Cooking With Richard

Tortellini, very roughly based on this Antonio Carluccio recipe, although I have heavily adapted it based on some tips I read in Heat.

This is the basic pork-and-chicken mix, with parsley, parma ham and pancetta (instead of mortadella – did you think they were going to have mortadella in Sainsburys?)

I made the pasta dough by hand using the basic pasta recipe and rolled it out with my pasta machine.

Assembly stage. I made some small and some big tortellini.

After quite a lot of practice I started to get the hang of it:

Here’s a tip: preserve and reuse your pasta water. Never tip it through a colander and down the sink!

Cook for three minutes and top with parmesan and pepper:

Apparently they look like ladies’ quims tummy buttons.

It has to be said that these tortellini tasted absolutely bloody great — don’t even compare them to the rubbish “fresh” ones you get in the supermarket.

I watched Channel 4′s “Cooking It” yesterday, featuring Jun Tanaka, a cooking teacher. He’s obviously not read his McGee because he would have known that meat is not cooked on the outside to “seal it”, so I had my serious doubts about this and other things he said. Anyhow, Jun’s mission is to get people cooking haute cuisine food, and so I set upon his recipe for Fillet of Beef cooked in a Herbed Salt Crust with polenta and roasted shallots. I’ve wanted to make a “salt crust” for beef for a while.

Unfortunately the result was pretty awful. The meat was too tough. The taragon in the dressing was overpowering and didn’t go with the meat. The polenta was dreadful (but that’s a story for another blog entry). But most of all despite all the effort that went into the “herbed salt crust”, it really wasn’t clear exactly how the meat was any better for all that work.

If in doubt, present it well …

Anyway, here is how it was made:

This is the meat after seasoning and coating with herbs:

The herbed salt crust is made with flour, salt, herbs, an egg and water, and so after wrapping it around the beef and cooking it for around 20 minutes it looks like this:

After another 20 minutes to rest the beef, I sliced it:

I made this with polenta, and roasted garlic and shallots:

A very cheap bike.

But I rode along the canal today for a leisurely ten minutes and nearly reached Apsley.

Roast pork with all the trimmings:

and Rick Stein’s (heavily modified) plum tart recipe:


(Sorry about the terrible photos, but the lovely N-sama has half-inched the camera so I’m back to using my phone.).

Click —>>> Head cheese, pig’s brains and stuff!

Click —>>> http://www.k3.dion.ne.jp/~tabihito/towadako_fuyu.htm

I’m reading Bill Buford’s Heat at the moment.

It’s a riot. It’s the true story about the author Bill Buford, a well-known New York food writer and critic who invites larger-than-life chef Mario Batali to his apartment for a meal. Bill, a rubbish amateur chef, wants to learn how to become a real cook so he offers to work as a prep chef in Batali’s famous New York restaurant Babbo. He’s a self-described kitchen slave. Barely better than Orwell’s plongeur in Down & Out he works his way up to line cook, pasta chef and on. (Well, actually that’s as far as I’ve got in the book …) Very interesting with lots of funny stories, and better than Anthony Bordain’s mess of a book.

Sweet tamarind chutney, served with poppadoms and Patak’s hot lime pickle:

Sweet and spicy, delicious!

Main course: Lamb tagine

Also sweet and spicy and very delicious.

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But what’s this?

Pesto — and the word comes from the same word as the English Pestle and Mortar — is a puree of basil leaves, often mixed with garlic, pine nuts and olive oil. I adapted this simple pesto recipe, using the surfeit of basil plants in our garden.

I’d like to say that we grew all of this basil from scratch, but in fact most of it comes from supermarket plants. These plants are grown under strong lights with the “ultimate” chemical feed to make them ready for the store, so they quickly wilt when they get home. We pot them up, N-sama gives them her loving spoonful, and we planted them out in the garden. They went wild, but the season is ending soon and it was time to finish them off.

Pine nuts prove surprisingly oily when blitzed into the basil:

and after the garlic, oil and other ingredients are added we end up with something that is pesto, but better:

The starter involved incinerating chillis. Here are some photographs. For the rest you’ll need to ask N-sama and M-kun.

I’ve cooked with this exotic Thai ingredient before, but never thought to taste it on its own, even less try it in its naked form. But this is what tamarind actually looks like:

The taste is sweet like figs, with a sour note.

A whole box of sweet tamarind pods cost me £1.89 from Oriental City in Colindale, surely a bargain considering that tamarind paste is an expensive luxury in supermarkets.

I have some potential recipes including sweet tamarind chutney and this site has several tamarind recipes.

Update: Sweet Tamarind Chutney

When the tamarind flesh is mixed with a little water, it dissolves into the familiar tamarind paste that you pay huge amounts of money for in the supermarket. Extracting the seeds is timeconsuming:

The recipe has a variety of spices, but none are strangers in the CookingWithRichard kitchen. However the smell of asafoetida while preparing reminds me of Jason’s socks. Nevertheless the resulting chutney is delicious:

N-sama took these photos of the local wildlife.

Spaghetti bolognese:

Tasted a lot better than it looked!

I’m afraid I didn’t get a good photograph of this chicken recipe that I made on Saturday night. It comes from Hugh’s book and uses the preserved lemons that I made six weeks ago.

The one thing I would change is to skin the chickens before cooking. The skin takes up the flavour of the Maillard browning reactions, but is discarded when eating.

Six weeks ago I made these preserved lemons. They’ve been sitting in the fridge in the old house and now the new house for that time. I took them out today to see what had happened:

What does it taste like Uncle Richard? (←voice of the reader)

Well, just like salty old lemons.

Apparently there are better preserved lemon recipes that I should have used:
http://www.recipesource.com/ethnic/africa/morocco/preserved-lemons1.html and http://www.stuttercut.org/hungry/archives/recipes/000324.html both look very interesting.

Nevertheless I may well try the chicken, preserved lemons and olive recipe that I originally had in mind. Watch this space!

I took this photograph today in a forest near the attractively named Potters Crouch.

What is this strange English weed, growing at the back of our garden? It has an unearthly five-fold symmetry.

The easiest meal in the world …

People [unnamed, but you know who you are!] have been complaining about the CookingWithRichard blog that I don’t post the recipes for much of what I make. So here is the recipe for pasta pesto.

Ingredients:
* Buy some pesto from the local shop. For this one I used Sacla red pepper pesto.
* Pasta
* Mushrooms, courgettes, a red pepper, or any other large vegetables.

(1) Start cooking pasta.
(2) While the pasta is cooking, fry up the vegetables in olive oil.
(3) After the pasta is cooked (make sure it’s a bit early or al dente), drain the pasta and mix it with the vegetables and pesto.
(4) Season with salt and pepper, and stir in rocket leaves.
(5) Serve, drizzled with olive oil.

We served this with a “salad” made with mozzarella and parma ham.

In about 15 minutes you’ll have a simple, delicious meal.