Broccoli Slaw

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I haven’t seen my lovely friend A in several months as she’s been Stateside sampling lobsters and fresh corn on the Maine coast, but thanks to the power of the Internet, she has managed to give me a truly fantastic gift in the shape of this recipe for broccoli slaw from Smitten Kitchen…

Fresh and simple, it re-invented the wheel somewhat for me in how I eat my favourite vegetable. I could eat broccoli with everything including breakfast, but I had never thought to try it raw until now. And it is revolutionary. It tastes fresher, less boarding house brassica in after taste and is addictively crunchy in texture. And of course, if you’re feeling lazy, it makes it even easier to get your 5 a day than getting the steamer out and playing the waiting game.

While I was immediately interested in this lovely sounding slaw, I also automatically started making plans to change the recipe. Deb suggests using her buttermilk dressing, but after my recent buttermilk disaster, I am steering well clear of the stuff until I can find a decent source. I was also perturbed by the amount of sugar and mayonnaise in it. If I’m going to eat raw veggies I want them to be super healthy (so that I can keep my fat intake for a nice cheese elsewhere). I also don’t like dried fruit in savoury dishes and find dried cranberries to be extremely expensive. And I didn’t have any flaked almonds…

So instead I made a dressing from live yoghurt with a big splash of cider vinegar and some salt and pepper. Creamy, yet tangy it goes beautifully with the broccoli and is low fat and easy while not creating any washing up as it can be mixed straight into the slaw. I then perked it up with some thinly sliced red onion, a handful of pumpkin seeds and in a flash of inspiration, some fresh pomegranate seeds. Super healthy and incredibly pretty!

And amazingly tasty! Those little jewels of pomegranate burst on the tongue with a explosion of sweet juicy deliciousness, the onion crunches with taste and the pumpkin seeds add extra taste filled texture to the mix of vegetables and the whole thing is just perfect!

I have made this six or seven times since getting the recipe just under a fortnight ago. I’ve eaten it on its own, with a steak, with a stew and with an avocado salad. I made it for the lunch at the most recent Invisible Food Walk and it went down a storm, even with the littlest walkers who loved the colours and textures. I just can’t get enough of this fresh feast and even though I will probably make myself ill by eating too much of it in the future, I can’t urge you enough to try this.

Make a big batch, knowing that it will keep well in the fridge and then amaze yourself by managing to eat it all in one veg-tastic sitting before having to make some more to satisfy the broccoli lust it will inspire!

Stuffed Squid…

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I don’t think Shirley Conran and I would get along. She thinks life is too short to stuff a mushroom and I seem to have a fascination with stuffing just about any food I can get my hands on. Stuffed cabbage leaves are a winter staple in my house, I loved my recent dalliance with a stuffed marrow and last Saturday I feasted on these amazing garlicky stuffed tomatoes as suggested by Nigel Slater. Having exhausted all the vegetables I can think of stuffing, I needed a new challenge…

And what better than nature’s very own windsock in the shape of a whole squid? Inspired by another Nigel Slater recipe from last week’s Observer Food Monthly and some stunning looking squid on my local fishmonger’s counter, I couldn’t resist.

After getting the fishmonger to clean the squid, my eye was caught by the last of the beautiful rainbow hued Bright Lights chard in the garden and I decided to base the stuffing around this. I also dug out the last of the wonderful breadcrumbs from the freezer from a stunning rye loaf from the Tebay farm shop to add a nutty hint of flavour to it all. A pinch of mace, a slug of olive oil and some lemon zest followed suit. But the crowning glory was the rest of the tin of smoked anchovies Mister North gave me for my birthday. These add a stunning depth of rich complexity to the already amazing umami taste of these fabulous little fish.

I combined everything and stuffed the squid as full as I could get it without ripping the beautiful soft flesh. The excess stuffing went round them and tentacles and I dotted them with the very last few Tumbler tomatoes from the garden before covering them in a rich tomato sauce made with the leftover oil from the anchovies and a few home grown chillies for a kick. Add in a splash of vegetable stock and it was ready to go in the oven for around 45 minutes.

It looked majestic when I opened the casserole dish. The tomatoes had intensified in the colour to a deep ruby red flecked with a hint of emerald from the chard and the milky white squid bathed in it like a less malevolent Moby Dick. It was so soft and tender from the long slow cooking that it was quite difficult to lift out of the dish without it falling apart. I served it with some of the Shetland Blue potatoes from the garden and well anointed with the silky soft tomato sauce and it was fantastic.

The squid cut beautifully and was delightfully tender with just enough of a bite to keep it interesting. The stuffing was umami and iron rich and the tomato sauce was sweet and tasted of the summer we didn’t really have. It was great with the potatoes to soak it up, but even with that, I had a lot of sauce leftover. I froze this to eat with pasta some night or to form the base of a quick fish stew.

I can’t think of a single flaw with this dish. Easy to make, perfect for using up odd and sods in the fridge in the sauce or stuffing and stylish enough to serve at a dinner party or as a Friday night treat at the end of a hard week. Try it with baby squid to cut the cooking time, because this dish is so good you’ll be driven to distraction waiting to taste it!

Fried chicken…

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I’ve been feeling quite confident in the kitchen recently so I decided it was time to shake things and make sure I didn’t get into a rut, so I invited 16 people round for beer and fried chicken at the weekend…

I love fried chicken, but have never really mastered the art of a light crispy coating and succulent chicken within, usually ending up with something closer to the greasy delights of KFC than I would care to admit. Obviously the way to sort this culinary blip is to put yourself under intense pressure in a very hot kitchen and then serve the results to your highly discerning friends. One of whom happens to make the best fried chicken you’ve ever eaten.

I was going to need some help to refine my recipe and get it right. I hoped Felicity Cloake over at the Word of Mouth blog on the Guardian had covered fried chicken in her ‘Perfect’ series each Thursday as she has a knack for explaining things well and giving handy hints that take a dish from pedestrian to perfection. But no such luck. I re-read the recipe I’ve been using for years from a weird little cookbook called Kenny Cooks America written by an oddly angry man called Kenny Miller who suggests marinading the chicken in milk first. I decided to take that a bit further and try using buttermilk instead to see if the extra acidity would help tenderise the chicken further.

Seeking reassurance on the internet, I Googled buttermilk fried chicken and found myself in the ever capable hands of Deb over at Smitten Kitchen with her delicious looking recipe. She suggests taking the buttermilk idea that little bit further and brining the chicken in a buttermilk brine overnight. The sheer saltiness of brining scares me slightly, but my American friends swear by it to keep meat (even a turkey) juicy and succulent. I often find frying chicken can make it a bit dry so this seemed like the perfect time to try it out.

I ran into some difficulty almost immediately though. Buttermilk is quite hard to come by here in England, even with Gin and Crumpets’ handy tip about Polish shops often stocking it and I had only ordered three small cartons online from Sainsbury’s which wasn’t enough for the both the brine and the batter. I improvised slightly and made up a brine from a mixture of natural yoghurt, buttermilk and a splash of whole milk to loosen it enough. Deb suggested mashed garlic, but I was fearful that this would jar with the mellow tastes of the dairy. Taking my cue from Nigella’s amazing Garlic Chicken from How to Eat, I boiled the garlic cloves til tender, popped them from their skins and pounded them in the pestle and mortar. This went into the marinade along with a hearty splash of Tabasco.

To this mixture I added the terrifyingly large amount of salt needed to make a brine. The recipe calls for Kosher salt, but having no idea where I could get such a thing in Brixton, I used good old Maldon Sea Salt instead. I kept the skin on the chicken (using a mixture of wings and thighs) and poured the mixture over them, rubbing it in well with my hands and then popping it all in the fridge overnight. Next morning, each piece was taken out and laid on a rack to airdry before being coated and fried. I could feel how tender the meat was even at this stage…

Batter ready...

Despite what Deb said, I don’t have a thermometer to test how hot the oil was for the chicken, but I erred on the side of caution and heated the pan while I was making the batter because an electric cooker means everything takes longer. The batter was very quick to make, but it was here that everything started to go wrong and my confidence began to depart me in droves.

The use of baking powder in the batter means that it puffs up incredibly and it seemed very thick, almost like industrial sealant rather than batter. I can only assume that the cultured buttermilk I was using is different in texture to the buttermilk in the recipe. Mine was more the consistency of yoghurt and I think it might have needed to be more milky to get a looser lighter batter. Nonetheless I perservered and dipped my chicken thigh pieces in seasoned flour, then batter, then flour again to get a light crisp coating and put them into the hot oil.

Frying pan, fire, all that...

They browned quickly and the first few pieces looked just the ticket as I turned them. Golden brown, crispy and light. I thought I might be about to give my friend D a run for her money. But then things started to go hideously and horribly wrong with the next batch of chicken pieces. The batter had continued to puff up and thicken and had become almost solid in texture, thus over coating the chicken and making it spongy and difficult to cook. I watered it down with some milk, but it didn’t seem to improve the consistency much with big globs of batter simply dripping into the dish of flour most unappealingly.

I allowed the pan to come back to the right heat and placed more chicken in it, but it soon became obvious that the coating was thick enough to be soaking up the oil and spreading around the edges so that each piece expanded in size and the batter formed a lip on each side when it was turned over, meaning each side was golden brown, but the middle still looked uncooked in colour. It was almost impossible to cook the sides evenly, having to set the pieces on the edge of the pan to try and colour it all evenly. This didn’t really work though and resulted in chicken that was overcooked in places. I then sampled one of these less alluring looking pieces of chicken and was beyond disappointed by it.

The offending article!

The batter was thick and bready like the stuff you get on cheap turkey shapes at a well known frozen foods store. Despite the generous amount of smoked paprika and seasoning in the flour, it tasted bland with a weird sweet aftertaste that made it seem cheap. This overpowered the amazingly juicy and succulent chicken and rendered the whole thing pretty revolting. I gave up at this point and returned the rest of the un-fried chicken to the original marinade along with some sumac and black pepper so I could cook it as yoghurt chicken rather than throw it all out. I was annoyed enough to have spoilt some good chicken and a couple of quidsworth of buttermilk without wasting anything more.

I cooled the chicken I had cooked so it could be reheated the next day, no longer caring if it wasn’t as crisp as I’d have liked since it was so rubbish to begin with. I then spent ages cleaning up the massive amount of mess the overly thick batter and hot oil had made. The lingering smell of frying food took much longer to subside.

I served the heated chicken the next day and while the batter hadn’t improved any the chicken was actually more moist and succulent than before. Very little of this got eaten and I’m not offended at all. It was mediocre at best and it is was up against the best fried chicken possible. I warned people off mine and hoped that D will give me her secret recipe instead. Hold out til then folks and don’t bother with this one unless you enjoy the faff of making disappointing poultry…

Sweet on corn…

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It’s still theoretically summer and that means just one thing to me right now….fresh corn on the cob! I can’t get enough of those sweet juicy bursting kernels of sheer goodness in the past few weeks. And with tightly wrapped ears of corn a mere £1 for four at the farmers’ market last week, I can afford to indulge this lust with wild abandon.

I’ve been eating the corn straight from the cobs, lightly boiled and slathered in chili and butter, dripping down my hands and smeared over my face as I eat the barely cooled corn over the sink with glee. I’ve stripped the kernels from the cobs with a knife and added these yellow nuggets of joy to the classic Chilean stew of porotos granados to put my munchkin squash to good use. And I’ve made stock with the denuded cobs and warmed up these increasing autumnal evenings with the delicious chicken and sweetcorn soup from the Leon Cookbook. And yet I still can’t enough corn so when I stumbled across a recipe for double corn muffins, I just had to make them…

A Dan Lepard recipe from the Guardian Weekend magazine, this is an incredibly simple recipe which combines fresh corn kernels, cornmeal and grated courgette, making it perfect for anyone with a zucchini glut! I decided to leave the bacon out as I wasn’t sure if I was serving these to any vegetarians and replaced it with a scotch bonnet pepper for a bit of a tingle. Other than that I followed the recipe exactly.

And it is a particularly easy recipe to follow. A quick softening of the onion, pepper and corn while I measured out the dry ingredients, beat an egg and poured the wet ingredients in my beloved measuring cups, then stirred it all together in one large mixing bowl. No folding, no faffing and absolutely no chance of over working the flour because it all combined beautifully. I mixed up this chunky flavoursome batter and popped it in the fridge overnight, so I could make the muffins fresh on Sunday to take to accompany a fried chicken fest at a friend’s house.

In the morning I spooned one dessertspoon of the batter into a regular sized bun case. Obviously these are meant to be muffins, but I’ve run out of muffin cases and couldn’t be bothered going in search of some over the Bank Holiday weekend. I planned to reduce the cooking time slightly to balance up the smaller sized muffins, but since I’m not at my sharpest early on a Sunday without at least two cups of tea in me, I actually put the oven on at 180° instead of 200° and ended up having to leave them in for 15 minutes longer after turning the oven up a bit to get them both cooked and appetisingly golden brown.

The mini muffins came out looking rich, glossy and golden but the paper cases looked soaked in oil even though I think I might have undermeasured it, but definitely had a bit less courgette in there that might have helped soak it up. I left them to cool slightly on the advice of the recipe to firm up before sampling the smallest and least appealing looking of them just to make sure I wasn’t going to poison anyone!

They were pleasingly firm, breaking apart cleanly and without disintegrating into crumbs. They were deliciously moist and studded with chewy kernels of corn with a good kick from the scotch bonnet and tasted so intense I could have sworn there was a bit of mature cheddar in there too. And despite the marked cases, they weren’t at all oily on the tongue, remaining light and chewy.

While these were a good accompaniment to chicken and would be a good breakfast dish too, they didn’t really make the most of the corn as it ended up tasting suspiciously like tinned sweetcorn after I’d cooked it. In fact with the scotch bonnet added, it tasted a bit like that weird tinned corn with bits of peppers in which was not what I was expecting. They would have been better with the sharpness of cayenne instead of the fruitiness of scotch bonnets or chilli sauce to minimise the tinned feeling. I might even go crazy next time and add some cheddar or parmesan to oomph up the umami undertones they already have.

But if you ever find yourself with a forlorn tin of sweetcorn, a courgette that’s seen better days and 30 minutes to spare, you couldn’t do better than making a batch of these, preferably full sized, and serving one split in half with a fried egg on top for a top class store cupboard supper…

Ravioli

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I have had a hankering to make pasta from scratch for quite some time, but the precision of Marcella Hazan’s instructions have made me cautious. I remember my mum making fresh pasta as a child and it always seemed like a grown up version of Play Dough in its simplicity, but this seemed much more tricky and likely to go wrong, especially as I don’t have a pasta machine. Then I stumbled across a much simpler sounding recipe online which seems to have been adapted from this Jamie Oliver recipe and decided that I would take the plunge…

My friend G came for dinner on Friday and I decided to try the ravioli recipe since he would simply laugh if I messed it up and be happy enough to eat pasta out of a packet instead! Plus I could rope him into pouring extra flour or water into the dough if needed to save on getting my sticky paws everywhere!

And I’m glad I did have him on hand. As usual, the recipe called for large eggs when I only ever buy medium (a friend who keeps hens tells me the large ones are bad for the hen) so I immediately wasn’t sure if my proportions were right. I added an extra teaspoon of olive oil and the whole 55ml of water called for, but the dough seemed incredibly sticky, so G sifted in a tablespoon or so of extra flour and it seemed to come together very nicely. I then kneaded it for about 5 minutes and it was beautifully glossy and elastic at that point and very easy to work with the rolling pin.

I quartered the dough, learned from my mistake with the pretzels the other week and oiled the worktop before rolling the dough as thin as I could with my rolling pin. I then used a shot glass to cut circles from the dough, before rolling them again to make them thinner and easier to fill.

My choice of filling was some chard fresh from the garden, sauteed down with some anchovy and garlic, cooled slightly and chopped even finer before squeezing any excess liquid from it. I thought the iron rich tang of the chard would complement the pasta perfectly, like spinach on steroids. The leaves and stalks had a lovely texture and I put a teaspoon full of the mix onto each a pasta circle, brushed the other half with water and then pressed them together, before using the shot glass to cut the dough again to give a neat looking finish.

This is all very simple, but unsurprisingly since it was the first time I had ever worked with pasta, mind-numbingly time consuming. Making enough ravioli to cover a dinner plate, took me about an hour and used a quarter of the dough. G was almost ready to eat a tea towel by the time I started on the second quarter. I made about 2/3 of the same amount again before I ran out of chard and abandoned the pretence of making any more ravioli before one or other of us actually fainted with hunger.

The home grown tomatoes had been slowly roasting in the oven throughout my protracted pasta session and were perfectly cooked and ready to go so I got a large pan of boiling water going on the cooker and realised in my glee at making recognisable ravioli I had forgotten to oil the plate they were sitting on or even dredge the pasta with flour like the recipe instructed. So my lovely little ravioli were stuck fast and required some almost surgical attention with some warm water and a knife to prise them loose, meaning some of them looked a bit stretched and others had actually holes in places. I patched them up as best I could and cooked them for about 4 minutes til they came to the surface of the water.

Slightly battered, but beautiful!

I drained them in a sieve, put them back in the pan to dry out further on the heat, added a teaspoon of oil to prevent them sticking together and served them up with a splash of ruby red tomato sauce and some grated parmesan on top…and they were great!

The chard worked beautifully with the pasta, the tomatoes tasted like heaven and the pasta was soft and silky and even where it was a little bit thick at the edges in places, it wasn’t heavy or claggy on the tongue, just a reminder that when you think the dough is thin enough, roll it again! But despite this, we were both impressed by the pasta and ate every scrap in record time.

I’ll definitely been making fresh pasta using this recipe again, but making sure I roll, roll and roll again first. Hopefully with a bit of practise my ravioli won’t take all night in future. I was certainly a bit faster when I used the leftover dough to make a fantastic summer vegetable lasagne the next night! I might even manage to take some half decent photos too!