Cooking With Richard

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

Recipe from here.

Previously, mabo dofu.

Recipe from here. It was better the next day after it had congealed slightly in the fridge.

The general recipe is from here. I added pak choi instead of onion, and a little more to finish it off.

Thanks to Brigitte for the artichokes.

Saag aloo — from the Hindi words Saag (spinach) and Aloo (potatoes) — is a favorite Indian vegetable dish of mine. It turns out to be surprisingly easy to make. I started out with this general recipe, but I added tomatoes and some water to allow the potatoes to cook. (I should have par-boiled the potatoes first). The result was especially delicious. Sorry about the rubbish photo …

The man who invented the doner kebab died last week and in honour of Mahmut Aygun I decided to make doner kebabs for us.

I don’t have a recipe, and I don’t have the rotating spit either, so a lot of improvisation was required.

The basic marinade is onion, garlic and a whole lot of curry spices, into which I mixed all the meat:

The meat, a mixture of lamb mince and lamb steaks, is sliced thinly and/or formed into patties and thoroughly cooked in a frying pan:

At the same time, I made a salad, and a greek yogurt and coriander sauce:

After cooking the meat, I stacked it up on my skewers to make kebabs:

Real doner kebab is cooked on a slowly rotating spit in front of a vertical grill …

I don’t have a doner kebab spit, so I had to improvise:

The aim was to burn the meat and give it a barbeque flavour:

These a greek chillis from a jar:

Heat up pitta bread, and layer everything on. At this point you can say “you want chilli with that boss?” in an authentic turkish accent …

Verdict: delicious! And much healthier than the real thing.

Recipe here. I’m not sure if I’ve ever used Mascarpone before, but it makes a wonderful combination with the cake.

Recipe here. I used about 100g of butter, 2 large spoonfuls of golden syrup, 7/8ths large packet of ordinary digestive biscuits, and 200g mix of 70% & 85% chocolate. The chocolate was a little too bitter, so more butter/syrup or a sweeter chocolate would have been better.

No idea about the name “polish cake”. We used to call it “broken biscuit biscuit”.

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: