The stuffing in this case is sausage meat and pistachio nuts (who knew that pistachio nuts grow on trees?):

I’ve boned two chicken legs (bloody difficult actually) and stuffed them:

The whole lot is wrapped first in bacon rashers and then tightly in several layers of tin foil:

I poached these for 30 minutes in boiling, salted water (the salt makes the aluminium turn dark, apparently this is safe), and now they are sitting in the fridge waiting for my guest to arrive. This would be a good meal to make for large numbers because it can be effectively prepared in advance and stored in the fridge for final finishing off.

Come back later to see me finish it!
Update:
After the fridge the whole thing is cooked and firmed up. I’m now drying off the excess water and fat:

Then we cook the bacon:

Slice and serve:

I had to rescue the gravy. I added too much vinegar while deglazing, so I covered up my mistake with a bit of soured double cream and redcurrant jelly.

This spider built a cobweb on my computer. I left him there for a few days but eventually had to evict him because I needed to move my computer around.

We have grasshoppers living in the front lawn.

At the air show yesterday I got sunburned rather badly. It hurts!

Airbus A380 … lorks a lordy, it really is huge:

MiG 29 - those Russian pilots are bonkers:

Red Arrows, before and after:

日本語 translation

See also: Cooking book from the 70s, Icing set

Update:
This is what Viennese fancies (or “whirls” as they now call them) look like in the supermarket:

This is Alaskan wild salmon cooked in butter and fennel seeds. The salad is broad beans with bulgur wheat, tomatoes, cucumber, roasted pumpkin seeds and feta cheese.

In order to make the finest viennese fancies I need an icing bag and set of nozzles. Those I bought today from this cake suppliers’ shop.

I’ll probably sound like a rabid Daily Mail reader for saying this, but I’m nevertheless saddened by the way that England is “modernising” by throwing away our traditional money, weights and measures. We threw away our real money, which had lasted for nearly a thousand years, back in 1972. Now we are disposing of temperatures and weights based on human measures.
Only the other day I was in one of our wretched supermarkets and the woman behind the till wanted me to sum something up (cashback if I remember) to a whole multiple of 10 pounds because the computers would “find it simpler”. Well yes, computers have their counting base. That is 2. Humans have 10 fingers to count with, unless of course we need to divide it into something, in which case 12s, 24s and 360s are a whole lot more useful. And lengths have a relationship to the human body, be it one inch (the length of the midsection of my index finger) or a mile (mille passuum, 1000 paces).
What’s this got to do with cooking? (I hear you ask, as if anyone is really still concentrating on my meandering moans). Well I’m collecting old recipe books and they’re all in pounds and ounces, so when I scribble down my ingredients and go over to the butchers and vegetable stalls, I give them those measures, and I’m happy to say they are glad to serve me in imperial units. For The Book Hugh has opted to go entirely metric, which I respect, and when I make recipes from there I order in metric units as well … converting in my head back to more familiar units.
I grew up being taught entirely in metric units, but at home and around people everyone was using imperial, and that’s really how I think of things. People are weighed in stones (yes, quite a lot of rocks in my stomach!). People are 5-foot-something-tall. This is never going to go away. And I hope it never does.

I took this photo when I was drunk …

Word for today: scally
Nowadays we suffer from chavs, but back in my day we had scallies … in our school!

What is a marrow? In England old men grow prize marrows on allotments. But I don’t know anyone who has knowingly eaten one of these overgrown courgettes, even amongst my Yorkshire-bred allotment-renting relatives. In the US, marrows are called squashes (they’re apparently a type of pumpkin), but their more common “butternut squash” is definitely different from our English marrow.

What the heck does a marrow taste of? Well, we’re about to find out!

Here we’ve got shallots, chorizo and parsley from the garden:

That is cooked up with a bit of couscous, some tomato purée, and coriander:

Update (after about 20 minutes):
Well, hmmm, I managed to burn the filling and the marrow itself was looking about the same as it did at the beginning. I’ve covered it with foil and turned down the temperature a bit.

This is how it turned out, with a bit of magic photo pixie dust to make it look good.

The bottom line I suppose is that the filling tastes rather salty and meaty (hello, chorizo), and the marrow flesh tastes of … nothing. Imagine a melon which isn’t sweet, and doesn’t taste of melon. It has that melon texture, tastes of very little at all.

Today is quite boring. I’d rather be heading for the moon.

The dressings are: guacamole, salsa, soured cream and refried beans. All from Waitrose and not made by hand as they should be.

For the origins of the phrase “legs eleven”.

This is a cookery book for women (obviously) from 1968. Look at that cover. Look specifically at the combination of kebabs, nasty looking tinned sweetcorn, and cheap red wine.

It contains a few crimes against food, particularly in the savoury section, reflecting, I think, the lack of available ingredients at the time:

On the other hand there is a promising recipe for pork pie, and the cakes (where English cooking is traditionally excellent) look really good:

Back at our wedding anniversary we held a barbeque where I made a few recipes from The Book. Hugh’s Jerk Chicken recipe was a surprise highlight of the day. It’s really easy to make, given that you take the time to find and prepare the complex series of spices for the seasoning, but after that you just rub the seasoning into the chicken, leave to marinade overnight, and the cooking is a doddle.
I won’t go through the whole recipe - please please buy The Book (see above). But the spices are interesting. We start with Allspice, Mace (the stringy-looking stuff in the photo below), salt and pepper:

We grind this with chilli, bay leaves and a number of other spices, then butter and olive oil. This is then blended together and rubbed into the chicken:

We leave that to marinate in the fridge overnight.
Please come back tomorrow to find out what happens!


Mitomi says “Oishii” again!

This is the simplest meal in the world, I mean for fuck’s sake you don’t even need to cook it …
(Which is just as well because our hob is broken and only one gas ring is still working, but that’s a very long story).
N-sama wouldn’t eat this because it’s not cooked and she has to work tomorrow. But this is good meat bought today from the farm where the cows live, so I’m not worried.
(Apologies for terrible photo)

Take a whole pork belly, spring onions, ginger, carrots and onions.
Boil some water with a cup of sake.
Add the ingredients and simmer very gently for 2-3 hours.

Take the pork and vegetables out, and throw away the veg, but keep the stock.
(At this point there was quite a lot of stock and I was on the horns of a dilemma as to whether to throw away excess stock, or reduce - in the end I threw away excess, which might have been a mistake).
Cut up the meat into 1.5″ x 1.5″ cubes.
Add 1/2 cup of sugar first, then soya sauce and a little bit of mirin.
Put the meat back into the stock and then cook slowly for 30mins - 1 hour.

Don’t stir the meat during this time.
Leave overnight and eat the next day.
Mitomi says “oishii!”

I went to Browns of Stagsden today, a local farm butchers, to get some meat.