Cooking With Richard

You will need:

• One whole chicken. Happy chicken, please.
• Bacon or pancetta
• One bottle of red wine
• Chicken stock (or water)
• Onions and garlic
• Tomatoes skinned (or tinned tomatoes, drained)
• Herbs (eg. thyme, rosemary, parsley, oregano, bay leaves)
• Mushrooms
• Flour
• Butter

This makes enough for 3-6 people. Everything is variable, including the ingredients, amounts, and number of people who can eat it!

Take a whole chicken and chop into 6 or 8 pieces. Brown them off in some butter in a casserole dish:

Take the chicken out of the casserole and then brown off some bacon. Take the bacon out, and put in some onions (just chopped into half or quarters) and brown off the onions and garlic:

Now take all the ingredients out of the casserole, put them aside. In the casserole dish, put the bottle of wine and bring it close to boiling point, then remove the heat and stir in some flour (say, 1 or 2 tablespoons, enough to thicken the sauce). You can also add hot chicken stock or water at this point or later. Stir that for a few minutes:

Now place the chicken, bacon, onions, tomatoes back into the casserole with the wine and stock. Take a big bunch of herbs and add that too:

Bring everything up to the boil, then cook on a very low heat for 2-3 hours.

In the last 30 minutes, fry some mushrooms and add them.

(In the voice of Gordon Ramsey …) “Coq au vin in 3 hours … Done!”

Here’s a terrible photo of the result:

This is a better photo from when I made it earlier:

The mayonnaise is home made, and dead easy (faster than going to the shop to buy it):

• 2 egg yokes

• up to 1 cup of oil (half olive, half ordinary cooking)
• juice from half a lemon
• salt and pepper

Gently beat the egg yokes and very gradually add the oil, a few drops at a time. Combine the oil before adding any more. After this add lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.

One of my favorite Middle-eastern foods has to be falafel. This is based very loosely on a BBC recipe but the recipe itself is wrong in several ways, most particularly you need to add a fair bit of flour to make it stick together. Also leaving out the baking powder is probably worthwhile.

Raw falafels:

Deep frying:

After deep frying:

With pitta bread, salad and a yogurt, olive oil and lemon juice sauce:

Pitta and falafel pocket:

Earlier my wife didn’t like this …

Jamie Oliver’s roast pork loin, nectarines, thyme and butter. The recipe is from Return of the Naked Chef. Served with celeriac and potato mash and a selection of roasted vegetables.

It’s really very simple to make. Start by stuffing the pork with nectarines and a thyme/butter mixture:

Roast in the oven as usual and rest.

Meanwhile I made the accoutrements, roast parsnips, roast carrots, boiled celeriac and baked potatoes (for the mash).

I caramelised meat juices to make a gravy (with some chicken stock and mirin).

Serve sprinkled with some fresh thyme flowers.

Before:

After boiling for 5 hours:

I’m now going to store these cans until I have lots of people round for dinner. But what modern classic am I making*?

* English people need not answer because it’s obvious for you.

How to make Umenana’s lovely Bangladeshi curry, translated from here …

カレーのレシピ♪
Curry recipe:

・じゃがいも
Potatoes

・たまねぎ
Onions

・とりにく
Chicken

・ココナッツミルク
Coconut milk

・ぎゅうにゅう
Milk

・ターメリックパウダー　　少々
Turmeric powder (a little)

・チリパウダー　　少々
Chilli powder (a little)

・ガラムマサラ　　ちょっと
Garam masala (chotto)

・シナモン　　ちょっと
Cinnamon (chotto)

・クミンパウダー　ちょっと
Cumin powder (chotto)

・ジンジャー
Ginger

・ガーリック
Garlic

・はちみつ
Honey

・しお
Salt

・コショウ
Pepper

She adds: I really dont read recipe…just add all ingredients and cook it.then add bit more some ingredients if i thought I need to do when I taste it…

This is a very simple, quick and effective recipe for bean salad. Start with some beans. Here I’ve got about half a lb of each of red kidney beans, french beans and broad beans, the latter cooked for 3 or 4 minutes and then rinsed in cold water:

The dressing is

• 4 tbsp of greek yogurt
• 3 tbsp of olive oil
• 2 tbsp of wine vinegar (I used sherry vinegar for this one)
• 2 tsp of Dijon mustard
• salt and pepper

Just mix the ingredients together to make the dressing:

Crisp up a little bit of streaky bacon in a dry frying pan:

Mix the beans and dressing, and top with the bacon:

The recipe for this kara-age:

• 12 chicken thighs, boned and cut into bite-sized chunks
• Grated ginger
• Grated garlic
• Half an apple, grated
• 5 tbsp soya sauce
• 5 tbsp sake
• 5 tbsp mirin

Mix the above and marinade for at least 30 minutes.

Then coat in potato starch or cornflour and deep fry until cooked.

Medieval recipes website. Some interesting ones including baked mallard and marmalade of quinces.

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

This is the classic Japanese beer junk-food, yakitori of chicken’s innards - hearts, gizzards, necks and whatever. Here I’m using chicken’s hearts from Oriental City. The hearts are rubbed in salt, washed and splayed.

Many chickens died to make this meal …

I cover them in the “mystery sauce” which N-sama made (it’s got at least mirin, lots of sugar and some soya sauce, but I’m not sure what else):

While grilling you need to keep dipping them in the mystery sauce. They cook in about 20 minutes.

Recipe for yakitori, and for the dipping sauce (日本語).

Remember this? Delicious potato cakes, stuffed with lamb and pinenuts. Here is how to make it.

2lbs (1kg) of potatoes, peeled and the large ones halved. Boil these until they are part-cooked, let them cool and mash:

200g lamb:

50g pine nuts, toasted:

These are the spices I’m using: a teaspoon of cinnamon, 3 cardamom peeled, 3 cloves, a pinch of pepper and a pinch of ground nutmeg. Bash these together in a pestle and mortar:

In 25g butter and some olive oil, brown the onions, then add the spices, then add the lamb. It’s a good idea to let the lamb brown on the pan (ie. don’t stir it too much):

Add 1 tablespoon of tomato puree, the pine nuts, lots of chopped parsley, and 2 tablespoons of water:

After the potatoes have been mashed, add 1 large tablespoon of white flour, mix well and form into four or five dough patties. Use lots of flour to cover everything including your hands, so nothing sticks:

Now this is the slightly tricky part. Actually it’s not too hard. Take a pattie of dough in the palm of your hand, put two tablespoons of filling on top, then wrap the potato around, pushing the filling down inside.

This shows one:

Repeat for the other cakes:

Shallow fry the cakes in oil. Be careful not to move them around the pan because they’ll fall apart quite easily:

Leave them to warm in the oven:

Result! Accompanying, N-sama made a salad, and there are some lemons and greek yogurt.

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:

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 …

We remember rhubarb and custard? This is the original, with real custard. Actually N-san doesn’t like this. But it’s one of my favourites.
To make the rhubarb, just break it down in a pan with a little water and sugar. For the custard start by mixing 3 eggs, a teaspoon of cornflour, and an ounce of sugar. Heat a pint of milk until it’s hot but not boiling, then stir the milk into the egg mixture, slowly and stirring all the time. Now comes the tricky part. Pour the mixture back into the pan and heat up, slowly, and without letting it get too hot (or boil!), and keep stirring. The eggs and cornflour will cause the custard to thicken. Have an ice cold bowl next to you, and once it starts to thicken, pour the custard into the bowl. (The coldness of the bowl stops the eggs from cooking further and turning the whole thing into scrambled eggs).