Cooking With Richard

Fat is good, right? Right? Well, no fat isn’t good for us, but it tastes bloody great.

I guess unless you make quiche you don’t really know that it’s essentially a giant fatty mousse on a rich fatty pastry base. In case you were under any delusions otherwise, here is the recipe for Roquefort cheese quiche, a slice of which is depicted thusly:

We start with a couple of ounces of butter in the pastry:

3 oz of blue cheese and 6 oz of soft cheese:

A quarter of a pint of (half-fat!) crème fraîche:

Don’t forget the two eggs:

This is the pastry, rolled out. I’m rather proud of this:

The finished fatty product.

By the way, snails are apparently a very low fat food.

I gave the snails a quick bath and a bite to eat.

Nice and clean:

Oi! Stop trying to escape!

Coincidentally the day after I caught my snails, Gordon Ramsey had a segment on his programme about eating snails from his garden. Here’s his recipe for pan fried snails.

Updates:

Here’s a newspaper article about a guy in San Francisco who serves garden snails at dinner parties. Apparently he cooks hundreds of them at a time - not sure where he gets hundreds from though.
Photographs of a mad bloke who’s breeding hundreds of the buggers. He’s got one, called Nancy, which appears to be a roman snail.

Hidden by the canal in Kings Langley.

Snails from our garden. Look at them, getting all fat eating expensive Waitrose kale and salad. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them soon …

This is a basic meatballs in tomato sauce recipe from Manju Malhi. There are some basic problems with her recipe (wow, aren’t I getting good!) but these are my notes and photographs from preparations.

The meatballs are made with Charlie’s sausages, made with very happy piggies, green chillies, garlic, ginger, cornflour and lemon:

The sauce base is onions, garlic, chilli, paprika, cumin, coriander, tumeric, salt, lemon and half a can of tomatoes:

But notice that the meatballs are placed directly in the sauce. Big mistake Manju. They should be seared on the outside first for two reasons, firstly to keep them together, but most importantly to get the flavourful reactions.

Second mistake is that the recipe calls for an additional half pint of water. I prefer to cook things long and slow, so I covered the pan and cooked on the lowest heat for about a quarter of an hour. Consequently I only added a quarter of a pint of water, and to be honest it needed much less, perhaps none at all.

Update: I am of course completely right about the lack of flavour in the meatballs and the watery sauce (thank god I didn’t put the whole half pint of water in there). Still, a very pleasant meal.
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A fatty cut of lamb which I’m going to slow cook for 4-5 hours:

First I baste with a mixture of ginger, soy sauce, Dijon mustard, garlic and olive oil. The recipe is from here. Already the meat smells wonderful.

I put it in the oven at 230°C for 15 minutes to “sizzle”. Then the temperature goes right down to 130 95°C for the full roast, taking upwards of 4 hours. This needs some cojones - the outside looks burnt, and the pan is full of burnt pieces of ginger, but inside it’ll be cooking very slowly and it’ll taste great.

To accompany, I’ve got mashed potato, made with creme fraiche and mashed very little so it contains rough lumps. And kale:

This is the result, a remarkably tender meat which falls off the bone. Not bad for a joint that cost about £3 and could feed four people.

Although N-sama made delicious karage today, my posting today concerns a special cheese made with Penicillium roqueforti from caves in Larzac, France. This Roquefort cheese is soft and melting in the mouth, with that wonderful fatty, moldy taste. It goes well with red wine.

Black Sheep Brewery is an independent brewery close to the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
They make this distinctive, malty, hoppy dark beer; the best bit is the picture of the stranded sheep on the label:

A very acquired taste, certainly not for everyone.

of chicken:

The marinade was basil, lemon, salt and pepper, olive oil.
Tasty!

Lunch is mushroom and brocoli curry, left over from yesterday. I put far too much chilli in it - it’s bloody spicy!

Followed by a fortune cookie:

A healthy way of living is be good to your health. - I’ll drink to that.

Confit of duck is duck, salted and cooked for hours in its own fat, and then preserved (for months) under a layer of fat. Here was the lovely confit that we had at a friend’s house last night:

The previous sabayon was a tricky yolk foam, and this is an Elizabeth David egg white foam - a mousse.

It starts with 4oz dark chocolate and an ounce of butter.

I will squeeze an orange and add a teaspoonful of orange liqueur:

The chocolate and butter is melted slightly in a barely warm oven,

and mixed with four egg yolks and the orange juices.

Following Elizabeth David’s very detailed instructions for making souffles, I beat the four egg whites to “peakiness” like this. This takes surprisingly little time, under five minutes with a hand whisk:

Then fold them together. My attempts are pretty lame and the resulting mousse has large blobs of white within it (you can’t tell because of the way I took the photographs). Still, the mousse is relatively robust, and after now two or three hours in the fridge shows no sign of sinking. Since it’s nice raw egg, we’ll have to eat this tomorrow morning.

The resulting mousse is tasty but very bitter because of the dark chocolate. It wouldn’t harm it to add a little sugar to the egg whites, and according to McGee that should help them to hold up as well.

This is a very rich tomato soup recipe from Jane Grigson’s English Food.

Chopped carrot, garlic and onion is gently cooked in butter for 10 minutes at a low heat to stop it burning:

Then we add (a tin of) tomatoes and a pint of chicken stock and cook gently for another 10 minutes:

The mixture is blitzed:

Then sieved to remove the bigger bits:

Add some salt, pepper, nutmeg. At this point I accidentally missed out the sugar (probably not a bad thing) and tomato puree (necessary) …
Here we enter the realm of 1970s cooking. The recipe calls for a quarter of a pint of cream, but this makes it far too rich. Really it only needs half of that amount. The cream is heated and then the tomato soup is added to it, and the whole thing warmed and served.

Badger Ales brewed in Dorset.