Ecuadorian Potato Patties

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llapingachos

I am so invested in my Irish obsessiveness about potatoes that I always forget they are in fact South American in origin and am surprised when I see them in recipes from those regions. An Ecudorian cafe has opened near me and when I Googled what llapingachos were, secretly hoping it involved llama, it turned out to be potato cakes filled with cheese. I’m sure you understand nothing about those words disappointed me despite the lack of weird shaped animal.

Potatoes have become even more important to me since going low fodmap because basically they are my fall back option now when eating out. There are always chips on a menu and for some reason other potato dishes rarely contain onion or garlic. I will never go hungry when there’s a spud around but I like to add to my repetoire of potato recipes where I can.

The original version I found of these sounded lovely but distinctly heavy on the onions. They also come in a hominy corn version I reworked for the Brixton Blog and since I was making a batch of the accompanying peanut sauce, I thought I’d tweak them to be onion free.

I know some fodmappers won’t be able to do the mozzarella inside them due to the higher lactose levels in softer cheeses. You could try using parmesan which is very low lactose or making a lactose free bechamel sauce which you chill and use to fill them instead like potatoey croquetas. Or you could go carnivorous and use leftover meat from a roast or a bit of bacon in the centre instead? I’d say the world is your oyster, but that would be awful here…

Instead of onion, I’ve added lots of green scallion (only the white bit is fodmap unfriendly), fresh parsley and a bit of fresh coriander for flavour. Make sure to use nice starchy baking potatoes and you’ll get a great shape on the patties. I froze some and they cooked well straight from the freezer for a quick brunch that combined champ, potato bread and Ecuador in one.

Ecudorian potato patties with peanut sauce (serves 4)

For the patties:

  • 4 baking potatoes
  • 2 scallions, chopped (green part only if fodmapping)
  • medium bunch flat leaf parsley, chopped
  • medium bunch fresh coriander, chopped
  • salt and pepper
  • 125g mozzarella, grated
  • 2 -4 tablespoons vegetable oil

For the peanut sauce:

  • 4 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter
  • 250ml milk (non dairy or lactose free is fine)
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 1 teaspoon ground achiote (see below)
  • 1 teaspoon soy sauce (use tamari if wheat free)
  • 1 lime, juiced
  • salt and pepper
  • fresh coriander, chopped
  • 1 red chilli, chopped or teaspoon hot sauce (optional)

These patties are super easy to make. I had the best results baking my potatoes to keep them drier and starchier and by baking, I mean shoving the baking spuds I bought in the microwave whole two at a time for 12 minutes. If you have the oven for something else, then use that method.

Allow the potatoes to cool down enough to handle them and split them in half and scoop the middles out into a bowl. Add the scallions and fresh herbs and season and mix in well.

Wet your hands slightly and scoop out a handful of the potaro mix into a ball, flattening it slightly onto a plate or lined baking tray. Using your thumbs, push outwards from the centre to make a hollow. Fill with grated mozzarella and then cover the cheese up again with potato so it’s completely hidden. You may need a little pinch of extra potato from the bowl.

Repeat until you have between 10 and 12 patties. Any cheese that doesn’t fit works incredibly well straight into your mouth as you put the patties into the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes. They’ll be fine in there for up to 24 hours so make ahead if you like.

When you are ready to eat them, heat the oil in a frying pan on a medium high heat and fry the patties for about 3 minutes each side. They should get a nice crisp crust without burning and the cheese is melted. I did about 4 at a time and kept the first batches warm in a low oven.

As the patties fry, make the peanut sauce by mixing the peanut butter with the milk over a low heat. I used the Sainsbury’s Basics peanut butter I had which is slightly sweetened and it was fine so don’t worry about fancy stuff if you don’t have it.

Add the spices once the peanut butter and milk combines. Achiote is a seed used in South American cooking (and known as annatto in the Caribbean). It adds a warm yellow colour and a slightly spicy flavour not unlike nutmeg. It’s not fodmap tested and if you don’t want to use it or can’t get it, substitute it with 1/2 teaspoon more of paprika and 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg. Add the juice of the lime and the soy sauce and then take the peanut sauce off the heat and stir through the fresh coriander and chilli if using.

Serve the patties as hot as possible with the peanut sauce on the side and some fried eggs on top. A little tomato salsa or avocado if you can eat them wouldn’t go amiss either. A dish like this reminds me why brunch is a brilliant thing.

 

 

 

Fodmap Friendly Chicken Liver Pate

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pateA recent health glitch involving the gallbladder I had removed when I was 18 means I’ve been stuck in the house recuperating for the last week or so. In between Googling to see if I need to see a gastroenterologist or an exorcist, I’ve almost been enjoying being round the house so much. The last few months have been a whirlwind of activity and it’s oddly comforting to have the chance to start doing more cooking than I’ve managed recently.

Coinciding with the weather becoming distinctly autumnal, the slow cooker has come back into action for more than just a whole chicken or a shoulder of pork and I’ve been enjoying de-fodmapping recipes from Slow Cooked and rediscovering some old favourites. I’ve also been meal planning again rather just eating variations of meat, rice and spinach for dinner every night in a fodmap inspired food funk.

I’ve managed to roast a chicken, make soup from it and whip up a batch of ragu that filled the freezer and made some Tuesday night cannelloni so far in the slow cooker. I felt extremely organised in between naps until I realised I’d managed to forget to put the chicken livers I’d defrosted into the ragu…

Armed with a tub of previously frozen offal and the memory of having to chuck a bag of mince in the bin the previous week because I’d been too ill to eat it, I couldn’t bring myself to throw more food out and my mind turned to pate.

I love love love pate. One of my great comfort foods has always been pate on toast. It’s a thing of joy to have a good pate filled with duck or chicken livers whether you go for rugged and chunky or smooth as silk. I even like the ones of more dubious provenance piled inch thick on toasted cheap white bread. Pate is my jam.

Except that all pate one can buy contains alliums. It’s a festival of shallots/garlic/onions/delete as applicable and thus out of the reach of my sticky little paws now. Even my own slow cooker version uses shallot. And just to add annoyance, there is often dried fruit too. I needed to adapt it but not lose flavour.

I decided to go creative and try to use up leftovers. A half drunk bottle of red wine went over the chicken livers to marinate them and depth. Since I’m supposed to watching my fat intake so as not stress my gallbladder area out and I’m not up to going out to buy double cream, I roasted some pumpkin with caraway seeds and fresh thyme to use instead. I browned some butter and fried the livers lightly in it.

Everything got blitzed together with a splash of brandy and it all went into the slow cooker in ramekins. Once cooked and cooled, I covered the tops of the ramekins with clarified butter and froze the ramekins inside a bag. Each one takes about an hour to defrost so I can have no fuss, low energy allium free lunches with ease and extra smugness.

Fodmap Friendly Chicken Liver Pate (serves 4)

  • 250g chicken livers
  • 100ml red wine
  • 100g pumpkin (or sweet potato if not sensitive)
  • 150g butter (see below for instructions)
  • 1 tablespoon caraway seeds
  • 4 sprigs fresh thyme
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 tablespoon brandy or red wine
  • dash lemon juice

Whether your chicken livers are fresh or frozen, it’s best to gently rinse them and remove any discoloured patches. Then carefully remove the gallbladders that are attached. These make the pate bitter otherwise. The irony of doing this to a chicken while my body was reacting to someone doing it to me was not lost on me. At least they gave me the good drugs at the same time.

Put the chicken livers in a non metallic bowl and put the red wine over them. Marinate for at least an hour or preferably overnight. This is the one time it’s appropriate to soak your liver in red wine.

While the livers do their thing, roast your pumpkin (or sweet potato or butternut squash if non fodmapping). I buy wedges of pumpkin in Brixton market and roast them chopped into chunks with the skin still on and then peel it off when it cooked.

You’re going to go through the cooking life cycle of butter next. Put all 150g in the pan, chopped into small cubes and melt it gently. Simmer it until it starts to foam and reduce and when the foaming dies down and it stops moving, pour half the butter through a sieve that you’ve lined with some muslin or a clean cloth into a bowl. The clear butter you collect is your clarified butter. Set aside until needed.

Then brown the remaining butter. Keep stirring it over a slightly higher heat and let it heat until the butter foams furiously again and turns brown and smells nutty but not burned. Watch it closely and take it off the heat at this point, pouring it into a clean bowl to cool slightly. You need to do this even though you’re going to cook in it because otherwise it will burn when you heat it again.

Heat the browned butter in a frying pan on a medium heat and when it bubbles slightly, add the chicken livers and the fresh thyme and caraway seeds. Keeping the livers moving the whole time, cook it all for 2 minutes. It’s fine if they are still pink in the middle.

Take the pan off the heat and tip the contents into a large bowl along with the cooking juices, add the pumpkin and lemon juice and with a handblender, blitz it all until it is smooth and silky looking. Add the splash of brandy and put into ramekins.

Set these in the slow cooker crock and fill it halfway with boiling water and put the lid on and cook on low for 2 hours. Or set them into a roasting tin, fill halfway with water and bake in the oven at 140℃ for 45 minutes. Either way when cooked, lift out of the water and allow them to cool.

Pour enough of your clarified butter over each cooled ramekin of pate to cover the surface well. You may need to melt it again first. You don’t want it an inch thick but enough to be noticeable. Allow it to cool and thicken. Pop the ramekins of pate in a freezer bag and seal. Freeze for up to 3 months or eat the pate from the fridge within 3 days.

I was delighted that I froze three quarters of my pate because when I started eating it in front of Don’t Tell The Bride that evening, it was so beautifully smooth and delicious I could have worked my way through the whole lot in one sitting. This way I got to feel smug that I was pacing myself and lying in bed eating pate instead of letting a man organise me a wedding I would hate. What a perfect evening.

 

 

Gherkin Soup

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gherkin soupI have several loves in my life. Black eyeliner. Slow cookers. Carmex. But my heart really belongs to gherkins. Just say the word to yourself. It’s delightful to utter. It looks comical to write. And you get to decide how deep your relationships with people will be depending how they feel about them in burgers.

I always keep a jar in the house and have to ration myself from crunching through a gherkin every time I open the fridge (and yes, I know pickling preserves them. There’s just more room in there.) I garnish sandwiches with them and add them to salads, but I’ve never cooked with them.

Like most people, by late August, I’m in courgette apathy. Allotmenteers have gluts of them, but for fodmappers like me, this lasts all year as they are one of the few vegetables I can eat.

Staring glumly at a courgette on a chilly August lunchtime, I wondered how I could perk things up a bit. Deciding soup would be more acceptable than turning the heating on, I used a jar of gherkins to add some bite and interest to the whole thing. My Polish friends might clutch their pearls in horror at how inauthentic it all is but it tasted great and made courgettes interesting again.

Gherkin Soup (serves 2)

  • 1 large courgette, grated
  • 1 large potato, grated
  • 1 parmesan rind or 25g grated parmesan
  • 1 anchovy fillet
  • 450ml stock (vegetable or chicken)
  • 100g gherkins, chopped finely
  • 25g fresh dill or parsley, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon sour cream

This is so easy and quick, writing the recipe out as a blogpost definitely took longer than cooking it from scratch (and I’m a speedy writer!)

Peel the potato and grate it and the courgette on the largest hole of a box grater and put into a large saucepan and cover with the stock. Add the anchovy fillet and the parmesan rind if you are using it. I stash mine in the freezer in a Tupperware until needed.

Simmer for about 10 minutes until the veg is soft and the anchovy has dissolved. I’m still working on a homemade fodmap friendly stock as it’s the place I miss the depth of onion the most, but I’m using the Knorr Touch of Taste one from a bottle. It’s onion and chicory fibre free for fodmappers and the least cheap roast chicken crisp flavoured commercial one I’ve found. Stop me if I sound too like Marco Pierre White though…

Fish the parmesan rind out and add in the chopped gherkins. Chuck in the grated parmesan if you’re using it instead and carefully blitz the soup with a stick blender, remembering hot liquids expand.

Add the chopped dill (I went fancy and added the parsley too. Mint would work if you are a dill-phobe) and stir in the sour cream and serve. It’s the perfect late summer soup, all fresh and tangy but warming and soothing at the same time. I’ve made it twice in a week which means my gherkin usage is about to fill my whole recycling bag singlehanded, but who cares when it’s this good?

 

Pork and Lemon Balm Spelt Salad

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pork spelt salad

If I’m honest, I have blogged little recently and cooked even less. Other people get inspired by hot summer weather and create wonderful meals of seasonal produce to be eaten outdoors. I tend to hide indoors eating a Magnum for dinner in front of an open window which is blissful but hard to write about.

My summer eating has also been cramped (literally) by the whole Fodmap thing. All stone fruit are a no-no. One small roasted flat peach the other week made me so ill I had to spend the next day in a darkened room with a fruit induced hangover basically. Asparagus is out. So are avocados. Corn and peas are only allowed in homeopathic amounts. Cherry tomatoes are causing issues. My innards wish it was mid winter and they could have some nice swede and curly kale.

Thank god for spinach is all I can say. Sometimes you just need something green and leafy and it does the trick. But it’s not what I’d call filling so I’m always looking for ways to bulk it up a bit. My friend Alex is a fellow Fodmapper who has issues with the wheat-rye-barley school and she introduce me to pearled spelt recently as a barley alternative.

Sadly much more expensive and only really available in Waitrose or through Sharpham Park, pearled spelt looks very like pearl barley but is more robust and hearty. It would be great in soups where I love that chewy grain texture but I’m wishing winter back again to talk about that, so I made a spelt salad.

I’m eating a LOT of meat right now. I’m trying a higher protein diet for gut issues generally while I learn more about leaky gut syndrome and auto immune illnesses (warning: Google is full of woo on this subject so read carefully) and because with most fruit and veg and all pulses being excluded and cheese limited, I don’t have many other choices. You need much more protein to fill you up when you can’t really bulk up on fibre as well. I’m trying to eat a variety of types of meat and fish and vary the cuts to keep it interesting.

I got a pork tenderloin inexpensively in Tesco recently (somewhere I alamost never shop but went into to enjoy their air con). Still a well priced cut, there’s no waste on it and a whole one does me about four meals. I combined it with some impulse purchase lemon balm, green beans and spinach and drizzled it with a lemon vinaigrette. It was delicious, but if anyone has any tips on giving vinaigrette a new twist or can suggest other Fodmap friendly dressings, please let me know!

Pork and Lemon Balm Spelt Salad (serves 4)

  • 450g pork (I used tenderloin or fillet)
  • 150g spelt (uncooked weight)
  • 1 lemon, zested and juiced and 1 lemon sliced
  • 1 courgette, sliced
  • 150g green beans
  • 1 tablespoon garlic oil
  • 1 big bag spinach
  • 50g green olives
  • 4 stalks lemon balm
  • small handful fresh parsley
  • small handful fresh chives
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar with a dash of lemon juice
  • 1 heaped teaspoon Dijon mustard
  • salt and pepper

Start by soaking the spelt in cold water for at least half an hour if you have time. I did mine in the morning and left it all day. It makes it quicker to cook, saves on labourious washing and gives a lovely texture to the cooked grain.

Add the soaked spelt to a large pan and cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Simmer and cook for about 20 minutes or until the spelt still has slight bite but is cooked. Drain and allow to cool for about 15 minutes.

Season the pork well. Seal it on each side for about 2 minutes to add some colour and then lay out some tinfoil and set the sliced lemon on it. Wrap the pork up in the foil like a parcel and pop in the oven for 12 minutes on 180 ℃. Leave to rest for 5-7 minutes and then slice thinly.

While the spelt is cooling, slice your courgette and fry in the garlic oil (remember Fodmaps are not oil soluble so garlic oil is fine). When they are cooked, dry fry the green beans in the remaining oil until slightly softened. Add both to the cooked spelt along with the lemon juice and zest.

Make the vinaigrette by combining the olive oil, vinegar and mustard and mixing well. Tear the lemon balm with your hands. It will discolour if you use a metal knife. Toss it into the spelt along with the sliced pork and add the chopped parsley and chives. Add the spinach and the olives and toss it all well so the warmth of the pork wilts the spinach just slightly.

Serve and eat outside if possible to give you that proper summer feeling. Excellent with a Magnum for afters too, preferably a Dark Espresso one…

 

 

Cream of Potato Soup

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potato soupFor some reason despite more or less worshipping at the shrine of the spud, I have never made a potato soup without adding either leeks or kale for caldo verde. In fact I’d never heard of cream of potato soup until I moved to England and saw packets of the Erin stuff in Irish sections of the supermarket and discovered it was thought of here as quintessentially Irish.

So when I checked out Ocado’s Irish shop for an event with them and Bord Bia for St Patrick’s Day, I was amused to see that they don’t stock this but lots of things I really do think of as Irish. I decided to make my own cream of potato soup though to be sure and top it with soda bread croutons, fresh dill and smoked salmon to make sure no one confused it with the packet stuff.

Cream of Potato Soup with Soda Bread Croutons (serves 4 to start)

For the soup:

  • 1 large onion
  • 25g butter
  • 500g potatoes
  • 650ml vegetable or chicken stock
  • 100ml buttermilk
  • salt and pepper

For the soda bread:

  • 225g plain flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 250ml buttermilk

To serve:

This is a very simple dish with a surprising amount of flavour from very few ingredients. I know I’ve described it as cream of potato but I forgot to buy any so I used the leftover buttermilk instead and the slight tang works brilliantly, so if you use cream, don’t skimp on a squirt of lemon juice too.

Finely slice the onion into half moons and allow it to soften into a sticky caramel tangle in butter over a low heat for about 30 minutes. Or use a batch of my slow cooker caramelised onions from the fridge where they last up to a month.

Peel the potatoes and cut into inch chunks. Add to the pan of onions and pour the stock over it all, seasoning well. Simmer on a low heat until the potatoes are collapsing around the edges for about 25 minutes. Use a handblender to blitz it all into a smooth soup.

It will thick and almost gluey at this stage but don’t panic. Add the buttermilk and blitz again and the texture will lift into a sleek soup with an almost foam like texture to the surface.

While the soup has been cooking, you’ll have been making the soda bread. I do buy mine for a emergency stash in the freezer, but having finally found a source of decent buttermilk, it seemed a shame not to make my own farls here.

Heat a dry heavy bottomed frying pan on the stove. Put the flour in a large bowl and add the sugar, salt and bicarb. Gradually add the buttermilk, bringing the dough together to a lump that shouldn’t be sticky. You may not need all the buttermilk. The acid in it activates the bicarbonate of soda and allows the bread to rise, so if you only milk, don’t forget to sour it with a splash of lemon or vinegar.

Flour the worktop and place the dough on it, pressing it into a circle with your hands until it is about an inch thick. Cut into four pieces or farls and cook two at a time in the dry frying pan giving them about 7 minutes on each side. Flip them over if they start to burn. Repeat with the remaining farls.

To make the croutons, split the farls in half and cut into small cubes. Add some oil or bacon fat to the frying pan and add the cubes to it and fry until the croutons are crisp and golden. Drain on some kitchen roll.

Serve the soup in shallow bowls scattered with the hot croutons, thinly sliced smoked salmon and chopped fresh dill. It probably doesn’t reheat well due to the buttermilk, but as there were only clean bowls from my guests, I’m not sure!