Files and Records

Category: Cook-Along Friday

  • Spring lamb curry #cookalongfriday

    Back on familiar ground this week, though with a twist.  And, no.  That twist isn’t a Royal Wedding-themed curry.  To be honest, I’d be the man on the train into London wondering where everyone was going or on the M25 wondering why it was so quiet.  I know there’s been blanket coverage on the TV but these things just don’t register on my radar!

    Anyway, today’s curry is a 3-part affair – preparation, the long cook and the final 5 minutes.  It’s also got an unusual ingredient that’s abundant in my garden at the moment…

    Ingredients:

    • 2lb lamb, cubed (2cm/1in)
    • 4 onions, finely sliced.  Whenever a recipe says this I put them through the Kenwood although I do now have  a wonderful ceramic cleaver and I now know the meaning of “finely sliced”!!!
    • 3 tsp ginger and garlic paste
    • 1tsp turmeric
    • 1/2 teaspoon chilli powder / paprika
    • 4floz chicken stock
    • Handful of coriander, same amount of mint (there’s the secret ingredient)
    • 3 chillies (optional)
    • 3tbsp lemon juice
    • 1tsp sugar

    The Preparation

    Put everything from the lamb down to the chicken stock into a large pan.  That’s it.

    The Long Cook

    Fire up the hob to a medium heat, bring everything to a simmer then drop the heat to low.  Bang on a lid, leave it mostly alone for two hours (long enough to watch some of that Royal Wedding coverage!).  Check on it from time to time, removing any oil that comes to the surface.

    Or…

    Whack the lot in a slow cooker and ignore.

    Or…

    Put it in the pressure cooker.  Cook for half an hour with no pressure then 15-30 minutes at full pressure (your mileage may vary!).  Sometimes this works wonderfully, sometimes the stuff sticks like dried-on Weetabix and burns.  I’ve not worked out how to judge this one yet, I’m just starting on my pressure-cooker career.

    The Final 5 Minutes

    Add the rest of the ingredients (but not the sugar) along with a couple of tablespoons of the juice from the pan to a blender and blend until smooth.  Stir this into the lamb mix, bring it back to a simmer, add the sugar, taste and adjust seasoning, serve.

    Cunning Tip Number 1 – You’re cooking for kids and adults and you want a full-heat version for the grown-ups.  Split the contents of the main pan and the blender in two (or whatever the ratio of kids to adults is), stir the un-chillied blend into pan 1, add chillies and blend again before adding to pan 2 for a full-heat, feel-the-burn, toilet-paper-in-the-fridge adults mix.

    So there you go.  Nothing particularly hard or scary about this one, fully adjustable heat levels so you can watch the looks of amazement on the other parent’s faces when you say “Oh, yes, my kids eat curry” as if it’s something perfectly normal and they’re the weird ones for not eating it!  Personally, I love the fact that I don’t have to cook different meals for the adults and the kids.

    Works wonderfully well with all that fine spring lamb that’s frolicking in the fields at the moment and the fresh mint that’s sprouting in the garden.

    Enjoy and tell me all about it in the comments!

  • Pizza, food of the Gods (#cookalongfriday #amcooking)

    Pizza today, and in a break from providing you with a complete recipe I’m going to treat you a general discussion and to my favourite toppings.
    I had put a tweet out to a number of famous (and not-so-famous) types to find out what the strangest pizza topping they’d had and enjoyed was but as of time-of-writing, I’ve had nothing back.

    Anyway.  Pizza breaks down into 3 components.  The base, the tomato sauce and the toppings.  Until recently it wasn’t always possible to reliably obtain pizza bases from the supermarket.  Back in the Somerfield days here on the rock we *could* get pizza bases from the bit at the back of the store where they prepared pizza but it depended entirely on who was serving.  Some were happy to sell us the bases on the grounds that it was a sale and that cash is always welcome.  Others were adamant that you could only buy a pizza base from them if you bought the rest of the pizza with it.  And there was no clear direction from on high.  So we improvised:

    • French sticks, cut in half and lightly grilled, work very well.  The downside is that the bread has a hard crust and can wreak havoc on the skin of your mouth.
    • Naan breads also work rather well, and you’ve got the advantage of building some flavour direct into the base if you go for a garlic and coriander naan in the first place.
    • If you’ve the time and the inclination, you can make the base yourself.

    We’ve done all three of these in the past and wolfed down every one.  Now we’ve got a Tescos, they’ve started stocking ready-made pizza bases and all is well with the world.  We’ll still make our own from time to time, though, just to prove we can!  I say “we”, it’s actually my wife that makes the bread and she’s damn good at it.

    That’s the base.  Now, the tomato sauce.I’ve seen a lot of recipes for this over the years, some a lot more complicated than others.  Ours involves a few key ingredients:  Tomato puree, wine vinegar, salt, pepper and fresh chopped basil.  After that, the additions are there to be made depending on what you’re putting on there.  Fresh herbs from the garden, where possible, are fantastic.  I can guarantee that there’ll be fresh parsley in today’s pizza base, it’s too yummy to miss out.  If we’re doing a seafood pizza we’ll stick in chopped anchovies and mussels to really round out the flavour.

    Now, the toppings.  Cheese goes without saying.  Experiment!  Wendsleydale isn’t half bad, feta makes a nice addition, I’ve not tried haloumi but I think it could work rather well.  We’ll bang on some stilton if we’ve got it, assorted strong (extra-mature, uber-Farmhouse-industrial-strength) cheddars and, of course, mozarella.  But under the cheese, ahh, that’s where things get interesting.

    Right.  In Norwich, many years ago (so long ago I’ve been informed they’ve closed the restaurant now) there used to be a place called Pizza One and Pasta Two.  In there I had “The Monty Python”.  Described as “Something completely different”, this was a curry and banana pizza.  And it was wonderful!  In fact, banana makes a few appearances on my pizza favourites (and if people will put up with pineapple, why not banana too?).  Tuna and banana, one I first had from Sinatra’s on the Lothian Road in Edinburgh, is one my kids love.  Bacon and banana likewise, although I don’t remember seeing this one commercially available anywhere.  On the Isle of Skye there used to be a pizza shop called Creeler’s.  Don’t know if it’s still there.  Had a seafood pizza from them when I was in the area, spent most of my time trying to work out just what it was I was eating!  “Seafood” being, apparently, whatever they pulled out of the sea and chopped up.  I know there were mussels and squid but there was stuff I’d need a degree in marine biology to recognise.  In Paris, they put smoked salmon on my seafood pizza (and charged accordingly!)

    @saccostomus on Twitter tells me he’s had haggis pizza, and a chilli and bitter chocolate one.  That sounds rather good.  I had a pizza in Leeds once that was topped with green chillis and very little else.  Painful but very tasty.  Very tasty indeed.

    I’m looking forward to my kids growing up so that I can slowly increase the amount of heat in these dishes.  Nothing better than the burn of a chilli on your pizza in my opinion.

    So…  Over to you.  What’s the best (or the worst) pizza topping you’ve had?  Where’s the best pizza you’ve had?  Anyone had one of those massive pizzas they featured on Friends?

  • Baked salmon with a curry & naan crust, lentil biryani #cookalongfriday

    Made a fortuitous discovery last night.  Thought the large slab of salmon in the fridge was smoked, it turned out to be fresh and ready for cooking.  That means we’re getting baked salmon with a curry and naan bread crust tonight, with a biryani of some kind to go with it.  That’s the up side.  The down side is that this is going to be almost entirely made up as I go along.  So here goes…

    Taking inspiration from Jamie Oliver’s crusted cod recipe (30 Minute Meals p142), for the salmon we’ll need:-

    • 2 garlic and coriander naan bread
    • 1 onion
    • 5 cardamon pods
    • 1 tsp garlic and ginger paste
    • 1 tsp black peppercorns
    • 1/2 cinnamon stick
    • 1 tsp each of ground cumin, ground coriander and garam masala

    The eagle-eyed might notice a surprising similarity to the curry paste from last week’s recipe.  Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

    • 1 side of salmon (or half a side, depending on what happens to be in the fridge).

    I suspect this would work with cod, ling, tusk, basically any firm fish.  Don’t know about monkfish, give it a shot and see how you get on.  How bad can it be?

    1. Put the grill on to medium-high heat.
    2. Put the salmon under the grill for 5 minutes whilst you…
    3. Put the onion, cardamon, garlic & ginger paste, cinnamon stick, peppercorns, cumin, coriander and garam masala into a blender and blitz to a paste.
    4. Crumb one or both of the naans depending on how much fish you’ve got to cover.
    5. Take the salmon out from under the grill, smear the paste all over the top covering fairly evenly.
    6. Cover the paste with the naan crumbs.
    7. Return the salmon to the oven on the middle shelf, turn up the heat, cook until the crust is golden and crisp (or for about 10 minutes).

    Now this is where the timing gets interesting because the biryani is going to take a lot longer to do than the salmon.

    • 100g lentils
    • 225g Basmati rice
    • 2 large onions
    • 1tbsp garlic and ginger paste
    • 25g butter1tbsp cumin seeds
    • 1/2 cinnamon stick
    • 5 green cardamon pods
    • 1 bay leafsalt and pepper
    • 900ml water
    • 1tsp garam masala
    1. Soak the lentils, wash the rice.
    2. Finely chop the onions
    3. Melt the butter in a large saucepan and fry the onions for a couple of minutes
    4. Add the garlic & ginger paste, cumin seeds, cinnamon stick, cardamon pods and bay leaf, fry for another 10 minutes or so on a low heat
    5. Drain the rice and lentils, add them to the pan and stir well, coating everything with the buttery oniony mixture.
    6. Add salt and pepper, then the water and bring to the boil.
    7. Stir once, lid on, heat down to lowest setting, leave it alone for 20 minutes.
    8. Start work on the salmon!
    9. Once the 20 minutes are up, remove the pan from the heat and the lid from the pan.  It can sit like this for another 10 minutes happily finishing everything off.

    So this is more than a little experimental.  It’s taking elements of a few recipes and putting them together in a way that should (hopefully) work.  And if it doesn’t, well you could always scrape the crust off the salmon and buy in some bagels or chips to serve it with!  But hey, it’s Friday.  Live a little.  It’s the weekend tomorrow and the weather’s set to be good.

    I’m not around next Friday, I’m down to Yorkshire to collect a table, amongst other things.  I’ll get my better half to let me know what she’s cooking and we’ll get that posted up here for your delectation and delight.

    After the event.  Well, that went alright.  If I do this again, I’ll cook the onion for the salmon crust for 5-10 minutes, sweat it down and start it caramelising.  Either that or substitute for tomato.

    The biryani worked very well as an accompaniment, though.  Delicious.