When travelling, days can go by on grabbed sandwiches and indifferent meals out. Monday was to be a case with end-to-end meetings and the last session finishing at 9.30 pm in Worcester – so a stay over needed.
I got a head start with the food, being warned there would be nothing from when I left till bedtime, by taking a brown baguette stuffed with home-made pate (see earlier). This was eaten greedily and in haste after quickly booking in to the Travelodge in the centre of the town. (For those in need ok – big rooms, dull, dull, dull, mine had great view of the Malverns over a forest of air conditioning units for the local shops. Expensive parking.)
Next door there is a Pizza Express open ‘till 11 pm, so look no further. I’ll skip the detail ‘cos here’s a more than detailed review of someone else there recently. For me it was too small, too bland – and that was the Diavolo! – and the only atmosphere that provided by well-oiled take awayers. The staff were efficient and charming.
No, the best pizza we’ve had in a long time was in Mali Velinj in Croatia: sitting on the side of the harbour, fish at our feet, literally. The dough was so good they sold it plain to eat with olive oil. The fish topping … well it hadn’t been dead long. They do take outs …..
At home we’ve settled on Jamie Oliver’s recipe for dough that includes semolina – not flour, the real thing. And a very fine crust it produces. More difficult to adopt his Italian, more is less approach: we’re in the British school of the more the better. Both view points worth exploring by trial and error.
Retro chicken hits the spot – 40 years on
It says that Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World was published in 1967, which is probably when I bought it. But he’d started writing in the Sunday Times before that and in those days (pre-Murdoch and its many rightward swings) I was an avid reader. So, it may have been even earlier when I made my first dish of chicken cacciatore, and it’s been recycled ever since, as basic a dish for chicken as doing a stir fry.
Of course it’s never the same every time you cook it, partly because you never mean to cook it: I mean, who would serve such a retro dish these days? Us of course.
I can’t check the great man’s recipe ‘cos it’s in a box of books whilst the conservatory is painted, but they all have the same thrust. Take large retro Le Creuset casserole (without handle type). Brown off the chicken – it can be a whole one in eight pieces, whole breasts, pieces eg chopped breast and thigh, any combination will do. As usual, don’t be tempted to use cheap and nasty for this, it’ll just be stringy and chewy, but a top of the range, corn fed organic is over the top, it’s subtlety will simply be lost. Set chicken aside. Then soften onion and an excess of garlic, adding red and green pepper, again slices, chunks, whatever. Add the chicken back into the pan and give a good glug of red wine, boil most off.
Now to tomatoes: some no doubt suggest the real thing but here it’s a waste of effort (considerable to peel the things) and you don’t get the taste. Napolina is the brand for my money, a bit more than the own brands (13p for a tin of tomatoes, who you kidding?) but a great taste. And you need tomato paste as well.
Somehow I always end up with more sauce than it needs, but don’t worry too much, any left over will make an instant pasta dish.
Now for flavouring: basil is a must, and lots of freshly chopped parsley. You can add chopped mushrooms, or a dash of mushroom ketchup. If you’ve used cheap tomatoes you may need a hint of sugar, and a glug of balsamic if the wine didn’t enrich enough. Lots of seasoning too. I am sure there’s a refined version of this to be had in Italy where each delicate flavour settles on the palate, but in 60’s Britain we needed impact, so go for it.
Finally, cook off in a medium oven: you want the chicken to be intensely flavoured and the sauce rich and reduced. Whether you add black olives before you put it in the oven, or 20 minutes from the end is a matter of taste again, as is stoned or not. I love the rich olive taste so it’s stones in, and straight in for me and watch the fillings.
What to eat with it? A mash of some sorts is great in the winter: potato and celeriac, creamed potato. For a Saturday lunch how about baked potato? Even chips: my first experience of casserole and chips was in a French restaurant in Stratford upon Avon circa 1966 and it quite blew me away.
Pasta if obvious is good, but something that’s going to catch the sauce, so shells or penne rather than long straight stuff. And us last night? Dietary steamed veg, cauliflower, tiny carrots and broccoli. Great.
Not quite an Adriatic seafood supper
As the picture testifies our recent Croatian boat trip saw us eat a magnificent lunch of mackerel, freshly caught, with the heads hand fed to squawking sea gulls. I think we probably had four fish each – so toni
ght’s two didn’t look too greedy.
Four in a dish, well seasoned, a splash of olive oil, a finely chopped red onion, slices of lemon, and few sprigs of fresh thyme. A glug of apple juice is a suggestion in a Good Housekeeping recipe so it can’t be wrong. Foiled and a hot oven for 30 minutes about.
I wanted a chunky salad: so pointed red Cambridgeshire cabbage – shredded, sliced mushrooms, more red onion, a tiny chilli, chunks of tomato. Tossed in best olive oil well seasoned and just before serving some shredded Cos lettuce folded in. I have found a trick for this sort of composed salads which is to mix everything ‘dry’ as it were before dressing. Somehow the flavours blend better than if you just give it a toss when dressing.
There was a fresh sourdough rye loaf to mop up juices and horseradish cream – made for us dieters with yoghourt, and non the worse for it.
I promised not to mention last night’s takeout. Yuk.
Lip smacking leftovers
We noted earlier that the organic chicken hadn’t lived up to its potential when roasted. It needed a second chance. So yesterday it was stripped from the carcass and every bit of bone and skin went into the stockpot with carrots and onions, bay leaves (home dried), peppercorns and water. Forgotten about on a bubbling boil for a couple of hours it yielded some excellent stock.
Happy Dryw (the dog) got a carrot or two.
In the weekly shop there were four fresh sweetcorns, most surprisingly au naturel and not vacuum packed to within an inch of their lives. The corns were stripped (just use a large, very sharp knife to cut the kernels off the corn) into the stock. I added a couple of teaspoons of Marigold organic vegetable stock for colour and taste. Ten minutes of boiling and I thickened a little with two teaspoons (heaped) of cornflour stirred into half a big tub of yoghourt until smooth. (You could use cream or fromage frais but that diet thing …)
Into the bubbling soup with the chopped chicken – there was quite a lot – and a quick cook through. It needed quite a bit more seasoning.
The result, significantly better than the same dish made with just any old chicken and frozen sweetcorn (something we have done regularly). Goes to show, again, what goes in the pot in terms of quality, comes out.
Big bowls were followed by a small slice of Mediterranean vegetable tart (shop), with plenty in the fridge for later lunches. So, in the end, chicken did good.
Emptying the shopping bags
Ok, so I mostly don’t get the horror of the supermarket shop, but I do get the job of emptying all those bloody Bags. Do we really need/eat all this stuff? Apparently we do.
Rarely do I feel like a proper cook after this – just too much food – and the exercise usually involves finding stuff hidden in the back of the fridge that has to be eaten now!
So there was a less than a portion of roasted vegetables, and half a tin of tomatoes that demanded attention. And a pack of shop made (Tesco Finest) cannelloni stuffed with ricotta and spinach. They all seemed destined for each other.
The left-overs were bunged in a saucepan with a glug of mushroom ketchup, a splash of balsamic vinegar and attacked with the hand held blender until pureed. A handful of chopped purple basil (again nearing the end of life) and parsley perked the whole thing up. Voila, instant sauce to cover the pasta which went into a dish into a hot oven for 25 minutes. Oh, and a grate of cheese on top.
Not half bad too it turned out. I have done the stuff your tubes with cheesy spinach mix: comparing effort to result the shop ones came out on top. The sauce, well a happy happen chance of leftovers.
The Art of Festering – and nearly instant food
Mentioned this notion before: that some things are best left to their own devices to develop taste and unctuousness by natural processes. This is probably akin to the biological and physical actions called ‘rotting’ in other situations, but let’s not dwell on that.
Supper tonight was a perfect example of many things: the virtue of making a curry from the finest ingredients (in this instance the remains of a leg of lamb that had first been baked on a bed of vegetables to which a can of beer had been added; plenty of herbs and three hours on a very low oven – thank you for the inspiration Rick Stein), not eating it all at once (another virtue indeed), and the festering effect of freezing.
I hope no-one out there’s in the camp that decries microwaves and freezers as devices of the culinary devil. For us they are essential to eating well, cheaply and sometimes fast.
So take the curry: one click top box full of lamb with aubergine and defrost, along with a couple of portions of frozen mixed rice (wild, brown and organic white) cooked to store a week ago. Now, there were last night’s left over potatoes (red salad ones as it happens) and they got diced and thrown into the lamb to reheat.
Now this sort of meal can easily be lacking the fresh veg we need – so I made large bowl of raita: peel and chop half a cucumber; finely chop about a third of a red onion; sprinkle with salt; then fold into thick plain yoghourt. Now you don’t want anything too posh for the yoghourt: it mustn’t have any sense of sweetness for my taste, so the extraordinary River Cottage yoghourt that tastes as though it’s made from double cream is no good. Sprinkle on a quarter teaspoon of garam masala and a pile of chopped coriander and you’re done.
Make sure curry and rice are piping hot. Serve in deep bowls and feast. Chapatis, nan breads et al will bulk out the fibre if you need too …. but they really need to be home made so no time tonight ….
Flat pack bread – the result
So proof of the pudding – in this case the bread – is in the eating. And the Ikea loaf in the box has passed with flying colours.
First this morning it made toast. Now any bread this substantial is going to make quite a slice and this was no exception, but it became crisp and chewy with a good bite. Not quite the long taste of a sourdough, but interesting enough and fine with peanut butter and home made lime marmalade – separately that is.
Tonight we had it with a selection of cheeses and it again was good – not overpowering, but interesting and moorish.
So, it does work. And I expect it to improve with age over the next few days – if it lasts that long….
The rest of supper was an organic chicken roasted with fresh herbs on a bed of thinly sliced fennel. Great taste, tough to eat. The roasted vegetables were refreshed with half a tin of tomatoes, and there were steamed red potatoes. Altogether good, if disappointing, expensive bird. The left overs had better be good.
Bread in a box? Seriously?
Well, yes. It’s seems that Ikea can even flat pack food. We all know, don’t we, that its food shop has great crisp bread, scrummy herrings of all sorts and wonderful red berry compote (far too slurpy to be called jam by the British and great on home made muesli (passim)) and of course meat balls? Now it has added Swedish rye bread in a box.
It has been blogged about before, but I hadn’t noticed and this one didn’t have much success.
The first thing is that although not cheap (about £2) the contents of the box seems to have a fine provenance: the home of Nordic rye bread and a family firm of millers who are big time in that part of the world. They are called Finax and as well as bread, produce muesli and a whole range, no less, of shake in the box products, especially muffins. See a fun video here.
So, what do you get? Well a box obviously, and of the Tetrapak kind since it was invented thereabouts. The instructions are clear: add water (for this you do need a thermometer, which as a sometimes souredough maker we had), and shake for 45 secs. I’d recommend a bit longer since there was a lump of hesitant ingredients lurking in a corner when I tipped it out straight into a greased bread tin: wait for 45 mins. It didn’t rise much but you wouldn’t expect a bread of this sort to. Into hot oven and wait another hour (again this might seem a long time, but par for the course for this sort of bread).
What’s it like? No telling, yet. I’ll turn it out and let it fester: most rye bread is best left for a day so I suspect it’ll be started at breakfast tomorrow. I’ll let you know.
For now it’s off to finish the roasted veg, steamed broccoli and grilled organic burgers from the happy pig man (Caermynydd Piggery Free Range Pork 01974 821 361 01545 571 607) at the Riverside food market.
Lazy food days
It started Friday because sister in law needed birthday pub lunch and The Halfway is a few yards from the office and home. A perfectly competent fish and chips did the job, but why the bullet sized peas? 
They’re one thing that freezes well so either buy decent ones or make them mushy. Supper reduced to bread and cheese to compensate.
Saturday got off to a flying start with a Big Breakfast (poached eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes with Sunflower seeded toast) so lunch was off the agenda. However, a surprise find at Ogmore Castle and the nearby farm tea rooms meant a slice of ‘Judith’s’ white chocolate cake with a dark chocolate granache: one between two mind you. Quite the most amazing view and a cake to go back for.
So, again some bought stuffed pasta for supper and early to bed.
Real Sardines on Toast
For this you need some left over (or specially done, worth it) grilled sardines, not a tin (delicious though they are in their own right).
Carefully fillet the by now cold fish – you can be picky about only using really nice bits, free of bones, they are so very cheap.
Toast a slice of good bread per person – we used tonight a seven seeds, wholegrain; sourdough would be good, Ciabata if it’s your thing. Butter. Cover with chopped crisp lettuce stuff (or posh leaves if you want, but I like crunchy for this).
Now lay the fish on top, be generous. Sprinkle on a good quantity of chopped red onion and finish with a dollop of salsa – shop will be fine. Stick a gherkin or two alongside.
Eat and be surprised.
It was an occasion when the starter was infinitely better than what followed – an indifferent stir fry of fresh vegetables, hair noodles and spicy sausage. The spicy wasn’t, I’d held back on the black bean sauce, the vegetables didn’t shine and the hair noodles were just – well, hairy. Win some, lose some.
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