Slow Cooked and Wrinkled Potatoes

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wrinkled potatoesThis year, the big date in my diary hasn’t been my birthday or Christmas or even Bonfire Night but the 6th of November instead. That’s because it’s publication day for Slow Cooked! My book baby is all ready to go out into the world. Those of you who have pre-ordered should have their paws on it by now and everyone else can start buying it from today.

I’ve had so much support and encouragement while I was writing it, especially from my Twitter followers and I’d just like to thank everyone who showed enthusiasm and interest throughout the process. Your patience is about to be rewarded! Go forth and make yourself something lovely in the slow cooker!

You can buy Slow Cooked on Amazon or in branches of Waterstones and WH Smith and good independent bookstores in person or through the fantastic Hive. It’s also available as an e-book if you’re new-fangled that way. Whatever format you decide to buy it in, I’m honoured that you’ve chosen to do so and hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. A massive thank you to Anti Limited for design, Olia Hercules for food styling and Jen Collins for illustrations.

You’ll also have to bear with me while I spend the new few weeks retweeting praise and generally getting a big head. I’ll make it up to you all by answering any slow cooker questions you’ve got on a webchat on Friday 14th November though. Simply tweet @northsouthfood and @eburypublishing and @thehappyfoodie using the #slowcooked hashtag and I’ll be happy to chat about slow cookers til the cows come home!

To celebrate today I’ve decided to go for a slow cooker recipe with one of my all time favourite ingredients; the potato. I’ve gone Spanish with wrinkled potatoes from the Canary Islands. Small potatoes are cooked in salted water until they wrinkle and are imbued with savoury flavour. The long slow cooking mellows the salinity and makes them massively moreish.

Traditionally they’d be served with a mojo sauce of red peppers and smoked paprika, but obviously as a fully fledged pepper hater, I didn’t want to do that. Instead I took my inspiration from another famed Canarian dip, almagrote which is made from mature goats cheese and tomatoes. I must admit that it’s the loosest interpretation of the dish possible and one that will probably get me hounded out of Tenerife if I ever visit. But it is lovely…

Canarian Wrinkled Potatoes with Sweet Potato Almagrote Style Dip

  • 750g small potatoes (I used International Kidney from Sainsbury’s Basics)
  • 50g sea salt
  • 1 litre boiling water
  • 1 large sweet potato, roasted or steamed
  • drizzle of oil if roasting
  • 1 clove of garlic, crushed
  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 50g cream cheese
  • 25g grated parmesan
  • 1 teaspoon tomato puree
  • 1/8 teaspoon white pepper
  • pinch cayenne pepper
  • juice of one lemon

This makes a great pre dinner dish like a homemade tapa. Perfect for soaking up the cava I will be celebrating with tonight in fact. You could also serve it as a side dish.

Start with your potatoes. Scrub them clean if needed and put into the slow cooker crock whole. Add the sea salt and pour the boiling water over them. Put the lid on and cook them on high for 5 hours. You can also boil them on the stove in the salted water but they get a better flavour and texture in the slow cooker.

Heat the oven to 200℃. Peel and chop the sweet potato into 1 inch chunks. Drizzle with the oil and roast for about 15 minutes. Take it out of the oven and add the smoked paprika and crushed garlic so the heat of it mellows them both. Mash the sweet potato with the cream cheese, parmesan and tomato puree. Beat well until it is smooth and add the cayenne and white pepper. Add the lemon juice and set aside.

Drain the potatoes well. The water will look dark as some of the colour has leached out of the potato skins, but don’t worry. This is totaally normal. Don’t rinse the potatoes, you want to keep the saltiness. Roast them for 10 minutes in the oven to dry the skins out and wrinkle the potatoes further. Serve with the sweet potato dip and enjoy the salty savoury umami hit each spud contains. The warm glow of publication day is optional…

PS: don’t forget, the fantastic Brixton Blog and Bugle that I also write for is crowdfunding for a news editor to keep bringing local news to Brixton. In the years it’s been going the Blog and Bugle have been funded by love and volunteers. We need some cash to move forward so please give anything you can!

 

 

 

Shooting ‘Slow Cooked’

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I thought it might be interesting for our readers to get a sneak peek behind the scenes at the tasty shots for the ‘Slow Cooked’ book, and hear about the process directly from the perspective of the photographer. It’s been an exciting exercise to help bring these very personal recipes and vibrant flavours to life… and see them in print in the book, which is published this week (you have pre-ordered your copy I hope!)

After Miss South was commissioned to write ‘Slow Cooked’ there was a whirlwind of activity on her part. While she was trialling and testing, sharing tantalising recipe ideas, we were starting to think about what the photographs could look like. As she’s the writer and I’m the visual one, this played to both our strengths and presented plenty of food for thought.

People often think of stews and casseroles when it comes to slow cookers, so Miss South was determined that the food had to be anything but the browns which are synonymous with books about slow cooking. The other thing we had to bear in mind was that this is honest, fun cooking: there’s a brilliant range of varied recipes but they’re not intimidating to make, and anyone with a slow cooker can create them, so we wanted the photos to reflect that. Homely, healthy, delicious, and good looking!

Read more

Slow Cooker Matchmaking

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slow cookers

So you’ve decided to buy a slow cooker? Welcome to the least time consuming cult in the world. We find time to put our feet up (at least metaphorically) and get on with all the other stuff we love in life and then sit down to a proper meal at the end of it. I particularly love the low washing up levels that accompany it.

But what do you do if you’re still standing on the side of the fence with the stove and saucepans, looking forlornly at a dish needing steeped and don’t know which toe to dip in first to join Club Slow Cooker? I’ve got some advice for you here so you’re ready to start using the recipes in Slow Cooked.

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Creating Slow Cooked

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book cover

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this before now or anything, but I’ve written a book! You’ll have to forgive me getting meta and writing about writing a book but I’m still in post book writing withdrawal and indulging myself with as many blog posts as possible before Slow Cooked comes out on November 6th.

After people congratulated me on the book deal (and believe me, nothing gets people more excited than a proper paper book even in these days of blogs and e-readers), they generally wanted to know two things. Firstly, how do you get published and secondly, how do you actually write a book from scratch?

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Slow Cooker Pig Cheek Ragu

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pig cheek raguThere is always room in my life for pig on a plate. From bacon, just crisping round the edges to slabs of Christmas ham in Coke or a grilled glistening chop or chorizo jam, I love pork in all its forms. It was of course, the one thing that tempted me from vegetarianism in all those five years and I still feel no qualms about the bacon sandwich eaten late at night up one of the Mourne Mountains after a long day’s walking on my Duke of Edinburgh Silver expedition. I went back to instant couscous the next day and avoided porcine temptations for years more.

But when a rare steak lured me back to omnivorousness once again, it was pig that kept me there. Just around the time Babe hit cinema screens, I was incapable of cooking anything with pork in it without gleefully exclaiming that ‘pork is a nice sweet meat‘ like a demented CGI mouse. More than anything else I eat, I am most able to separate the cuteness of piglets from their taste and texture and the only thing I feel guilty about is my inability to feel guilt about it all.

At first the attraction was that pork is pretty easy to cook. Compare grilling a pork chop to getting a steak just right and you’ll see what I mean. I wasn’t a confident cook at all (if you’d told the 19 year old me that I end up writing two cookbooks, I’d have laughed myself inside out) and meals that were easy to make really appealed. Pork is also often lower in fat which as someone who had just had their gallbladder removed was crucial and combining all these factors with the fact pork is the most affordable meat for free range or higher welfare standards, I’ve cooked it a lot over the years.

We all know that you can eat everything on a pig except the oink and I find it a good way to keep expanding my horizons. Black pudding is a borderline North/South Food obsession and I’ve certainly been won over to the taste if not the texture of trotters, so it was inevitable that pig’s cheeks would call to me. Technically classed as offal as they come from the head, they are in fact pure muscle and perfect for low slow cooking to help the meat fall apart in a tender tangle. Very inexpensive at around £2 for 4, they’ll easily feed 4 people cooked well.

I get mine in Morrisons or Waitrose (and yes, that £2 price is correct for Waitrose as part of their Forgotten Cuts range) and tend to make a massive batch of this ragu in the slow cooker before portioning it up and freezing it until needed. It makes a lasagne of such beauty it’s hard not lick your lips as you describe it. It also goes well with either baked potatoes or as a porky version of cottage pie with cauliflower and potato mash on top. I served it simply here on top of some rigatoni with a hearty sprinkle of parmesan for the first properly autumnal day here in London.

It’s a slow cooker dream and makes a nice change from the ubiquitous pulled pork. I’ve made it without onions as I don’t eat them and I suggest you leave them out too. They bully the soft sweetness of the meat into something less soothing. Read more