Cooking With Richard

I made some not very successful caramelized onions (in the orange Creuset pan).

These tasted just like the American version that I had in Boston.

Fat Rascals are a type of fruit scone traditionally made in York and Harrogate (particularly at Betty’s of York Tea Rooms). This recipe is a simple one from the Waitrose web site. The cherries are from Netherbury’s cherry liqueur.

Inside, it’s lemony:

Paratha is a type of fried bread which I discovered and decided (wrongly) was naan. Anyway, here we’re eating it with a mouth-watering slow-cooked lamb curry made with shanks from the local butcher and sweet potatoes from the local shop. Oishii!

Sorry about the terrible photo. Notice in the background the JML pedometer which registered 3000 steps an hour on my treadmill before it overloaded and died. Bloody JML!!

Apparently a better stollen recipe (English translation).

The brawn is tasty, rather like a cold, meaty pâté.

We ate it with home made toast. The only problem is there’s just so much of it, a complete “loaf” of brawn which we won’t ever be able to eat in time. Luckily Hugh has a recipe for fried brawn — we’ll see about that.

Brawn with toast and salad. Everything here is home-produced!

Next time: More spices. This dish will take a large amount of spice because the pig is highly flavoured itself, and there’s such a lot of it. I think I’d want to go with a real recipe next time so we can choose to make it Chinese-spicy and British-spicy. Also more salt for the same reason.

For Coco-chan:

The recipe was derived from this, quantities doubled, about 3 tbsps of sugar and quite a large amount of parmesan.

Because the bread is quite sweet, it tastes a little like a crumpet when you put butter on top. I note that real crumpets are made with warm milk.

One thing I really should do regularly is to bake bread, partly because I like bread, partly because it tastes much better, and also because it’s much better for you than the salt-filled, fatty rubbish you buy in supermarkets.

This one used my standard bread recipe (520g of strong white bread flour, 400g water) to make a single loaf. I varied it with: 1 large tablespoon of sugar, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and about a tablespoon of finely grated parmesan cheese. Cooking time was approx. 45 minutes at 190-200C.

Next time: double the recipe (to make two loaves), more parmesan.