Cooking With Richard

I need to try this …

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

(From an article George Orwell wrote for the Evening Standard in 1946, hence the references to rationing)

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.
This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.
These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

Monty Don’s guide to making soap …

1. Soap is simpler to make than you might have thought. You’ll need olive oil, organic palm or coconut oil, and beeswax pellets.
2. Heat the ingredients together on the stove to about 54 degrees centigrade stirring regularly.
3. Now for the tricky bit. Soap is produced when the oils which are acidic are mixed with lye.
4. Lye is sodium hydroxide or caustic soda, a powerful alkali. When powdered lye is added to water it heats up, add the hot lye water to the melted oils, taking great care to avoid splashes as these will burn, and stir until the mixture thickens.

5. After this is done, you can add any colourings, fragrance and softening oils – for example, honey and sweet almond oil.
6. Pour the raw soap into a mould for setting and curing which is a maturing process needed before the soap is ready and safe to use.
7. Finally turn the soap out of the mould and cut to the desired shape.

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.

Apparently a better stollen recipe (English translation).

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:

I ordered a goose from Clerkes Geese, but how best to cook my goose? (I’m going to call her “WAAKO”).

This site has illustrations on how to truss, cook and slice a goose.

Gordon Ramsey’s Christmas goose recipe looks a bit poor.

Delia’s suggesting goose, pork, sage and pears.

Goose, plum and sage, sounds nice.

Goose with cranberries, sage and a traditional stuffing. Another goose recipe with a traditional chestnut stuffing. I think I’m seeing a pattern here …

Goose with apple stuffing, and another goose and apple recipe, and yet another one.

The recipe is a variation on this one and this one.

I almost discovered this recipe by accident, by taking very thin, small strips of the pizza dough and frying them quickly in olive oil (over a very hot pan).

Mmmm delicious with home made sprout and sweet potato curry!

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.

Interesting video, how to make porchetta di testa, which is a kind of salami made from a pig’s head.

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.

I started with a simple soup concept with just pumpkin and potatoes, with my home made chicken stock. However it didn’t really taste that good, so I enhanced it with ground coriander and cumin to make a kind of (very mild) curried flavour. Then I had some left-over baguette which I fried in olive oil and garlic to make the croutons. Not shown in this photo, I also added flakes of parmesan cheese over the break. The result was pretty good, but the parmesan should have been grilled.

Cold ramen noodles, approximately from this recipe:

I post this photo to show to some lady that M is stalking on the internet …

Roast chicken:

From the chicken carcass I made stock (using the carcass, water, only a little sake, carrots, onions, garlic, and parsley):

I made a potato soup from this chicken stock which was decidedly better than any previous soup I’d made, the difference being down to the stock itself.

With home-made custard. The tart was approximately from this recipe.

… and made into a pie for the next day.

The recipe is this one, not bad, not great. Addition of dijon mustard and vinegar gives it a unique taste.

Starting with the roast beef from the weekend, this is a Mary Berry BBQ recipe for spare ribs:

Update

Recipe for Rachel. This is for ~1 kg of pork or beef ribs.

First roast the ribs. Then mix up the sauce ingredients below and spread them on the ribs. Then cook the ribs again for 25-30 mins.

• 2.5cm piece of ginger, grated
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons mirin
• 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
• 2 tablespoons tomato puree
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon sugar