Cooking With Richard

…who today made shrikhand, well except they didn’t make that precisely because on the programme they made it with pineapple and pomegranate. Still, it looks really nice.

And …

Something which looked like a deep-fried doughnut and looked like it might be really delicious and simple to make, but I didn’t catch the name. Was it veda?

Bombardier “Satanic Mills” is a pleasant caramel-flavoured porter ale. Recommended!

“Satanic mills” is a reference to the hymn Jerusalem, which in turn refers to the poem “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake.

Chicken cacciatora (”hunter’s chicken”) is chicken marinated in wine, rosemary and bay leaves overnight, then cooked with olives, tomatoes and anchovies.

I bought something really useful:

Finished:

The simple prawn pasta tastes like great restaurant food, and takes just about 15-20 minutes to make, so when M-kun came around wanting food of course that’s what I made.

(Sorry for terrible photo!)

I just downloaded all the old photographs from my camera phone. Here is a small selection:

So this is interesting: I made a lamb shoulder, cooked for 4 hours and because I had some sweet potatoes I made a sweet potato mash to go with it. Really great combination — similar in concept to the tagine.

The mash (in orange) was done just like for regular perfect mash — in the skins for about 45 minutes. I used a little butter, salt and pepper, but no milk.

Working too hard at the moment.

This is Hugh’s coq au vin, and it’s great of course.

A whole chicken, chopped into 7 or 8 pieces:

While it’s cooking, I grilled Halloumi cheese. This one is from Sainsbury’s, and in spite of that it’s actually pretty nice.

The final coq-au-vin:

(Previously, Katamari in real life)

I am officially a Nerd God.

Verdict: very nice, but needs squid (they don’t sell squid around here).

I just watched Rick Stein making this: Arroz a la banda. I’ve got to try it!

Update

This one too –> Kofta kebabs with kohlrabi and carrot salad

Potato and tuna gratin from this recipe (roughly).

This one was bought in Sainsburys.

“Gala” means festival. I have no idea why they are called gala pies.

An online butcher selling rather expensive gala pies.

Tonight’s lunar eclipse.

I was using my camera with the rubbish 300mm lens, in our back garden:

Full moon, taken at around 9pm:

This is about when we can see the eclipse:

Half-eclipsed in the earth’s shadow:

More:

What doesn’t really come out well in photographs, and what you don’t know unless you read stories about 19th century travellers: The lunar eclipsed moon has an uncanny bloody quality about it. We know that this is caused by light filtering through the earth’s atmosphere, but still it is unsettling. I tried to capture this in this photograph, taken with a 1 minute exposure during the eclipse: