Cooking With Richard

I look rather mad, but that’s because I was concentrating on taking the photo. Actually my new job’s pretty cool.

Second attempt at making flatbreads here. I’m really just cooking leftovers from the past few days. It’s hard cooking for one! So anyway this time I used double the dough for each base (for each base, one half of the small “quick dough” recipe), and that improved it a lot:

Yet more bread and butter pudding. This is the third day in the row, and still there was more. I ended up throwing the rest away!

My brother bought me the Casa Moro recipe book for Christmas this year. They are an English couple who fell in love with Andalusian food and now run a famous Spanish restaurant in Clerkenwell, London. Go on, buy a copy from the Amazon link on the right, and I’ll make some really tiny amount of money (like 25p or something).

I’m currently making flatbreads (similar in concept to pizza). These are Turkish-influenced (Turkey and Andalusia share a lot of similarities because of the Muslim/Moorish influence).

The smell is amazing — just lovely lamb and garlic perfumes wafting from the kitchen, so I can’t wait.

Come back shortly when I will have some photographs and results.

Small update

While I’m cooking this, here is a great photo of a waiter carving a cured pork leg, that I saw when I was in Seville last year.

Update

Lamb neck fillet, cooked for 2 hours with some allspice and onions:

Tomatoes, garlic and olive oil:

This is the flatbread dough, a simple dough made with just a little yeast and olive oil:

I had to look inside the oven with a torch to see if the flatbreads were cooking properly:

Finished product:

Verdict: Tasty, meaty .. and spicy!

It’s funny because until about 6 months ago I had never eaten the English classic dessert bread and butter pudding. I had eaten, on one or two occasions, a very poor M&S immitation, but never the real thing. So I decided to make it using a Mary Berry recipe, and it was good.

Let me tell you how to make it yourselves.

You will need the following rather basic ingredients. Can you guess? Can you?

12 slices of white bread and 4oz / 125g of butter:

6oz / 175g of mixed dried fruit. Here I’m using apricots and raisins:

4 oz / 125g of brown sugar:

Zest of 2 lemons, 2 pints of milk and 4 beaten eggs.

Mix the milk and beaten eggs. Spread butter on the slices of bread. Halve the bread slices.

Take a large tin and line with half the bread slices, face down. Cover with half the fruit/sugar/lemon zest. Then cover with the rest of the bread, face up, and cover that with the rest of the ingredients. To make that a bit simpler to understand, this is how your layers will look if you complete the assembly successfully:

fruit, sugar, zest
butter
bread
fruit, sugar, zest
bread
butter

Cover with the milk/eggs mixture, and allow it to soak for 1 hour:

I’m actually using double the custard [eggs/milk] mixture than specified in the original Mary Berry recipe, and that’s because when I first made this 6 months ago I found it rather dry.

After soaking, cook it for 40-45 minutes in a 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 oven until it is browned on top.

Bread and butter pudding:

I just noticed that Cory’s obviously working through his backlog over at BoingBoing, and he’s picked up my story about the first ever lightgun game (a variation of Duck Hunt). Ah PageRank, how much do I love thee?

Haggis (recipe, originally from this Guardian article) — the ultimate in Scottish indulgence, and it turns out to be surprisingly easy to make.

The basic ingredients are oats, suet, onion,

and about 1lb / 500g of lamb hearts:

The suet, onion and hearts are browned and minced:

We add allspice, salt, pepper, thyme and lamb stock, and simmer for 3 hours.

Just before the end of cooking, add the oats and cook for another 10 minutes.

Come back to see how it looks when I’ve finished. It smells absolutely amazing.

Update - it’s finished

This was fantastic. Even though I was using just hearts (and not lungs and livers as you’re supposed to), the taste was better than any shop-bought haggis. I won’t be buying haggis again, especially not on 25th Jan. Could have done with a bit of whisky though …

I caught this advert on a US news site:

We may speak the same language, but what on earth is going on in this advert? Let’s start with the facts: Rozerem is a type of sleeping pill. The guy in the hat is a poor Abraham (”Abe”) Lincoln impersonator (although not as bad a lookalike as this guy). Abe Lincoln was 16th President of the United States. As far as my researches go, he did not suffer from insomnia.

Abe is holding something in his hand. At first glance I assumed he was holding a couple of sleeping pills. He has that kind of mad look in his eye that indicates he might not have had a good night sleep for a while (assassination can have that effect on a man). Then I realised that he seems to be holding his pocket watch. Is that a clue?

Then there are the baffling words: “they miss you”. Who misses you? Dead Presidents miss me?

I’ve got a few theories about those words … In England we are supposed to dream of sheep. Perhaps in the US they dream of Presidents? Then the advert would make perfect sense: the Presidents are missing you! Drop a sleeping pill and come back to them!

The watch must be some sort of a clue — I’m wondering if in fact it isn’t Abe Lincoln but some sort of Amish train conductor waiting for your sleepy head to get on a train.

Update

Yes, by the power of viral marketing, it’s a viral ad for sleeping pills! More here and especially here.

… of this.

I have a load of food left over from New Year, so here are some ideas on how to use it.

Lamb hearts

I bought lamb hearts from Watford market. One possible use is to make this haggis (scroll down):

Stravaigin’s award-winning haggis

100g suet
2 Spanish onions, one roughly chopped, the other finely
1kg very fresh mixed lamb’s heart, lungs and liver, roughly chopped
½ tsp ground allspice (or ground pimento berries)
1 tsp dried thyme
2 tsp cracked black pepper
1 tsp salt
500ml lamb stock
400g toasted pinhead oatmeal

Heat the suet in a large saucepan. Add the roughly chopped onion and the offal, and brown all over. Pass the contents of the pan through a fine mincer and set aside.

In the same pan, fry the finely chopped onion for a minute, then add the minced offal mixture. Stirring all the time, add the allspice, thyme and seasoning, followed by 400ml of lamb stock. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for three hours, stirring occasionally. Top up with the remaining stock if necessary (the mixture should be very moist at this stage).

After three hours, add the oatmeal and cook for a further 10 minutes (or until the oatmeal is al dente), stirring continuously. The mix should have thickened considerably, but add any remaining lamb stock if it’s too dry. Remove from the heat and serve with mashed neeps, tatties and a final sprinkling of oatmeal for garnish - and a wee dram of whisky.

Heh heh, have to buy some whisky to get the “full effect” …

Sausages, about two dozen eggs, and a loaf of white bread

A variation on toad in the hole? Followed by bread and butter pudding.

That should last me solo for the rest of the week.

Yorkshire pudding first. I’m quite proud of my individual Yorkshire puddings which for the first time ever came out really well. The recipe is yet another “guaranteed” one (they never work); this is from the Meat book.

For reference the recipe makes about 12 individual puddings.

The roast beef is a large single rib (about 4 lb) of Scottish beef from the always friendly gents (and lady) at G. Gibson butchers in Watford market.

I picked up some lamb hearts there too, and I noticed they also sell tripe, which means I must go back there soon, once I’ve armed myself with a good recipe.

The last of the summer elderberries went into this crumble. I used Amaretto cream — the almonds in the Amaretto go with the ground almonds in the crumble.