HHDD#29 Roasted Garlic Round-up

For this month's HHDD#29, it was all about the roasted garlic. When I’d been asked to host this month’s HHDD event I high-tailed to my still emerging donna hay magazine collection, plus a couple of her cookery books.  I wanted something I would like to eat, a recipe that was simple and crucially others would be inspired to cook and tuck into also.  And in the spirit of this event I was keen to find a recipe that I would follow slavishly and not just use as a springboard to my own creations.

 So in my case that means absolutely no tomato, no bananas nor every of the other black listed ingredients I normally swerve around. My donna hay magazines are full of little post-it note tabs, so inspiration was not a problem, it was more a matter of filtering the ‘I want to cook’ pile to manageable proportions.  To someone who hasn’t discovered Donna Hay yet it’s hard to define what is particularly unique about her style, but really that’s the word – ‘style’. Donna’s style is all the about the mouth-watering looking food enhanced with whiter than white, neutral palette accessories, photographed in a diffused light so the shadows are soft and the whiteness seems endless.  If the immaculate white bowls or un- crusty white casserole dish need adornment it’s most likely to be a crisp white folded tea towel acting as a tablemat or pot holder.  When I am channelling Donna, that’s exactly the route I try and go down and feel the urge to inhabit an entirely white place with a teetering tower of plain white crockery and a stack of crisp white tea-towels. 
So after all the consultation and pondering I settled on creamy pancetta and roasted garlic pasta.  I like pasta and this one is entirely devoid of tomato and is laced with sweet and juicy roasted garlic cloves and Donna hay’s recipe is:

roasted garlic
2 heads of garlic
1 teaspoon olive oil

  Preheat oven to 180C/fan 160C/355F. Cut off the tops of the garlic heads so the cloves are just showing. Drizzle the garlic with olive oil and wrap in aluminium foil. Place on a baking tray and cook for 45 minutes or until soft. Set aside to cool slightly before peeling off the skins*.
   Place cloves in a bowl and mash with the back of a fork.
*The garlic will be so soft and jammy that you'll be able to press the flesh out by gently squeezing the cloves between your fingers, or gently lift each clove out with a skewer.
Then taking your caramelised garlic cloves and transform into a tasty pasta dish:

creamy pancetta and roasted garlic pasta
400g dried or fresh pappardelle pasta
2 teaspoons olive oil
300g piece mild pancetta, chopped
1 head roasted garlic, mashed
½ teaspoon dried chilli flakes
125ml pouring cream
sea salt and cracked black pepper
1 cup coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley
finely grated parmesan, to serve

  Cook the pasta in a saucepan of salted, boiling water until al dente (10-12 minutes for dried or 3-5 minutes for fresh pasta). Drain and keep warm.
  Heat the oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the pancetta and cook for 2-3 minutes or until browned. Remove from the heat and add garlic, chilli, cream, salt and pepper and stir to combine. Add the warm pasta* with the parsley and parmesan and toss to coat. Serves 4
*the heat from the pasta will thicken the sauce
- donna hay magazine issue 38  

I decided that as I hadn’t made some for a while I made some silky fresh pasta (for one) with 100g 00 Italian flour and 1 large egg.  After rolling out I cut the golden dough into fat strips with the fluted pastry wheel and left to dry over clean white tea-towels (how very Donna!) hung over the kitchen doors. 
I was happy with the recipe choice, the roasted garlic was unctuous, I am always partial to pancetta and wasn’t remotely drowned in cream, so clearly I normally use too much cream with my pasta.  As there was no specification of Parmesan quantity I finished off with another sprinkling.  Fortunately there were some other guests who also enjoyed this dish.

Zaira of La Cocina de Zaira has translated the recipe into vegetarian Spanish version and spiced hers up by using multicoloured shell pasta.  I’m not sure the garlic is roasted but is sautéed with lots of herbs and pine nuts.

Mardi of Eat, Live, Travel, Write did go the whole roasting the garlic route and used some delicious looking mushroom pasta.  It seems that someone feels the same as I do about pancetta and bacon, and home-cured as well, very impressive.

Homemades by Arfi opted for roasted smoked garlic and used a plump globe artichoke for the vehicle of the sauce instead of pasta.

Denise of Chez Us also whipped up a batch of creamy pancetta and roasted garlic pasta for her guests and I am loving the Donna-style whiteness of the bowl and background.
I had great fun planning this month’s homage to Donna and thank you to those who joined me in roasted garlic worship.

Hay, hay, hay - Donna does chicken

“Hay Hay it's Donna day” is the first blogging event I stumbled across when I started my culinary ramblings and the whole concept of these random bloggers all over the world all emulating the signature white and clean stylised look of Donna's food really intrigued me.
I'd discovered Donna Hay and her inimitable food styling from her Marie Claire days and when confronted by stacks of white plates and bowls and that exquisite Vendee light back in October 2006 I was inspired to create a homage to Donna and attempt her quintessential appreciation of all that is pale and interesting.
Reading the other entrants of the HHDD blog event I realised that what was missing from my life was the donna hay bi-monthly magazine. My cookbook addiction is only slightly tempered by my obsession for cooking magazines. Over the years I’ve subscribed to some, dabbled with several and tracked down a few more.  My only problem is occasionally whittling down and recycling them when they threaten to overtake my home. 
The donna hay magazine is not a regular on the UK newsstands so I had to try a little harder to procure.  I found a newsagent in Knightsbridge that specialised in foreign magazines and that worked for a while but I wanted a more regular supply.  My local newsagent eventually managed to become my customary provider and has managed to pickup a couple more fans in the local area as his issues are always pounced on. 
I was only thinking recently that now I have amassed a small collection of said magazine I should try another go at the HHDD event.  And when I leapt into the world of tweeting and commenced trawling for mutual foodie tweets, I spotted a familiar twitter-er called HHDday and in the sometimes small world of food blogging learnt that this month’s host is Stephanie of Dispensing Happiness fame.  Chez Us host the event but as Stephanie's interpretation of last month's HHDD challenge, she gets to choose this month's Donna recipe. Stephanie was the fabulous host of the monthly blogging parties but has taken a hiatus from these exertions so it was really great to see her back blogging and back at the head of the table again. 
Stephanie sensibly wasn’t taking any chances with us seizing her theme and twisting it in a non-Donna sty-le so she provided her choice of Donna Hay Parmesan and Polenta Chicken recipe.  I was determined to track down the original recipe only because I was fascinated to see Donna’s presentation.  I combed through my magazine hoard to no avail and even my donna hay chicken cookbook couldn’t help me.  But with a little digging I found another food blogger who’d been taken with the same recipe and had mentioned that she’d espied it in donna hay magazine #31, a couple of months before my collection started, that explains it.

Parmesan and Polenta Chicken
donna hay Magazine, Issue 31
2 cobs corn, husks and silks removed
olive oil for brushing
2 x 200g (7oz) chicken breasts
flour for dusting
2 eggs, lightly whisked
1/2 cup(100g/3 1/2 oz) polenta
1/3 cup finely grated parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
100g (3 1/2 oz) baby spinach leaves
1/2 basil leaves
grated parmesan cheese, extra to serve
dressing
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 teaspoons honey
sea salt and cracked black pepper
To make the dressing, place the mustard, lemon juice, garlic, oil, honey, salt and pepper in a bowl and whisk to combine. Set aside.
Preheat the oven to 220 C (425 F. Brush the corn with oil, place in a baking dish and roast for 25 minutes or until golden. Slice the kernels from the corn and set aside.
Slice the chicken in half horizontally, dust with the flour, dip into the egg and press into the combined parmesan and polenta to coat. Heat the oil in a non-stick frying pan over medium heat and cook the chicken for 2-3 minutes each side or until golden and cooked through. Arrange the chicken, corn, spinach and basil on plates and spoon over the dressing and grated parmesan to serve. Serves 4 
       
Unusually for me I followed the recipe to the letter, my only substitution was the spinach for lamb’s lettuce and pea tops that I already had in the fridge.  I’d never used Parmesan and polenta for a crispy jacket before and it definitely added a pleasing crunch to my 'happy' chicken breasts so will definitely do this again. I’m never shy to use Parmesan (or Grana Padana) and especially after absorbing Easy Tasty Italian from cover-to-cover I was even more convinced that was the way forward. 
Not seeing the original recipe I wasn’t entirely sure how to present the chicken so I thought I’d go for both constructed and slightly deconstructed version.  I suspect the corn kernels scattered over the plate is truer to the recipe and possibly looked the prettiest but the corn flavour was much punchier munching it off the cob – excuse the butter on the chin though!  Style over content, the choice is yours I think.
It’s wonderful to be back in the company of Stephanie again, and has been great fun channelling Donna again. Check back here for how my fellow HHDDers fared.

U-mamma!

I read two separate tweets yesterday extolling the virtue of the new cookbook Easy Tasty Italian available in all good bookshops (and most likely those not so good) early next month. One of the tweets handily mentioned how a rampant cookbook-ophile such as me might feed their habit and procure a copy ahead of time and much to my delight a shiny copy of said cookbook was sat on the doormat awaiting my pleasure today. Who knew our post could be so efficient? And this is not just any cookbook this is a really good one! I feel I can speak from the vantage point of an expert of cookbooks, having managed to amass a veritable tower of them over the years and if there was an organisation called Cookbooks Anonymous I would be there taking the pledge.
The author of this delightful missive is the occasionally acerbic and always wise Mrs. Santini from Waitrose Food Illustrated. She’s thrown off her guise of culinary agony aunt and we get to meet the very elegant half Italian Laura Santtini (yes, in the transformation she’s gained a ‘t’!), daughter of the now retired proprietor of Frank Sinatra’s favourite restaurant Belgravia’s Santini.
So why does the world need another cookbook, Italian or otherwise? Well what Mrs Santinni is going to do is add a little va va vroom into your cooking. Her U.S.P. is the U-bomb or umami bomb, the little taste rockets she conjures up are flavoured butters, tasty pastes, salsas, marinades and most intriguingly - the potions and elixirs. The first section of Easy Tasty Italian is all about whipping up this wizardry. There is an artichoke, prosciutto, lemon & ricotta trifolata to juzz up a pasta dish. A rosemary, apple & lavender marinade to transform pork or veal, horseradish & rose butter with which to anoint red meat or oily fish. The glamorous sounding savoury enhancer wild mushroom & anchovy stardust or the secret weapon in many a risotto a Parmesan & prosciutto paste. And not forgetting the surely magical black chocolate elixir to provide that ‘je ne sais quoi’ to a beef dish. Laura Santtini defines umami as the "things that make you go 'mmmmm'" and as umami is the Japanese name for deliciousness she has christened her Italian version of this tongue tingling culinary alchemy as u-mamma! And where can you find this u-mamma in the larder? The answer is in some of those Italian stalwarts - Parmesan, prosciutto crudo, porcini mushrooms, white truffles, balsamic vinegar and salted anchovies. And though I can't bring myself to trumpet the tomato I'll concede their usefulness in Italian cooking, though frankly not in mine!
On top of the larder essentials she spices them up further with her alchemic pantry ingredients, a taster being - hibiscus flowers, pomegranate seeds, Amalfi lemon, pistachios, rose water, pink and green peppercorns, sumac, ginger and for that essential little bit of bling, edible gold and silver. Armed with this epicurean toolbox and a few grinding, cutting and cooking utensils this is where the magic happens. The rest of Easy Tasty Italian doesn't follow the usual formulaic cookbook format of chapters entitled spring, summer, autumn, winter or salads, meat, fish, vegetable accompaniments and desserts. Here in section two we have four poetically entitled chapters that are, Air ‘I was raw’, Water ‘I was cooked’, Fire ‘I was burned’ and Earth ‘I am tasty’. You’ve got to admit that’s a little different!
In Raw there’s prosciutto wrapped mozzarella balls with a soupçon of tapenade, scallops anointed with rose stardust and carpaccio and various ‘rich & thin’ alternatives. In Water the magic is applied to soups, pasta and risotti. I can’t wait to try the ‘cheeky lobster’ though the cherry tomatoes may accidently be forgotten. The creamy pesto with asparagus & crispy pancetta will be a must when asparagus comes back round again and the strawberry and balsamic with a few grinds of black pepper I already know I love but with risotto? I have to try that!
In Heat there’s the oxymoronic ‘hot carpaccios’, the beef tagliata with that ever so captivating black chocolate elixir, the strawberry and cucumber salsa’s swordfish (though I fear swordfish is now too endangered to enjoy) and veal Milanese with a variety of exotic twists. There’s a great bit headed 'roll, wrap & splash' which has all sorts of loveliness rolled in Parmesan gratings, wrapped in prosciutto and then doused in something suitably alcoholic or just extra-virgin olive oil if you must. The beef fillet with mascarpone & rose horseradish sounds truly inspirational.
And Earth is all about slow cooking so we have beautiful hunks of beef drowned in Barolo, the tongue-in-cheekily named Leg-over lamb (check out her reason for how this dish got its name), the infamous 36-clove spring chicken and a dozen twists on vegetables. I’ve always felt that mash potato is pretty tricky to beat but Mrs Santtini adds mascarpone and sweet roasted garlic to elevate it even further and she then suggests you could add an extra dimension to this mimosa with her wild mushroom and anchovy stardust.
If all this has still not whetted your appetite we round up with some charming take on desserts and if I need a licence to gather more table accoutrements Laura suggests ‘pimping your plate’ by procuring all sorts of random little glasses and cups in which to serve your accompaniments. For a final flourish the last recipe is a pink-hued Prosecco cocktail which has a sprig of rosemary as a verdant swizzle stick – sounds delicious!
I’ve been completely entranced by this book on first opening, I’ve already amassed some jazzed-up butter to slice a couple of rounds off to top steak or vegetables but after reading this I think I need to broaden my butter mountain further. I’ve been checking how my larder would pass muster as an alchemic kitbag and I fear it falls a little short, time I think to get out of a culinary rut, take a leaf out of Mrs Santtini’s enchanting book and drop a few U-bombs. They do say Italians do it better and this one may just might!

A little birdie told me

Despite being fully Twittered up for a few months yet unaccustomed to such brevity of thought I hadn't conjured up the appropriate bon mots with which to christen my account so it remained entirely bereft of tweets. I started to gather followers though and thinking how odd it was that Cheryl Cole would take time out of her busy life of mini skirt wearing and strutting her stuff in Girls Aloud to follow someone who hadn't even deigned to form a single little tweet was put straight by multi-brothered J. The excessively sibling'ed one also goes by the name of Wiki for his unparalleled knowledge on all that is www and he informed me that my so called followers were not loitering intent on hanging onto my every word should I ever get around to writing any but are probably just spamming me. But inspired by Giles Coren talking about how he has to get himself out there more - media speaking that is I thought I'd take another look at this twittering lark. Giles and I have another thing in common other than a love of writing about their epicurean tendencies though only one of us gets paid for it, but also we both work for 'the man'. Giles spoke of the live aspect of his restaurants reviews by submitting his thoughts via his phone on the repast en passant. This did intrigue me and i pondered following suit but read his column whilst I was I was holidaying in North Norfolk and seemingly entirely deprived of network connection in that far from isolated idyll I couldn't eat and tweet. Being back in the hub of unprotected wifi connections and a pretty reliable 02 such indulgence seems plausible but apart from a couple of tiny tweetettes under my new J with fork mantel I had mainly followed other more prolific scribes.
But today being my birthday initally I was inspired to tweet about yearning for chocolate cake then the joy of finding a dream cake of such substance on arrival to work. But when thoughts of an unplanned fabulous evening of dining out starting to enter my head I thought as well as consulting the usual suspects of restaurant guides I'd ask for advice on solo dining in London on Twitter. And sure enough I got a suggestion that seemed just perfect and headed forth in the direction of that tweeter's recommendation. And keeping on with the theme of giving the world a running commentary of every tiny musing I dutifully tweeted the experience in between appreciative forkfuls. It's a curious medium though, you really feel you have to be very immediate and unlike blogging where I invariably end up with a backlog of posts I guess if you can't say if there and then the moment has passed. And whether the online masses are intrigued and/or amused by your stream of consciousness can also be measured and critiqued in real time And of course by tweeting you are (possibly thankfully for any readers) curtailed in the act of scribing the more verbose of missives. If this post had been strapped into the confines of a 140 character tweet I'd been able to write as far as 'bon mots' maybe curiously prophetic but somewhat lacking in any sense at all I suspect.
If you are remotely inclined to follow a little trail of breadcrumbs of my random bursts of ruminations and nibblings, you'll find the link here or on the right under "eating & tweeting" tweet, tweet, tweet!

Love food, hate waste!

I was sent an email this week about the love food hate waste campaign and I definitely had a little twinge of conscience. I think I’m pretty good about avoiding food waste, I try not to be suckered into the buy one get one free offers unless I really think I can use the second before it dies on me, I consider the use by dates when I buy items and when practically I will be consuming them and all my leftover food goes into the green bin. But I could do more, for example, really my green bin should only contain egg shells, vegetables peelings and the odd exhausted tea bag. It shouldn’t have whole slices of bread, forgotten rashers of bacon and strangely green furry bits of chicken thigh. I hang my head in shame; I guess the rule should be - if I buy it to eat it, I should actually eat it – otherwise I could cut out the middle man and chuck a few pounds straight into the bin. And then of course the conundrum would be which container to put it in, could it go in the black box with the bottles and cans? If I just decide it’s a fiver, does that go with the paper in the blue bag or the white bag for the plastic bottles, foil and card? The answer is that I should pay attention to the love food hate waste five sure fire ways to save money off the weekly food bill and then I don’t have to throw away any money. I can't promise to improve the lot of the 2.8 million tomatoes we throw away every day, but at least I can promise not to add to the discarded tomato heap, I just won't ever buy any!

1. Get familiar with you fridge & friendly with your freezer

This is where my best intentions occasionally flounder, I have definite plans to concoct greatness from some well chosen items and then I eat out or work late or horror of horrors get attracted to something more sparkly on the way home and eat that instead and let other things expire in my fridge.

2. Storecupboard savvy

I probably fare a little better here but there is the perennial habit of bulk buying exotic whatnots when I am abroad or lured into purchasing a small basil mustard mountain at a food show and then letting them languish in the back of the cupboard until a decade has passed. So I guess a regular spring clean should be in operation so a) I don’t just stockpile needlessly and b) just as important I don’t run out of the critical stuff.

3. Carb control

Apparently this is a common offence and we throw away 7 million slices of bread and 5.1 million potatoes every day. And yes I can be accused of the bread crime, it is hard to believe for a well-known bread monster but I don’t generally get through a loaf before it’s growing some exciting new culture. The first problem is that I don’t really like the crusts, but then M&S do a half loaf that doesn’t have the two crusts so I should confine my loaf buying habits to just that particular one. And then as sometimes I don't really want all that bread, I should always (rather than occasionally) spilt the loaf in half and freeze some for toasting later. It is helpful when you can buy one or two potatoes to whip up a little mash or a small handful of Jersey Royals for a potato salad but loaves are more 'one size fits all'.

4. Lovely leftovers

I’ve mentioned on various occasions that I enjoy the challenge of revitalising some jewels from a previous meal and repurpose the remainder into a new delight. For example my recent foray into risotto resurrecting, my joy at a well turned bubble and squeak and turning some delicious remnants into an oeuf en cocotte or scrambled eggs. But occasionally you look at the remains and wonder if you should just put them out of their misery, so again I need to take a leaf out of Rose Prince's fabulous new book and always recycle.

5. It pays to plan!

I do occasionally stick a list of the items in my latest Ocado order and an eat-by-date to the fridge to remind myself of what lies within, but still get the odd surprise when I find an inadvertently unopened packet of salad complete with a brown sludgy liquid lurking at the back of my fridge so I must do better!

With all these tips in mind I was determined not to succumb to shiny new food today but see if I could conjure up a feast from a few sad pieces. Firstly the question of the salad, as it was indeed questionable. But with a new found zeal I washed it thoroughly and span it in the salad spinner until it was positively dizzy and it did seem to bring it back from the brink. I had some stems of purple sprouting broccoli remaining and hoped they could join the party but they were way too furry and no amount of mouth to mouth resuscitation would persuade me to eat them - so straight in the green bin. They were a few remaining rashers of smoky bacon left after the canapés on horseback the other night so they got snipped into a a frying pan. A few cubes of slightly over-mature Cheddar and a golden yolk oozing over the Balsamic drizzled resurrected lamb's lettuce later and a new dish was born!

And rather dashing did it look on my new RE-found objects cutlery-printed linen table mats. It seemed very appropriate as re-found specialise in REmarkable, REcycled, REscued and REstored objects which seem entirely in keeping with the theme of today's salvaged salad.

Frying tonight!

Stephanie gave us a little more time this month to prepare our bite-sized nibbles for her latest fried food themed blog party but still I prevaricated. I’ve been a dreadful blog-dodger recently but I have to admit this isn’t of my own volition it started off being under the weather almost continuously lurching from one lurgy to the next (and I still manage to get the sniffles every couple of days) and feeling more or less incapable of composing anything more than a brief email. And then to cap that my real job just seemed to stea

l every waking moment (and a few of my sleeping ones – you know it’s not going so well when you’re dreaming about spreadsheets etcetera) so much so that I referred to a couple of my clients as time thieves but my colleague topped me and declared them to be extraordinarily appropriately - time bandits. And I doubt even as if the biggest offenders know who they are and how they are depriving me from doing much else other than endlessly data-crunch for their good selves and the unavoidable casualty is always my blog it seems. But yet again I am determined to rectify this; I will claw back some of my own time and dedicate them to toiling over a hot keyboard again. So this is the first and inevitably I am tardy for Stephanie’s soiree but never mind, it seems a suitable theme for my life recently so

I will just plough on regardless.

Stephanie stipulated a fried food theme and I’ve said here before I am not a fan of deep fat fryers, firstly the public information films from my childhood often used to warn us of the danger of an exploding chip pan and clearly these admonitions have lingered in my consciousness. Also I have this abhorrence of tons of dirty oil, I don’t really know how one should dispose of it correctly unless you happen to know someone who handily runs a bio-fuel vehicle – and I don’t unfortunately. Recently I’ve found myself being drawn to the Tefal Actifry in the Lakeland catalogue; I do like the idea of a batch of ‘proper’ chips being cooked in a tablespoon of oil, so no oil to dispose of. But it looks a little chunky, somewhat plasticky and perhaps not as robust as I’d like and as I only have a compact and bijou kitchen I thin

k I’ll just have to resort to the occasional chunky oven chips (and no I don’t mean McCain’s, I mean à la Gordon) until perhaps a sleeker alternative arises. I’m not adverse to a crispy battered prime hunk of sustainable fish and chips and we are hoping to avail ourselves of the new Tom’s Place when D and MC and next in my neck of the woods. I don’t shy away from a bit of fried food if it’s emanating from someone else’s kitchen but no vats of burning fat in my extremely flammable kitchen. So I wasn’t going to deep-fry but I am happy to conjure up a fine fry-up so my canapés are going to be fried breakfast accoutrements.

Firstly I fried some of Clarence Court’s finest quail eggs and top

ped dinky squares of fried bread. I’ve never really got fried bread (sorry MC), I love bread – don’t get me wrong, but I prefer my bread just hot from the oven, or toasted or in some fabulous carbohydrate feast of a hot chip butty. The quail eggs are always a challenge, they cook so much quicker than hens’ eggs that it’s all about your mis en place. Firstly using a serrated knife slice the top off the rounded part of the egg and then return it to the egg box. Then continue your slicing and careful lining up in the egg box un

til all the eggs you need are prepared. The reason why this is important is that those sweet little flecked quail eggshells are notoriously difficult to break and enter and if you crack one straight into a pan and then return to penetrating the second, the first will be totally fried!

Actually these were a tad more fried than I intended and the whites ran into each other too much making getting them out of the pan with delicate lacy edging way too difficult. But they tasted good and next time I’ll leave more space between my doll house sized fried eggs.

Next I fried some de-stemed chestnut mushrooms with a fine dusting of nutmeg and top with slivers of fried dry-cure smoked bacon. Hmmm, who can resist a bit of bacon?

For third canapé I grated some potato, squeezed all the water out, sprinkled with a soupçon of oil and fried in little heaps to aim for a free-form rösti effect. For the topping I got some plump Cumberland sausages snipped the sausage skin off and broke into three. Then rolling each third into a ball and then flattening to form a petite sausage patty. These were fried alongside the rösti and turned out to be my favourite of all three. Not surprising, I’m a sucker for sausages and potatoes!

For the obligatory drink I wanted to carry on with the breakfast theme and then thought I could also build on the frying theme and pan-fried some mango wedges and pineapple pieces to top my glass of pineapple juice. Very tasty and I loved the caramelisation of the mango and pineapple sugars, a pick me up in a glass.

I was a little late for Stephanie this month but to see those who weren’t so belated, check out the party here.

All fright on the night

And hasn't the month gone quickly again! In fact Stephanie gave us longer than usual for this month's blog party and yet still I rush to complete it by the deadline. Ah well nothing changes! This month is was all about Halloween. I was thinking spooky food, creepy food, some sort of witch's brew or maybe more sensibly orange and black food - or as it ended up orange food served on black crockery.
I realised that I'd never tackled carving a pumpkin and felt that this was the time to master this skill hitherto lacking in my repertoire. I didn't heave the largest most obese pumpkin from the pile but bearing in mind that I wanted to contrast my carved pumpkin with my canapés I selected the smallest. In fact I was hoping to find a little squash but only the oversized orange vegetable was available for my delectation. I also picked up some vital pumpkin carving tools and particularly liked the little saws.
And after sketching a miscellany of scary, pointed teeth pumpkin faces, I totally changed my mind and went for the 'J' and the lone bat. Somehow it seems much more me!
I was planning on using the pumpkin interior chopped up into cubes and skewered with some chipolatas. However as veteran pumpkin carvers are surely already aware there's really nothing but seeds and some stringing fibrous pumpkiny bits within so entirely useless edibilty wise!
So instead I made some carrot with a touch of ginger soup and served it in the tiny Nigella espresso cups. Though it looks a little like orange sorbetit really is carrot.
Next I made little welsh rarebits (or it really should be "rabbits" but apparently the original name confuses vegetarians) with cider and double Gloucester to ensure a more carrot topped hue. I am rather partial to a rarebit, it just seems a couple of notches up from cheese on toast. I loved the slightly glazed topping and the ever-so gooey circles were maybe not particularly spooky but more importantly, delicious!
And for a blood-curdling drink I went for the very refreshing freshly squeezed orange juice with a dash of raspberry.
All very chilling I hope you agree. And when I catch up with the other ghoulish blog party entries, they will be here...

PS - I stumbled on so much bat-speckled and ghost strewn crockery and also a plethora of pumpkin table paraphernalia when researching for this party, but I resisted! Though if I had stumbled across little orange pumpkin table confetti I might have caved in!

There's something inside...

Stephanie gave us a quirkier challenge for this month’s blog party – “It’s What’s Inside” and immediately I started to think of mini Beef Wellingtons.

This isn’t a big surprise as I am a huge fan of Beef Wellington and I have been pondering miniaturising this fabulous meaty treat for a while. I didn’t really follow a recipe, I had a plan which was vaguely like the details that follow and intended to make a few dozen of these little babies but then my fellow fans of Beef Wellington in any size turned up early. So then it just became critical to get as many as I could into the oven as quickly as possible and then photograph them swiftly before they were inhaled. So speedily I may add that I was unable to light them properly hence the 70's style cookbook food photography - and would the little darlings stay still on the plate whilst I photographed them? The answer is a resounding no! I am pretty sure that the speed that they vanished meant that they were popular; I will definitely be making these gorgeous little Wellingtons again.

MINI CANAPÉ BEEF WELLINGTONS

Ready rolled puff pastry
Brussels pâté
Beef fillet cut roughly into 2cm cubes
1 lightly beaten egg

(Unfortunately I didn’t make a note of the quantities, I made about 24 but they mysteriously disappeared so I didn’t get to count them and I still had a lot of beef, pâté and pastry left so I could have made a few more plates worth but instead I moved swiftly onto the starters instead)

- Preheat the oven to 200°c.
- Roll out the puff pastry and cut into 4cm squares. My pastry was pre-rolled but I felt it needed to be a little thinner for these canapés.
- Smear the point of a spoon of pâté in the centre of each square and top with a seasoned beef cube. I had pondered making some mushroom duxelle but as one of my prospective diners lives a mushroom-free life I decided to leave it out.
- I tried to fold the pastry over the beef and neatly tuck in the corners like a larger Beef Wellington but on this scale this proved tricky. I preferred to roll each into a beefy ball and line up them all up on a baking sheet.
- Carefully brush each ball with the beaten egg and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until pleasantly puffed and golden brown.
- Allow to cool slightly, (if permitted by your hungry guests) and then transfer to a platter to serve.

My next idea was inspired by a Anton Edelmann scrambled eggs wrapped in smoked salmon recipe I’d espied in a Freedom Food pamphlet that came with this month's Fresh. He lined a ramekin with thinly sliced smoked salmon and then filled it with scrambled egg. The overhanging salmon is tucked over the scrambled egg and turned upside-down to make a perfect parcel.

I lined little bun tins with almost transparent smoked salmon slices and then spooned some unctuous and creamy scrambled egg heavily studded with chives into the indentations. I inverted the resultant little salmony discs and placed on ceramic spoons. They were very good also, another winner!

For my final savoury bite I decided to get some good quality lean minced steak and make oozy cheesy meatballs. I tried to get some Tallegio but failed so cubes of Cheddar was enveloped in the mince mixed with black pepper and thyme. I pan fried these until deliciously seared all over and popped them on my lovely new little canapé spoons. These were very fine as well, I am now definitely a huge fan of one delicious ingredient hidden inside another. Fabulous!

The necessary drink proved the usual per monthly challenge, a thought of Coke Float wafted into my mind but I dismissed it and decided instead that my interpretation would mean plump fresh raspberries would be frozen in Evian (to ensure the resultant ice cubes stayed as clear as possible) and then the fruity cubes were plopped into a tall glass of 7up. As the cubes melted the bubbles got captured inside the raspberries and made a fizzy little dessert.

I look forward to seeing what hidden savouries Stephanie's other guests bring.

Culinary twins separated at birth

Blogging by mail - This week I have been eagerly awaiting my parcel from the latest edition of this event. An event organised by the wonderful Stephanie of Dispensing Happiness as she pairs food bloggers from around the world and you have to send a mystery parcel to your hand-picked fellow food blogger according to a chosen theme. And this time the theme was "some of my favourite things". I was matched with the fabulous Breadchick of Sour Dough as my receiver and as yet I don't know who my sender is. It is ever so exciting!
I really enjoyed reading Breadchick's blog, learning about her, her life, her tastes and her cat and deciding what would be appropriate. And it seems that after braving the post office (known as not being one of my favourite places!) my parcel flew over the pond to turn up at Breadchick's office whilst I was on holiday. And it seems she really likes the gifts I'd chosen, and I may have found my culinary twin. And I am so very pleased as they are some of my favourite things so I wanted her to be as happy with them as I was. And I am also delighted that she took photos as I didn't have time amongst all that packing and wrapping extensively with lashings of brown tape to take any photographs myself. And I am extra pleased as the last two times I've sent my blogging by mail parcels the last recipients haven't been so enthusiastic. Though fair play, Kate of Veggie Friendly fame had massive computer issues around the time my parcel arrived so that had to be sorted out first, but at least she expressed her delight about it later when the annoying laptop issues were resolved. Flavor Junkie never posted anything about my surprise parcel which was a shame as I was pleased with my choices and I'd sneakily taken these treats over to the US when I was last there on business (and of course a quick pop to Gordon Ramsay at London) and N's lovely husband A kindly braved a US post office on my behalf to ensure it got to her without unnecessary custom's intervention. And no, there were no banned substances in there, it was just much easier to do it that way!
However my parcel to Breadchick was substantially larger that Flavor Junkie's so carrying it on a hand luggage wouldn't have worked this time! And who knows the cheese knife may have been considered an offensive weapon, though what injury one could inflict with a Stilton scoop is anyone's guess! Hmmm, I think that sounds like an old Monty Python routine!

So I have a new culinary twin and a fabulous new blog to peruse. And I guess that's what the entire event is about. Now come on postman, I am waiting!

Minty fresh!

I seem to like giving myself challenges! I'd known about Stephanie's monthly blog party theme of mint for a while before going on holiday. But then there was all that work and all that socialising (read eating!) and all that getting ready to go on holiday to do. And then I came back and I had to ever so quickly whip some canapés up to get my minty fresh contributions under the wire before the blog party deadline. But oh I am so tired, I'd say jet-lag but I haven't been on a plane , I've been on a cruiseship so it must be boat-lag. I'm not sure there is such a thing but there must be some explanation. Maybe I am missing my morning omelette off Oscar, maybe the lack of daily itinary has left a void in my life (ah but then I have a full diary - though admittedly none of my appointments now involve vegetable or ice carving!), or maybe I got off the boat too quickly and have some bizarre boat bends? Whatever it is I probably should be sleeping and not thinking about mint but I won't give in and mint it is!
Firstly I'm not crazy about mint except inside an After Eight or in a Polo or in mint chocolate chip ice cream but Stephanie has set a challenge and I'm all out of mint coloured crockery so I will embrace a little mint for the event.
In a very timely fashion there was a recipe for crab and broad bean crostini in the latest Waitrose Seasons magazine and as the recipe contained mint, it seemed a good place to start. Though the mint doesn't seem a very strong feature, there is still a minty appearance. And there's no denying that crab is almost always a good place to start!

Crab and Broad Bean Crostini

1 pain au levain or another loaf of a similar size
375g broad beans (podded weight)
1 clove garlic, crushed
20g pack fresh mint or parsley, chopped
Juice of ½ lemon, plus extra for serving
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
200g fresh white crab meat

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C, gas mark 6. Cut the bread into 12 slices, about 1.5cm thick. Put these on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for 7 minutes, then turn them over and cook for a further 5-6 minutes, until toasted but not hard.
2. Meanwhile, cook the broad beans in a pan of boiling water for 3-4 minutes, until tender, then drain and rinse in cold water. It might seem like a hassle, but it’s better to slip the skins off, leaving just the bright green beans. Do this when they’re cool enough to handle
3. Place the beans in a bowl with the garlic, your chosen herb, the lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil and seasoning. Mix together, then mash some of the beans with a fork so you end up with a mixture that has whole and crushed beans in it.
4. Spread the mixture generously on to each piece of toasted bread, then top with the crab meat. Squeeze lemon juice and grind black pepper over them, drizzle with more olive oil and serve.

And they were quite nice; however they would have been better if I'd used plain extra virgin olive oil instead of my favourite extrapesto basil extra virgin olive oil. Which as it sits on my worktop can be a little too easy to grab sometimes when basil is really an ingredient too much. Accordingly I suspect there's a reason that generally basil and mint aren't used in the same recipe.
Also this was my first attempt at podding broad beans, I rather liked it but don't think I'd like to do baskets of them.
Next it was a typical pea and mint soup, though still not being too enamoured with mint in a savoury environment, I was quite light on the mint. And surprisingly I didn't feel like getting some green crockery for the event, though I am aware that the M&S pink Andante range I have already has some green cousins - I resisted! So all the minty green offerings were enhanced by my new favourite Gordon Ramsay Royal Doulton range including the soup, as it gives me the fine opportunity to christen my espresso cups for the first time.
For a little sweeter canapé, one that was much more in line with my mint tendencies I went for balls of mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiched between small squares of mint chocolate thins. Very delicious, albeit a tad messy!
And then there's the drink. Now mint does make that much easier this month as I could have gone for mint tea (though frankly I'm not a fan) or a mint julep. But instead I returned to an old stalwart, a PIMM'S. Though this time with a twist. I had spotted these iced lemon wedges on Ocado last month; they come with mint and cucumber for that whole PIMM'S experience. Many places forget to add mint to their PIMM'S and it does really enhance it. In fact in my new efforts to accept mint more, I should really insist upon it.
A hint of mint anyone?

All white on the night

And yet again I've left it to the last minute to cook and blog my canapés for the latest blog party. When Stephanie said that this month’s party could be the last I gasped, what am I ever going to do with my expanding collection of little forks and cocktail sticks? Well I guess I just need to make more party nibbles. I am fairly positive that M would happily live off a pure canapé diet as she really only likes little tastes of everything so maybe I'll have to do the same. And then Stephanie also said that the theme was of our own choosing. This seemed a good idea at first but then I just couldn’t decide. Should I go for a regional theme? Or maybe something inspired by my exhaustive and dare I say teetering crockery collection? Perhaps I could be inspired by Stephanie’s Blogging by Mail theme ‘Some of my favourite things’? In fact I started with that idea but it was all getting a little wayward. In the end I decided that as one of my favourite themes from a previous month was black & white, I would go even more minimalist and have all white.

Okay now I’ve decided on the theme I just needed to formulate the menu. My mind lurched in that gastronomic butterfly way from cauliflower risotto to potato soup, to scallops; white chocolate ice cream (which was a discovery when I did the black & white party), white truffles and quail eggs. And because I was so indecisive I ended up with too many ideas and then too little time to put it all together. But dismissing some of the more unseasonable options I ended up with a four course (nearly five courses until I realised that I was just overreaching myself again) canapé meal. I can guess what you’re saying; I just don’t know when to stop!

So for the amuse gueule of this white feast I opted for the unusual option of Pizza Bianco. And being incredibly pushed for time I chose not to make my own pizza base and bizarrely decided to adapt some supremely fluffy part-cooked garlic bread by covering it in the thinnest rounds of sliced mozzarella. I guess it was similar to a pizza bianco if you are rather partial to garlic! The resultant cheesy garlic bread was cut into one to two bite squares and of course placed on a white plate. Despite M thinking that you wouldn’t be able to see the white food on a white plate, but of course none of the food appears entirely white in the photographs.

Next it was the fish course. The scallops were an obvious choice, I never miss an opportunity to use scallops, and these were exceptionally lovely, and I forgave their ‘not with the theme’ caramelised tingeing as it tastes too good. And don’t they fine impaled by my new glass and white pearl cocktail sticks? I’d been pondering using for them and the day has come! I have inadvertently acquired quite a few sets of cocktail sticks, all due to eBay, since joining in this monthly fun. At least they don’t take up as much space as the plates do!

To accompany the scallops I thought a little nibble of fish pie on a spoon would be both white and tasty. I used some un-dyed smoked haddock (not that I wouldn’t have done even if I wasn’t going all pale and interesting tonight). I kept the sauce fairly cheese sparse and mustard free to preserve the lightness, and wasn’t too liberal with the butter in the mash potato for the same reason. A fish pie works in any quantity and bite-sized morsels works very well nestled in the white spoons.

For the meat course I pondered poached chicken but after a peculiar conversation with the multi-brothered J about the horrible things his staff used to inflict on mountains of poached chicken breasts in a previous life whilst running some sort of hostelry, I decided to rethink. Poached chicken can look so incredibly flaccid, so I opted to roast the chicken breasts instead and then tear it into chunks to stab with the pearly cocktail sticks again. And as someone in this family should eat vegetables, I sliced some white of leeks and sautéed with some double creamy, well would one of my meals be really complete without creamy leeks?

Dessert was alternating white china egg spoons either loaded with cold creamy vanilla risotto and even colder Waitrose white chocolate ice cream. Both very nice indeed!

I had my usual quandaries regarding the obligatory drink to serve alongside the burgeoning plates of tasty morsels so I just plumped for a martini glass of milk, well a girl got to use a little style! I even thought I'd try some, I used to happy guzzle a glass for breakfast before school each day and I'd also much less happily drink the mandatory little warm bottle at school later the same day. My main problem is that I can't bear milk if it tastes creamy and this was full fat milk for my fish pie béchamel and the mash and it was horrible, well to my taste anyway. I shouldn't have been surprised. I haven't drunk milk for maybe twenty years and I don't even like creamy cocktails. I liked the crystal cocktail glass though.

Even today I came across an interesting recipe in Lyndsey Bareham's new Dinners in a Dash book for white gazpacho soup, with garlic, lashings of white bread, white grapes and white wine vinegar. I ambitiously bought the bread on the way home but unfortunately ended up being overwhelmed with work deadlines, blog party deadlines and too much Patrick Dempsey. Can you have too much Patrick Dempsey? And the bread is supposed to be a day old anyway. So the white gazpacho will have to live for another day.

I think I've probably gathered enough gorgeous little white things for one pale party anyway. Cheers!

And to check out what everyone else brought to the party...

To boldly eat...

I’m already running late for this month’s blog party, I’ve had a crazy busy work week and yet again I’d forgotten to get the components for a suitable themed drink, always the most tricky part of the challenge for me each month.

When Stephanie came up with the theme for the blog party of Sci-Fi I think she thought I'd be as thwarted with the crockery decisions as I had been for the Wild West event but little didn't she know that I'd recently procured some little vintage black polka dot plates and rather spookily some silver sputnik shaped knife rests from fine emporium of eBay and been looking for an opportunity to premier them so I don't thwart that easily!
And as for food, I guess I need plenty of star shaped food and then place my spotty plates on a star strewn tablecloth.
So my first thought for my foray to the dark side of the moon was tiny pointy crab sandwiches, I was thinking of Cancer the crab as being a suitably starry theme but ran out of similar star sign food tie-ups unless you can stretch the analogy of the smoked salmon and cream cheese topped toast stars being 'Pisces'! But oh what to do for Virgo? I can vouch for the extreme difficulty of cutting out star-shaped toast bites with the star cutter, preserving all the five points was troublesome, however I got there in the end.

I then started thinking a little esoterically; what sort of food and Sci-Fi tie-in could I conjure up? And then it came to me in a kind of dream, I remembered the Devil’s Tower inspired mash potato sculpture from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Perhaps I could recreate my own miniature mashed potato mountain with some little forks to mine little mouthfuls. And I think it turned out quite well, I didn’t start seeing beaming lights through the window or hearing doo, doo doo, do, doooo and mash potatoes is obviously always a good thing in my mind. I am going to gloss over the fact that I may occasionally dream about mash potato, maybe I need to get myself to Joel Robuchon's L'Atelier!

I had this idea for the last plate of nibbles to be some Parma ham and brie moon shaped croissants. And they were delicious but they weren’t the beautiful moon shaped as I’d envisaged, I think I shrunk them down a little too much and they completely unfurled whilst they were baking and I ended up with puffed triangles with tongues of rosy Parma ham sticking out. Not gorgeous, though tasty but they weren’t good enough for my blog bites. At the same time I baked some puff pastry Parmesan stars which didn’t do anything untoward in the oven and no-one ever going to reject a cheesy bite.

To compensate for my lack of croissant moons, I cut out some toast moons (yes, I do have a moon shaped cutter as well as a constellation of different sized stars) and top these off to make tuna pâté toasted moons.

And for a sweet finale I’d been pondering the rather tasteless rice paper flying saucers or tongue tingling fizzing space dust but I could only find them on retro websites and I left it too late to order any. So I visited a few places that sold pick’n’mix to see if anything inspired me but no green jelly Martians, candy rockets or sugared spaceships. But over on the confectionery counter there are a couple of suitably spacey chocolaty things that could be deployed – maybe a Mars bar or a Milky Way, but then I spotted a new sweetmeat – Mars “Planets”, hmm that might do the trick. They are kind of a deconstructed Mars bar spilt into different sized spheres. One has a soft fluffy centre, one the caramel and one was crispy – I haven’t had a Mars bar for many years but I don’t recall a crispy bit. The chocolaty spheres reminded me of a dessert we’d been offered years ago where our French chef had suggested a dish of ‘ice cream with balls’, the balls turned out to be Maltesers but he didn’t know the word Maltesers. So this is my spacier take of the ice cream with balls.

And for the drink/cocktail, the part I always struggle with – I tried to think of a spacey cocktail and thinking of the Red Bull strap line “Red Bull gives you wings”, I thought a drink that makes you believe you can fly would make a perfect finish. A Chambord Energiser has Chambord, raspberry vodka and Red Bull. I didn’t have any raspberry vodka so I made it slightly more virginal (ooh have I squeezed a Virgo reference in there?) with a good slug of Chambord, sugar free Red Bull (okay I may be clipping my wings slightly here but Red Bull does give you a massive sugar high, hence the flying I guess) and loads of frozen raspberries. I couldn’t find any suitably astro-themed cocktail stirrers so went for a favourite black sparkly brooch attached to a chopstick. Out of this world!

Sorry I was so tardy Stephanie, I’ve emerged from the black hole that was this week and I’m here and I’m feeling all kind of ready to boldly go where no blog has gone before.