Posts filed under 'Food'
No fancy food photography here! Just a recommendation for a tasty and satisfying pie.
Filling for Homestead chicken pie
This is a very old favourite from the days of struggling to put food on the table when my partner and I were both studying and the kids had big appetites. We’ve revisited this many, many times over the years and have recently rediscovered its wholesome silkiness.
The chicken and veggies are in a velvety velouté sauce. Something magic happens between the flavours of the chook, the sauce and the veggies - especially the carrot and mushrooms.
You can vary the veggies a bit - I have used parsnip and other root veggies. It is essential though to have the beans, carrots and mushrooms.
Homestead Chicken Pie
Serves 6.
250 g (1 quantity) rough puff or shortcrust pastry
Filling:
1/2 cup diced carrot
1/2 cup diced potato
1/2 cup diced turnip
1/2 cup chopped green beans
125 g (4 oz) mushrooms, sliced
60 g (2 tablespoons) butter
3 cups cooked chicken cut into bite-sized pieces
1/2 teaspoon thyme
salt
freshly ground black pepper
Velouté sauce:
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
90 g (3 tablespoons) butter
3 tablespoons plain flour
750 ml (3 cups) chicken stock
1/4 teaspoon salt
white pepper
beaten egg for glazing
Make pastry according to recipe and chill well.
Filling: In a small pan of boiling, salted water, boil carrot, potato, turnip and green beans for 5-10 minutes, or until just tender. Drain in a colander and refresh them under running cold water. In a heavy-based frying pan, gently fry mushrooms in butter over a medium heat for 5 minutes. Place chicken in a mixing bowl and add all prepared vegetables.
Velouté sauce: Gently fry onion in the butter in a saucepan until soft but not brown. Stir in flour and cook roux over a low heat, stirring continuously, for 3 minutes. Remove saucepan from heat and pour in chicken stock. Return to heat and bring to the boil, stirring continuously. Increase heat to medium and simmer for 15 minutes. Stir in salt and pepper to taste. Pour sauce over chicken and vegetables and mix gently.
To finish pie: Place filling in a 1 litre (4 cup) oval pie dish or casserole and leave to cool. Roll pastry out on a lightly floured board to an oval shape and cover pie. Brush pastry (not flaked edges) with beaten egg. Place pie on a baking tray and bake towards the top of a hot oven at 220°C (425°F) for 20-30 minutes or until pastry is golden. Serve hot.
Shortcrust top
I’ve used a variety of pastry tops. My favourite is shortcrust but I’ve used a commercial puff pastry when feeling lazy. These pics show individual pies but I usually make one large one.
Puff top
The original recipe is from a 1979 paperback called The Perfect Piebook by Anne Marshall. One of the many pie books in my library.
January 12th, 2009
A perfect amuse bouche is a lot like a stolen kiss.
In a cunning plan to spread the workload for our New Year’s Eve dinner, I invited each of the 5 couples attending to bring a plate of amuse-bouche for 12. This provided an entertaining starter and meant I only had to serve a big bowl of Persian lamb stew, some couscous and green beans to complete the savoury part of the meal.
Of course I wanted to make my own amuse-bouche. One of my favourite food bloggers, Béa of La Tartine Gourmande had recently posted a recipe (and some great pictures as usual) for Potato Nests with Crab and Apple Topping. They looked great to me. These are my efforts.
Potato Nests with Crab and Apple Topping
The cases are grated potato, bound with egg, seasoned with parsley, nutmeg and red peppercorns and baked with a little butter. These tasted fantastic on their own and will provide a versatile base for future appetizers.
The filling is crab and grated green apple flavoured with coriander, olive oil, lime juice, spring onions and chives. The amuse-bouche is topped with crème fraîche, a pomegranite seed and chives tips.
The quality and flavour of the crab is important in this dish. Mine was a little flat but the rest of the flavours carried it through. I’d love to try this with some really fresh crab.
I dedicated my serving to its creator Béa who gave birth to her first child Lulu on Christmas Day (only 8 days after she posted this wonderful recipe).
Other amuse-bouche included egg and caviar cakes, an updated prawn cocktail, mini-pizza, a ham and mustard roulade and a well presented tray of christmas trees and stars in puff pastry - the trees topped with smoked salmon and the stars with a curried egg mixture.
The other offerings
January 6th, 2009
Baby garlic from the garden
There’s something very sweet about baby garlic picked fresh from the garden.
The purple and green always reminds me of Wimbledon (even though we don’t harvest in June).
October 31st, 2008
Melissa from The Traveler’s Lunchbox has posted a provocative article on the age-old question of how to store your spices. You only need to read a few of the comments (68 before I had my say) to realise how important this topic is to many people.
Regular readers will understand how close to my heart this subject is. As both a wanton foodie and cook and a woodworker who specialises in cabinets and containers, there aren’t many things I am more passionate about.
It is easy (and uninteresting) to produce a stylish looking way of storing a few spices but as Melissa points out such designs rarely accommodate the practical requirements of the even-slightly serious cook.
Tray for 50 spices
First up is the number of spices. The subject of my
Combined Passions post is a box containing 50 spices (
more pictures here). While I may have cribbed a bit to get to 50, that is because I only used whole spices (with the single exception of Ras el Hanout). If you add in ground spices and spice mixes the number can grow to well beyond 50. Any storage solution must accommodate at least this number.
Second is volume. Dinky little jars and boxes might look good in kitchen design magazines but real cooks buy many spices in large bags. (The difference in freshness and price between supermarket jars and bags of spices from ethnically-specialised food shops is staggering.) Being able to fit 10 black cardamon pods into your spice container is no good if you use more than this quantity each week.
Third is variation. Some spices you have a small amount of - saffron for example. Some spices - such as black limes or dried mango - take up lots of room. Some spices you use a little of and some a lot. Your storage solution should efficiently deal with this variation.
Then there is the freshness issue. Many solutions, including my own wooden cabinets, don’t provide the air-tight seal that is essential to maintaining fresh spices.
There are other considerations such as light, accessibility and of course I don’t mean to totally dismiss style!
So having laid out some requirements you might imagine I am about to give you a solution. Well no I’m not. I haven’t sorted it out myself yet. Melissa’s solution might work for you - or one of the other systems decsribed in the comments to her post. My current solution is more prosaic.
My old spice cabinet in situ
I’m using a few different approaches (I won’t call them solutions). I have a spice cabinet that I made a long time ago (before I had many clues about woodwork) that is based on the 18thC Pennsylvania spice boxes. This is my most enjoyable storage. It’s still a thrill to go to the cabinet, take a drawer over to my pot and scoop out a teaspoon or two of the required spice. This approach copes with varying quantities quite well but fails on keeping the spices fresh. I use it for spices that have their own custom containers such as vanilla pods and saffron threads (a gorgeous tin decorated in Islamic patterns brought back for me from Tehran by a friend). Also for high-turnover spices like cumin that don’t get time to go stale, and whole spices like star anise that tend to hold their flavour.
One element of my new spice 'cabinet'
My main storage though is practical but lacking in romance. I have several plastic storage containers about the size of shoe-boxes. Each of these holds up to a dozen spices in their original plastic bags. The bags stand upright across the width of the container. As they are usually organised by size or history, I used to have to search through each container to find the spice I need. Even I realised that this was sub-optimal so I invested in a Dymo labeller and now only have to scan the ends of the containers to narrow my search. Perhaps I secretly enjoy the bit of hunting and gathering in the process.
Of course there are also the dinky jars on the window sill (the worst place to store spices) - about 40 from a quick count. And then there are all the liquids such as rose and orange water, 5 varieties of soy, oils, vinegars and mustards - I better stop before getting to the pantry cupboard!
It is still a goal in my life to design a spice storage solution that satisfies all these requirements and is sexy to boot. But since I have a small kitchen that could do with many other improvements it may be some time yet. I console myself that you need to keep some goals unfulfilled so there is something to think about in the shower each morning.
Like Melissa I would love to hear about your solutions.
October 26th, 2008
A little while back I had a bunch of family around for my partner’s birthday. The main course was Neil Perry’s Persian lamb stew and I needed something to start that we could eat casually while presents were given and opened.
I ended up serving four great dips with lots of warm turkish bread. The smoky baba ghanoush was a given as was my standard creamy hummus. I found two more dips in Barry Véra’s Feast Bazaar.
One was a bean dip with feta from Syria which was pretty good and worth making again but the other was an absolute stunner.
Also Syrian, Beetroot and Yoghurt Dip is, as Barry says, colourful and very tasty! In fact for me it eclipsed all the others including the Baba Ghanoush that I have raved about previously.
Thanks to Barry and all the generations who have perfected this wonderful recipe.
Beetroot and Yoghurt Dip
• 500g beetroot
• 500g plain yoghurt
• 1 tablespoon tahini
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• ½ teaspoon ground cumin
• finely grated zest of 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 20 mint leaves, thinly sliced (optional)
• extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling
• 6 pides (Turkish/flat breads), warmed to serve
Peel the beetroot and trim the ends. Cut into chunks and place in a saucepan of boiling salted water. Cook for 30-45 minutes, or until tender. Use the point of a sharp knife to test if the beetroot is cooked - the knife should slide through, but the beetroot should still be firm. Remove from the heat, drain and refresh under cold running water, then drain again.
When cool enough to handle, coarsely grate the beetroot into a mixing bowl, then fold in the yoghurt, tahini, garlic, cumin, lemon zest and juice. Season to taste, cover, and refrigerate for at least 2-3 hours until chilled.
To serve, fold in the sliced mint, if desired, and adjust the seasoning to taste. Place in a serving bowl, drizzle with a little extra virgin olive oil and serve with warm pide.
Hope you try this and sorry about the pun!
September 4th, 2008
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