Category Archives: Food

Duckflower Salad

December 2, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Prologue

All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!

Ducks’ tails, drakes’ tails,
Yellow feet a-quiver,
Yellow bills all out of sight
Busy in the river!

Wind In the Willows, Ratty’s “Ducks’ Ditty”… Actually, it brings Tom Bombadil into the fore of my mind, there’s a parallel I’ve not considered before; Tom and Ratty… Hmm, very literary, very picturesque, now let’s shoot a few of the damn ducks and get on with the show.

In actual fact the duck I’ve used in this recipe is neither wild or shot. Duck isn’t all that uncommon and in the UK you can find it in many supermarkets, even Tesco, and most butchers. Duck farming is smaller business than chickens, but is big enough that there are intensive duck rearers — poor ducks that never see the sky, let alone any kind of pond. If you’re going to buy duck please try and stick to “free range”, especially if also “organic” (nothing more unappetising than a silicon duck!).

For this recipe I found a nice looking pair of breast fillets at a local butcher. Large, fatty, luxurious breasts. On first sight of a duck breast fillet the you’re likely to note that it looks like there’s more fat than meat, and by volume there sometimes is! Don’t worry though, the breasts will transform into meaty nuggets once cooked and the layer of fat all but vanish (into a puddle in the pan). Compare the photo of the raw breasts to the one of the cooked one and you’ll get the idea.

Ingredients

Duck

2 x 200g Duck Breast Fillets
10g Chestnut Honey[1] (or other honey)
10g good thick Balsamic Vinegar
1tsp fresh ground Black Pepper
2 cloves (6g) Garlic
100ml dry Red Wine

Dressing

Reduced marinade (see below)
10g (~1 tbsp) Extra Virgin Olive Oil
10g (~1 tbsp) dry Red Wine

Salad

2 small (~100g each) lettuce, like “baby Cos”
100g Red Radishes
100g Cherry Tomatoes

Method

We start by marinating the breasts, at least an hour before cooking by preference. In my case about 6 hours, longer shouldn’t hurt (for example: start them marinating before you go to work in the morning so you can cook as soon as you get back).

Crush the garlic cloves into a bowl big enough to hold the duck. Add the chestnut honey[1], vinegar, wine and pepper and ensure the marinade is well blended. Slice into the fat-side of the fillets, about 6 slashes stopping short of slicing into the meat. Plonk the duck breasts into the marinade fat-side-up, cover, and into the fridge with the lot. Ideally you should flip the breasts every 1.5 to 2 hours, but this can be skipped.

Later…

Remove breast fillets from the marinade and pat dry with paper towels. Set marinade aside for later.

Pull out your heavy cast-iron pan, in my case a nice heavy square grill-pan, and very lightly oil the surface with a peanut or canola oil (for the high smoke-point). The oil is just to gauge the pan temperature, the duck will provide loads of fat of it’s own. Now put your pan on a high flame and heat until the oil just starts to smoke, at this point drop the temperature of the flame about 30%. In goes the duck! Quaaaaaacccck! Fat side-down for 5 minutes. Beware, it’ll hiss, spit, and smoke like anything. This is all normal, if it isn’t making a mess of your kitchen your pan isn’t hot enough.

While the duck gets it’s 5 minute sizzle you can separate the lettuce leaves. (If you need to wash your lettuce you should have done this earlier and washed the leaves so they can drain, soaking leaves make a mess of salad.) There’s no hurry though, the duck will need some resting and cooling time. Don’t rush yourself. Clean and slice the radishes, and quarter the baby tomatoes. The salad ingredient’s can be whatever you like. I think some avocado and blanched snow peas (mangetouts) would go very well with the duck.

With 5 minutes passed flip the duck over and give two minutes on the meaty side. Done! Set the fillets aside on a plate somewhere out of the way.

Turn off the heat and pour the fat off the pan (to be discarded), be careful. Give the pan a couple of minutes to cool then dump in the marinade. Hiss! Give the pan a good scrape and then put the liquid back on the heat bubbling vigorously until it’s reduced to about 10% of the original volume (see photo right). In my case I poured and scraped the liquid out of the pan into a small saucepan. Reducing a sauce in a grill-pan is a path to much difficulty.

Strain the reduced liquid into a small pouring jug, helping it through a fine strainer with the back of a spoon, this gets rid of lumps of garlic and any errant chunks of crispy duck skin. Add the extra dash of red wine and the EVOO and mix it up a bit.

Now lay out the lettuce, tomatoes, and radish in a couple of shallow bowls (see left). At this time the duck should have had about 10 minutes to rest since coming out of the pan, if not then pour yourself a bit of wine to make up the time. Notice that the fat layer has reduced to a thin and crispy veneer, you’ll have poured away the majority of it’s volume from the pan. Now, you might want to remove the skin layer at this point, it’ll pull away easily, but note that it’s beautifully tasty! Get your sharpest knife and cut each fillet, across the grain, into slices no more than 5mm thick.

Arrange the duck slices on top of each salad in a double-circle, forming the titular “flower”. Give the dressing a good stir and drizzle over the salads. Add a couple of grinds of pepper.

Quack! With some wine!

Nutrition

Using non-mainstream meats is always a bit of a conundrum when it comes to calculating the nutritional profile of a meal. Duck is isn’t too bad on this front but free-range ducks can vary a fair bit from one critter to another and tend to be much leaner than intensively reared quackers, wild ducks even more so. With this in mind note that the calculated nutritional information will be even more “approximate” than usual (OK, there aren’t typically grades of approximation, in truth I should say “less accurate”).

Thing	Value
Energy	432 kcal
Carbohydrate	17.5g
Protein	42.1g
Fat	23.1g
Saturated	5.4g
Dietry Fibre	3.5g

Epilogue

A very enjoyable meal, light and tasty. The duck was a little on the sinewey side but had excellent flavour. Next time I’ll try it with an Asian twist, some ginger, coriander, soy, and normal honey in the marinade. The salad would have worked better with some avocado, can’t go wrong with avo.

[1] Chestnut honey? I bought a jar of this a while back and the flavour is far too strong and bitter to use on porridge (our usual use for honey), you could even say the flavour is gamey. So this honey is only used for the occasional marinade where I think the flavour is going to work. In this case it worked really well I think! The recipe should be fine with normal honey though, but the flavour will certainly not be the same.

Cooking

Roast Wood Pigeon with Braised Vegetables

December 1, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Prologue

I’ve decided to try cooking game with greater variance and frequency. My motivation stems from The River Cottage Meat Book and was recently reinforced by the surprising range of game available at a new local supermarket. To-date my game cooking experience has been rather limited, just venison and rabbit. The former possibly farmed, the latter certainly farmed (so the link to “game” is tenuous at best). If you’re unfamillar with game then the Hugh book is a great start, but game is just a small part of it’s coverage and I can recommend Clarissa Dickson Wright’s (one of the “Two Fat Ladies“) & Johnny Scott’s “The Game Cookbook” as an alternative starting point that is also a great read.

I fear that the supermarket-with-game situation will be short lived due to a lack of demand, will enough locals buy game? Anyway, Waitrose is not the be-all-and-end-all of game, far from it! While the High Street butcher showed little promise on the game front (admittedly I’ve only tried asking for rabbit, in which case all they had to offer was farmed rabbit from China!) I recently found out about a different butcher nearby that ticks all the right boxes, I picked up some tasty duck breast there on Thursday and went back today for a couple of wild rabbits. Wabbit stoo tomorrow!

So, on Tuesday I decided to give a bird, or two, a whirl. I trundled over the tracks to the supermarket intending to get a couple of partridges. Alas, there were none! Luckily there was Wood Pigeon, the other birds available were far too large for one each (pheasant, mallard, goose!). Don’t fear, Wood Pigeons are not the same thing as the greasy rats-of-the-sky very familiar in Sydney (and London). I think that city-pigeons might be Rock Dove’s (Columba livia) or maybe just some sort of mongrel, Wood Pigeons (Columba palumbus) are related though.

Let us get on with the recipe.

Ingredients

2 Wood Pigeons (~280g each, marked on packet as 250g)
6 rashers of Streaky Bacon (120g)
1 small Zucchini (90g after tidying & chopping)
1 medium Onion (200g after tidying & chopping)
12 White Mushrooms (410g after tidying & chopping)
1 tbsp Maple Syrup (10g)
150ml Dry Red Wine
2 cloves of Garlic
6 Juniper Berries
1 heaped tsp of dried Oregano
2 tsp fresh ground Black Pepper
2 tbsp Spiced Mead, or Port, or Sherry
Salt

Method

Determining the right baking parameters for the birdies was a little difficult. The packaging recommended 40 minutes at 160 degrees, while Hugh’s Meat Book suggests up to 25 minutes at 230 degrees. I stuck to the latter, since the Meat Book is well on it’s way to becoming my preferred deity. If anything I think that critters of this size could have done better with 20 minutes rather than 25 (25 was the upper threshold for a “large” pigeon, but I don’t know what “large” is for a pigeon!). So, first step, preheat oven to 230 degrees.

Next heat the spiced mead, just bung it in a teacup and microwave it. Crush and halve the garlic cloves, crush the juniper berries, and throw both into the heated mead along with a teaspoon of pepper and a couple of grinds of salt.

Now prepare the vegetables. Trim mushroom stems, if necessary, and slice. Top and tail zucchini, halve lengthwise, and slice. Halve, top, and tail the onion and slice. (Photo right.)

Rub the birds with some olive oil, not dripping with oil, just glistening. Now place them breast-up in a roasting pan and get out the bacon. The bacon is to be wrapped over the breast of the bird, the idea is to provide a steady stream of fat to reduce moisture loss, this is known as barding. No special technique is required, the image on the left shows the barded birds. With this done spoon the mead mixture, which should have been sitting for at least 5 minutes, into the cavities of the bird sharing out the garlic and berries evenly. Whack it in the oven! Make a note of the time, they’ll be ready in 25 minutes.

Use a large heavy based pan to deal with the veggies. Add a tablespoon of light olive oil and get it nice and hot, the oil should shimmer and run like water but not be smoking. Toss in the veggies! Keep tossing them around and let them brown a little. After about 5 minutes of this push the temperature right down and add the wine, maple syrup, remaining pepper, and about 50ml of water (or stock if you have some handy). Put a lid on the pan and let it lightly sizzle for about 10 minutes, stirring on occasion. Turn off the heat and have a quick peek at your birds to make sure nothing untoward has happened.

If there’s some time remaining for the birds pour some wine and marinate the
cook.

Remove birds from the oven, turn it off and place a couple of plates in it to warm. Get a medium flame going under the vegetables again, and then continue self-marination for 5 minutes. Remove birds to a temporary holding dish (probably best to have warmed this in the oven too) and pour juices from the pan into the vegetable pan, add about 50ml of water to the pan scrape, swirl, and tip into vegetables. Now push the vegetables to high heat and boil away liquid until vegetable mix resembles that shown in the photo to the right, there should be very little liquid remaining. Grab the hot pates from the oven (careful!) and divide vegetable mixture between them. Place birds on top of vegetables, add a couple of grinds of pepper, serve! Simple!

Nutrition

This is a hard sort of meal to deal with on the Nutrition front, mostly thanks to the pigeon. The Waitrose nutritional information was for “when prepared as directed”, but this would involve weighing the beasts after baking them and didn’t specify whether the weight should include bones or not! I took a punt at it by calculating the raw consumed weight as the raw weight minus the leftover carcass parts after eating (approximating a total of 200g). I had little luck finding nutritional stats for raw wood pigeon so I used stats for “Pheasant, raw, meat and skin” from the USDA database.

So, clearly the information here must be regarded as little more than a rough approximation! Here’s goes:

Thing	Value
Energy	672 kcal
Carbohydrate	19.4g
Protein	61.0g
Fat	38.5g
Saturated	5.5g
Dietry Fibre	3.7g

Epilogue

We found the pigeons to be mild in flavour and maybe a little dry, but the wet vegetable mixture covered for any dryness in the meat. Next time I’d probably give them 5 minutes less time in the oven. That said, the sky-rats are certainly to be repeated!

Produce

Waitrose

November 25, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Waitrose, a supermarket, yes, most exciting. Why? Well a Waitrose just moved to Rickmansworth and is now our closest supermarket. Previously Ricky had the choice of just a medium sized Tesco and a small sized Marks & Spencer (and “Iceland”, if you count a frozen-goods store as a supermarket). We became Tesco shoppers, since the local M&S’s stock range is too limited to be of much use. M&S became the useful “cold meat and cheese stop” as it is only about 3 minutes away, while Tesco, a 10 minute walk, did for our weekly shopping.

Here in the UK supermarkets seem to have a class structure. Tesco is pretty much right in the middle, while M&S and Sainsbury’s position themselves as pretty classy. At the bottom of the class ladder are Morrisons and Aldi, while, at the top, Waitrose seems to lord it over the rest. So now Ricky has a high-class supermarket, if such a thing can exist (real class is not having to care about the shopping, let alone how or where it is done). This is all rather different from the situation back home in Australia where, generally, a supermarket is a supermarket with either Coles and Woolies being it, though there is a light sprinkling of “budget” chains like BiLo mostly to be found in less metropolitan areas (all owned by Coles or Woolies anyway).

It seems that Waitrose is now going to be our supermarket of choice, we’re just so bloody classy. Not only is it just across the train tracks from us (a one minute stroll aided by an overpass) but it also has brilliant variety! Though smaller than the Tesco-extra in Watford, which we had to stop shopping at when we dumped the car, it still seems to kill it on variety. One prime example is game meats, today we tallied up farmed venison, duck, and goose; plus game birds of pheasant, partridge, wood pigeon, and mallard! At a supermarket. They have a good range of “fresh” seafood, some good beers (including some of the St Peter’s range, though not any of our favourites), and more “foreign muck” than you can point a stick at. The only department they fail in a little is wholefoods, but they’re at least as good at the local Tesco on that front.

The vegies and general meats look decent too but I’ll stick to the little high street Chris Blake Butchers (chain) and Mark’s Fruits for these needs. So long as they can provide what I want I prefer to stick to the small guys, I’ll leave Waitrose for the occasional exotic ingredient.

The sudden existence of this new supermarket has me pondering local retail economics. How will this affect the Tesco and M&S? I assume the Tesco will suffer a decent drop in revenue as it was formerly the only resonable general supermarket in town. At the same time, I don’t think it’ll be as much as one might expect. While Waitrose was packed last Sunday this Sunday it was really rather quiet, I think a lot of people looked around and saw the same old stuff they get at Tesco and a whole load of stuff they don’t care about. Waitrose prices tend to be a little higher than Tesco prices, though I think the goods are a bit better in many cases, and people set a lot of importance in differences even as low as 5 quid per week. I think Waitrose is in a convenient position, but I live right in the middle of town and don’t have a car, anyone who drives isn’t going to care either way. The M&S could suffer quite a lot, I think it previously only really had any point due to it’s central location. Having a new “classy” supermarket nearby that is 5 times the size might be bad for it. I’d expect to find that many of the customers attracted to Waitrose will actually come from a local pool of people who drive to Watford for their groceries (as we did when we had a car), thus not having so great an impact on the local stores.

I do fear for the small High Street veggie shop and butcher though. Waitrose easily outdoes them on range, maybe on price. Like I said, I’ll stick to the little shops (everything’s a one minute walk away) but for many the convenience of the supermarket may overrule.

As for Waitrose, my fear is that very few locals will be interested in the items they stock that excite me. If nobody buys game birds they’ll stop stocking them and stock more bacon or something instead. Yay. Time will tell, I think Waitrose stock variety will be an interesting observational study (what kind of nerd am I?).

Enough of this dullardry! It’s just a bloody supermarket. (With game birds!)

Produce

Regulated Up The Backside And Back Again

November 23, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I come from a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, where unpasteurised cheeses and charcuterie (salamis, etc) were made illegal to “protect people”. Want to move to Australia? Remember to say your fond farewell’s to the likes of Roquefort! Australian Camembert is to a good French unpasteurised version as chewing a candle is to a bite of good vintage cheddar.

In essence, moving to the UK has been a real experience when it comes to unpasteurised meat and dairy products! If I was to move back to “The Antipodes”, as some Poms inaccurately label my homeland, I’d have to a) first learn charcuterie and cheese making, and b) move to a farm. (Actually, this sounds like my dream life! The problem with dreams is always the practicalities.)

This is all a digression leading up to the main point: tonight I found this article.

A sad story of proposed EU guidelines that may make life very difficult for some, requiring restaurants to place detailed ingredient lists on their menus (frankly, beyond the important bits, I just don’t need to know) and probably mostly kill random preserves at markets. It just isn’t necessary, if you’re allergic to something stay away from unlabelled foods. It’s like some the fabled idiot with an acute sesame allergy who goes to a thai restaurant and dies. Don’t punish the restaurant, this is natural selection at work! How it is that governments form these nanny-state rules that most individuals would think are ridiculous?

I hope the current exemptions hold. I hope, dearly, not to see the UK or EU adopt rules that subtract a little joy from the lives of many for the sake of a very small minority. If anything is to be done I’d propose sticking great big warning labels to food with slogans like: “Unpasteurised Food May Harm You”, “This Cheese Could KILL YOUR BABY”, “Unlabelled Food May Be POISION”. It’s how they handle the cigarettes. Seriously, if buying cigarettes and alcohol can be legal then why not a bloody unpasteurised cheese?

C’mon EU, what the bloody hell are ya?

Ristretto

The Coffee House on Watford High Street

November 10, 2007 Yvan 2 Comments

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Coffee House: The Coffee House
Address: The Parade, High Street , Watford, WD17 1LQ (inside the Presence gift shop)
Rating: Between New Orleans and Bathers’, tending to the former on good days (Sydney-Coffee Rating System)
Map

When we first spotted The Coffee House in Watford we puzzled over whether or not it was part of a chain. It seems that it is not; but, just like Cinnamon Square in Ricky, a lot of effort has been put into the finishings, so much so that it seems like a franchise kit. Chain or not, they do a pretty good attempt at an espresso.

The Coffee House came into existence some time after we moved to Rickmansworth and is a welcome addition to Watford’s[1] retail centre. Previously the best we could do for espresso was dreary old Starbucks, yeah, that bad. There are a few small coffee shops around the town centre, I doubt we’ve tried all of them but the ones that we’ve tried (the more inviting ones) have all been a disappointment (i.e. Starbucks beats the lot).

"The Coffee House" branded demitasse. — “The Coffee House” branded demitasse.

So what’s distinctive about The Coffee House? Well, first of all, you can easily miss the place — out the front there’s a small cluster of chairs with in a branded enclosure that doesn’t look associated with any nearby café, a very small sign, and a chalked swing-board. What makes the place really easy to miss is that the entire shop-front is one of those kitschy gift shops and The Coffee House is tucked away up the back of the shop. Other distinctive features include: plenty of comfy leather sofas, free wireless, fresh roast coffee (relatively), and their self-description as Watford’s finest coffee bar.

Crema? Like light cloud cover. — Coffee House coffee

What about the espresso? Welllll… it isn’t close to excellent, and isn’t worth travelling to Watford for. That aside, it is easily the finest espresso we’ve found in Watford over the last 18 months. On the Sydney scale it certainly betters Bathers’ (i.e. it’s much better than typical Sydney restaurant coffee, which is not to be mistaken for the swill English restaurants call coffee) but isn’t quite up to the New Orleans Cafe standard. Crema is often very light and short-lived, but the wide demitasse and typical over-volume of water is probably more responsible for this than anything else. On the flavour side, they seem to use a well balanced blend and they claim that it’s recently roasted (on November 10th they had a sign up to say the coffee was roasted on November 5th, maybe getting old by Toby’s standards but certainly far from long in the tooth). I think there’s a lot of potential to be unleashed here, if I was there more regularly than fortnightly I might work up the motivation to have a chat about pseudo-ristretto.

In conclusion: Watford’s not all bad, there’s a place to hide on a comfy sofa, with free wireless and rather decent espresso. The espresso isn’t free! But no worries at 155p for a double[2]. If you’re in Watford town centre and you feel the urge for some short black indulgence you probably can’t do better than The Coffee Bar.

[1] Watford is the closest major shopping-town to Rickmansworth, where we live. The one advantage of the Metro line always being “maintained” during weekends is the free bus trips to the not-very-conveniently-located Watford tube station. If it wasn’t for the frequent free transport we’d probably go to somewhere only a single tube trip away, like Harrow, Finchley, or London proper.

[2] Ever noticed that as the espresso gets better the price goes down? 1.85 quid here, 1.70 at Cinnamon Square, 1.20 at The Coffee Plant, and 1.00 at Monmouth … curious. As far as I can recall a similar pattern exists in Sydney.
Well, given the correction on the price below this pattern doesn’t seem to hold. That said, since a couple of people left Cinnamon Square the coffee wasn’t as good anyway, so maybe it balances out. Of course, for the inner London places economies of scale must play a part too.

Produce

Beer and Cheese

May 6, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Well, it’s happening — through time I’m finding things in the UK that fill in some of the gaps left from Sydney. One of these gaps is beer; cheese isn’t one, England thrashes Australia on the cheese front (I guess we have to give them a chance somewhere). This Saturday we did one of our trips into Borough Market and discovered some great beer while picking up some excellent cheese.

B33R

After our, now traditional, “three posh bangers in a roll” from the Stoney Street Café we noted the “porter” in “Wright Brothers Oyster & Porter House” for the first time. We had three great beers (two porters, one stout), at a slightly hefty price tag of 5-6 quid per 500ml bottle! Next time we’ll have to try some of the oysters and maybe the deep fried squid. There was a stand next to us, out the front of the premises, where a guy shucked oysters and generated mouth watering aromas by deep-frying squid for passers-by.

With porter on my mind (and in my belly) we wandered into the Utobeer stall in the market. Amongst their excellent range of beer was one of the porters we’d just had, along with as everything from stubbies of VB (hrm) to Chimay Bleu (mmm). We left with a small sample of beers to try, a bottle of the St Peter’s Old Style Porter we’d just had along with it’s Honey Porter and Cream Stout brethren (the oval bottles they use are very distinctive) and an Okell’s Aile Smoked Celtic Porter (because it sounded interesting). The over-the-counter prices for these beers is a rather more palatable ~2.50 each.

The St Peter’s beers, along with the nearby Brew Wharf are now on our “see, the English can make beer” tour of London. St. Peter’s also has a pub with their cask ales: the Jerusalem Tavern, in Clerkenwell (EC1). We’ll be checking it out soon!

Taking a quick detour; far out of London in Alyesbury, I’ve recently been led to Hop Pole (“Aylesbury’s permanent beer festival“). A pub with a great range of cask ales on tap, many from the local area. The Vale Pale Ale and the Grand Union Honey Porter are both excellent. Unfortunately this discovery comes near the end of the time I’ll be in Aylesbury regularly (after more than a year), a bit late! If you ever happen to be there and after a beer, the Hop Pole Inn is the place to go (it’s on Bicester Road, only about a 10 minute walk from the town centre).

CH33S3

Cheese is a different matter. The cheese situation here in the UK was clearly superior to that in Australia from the start. Even in Tesco (like Coles) you can get a great range of local and continental cheese. Sheep, buffalo, goat, even cow. Unpasteurised and pasteurised. Soft, hard, old, and mouldy. That’s just Tesco. My first unpasteurised Camembert was an education in it’s self, and after a year the lesson has only just begun.

As I’ve already covered, we get some great parmesan from Borough Market. As well as the parmesan people there are always many other stalls with great cheese; the luxurious, velvety Comté, the delicate and tasty Caerphilly (sold by authentic hairy Welsh gentlemen), the small stalls with 100s of different cheeses, and then there’s also the slicker Neal’s Yard shop on Park Street.

As well as our usual parmesan purchase we grabbed an exquisite unpasteurised Stilton from one of the stalls. Alas, I cannot remember it’s name, I can remember that it comes from Nottinghamshire (almost a “duh” is seems), can also be found at Neal’s Yard (but isn’t listed on their website), and tastes glorious. We just ate some of it with the St. Peter’s Cream Stout — one last thing to add: ner ner.

All the specialist cheese stalls (stalls which provide just one or two specific cheeses) have bits out for tasting, as does Neal’s Yard, so you don’t have to take my word on any of this. Get yourself to the market and eat cheese!

Cooking

Carrot & Tomato Soup with Basil & Tarragon

March 26, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Carrot and Tomato Soup with Basil and Tarragon: Output — Carrot and Tomato Soup with Basil and Tarragon

This easy soup is one for the tomato lovers. I’ve used tinned chopped tomato, but be very picky with tinned tomato and don’t just buy the cheapest. The tomatoes I use (Napolina brand) are 70% tomato by weight, in tomato juice with added citric acid (preservative) and that’s the entire ingredient list. It could be replaced with an equivalent weight of blanched and skinned Roma tomatoes and a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, but I’m after low-effort here.

Use fresh tarragon if you can get it (to taste, maybe 2 or 3 tbsp of packed chopped leaf), and add it with the basil. The last time I bought fresh tarragon from Tesco what I got was not tarragon, I’m 100% certain of this, it didn’t look like tarragon and it didn’t have even slightly the right flavour!

Hunting

Carrot and Tomato Soup with Basil and Tarragon: Input — Input

200g Brown Onion — peeled and diced
25g Unsalted Butter
400g Carrot — peeled, topped, and tailed
10g (small knob) Ginger — skin scraped off and thinly sliced
15g (4 cloves) Garlic — peeled and sliced
1 (10g) Chicken Stock Cube
1200g canned Chopped Tomatoes (in “Rich Tomato Juice”)
3tsp (heaped) Dried Tarragon
2tsp Black Pepper — fresh ground
100ml dry White Wine
25g fresh Basil — chopped

Killing

In a large pot melt the butter and start frying the onion, with the dried tarragon, sliced ginger, and black pepper.
Meanwhile peel/slice carrot as required and place in with softened onion (not browned!).
Toss carrot with onion then pour in wine and let simmer away.
Now add chopped tomato, stock cube melted in 500ml of hot water, and the sliced garlic.
Put on very low heat and let simmer until the carrot is granny-cooked (30 minutes should do), then remove from heat and let cool.
When cool enough that you could eat it without pain it’s time to emulsify!.
First fine-chop the basil and stir through the soup, then blend to a smooth consistency in whatever sized batches fit your emulsifier.

Serving

Heat to desired temperature and eat, or package and fridge/freeze. I’d serve
this with some fresh chopped basil, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a
dollop of natural yoghurt.

The serve to the right has all this except the basil, there’s a generous grinding of pepper on there though. The small serve (100g) of new potatoes adds a bit of extra fodder to this meal. They’re microwaved for 3 minutes, tossed in EVOO, pepper and a little salt and then browned under an overhead grill. The beer is Innis & Gunn — Oak Aged Beer. It’s taking a long time to find a decent variety of drinkable British beer and this is a new favourite — now if only the Poms sold decent beer by the case like we do in Australia!

Counting

A serving for me is around 300ml and this recipe makes 6 servings, but could probably make 8 if you prefer a less thick soup (add 1.2l of water instead of 500ml). Based on a serving being 1/6th of this recipe with a 2g drizzle of EVOO and a 20g dollop of natural yoghurt I’ve calculated this approximate nutritional information (thanks to gourmet, USDA and a few manual database entries). The essentials and highlights:

Thing	Value
Energy	142 Calories
Carbs	20g
Protein	5g
Fat	6g
Saturated	2g
Sodium	379mg
Dietry Fibre	4g
Calcium	153mg
Iron	2mg
Folate	35µg
Vitamin A	8598IU
Vitamin C	26mg

The potatoes and beer aren’t accounted for here. Around 70Cals for the spuds with 15g of carbs. Beer? That’s just getting daft.

Produce

New Zealand Wasabi

March 4, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Wasabi!

Not long ago, while trawling the web for wasabi, I found New Zealand Wasabi, and with little delay I put in an order. It’s not fresh wasabi unfortunately (which could be a bit of a shipping problem from NZ to the UK! Wasabi might even be a weapon of terror.) The story is that anything other than real, fresh wasabi is just not right — alas I have not had the pleasure of real wasabi’s company and it doesn’t seem overly eager to meet me.

NZ Wasabi goes a long way to bringing you the real thing: “It only contains one ingredient — Wasabia Japonica rhizome.“. I imagine it’d be possible to have fresh wasabi delivered too, but you’d need to come to some sort of commercial arrangement. Our humble buying power only allows access to the snorting-grade powdered goods. Judging from information on their website they’ve put a lot of effort into perfecting the growing conditions; so much so they have patented their growing system. It sounds like a great business they’ve got running there, I hope their success continues.

We eagerly awaited the arrival of our wasabi package, the fateful day came upon us and we were the proud recipients of three small jars (12g) and three medium cannisters (50g) of real wasabi powder. One hiccup did occur, the smaller jars were a bit old and the wasabi powder had a rather disturbing “bruised avocado” colour when mixed with water, while the powder from the larger containers produced a more appetising bright green colour. All is well though, the NZ Wasabi people immediately dispatched replacements along with some bonus chocolate! Not just real wasabi, also real customer service.

The wasabi is quite a different creature to the tubed horseradish “wasabi” we’re used to. The colour is much the same, as is the nature of the nose-tingling hotness. The flavour is significantly different, the horseradish “wasabi” tastes much like horseradish — the real wasabi tastes like, well, like wasabi I guess. On the matter of “ouch” the fake wasabi initially seemed to have significantly more bite, but we’re discovering that the potential bite of the rehydrated wasabi powder seems to increase with the level-of and time-since rehydration. The wetter and longer-rehydrated the hotter it gets. (Within reason! I’m talking thick paste for 30 minutes, we’re not laying down bottles of watery wasabi to age.)

I recommend giving this real wasabi a go if you’re keen to explore such things, with the buying power of the GBP against the NZD it doesn’t seem too horrific — our 186g of wasabi cost us 18GBP. That’s OK, considering that a 43g tube of very wet ~~wasabi~~ horseradish paste from Tesco costs 89p. I can’t guess exactly how much wasabi powder is used to make a gram of paste, but I think the cost delta wouldn’t be all that terrible with hydration taken into account. Based on our usage so far this supply will last us a good while. However at this price it’d be difficult to consider the cost worthwhile in Australia, where the price would be the same.

Cooking

Beetroot and Celeriac Borscht with Basil and Nutmeg

February 4, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Celeriac Borscht: Post-Purée — Post-Purée

I wouldn’t normally bother to write about soup since it is essentially a “grab stuff, throw stuff in pot, heat and maybe blend” creation. I make a week’s worth of soup almost every Sunday so we can have soup in the fridge and freezer. We have soup for dinner at least three nights per week and alternate between “this week’s” and “last week’s” soup for variety. This will probably sound most unlike me, but here in the UK I follow much more planned eating habits than I did in Sydney. The primary reasons for this are: inaccessibility of good produce, the high price of produce and the extreme price of eating-out. Life here is very different to living and working mid-Sydney, I’d probably revert to my old ways if I lived and worked mid-London (and could afford it!). These days we have soup on Mon, Wed and Fri with カチンシ (Kathleneshi – Kat’s sushi) on Tue and my own cooking on Thu (usually a fish dish using something from the “Billingsgate” compartment in our freezer), weekends are “freestyle” to make up for weekday lunches, which are strongly regimented.

Back on topic! Today I made a potentially unusual soup and it turned out so well that I decided to make note of it, it can probably be more accurately called a borscht thanks to the beetroot.

The story of borscht starts on Saturday when we visited the Notting Hill office and thus, inevitably, the Portobello Road market, where I was browsing with this week’s soup in mind (and coffee!). Looking like boxes of well used medicine balls there was celeriac everywhere. I have never bought celeriac before but they look like they have soup potential so I picked one up. I’m afraid I didn’t take a photo of it but it looks like most celeriac I’ve seen – large, spherical, greenish and rough. The cooking goddess Stephanie says you should choose celeriac that are firm and baseball sized… I didn’t know this at the time though so I picked one that was about twice the diameter of a baseball (an unusual measure for an Australian chef to use!), luckily it turned out to be solid all the way through with no pithy hollows. I decided to pick up some beetroot too since I was aware that celeriac had a flavour similar to celery and I didn’t relish the idea of soup with a monotone celery flavour. The beetroot were around baseball sized and I got three of them.

So, fairly simple as soup should be, here it is:

1 double-baseball Celeriac
3 single-baseball Beetroot
1 large Brown Onion
A knob of Butter
4 grinds of Salt
plenty of grinds of Pepper
1 Chicken Stock Cube
A Nutmeg
A large handful of Basil Leaves

Skin and roughly dice the onion and put into a large stock pot with the butter and grate in half the nutmeg.
Peel the celeriac (I found this much easier to do roughly with a knife than with a peeler), quarter and slice thinly (since it is going into a soup with beetroot don’t bother with the acidulated water).
Peel the beetroot (peeler does fine here) and slice as with celeriac.
Turn on the heat and cook to very lightly brown the onion.
With the onion browned throw all other ingredients except for the basil into the pot and add water until the celeriac just starts to lift (i.e. just-covered).
Up the heat and bring to a boil then reduce to a low simmer (lowest heat on the smallest rosette), cover with the lid slightly ajar and leave to simmer (we actually went out with it simmering away so it got up to two hours of simmer-time but probably would have been fine with less).
When the beetroot is tender turn off the heat and let cool for emulsifying.
In batches process soup with the emulsifier (sorry, I just like that word – I mean food processor or blender) to an almost-smooth (but not quite) texture.
Chop the basil leaves finely (i.e. with a knife or herb-chopper) and mix into the processed soup.
At point taste and add more salt/pepper/nutmeg as you see fit.
Reheat and serve! Or: Package and freeze!

I would serve this with a sprinkling of very-fine-sliced basil leaves, a couple of grinds of pepper and a drizzle of good olive oil (photo on left topped with grated nutmeg, ground pepper and olive oil – if you look at the album you’ll see it was served with an unusual accompaniment). A good crusty chunk of bread would go down with it beautifully – but unfortunately bread isn’t something we buy.

Celeriac Borscht: Full Spread — Full Spread

Ristretto

Coffee Plant on Portobello Road

February 4, 2007 Yvan

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Coffee House: Coffee Plant
Address: 180 Portobello Road, London W11 2EB
Rating: TBA verging on Toby’s (Sydney-Coffee Rating System)
Website | Map

Discovered on busy Portobello Road thanks to an “I had a good coffee at this place” comment from a co-worker Coffee Plant has a special place in my caffeinated heart: my first good UK ristretto. It’s hard to describe the moment. About two weeks after getting into the UK I had decided that coffee was a thing of the past, so any halfway reasonable attempt at an espresso would have knocked me out. Trying to explain feeling of sheer glee in discovering that I was wrong would just make me look loony (as if I don’t already). I think I had four doubles — not wise after two weeks of very litle caffeine (I had switched to drinking a lot of green tea though).

Coffee Plant is a decent sized café with a mid-floor counter populated with barristas and a counter up the back where they sell beans (including green beans for home roasting). Their prices are just not London – with a single espresso clocking in at only 80p (but I must say that all the good coffee places I’ve found have remarkably below-chain pricing for espresso, including back in Sydney). They’ve been busy every time I’ve been in, but with the high customer turnover means you often do get a seat, the atmosphere is lively and has an almost un-Londonian friendliness (another common trait amongst the coffee places I like here).

They’re fair-trade up to their eyeballs and what a friend of mine would call long-haired-tree-huggin’-hippies. Peace symbols scrawled across a wallpaper of anti-war, anti-golbalisation, anti-Bush, anti-Blair and anti-anything-non-long-haired-hippy propaganda. In fact the owner of the place is known for such politics and has even written book about the inconsistencies in the US governments “official story” for September-11. I’ll neither agree nor disagree with any of this, I must admit that some of it seems a bit far-out. But hippy politics and good coffee seem to go hand-in-hand, Coffee Plant is merely the most extreme example I have seen thus far. Fair-trade is an excellent and sensible way for things to be and since my own political views lean Left and have a strong hippy bent to them I don’t mind the extended politics.

But this is about the espresso! At Coffee Plant you can have your excellent espresso and rest assured that third-world farmers have got a reasonable deal (as at any coffee house that really cares about their coffee).

On the ristretto front the only negative is that occasionally you’ll get a barista who doesn’t quite pour one that is up to their usual standard (but I’m not the sort of person who can make a point about this so unless it is terrible I don’t say anything – and it has never been even close to terrible!). On a measure of personal taste I rate them just below Monouth Coffee and on-par with Coffee Tree in Aylesbury – I think this may have more to do with the roast than anything else. Honestly, I can’t specifically fault anything at any of these three places and they’re my “top three” for the UK – thus far.

The photo on the right was taken from the same point that the façade photo was taken from, but facing 90° to the left — so this stall of sweet carbohydratic delights is directly outside Coffee Plant. If you’re visiting London the Portobello Road market is one of the top-ten locations to visit in my mind (especially if one of the movies you grew up on was Bedknobs and Broomsticks!), it’s chaos stretches along the road for a mile or more on Saturday so wear good walking shoes. You’ll need to fight your way down the road (from the Notting Hill end in my case) to get to Coffee Plant, but it is well worth it (it is a lot easier on weekdays).

Trellick Tower – Nothing to do with coffee

The market area around Coffee Plant is devoted to food, mainly fruit-and-vege but with a smattering of meats, cheeses, spices, preserves and take-away. If you wander further along towards W10 it’ll degrade to clothes and trinkets, then to garage-sale quality junk and finally to tip-quality junk and bodgey furniture. If you go far enough you’ve hit Golburne Road where you’ll find a variety of interesting delicatessens and cafés (including a seemingly Australian one, it matches the street name I think) — and in the distance you’ll see the absurd looking building pictured on the left.

So for an interesting morning out and excellent espresso hit the Portobello Road market and drop into Coffee Plant a couple of times, or maybe more.

Yvan.Seth.id.au

Category Archives: Food

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Beetroot and Celeriac Borscht with Basil and Nutmeg

Coffee Plant on Portobello Road

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