Cooking With Richard

Credit: Sven Teschke, Büdingen, from Wikipedia

As well as our cherry tree I also bought an apple tree of the James Grieve variety. Wikipedia says:

This is a savoury, juicy apple with strong acidity at first, which then mellows as the fruit matures during September, but the flesh softens soon thereafter. When picked early, it makes a sweet and delicate stewed apple, but then can be used as a dessert apple. [...] James Grieve is a very good apple because it produces fruit every year, is somewhat disease-resistant, and a very good pollenizer for other apples. It may drop early in warm weather. It is also a good apple for making apple juice.

We’re going to plant both of them at the bottom of the garden.

I need to try this …

http://www.wasabibratwurst.com/caramelized-onions/

I ordered a morello cherry tree. I hope it does better than our lemon tree which eventually died.

It is a maiden tree, which means it will be 1 year old, and won’t fruit for several years.

In the language of flowers, cherry blossom signifies a good education.

Slightly better photos of the pigeon pie:

Apparently it’s called “Sushi Bar“. It’s impossible for non-Japanese.

I made the pheasant pie again, much better this time. Unfortunately I didn’t take any good photos :-(

The pheasants were from Gibson’s in Watford market.

I found three shot while I was making it, and N-sama found another two:

… with lots of instructions!

My not-so-new but favourite blog is Cooking Issues, which is the French Culinary Institute’s tech blog.

Some interesting articles to start with:

• pressure cooking
• liquid nitrogen (looks like I won’t be using this then)
• rotovap
• and finally .. drinking shots
  

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!!

We were given some rather pretty bento boxes by a relative:

But wait, there’s more!

For pudding, stinky cheese from France:

This is ridiculously easy to make, and very tasty. It’s a kind of English okonomiyaki. Just mash up yesterday’s roast potatoes and veg and mix with lots of eggs.

Here is the Wikipedia page on bubble and squeak.

Oriental City was a large South-East Asian mall and community centre in North London, reasonably close to Colindale Station. It closed for redevelopment on 1 June 2008, though as of early 2010 the redevelopment appears unlikely to actually happen, and the new Pacific Plaza in Wembley looks much more promising. THIS LINK is a partial list of where the Oriental City traders have moved to. (Was it worth destroying a few acres of land and an entire cross-London community for this?)

Possibly Pacific Plaza might replace it. They have the Japanese crockery shop, but not yet the huge supermarket.

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A brace of pheasants in a pheasant pie:

Tarte tatin, named after a French hotel:

A very tasty Sunday dinner!

The recipe for pheasant pie is very easy, although somewhat time-consuming. It is adapted from this one. First I simmered the pheasants, onions, carrots (etc) in water and some white wine for a few hours:

Then I separated the meat into some pie dishes and covered it with streaky bacon:

I returned the bones to the stock and boiled it further, then removed all the bones and vegetables from the stock and boiled it hard to reduce the stock and intensify the flavour:

I also added sage, thyme and pepper at this point to get the seasoning right.

Finally pour a little of the stock over the meat (not too much — you can save any stock you don’t use), cover with puff pastry, and cook in the oven 200C for about 20 minutes.

I finally got a log to plant my shiitake mushroom plugs in.

Apparently a better stollen recipe (English translation).

Here is my kakizome for 2010:

2008’s kakizome (水/”water”) worked out. We got plenty of water, of the wrong sort.

2009’s kakizome (金/”money”) worked well too … Now I have no money.

In 2010, either I’ll grow lots of these, or I’ll become a vegetable. Tune in during 2010 to find out …

By the way, thanks for everyone who wished me a happy birthday. However it’s not actually my birthday. It’s just that I put 1/1 in Facebook because of their privacy-sucking policies.

Update

N-sama making a gift for 書き初めの神:

Hiyoko Sable site …

(Thanks Nobuko!)

I tried making smaller pizza … they work a bit better:

This was a multi-stage curry that I cooked from scratch without a recipe. The base was onions and tomato. The first curry was lamb shank and sweet potato (pictured below). After that, the next day I made a pea and sprout curry with the leftover sauce. Both curries were excellent.

This is a bacon butty I made for N-sama last weekend. The bacon was particularly good quality and the butty tasted really great: