February 22, 2012

Salted Caramel Popcorn

It turns out I go a bit crazy in the kitchen when I’m anxious. In the last 2 weeks I’ve made cupcakes, apple cake, mont blanc, 3 batches of cookies and 2 batches of caramel popcorn. I guess cooking is a nice way to relax and it’s something you have control over when life sometimes feel a bit out of your control. The cause of my anxiety has undoubtedly been the move, but also the boys started at their new school today…always a bit nerve wracking.

It went well (sigh of relief).

So to celebrate and torment you, I shall share my wisdom on caramel popcorn.

I don’t even know why I had to make it, but I just did. I have looked around recipes and I have made some mistakes. Here’s what I’ve learnt.

- mixing the sugar types prevents crystalisation

- I’ve heard not stirring the caramel also guards against this

- to make the popcorn crunchy and NOT chewy, you bake it for a little while

- it’s really hard to get a good coating, so I’ll give you ratios for greedy guts’ like me who like a well coated kernel.

- I’m not too sure what makes it stay glossy….I’ll have to let you know when I figure that one out.

Salted Caramel Popcorn Recipe

Ingredients:

About 3 cups of popped corn (air or oil popped, but unsalted)

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup caster sugar

2 tbs golden syrup (or maple syrup or corn syrup)

55-60g butter (half a stick)

1/2 tsp salt (but you can put as much or little as you like)

heaped 1/4 tsp bi-carb soda

Method:

Oven at 160C

Have the pop corn spread out, in one layer in a baking tray.

In a medium sized pot, melt all the ingredients together except the bi-carb soda. Ok to stir at first, but once it’s combined, stop stirring.

Bring to a boil and bubble on a medium-low heat for about 4 minutes. Swirl the pot to keep it mixing.

Take off heat and stir in the bi-carb soda. Stir until it goes creamy looking, about a 30 seconds.

Pour the caramel over the popcorn and mix it all around to coat it as well as possible.

This bit’s tricky, it all goes flying, so do your best. Use a couple of wooden spoons at first, because it’s a bit hot. The caramel cools quickly though, so you have to work fast and eventually you can use your hands to mix even more.

Pop it in the oven for a few minutes at a time. Stir and pop back in. I wouldn’t give it any more than about ten minutes in the oven, or it will go too crunchy and might dry it out too much.

This recipe is pretty easy unfortunately, so if you don’t get it the way you like it the first time you know the saying, ‘If at first you don’t succeed try and try again.‘

(Do I need to point out that nuts would go really nicely with this?)

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February 20, 2012

Cosy Lamb Meatballs

This is another recipe from Maria Elia, a chef I came across in my work for Foodepedia. I also got the Aubergine Mull recipe from her book which has proved to be a welcome addition to my kitchen. These meatballs are a nice alternative to beef or pork meatballs. I make them regularly as they are easy to make and taste great. The only thing to take care of with this recipe is to not overcook the meatballs because they will become tough or rubbery. With other meatballs I use milk-soaked breadcrumbs that prevent this drying out, but these ones don’t require it. But it also means you have to take care.

The unusual addition of cinnamon gives this dish a subtle warmth and flavour that goes perfectly with the lamb. I’ve never added the dill and rarely the mint, as they’re not ingredients I have in the kitchen usually, but if you can add it, it would really make it a special dish. Finally, this recipe calls for the meatballs to be browned in a frying pan, but I always bake mine – it’s quicker and adds less fat. I also don’t dust my meatballs in flour, mainly because I’m lazy. The flour simply works to thicken the sauce, which you can do with a flour and water paste anyway.

Cosy Lamb Meatballs Recipe

Ingredients:

For the Meatballs:

500g lamb mince

2 garlic cloves (minced)

pinch of cayenne pepper

2 tsp cumin

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp tumeric flour for dusting (optional)

For the sauce:

1 small onion (diced)

2 garlic cloves (minced)

1 tbs tomato paste

1 tsp cinnamon

1 can of tomatoes

pinch of sugar

1 chicken stock cube (or equivalent)

frozen baby peas.

1 tsp dried dill (or fresh)

1/2 bunch of mint (chopped)

Oven 180C

Method:

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix. Roll out the meatballs and dust with flour.

Bake on lined trays till JUST browned.

For the sauce, saute the onion and garlic.

Add cinnamon and stir for a minute or so to release the flavour.

Add the tomato paste, can of tomatoes, stock, sugar, dill and about a cup of water and simmer for half an hour or more.

Add meatballs and peas and simmer for another 15 minutes.

Season and throw in the mint. Serve with mashed potato.

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February 16, 2012

Caldo Verde (Green Soup)

I don’t usually buy cabbages like this. Winter cabbages are so hard and have a strong, almost bitter taste. I usually use the Chinese Cabbage which is a softer flavour and texture perfect for stir fries and light sauteing.

However, this winter cabbage is perfect for Caldo Verde, or translated Green Soup, or as interpreted by me, Cabbage Soup. Only sounds appetising if you love cabbage like I do, or are being forced to eat it because you are trying really hard to remove all grains and potatoes from the dinner menu. ; )

Seriously though, I do actually, thankfully, love cabbage and this is an easy soup to make and is nutritious too. The original recipe contains potato and I found it in the fraudulently titled ‘Good Food Magazine’ and happened to be the only interesting thing in the whole magazine. Sorry England, but your food mags aren’t much chop. I do miss the good old Delicious, Donna Hay and Gourmet Traveller. I’m yet to find an equivalent here.

I have kindly removed the potato from the equation for the ‘Paleo’ minded, but feel free to replace with the much less starchy sweet potato, or even some butternut squash. The sweetness works nicely.You can obviously add whatever vegetables you like to this, it’s really just the basis for hearty winter vegetable fun.

Caldo Verde Recipe

Ingredients:

1 onion, sliced

1 chorizo, sliced

2 garlic cloves, diced/minced

1 tin harricot beans (anu bean will do)

500ml vegetable/chicken stock

1 cabbage, sliced/shredded

chilli flakes/fresh chilli sliced/cayenne pepper (optional)

Method:

Saute the chorizo slices in a big sauce pan. Remove when done.

Saute the onion and garlic in the oil from the chorizo.

Add any chilli you want to use, and cook off briefly.

Add stock, chorizo and any potato or sweet potato and simmer for about half an hour.

Add the cabbage and beans. (and any other vegetable you like, eg: green beans, spinach, peas)

Simmer till the cabbage is cooked to your liking.

(If you’re not worried about calories or abstaining from grains, this meal would be heavenly with a massive hunk of bread. I imagine. Can you hear my stomach pining for the days of bread?)

 

 

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February 13, 2012

The View from Maidenhead

Moving is never fun. After the excitement of getting the physical items moved from A to B, you’re left with the difficult job of unpacking your life from (terribly inadequately labelled) cardboard boxes. At the moment we’re sleeping on mattresses and subsisting on the bare essentials, but luckily for us, the kitchen is pretty well sorted.

I’ve got my La Creuset orange pots (bought 2nd hand on ebay for a steal) and my mixer from home. I’ve bought myself a ridiculously heavy cast iron frying pan for the bargain price of £12. There’s something so reassuring about knowing I can scrape at the surface of this pan without doing it any damage. I am not a fan of teflon, and yet it’s very difficult to get your hand on anything else these days.

While the view from kitchen window in Maidenhead might not give me a lifeline to the world outside, it does let a wonderful amount of sunshine in. The kitchen (ceramic hob aside) is pretty great. I’m still getting used to where I’ve put everything. I have developed a system of organisation where I put things like oils and sauces in a cupboard right by the stove. It has worked for me in the past and continues to serve me well.

Here’s a photo of the new set up. I’ve got my canisters in pride of place, and my cast iron weapon of choice in the foreground. This is the new home of Feeding Time Blog.

I’m going to cook up a Caldo Verde tonight to repent for our snacking sins of the past couple of weeks. It sounds fancy but it just means ‘green soup’ in Portuguese and is more or less a soup made with cabbage and chorizo and potato. Of course I’ll be leaving out the potato. But it’s a rip-snorter for those chilly nights when you want something hearty (and farty) to tuck into.

I’ve got the oven on and I’m going to make some cupcakes for the boys who are on their second week off school. I’ve been playing with chestnuts lately and am determined to make a Mont Blanc similar to the one I love at Maison Bertaux (click to see a photo of them, they’re the ones with the cream piled on top). I’ve tried using chestnut paste from France, but it was too sweet and grainy, so I’m going to try using a can of chestnut puree I found at Sainsburys last week. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

Here’s a photo of the backyard.

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February 2, 2012

Soho Sweeties

Allow me to set the scene of the ‘crime’.

The crime being my ridiculous enjoyment of the Mont Blancs they make at Maison Bertaux.

 

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January 28, 2012

Shakshuka

I know I said I wouldn’t post anything this week, due to our move. But it’s Saturday and cold and I made something nice this morning, so I thought I’d share.

Shashuka is a north African dish which I think we’ve seen all over the place in the last few years. This recipe is from Ottolenghi’s Plenty book. I didn’t have a lot of the ingredients, but I still made it with what I had and it turned out great.

I like this because you could make up a batch of the tomato sauce on the weekend, put it in the fridge and then it can become a quick and easy breakfast during the week. You can add beans, spinach or chorizo and turn it into dinner.

This dish is fresh and tasty and perfect for when you’re feeling like a savoury start to the day.

Shakshuka Recipe – enough for 2 people

Ingredients:

1 tsp cumin

pinch of cayenne

1 onion, sliced

1 red pepper sliced

1 yellow pepper sliced

2 tsp brown sugar

thyme sprigs

handful of chopped parsley

handful of chopped coriander

3 tomatoes, roughly diced (you could use tinned if you had to)

4 eggs

Method:

Saute the onions and cumin in some olive oil.

Add the peppers, sugar, herbs.

Add tomatoes, cayenne and season to taste.

Cook off, over a medium high heat, adding water so it doesn’t dry out. About 5 minutes.

Turn heat down to low.

Make little holes in the mixture and drop the eggs in carefully.

Cover if possible and cook eggs till done. Don’t over cook or you won’t get all that lovely runny yoke to mix into the meal.

Serve with bread. (or not).

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January 24, 2012

Leaving London

I haven’t been posting much these days because we’re preparing to move out of London. I know.

Sigh…

I look out of my kitchen and I see the hustle of the street. I see the chefs at the restaurant across the road taking a smoking break. I see little chavs tearing about and people walking their gigantic dogs. I see drug dealers and BMWs, tourists and locals. I see everything from my little kitchen window. I’ll miss that. I’ve never felt so part of the world while still in my kitchen. I’ll be going back to that domestic isolation of looking into the backyard while I wash dishes that I don’t enjoy as much. I’ll be going to kitchen with a ceramic hob. WHO INSTALLS A CERAMIC HOB?

I’ve made some Ottolenghi fritters that Mum made one afternoon, but mine turned out really rubbish. They were rubbery. And my last pizza was not excellent. And I made a butterscotch curl cake on the weekend and it didn’t work out. For some reason the butter and sugar didn’t caramelise, it just crystalised instead. So I feel like I’ve lost my mojo a bit. Not making anything worth sharing and I can’t help but think it’s because my heart isn’t here anymore. It’s already moved to Maidenhead.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself. OK, so I am a little bit. But with kids, an urban existence is rather exhausting. I’m looking forward to the change of pace that living in Maidenhead will bring. Living so close to the city, I constantly feel the lure of adventure and so I constantly feel like I’m being lazy or not taking advantage or worse, missing out.

At least moving away will put that to rest a little. I’ll take the train in once a week and visit the places that I’ve come to love, like Soho and Covent Garden, The British Library and Trafalgar Sq. I don’t know if it’s because it’s in my interest to, or out of genuine exhaustion that I’m kind of looking forward to moving out of London. It will never be far away of course, but it will be far enough that I won’t want to just go in all the time, or feel as if I have to.

I’m looking forward to a kitchen with more room. The little shoe box here is not wide enough to fit even two people. The oven is gas but it keeps coming out of the wall. The bench space is completely inadequate and the cupboard doors are just too large.

I’m looking forward to a dishwasher in the new place. That’s a little bit of luxury I’ve learnt to live without but will slip back into with no trouble. I’ve even bought dishwasher tablets already. I’m looking forward to getting all our things. Our container shipped today. I’ll get my blitzer, my pots, my cutlery and my bowls. Not to mention beds, chairs, pictures and all the furniture we didn’t sell.

I’ve been trying to get out and do all the things I’ve meant to like go out to Tooting with Mum. They have a big Indian community there and we had some lunch and I bought some smoked ribs and bought a pair of £5 shoes. I’m going to the Tate Modern tomorrow. I strolled down Oxford St in the rain today. We went up to Bodeans at Clapham Common for one last pulled pork meal. We’ve got a couple left to do, like go for some Chinese in Soho and have some foie gras up at our little bistro one last time.

It might sound silly, but England doesn’t do ‘ethnic’ in the outskirts. London is a wonderfully vibrant city with everything you could want, but once outside London, things get a little more homogenous. I don’t even know if they have a Chinese restaurant in Maidenhead. I know there’s probably fifteen pubs, but I’m not confident they’ll have much in the way of Asian cuisine or any other cuisine for that matter. I’ll let you know about that one.

At least Legoland won’t be far away. Neither will Lizzy. She only lives down the road. We will be moving to the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead you know.

 

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January 18, 2012

Instagram+Brownie

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January 16, 2012

New Year New Ideas

I have a little confession to make. When we moved to London in June last year, we were struck adrift with no access and indeed no funds to a gymnasium. As yet the ‘Heathrow injection’ as they call it had not yet hit and we did not want our waist lines to get any bigger. AT was investigating the art of body weight work outs and I was jogging the beautiful parks and commons of the Clapham/Battersea area but we needed more than just some exercise.

AT discovered the Paleo Diet while researching body weight regimes. He said he’d like to try it. But because of its restrictive nature, I scoffed. A lot. But he did a lot of reading and he even bought a cook book and I figured that it can’t hurt to give it a go. I’m always interested in ways to keep the weight down.

Essentially going Paleo means removing all of the things from your diet that the Paleolithic man would not have had access to because at that time there was no agriculture. This includes grains, legumes, beans, dairy and potatoes. I know, it’s insane. But I was willing to compromise. I had already started cutting out carbs at lunch time, and so all it meant was that I would now cut carbs at dinner time. But as many of you might know, this is not so easy. It means no rice, no pasta, no flour, no breadcrumbs, no bread and nothing creamy or beany.

If you want to read more about the Paleo diet, please do, but we found it too limiting right off the bat. So instead we compromised to removing grains from our diet, and white potatoes. We are trying to reduce our intake of high GI carbs and increase our vegetable intake. It’s not Atkins, we don’t eat bucket loads of meat, we eat the usual amount of meat we always do, which is about 150g per dinner. Rather what we’re trying to do is fill up on masses of vegetables instead of grains and potatoes. This is a concept you will find repeated again and again in nutritional advice. I imagine it works because we simply don’t require the amount of fuel that grains and high HI carbohydrates give out. Most of us sit at our desks all day.

Once I got my head around it – which did take some time – I am very much enjoying our new evening meals. It’s been over 6 months now and we’re still going and I am expanding my repertoire everyday. I do admit that I did not give up my old habits easily. I got frustrated trying to re-think meal plans that had served me well for ten years. But it’s a work in progress. I have discovered the joys of Yotem Ottolenghi’s lentil dishes and I am going to embark on a massive food exploration of middle eastern cuisine this year in my attempts to break the western habits of carb loading. I love chickpeas and lentils and the spices used in Turkish and Lebanese cuisine and I want to try to incorporate some of these things into my diet.

So now that my little secret is out, I thought I might share some of my favourite carb reduced meals if you’re looking to drop a few kilos or even just shake up the routine a bit.

I’ll start with a dish you can eat with a piece of meat, like salmon or a pork chop for example. I found this recipe in a book I reviewed for Foodepedia, from a chef called Maria Elia. Funnily enough she got this recipe from Neil Perry’s Rockpool in Sydney. It’s called Aubergine Mull. That’s eggplant to an Aussie. But it seems Australians could be the only people in the world who call it an eggplant. So lets get continental and use the much more elegant sounding, aubergine.

Aubergine Mull Recipe

Ingredients:

1 aubergine, sliced thickly

4 plum tomatoes, peeled and quartered

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp cumin

pinch of cayenne pepper

Juice of half a lemon

handful of chopped parsley and corriander

salt to season

Method:

Quickest way to peel tomatoes is to pour boiling water over them in a big jug or bowl. Leave them for five minutes and the skin will come right off.

This recipe asks you to fry the slices of aubergine in oil. I prefer to roast mine in an oven for half an hour or so. Bit less fatty and as any aubergine fan knows, they soak up the oil like crazy!

Fry the garlic in some oil in a pan, and add the tomatoes and spices. Cook for about five minutes.

Add eggplant, cook for another few minutes.

Turn the heat off and add lemon and herbs and season to taste.

Serve at room temp.

 

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January 7, 2012

Birthday Cakes

It was my birthday yesterday and I had a super time scooting around London. Mum and I went shopping and we picked up some bargains. We rested our weary bones at Sketch on Conduit St, a place I’d read about while working on Foodepedia. The brainchild of Mourad “Momo” Mazouz, Sketch is a place where food, art and music fuse to make a truly unique experience in an unexpected place. The food was OK, and the decor was exciting but the thing that held my fascination were the toilets. I know…I’m a simpleton. The toilet I went to consisted of a large white room where at the top of a curling white stair case stood a collection of white, egg shaped pods. The toilets were inside the pods and were lit only by a soft, pink light. It was mental.

Anyway, enough about toilets, I also happened to spend the evening at The Savoy with AT. We drank Mint Juleps at The American Bar (the oldest cocktail bar in London – dare I say the world!) where the likes of Frank Sinatra and Winston Churchill threw back a martini or two. Then we made our way down to the Savoy Grill where we dined on the Gordon Ramsay designed menu and again in a space where countless celebrities and politicians have supped. I won’t go into the details of the meal, it was lovely but a little rich. When will I learn that I don’t need 3 courses? The standard was as excellent as I expected and there was not a complaint to be had.  The hazelnut souffle was as light as air and a delight to behold and my Nashi cocktail was possibly THE best cocktail I have ever tasted.

The reason I really wanted to post about my birthday actually was to share this lovely birthday spread that my mum and sister prepared for me. Cakes were bought at Yotem Ottolenghi, an Israeli chef living in London with a few delis/restaurants around the place that sell his famous salads and delectable desserts. I am currently experimenting with the lovely vegetarian recipes from his book Plenty and believe him to be one of the most progressive and exciting chefs around these days. What you can see in this photo is an apple cake, a chocolate cake with Bailey’s cream that was TO DIE FOR, a brownie that was out of this world, a cheesecake with cranberries and pistachio and a lemon curd tart. All were exceptional. What I liked the most though was the presentation. These little delights were laid out on a chopping board we bought for mum her birthday last week and decorated with seasonal sprigs. That’s love right there folks.

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