migrant|roo

Rob and Dave, a couple of old Uni friends, swung by to stay with us this weekend which was really awesome. Awesome and full of long afternoons in the pub, loads of cooking and loads of Guitar Hero.

I cooked Vietnamese chili, salt and pepper squid - which is becoming a real favourite - and chicken with chilli and lemon grass. Cooking it was a bit of a haze; no photos I'm afraid, doing it after hours in the pub plus the whirlwind I'd creating in the kitchen, and Guitar Hero duels were a little too distracting.

Sunday started slowly (with a hangover) but good coffee and eggs on potato farls got us moving soon enough. Moving enough to somehow end up in an oriental supermarket shopping for lunch.

Pork and Prawn Gyoza

• 50 frozen gyoza wrappers
• 200g pork mince
• 12 large raw peeled prawns, finely chopped
• 6 finely chopped spring onions
• Half a finely chopped chinese cabbage
• 6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 large piece of ginger, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon of caster sugar
• 2 tablespoons Kikkoman soy sauce
• Dash of rice vinegar

Lots of chopping eh? I had lots of help in the kitchen from Jo, Dave and Rob luckily! Mix it all up and you're ready to roll (I fried a test gyoza off to test the seasoning).

The gyoza wrappers were frozen, but by the time they'd been out for 30 minutes or so they were easy to handle.

We learnt quickly that dry hands really help, so that the wrappers don't stick to your hands. Stick a bit of the pork and prawn mix (not too much), and then use a bit of water around the edge to act as glue to seal it. Squeeze it close, and line 'em up.

We made 50. Less 1 that was the test, and 1 that was put down because of severe deformity.

It might seem that 48 gyoza is a lot for 4 people, but as soon as we cooked half and started eating it was pretty obvious that we weren't going to be able to stop until they were all gone ;)

I wonder if I'll ever get bored of cooking Asian food..

With peanut butter and M and Ms - for Buzz's send off tomorrow :)

I made a pie today.

In fact, it was a birthday request from my Dad who had been craving a traditional chicken and mushroom pie - he got one for his birthday!

I used chicken thighs (poached for 40 minutes in stock, then carefully and lovingly de-boned and diced) instead of breast to ensure the chicken didn't go dry, and it worked really well. The filling was essentially a bechamel sauce (but with more chicken stock than milk) with sauteed mushrooms, tarragon and chicken.

Shortcrust pastry unashamedly bought off the shelf. Here's the beast in all it's glory - fed 6 people easily.

Served with chunky chips, roast butternut squash and thick gravy.

There was something satisfying about making one big "thing" that everyone shares, and it was fun to make something a bit more rustic and English after 2 weeks of south-east Asian cooking too.

Vietnam was undoubtedly my favourite country when we went around the world. A big reason for this was the food; I fell in love.

All this made the fact that I couldn't find a good Vietnamese cookbook even more disappointing, until now:

The Secrets of the Red Lantern is now my favourite cookbook. Ever! It's not just a cookbook, it's a beautifully presented story of one family's escape from the Vietnam war, leading eventually (I won't spoil the story) to The Red Lantern, a revered Vietnamese restaurent in Sydney.

We'd invited Flo, Tracy and Monkey over for dinner on Saturday night, so I thought "Hey! Why not cook 4 dishes from this fantastic new book?".

Lesson #1

Vietnamese food, although quick to cook, is not simple. There is an elegant simplicity to the approach of each dish; fresh herbs, fresh vegetables, fresh seafood - do you see the pattern? However, there is a lot of preparation involved, and I spent 4 hours in the kitchen frantically chopping, soaking, folding, tearing, picking, slicing, coating, marinading.. phew!

Lesson #2

I'm not going to cook four dishes I've never cooked before when hosting a dinner party. Thankfully, Tracy and Flo were 45 minutes late, but even so, I was shattered and the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it!

Lesson #3

Don't skimp on quality of ingredients. I know this might seem obvious, and it's something I try to do myself but it's worth mentioned here, if only because I'm feeling a bit smug. We made a huge effort on Saturday afternoon legging it around the city trying to find everything we needed totally fresh (not frozen or jarred if we could help it) and I think it played the most crucial part in the quality of the meal.

So, lessons over, how did it go? Well, at 5pm you I wouldn't have believed it, but by 7pm we were eating a really, really delicious, authentic tasting meal complete with home-made dipping sauces.

There's a downshot though - I was so stressed, snowed under with cooking that I didn't take many good photos. In fact, I didn't even get any photos of some of the dishes :(

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

A favourite of mine from when I was in Vietnam, these ended up being 10 out of 10 on the authenticity-scale, but it didn't come free; 15 rolls took me over an hour to make.

Deep-fried squid with salt, pepper and chilli

NO PHOTO

I've never deep fried anything before, so I was really worried about this. Luckily, we got some freshly caught squid which I sliced into thin strips so they'd cook quickly, then coat in egg-white and work in potato starch (heh, that was easy to find..). They cooked in hot oil in about a minute, whereupon I tossed them in sea salt, fresh cracked black pepper, red chillies and 4 slices, fried spring onions.

It's hard to explain the disbelief at how good they tasted when I tried them!

Rare steak and glass noodle salad

This dish had about 30 ingredients! Even the marinade had 10+ ingedients, but it was all worth it. I cooked the rump steak on a really hot griddle for 3 minutes each side and sliced it ultra thin. The salad was essentially a herb salad (basil, thai basil, corriander, perilla and mint) with glass noodles, red onions and cucumber, dressed (a mix of soy, garlic, corrainder, sugar and fish sauce blended together) and finally garnished with roasted peanuts.

The result was so fresh tasting, an absolute explosion of flavours.

Chicken with chilli and lemongrass

Another favourite of ours from Vietnam, I learnt the secret to cooking this one (aside from chopping the lemongrass really, really fine) was to let it cook longer than you think. It's not a stir-fry, it needs time for the sauce to really come together (I deglazed the wok in the middle, too) and for the onions and garlic to caramelize.

I'm so pleased, I feel like I've finally got a crack at mastering Vietnamese, one of my favourite cuisines. I learnt a few lessons, but I'm not put off at all - just totally exhilerated by that most fantastic cookbook.

Man, it's rare that I spend so long preparing and cooking something that ends up looking a bit unspectacular, but today was one of those.

Slow-cooked Lamb shoulder, with gnocchi and caremlised butternut squash

Taking the meat off the shoulder and trimming the fat took bloody ages! Satisfying seeing it brown off in a very hot griddle pan before being stuck in the oven for an hour with an onion, a touch of stock and and oregano.

I thought I'd double experiment with the gnocchi - attempt them for first time, and also try and inject some earthy mushroom flavour into them. Did you know that 12 mushrooms, finely blitzed in a mini-food processor then gentle fried in olive oil disappear to almost nothing? The yield was about 2 tablespoons of fine mushroom paste.

I used Jamie Oliver's gnocchi recipe - classic potato (none of yer fancy Roman semolina brand here) - adding in the mushroom paste half way through.

While this was going on I continued to develop my mild addiction to oven-roasted tomatoes - I put 12 of them, quartered, into the oven for 90 minutes with salt, basil and olive oil. Also in an already full oven was half a butternut squash cut into a thin, long strips (for extra crispness keep them thin) drizzled with olive oil.

All that was left was to combine the shrunken, intense tomatoes into the lamb making a rustic lamb ragu of sorts - then serving over the gnocchi, a scattering of crispy butternut squash pieces and some grated parmesan.

Warming, autumnal, rustic and bloody hard work.

A few months ago a small team of us (Karen, Nico, Tom and myself) at POKE built a new website for the excellent Ottolenghi restaurant.

As a "thank you", Yotam and his team at Ottolenghi kindly invited a large mob of POKE food-heads across to Leith's Cookery School for a Saturday morning lesson in mediterranean and Isreali cooking.

It was really, really nice (but also a bit weird initially) to socialise with Pokers outside of their two natural habitats: the studio, and the pub! Everyone was buzzing and it was a brilliant morning - everything was perfectly organised and the recipes were absolutely delicious (I've cooked them all since the course at home).

I tried to get some decent photos, but it was a bit manic with all the cooking - here's the best of the bunch:

The hardware

Knife skills

Red onion, cucumber and dill salad

This might look plain, but it's far from it. We salted the cucumber after scooping the seeds out to get them to release a lot of water, giving them loads of crunch. The dressing was a mix of vinegar, sugar and dill - the vinegar really took the edge of the onions. This is going to be eaten a lot this summer :)

Chicken and courgette burgers

I've always been scared of burgers - no more. It was an extremely wet mixture before cooking, my nerves were jangling.. but the lesson is to trust the professionals; after 2 minutes in the pan they firmed up enough to flip and the rest, is delicious history.

The Meal

All together, along with my favourite dish of the day: the bulgar wheat, caremlised onion and feta salad. You can see it in the background, unfortunately I was too busy faffing around cooking to get a proper shot of the bulgar salad on it's own.

Messy dessert

Raspberry and passion fruit mess, made with the infamous Ottolenghi meringues! I managed to coax a few meringue secrets out of Yotam too ;)

A fully brilliant day, capped off with a few pints in a local pub and a sleepy, sunny, gentle journey home.

Like most London-workers, I've become a serial sushi eater. I've only ever tried to make sushi at home a couple of times before, enjoying limited success.

A couple of weeks ago when Monkey and Rob came to stay for the weekend I decided to give it another go, but this time I was going to buy the best salmon fillet I could find. After a bit of hunting around on that Sunday morning with Rob, it turns out the best we could find was also the biggest. So I made a shitload of sushi!

The salmon was an organic skinless fillet from Waitrose, and I picked up some nori sheets too. I didn't have any sushi rice so I used unwashed (don't laugh - not washing keeps the starch in making it more sticky) basmati rice.

One thing nobody tells you is that when making sushi (especially a lot of it) the rice gets absolutely EVERYWHERE. It sticks to your hands, gets trodden into the carpet, in your hair - everywhere. I find having wet hands makes it much easier to pick up rice without it all sticking to your hands.

Rolling was good fun - the first one was shit, the rest were good. My knife was just about sharp enough, but making sushi really makes me want to splash out on one of these bad boys :)

Big fish, sharp knife

Attempt #2 at rolling - looking good

All rolled

The spread (well, half of it..)

Cut rolls

It's rare that I eat so much sushi that I feel completely full. This was one of those times. We ate, and ate and ate and there was still a massive slab of salmon left over.

I've always steered clear of making pies and other items in the Pie Family (quiche, tart, flan, pastry), but I guess something spurred me into trying it because here's an apple pie I made this afternoon:

Closed

Slightly eated

Apple Pie Recipe

• 5 bramley apples, cut into sugar-cube sized pieces
• 2 teaspoons of freshly ground cinnamon sticks
• 3 tablespoons of caster sugar
• squeeze of lemon juice

I used some off-the-shelf shortcrust pastry and rolled it out into a bottom-up cake tin, and brushed milk and sprinkled sugar over the top before sticking in a medium oven until it looked wicked.

Look how taken with the pie Suki was:

Can naughty cats eat pie?

I spent about an hour on Sunday strolling around the internet looking at food related stuff. I've realised that BBC Good Food is a great resource for recipes and also exhibits excellent food photography - something that most definitely floats my boat!

Inspired by some of the recipes, I decided to embark on a concerted flurry of cookery on this Sunny Snowy Sunday in an attempt to delight the tastebuds of my visiting parents and sister.

Breaded goats cheese and caramelised red onions on rocket

We've been eating Soignon goats cheese (tried to find a link, but they're obviously too busy cheese-creating to faff around with silly internets) for a while now, indulging ourselves in it mostly using pizza. However, I decided to breadcrumb it and gently shallow fry it - hoping for some oozy soft cheese and crunchy crust.

First, I cut the cheese into rounds. Can you guess how many of us there were?

For the breadcrumbs, I put the following into a mini-blender:

• Stale bread
• Salt
• Pepper
• Oregano and basil
• Olive oil
• Parmesan

Using egg as glue, I generously double-coated (dip, coat, then dip, coat again) the cheese rounds, until they looked like this:

To complement the strong, salty goats cheese, I wanted something sweet and tarte, so I quickly caramelised some red onions with balsamic vinegar, a pinch of sugar and a tiny dash of soy sauce (don't tell anyone). About 2 minutes in, the onions looked like this:

I continued cooking them for about 10 minutes at least, until they were extremely dark and soft.

While the recently breaded goats cheese rounds were on a very low heat on a lightly oiled griddle pan, I dressed rocket leaves with balsamic vinegar, olive oil and salt.

After 5-6 minutes the breaded rounds were perfectly golden and crunchy on the outside, and soft and gooey inside. I served them on the dressed rocket leaves with a generous portion of the caramelised red onions on top, voila:

Tomato, Rosemary and Garlic flatbread

Tomatos in this country suck. More often than not they're hard, tasteless and a pathetic off-red colour. To significantly improve the experience of eating such sub-par fruits, I cook them for absolutely ages with my favourite things:

My favourite things to slow-roast tomatoes with:

• Garlic
• Really good quality sea salt
• Fresh basil
• Olive oil

Halve the tomatos, chop the garlic, tear up the basil and use olive oil like it's going out of fashion and you'll end up with something like I did, this:

After being in the oven for 1 hour on a low heat (80C?), everything is soft and delicious. There's a rich, red oil left with the tomatos, and if you do enough it'll keep in the fridge in a jar.

I made a quick flatbread and threw on rosemary from the garden, garlic slivers and the roasted tomatoes (as well as some of that awesome oil) to have with an excellent macaroni cheese that Jo made (the photos of the macaroni cheese came out terrible unfortunately):

We sat around our new japanese-style dining table (read: re-purposed Ikea coffee table) to eat and drink together:

Lovely.

Half-toast pitta bread and split them in half once they've puffed out a bit.

For the tomato base, there's an ultra-quick way (tomato puree, plenty of salt, oregano, olive oil, garlic) and a slower way (can of good quality chopped tomatoes, salt, sugar, garlic, basil, oregano, cooked down for 10 minutes).

Add whatever toppings you've got lying around - i've yet to make a bad one! I can recommend tuna, capers, olives, red onions and basil (no cheese).

Stick under a very hot grill for 2-3 minutes until very golden, drizzle loads of olive oil and enjoy!

"Lasagne of the sea" (Adapted from a recipe in Jamie Oliver's "Cook with Jamie" book)

Into a heavy-bottomed pan on a low heat with some olive oil, I put (all very finely chopped):

• Carrot
• Onion
• Celery
• Fennel
• Garlic
• Parsely

I left the lid on and let it sweat for 10 minutes or so until the mixture is really soft. Then added about a pint of milk and brought to the boil.

In a separate pan, I melted some butter and added some flour to make a roux - then ladelled in the milk and vegetable mixture gradually until I had a semi-thick sauce.

Seasoned the sauce and added a bit of parmesan some more chopped parsely and it was ready to go.

Now it was time to build the lasagne.

I layered the sauce, with chunks of salmon, haddock and whole tiger prawns, along with halved cherry tomatoes.

Seafood

Layering the lasagne

I made two layers, and then topped it with breadcrumbs (2 slices of toast in a mini-blender, with parmesan) and yet more curley parsely.

Stuck it all in the oven for 45 minutes (but for 30 minutes covered in tinfoil) and it came out looking like this:

I served it like this:

With baby spinach leaves in a light olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing.

Spot on!

Having cooked quite a few complex and challenging dishes over the last few weeks, I thought i'd take stock of the fridge and make something out of what we had in. A noble idea, but I still had to pop out to get a couple of bits.

Butternut Squash Soup

Determined to make a soup from scratch without cheating, I made a vegetable stock by boiling celery, onions, carrots, a tiny bit of garlic, parsely, a bay leaf in water for about an hour. I also added the centre pulp from the butternut squash, and seasoning.

I strained the stock through a fine seive, leaving a tasty, clear broth.

While the stock was boiling away, I roasted a whole butternut squash in olive oil and rock salt in a hot oven for 45 minutes. I was aiming to get some colour on the squash, but got impatient and took them out when they were just very soft. (In hindsight this worked much better, as if they were caremelised there would be black bits in the soup).

I simply blended the lovely, soft roasted butternut squash with the vegetable stock until it had a autumnal-soup consistency.

Does this count as a 2-ingredient soup if you don't count the stock? If so, it was a marvel, served with a drizzle of double cream and truffle oil.

Caesar salad

One of my favourite salads, I thought i'd attempt this from scratch... dressing and all.

For the dressing, I put into my trusty mini-blender:

• 3 egg yolks
• Olive oil
• Pinch of paprika
• Pinch of mustard powder
• Pinch of salt
• 4 anchovy fillets (from a jar in oil)
• A handful of grated parmesan

I then blended the shit out of it until it essentially turned it mayonnaise, and predictably seasoned to taste.

I just dressed some romaine lettuce leaves, and added some chopped anchovy fillets and crispy pancetta bits.

It was authentic, and quick - and i've also got at least 20 portions of caeser dressing left in the fridge, result!

Simple Macaroni Cheese

I'd forgotten how much I love macaroni cheese.

All there was to this was a roux with milk, and a bucketload of English mature cheddar.

So, I've cleared our fridge a bit and still managed to serve up some tasty food.

In what has become a slightly recurring theme, I cooked a bit of an adventurous dinner on this lovely, slow Sunday.

Starter - Mussels, cooked in a proper Masala sauce Tikka Masala has a bit of a bad reputation (with me, anyway). It's usually a bland, blood-red (thanks to food colouring) sat-fat fest. You might argue that the Tikka Masala sauce was invented for an Englishman so isn't Indian anyway, so who cares if it resembles nothing of Indian cooking? I do!

So here's how I made a "proper" masala sauce in a blender/processor:

Loads of garlic and ginger Tumeric Corriander (both fresh, ground and seeds) Couple of cloves Hot red chili powder Generous squeeze of tomato puree Oil Salt Pinch of sugar

Whizz it up in your whizzing machine until it's a fine paste. I reckon this would store for weeks at least.

I've fancied mussels for ages, so I thought i'd see how mussels cooked in a masala sauce tasted.

I fried the paste in a hot, dry pan until it started to change colour and smoke. Then I added equal parts cream and milk until it looked like there was enough for the mussels to cook in. Throw in a bunch of live mussels (cleaned of beards) and put the lid on for 4-5 minutes. When you put them in, all the mussels are closed, like this:

A good way to tell when they are done is to wait for them all to open.

Dump out into a bowl and serve with fresh corriander and naan bread cut into pointy shapes:

It was absolutely delicious!

Main - Trout in japanese broth with spring onions and mushrooms.

I threw together a thin marinade of soy, rice vinegar, nuoc cham (ingredient borrowed from Vietnam!), seasame oil. I left the trout fillets in the marinade for a good 4 hours.

I made a paste of ginger, lemongrass and honey. I smeared this onto the trout fillet, and cooked on a griddle pan for 2-3 minutes on both sides.

Meanwhile, I took the marinade for the fish and added it to a pan with hot water, pinch of salt and a bit of soy. I then added a bunch of very fine slivers of spring onion and sliced mushroom to the japanese broth, and some very finely chopped ginger. Just wait a minute or two for the onions and mushrooms to go slightly soft. I wanted to intentionally keep the broth light and subtle.

Serve the broth over fresh pasta, and the trout fillet on top.

Knocking out more fresh pasta

Trout fillets, served on pasta in a spring onion and mushroom japanese broth

The trout wasn't burnt (despite how it may look in the photo) - it's the honey in the glaze that caremelised ;)

Both dishes were great fun to cook, but it was the mussels that won our tastebuds over. It takes 5 minutes to cook as the pasta can be prepared well in advance, and it tasted absolutely bonza.

One of my favourite things is to spend Sunday morning deciding what to have for dinner, Sunday afternoon buying the ingredients and Sunday evening crafting a delicious dinner.

Tagliatelle with a mushroom sauce and grilled chicken For the sauce, fry shallots and at least 15 mushrooms (finely chopped, I used Shitake and Button) both very finely chopped. When very soft, add a glass of milk and half a glass of double cream. Add 1 crushed garlic clove and season (I crumbed in a bit of a chicken stock cube).

The chicken was scored deep and stuffed with a herb crust, made of dried mixed herbs, garlic, olive oil, chili flakes, salt and pepper. Grill on a low heat for 30 mins (baste them to keep them moist).

The pasta was made using my brand new pasta machine :)

Evidence

Tangy Snickers Cheesecake

I've wanted to try making a cheesecake with Snickers for ages :) I used a presentation ring (you know, the things that make round rice-towers) to build the cheesecake, it worked wonderfully.

For the biscuit base, 4 crumbled digestive biscuits, knob of melted butter and a teaspoon of dark brown sugar. Pack the biscuit base down into the ring.

Whip mascarpone with a shot of coconut rum, and a teaspoon of lemon and lime marmalade. Smoothly layer over the biscuit base. Whip a little cream until thick and add a thin layer over the mascarpone.

Melt 2 Snickers bars and smooth that over to top the cheesecake, then chill in the fridge to properly set it for a couple of hours.

Gently pull the presentation ring up when ready to serve. I drizzled a reduction of lemon and lime marmalade and coconut rum around the cheesecake, which finished it beautifully.

Evidence

It was a delight! The cream was lighter than the mascarpone which kept it from being claggy like some cheesecakes are. The tang and sweetness from the lemon and lime was so good with the mascarpone, coconut flavour and of course, melted Snickers. I'm well and truly chuffed with how well both dishes turned out :)