French Onion Soup

Basic ingredients: 

Approx 1Kg of onions. I used about 6 regular onions, 2 reds and 2 shallots - so you can mix it up a bit with whatever you have. 2 cloves of garlic crushed, knob of butter, 2 table spoons of olive oil, teaspoon of sugar, seasoning, a glurg of white wine/brandy, 2 pints of dark stock.

Method:

Chop the onions and fry them (hot) in the oil and butter until they start to caramelize, add the garlic, sugar, wine and seasoning. Stir it all in and cook until it's a sticky mess (don't allow it to burn). Then add the stock and let it simmer for an hour. Serve with cheese, garlic bread, croutons etc.

 

Mediocre Meringue

It was good, but it didn't look as good as this.......

Ingredients:
4 egg whites
240g sugar (being 120g caster sugar & 120g icing sugar)
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 teaspoon vinegar (if you dare - I didn't - maybe that's why it didn't look like a mountain range?)

Method:
Beat the egg whites for a long long time until they are so stiff you can turn the bowl upside down above your head without worrying if they will fall out or not.

Gently stir in the caster sugar,  a spoonful at a time, and then fold in the icing sugar mixed with cornflour.

Think about adding the vinegar.  If you do it, let me know what happens.

Spoon over whatever it is that you are baking - for us it was baked apples but it could be a lemon pie or anything else.

Bake in a lukewarm oven (50 degrees c)  for a very long time - say an hour and a half.

Serve and enjoy.

Easy Peasy Soda Bread

Soda Bread - Christmas 2018

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius and prepare a greased baking sheet

Ingredients

40g shortening (I used lard, but butter or marg should be fine)

50g rolled oats

450g whole meal flour

1 tsp salt

2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 tsp cream of tartar / baking powder

1 tsp caster sugar

1 tablespoon honey

450 ml of buttermilk 

1. In a bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients and rub in the shortening

2. Make a well in the centre 

3. Separately, mix together the buttermilk and honey

4. Pour the buttermilk mixture into the well in the centre of the dry ingredients

5. With hands, fold and gently knead into a soft dough

6. Form the dough into a round on a baking sheet.  The less kneading the better.

7. Score a cross into the dough.  

8. Dust gently with flour 

9. Bake for 50 mins

 

 As encouraged by Alan and supported by John!

MUM'S CHOCOLATE STUFF

Ingredients 

• 8oz digestive biscuits

• 4oz margarine (in the original) - butter I'd say in the butter-is-better version

• 3 tablespoons granulated sugar

• 2 tablespoons drinking chocolate

• 4oz sultanas

• 1 egg (if you dare - and at your own risk)

• a few drops of vanilla essence

• 12 squares cooking chocolate to top

Method

1. Melt the marg/butter, sugar & chocolate in pan
   
   
   

   

   
   
2. Crumble biscuits in baking bowl
3. Add melted mixture and a well beaten egg (or alternatively, honey and/or golden syrup - enough just to bind) 
4. Add sultanas & vanilla essence 
5. Press into flat baking tin
   
   
   

   

   
   
   
6. Melt cooking chocolate over a pan of boiling water (or however you like to melt chocolate)
7. Spread evenly over the pressed stuff
8. Leave to set and cut into squares
9. Try not to eat too many squares at the same time

(If using the egg, check dietary requirements / allergies / sensitivities of target consumers and get everyone to sign disclaimers!)

Rice Dams

Not two words that normally go together, rice and dam. A new (?)  Japanese designer food trend. A rice dam that once breached by the hungry user floods the other food in the dish with a tasty sauce. Whatever will they think of next and why is it that we never quite get there first? Served cold from the rear of the fridge after two long days it may well be a high quality, highly effective hangover cure.

Fictitious Dishes

You'll recognise these two. In my teenage years I did become a bit obsessed with the nutritious value of ice cream and apple pie using it as some kind of culinary reference point. Strangely I hardy ever partook of this treat until in my later years...the influence remains however. I was pretty much on the road in the wrong country. All you got here in the glorious non-glam post pretentious 70s was chips, pieces and filed rolls. As for Holden Caulfield's pedestrian snack cheese sandwich, well it's OK if unspectacular. I need to see what Gatsby had for a snack, just to make a meaningful comparison. Next: I'm sure there's a few questionable or bizarre lunchtime treats yet to be explored in Game of Thrones. That's for another day.

Steak Night

If you don't understand the significance of steak night then you've clearly a) not been in the navy or b) watched many episodes of Scrubs. Everybody needs a steak night now and then, so here we have:

2 x Sirloin steaks, mushrooms, tomato, (the pepper sauce and fat chips didn't make the pic).

Heat the cast iron frying pan (with a little oil) until hot, add the steaks and sear them, let it all hiss and turn frequently. 5 minutes = medium any more is well done so add the tomatoes and the mushrooms at about 2 minutes. The fat chips should be in the oven, they'll take 20 mins from frozen (don't judge me) so work backwards from that.

Pepper sauce: Double cream, peppercorns, beef stock, brandy (or whisky), butter and seasoning; all sensible amounts. Melt everything in a pan and then add the cream last, mix and simmer thoroughly until smooth and you're away. 

Serve on warm plates with room temp French Beaujolais. Nice.

Overall cost inc wine; £21.55.

Other burger recipes

Following on from the Earnest Hemingway burger recipe here are two slightly less sophisticated but still appealing options you might want to try.

Believing the hype

Tenuous linkages. Strictly speaking this is not a  recipe but it does exist way over to the left on the food and drink awareness spectrum. It's about the way that once you reach about half way with any jar of coffee the flavour tends to turn a little sour or flat or ceases to be as good as when the jar started. I've noticed this with all the major brands and derivatives; I've been robbed of coffee joy. A sad state of affairs. This phenomenon also applies to some extent to the sludge that Costa, Starbucks and the like serve up. So coffee pleasure has slipped away from my taste bud's top ten and been replaced with tea and milk bombs, strange  but still refreshing days. 

So in a bid to restart a coffee revival and as a result of some intense marketing and TV advertising I became aware of new Gold Blend Barista Style - it promised a lot (rich and full bodied) and I believed and...two cups later and it's ok. We'll see how well it's doing once I get to halfway down the jar.

How to cook

Happy days

All of this is stolen by the way - Dangerous Minds strikes again: A favourite Hemingway anecdotes always revolve around him being absurdly macho—like when he mocked F. Scott Fitzgerald for his monogamy, or when, in an attempt to prevent sharks from eating the tuna he had just caught, he opened fire with a Thompson submachine-gun directly into the water. This, of course, was pretty counterproductive, since it only produced more blood, attracting more sharks and exacerbating the feeding frenzy.

It only makes sense that Hemingway would tire of shooting fish at some point, and settle himself down for a nice, slow-moving animal like a cow, and it turns out that he had very interesting (and totally delicious-sounding) specifications for his burgers. Below is his recipe for an ultra-manly, super-robust burger. Apparently, Mei Yen Powder is no longer on the market, but you can approximate the rich, umami flavor with nine parts salt, nine parts sugar and two parts MSG. For 1 teaspoon of Mei Yen Powder, use 2/3 of a teaspoon of the mix, plus 1/3 of a teaspoon of soy sauce. (And don’t believe the hype about MSG—it’s harmless and delicious.)

Ingredients–

1 lb. ground lean beef

2 cloves, minced garlic

2 little green onions, finely chopped

1 heaping teaspoon, India relish

2 tablespoons, capers

1 heaping teaspoon, Spice Islands sage

Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning — 1/2 teaspoon

Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder — 1/2 teaspoon

1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork

About 1/3 cup dry red or white wine

1 tablespoon cooking oil

What to do–

Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make your fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.

That is one hell of a specific hamburger is it not? If you've no time for all this try a Tony Macaroni burger when you're next out on the town.

Eton Messing

This is really scrummy and didn't survive very long after Christmas dinner. Fruit Pavlova. Home made meringue loaded with fresh fruit and cream. Complicated and messy but simple and very tasty. As a presentation it has a high Wow! factor.

Baked Apples

Viewed on one level it's like a torture chamber for cooking apples (as in Fig. 1) in the style of Annoying Orange...but if you can forget possible plots for Aggrieved Apples or Apples in Angst it all works out fine. So this tasty and filling desert requires 4 cooking apples, mincemeat, shortcrust pastry and brown sugar. Firstly peel and core the apples (and torture them if you must), stuff the newly revealed  core-void with mincemeat, roll them in the pastry and sprinkle with brown sugar. Bake them in a hot oven for half and hour until golden delicious brown and serve them with cream or creme fraiche. "Yummy!"was what we all said afterwards. P.S. the pictures are of course not quite in the correct order. Just the right meal to discuss your prospective Progressive Rock Cruise venture over.

(PS - Don't forget to inject, at various stages known to only you, secret sloshes of honey mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg. )

Fish & Finger Baps

Fish fingers, rocket, tomato and mayo. You know what to do.

Buffalo Stovies

Forgot to take a photo at the right time, here are the remains however.

Using local buffalo mince produces a nice pot of tasty stovies, here's how:

Grab a pound or so of buffalo mince from Puddledub Farms , brown it in a pot (skim away any fat, there won't be much) and add two chopped onions, seasoning and a couple of spoons of browning and hot water to lubricate the pot. While the mince is cooking chop up about 8 - 10 potatoes and boil them till they are still a bit solid. Drain them and add them to the mince once it's had about 30 mins of simmering. Mix up the mixture and bake it in the oven at 200C for a further 20 mins just to "crust" the top of the stovies. Serve with fresh bread cut in chunks and brown sauce. This amount serves 3, ramp it up for more.

Bit of an experiment

Chicken and Sweet Potato Stew.

Gather together the usual suspects in a deep caserole dish - chopped chicken breasts (4), sweet potato and chopped and diced onion, turnip and carrot. Add in a stock cube, white wine, ginger, paprika, West Country sauce and seasoning and bake for about an hour in a hot oven. Serve with chutney and fresh bread. Verdict: an easy-peasy, labour saving, wholesome if not particularly inspiring chicken stew...we both went for second helpings and there's enough left over to form the basis of a decent leftover curry.

Milk Bomb

A lot of people don't really get this, I wonder why? It's a simple recipe for a quick and tasty pick me up drink that's good anytime. No drugs, no potions, no excuses just lots of processed muck rubbing their atoms together to form a creamy and addictive soup of esoteric and misunderstood mass produced dairy products. So if you get protein cravings but are too far away from a tender steak or a deep fried cod to hold your weak flesh together then this is a good fixation busting alternative.

The raw materials are best mixed 50 / 50 and do it in your favourite glass, accept no substitute. OK, half a glass of blue (fat) milk and a pot of Actimel or Vitality (as illustrated) or whatever cheap stuff you've got in a BOGOF offer. Add the yogurt to the milk to get the full bomb effect - the yogurt descends down through the chemical make up of the milk like a none too polite bomb travelling through the clouds heading downwards to hit it's allotted target. Then glug it over and don't hold back. Cheers! If I do nothing else in life at least I'll be remembered as the inventor and architect of the MILK BOMB. I'll go happy on that one thought - if you're listening humanity.

Fife diet revisited

By now you all (presumably) get the Fife Diet concept, it's a bit long in the tooth but every so often we have a relapse and go local.  So this meal mainly utilises produce bought at the local farm shop which is conveniently situated in the local farm next door; Bankhead Farm. So ladies and gentlemen I give you:

Cockletrees Sausage & Sweet Potato with Cauliflower Cheese.

Boil and mash sweet potato ( 3 good sized ones will do), add a bit of butter for lubrication.

Cook (beef) sausage in onion (add a shot of Bisto) and lay it in an ashet with the sweet potato.

Boil cauliflower, add a cheese sauce, add grated cheese. Bake in the oven until burny burny.

Serve as per the photo above.

For two lost souls you need: 3 sweet potatoes boiled and mashed in butter, 6 beef sausages, 1 onion, Bisto, 1 cauliflower, cheese sauce (?), grated cheese, seasonings.

Ali's verdict - tasty & filling. Yum.

Lessons Learned

The burning pudding

The toasted sandwich

What foodie related things did we learn in 2012? Here's the top ones in no particular order:

Roasted ham with honey and mustard applied is fantastic.
A good turkey sandwich needs to be toasted.
Whisky burns very well on a Christmas pudding.
We need to buy more locally produced meat and vegetables.
Olive bread is great.
Coca-Cola still is the best drink in the world and should really be considered a health drink.
Garlic roasted spuds do the trick.
Salt and sauce or salt and vinegar? We can't quite decide.
French wine every time.
Breakfast biscuits are made by Elves and have magical properties.
Proactive yogurt and fruit smoothie mix well as an invigorating drink.
Dirty carrots are good for you.

Weekend Curry

Adapted from the More with Less Cookbook's "Garden Vegetable Curry"
Serves 7 - 8

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan and add a couple of chopped onions together with a couple of cloves of minced / finely chopped cloves.

Fry lightly for 5 minutes and then add 2 tablespoons of curry powder, 1 teaspoon of turmeric and a teaspoon of cumin seeds and fry for another 3 minutes.

Add a tin of chopped tomatoes and a squeeze of tomato paste and cook for a few minutes until the mixture thickens.

Add a packet of sliced cabbage or cabbage and leeks or greens; 3 diced carrots and 5 small chopped potatoes.  Stir until all coated in the sauce and then add a teaspoon of salt. 

Cover with water and simmer for 15 minutes.  

While simmering, boil half a dozen eggs then shell them.

Add a few handfuls of frozen green beans or peas or both, and a tablespoon of lemon juice, and simmer for another 15 minutes.

Add the boiled eggs (whole) and heat through for 5 minutes.

Serve with long grain rice, cutting the eggs in half for serving and with chutneys, curry condiments and chipatas on the side.

Voodoo Chill Out Rice

A quick and tasty veg stir fry.

You need: A chopped onion, 6 small dirty carrots, 12 chopped mushrooms, a half cup of frozen peas, 6 small plum tomatoes, cooked rice, balsamic vinegar, garlic (as you like it), dried chillies, salt and pepper and oil. Use a well oiled wok or better still something non-stick with a lid and chop the veg to suit.

Fry in the usual stir fry order on a hot hob, that's onions oil and all the additives first, don't be mean. Then add the vegetables finishing with the cooked rice (pre-prepared elsewhere or even leftover). Take away from the heat after about 7 minutes and leave with a lid on for another 5 just to let it all come together. Serve immediately.

You can of course add (cooked) meat or whatever things you like towards the end of the process.