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Kotopoolo

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

“Kotopoolo, kotopoolo…” Sophia fell silent, shaking her head.

She had made it sound like the clucking of a hen. I thought that ‘pollo’, the Spanish word for chicken, was derived from the Greek, but it makes no sense. ‘Pollo’ (po-yo) doesn’t sound like any noise a chicken would make.

But I digress. Sophia wasn’t pleased. She shook her head again and muttered something in Greek, trying for the right words. “Spaghetti,” she said finally, pointing at the tiny stove with it’s single hotplate and a much smaller plate meant for heating jugs of Greek coffee. She looked disapprovingly at the herbs on the shelf, the spice box and the bottles of oils and vinegar.

“Spagetthi OK,” she reiterated and walked away, still shaking her head.

I may have been forgiven for imagining the homestay’s ‘communal kitchen facilities’ to be dominated by a large stove—perhaps an aga—with cooking paraphernalia hanging on hooks along the walls and wooden cutting boards surrounded by tins and jars. Somewhere in my imagination, a BBQ pit also featured, along with a roasting spit where we might gather to roast an Easter lamb, if one could be procured in time.

I didn’t imagine the facilities to be more along the lines of a tea kitchen, although to be fair there were several of them, and I was the only traveller to bring my own set of knives. Despite the place being fully booked, most of the kitchenettes remained unused.

Well, it was too late. The chicken that was defrosting on the sink needed cooking.

Lemon Chicken with Wheat and Salad

Lemon Chicken

Take one chicken and joint it. Brown it in batches in a pot to which you have added a small slug of vegetable oil and a generous slosh of olive oil (the vegetable oil prevents the latter from burning. Don’t ask me why, but this trick also works with butter).

Set aside the pieces and add a roughly chopped onion to the pot. As soon as this has softened, add 2-3 cloves crushed garlic, some bay leaves and about 2 tsp of dried oregano (frying oily herbs increases their flavour).

When the mix begins to smell aromatic, add 300ml of white wine, return the chicken, add the zest and juice of 1 lemon (I also keep some preserved peel in my spice box, and that goes in as well), a handful of green olives and—since this dish wasn’t going to be braised—enough water or stock to just cover.

I couldn’t resist the tiny courgettes I’d spotted at the greengrocer’s (nor, for that matter, the aubergines, peppers, fresh garlic, spinach and whatnot), so I placed them on top, covered the pot and let the lot simmer for 45 minutes. Greek courgettes are thick-skinned and benefit from slowly steaming in their own juices.

Season and serve with bread, salad and couscous or wheat (which I managed to cook up on the tiny coffe plate).

As for the spinach which I’d also bought: it was nice prepared á’l horta, washed, steamed for a minute or so, with just the water that clings to the leaves, seasoned and tossed with a squirt of lemon juice and plenty of olive oil.

I made sure to keep the kitchen scrupulously clean and refrained from bringing further chickens, lambs or fishes onto the premises.

The next time she found me cooking, Sophia approved. She had come around with a cup of coffee and the divine lemon and vanilla cookies with which she spoils her guests.

She smiled. “Ah, spaghetti!”

No, a sausage, pepper and aubergine stew. I still had to use up that bounty from the greengrocer’s. When it was done, we carried it across to the courtyard to share with the other guests.

There’s no need to be over-ambitious when it comes to cooking on the road.

Anonymous Homestay, Chania

Borth 2008

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

It was the party of the decade, if not the century!

Aberjazz filling up the Dancefloor

Have a look at the menu and laugh (or weep):

  • 13:30 Soup Lunch & Fresh Rolls: Welsh Cawl, Potato & Leek (V)
    —50 portions @ 250ml

  • 16:00 (pre-rugby) Early Supper: Baked potatoes, chilli, vegetarian lasagne, salad
    —30/15 portions resp.

  • 18:00 Cocktails & Canapés: parmesan tuiles, lapsang souchong-marbled quails eggs, savoury choux balls, rice paper rolls, Thai fishcakes/sausage rolls
    —yes, they were all on the list. I was hoping for three of them to come off. Some did, but not the ones mentioned here.

  • 19:30 Sandwiches: egg mayo, tuna& sweetcorn, cheese & coleslaw/salad, ham & salad
    —20 medium-sliced loaves, mainly for the 50 members of the choir. Next time I’ll ask for thickly sliced!

  • 19:00-onwards Finger Party Food: Tricolore crustades, mini samosas, Thai sausage rolls with soy & ginger dip, savoury palmiers, puff pastry pouches, devilled eggs, crudités with blue cheese dip baba ganoush and white bean dip, mini baked potatoes, roast vegetable skewers, köfte meatballs with hummous dip, falafel-pita bites with hummous & tzaziki, tortilla bites with mango salsa and soured cream, guacamole, pumpernickel/blini/bread bites with tapenade, mackerel pâté, smoked salmon, prawns etc., stuffed cherry tomatoes and cucumber cups with herby cream cheese, cheese board
    —Most of this got made, but not the way I intended it. For example, did you know that 750g potato curry makes enough filling for 100 samosas, but a pack of Filo pastry has only 6 sheets in it?

It was five o’ clock on the day of the event before I started on the party food prep—at about the time when the chef who was helping said that we should start plating up. So none of the canapés turned out quite as intended. But what is most amazing is that only nine of the 50-odd proposed menu items didn’t get made in the end. No, really.

Long entry warning (2,500 words)
[read on]

Borth 2008: Test-Kitchen—Last Minute Experiments 2

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

Tortilla chips with cream cheese-lime and mango salsa:
Tortilla Chip Canapes
These are nice and will look good if I get better at assembly, plus they can be contrasted well with red salsa which I’ll also make. However, they turn soggy fast, so they have to be milled out while people are grazing.

Thai fish cakes with sweet chilli dip (recipe for fish cakes in photo link. The sweet chilli dip is easy to make, too):
Thai Fish Cakes with Sweet Chilli Dip
I’ve tried several dips, but sweet chilli wins every time.

On the other hand, soy & ginger dip goes well with Thai-style sausage rolls:
Thai-style Sausage Rolls

I wasn’t going to do sweets (and I’m not going to on the day), but I had this tin of matcha tea powder left from Nippon 2007, and it needed using. So…

Green Tea Cakes

Green tea shortbread should be a crowd-pleaser. However, these are too sweet. My college-recipe shortbread already uses masses of icing sugar. Sadly, this wasn’t a trial-run: half my green tea cakes are sickly sweet…

Alas, this was the effect I was after.

Without the sugar-coating, the effect is more pleasant. (Note: these things will go from being undercooked to burnt inside two minutes!):
Green Tea Cakes--Actually Green!

Finally, I’ve never baked brownies, but these just looked too spectacular to pass up.

Sadly, the same can’t be said about mine:

Matcha-marbled Brownie
But come on—I’ve never tried this before.

Borth 2008: Test-Kitchen—Last Minute Experiments 1

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

My experiments in egg marbling haven’t progressed much:

Unevenly Tea-marbled Quails Eggs with Dip

But this may be as good as it gets. The eggs have been marinated (l-r) for 1h, 4hrs and overnight respectively. Suffice to say that marinating time has less influence on the outcome than handling.

Quails eggs are fragile things and bruise easily. The shell is thin, but the membrane is tough, so peeling is fickle—rush and you’ll end up with nicks. Specks of shell will remain no matter how carefully you wipe, but they can be washed under running water. Finally, not all quails eggs end up egg-shaped.

Borth 2008: Test Kitchen—Mini Palmiers

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

In the final few days before the big occasion, I’m testing out recipes that are new to me or that I haven’t made for a while. Today I’m making oriental foods, but because of the time it takes to prepare them I’m usually lagging at least a day behind with updates.

So here’s one I made earlier:

Mini Palmiers

Mini palmiers are a canapé-party standby, but a modicum of practice is nessecary—as you can see from the somewhat amateurish result.

The classic filling for savoury palmiers is red and green pesto, but I’m avoiding nut products so I’ve tried alternatives.

Roast vegetable pasta sauce was not a success because the red pepper clashed with the parmesan and puff pastry. The whole thing tasted somewhat metallic. Puréed roast vegetables would work, but cut back the pepper and add sunblush tomatoes and basil.

Mushroom duxelle with cheese was tasty, but may need to be cut finer. Sprinkling the things with parmesan means that they brown a bit much and the spiral pattern is somewhat obscured.

These things are tasty enough either (slightly) warm or cold and I will make them. The maximum time for them to stay crispy is 4 hours. Don’t you hate the stale sausage rolls that are usually dished up at buffets? This is why (but in fairness, we’ll have an adjacent kitchen).

Borth 2008: Test Kitchen—The Countdown Begins

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I’m twitching in my chair as I write this. I want to get going with a few more test recipes, but I’m not running the oven today and it’s still too early to think about baking anything.

As for tea-marbled quail’s eggs: I’ve got to be in the kitchen for that so I can keep an eye on them and since our kitchen in unheated and devoid of comforts such as chairs I’m writing this upstairs.

My first attempt at marbling eggs was not a success:

Tea-marbled egg

Verdict: I boiled this egg together with John’s sandwich egg and chilled both under ice cold water, for too long as it turns out. Plunging the eggs into cold water causes the albumin to contract and separate from the shell. That makes for easy peeling, but insufficient contact for the tea marinade to penetrate, hence the lack of marbling. I haven’t yet tried this with quails eggs; they could well behave differently.

The list so far: 26 spices and 25-odd bits of kit brought from my own kitchen, 116 different ingredients ranging from avocados to Worcester sauce (what, I haven’t got anything with ‘z’?) and about 80 recipes ranging from soup & dinner rolls to dips & canapés.

Not only don’t I know yet whether I’ll have access to the prep kitchen on the day before the shenanigans, I also wonder whether I’ll have any assistants, preferably with professional catering experience…

Traditional Sülze

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

I promised a few summertime cook-out recipes, but as I see, my old blog entry from way back already describes the procedure.

A bit of background:

Head-to-tail eating has become trendy lately, but I’ve grown up with it.

I mean that literally—both parts of said anatomy made regular appearances on my dinner plate.

Back in the Sixties and early Seventies, people were not as removed from their food as they are now. (Disgracefully, this is even true of some chefs, such as Leslie Waters who gushes in the current issue of the Good Food Magazine (June 2007): : ‘Offal—I hate it, too much information for me. I’m not into all that, nor stuff like pig’s trotters.’. Mmmh…)

Back then, it was quite common to raise pigs on smallholdings (even the nuns at my boarding school did this). My elder sister’s best friend came from a farm, and her parents raised their own pigs and cured and smoked their own bacon. One year, we decided to share a pig with them (we acquired a big chest freezer, taking up almost an entire wall of the cellar entrance, for the occasion).

I remember watching black pudding and sausages being made. And while my sister’s friend’s parents went on to brine the legs and belly for ham and speck, my mother surprised me by making her own Sülze, or headcheese (unlike brawn—which is set with only a tiny amount of stock, much like a low-fat version of rillette—Sülze is jelly-like, with cubes of meat and garnish set in a clear stock).

Making Traditional Sülze
I’ve just send this to various Flickr food groups, including Mosaic Cooking (which I would have founded if it didn’t exist already). Let the backlash begin…

Along with other off-cuts and innards (the term ‘offal’ reminds me too much of the German word ‘Abfall’—yuck), pig’s heads and trotters are still for sale at some traditional butchers (they may have to be ordered in advance) and at the Greenfield Pork stall at Basingstoke Farmers’ Market, where I saw it for the first time two years ago. And remembering my mother’s cooking during my childhood, I took up the challenge yet again.

Summertime Cook-out

Monday, June 4th, 2007

I haven’t been around much lately, but that’s because nothing much of interest has been happening. Except for the odd weekend, travel is pretty much over with until we’re going to Japan for Nippon 2007.

That’s even though flights to Central Europe are so cheap that some of them are free.

Why? I hear you cry.

Because getting to either Stansted or Luton from Tadley is an expedition in its own right, and would cost about as much as a week’s package holiday in Ibiza.

And because, in the Summer, England is one of the best countries to be in. I have no particular desire to go anywhere for the time being.

And finally, because at long last I’m working on that novel. I hardly dare mention it, in case I’ll dry up again, but it’s kept me on my toes for the past month and that’s what I’m doing whenever I’m not procrastinating (the technical term for that is ‘cat-vacuuming’, but the neighbours’ cats have been avoiding me recently).

Well, today is one of those days, because today I’m having a cook-out.

With my hubby working late and weekends otherwise engaged, we haven’t had any fresh ingredients in the house for about two weeks. Only when I threatened to serve up spaghetti hoops on toast from the Co-op across the road, did hubby agree to take me shopping on Sunday.

It was the occasion of the bi-monthly Basingstoke Farmers’ Market. —That’s living in the sticks for you: what should be a twice-weekly occurrence for people to buy seasonal and local produce has still not quite penetrated to these parts, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Basingstoke Farmers' Market

[read on]

Slow Cooking Day…

Monday, March 12th, 2007

So I let my husband do the weekly shopping as I was away on a writers’ meeting on Saturday. Naturally, he returned with a joint of pork, bacon, sausages, a red cabbage, a bag of green kale and—an oxtail.

Sheesh.

Try as I might, green kale and red cabbage clash, horribly. But I’m currently slow-frying one of the butcher’s enormous sausages (they take a good half-hour to cook) and it gave me an idea. Colcannon is essentially mashed potato with green kale. It complements sausages and onions perfectly. To underline the slight bitterness already present in this dish, I’d colour ordinary onions instead of slowly caramelising the red kind to the consistence of jam. I’ll be boiling the kale shortly, but this dinner will actually happen on Wednesday, after we’ve finished the roast pork and that damn oxtail that was taking up too much room in the freezer. So, first the oxtail.

(It is my hope that eating fatty dishes with mashed potatoes for three days in a row will put off my hubby from buying more stodgy winter food during this beautiful spring we’re having. Roll on steamed fish and salad…)
[read on]

Curry Goat

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

Curry Goat

Well, the weather has turned to shit, and so I’m trying to invoke memories of hotter climes through cooking.

I actually came across this dish when living in New Cross, SE London, where there is a strong Caribbean community. Still—aside from being one of the best curry dishes there are—this invokes memories of bright colours and tropical sunshine.

I can’t believe that I never blogged this before.

Curry Goat with Rice and Peas and Fried Plantain

Goat meat is required, but it can be picked up wherever there’s a Caribbean community. The halal butchers usually have it, and the remaining ingredients can be picked up in ethnic shops and markets nearby.

This is about the only dish which I cook with pre-made curry powder (Sharwood’s Madras).

Curry goat

1kg goat meat (bone in), chopped; juice 1 lime; 3 cloves garlic, crushed; 1 tablespoon chopped coriander (stalks are OK, keep the leaves for garnish, if desired); 2 spring onions, finely chopped; ½-1 Scotch Bonnet Chilli, finely chopped (take care—hot!); ½ onion, finely chopped; 2 tomatoes, scalded and peeled, then chopped; 1 tablespoon dried thyme; pinch allspice; 1 tablespoon curry powder, plus one extra; 1 cube chicken stock; few twists of black pepper

Wash the goat meat (it will be full of bone splinters), pat dry and rub with lime juice. The marinating step is optional. You don’t need to marinate, or you could just marinate for 1 hr. I did it overnight. If you marinate, combine all the ingredients (except for the 1 extra spoon of curry powder), and rest, then brush off and reserve the spice mixture.

Brown the meat and transfer to a heavy pot. Fry the chopped veg and spices with the extra spoon of curry powder (it will darken), deglaze the pan and just cover the meat with the liquid and stock (dissolve cube in 1 cup hot water, then make up the volume as necessary). The idea is that the gravy will thicken during cooking. Simmer very gently 2-3 hours until meat starts to fall off the bone.

Rice & Peas

(I always cook rice by volume, absorption method. Basmati rice from the supermarket doesn’t need washing).

1 cup rice; 1 onion, finely chopped; 400g gunko peas; 1 cup chicken stock; just under 1 cup coconut milk; small piece cinnamon; 2 bay leaves; 1 scotch bonnet chilli (whole); pinch allspice; salt

Fry the onion until soft, add remaining ingredients and simmer to absorb (ca. 15 minutes). Fish out the whole chilli and other spices and serve. The chilli should impart a gentle warmth on the dish. If you don’t have a scotch bonnet (habanero) chilli, use a small dash of original Encona sauce.

Serve with fried plantain and extra lime juice (or a relish made with tomato, cucumber, spring onion, chopped coriander and lime juice—I use that for all my curries).