Tag Archive for: fodmap

boiled mutton

Boiled Mutton

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boiled muttonAlright, technically it’s lamb, but boiled lamb probably sounds even less appealing to you. But don’t be misled, there was a reason this dish was a Victorian classic.

You take a piece of lamb (or mutton) and essentially poach it slowly with herbs and vegetables and you end up with beautiful moist meat that falls away from the bone and a deep meaty broth that makes the perfect basis for soup.

I had bought a half shoulder of lamb and was planning to essentially roast it in some way in the slow cooker, but then I happened across this piece on rejuvenating boiled mutton by Bee Wilson and felt inspired to try it for myself instead.

I’ve been having terrible trouble finding a way to make chicken stock taste like anything on the fodmap diet, but recently cracked it by using celeriac instead of celery and am now into broths again in a big way.

Adding it along with carrot, parsnip, fresh thyme, bay leaves, green peppercorns and the tail end of a bottle of vermouth, I popped the well seasoned half shoulder into my 6.5 litre slow cooker and cooked it on high for 8-9 hours.

I lifted it out and rested it for 15 minutes and the meat just slipped off the bone, pulling apart beautifully. I let the broth cool and strained half of it off as stock for a gravy and blitzed the other half up as a soup out of the sheer novelty of being able to eat soup again for once.

Boiled Mutton (serves 3-4)

  • half shoulder of lamb, well seasoned
  • 1/4 celeriac, diced
  • 2 carrots, diced
  • 1 parsnip, diced
  • 1 onion (if not on fodmap)
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 2 big sprigs fresh thyme
  • 1 tablespoon green peppercorns
  • 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
  • 3 anchovies
  • 100ml vermouth
  • 1 litre cold water

There is barely any recipe here if you’re looking for something to make as a Sunday lunch that requires absolutely no effort or washing up but looks like you went out of your way to slave over a hot stove. I can’t decide if Mrs Beeton would approve of such inherent laziness or consider me a massive let down to womanhood…

Prep the veg and put it and the herbs on the bottom of the slow cooker crock and set the lamb on top of it. Add the vermouth and the cold water so the lamb is completely covered.

Cook on high for 8-9 hours. To make up for my laziness, I got my timings cock-eyed and ended up having to set my alarm for 6am to get up and rescue the lamb before it turned woolly in texture.

Rest for 15 minutes and then simply pull the meat away from the bone with a fork and serve with a quick relish made from capers, diced cucumber and fresh mint tossed in a little white wine vinegar, sugar and salt and left to sit for 30 minutes before being lightly squished with a potato masher.

I then served half the lamb with this and some roasted tomatoes and the other half as a shepherd’s pie using some of the lamb broth to make a gravy. All that and soup from one piece of meat? Not a bad night’s sleep really!

*This is another entry for the recent #livepeasant campaign for Simply Beef and Lamb, but all content is my own.

Champ Rosti

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rosti

*Warning: this recipe may contain surprise cheese…

It was Pancake Day this week and with my usual organisational skills when I went to make pancakes for dinner on Tuesday, I had run out of eggs. And I don’t want to know how to make pancake batter without eggs thank you very much.

I thought what other flat foodstuff I could make for dinner and my mind went to rosti. Basically a pancake made almost entirely of potato, it’s quite the favourite of mine for that and its relative ease to make. Its Irish cousin boxty defeats me every time. Which might explain why I’m single on Valentine’s Day as apparently its your boxty making skills men are after. Who knew?

No such challenges with rosti (unlike me bothering to find the umlaut on my keyboard it would seem.) I decided to make one large rosti and to fodmap it, replace the onion with the greens of spring onion which gives it a champ flavour.

I also stealthily slipped some sliced mozzarella on top of the first layer of potato before adding a second layer and baking it all in the oven so I ended up with a gooey cheesy filling for a fantastic easy one pot brunch or dinner.

When I say serves 2, you of course know I ate the lot myself but in two sittings which totally counts.

Champ Rosti (serves 2)

  • 700g potatoes, grated
  • 3 spring onions (greens only if fodmap friendly)
  • 25g butter
  • 1 ball mozzarella, sliced
  • salt and pepper

The knack to a good rosti is potato starch to stick the strands of spud together and the best way I’ve found is to peel your potatoes (I used these Elfe ones I’ve been getting in Lidl which are fantastic) and boil them whole for exactly eight minutes.

Drain and allow to cool enough to be able to handle the potato and then grate on the coarsest side of the grater. You will have the correct amount of potato starch needed with the minimum of fuss. It should be sticky rather than gluey.

Put the grated potato in a bowl. Thinly slice the spring onions and add to the potatoes. Season it all well and mix the spring onions through well. I have in the past also added thinly shredded cabbage here too.

Melt half the butter in the base of an ovenproof pan or skillet until it starts to foam. I actually used some brown butter I had left from another batch of these cookies which is why my rosti is so toasty brown.

Press half the potato mix into the pan without packing it down too tightly. Put the sliced mozzarella on top of it all and then press the other half of the potato on top of that. Press it all down quite firmly with a fish slice or spatula. Dot the remaining butter on top it all and put the pan in a preheated 200℃ oven for 20 minutes.

I went to clean the bathroom while mine was cooking but you may prefer to kill time other ways. Either way you’ll have a gorgeous golden rosti with crisp edges and a delicious cheesy centre and the only other effort being whether to top it with an egg or not. Any spare lemon and sugar from thwarted pancake making is not recommended though…

 

 

A Waste of Space

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Brindisa kale

I haven’t written anything for weeks because I haven’t cooked anything for weeks beyond the narrowest repertoire of pork shoulder steaks, rice and chicken and rice. I feel like all my meals are one drizzle of gravy away from being confused with what people feed the dog.

My body which isn’t good with fruit or veg at the best of times appears to have completely and utterly rebelled and is refusing to let me consume anything green or leafy at all without throwing an epic tantrum. I’m at the stage where I’m dreaming of crunchy kale and lightly steamed broccoli.

The problem is that I haven’t stopped buying vegetables or trying to eat them because I love them more than they love me. It leads to something I’m almost ashamed to admit in our current climate: not only do I not green juice, my diet is paler than most people’s complexion in early February, but I also throw food out all the time right now.

This feels akin to saying I also tap dance on rescue puppies or shout at sleeping babies in the street. The world is full of articles and initiatives about reducing food waste and I seem to be chucking food out left right and centre.

It’s particularly galling as I live on a really tight budget and literally can’t afford to be throwing money away, but I also can’t face not buying fresh food because it feels like not trying or being defeated by dietary issues. I can’t decide if I’m more governed by my own tightness or bloody mindedness.

I slightly miss having flatmates who would just steal all your food and then lie to you that they had in this situation. (I lived with a guy like this for several years and it drove me and my other flatmate so mad, we once took a solitary but overlapping bite out of the Nando’s he’d brought home and then convinced him he’d done it himself when he was drunk as revenge for his thieving ways…)

Slightly less pettily and a lot more environmentally friendly, I’ve just signed up to the new Olio app which has launched around London. You take a photo of what you’ve got a surplus of and a description and it links you up with someone who wants half a bag of dried beans and some coriander for example. It’s like Tinder for groceries.

I’m quite excited to have solved 90% of my problem while being glued to my phone as per, but now all I’ve got to do is tackle my other bad habit of leaving things to go off in my depths of my fridge. If anyone actually wants a bag of yellowing Brussel sprouts, I don’t want to meet them…

 

 

Chocolate Mousse Trifle

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trifle

Merry post Christmas and Happy New 2016! I hope you had a fantastic festive season and aren’t planning to punish yourselves in anyway with month long detoxes or exclusions? You can drink a wee bit less or eat more vegan food any time you know. A pissing wet January weekend isn’t my moment to have a major life change, but I guess everyone’s different…

My big difference this Christmas was that I didn’t cook. I ate some excellent food but for once I allowed other people to cook for me. And it was absolutely wonderful.

My lovely friends went out of their way to welcome me to their homes and tables over the holidays and make food I could eat and make no fuss when there was something I couldn’t. As a result I enjoyed each and every time I ate and felt more treated and spoiled than if I’d been plied with gifts.

This was my first Christmas in England and I decided to go the whole hog and do as many firsts as possible and try as much new stuff as I could. I ate my first blini, drank my first Baileys, ate Brussel sprouts and pigs in blankets with Christmas dinner, had a snowball and the big one, made and ate my first ever trifle.

I have always loathed the idea of trifle. Technically I have never loathed trifle because I have never eaten trifle until last week. It’s not something we do in our family and frankly, I’ve always found it rather English.

My only childhood experience of trifle were terrifying ready made Dale Farm ones made of lurid jelly, cryogenically suspended tinned fruit and squirty cream begging to be put out of its mercy. Other Northern Irish children of the Eighties probably remember these in Crazy Prices or Stewarts too. I believe one was supposed to wash it down with some of that day glo orange squash children were practically weaned on in those days since it came in milk bottles beside your daily pinta.

I never touched them no matter how rude it made me look when I went to friends’ houses for tea after school. Luckily most adults were so tickled by a small child refusing sugar that they forgot to tell my parents what a precocious brat I was. Once I got to secondary school, trifle just seemed to vanish out of my life and I’ve avoided it ever since.

Listening to this Radio 4 programme with Tim Hayward before Christmas was my equivalent of watching a horror film. I ducked beneath the bed covers at least once as they discussed jelly and declared myself trifle-phobic.

Then it all happened. My friends who I was joining for Christmas dinner asked me to bring a dessert. I decided to make a version of this chocolate prune cake but with chestnut puree instead of dried fruit. This was my no cooking Christmas after all and that cake is so simple you can make and bake it in under an hour.

But what you can’t do at 1am on the morning of Christmas Eve is take it out of a bundt tin without it breaking into moussey hunks of panic on your kitchen worktops. Emergency Googling told me you have two options with a broken cake: cake pops or trifle.

And when you’ve got Christmas Eve plans involving prosecco and good jamon and better manners than turning up to Christmas lunch with no desert, you go with trifle.

One swift trip to Tesco Express later and I had the makings of a chocolate mousse trifle. I would layer the sliced cake up and pour raspberry coulis and fresh raspberries over it, add homemade chocolate mousse, more raspberries and whipped cream and it would all be fine.

Apart from the fact a trifle-hater doesn’t usually have anything they can make trifle for 6 people in and carry it around the corner with ease. Which is how I found myself making a bucket of trifle in a Tupperware container big enough to bath a baby, but yet easy to transport.

This actually make enough trifle for 16 people so it was going to be too weird to excuse myself from eating my own dessert. I dug in and told myself it wasn’t really trifle because the cake hadn’t been moistened but was meant to be like that.

And it was delicious. Incredibly ridiculously rich. But delicious. Turns out I’m not trifle-phobic. I’m just fussy. But you probably all knew that anyway…

Chocolate Mousse Trifle (serves an even dozen at least)

For the cake:

  • 400g dark chocolate
  • 200g chestnut puree
  • 175g butter
  • 6 egg yolks
  • 6 egg whites
  • 3 tablespoons icing sugar

For the mousse:

  • 400g milk chocolate
  • 175g butter
  • 6 egg yolks
  • 6 egg whites
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the trifle:

  • 350g raspberry puree
  • 200g fresh raspberries
  • 500ml double cream

You could of course just make the cake or the mousse and not bugger either of them up and serve them separately. But if I’d done that I wouldn’t have had an amusing anecdote or a blog post.

Grease and flour a 9 inch cake tin. You can use a bundt if you want to save on some of the effort of slicing, but a standard tin is fine. Heat the oven to 175℃.

Make a bain marie by placing a large bowl over a pan of water on the cooker, making sure the water doesn’t touch the base of the bowl. Melt the chocolate, chestnut puree and butter together in this. Separate the eggs and set aside.

Once the chocolate is melted, take it off the heat and set carefully into a sink of cold water to cool. Beat the egg whites with the icing sugar until stiff peaks and set aside.

Take the chocolate out of the water and beat each egg yolk into it one at a time with your electric whisk to add lots of air. Then fold in the egg whites a third at a time.

Pour the mix into your cake tin and bake for 40-45 minutes. The cake will rise massively in the oven so allow breathing space. Once the top is slightly cracked and light in colour, take out and let it cool on a wire rack.

Make the raspberry puree by blitzing either defrosted raspberries or fresh ones with a tablespoon of icing sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice and set set aside.

Slice the cooled cake and layer into a trifle bowl (or enormous tupperware container.) Pour the raspberry puree over it and add about half the raspberries. Allow to sit while you make the mousse. You could use that bottle of Chambord you have knocking round instead if you prefer.

Set up up your bain marie again and melt the chocolate and butter together. Separate the eggs and cool the melted chocolate well. You do not want scrambled egg while you’re making trifle (obviously I got it on Christmas Eve and just carried on anyway.)

Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks with a pinch of salt and set aside. Add the vanilla extract and beat each egg yolk in one at a time and then fold in the egg whites a third at a time.

Pour over the cake and raspberry puree and chill for 4 hours or overnight. About an hour before serving whip the double cream and spread on top of the set mousse and decorate with the remaining fresh raspberries. Serve and convert all the trifle haters and jelly doubters!

 

Fodmap Friendly Granola

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fodmap granolaThe places that those pesky fodmaps can hide is never ending. If there is isn’t wheat in one thing, there’s lactose in another and honey in the next. Ironically the ‘healthier’ the food is, the more likely it is that a fodmap trigger will leap out at you.

I don’t really eat cereal, but I do love granola. Two things force me to make my own: the cost of the decent ones and the fact they all seem to sneak inulin in there for fibre. Inulin is the stuff that makes Jerusalem artichokes so difficult to digest for most people and it’s a super charged neon light flashing fodmap.

Discovering there was such a thing as oatgerm recently made me realise I could tweak my basic granola recipe to something all fodmappers can eat if I switch the honey for golden syrup. Before everyone gets up in arms about sugar in their breakfast cereal, let me remind you that honey is just middle class sugar. In fact it’s got a higher fructose load than the high fructose corn syrup we are taught to fear but it’s allowed to be put into things as ‘no added sugar’. Ahem.

Fodmap Friendly Granola (makes about 850g)

  • 100g jumbo oats
  • 150g porridge oats
  • 30g oatgerm
  • 30g sesame seeds
  • 30g pumpkin seeds
  • 30g sunflower seeds
  • 100g Brazil nuts, halved
  • 50g pecans
  • 100g flaked coconut (not desiccated)
  • 125g vegetable oil (or coconut oil if you like)
  • 125ml golden syrup
  • pinch salt
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 egg white

This is so easy to make and this is a good base recipe that you can tweak to your own preferences. If you want higher protein levels, add some amaranth or if higher fibre is your thing, add chia seeds. If you can tolerate dried fruit, add about 100g as the granola cools. If like me, you like your granola more like a snack than breakfast, add some chocolate chips when it’s cooled.

Put the golden syrup and the oil in a small saucepan and heat until melted together. Take off the heat and add in the salt and the vanilla extract.

Put all the dried ingredients in a large bowl and pour the syrup and oil mix over it all and mix well. It will look like the liquid has soaked in and it will be too dry. Don’t panic. It will be the perfect amount to give a burnished golden look to the granola.

Beat the egg white slightly in a small bowl and add to the dried ingredients. This helps them to cluster together to give that luxurious feeling the posh granolas have and separates it further from its raw cousin muesli. It doesn’t make any difference to the storage of the granola because the egg is cooked.

Put the granola mix into two deep non stick roasting tins, making sure you can move the granola around in them. Cook in a preheated oven at 160℃ for about 25 minutes or until as golden as you like it. It will still be very slightly soft as it crisps up as it cools.

Give the granola a stir round before it cools or it will harden into a massive clump that you will have to chisel off the tray later. I made this mistake the first time and the mice in my kitchen are still enjoying the spoils of it exploding everywhere when I tried to lever it out of the tray.

Once cooled, stir any additions in and then store in an airtight container for up to 4 weeks. It would also be rather excellent in small cellophane or foil bags as Christmas gifts. Just leave the egg white out if you’re going vegan.

It will seem like you spent a lot of money to make a small amount of granola, but remember the ingredients make at least five or six batches for the price of two boxes of branded stuff. Plus you can eat it dry in front of the telly over Christmas and look much fancier than if you ate cereal from the packet…