The Fat Expat

2011-08-30T16:58:00.001+04:00

Sir and I are huge fans of Indian cuisine. I mean massive. We have toured entire cities in search of the ultimate curry (a dish which, as it turns out, originated in ancient Iraq).
We are also big fans of The Meridien Village in Dubai so it was always a disappointment to us that they didn’t have an Indian restaurant. I ‘asked the universe’ and the universe took about 6 years to answer. The result of my wishing and hoping (and not of course the result of commercial demand) is MAHEC. It is spelt in CAPITALS because MAHEC is actually an acronym for Modern Authentic Hindustani Evolved Cuisine which is more of a mouthful than a spoonful of vindaloo.
They claim to be a ‘fusion’ Indian restaurant. ‘Fusion’ is a word that repeats on me like this morning’s smoked mackerel. Historically Indian cuisine is of course a fusion of Middle Eastern, Turkish and Persian flavours but that is not what they are getting at here. They are trying to meld together east and west in a marriage that would have traditional Indian parents wailing in despair.
The décor is not what I was expecting at all. It sidesteps the usual reds, browns, golds and brocade in favour of simplicity and clean lines. So that covers the ‘Modern’. The staff are attentive and welcoming with plenty of bowing and scraping going on.
We are offered the wine list, which is exhaustive. The waiter points helpfully to their wine display cabinets which line two walls and have a little library-style slidey ladder to reach the top shelves – which I presume is where they keep their AED 41,500 1990 Chateau Margaux Premiere Cru. We resist the temptation to order this and settle instead for the more traditional accompaniment of Kingfisher Beer.
Moments later our chilled beers arrive together with a rather unexpected surprise. The waiter presents us with an elegant morsel each which he declares is the ‘amuse bouche’. This I do find rather amusing. It turns out to be a delectable, if regrettably small, chickpea pakora with a tiny dollop of mint sauce.
We are handed our menus and I have to admit that some of the familiar names throw up unexpected twists. The crispy soft shell crabs are served with green apple and the tandoori lamb sheesh kebab has rosemary in it. We decide to skip starters. Looking at the main courses perplexes us some more. I order the intriguing ‘creamy porcini with lamb masala’ which also promises an enoki salad. Sir, being less adventurous than me, orders the more traditional sounding ‘chicken tikka masala’. We also order the dal makhani – a firm favourite – and some saffron rice, raita and tandoori naan.
So far we have not been that daring with our choices, but I am interested to see how the porcini stands up to a round in the pan with lamb masala. I am not disappointed. Imagine if a Bollywood actor, all sultry and brooding, had a scandalous affair with a busty Italian supermodel and their resulting love-child was exotic and stunning. No one thinks the affair would work, but somehow it does. The flavours do things to each other in my mouth that flavours in love do. The earthy mushrooms temper the spice in the masala. The enoki is superfluous in my opinion.
The CTM is a slight disappointment as the heat is overpowering, leaving the other flavours struggling to emerge. The dal makhani is ‘Authentic’. It is creamy and unctuous and so that covers that. The usual suspects of rice, raita and naan do not disappoint. We move onto desserts. Here again the pairings are sinful.
The ‘chocolebi’ for example is a cardamom chocolate mousse with praline jalebis. Might this be the ‘Evolved’ section? We both decide on the ‘methi samosa’ a carrot halwa filled pastry with a sidekick of fig and ginger ice-cream. It was delicious. I particularly enjoyed the ice-cream. My only criticism would be that although crisp and not greasy I found the samosa pastry too heavy for the delicate gazar halwa.
The service was spot-on for the whole evening and the staff were attentive and anticipating. The atmosphere was unfussy and easy. The average cost for a starter is 40 to 50 dirhams with mains coming in at around the 100 mark, which I found a bit steep. Deserts are reasonable at around 30-40 dirhams.
I will be going back; if only to see if the wailing parents will win and the ‘Hindustani’ ingredients will find more traditional partners.

Mashed Potatoes

2011-07-28T17:23:00.004+04:00

Probably one of the most abused preparations in the history of modern food, mashed potatoes have been around a long time, and only recently has anyone given some thought to proper preparation. That is, to serve potatoes that are not gluey, stodgy or too lumpy. (some people like lumps, or "texture") With properly cooked potatoes, though, the lumps are not necessary for texture.

In my opinion, the following are essential for good mashed potatoes.

1.) Choice of potatoes: You want floury potatoes, not waxy. Waxy potatoes are more suited to potato salad. Some cooks like to combine the two types - not me.

2.) Cut the potatoes into 1 cm slices, peeled or unpeeled, your choice. I find that unpeeled taste better. Just cut off any blemishes.

3.) Put the potatoes into heavily salted water. (20 g/l)

4.) Bring the temperature up to between 80⁰ and 85⁰ C. Hold at that for 20 minutes. You need a thermometer and have to stay nearby for this, (unless you have a sous vide heater / circulator) but it is worth it.

5.) Bring to a rolling boil, turn down the heat and simmer until the potatoes are just cooked, and drain.

6.) Put through a ricer or use a potato masher after first removing the peels if you wish. Add butter (a certain famous French cook uses the same amount of butter as potatoes by weight. That is possibly too much for everyday potatoes, but should be tried at least once.) Depending on the amount of butter you used, you may want to add a little milk or cream until the spuds are the consistency you want.

The idea behind the steady temperature of max 85⁰ C for 20 minutes is to keep the cell walls as intact as possible. When the cell walls burst the released starch absorbs water and that is what causes the gummy texture so often found. Whatever you do, never put the potatoes in a food processor or other mechanical device. Just mash them by hand until you have the texture and consistency required. Adjust the seasoning, I prefer a grating of nutmeg, black pepper and salt. Try this method, you will get the best results ever.

I did not mention any of the potato varieties, but think probably the most used is your basic russet potato. There are thousands.

Thanks to potato man for the image.

Carrot and Coriander Soup

2011-07-23T13:44:00.001+04:00

I found these bad boys down at the organic shop during a trip to (the packed and awful) Dubai Mall yesterday and they just screamed carrot and coriander soup. Well, carrots don't scream and if they did it would probably be something along the lines of 'don't eat me' but you know what I mean. The flavour is out of this world and the consequent soup is made brilliant by the sheer 'pow' of organic ingredients.

So please don't try and make this with those little orange sticky things that Spinneys et al sell. Make this with unpeeled, organic carrots and oranges. You'll never look back.

Ingredients

800g organic carrots
1 onion, chopped
1 medium (200g or so) potato, chopped
2 oranges, grated zest and juice
1.2 litres good, light stock
1/2 tsp salt
A pinch of sugar
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp coriander seeds

Wash the carrots with a stiff vegetable brush and chop 'em. Throw the chopped carrot in a pan along with the chopped onion, potato and olive oil. Sweat these over a medium heat for 10 minutes or so, giving the occasional stir. Add the pinch of sugar. Meanwhile toast the coriander seeds in a frying pan, you want them starting to brown and giving off that rich, slightly burned orangey coriander seed smell. Add the stock to the vegetables, remembering to congratulate yourself on using a light home-made vegetable stock or a mixture of 1/2 chicken stock and 1/2 water rather than being a lazy bum and spoiling everything by using that gross mixture of salt, msg and celery flavoids that commercial stock cubes are packed with.

Cook the vegetables for a further 10-15 minutes until they have softened, adding salt to taste at the end of cooking. Pitch in the orange juice, coriander seeds and the orange zest and stir these in, cooking for a further couple of minutes before removing from the heat and whizzing comprehensively using whatever whizzy solution you prefer.

Serve with crusty french bread, laced with cream or perhaps even a chopped coriander-leaf laced drizzle of olive oil. This soup is also stunning served cold with, may I suggest, a cheeky little quenelle of sour cream floating in it.

Chicken and leek with a bit of this and a dash of that

2011-07-07T10:15:00.008+04:00

This recipe originated in my kitchen circa the middle of last week.

It's obvious that chicken and leeks go together like soccer mums and SUVs so it didn't require much imagination to throw these two together with a few other likely suspects and come out with a very fine dish indeed.

* Contains pork, alcohol, butter and cream!

Ingredients

6 skinned chicken breasts cut into bite-sized morsels
1 large leek sliced into rings
1/2 a medium red onion diced
2 modest cloves of garlic
6 button mushrooms
2 tsp minced coriander
2 heaped tsp grainy mustard
1/2 a pack of smoked lardons
1 (or slightly more) large glass of good white wine.
1/2 a square pack of puck cream
salt and pepper to season

A few notes on ingredients. I like to slice my mushrooms very thinly as I prefer the taste to the texture, you might like them just quartered! I chop fresh coriander, then steep it in olive oil in storage boxes and keep it in the freezer - very convenient. I used a Californian Riesling - it's important to keep testing this during the cooking process...

Heat a little olive oil in a large wok-like pan and then throw in a knob of butter. Add the red onion then the leeks and soften. Add the chicken and season. Fry the chicken until it starts to brown then add lardons and reduce the heat.

Add the garlic just after this so that it doesn't burn and turn bitter. Add mushrooms, the corriander and mustard and mix around a bit, then the wine to heat through. Add the cream last thing and do a final stir-through and seasoning.

I served it with wholewheat spag which was lovely but I think it would be better with penne or twisty pasta as the bite sizes would match better.

Enjoy with the remains of the wine!

Curry Isn't Indian

2011-07-05T10:07:00.001+04:00

Image by DerekSteen via FlickrThat's going to cause a fuss, isn't it? As Gulf News points out today, curry isn't actually Indian - although GN seems to think some people think it's British, which is patent claptrap.

But the fact of the matter is that 'curry', as we know and recognise it, isn’t actually Indian. In fact, the earliest curry recipe in the world comes from Iraq. Sumerian tablets dating back to 1700BC make the first mention of a meat cooked in a spiced sauce and served with bread. The Romans, too, used spiced sauces – and actually liked to cook meat in two sauces – a cooking sauce and a serving sauce. They also used a disgusting mess of fermented Mackerel guts called liquamen, which we'd possibly recognise through a remote cousin, nam pla or fish sauce.

And then we have the fact that curry has travelled so far East and West. Alongside the marvellous explosion of tastes, textures and experiences to be had from the richly varied cuisines of India, we can trace the movement of curry from Southern India and Sri Lanka across to Asia, with Malay, Indonesian and Thai curries sharing a tendency towards coconut bases and mixing fish sauces and pastes as a flavouring. Japan has its curries, too.

The word ‘curry’ itself is widely acknowledged to have originated in Tamil, where the word ‘kari’ means a sauce or vegetable in sauce. While there are similar words in most Indian dialects, including ‘karahi’ and ‘kadhai’, a round bottomed, double-handled pan, the idea of cooking meat in rich, spiced sauces filtered through to Europe from the Middle East – and possibly into India from the Caucasus. The Romans brought back spices from their Middle Eastern adventures, including the spice they called ‘laser’ and which we know better as asafoetida or, in Hindi, ‘heeng’. Did it move East or West? We may never truly know...

The great movements of people, cultural influences and wealth that took place across Europe and the Middle East through the establishment of Muslim caliphate in Spain, the Crusades and the collapse of the Byzantine Eastern Empire also changes in the way people saw food. By the fourteenth century, the French and British were cooking with many of the ingredients that we associate with curries today. The use of ginger, galangal, nutmeg, cloves, coriander, cardamom and aniseed, as well as pepper, can be dated back to the dark ages. All of these ingredients were discovered in the Middle East, on their way from the rich spice groves of southern India and Indonesia. The popularity of these spices, and the race to acquire monopolies in the highly lucrative trade in them, shaped much colonial history – and saw the Dutch, Portugese, Spanish and British battling for control of the land and seas alike.

We can find early Medieval references in British recipes to ‘cury’, a sixteenth century Dutch reference to ‘Carriel’ and a seventeenth century Portugese spice powder called ‘caril’. Throughout our history, throughout the world, we’ve been enjoying curry – meat and spices cooked together with a sauce.

The curry world map
The cuisines of the Indian subcontinent are, as you’d expect from a country with such a huge area and diversity of regions, incredibly varied. From the vegetarian dishes of the mountainous regions of North Eastern India, Nepal and Baltistan and the Northwestern India areas bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan, we find richer dishes as we move to richer lands, with Mughlai and Kashmiri cuisines, the vegetarianism of Gujarati cuisine gives way to the richer Muslim influences of Delhi and Hyderabad. Mughlai cuisine, in particular, is important in that it shows the clear influence of centuries of Muslim domination in central India, the melding of the rich, fruit-based cookery of Persia with the spices and sauces of India. The resulting cuisine is seldom less than stunning, if at times – as befits the food of kings, rich beyond belief!

Moving south, we see Goan curries clearly showing the massive influence of Portugese colonisation, a mixture of influences that resulted in the famed ‘Vindaloo’ curry, based on a Portugese method of cooking with vinegar. It’s perhaps worth noting that ‘Vindalho’ curries in India are much milder than the fearsome concoction sold in British curry-houses.

Moving south to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, there is more use of coconut, mustard seeds and curry leaves to create curries that often can seem almost Thai in their nature. This influence stretches into Sri Lankan cuisine and across into Malay curries, which reflect a similar use of ingredients such as galangal, lemon grass and ginger in a base of coconut milk. From Thailand’s highly fragrant curries, now dominated by the mixture of the sea (thanks mainly to the ubiquitous nam pla, or fish sauce), kaffir lime, lemongrass and coconuts we can move across to Indonesian classics such as ‘rendang’ a dish of beef cooked in a reduced coconut sauce mix. While Chinese curries are based on the Malay/Singaporean flavours, the Japanese were actually introduced to curry, now a popular national dish, by the British!

We have, in Thailand, the deliciousness of the 'massaman' curry, closer to the dark richness of Indian curries than the light heat of other Thai curries - and for a reason, too - 'massaman' is from 'Mussulman' or Muslim, this curry is packed with culinary influences brought to the East out of India.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Curry has its adherents in South Africa, where immigrant populations of workers from India, principally Goa, brought their cuisine – resulting in unique mixtures such as ‘bunny chow’, a loaf of bread hollowed out and filled with steaming hot, spicy curry. And, of course, curry is a part of Khaleeji cookery, too, where the use of a ‘masala’, or spice mixture, finds the Khaleeji ‘Baharat’. The addition of ingredients such as ‘loomi’, dried lemons, to these milder masalas yields a taste that is uniquely of the Gulf – but that is, nevertheless, still ‘curry’ and therefore, strangely enough, would have been recognised in Medieval France and England!

Here. A Fat Expat Curry Flurry!

CHICKEN

Chicken Korma

Chicken Tikka

Chicken Dhansak

Chicken Kadhai

The 'British National Dish' Chicken Tikka Masala (Recipe One) and (Recipe Two)

Rajasthani Kebabs

Birmingham's own - Chicken Balti and Balti Paste

Thai Red Chicken Curry

MEAT

Lamb Matsaman Curry

Beef Madras

Beef Rendang

Beef Rendang Brochettes

Kakori Ke Kebab

VEGETABLES

Chaat

Katcha Channa

Vadouvan

Cucumber Curry Salad

Red Mung Dal

Tarka Dal

Pineapple Raita

Dry Potato Curry

Vegetable Biriani

Mung Dal With Green Chilies

CURIOS

A Collection of curries from Sri Lanka

A Chuckle of Chutnies with a Pile of Poppadums

And last, but by no means least, a British Army Mess Curry! :)

Chicken Korma

2011-07-05T09:42:00.000+04:00

This is arguably the classic dish of Mughlai cuisine; mild, rich and bursting with luxurious flavours – it’s the perfect curry to serve people who ‘don’t like curry’ or who are scared of the heat, because the yoghurt and almond take all the bite out of the spices and turn them into a pleasure rather than a pain.

Ingredients

500g chicken breast, cut in 3 cm pieces
4 tablespoons yoghurt, beaten
2 medium sized onions, sliced finely lengthwise
3cm piece ginger, finely grated
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp chili powder
2 tsp coriander powder
2 green cardamoms
2 cloves
4 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
½ tsp garam masala
Pinch powdered nutmeg
3 tbsp ghee
Pinch of saffron
Salt to taste

Melt the ghee in a pot and fry the onions till golden brown (Do not overfry, otherwise they would give the korma a bitter taste). Take them out and grind them. In the same pot put the cardamoms, cloves, peppercorns, bayleaf with the chicken pieces and fry all of them together till the ghee begins to appear on the surface and the chicken pieces start to look white. Now add the ground ginger and garlic and again fry for 3-4 minutes. Reduce the heat and add the beaten yoghurt. Keep it well stirred. After 5 minutes add the chilli powder, coriander powder, ground onions and salt. Add one and a half cups of water and let it cook till the meat becomes tender. When the gravy thickens add the garam masala powder and saffron and keep stirring till the ghee appears on the surface. Remove from the heat and serve with piping hot rotis or parathas.

Fake Blueberries

2011-05-25T17:47:00.005+04:00

I have just come across a rather worrying video about how blueberries are 'faked' in cereals and other breakfast products.

I never really thought that a product that claims to contain blueberries, or any other berries for that matter, might not actually be telling the truth. I just this morning had the last of my breakfast cereal allegedly containing raspberries and have unfortunately thrown away the box so couldn't analyse the ingredients.

I tell you one thing for sure though; I will never again be buying pop-tarts for my children - no matter how much they nag! See what you think.

http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=7EC06D27B1A945BE85E7DA8483025962

The Queen's Coronation Chicken

2011-05-20T21:09:00.003+04:00

Let’s get RETRO!!

Wow I haven’t been here for ages, slackest blogger on the planet it would seem but anyway, I’m back!

So for The Wedding last month I was asked to make a very large vat of Coronation Chicken to feed some ridiculous number of people. From some dim recess of my memory I recalled a recipe with red wine, apricot jam, mangoes etc I tried to recreate it and the general verdict was that it was quite a success.

You will need (for about 20 people!!)

10 chicken breasts
350ml red wine
2tsp turmeric powder
3 star anise
1 stick cinnamon
10 cardamon pods
1 tsp black peppercorns
200ml mango chutney
200ml Apricot jam
10 dried apricots chopped into small pieces
2 tbs mild curry paste (like a korma)
200ml double cream
200ml mayonnaise
200ml natural yoghurt
lots of chopped coriander
chopped almonds

for the poaching liquid:

star anise
cinnamon
cloves
peppercorns
bay leaves
cardamom pods
whole bulb of garlic (not need to peel)

And then you need to:

Fill a big saucepan with water, throw in a few of each of the spices listed under the poaching liquid, bring to the boil and let simmer fast for about 10 minutes. Your kitchen will start to smell like Christmas!

Throw the chicken breasts into the boiling liquid three at a time and poach for 20 minutes. Remove the chicken, set to one side and once cool slice into bite sized chunks. Do the next batch until all cooked. If you can be bothered this poaching liquid actually makes a really good base for a delicious Asian styled soup or noodle broth.

Whilst this is going on pour the red wine into a large saucepan and add the star anise, cardamom, cinnamon, peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and reduce to about 150ml.

Strain and return the liquid to the pan. Add the apricot jam, dried apricots, mango chutney, turmeric and curry paste. Simmer gently for about 5-10mins until thick and syrupy.

Remove from heat and leave to cool.

Stir in mayo, cream, yoghurt and you should have a thick yellowish curry sauce.

In a big mixing bowl add the chicken, half the coriander and the sauce. Mix really well and transfer to your serving platter. Sprinkle remaining coriander and the chopped almonds on top and voila! You are ready to go. A dish fit for a beautiful Queen.

This time it's not thyme

2011-05-11T14:45:00.001+04:00

Roast Chicken. It used to be one of the best known comfort foods. Delicious, easy to cook, dripping with juicy salty goodness. Then the supermarket rotisserie came along and spoiled it all for everybody. They sold cooked chooks for less than a fresh one, and so all the sensible people went and purchased them instead.

Or were they sensible? A supermarket rotisserie has great skin, but that's where the comparison to a home-cooked chicken stops. They're dry, spindly little battery-hens, often overcooked, flavoured either too simply or with truckloads of horrible stuff like MSG.

Wouldn't you rather have the juicy free-range one in this picture?

The other day, I found savoury at the local hypermarket. Here, they call it thyme, but it's not thyme. It's not rosemary, although that's what it most closely resembles in appearance. It tastes like something in between, maybe with a touch of fragrance like dill, and it's heavenly with roast chicken. And even better, it propagates easily. The cut herbs I bought have now started to grow on their own in some potting mix - simply cut off the bottom of the stem at an angle and plant. Let's hope it continues, because this herb is something special!

Ingredients:

1 chicken (no need to remove giblets unless they are in a plastic bag inside)
1 lemon
1 garlic bulb, halved parallel to root (so it exposes the inside)
several stalks of savoury
sweet paprika to sprinkle
salt and pepper
1 tsp butter and 1tsp flour combined for gravy

Instructions

Preheat oven to 180ᵒC. Wash chicken inside and out, pat dry, and then stuff with lemon, garlic and savoury, then generously sprinkle bird with salt, pepper and paprika (particularly salt)
Roast for 1 hour, or until the breast is cooked through, basting at least once during cooking (timing will depend on size of chicken - I use a 1400g to feed a family of 4)
Reduce juices with the mix of butter and flour while the meat is resting, flavouring with extra salt and pepper if necessary, and chopped savoury.

Notes:
I like to lay the bird on salted potato pieces in a non-stick pan. After it has been cooking for about 20 minutes, I prick the underside of the thighs, and all the fat rushes out, so the potatoes cook in the juices of the chicken. While the chicken is resting and you are preparing the gravy (with juice strained out between the potatoes), blast the potatoes on the top shelf of the oven at top heat if they need crisping up. I also serve with the pumpkin in the previous post, and roasted whole onions, which are simply peeled and added to the same pan as the chicken and potatoes at the same time. Oh, and some frozen peas - cooked of course. What an easy dinner!

Fish Vindaye from Mauritius

2011-04-19T17:56:00.006+04:00

This is a slightly famous dish from the island of Mauritius. The name is said to be a corrupted form of vindaloo, but I don't really see the connection, except that a large portion of the population of Mauritius is of Indian origin. Good stuff for a starter on warm day, with lots of beer or wine. You can adjust the acidity to taste, with the vinegar.

You will need:

500 g Firm, white fish that won't break apart easily, preferably line fish of some sort. Tuna is excellent, as is barracuda or other line fish.

2 Large onions peeled and sliced.

2 fresh green chillies sliced in half lengthways.

A handful of fresh garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped.

3 cm of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped.

1-2 cups good quality white wine or apple cider vinegar

Sunflower oil

Tumeric

2 Tsp Black Mustard Seeds (kalwanji)

Salt.

Pepper.

Fresh Coriander leaves.

Proceed as follows:

Put into the sliced onions into a bowl bowl and cover with the vinegar for an hour or so.

Pat the fish dry with paper towels. Cut into large porthions, take out any bones and season with salt & pepper.

Heat about 5 mm of oil over a low heat in a large, heavy bottomed frying pan. Fry the fish for a few minutes on both sides, just to crisp the outside. Don't overcook or it will dry out. Remove the fish from the oil, and allow it to drain on paper towels. Wipe the pan clean

Put the peeled and roughly chopped garlic and ginger into a blender with the mustard seeds and grind to a pulp or use a mortar and pestle (better). Crush as many of the seeds as possible.

Pour 5mm of fresh oil into the frying pan and warm through slowly and gently. Important - don't heat the oil too much, you are not going to be frying this, just coaxing out the the flavour. Add the drained onion, the garlic/ginger/mustard seed mix, the sliced chillies, and the turmeric (say about 20 ml). Stir well, and add several tablespoons of the vinegar that the onions were soaking in. The aroma will be fantastic. Cook and stir for about 5 minutes, just until the onion is soft. Add 5 cc of sugar stir well. This is your marinade.

Remove the marinade from the heat. Add the pieces of fish and spoon the marinade over, try not to break the fish up. Check the seasoning and add salt, pepper, and possibly some more of the vinegar.

Cover. cool and refrigerate for 48 hrs, if you can wait that long. It will be worth it.

This is served at room temperature, depending of course where your room is, take it out of the fridge a good while before serving. Just before serving stir in some chopped coriander to taste. If you don't like coriander, leave it out. Put some good crunchy french bread and lots of butter on the table to mop up the juices. Beer or chardonnay to drink.

Souk, Souq, Suq

2011-04-19T09:57:00.000+04:00

Cinnamon

You can smell it as your abra touch-parks at the riverbank. The aromas lead you stumbling up the gangplanks and into a throbbing intersection. You ponder for a moment - safe stroll through the subway, or manic death-wish rush through Deira traffic? You opt for the road - the thought of darkness, dankness and urine assaulting your senses is unbearable.

Suddenly you find yourself on the other side, and snicker at the fools coughing and spluttering while collapsing out of the vile tunnel. You are already striding ahead into a different cloud of air pollution, the kind you find at a spice souq.

It's my favorite of all the markets here in Dubai - sure, it's ripe with the standard pitfalls of a tourist trap - cheap rubbish dressed in clever disguise, laughably high prices that are never offered to the locals, spruikers offering fake (and substandard to karama) designer goods. But this, to me, is the closest we get to a traditional Arab market, and the atmosphere is intoxicating.

tumeric, ginger, star anise, rose petals and buds

There are fewer westerners here than in the Old, Textile, or Gold Souqs, particularly as you delve into the deeper, narrower aisles. On many visits I am a lone white face, and the only unveiled female. The stall holders always think I'm German, and when I don't respond to their greetings, the switch to French, then finally English. I skirt them expertly, I have "my guy", the man who's prices start halfway up the scale now he knows my face.

Read more on the hedonista here...

Chicken Tikka

2011-04-19T09:50:00.002+04:00

It's been a while since I posted something curry-ish. Actually, it' been a while since I posted anything! (Sorree!) So here's a real treat - so fast and simple to make and yet spectacularly, sumptuously tasty with a fine kick in the tail. If you thought chicken tikka should consist of mildly tangy bits of chicken steeped in aniline dye and slapped onto a skewer before being grilled to death, here's another world view - these little kebabs are much more complex and a great deal more fun. This recipe bakes them, but you can always skewer them up and cook them on the barbecue.

One of the few 'cooks cheats' I allow to sneak guiltily into the store cupboard is a pot of pre-fried onions, which makes dishes like this a great deal faster. If you're going to be an ultra-purist, you'll have to finely slice an onion and then fry it gently in a little oil until it browns deeply - but doesn't burn. I prefer the pots myself...

How big are chicken cubes? For this recipe, and using local chicken breasts, I'll usually detach the little strip of meat with the tendon in it and use that for something else, lop off the tail end to about 2/3 of the length of the breast and then quarter the remaining meat to end up with five sort of similarly sized chunks of chicken.

I'm a sucker for serving this with plain basmati rice, a dal (or try this one!) and dry-fried Kerala poppadums, but a tomato salad with a smattering of fried spices is also great. I get my poppadums from the local cold store, where they're tickled to death by the Brit that eats pappad for some reason!

Ingredients

500g chicken breast in cubes
1 bunch coriander, chopped
4 cm fresh ginger, chopped
4 garlic cloves, chopped
5 red bird's eye chilis, chopped
150g natural yoghurt
50ml cream
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 tbsp fried onions
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp salt

Sling everything but the chicken in the bowl of your blender, processor, whizzer or whatever you use. If you include the chicken at this stage, life is going to get pretty messy. Whizz it and then combine the mixture with the chicken to marinate - ideally overnight, but you can get away with shorter. Line a roasting tin with foil and give it a light brush of oil, then space the chicken chunks evenly on the foil, topping them up with any remaining marinade. Roast them in the middle of a 200C/400F/GM6 oven for 25 minutes or theareabouts, turn off the oven and leave them in for a further five minutes before serving.

Modernist Cuisine.

2011-04-04T17:59:00.008+04:00

I have been trying really hard not to do this post. So much is being mentioned about this heavily hyped and praised romp through the world of cooking, that any post here seems trivial. But just a short post to draw the attention of those who have been away on another planet.

This 6 volume, 2400 page "book" took Nathan Myhrvold, the ex-Microsoft billionaire and his team of 15, five years and "More than a million, but less than 10 million" dollars to develop. 1,500 recipes, which you will never make. But if you are interested in food and cooking, and are a trust-fund baby, you will get this book. Amazon price - $421. That is less than Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese per kilo. But this is much, much more than just a book. Chroma centric inks. Stochastic screening. Mindboggling

The book is backlogged on orders, but here are some links.

NYT

Modernist Cuisine

Description of the book

eGullet

Five Things I Hate In Food

2011-03-21T14:40:00.003+04:00

Image via WikipediaThe ketchup post a wee while back seems to have caused a few raised eyebrows so here's some more good old food scare type stuff to have you checking labels a tad more carefully next time you're trundling that trolley down the aisles!

This is a quick scan of some of the things I avoid in food, just in case you'd like to do likewise. I understand that I am slightly more than normally obsessive about these things. I use basic, raw ingredients wherever I can and distrust processed foods in general - hence getting into the habit of looking at what's in foods - and why it's there in the first place. I haven't mentioned HFCS as it was extensively covered in the ketchup post a few days ago and also over here. But here are a few areas to watch...

GMOs
98% of American corn is genetically modified to allow it to live despite being saturated with pesticides. High proportions of the American and Canadian soy bean, maize and rapeseed (Canola, by the way, is rapeseed that has been rebranded with a more 'consumer friendly' name - CANadial Oil Low Acid, in this case) crops are genetically modified. Oh, and cottonseed too. Europe used to be a safe haven, but it's patchier than it was. Generally, the UK, Ireland, France and Germany are hardest on GMOs. India has long battled with the issue and a lot of Indian rice is genetically modified. Interestingly, India Gate brand rice is labelled specifically as containing no GMOs.

Generally, if it's American and processed, the food is likely to contain GMOs. So watch out for those flakes of golden, Genetically Engineered corn at breakfast!

Are GMOs bad for you? I prefer not to eat food that has been modified in this way until we truly understand the science and we certainly don't. Also, if it's been altered to accept massive doses of pesticide that's nice - but I haven't. Here, in case you're interested, is one list of 'Frankenfoods' and the Greenpeace guide to avoiding GMOs. I bet you find a few surprises in the Greenpeace document ( I would have linked to Greenpeace's own site, but I can't find the stupid document there - the site's not terribly well done!)

PALM OIL
I've written about this stuff before over here, but it's worth a revisit. Palm oil is insidious stuff that is used as cheap fat. It's really, really bad for you because it's a saturated fat - basically, you'd be as well off eating liquid beef fat as eating palm oil. It's popular with food processors because its nice, cheap fat and also because it's semi-solid at room temperature, behaving much like thick cream. Watch out for it in ice creams (it's cheaper than the stuff that comes out of cows) and in Lay's crisps, which are fried in Palm Oil. Also in cheaper biscuits, bakes and processed foods such as freezer cakes and the like. You'll often find it masquerading as Vegetable Oil (palm and/or other oils) on labels.

Quite apart from its health issues, palm oil is also responsible for some of the most wicked deforestation of important rain forests, particularly in Indonesia.

E110 AND THE LIKE
You'll often find 'E' numbers lurking in the labels of processed foods, frequently as 'permitted colourings E110, E115'. These are European Union classifications for permitted food additives of a wide variety. This one, E110, is 'Sunset Yellow' an artificial colouring derived from petroleum that has been widely linked to allergic reactions and triggering hyperactivity in kids. You can find a full list of E numbers and explanations right here, some of my favourites include the disgusting Brown FK (E154, it's derived from creosote) and E120, cochineal, which is made out of crushed beetles. I kid you not. They look so much nicer as 'E' numbers, don't they? Oh, and by the way, the natural colour of a tinned pea is grey.

SUGAR
It's amazing how much sugar you can cram into processed foods. A can of coke, for instance, packs a heft 39g of sugar. This website, Sugar Stacks is quite fun, it shows a wide range of foods next to stacks of sugarlumps showing quite how much bulk of sugar we're talking about here. Generally, foods are labelled with ingredients in decreasing order of weight, so where you find a food that's labelled Ingredients: Water, flour, sugar then you can bet we're talking quite a hit of sugar. Kellog's Fruit Loops, for instance, pack a hefty 48% of their total dry weight as sugar. And they're not that atypical, either.

Food manufacturers often play games with labelling that, after a while, you can develop a 'nose' for. Take Nesquik Fat Free Chocolate Milk. Sure, it's fat free. But it's got 54 grammes of sugar in it!

SALT
Well, more sodium than salt. There are about 40 different sodiums in common use in food processing. Salt, good old sodium chloride, is by far the most ubiquitous. We like salty food, it's more flavourful, so frequently processed foods consist of a good dose of sugars, salts and some nice potentiators like MSG (monosodium glutamate to you, mate) that con us into thinking the stuff we're eating isn't really grey gloop that's been derived from belly button fluff in a huge factors but is actually a taste sensation full of the goodness of the sun and rolling fields. Sodium saccharin, a sweetener and sodium benzoate, a preservative, are other commonly used sodium based additives. We should be consuming no more than 6g of salt a day. And yet a cup of V8 juice packs 480 mg alone. And by the way, a tablespoon of soy sauce is about 1.2g of salt - and stock cubes are little more than salt, celery and sundry other gook - they're full of the stuff. Even the good old baked bean packs something like 3g of salt in a 200g can! Basically, anything above 1g of salt per 100g of product is very high in salt - surprises include breakfast cereals and soups in particular.

If that's not all enough for you, you can take a look at what they put in Pringles over here.

Enjoy that next shopping trip! :)

Kitchen Culture

2011-03-19T14:24:00.000+04:00

In a couple of months, I will be sharing my three year anniversary with Dubai. I am so happy I am still here, what a wonderful place to live. And now, I will be accepted as a real expat - for those that have been here for a little longer know, that if you make it past two years, the place has your heart, and you will be here for five years, ten, or maybe even the rest of your life. But a little confession before I go on - until last week, I had never joined the cultural gig down at the Sheikh Mohammad Centre for Cultural Understanding. I know, atrocious! So on Wednesday morning at 9:50, I bombasted my beast of a 4WD past all others to grab the last remaining carpark at Bastakiya, and re-entered my favourite little suburban nook in Dubai to find out all about Emiratis.

In case you haven't been to, or heard about Bastakiya, it is a tiny suburb that holds the last remaining architecture of Dubai's recent history. It was cordoned off and preserved by (I believe) the UAE Architectural society, and the buildings have been restored faithfully and lovingly. It is a maze of ochre walls, wind towers, crazy paving, modern art, carved cedar doors, and is a cool, quiet step away from modern Dubai. The building I entered has been set aside by ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and now gives lessons in the way of breakfasts and lunches and informal chats in a majlis - sharing the history and culture with people just like me.

The courtyard is cool and whitewashed, with the sun peeking just over the upper walls and being caught in the cut-out stonework, embellishing the blank spaces with lacy patterns. The central floor laid with a mammoth red carpet and camel-wool majlis cushions, and the centrepiece - three massive covered cauldrons, bowls of dates and pretty coffee pots and tiny crystal or porcelain glasses. With my tummy rumbling, I counted every minute past 10am, the official starting time.

Finally Nasif claps his hands together and says "Hello, Welcome!... Has anybody been here before?....No?....Ah, good! You are all fresh! I can mess with you. Ha Ha Ha" He sits down with a smile and his confident eyes make firm contact with each spectator separately. He adjusts his white ghutrah, first lifting it a little at the ears, then throwing the tails over his shoulder. As he begins, Yusif comes around with the coffee, pouring the lightly couloured, cardamom scented Yemeni blend into tiny cups - only half full, so we don't burn our fingers. We are told we can ask anything we like - nothing is taboo, except preceding a question with the phrase "Sorry, I know this is a stupid question, but..."

Read more

Sho Cho's

2011-03-17T07:48:00.003+04:00

Sho Cho’s Dubai Marine Beach Resort
Reservations: +971 4 3461111
Web: http://www.dxbmarine.com

Sho Cho’s is a Japanese restaurant masquerading as a trendy nightspot, or possibly the other way round, but either way it does serve food.

It’s a hang-out for the hip. Being more hippy than hip I was a bit perturbed to learn that I was invited to dine there with a group of friends and family. I do however have a weak spot for Maki rolls, so I graciously accepted.

We sat outdoors on the terrace and the weather was perfect for it. The bar was modern and slick and lit blue, an eerie ambience strongly evoking memories of intensive care units. This is, of course, a touch subjective. We were surrounded by the cool and the young bopping to some club music. I was pleasantly surprised therefore to be offered a rather sophisticated and extensive menu.

We started with some salted edamame beans which were the best I’ve had. Drink selections round the table included Mango Margarita which was a tropical holiday in a glass and Berry Mojito – so packed with berries that it was practically virtuous.

Appetisers were selected. The prawn tempura was crisp and light and everything tempura should be. The Maki rolls disappeared in delicious fishy mouthfuls. Soon enough we were tapping our feet to the club beats.

My main of beef teriyaki was impressive. The beef was so soft it practically chewed itself. The flavour was subtle and perfectly balanced. One of our group ordered the shrimp and lobster with spicy lemon dressing. The name did not do it justice. The lemon was not overpowering and the chilli was a warm heat not a searing burn. The lobster was plentiful and the shrimp succulent. The young lady who had ordered the asparagus salad looked on enviously.

The music eventually became somewhat tedious and our foot-tapping gave way to a constant thumping in our heads. Our waitress smiled vacantly the whole night like a child that had been accidently dropped on its head. The food however was faultless. I am going back, but next time I’ll be armed with earplugs.

On the pocket side of things, not exactly bargain basement with mains coming in at around the Dhs95 mark, but hardly break the bank stuff either - middling, then...

This review courtesy Fat Expat Guest Contributor Shereen Habib.

Sausage Rolls for Adults

2011-03-07T14:25:00.001+04:00

I love cooking for parties. It is the kind of food I really excel at - tit-bits that can combine my love of fusion food, and my desire to cheat at every corner. I make one hell of a Peking duck pancake, and my canapes (I reserve that title for anything on a biscuit or piece of Melba toast) are inventive and delicious. But (beside it not falling into the category of fusion food), this is my new favourite cheat. I served them at my husband's birthday party last week, and they disappeared before the steam ceased rising off them.

Ingredients:

One 200g packet of smoked salmon - preferably in steak form
1 packet of puff pastry squares
half a tub of double cream
sprinkling of chopped chives
about 1- 2 tbsp seeded mustard
salt and pepper

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 220ºC, then halve the cream into two bowls - put chives and salt and pepper in one, and mustard and salt and pepper in the other. Combine each separately and put the mustard one aside - that is your dipping sauce.
Cover a flat oven tray with greaseproof paper and cut each of the pastry squares in half to form a rectangle. Cut the salmon into 20 portions, and place at the end of each rectangle. Place a pea-sized dollop of cream and chive mix on each, then roll like a sausage-roll.
Cook for about 10 minutes or until puffy and golden brown. Serve hot with the dipping sauce.

Notes:
Would also work well with fresh salmon, but will have a milder flavour, and you might want to drop the temperature to 200 and cook for 20 minutes if you don't like your salmon red-pink in the middle (I do!) Don't forget to ask the fishmonger to remove the back bones with tweezers so you can cut the steak easier.

Benihana Kuwait - Silence! I sue you!

2011-02-14T08:02:00.004+04:00

MyBenihana Experience

A few days back I posted about Benihana opening up at the Avenues and yesterday night I decided to pass by with Nat and try it out. The service wasn’t too bad for a restaurant that’s just been open for a few days and the staff were really friendly. The restaurant itself is made up of islands and bars with a grill in the middle of each one. You sit around the grill and the chef will come to your table and prepare the food right in front of you which makes things entertaining. It’s actually why I prefer sitting at the bar in Japanese restaurants in general, since you can talk to the chef and watch them put your dish together. The problem with my experience last night though was with the food, it was disappointing to say the least.

We ordered beef negimayaki for starters followed by an Orange Blossom maki and a Hibachi Chicken. The negimaki arrived looking good and was probably the best thing we had there even though I prefer Maki’s negimaki which has a richer teriyaki sauce. The Orange Blossom was very ordinary, wouldn’t order it again. Now the Hibachi chicken which is basically grilled chicken, that was the worst. The chicken was very chewy (I could swear it was undercooked if not raw) and tasted terrible. Even after I had the chef add some more teriyaki sauce in hopes of improving the taste it didn’t work. I tried to dip it into the sauces that came with the chicken but it was hard to figure out if they were actually making things worse or not. Nat only ate one piece of chicken and left the rest while I needed my protein since I’m on a strict diet and forced myself to eat my whole plate (I can do that) but the after taste was really bad. Even the rice and the veggies that came with it tasted bad AND were under cooked. Once we left I considered picking up a frozen yogurt from Pinkberry even though I hate frozen yogurts but I just needed something to get rid of the aftertaste. A few moments later we ended up at Chocolate Bar ordering the gooey chocolate cake (bye bye diet).

I shot the two videos above of the chef preparing our meal. Benihana are known for the live shows they perform when preparing your dish so I was expecting to see [This] but ended up with the above . Would I go back to Benihana? No I wouldn’t. Their sashimi and maki’s are pretty cheap (KD1.5 for 5 pieces of Salmon sashimi for example) but there are two other Japanese restaurants at the Avenues, Wasabi and Maki, and I would prefer either one of those to Benihana.
_________________________________________________________________

The above is a reproduction of Mark Makhoul's original post on Kuwaiti blog 2:48AM talking about what he thought of newly opened Kuwaiti restaurant Benihana. The franchise holder of the restaurant then proceeded to issue a lawsuit against Mark, presumably with the intention of scaring him into taking down his post or perhaps agreeing to post something altogether more fawning. The company then faced a wave of public anger at its actions, choosing to ignore this, deleting negative comments from its Facebook page and blocking those who commented. Both Benihana Kuwait and the franchisor, Benihana of Tokyo, have consistently refused comment on this shameful little episode.

This has already turned into a social media mismanagement case study that will run and run. They're a laughing stock. Millions of people around the world have read the story: Fast Company, BoingBoing, TheNextWeb and others have posted it (let alone traditional news media around the world). Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have seen the story on Twitter. And it's not going to go away - bloggers around the region and beyond are posting copies of Mark's OP today - on blogs, Facebook and other social media platforms.

Already, this case is prominent when you Google Benihana - and it is, of course, on their Wikipedia entry. If you're looking for Benihana Kuwait, this nasty little story is all you get. Surely these people realise that this is already game over - that if they don't reconsider their actions and act to stop this (and stopping it rests, as it always has, entirely in their hands) that they won't have a restaurant left at the end of the day? It is NOT going to go away.

The case is due to have its first day in court on the 8th March. I would URGE Benihana of Tokyo to finally act responsibly and rein in its idiotic licensee before the damage to the Benihana brand globally becomes irreperable. This will start to hurt other Benihana licensees who have had no part in this. All Benihana has to do is drop the case.

For fun and larks, you can follow the hashtag #BenihanaKUW on Twitter.

Slap-Dash Biryani in the rice cooker

2011-01-28T11:51:00.000+04:00

I have always loved Biryani. I suppose it comes from all my childhood memories of cinnamon, and of course where it was used - apple pie, with sugar on pancakes, mixed into Mum's banana custard - all wonderfully sweet and heart-warming dishes. So now the use of it is always associated with comforting, warm moments - and I am doing my best to add it to my own children's sensory memories.

True Biryani is made by pan-frying a spice, onion and meat mix, then adding to par-cooked rice and finally baking the lot in an oven. All this takes about 2 1/2 hours. In these days of gadgets, I make mine in (gasp!) a rice cooker. I cook the meat seperately, because I like to keep it browned and crispy, and although you could serve this spiced rice with anything, from barbecued lamb kebabs to garlic tiger prawns or even on it's own, I like it with chicken.

Ingredients:

For the Chicken:

1kg Chicken Drumsticks (skin on)
1/2 teaspoons of saffron - soaked in warm water for a minute or two
a big pinch of salt
1 tablespoon of honey
1 tablespoon of oil
a little pinch of white pepper

For the Rice:

2 cups of basmati rice
2 medium carrots - julienne
2 celery stalks, fine dice
1 cup frozen green peas
2 onions (I like the red - they are sweeter), sliced finely
crushed garlic (to taste - I like 2 cloves)
1 cinnamon quill
5 cardamom pods (split)
1/4 teaspoon of clove powder
1 chicken stock cube
water
oil for pan-frying

Instructions:

For the chicken - mix all ingredients except the chicken in a bowl, then roll drumsticks in the liquid. Place on an oven tray, sprinkle a little more salt, and then bake at 180ºC for about 45 minutes

For the rice - pan-fry onions and garlic until they are deep dark brown, then add carrots and celery, stock cube and a small amount of water and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Put this mix and the rest of the ingredients in the rice cooker with the appropriate amount of cold water for your cooker (in my case this is another 2 cups). Serves 4.

You will notice that the onions will lose their colour. The reasons for browning are two-fold. One, the colour is absorbed by the rice, and two, the flavour of caramelized onions lends a more appropriate flavour.

I like to serve with a yogurt and chilli sauce - but you could also make a gravy with the scrapings of the baking pan, some extra salt, pepper and honey - with flour and water if you like it thick - or water and lemon juice if you like it thin.

Mushrooms á la Grecque

2011-01-08T18:12:00.000+04:00

I am very fond of this simple, classic salad. It'll keep for a while in a fridge and makes a smashing starter just served on a plate piled up with a twist of thinly sliced Parma ham. I often make this recipe with 1/4 of the ingredients as a side salad for 2 people, in which case I'll usually quarter the mushrooms (hence the piccie) but ideally it should be made with smaller button mushrooms left whole.

Ingredients

450ml water
100ml olive oil
1 large lemon, juiced
Salt (a good pinch)
18 black peppercorns
18 fennel seeds
12 coriander seeds
1 tbsp chopped curly parsley
2 shallots, chopped finely
500g button mushrooms (2 punnets)
3cm celery, chopped

You don't have to go around counting seeds, just a few pinches here and there depending on how strong you like your spicy flavours. Put everything in a pan apart from the mushrooms and bring it to a boil, reducing to a lively simmer for about 10-12 minutes. Wipe the mushrooms and trim the stalks, then add them into the pan and cook them for another 10 minutes or so. Lift out the mushrooms and slip 'em into the serving dish of your choice, then boil down the cooking liquid, stirring it, until you've got 80-100ml of emulsified liquid left in the pan. Strain this over the mushrooms and chill until you're ready to serve them.

The Problem With Ketchup

2010-12-02T19:31:00.004+04:00

Image via Wikipedia
The UAE has been flooded recently with unwelcome little red guests and I'm not talking redback spiders here.

I'm talking Heinz ketchup from Pittsburgh.

I can almost see you doing the Scooby Doo 'HuuuUH'? at this point. Who cares where ketchup comes from, after all?

Well, me for a start. Because the Heinz Ketchup from Pittsburgh packs a whack of a processed food ingredient that really gets my goat - high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS to its friends. In fact, HFCS is the third largest ingredient by weight in the US version of the plate-side treat that we all know and love. It's why the ketchup is pleasingly gloopy, and yet its a highly processed, vile foodstuff that is 98% likely refined from genetically modified corn.

You'd not get away with this in Europe. And the 'standard' ketchup in the Middle East, made by Heinz' Egyptian subsidiary (it used to be a joint venture, but Heinz bought its partner out in 2009) actually uses sugar as a sweetener rather than the more controversial and dishonest HFCS. Why we're suddenly getting our ketchup in the UAE from Pittsburgh rather than Cairo is a mystery to me.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is nasty stuff. I've talked about it before over at the Fake Plastic blog - take a look, it's linked here and not pleasant reading.

So take a look at that ketchup bottle in your fridge. Just so's you know what you're eating. Or giving your kids to eat...

Mushroom And Swiss

2010-11-29T08:50:00.000+04:00

Burger joint Hardees has a sandwich called Mushroom n Swiss, a beef patty covered in a dark mushroom mixture and topped with a slice of something that may once have been based on emmental. Sarah has always had a fatal weakness for this particularly fine example of fast food at its most terrifying. The trouble is, of course, that it’s delicious. It’s only shortly afterwards that you realise the aftertaste isn’t a fine countryside organic wholefood experience but a powerful charge of salt, sugar and awful chemical compounds designed to smack your tastebuds so hard around the head they don’t even realise they’re eating mass produced processed gunk that, without the chemicals, would be a tasteless pile of goo leached of any goodness or flavour.

There’s a vile little recipe circulating on the interwebs that uses tinned mushrooms and Campbell’s mushroom soup to recreate the Mushroom n Swiss experience. I find it odd how many American recipes start with ingredient lists of packets of this and cans of that. It’s almost as if raw food doesn’t exist.

Anyway, here’s a go at doing a homemade mushroom n swiss that doesn’t use canned shite. Although it does use other things that my old mum wouldn’t allow in the house. It’s a guilty pleasure, this one...

Ingredients

250g fresh button mushrooms, sliced
1 tbsp mushroom soy sauce
2 tsp brown sugar
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
100ml wine or stock
Oil
500g minced beef
Processed Emmental slices
Golden Loaf Bakery burger baps (the sesame ones)

Splash a frying pan with the oil and fry off the mushrooms on a high heat so they brown and then start to relax and become moist. Slosh in the soy sauce and mix it all up, followed by the other ingredients. Keep it all moving in the pan and cook until it’s a mixture of soft mushroom in a thick, dark, sauce. Cover and keep in a warm place.

Split the beef into four balls of equal size and weight, then squash these into round discs – they should be 1-2 cm bigger all round than the buns and quite thin, you don’t want great thick patties that form a wodge inside the bun, you want a bun-matching beef patty experience - and the pattys shrink when you cook 'em (you might think that's too obvious to mention, but many burger-serving restaurants that aren't massive chains get it wrong time after time). You can either pan-fry the patties with a quick brush of oil (use a grillpan) or, better, grill ‘em off. Either way, you don’t want to cremate ‘em, just seal them and let them cook through a little - there should be a tinge of pink in an ideal world. This is not true to the original, of course, which is a uniform grey. They’ll keep, covered, in a warm oven for a short while. Let’s face it, the chains will keep ‘em like that for hours...

Slice the buns in half and toast the cut faces, ideally under a grill. Slap a beef patty on a bun, slather with mushroom mixture and then top with a square of shiny, suspiciously un-emmental looking stuff from a packet. If you’re feeling wicked, slip one of these slices of wrongness under the patty as well.

Serve with chips, French fries or whatever you fancy. And tomato sauce. And mayonnaise. Even mix some Dijon with the mayo. But don’t blame us – you chose to follow this recipe and the post burger guilt thing is entirely yours to deal with.

Putting on the Ritz

2010-11-10T14:44:00.001+04:00

Emirates
EK 903/902 to/from Amman from Dubai
Web: http://www.emirates.com

We've reviewed Emirates' food before. It's perhaps unusual to include a review of airline fare on a food blog, but when you're sitting 'up front' you have a certain expectation and our last review, some while ago, found EK's food to be worthy of note on a restaurant quality test scale. It's linked here, BTW.

So a recent trip gives a chance to compare then with now. And oh dear, but there's trouble in paradise.

Emirates' Business class service is nothing less than excellent. The staff are friendly, the purser's got a tablet PC with guest preferences noted and everything's handled with a personal touch, with ease and smilingly at that. A glass of something before we take off? Oh yes. A glass of something with a dish of nuts as we break the cloud layer? Sure - but cut out the macadamias, eh? Many of those turning left rather than right (Zuckerburgs excepted) are old enough to not necessarily want the saturated fat punch those things pack.

Outbound
The menu's straightforward and sensible: mezze or a lobster and crab timbale; Gulf style biryani, tenderloin, prawns in tamarind or rigatoni - dessert's a yoghurt panna cotta. That's really taken care of Arab, European and Indian tastes and gives everyone a nice mix and match. I took the timbale and the tenderloin because I was feeling, well, straightforward.

The timbale was good - a little heap of shredded lobster and crab meat moistened with a touch of Mary Rose, a few clear, sweet cubes of pineapple jelly dotting the dish. Served with a lovely Craggy Range sauvignon blanc, it's a really nice starter.

Seared tenderloin beef fillet steak, as it's described on the menu, had me a little confused, it's like serving a seared breast of chicken breast. Served with 'a wild mushroom sauce, accompanied with roasted new potato skin on with herbs and sautéed free cut vegetables in a chunky tomato sauce' it was an overcooked little dish of strong and clashing flavours. Who would be mad enough to roast new potatoes for a start? What a terrible thing to do to them, sweet and clean as they are. And the steak was 'grise', the sauce burned on and the vegetables overdone to soft squishiness. It was simply a dish of over-baked stuff and really didn't live up to the description. It came with a lovely soft Torbeck, though.

The pannacotta was nice enough.

Inbound
Once again, excellent service. I am a huge EK fan - have been for years - and this is just what it's all about. Relaxed and stuck in a book, somehow I miss the menu being handed out but that's just dealt with nicely. The choice this time is mezze or smoked salmon; lamb loin meloubeh, stuffed chicken breast, pan-drived pomfret or seafood pasta. Dessert in all cases is banoffee pie.

The salmon is served with triangles of feta and a green bean and 'sun-dried tomato salad along with celery heart and seasonal green leaves' - it turns out that 'seasonal green leaves' means some frisee but that's okay. The celery leaves are hardly a heart but I like celery. The salmon runs red when you squeeze lemon on it, which isn't a great sign - it's served as three thick tranches and they're moist enough, although hardly small smokehouse fare - this is farmed rather than artisanale, if I'm not mistaken. It's actually hard, up there, to taste the difference - but it doesn't scream smoked and salmon, as good stuff will. The salad's nice, though. The Meursault was lovely, but a bit warm.

I took the pomfret as a main. The hostie didn't recognise 'pomfret' as a fish and we settled on 'the fish course'. Served with a 'clear ginger sauce and spring baton, accompanied by stir-fried noodles and wok-fried seasonal vegetables', I should have thought my choice through and avoided. this.

How can you sensibly expect 'stir-fried noodles' to survive being dished up, cooled down, re-heated and served without becoming a mass of slightly soft stuff? Wok-fried seasonal vegetables should come from a wok - it's simply unreasonable to expect them to survive being stacked in containers and kept for hours before being lammed into a tray heater and banged out five miles above the earth. This was borne out by the dish of over-cooked fish, limp vegetable, over-salted gloopy sauce and soft, flaccid noodles. I'm not sure if EK is at fault trying to make this work or if I was at fault ordering it. Either way, I couldn't finish the dish.

The banoffee pie 'garnished with white chocolate shavings' was actually garnished with milk chocolate shavings and was heavy on the foamy cream stuff and light on the 'offee'. I'm not sure that banoffee pie needs to compete with a strawberry compote, actually. How about a créme Anglaise?

Both menus promise a cheese selection that simply didn't happen. It wasn't the end of my world, to tell you the truth.

So is reviewing business class airline food the work of a total twat? Probably, but you're paying the money and the food's a major differentiator - along with the legroom, fancy screen, funky electro-seat and the service - and you're paying double the cattle class rack rate for it. The experience is one of being diverted from the tiresome process of frequent flying by being well looked after and fed with a menu of things that delight. So it's worth bringing it under scrutiny, IMHO.

The trip, the service and the many creature comforts delivered. Sadly the mains didn't.

Poached eggs with yoghurt.

2010-11-07T21:38:00.005+04:00

This is from The "Moro" cookbook.

A really quick and unusual dish from Turkey.

You will need:

About 12 fresh sage leaves.

1 garlic clove, crushed tp a paste with salt.

350 g home-made or greek yoghurt, thinned with 2 tablespoons milk.

75g butter

Large splash of any vinegar

4 very fresh eggs

1 teaspoon fresh Turkish chile flakes (Italian will do)

Salt & freshly ground pepper.

Caramelise the butter, heating slowly until the whey separates and turns golden brown, being careful not to burn the brown bits. Strain through a fine sieve and fry the sage leaves in the clear liquid until crisp, Lift them out, drain on kitchen paper and return the browned bits to the butter.. Set aside. Poach the eggs in the vinegar and water. While the eggs are poaching, mix the garlic paste with the yogurt. Check for seasoning. Spread 1/4 of the yoghurt on each of 4 plates plate, making a well in the middle for the egg. When the eggs are cooked the way you want them, lift them out, drain and place in the well., season with salt and pepper. Warm up the butter and and divide evenly over the yoghurt and eggs. Divide the sage leaves and chili flakes over the top.

Magical.

Serves 4

Puddings Aplenty!

2010-11-01T08:52:00.000+04:00

If you followed the Christmas Pudding Recipe, you'll have a big bowl of rich Christmassy stuff in the fridge. Now you're going to boil it. For six hours.

You obviously need to plan this so you'll be around for six hours. You'll need some tinfoil, some butter muslin, some greaseproof paper, a little butter and a 2 litre Pyrex bowl. Oh, and some kitchen string. Cut two rounds of greaseproof paper using the bowl's rim as a guide.

Butter the bowl well and slosh the pudding mix into it. Top this with the disks of greaseproof and then fold a double layer of muslin over the top. Tie this under the rim of the bowl with some kitchen string, making sure it's good and tight. If you're feeling clever, tie the last loop of string over the bowl to act as a handle - as long as the string's good and tight (and so won't slip over the lip and send the bowl tumbling), you'll have a handy burnt-finger saving handle.

Fold a couple of feet of tinfoil up to make a square pad and place this on the base of a largeish pan, adding the pudding. Ideally you should use a pan that leaves space around the pudding bowl because you're going to need to pour boiling water into the pan without soaking the pudding. The foil pad acts in place of an upturned plate in keeping the pudding clear of the hotter base of the pan. Boil up a kettle of water and pour this into the pan, turning on the heat and topping the pan up to a couple of centimetres short of the rim of the bowl. And set it to a gentle boil. Cover and find something better to do with your time, returning every 30 minutes or so to check and top up the water. Six hours later, stop doing this and let the pudding cool.

When the pudding's good and cold (probably the next day), remove the muslin and greaseproof and give the pudding a good poke with a sharp stick all over. Pour brandy over the top so that it soaks into the holes, then cover the pudding with another couple of disks of greaseproof and some more muslin. At this stage, I usually tie the muslin down with masking tape as its easier to remove it for topping up sessions.

Every week or so leading up to Christmas, pull the pudding out of the deep recess in your fridge and give it a slosh of brandy. Re-tie the coverings and pop it back again.

On the day, you need to allow two hours for the pudding to cook. Do the whole tinfoil pad/pan thing again and boil it up as before. Upend it on a warm serving dish and slip some nice warm brandy over the top. Ignite and serve with the lights out.

Christmas Pudding Time!

2010-10-25T09:36:00.003+04:00

What do you mean it "looks icky"?

That's what real food looks like when you don't have gangs of stylists

dancing around spraying it with gelatine and primping it!

The house smelled of Christmas last night - a little belatedly, I finally got it together and managed to gather the little collection of things that go into Christmas Pudding - that finest of seasonal treats.

The original recipe's linked here, but it makes two puddings and I just want the one this Christmas, thanks. So I've adapted it and given this year's version below. So here's a Christmas pudding recipe that'll serve a generous four and a reasonable six.

Ingredients

125g sultanas
125 currants
1/2 carrot, grated
1 small apple, grated
70g candied mixed peel, chopped
30g chopped almonds
1 lemon, zest and 1/2 the juice
1 orange, zest and 1/2 the juice
70g self raising flour
125g breadcrumbs
125g suet (Atora light is just fine)
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
175g muscovado sugar
1 tbsp date syrup
2 tbsp brandy
2 fresh eggs, whisked
250ml Guinness

Measure everything into a roomy mixing bowl (ideally one of those yellow-glazed ones you make your bread in!) and stir it up, giving it a good old slosh around to mix in well. Tradition chez McNabb dictates that everyone in the household has a stir. Cover it over and whack it in the fridge for a day or two.

I'll do the rest of it in a couple of days' time when I boil the pudding.

Tom Robbin's request for a last meal.

2010-10-11T18:37:00.005+04:00

Well, trying to breathe some life into this again after a long hiatus.

This is a simple sandwich, but so good that author Tom Robbins wrote that this would be his request for a last meal, should he ever find himself in a position to request one. And do do it right, he would request the makings, and do it himself. It may seem silly to have instructions for this, but because of the particular ingredients, only this sandwich has the required taste.

So, he would need.

2 slices of bread for each sandwich. In this case, the bread needs to be Wonder bread or similar - the synthetic, squishy, air "bread" everyone knows from school sandwiches. (the bread in the picture is not Wonder bread)

1 large very ripe tomato, preferably from your own garden, or a farmer's market. the quality and taste of the tomato is essential for this to taste right. It should be so soft that it has to be cut with a serrated knife. No plum or Roma tomatoes - you need a big one,

Hellmann's mayonnaise, salt & pepper

Slather both slices of bread with mayonnaise, salt and pepper to taste. Plenty of salt is good. Cut the tomato into thick slices (about 1 cm). Layer them on one slice, add more salt to taste, top with the other slice. Push down hard on the top of the sandwich with your hand or the bottom of a plate, to meld the juices with the mayonnaise.

Simple, quick, delicious.

Blackened Tuna

2010-10-05T17:44:00.004+04:00

Tuna is probably one of the best fishes for blackening and by wonderful coincidence, no way of cooking tuna is better than blackening. The thing to know is that blackening fish (or anything else) creates a terrific amount of smoke and possibly flames. Best done outdoors over a very hot fire. - it can't possibly be too hot. A red-hot cast iron frying pan is ideal but you probably will not get it that hot.

You need

4 tuna steaks, about 300g each, cut at least 2 cm thick (but better if thicker.)

100 ml white wine

3 dashes. Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon paprika (sweet or hot)

1 tablespoon black pepper

1 tablespoon salt

250 g melted butter

6 tablespoons softened butter

Cut off any dark parts of the tuna and discard.

Mix the wine, Worcestershire, lemon juice, and garlic in a broad bowl. Place the tuna steaks in this mixture for about thirty seconds on each side. Shake off excess marinade and reserve the tuna.

Strain the remaining marinade into a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce by half. reserve.

Place a large cast iron frying pan over the hottest heat source you have. The pan is ready when the surface is smoking.

Combine the paprika and pepper with the salt in a bowl. Coat both sides of the fish liberally. Spoon melted butter over both sides, enough for it to drip a bit.

Place the fish into the hot skillet. BE CAREFUL! There is a very good chance that this will flame up briefly, most definitely there will be a lot of smoke. Don't touch the fish for a minute, or you will break the crust. After a minute or so it will break free when lifted with a spatula. Turn it and cook the other side the same way. Spoon a little more butter over - It should be pink in the center.

To make a lemon butter sauce, reduce the marinade by half, then remove from the heat. Mount the softened butter in this sauce a tablespoon at a time until it is creamy.

Serves four.

Jambalaya (Cajun Syle)

2010-01-17T07:53:00.004+04:00

This is a brown jambalaya, as opposed to the red style usually found in New Orleans, which is Creole style and which contains tomatoes. You need a big cast iron saucepan for this. Jambalaya should never be stirred - turn rather than stir after the rice has been added. This prevents the grains of rice from breaking up. Most cooks turn jambalaya only two or three times after the rice is added, being sure to scoop from the bottom of the pot to mix the rice evenly with other ingredients. This one is in U.S. measures, being a U.S. dish, but this is normally a Euro blog.

6 Chicken thighs.

300 g smoked sausage.cut on the bias into 2 cm pieces.

3 cups long grain rice - uncooked (not basmati or any other asian rice.)

1/4 cup cooking oil

3 medium white onions - chopped fine

6 cups chicken stock.

1 tablespoon salt, or to taste (depending on how salty the stock is)

2-1/2 teaspoons granulated garlic

1 cup spring onions - chopped

1/2 cup green peppers

1/2 cup celery - chopped fine

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

Red pepper to taste

2 tablespoons Louisiana hot sauce

Fry the chicken in cooking oil until golden brown.Remove the chicken. Fry the sausage in the same pan until brown Remove the sausage and excess oil, leaving just enough to cover the bottom of the pot. Add the onions,celery and green peppers and fry until golden brown. Put the chicken and sausage back into the pot with the vegetables, and add 6 cups of stock (note the liquid level). Add the remaining seasoning and simmer covered until the chicken is tender. If necessary, add enough water to bring back to the previous level. Bring back to a rolling boil, and add the rice. Simmer uncovered for about 15 minutes - turn the rice. Cover with tight fitting lid, let steam for 15 minutes, or until the rice is tender. Turn the rice once more, and turn the heat off. Let stand for 10 minutes and then serve.

Jambalaya is more tasty if highly seasoned, so don't forget the red pepper. When adding salt, the liquid should taste a little too salty, as rice absorbs a considerable amount of salt.

6 to 8 generous servings.

Kingklip with Black Butter

2010-01-04T02:41:00.009+04:00

Kingklip is a Southern Hemisphere fish, found in South African waters (which you might expect, as “kingklip” is an Afrikaans word) and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America, where is is called congrio or cusk eel. This fish is available as fillets in supermarkets worldwide, but any firm white fish can be used, as long as it is not too oily. Also works for skate wings, if you like them. This does not take more than 30 minutes, including prep.

Ingredients:

1 Onion,

salt,

Bay leaves,

6 Black peppercorns,

Kingklip fillets, about 500g,

1 teaspoon capers, rinsed,

6 tablespoons butter,

1 tablespoon wine vinegar,

Chopped fresh flat leaf parsley.

Put 1 litre of water to boil, in a shallow saucepan, throw in the thinly sliced onion, a few bay leaves, the peppercorns and a teaspoon of salt. When it boils, slow it down to a simmer and leave it for 10 minutes. Slide the fillets into the simmering water, and cook for 10 minutes per 2 cm of thickness.

Melt the butter in a small frying pan, and let it foam and darken to a nut brown. you should be able to smell the nutty smell. Careful not to burn it. A stainless steel uncoated pan is best for this. Add the vinegar and a large pinch of finely chopped parsley, swirl, and immediately pour the whole lot over the fish. A squeeze of lemon and it is ready.

Moroccan Spiced Chicken

2009-12-28T13:15:00.007+04:00

So this is why you made the preserved lemons a few weeks ago. What? Didn't make them? OK, you can probably buy some. This one is complicated, labour-intensive and fussy. But it really is worth it. You could probably stretch it out over 2-3 days, and just make the chicken and couscous on the day you want to eat. The spice mix works well with lamb also.

Moroccan Spiced Chicken

Ingredients:

2 Fresh chickens, 1.5 Kg each, cut into 8 pieces (4 legs and 4 breasts)

4 cloves garlic

75 ml olive oil

12 mint leaves

Vegetable oil

75 ml Moroccan spice blend (recipe below)

200 ml bulgur couscous (method below)

1 cinnamon stick

20 Medjool dates

75 ml cup white wine vinegar

2 tsp ground turmeric toasted

2 tsp Aleppo chili

75 cup olive oil

150 ml water

75 ml cup toasted Marcona almonds

150 ml finely minced parsley

1 preserved lemon

150 ml caramelized chicken jus (recipe below)

salt to taste

Method:

Marinating and roasting chicken

1. In a mortar, mash 4 garlic cloves, 12 mint leaves, and a pinch of salt

until pasty. Add 75 ml of Moroccan spice blend, and the 75 ml olive oil and mix with pestle.

2. Coat chicken with mixture. Marinate overnight.

3. Season legs and breasts with salt.Coat two cast iron pans with vegetable oil and place the four legs in one pan and the four breasts in another pan with the skin side down.

4. Cook for 8 minutes, then place in a preheated 400-degree oven for 12 minutes (breasts) and 15 minutes (legs), or until cooked through but still juicy.

Method: Turmeric Dates.

1. Simmer dates in water for a few seconds, or until the peel can be easily removed, and do that.Cut dates in half.

Simmer 75 ml vinegar, 75 ml olive oil, 150 ml water, 2 teaspoons turmeric, and 2 teaspoons Aleppo chili, and let cool to ambient temperature.

2. Add the vinegar mixture to the dates, and place in a tight-fitting container so that they are one layer deep with the rounded half facing up.

Method: Bulgur couscous

1. Rinse the bulgur under cold running water for several minutes. Flake the bulghur by hand into individual grains.

2. Place the bulgur into a steamer with the lid off. Steam for 10 minutes on very high heat.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 so that you have steamed and flaked the couscous a total of three times.

(30 minutes total cooking time.)

Finishing the dish

Mound 150 ml of bulghur couscous into the center of an entrée plate,place warm dates and carrots around the couscous, sprinkle with toasted almonds. Place chicken over the couscous, drizzle chicken jus around the plate.

Enough for 8 hungry people.

Moroccan Spice Blend

Ingredients:

1 part toasted cardamom,coarsely ground

1 part toasted cinnamon,coarsely ground

1/4 part toasted cayenne, ground and toasted

3 parts toasted coriander, coarsely ground

3 parts toasted cumin,coarsely ground

3 parts toasted paprika, ground and toasted

1 part mint leaves, coarsely chopped

2 parts coarsely chopped garlic

2 parts olive oil

1/2 part lemon zest, peeled and bruised

1/2 part turmeric, ground and toasted

1/2 part fresh ginger, chopped finely.

Method:

Prepare all ingredients individually, mix together

Caramelized Chicken Jus

Ingredients:

500 g chicken wings, roasted in the oven until golden brown

grape seed oil

150 ml Marsala wine

800 ml blond chicken stock

75 ml peeled and diced carrots

150 ml peeled and diced shallots

2 garlic cloves

1 bay leaf

6 sprigs thyme

Method:

1. Caramelize the carrots and shallots.

2. Add the roasted chicken wings, garlic and Marsala, and reduce to a glaze. Add the blond chicken stock and simmer for one hour.

3. Strain several times through a chinoise. Place back over the stove top and reduce to one cup.

4. Add the thyme and bay leafduring the last five minutes

3. Place bulghur onto a sheet pan. Let cool slightly. Drizzle with a liberal amount of extra virgin olive oil, flake grains again. Season to taste with salt.

5. Add parsley, preserved lemon zest, 30 ml lemon juice, and additional extra virgin olive oil and salt to taste, set aside.

Thanks to Mark Sullivan for the recipes.

Picanha

2009-12-22T03:50:00.009+04:00

The piece of meat you see in the picture above is called Picanha. It is cut off the rump of the ox, from what is known as the rumpsteak. If it weighs more than 1.5 Kg, it is probably not all picanha, and has some rumpsteak attached. Known as a tri-tip steak in the U.S. and Canada, it is the most consumed cut in Brazilian churrascarias.

Unlike Argentina and the U.S. and Europe, Brazilians prefer their meat fresh, not aged, and seasoned only with coarse salt. (the one in the picture seems to have been seasoned with pepper, but that is not done) Aged meat is found in Brazil, but fresh is by far the most popular. The preferred state of doneness is very rare, but with the fat crisped. It is quite an art to gril one of these properly. Picanha is normally grilled over charcoal (sometimes gas) in one piece, on a rotating skewer, brought to the table on a skewer, then sliced with the grain in very thin slices. On the plate it is cut acroos the grain, so it has a tender, unusual taste. You can shoose exactly where you want the server to slice from. This means you can get a piece with crust on one side, or no crust - lots of fat or no fat. A delicious and worthwhile experience.

I had to post this picture, which is from the in-flight magazine of GOL, a Brazilian airline. It is a perfect example of good Brazilian grilling.

Soft Pretzels

2009-11-20T05:16:00.006+04:00

OK, this recipe uses caustic soda. So live dangerously! This is from Michael Ruhlman, a fine food writer, the picture above by his wife Donna. I used regular caustic soda, not even food grade, and it worked fine. If you are afraid to use cs, try a 1:10 solution of sodium bicarbonate, but they won't have the classic pretzel aroma and taste. You can get food-grade sodium hydroxide or cs from a chemist shop. The other interesting part is the 5:3 stanfard bread dough. With this you can make bread, pizza, focaccia (add some olive oil), and so on.

500g of GP flour

300 cc of water

This will give you a basic 5:3 bread dough

3 grams dry yeast, or slightly more if you need a quick rise.

12 grams kosher salt

4 teaspoons of food grade caustic soda dissolved in 750 ml of water

Vegetable oil or spray

Very coarse sea salt (or kosher salt) as needed

Non-reactive bakeware - glass, ceramic or silicone.

Mix the flour, water, yeast and salt until you have a smooth elastic dough. Cover it and let it rise to about double it's volume, 2 to 4 hours depending on how much yeast you've used. Beat it down manfully to release the gas and redistribute the yeast. Divide the dough into roughly 90-gram portions.

Preheat your oven to 210 degrees C.

Roll each portion into a cylinder about 15 long. Cover them with a towel while you prepare the caustic soda and ready some non-reactive baking sheets - don't use metal sheets, caustic soda can do funny things to it. Heat the cs solution in a pan that will allow you to dip your pretzels and retrieve them with a wide, slotted spatula. Coat the baking surfaces with vegetable oil.

After the dough pieces have rested for 10 minutes, roll them out into 30 cm long cylinders. To make the pretzel shape, lift either end, make one complete twist, then fold them over into the traditional pretzel shape. See the picture above. Bear in mind they will double in size.

When the lye solution is hot, just below a simmer, dip each pretzel in the cs solution for 10 to 15 seconds, then remove to your baking pan. Repeat with the others, sprinkle them with salt and bake for 12 to 15 minutes.

Morrocan Preserved Lemons

2009-11-16T05:35:00.011+04:00

I will be posting a Morrocan recipe that needs these in about 3 weeks, so make these now (or not), but you will be sooooorry if you don't! For an authentic Moroccan dish there is no alternative to the delicious soft pickled lemon flavor. With a little forward planning have your own pickled lemons. It’s an easy and satisfying job preserving your own. The time consuming part is the wait after preserving them until they can be used.

You will need:

5-6 Lemons - to fit a large clear jar

½ kg coarse salt

1 Cinnamon stick

3 Bay leaves

¼ cup olive oil

Bottled water - to fill the jar

1. Wash the lemons and cut them into quarters from the pointed end up to within 2cm of the stalk end. Gently open them without breaking them apart, remove any visible pips, pack them with salt and then:

2. Put 1 tablespoon salt into the large sterilized clear jar.

3. Put in the lemons and press them down, adding more salt and spices between the layers. Push the lemons down firmly to release some of the juice and to make room for the other lemons. Fill the jar up with spring water, leaving enough space for the olive oil.

4. Cover the top with oil and seal the jar. The oil is to seal and protect the lemons from contact with the air.

5. Leave the lemons in a cool dry and dark place for 4-6 weeks before using.

The lemons don’t need to be refrigerated after opening, but it’s a good idea to put another thin layer of oil on the top to keep the air out. Between the acidity of the lemon juice and all the salt, nothing scary is going to grow in there, so you don’t even have to properly seal the jars, but best to be safe. They can be kept for up to a year.

Thanks to bbcgoodfoods for the picture. my jar looks horrible.

Tres Leches Cake

2009-11-15T16:47:00.006+04:00

It is not certain what the origin of this cake is, but it is very popular in Central America and thus also in the large Central American communities in the U.S. Probably one of the most.delicious.desserts.ever. If you are not into baking, the easier way to do this is to buy a large sponge cake and give it the 3-milk treatment. That way, it is quick and easy. Do try this. Add some dark rum to the icing if you are feeling naughty.

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

5 eggs

125 ml sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

50 ml milk

1 can evaporated milk

1 can sweetened condensed milk

50 ml heavy cream

500 ml heavy cream, for whipping

3 tablespoons sugar

Preheat oven to 180 degrees.

Coat 23 cm X 33 cm (9 x 13 inch) pan well with butter

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl.

Separate the eggs.

Beat the egg yolks with 100 ml sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. Stir in the milk and vanilla essence. Pour the egg yolk mixture over flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. With mixer on, pour in remaing sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry. Fold the egg white mixture into the other mixture very gently until just combined. Pour into the prepared pan and even out the surface. Bake it for 35 to 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Turn the cake out onto a rimmed platter and allow it to cool.

Or, Instead of all the above, buy a large sponge cake, square, if possible.

Combine the condensed milk, evaporated milk, and 50 ml heavy cream in a jug. When the cake is cool, pierce the surface with a fork all over (about 100 times). Slowly drizzle as much as you can of the milk mixture over the cake. Try to get the edges of the cake as well. Allow the cake to absorb the milk mixture for 30 minutes. Whip 500 ml heavy cream with 3 tablespoons of sugar until thick and spreadable.

Spread over the surface of the cake. Decorate the cake with whole or chopped maraschino cherries. Cut into squares and serve.

Prawn Tempura

2009-11-12T11:26:00.003+04:00

Here’s another dish which I was sure I had posted a while ago but I don’t seem to have done so. Time to rectify.

I love making this, the prawns are so easy to throw together and yet you get a big "oooh and ahhh" factor when you serve them up.

The key to good tempura is a very light and lacey batter, this is not fish and chips Brit style, but what you want is a thin light coating on the prawns. To best achieve this you should:

• Make the batter up just before using, don’t let it stand around too long. Also don’t whisk it too much, lumpy is okay.

• Use VERY cold water and add a couple of ice cubes as well. The contrast of the very cold batter and very hot oil is explosive and that creates the lacey texture

• The batter mix will be quite runny, and will appear to only very thinly coat the prawns. This is perfect so don’t worry.

• If you want to substitute the cold water for cold beer or cold fizzy water as some recipes suggest please do. Apparently the bubbles also help to make a lighter batter but personally I’ve not been able to tell the difference.

Traditionally tempura is served with a dipping sauce made with something called ‘dashi’ which is a kind of stock made with dried fish flakes and seaweed. I have never been able to find this in Dubai (if any readers have come across it please do share) and so I use a made up sauce below.

This is a recipe for Prawn Tempura but obviously it is exactly the same for vegetable tempura.

You will need:

Lots of prawns, get the fishmonger to de-shell them but leave the tails on.
Lots of oil, at least 800ml. I tend to use peanut oil, but sunflower etc is okay.

For the batter:

1 egg yolk
125g plain flour
3 tbsp cornstarch
A pinch of baking soda
300ml really cold water
Ice cubes

For the dipping sauce

2 tbsp soya sauce
2 tbsp mirin or sherry
1 tbsp ketyap manis (Maestro Alexander explains what that is here )
And then you need to:

Add the dipping sauce ingredients together in a small saucepan and bring to a gentle simmer. Let gently bubble for 5 mins and then pour into a little bowl.

Add the oil to a wok and bring to a high heat. I turn my hob up to 8 (out of 10).

Make up the batter by adding the water (or beer) to the egg yolk and then mixing in the flour, cornstarch and baking soda. Add ice cubes, don’t over work and set to one side.

Wash, then dry the prawns. Dip into the batter, let the excess run off and carefully drop into the very hot oil. Don’t overcrowd the oil, do a couple at a time and don’t stir them around too much. The prawns will cook very quickly, certainly in less than 2 minutes. Remove gently, place on kitchen towel to drain a little and then arrange on a large platter for serving.

And that, as they say, is that!

Cooking Rice

2009-10-29T11:35:00.006+04:00

I meet so many people who are intimidated by cooking rice and I frequently see bad advice about it with unnecessarily complex procedures. You know, rinse the rice twice in cold water before letting it stand and dancing around the bowl three times naked before draining it and so on and so on – all laced with dire warnings balanced with reassurances that by following the author’s method, you’ll never cry again.

Here’s how I cook rice. It works for me every time and doesn’t involve more steps than a visit to the Priory. It can’t go wrong.

Sling basmati rice in pan, around 60g per person. Boil kettle. As kettle comes to boil, turn on gas under pan so that when you slosh in the boiling water, it froths and bubbles in the pan as it hits the hot metal. There’s no particularly good reason to do this, I just like the drama of it all. Now half-cover the rice and let it boil for 12 minutes. Don’t let it boil over, otherwise you’ll have to clean up the hob.

Test a grain – go on, be a devil – it should just bite a little bit but not have a chalky core. Now drain it in a sieve (pour off any froth first before you drain it) and put the sieve resting in the pan with the lid on it. Do whatever else you need to do, it’ll wait there for you for a good hour or so quite happily. When you’re ready to serve it, refill the kettle and pour the boiling water all over the rice, tapping it a couple of times to help it drain and loosen up. It will do this quite easily.

Serve. No fuss, no messing, no tears, no drama.

Cucumber Curry Salad

2009-10-18T16:06:00.004+04:00

Cucumbers are mostly water, so this should be made shortly before serving, or the cukes will become pulpy and floppy - no crunch. Based on a cooked Srilankan curry, This is a little unusual (to me, anyway), quick and easy. Goes well with fish, or can be served as a non-traditional mezze, Sorry, no picture of the dish. Use your imagination

2 tablespoons crême fraiche or double cream with a little lemon juice added.

2 tablespoons plain thick yogurt

1 teaspoon "curry powder"

1 medium-sized seedless cucumber, peeled if the skin is thick or waxed. If you can't find seedless, cut it in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Slice it thinly.

Salt & pepper.

Toss the cucumbers with a little salt, leave in a bowl for 30 minutes. Rinse and drain.

Mix together the cream, yogurt and curry powder. Toss with the cucumber slices.

Adjust the seasoning. Serve immediately. If you let this stand, the cucumbers will continue to lose water and your salad will become a soggy mess.

Fried Halloumi

2009-10-18T07:40:00.003+04:00

Oh, the charm of fresh slabs of creamy, white fried halloumi with those scorched brown lines in it – warm and soft, the slight tang of the raw cheese transformed by its cooking.

Fried halloumi, 'halloum meshwe' in Arabic, is traditionally part of a Levantine mezze. Like much of Levantine cuisine, everyone claims it as their own, but it's thought that halloumi is 'properly' Cypriot. Halloumi dates back to the Byzantine period and that great mix of ideas, thought and culture that took place in the Eastern Mediterranean and traditionally has flecks of mint in it - mint was originally used to store the cheese and keep it fresh.

There’s no great secret to fried halloumi. Slice the cheese, about 1cm thickness or just under (if you slice it too thin, it’ll get messy when you cook it) heat up the grill pan and place the slices on the hot pan. Fry them for a minute or so before turning them over with a spatula, using a swift, confident stroke and uttering a sharp ‘Ha!’ just to let the cheese know who’s boss.

Some people apparently dust the cheese slices with flour. I think this is unnecessary myself.

It’s nice served with drinks as well. It’s also great barbecued and gives everyone something to nibble on while you’re getting all alpha male with the slabs of meat.

Risotto Cakes

2009-10-14T09:15:00.005+04:00

So you’ve cooked risotto and there’s some left over - despite you having over-indulged massively, which is how risotto nights always turn out in my experience. Despite my best efforts to be a reasonable consumer of this most unctuous of rice dishes, I always overdo it. But I always fall victim to my own innate greed and make too much. Catch 22 for fatties.

Freeze it. When the time comes, defrost it and make little balls of risotto and then flatten them into patties (I’ve actually used a falafel maker for this, which works quite well but I have to confess it was a meretricious application of Levantine food technology. You can use your hands).

Dip each patty into a mixture of breadcrumbs, mixed herbs and a little salt and pepper. Slip a good spludge of olive oil into a small pan and fry off the patties, taking care not to turn them too early or mess about with them too much as they are sort of friable as well as being fry-able.

I serve them with a delicious Italian sweet chili pickle I picked up at the Organic. You can serve ‘em with any sort of contrasting tomatoey condiment you like. Or maybe a spiced peach salsa. Now there’s an idea…

Warning, this idea doesn't work with HMHB's Creamy Risotto With Prawns. The prawns stick out of the cakes...

Cauliflower Gratin

2009-10-10T09:00:00.000+04:00

I originally made this as a side dish and think that it would make a nice vegetarian dinner. That theory will never be put to the test, however, as I'm far too find of eating dead things.

Ingredients

1 cauliflower, approx 1kg, in florets
1 red pepper, chopped
6 tomatoes, chopped
1 stick celery, chopped
½ onion, chopped
1 tsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 slices dry bread
2 tsp mixed herbs
1 tsp salt
50g grated parmesan

In a saucepan, fry off the onions in the oil until they’ve softened a little, then add the garlic, followed after a couple of minutes by the red pepper, celery, tomatoes and salt. Turn the heat to low and let this mixture cook away for 20 minutes or so.

In the meantime, drop the florets of cauliflower in salted, boiling water and par-boil them for five minutes or so. Drain them and then place them in a lightly oiled ceramic oven-proof dish.

Tear up the bread and whizz it to make breadcrumbs, adding in the herbs and parmesan. Pour the tomato mixture over the cauliflower, topping it with the breadcrumb mixture. Place this in a GM6/200C/400F oven for 30 minutes.

Singapore Chicken Rice

2009-10-08T21:51:00.006+04:00

In Singapore, conversations always turn to where the best place is to eat this perennial favorite. Originally from Hainan Island in China, this dish is all over Singapore. My personal favorite is Lau Pa Sat at Newton Circle (Circus). Quick and easy to make also.

INGREDIENTS

For the chicken

2 Kg boned chicken thighs

3 cloves garlic

2 (3 cm) pieces fresh ginger root, peeled

2 green onions

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons sesame oil

For the rice

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 tablespoon sesame oil

2 shallots, finely chopped

5 cloves garlic, minced

1 (3cm) piece fresh ginger root, peeled and chopped

250 ml chopped cilantro (coriander leaves)

500 ml cups chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon salt

400 ml long grain rice, rinsed and drained

Garnish

cilantro sprigs

sliced green onion

1 cucumber, thinly sliced

2 fresh tomatoes, chopped

Chili sauce to taste

DIRECTIONS

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Crush 3 cloves of garlic and 2 pieces of ginger, and add them to the pot. Tie the green onions into a knot, and place them in the pot along with 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Add the chicken

Bring to a boil, then cover and remove from heat. Let stand covered for 40 minutes While the chicken is cooking, heat the vegetable oil and 1 tablespoon of sesame oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Fry the shallots,

ginger, and garlic in the oil until fragrant. Add the coriander and rice, and cook, stirring until toasted. Pour in the chicken stock and season with salt. Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer until rice is tender and 'steam holes' appear in the surface of the rice, about 20 minutes.

When the chicken is done, remove it from the pot, and place it under cold running water to tighten the juices. Rub the outside with sesame oil, and chop into pieces. Place pieces on a serving platter. Serve with the rice, and garnishes on the side.

You don't win friends with salad

2009-10-06T18:28:00.001+04:00

After many years wasting lunch hours on mean order-in meals from local malls and over-greased noodles from the sole, sit-down restaurant within walking distance of my office, respite was delivered in the form of Jones the Grocer.
Let me be plain: despite the friendly demeanor of the staff, the swank deli and grocery is overpriced, over hyped and over harried.
The last time I ordered a take-away sandwich, the staff took twenty minutes to pick the sandwich, cut the sandwich, put the sandwich in the box and charge me Dh32 for it. There was only one other person in line.
During another unfortunate lunch venture, I took my box lunch back to the office to find they had given me a beef and guyere on mustard instead of the mozzarella and tomato baguette. I hate mustard. I ate it anyway.
Oh, and don't be fooled by the artisan breads and fine quality ingredients. As my investigation of the chevre and sun-dried tomato has proven: Jones side-loads the sandwich.

That's right. From the outside it appears to be generous and plentiful. It promises a messy expanse of creamy cheese and tart tomato. But take a peek inside. It's all rocket.
I spent Dh32 for a slice of bread and arugula.
And then I did it again.
And again.
Why? Why do I do this?
Because it's this, or the Lebanese bakery where I once found a hair in my Lebneh. Because it's this or the Chinese food restaurant where I'm sure I detected the faint hint of ketchup on the sweet and sour balls.
Afghanistan restaurant is always a cheap and plentiful option, just as long as you don't mind waiting for your roast chicken while staring at the floor to avoid the gaze of a very angry looking Pashto man who seems deeply unimpressed by your sartorial choice of a knee-length skirt. And I just can't face another meal in the "family section" of the tasty curry joint where the cab drivers take their lunch, cowering behind the laminated room dividers in the back of the windowless upper floor.
Oh, for the first year, I tried it all. They were all tiles in the beautiful cultural mosaic of my expatriate experience.
Now, I say: save it for the tourists. I want a baguette. And I'll pay three times its worth to get it from somebody who will look me in the eye.

Rich Minty Lamb Stew

2009-10-01T10:00:00.002+04:00

Here's another lamb dish to follow on from Alexander's delicious one below.

Both Spinneys and Park'N Shop have marinated lamb kebabs in a sweetish mint sauce. They are supposed to be grilled obviously but I don’t think the quality of meat is good enough for grilling and I find that they are always quite tough. However, I have now found another use for them!

The marinade is quite sweet and very minty but they really do make a great tasting rich stew.

I have taken to adding anchovies to anything to do with lamb, I find it really seems to bring out the best of the lamb's flavours. I know it seems a really strange combination, and god alone knows what inspired the first person to give it a go, but I promise you it is a marriage made in heaven. Whenever I roast a lamb leg I stab it all over and insert slivers of garlic, sprigs of rosemary and anchovy filets into all the little holes and it tastes fantastic! Trust me, I'm in insurance.

You will need:

4 skewers of marinanded minty lamb
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1 onion, chopped fine
4 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 tsp fennel seeds
4 medium tomatoes
3 anchovy fillets
100ml red wine
100ml beef or lamb stock
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp tomato paste
Handful of chopped flat leaf parsley
½ tsp pimento
Pinch oregano

And then you need to:

Preheat oven to 400F/200C

In a heavy based casserole dish over a low heat glug in some EV olive oil and add the onions, garlic and carrots with a pinch of salt and the fennel seeds. Leave to gently sweat for about 5 mins.

Meanwhile put the tomatoes in a glass bowl and pour boiling water over them. Leave for about a minute, then remove and slip off the skins. Cut into quarters, remove the pith and seeds (discard) and then chop the flesh into small pieces. Add to the casserole dish.

Once the tomatoes have broken down into a bit of a paste remove the lamb cubes from the wooden skewers and throw into the pot.

Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a gentle boil. Once it is gently simmering place in oven and leave with lid on for at least an hour, but longer is much more betterer. Give it a stir every so often and if it looks to be drying out a bit pour in a little boiling water.

It really is as simple as that.

Serve with peas or French beans and some lovely garlicky roasted new potatoes with their skin on.

Loin of Lamb with garlic, lemon & rosemary rub

2009-09-30T08:40:00.006+04:00

When you find a cheeky little lamb loin staring up at you from the shelf in the Organic, it’s time to grab it and rush home to cook this dinner party pleaser – you need the skin on the loin, but not if it’s a great big fatty lump of a thing, hence the choice of the Organic’s lamb rather than Spinneys’.

I served this one on a bed of wilted Thai celery leaves (because I could, that's why) and with sautéed potatoes and peas, but you can do what you want. Each loin is cut into two, giving you pretty much what you’d serve up with a 4-bone rack, but just without the bones getting in the way.

Ingredients

2 lamb loins, each @400g
2 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
6 cloves garlic, roughly grated
4 lemons, grated zest
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
2 tbsp olive oil

Red wine sauce

½ onion, finely chopped
1 tomato, skinned, deseeded & chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ stick celery, chopped
300ml red wine
300ml good stock
25g butter
1 heaped tsp flour
1 tbsp olive oil
Fresh peppercorns

Mix together the rosemary, zest, garlic, salt and pepper. Oil a foil-lined baking tray. (I like to line it with foil to cut down on washing up because I’m bone idle). Cut each of the lamb loins in two and brush them with oil, sprinkling a little salt and pepper on them as you do so. Heat a grillpan and quickly sear the meat side of the loins, then turn them to cook the skin side down for a little longer, about 2-3 minutes. Spread the herb mixture over the loins on the meaty side as the skin side is cooking, adding a bit to the skin side too as you remove them to the baking tray to sit skin side up. These can sit around for a while until you’re ready to finish them.

For the red wine sauce, fry the onion, garlic and celery gently in a saucepan until everything’s nicely softened, then crank up the heat a little and add the tomato and then the stock and wine, then leave to cook away, partially covered, for 20-30 minutes over a medium heat, before blitzing it with a hand blender. Heat it for another 10-15 minutes, then strain it. Mix together the butter and flour to make a roux and add this to the sauce, re-heating it when you’re ready to serve.

I’m also fond of adding in a teaspoon of fresh pink peppercorns at the last minute.

Heat the oven to GM7/220C/425 and bake the lamb loins for 15 minutes (20 minutes for well done just a hint of pink showing and 25 minutes for cremated, Lamb Grise á la Goute de Femme Irlandais). Let them rest for five minutes in a warm place then serve ‘em up!

Boeuf en Daube Provençale

2009-09-28T09:00:00.000+04:00

When I was a kid, my parents took me to eat at a posh restaurant (The Pheasant at Chalfont St Giles, if I recall) and I chose 'Scampi Provençale' from the menu. So I was precocious, sue me.

I loathed it - I knew what scampi was, it came fried in breadcrumbs with mayonnaise on the side and these dolts served it in a dish filled with tomatoes and red peppers and stuff! Yew!

I think my tastes may have matured a little since then.

Provençale means in the style of Provence and really, as far as I can see, in classic French cookery, means "with a bit o' tomato and maybe the odd mushroom and olive, if you must some red pepper and perhaps some 'erbs". It doesn't mean 'all sloshed with a red and raw sauce, tomato and pepper dominated with lots of bitter olives'. It's subtler than that.

Uber-cooks Elizabeth David and Margaret Costa's Boeuf Provençal recipes inspired me, Auguste Escoffier's repelled me ('cut up cold boiled beef and stew it in tomatoes and stuff. You can chuck in some olives and mushroom if you want' would be a reasonable precis). I've messed around with quite a few versions of this recipe quite a bit over the years and I love this, the result of all that messing.

All you need is a little time in hand but, like most smashing recipes, you can actually do all the prep the night before and then just store it in the fridge before taking it out to come to room temperature and then doing the oven baking the next day. As a party dish, this is perfect - you can simply forget about it until you're ready to serve it up. For a dinner party, I'd do it with some fresh boiled vegetables enlivened with a herb or two (dill seed for carrots, mint with peas, that sort of idea) and a really rich cream, truffle oil and butter laced potato mash. But that's just me...

The crushed garlic in this recipe is literally crushed with the blade of a knife so that it remains sort of intact, but in smashed up lumps rather than in garlic-crusher mush. If you know what I mean. If you can get your hands on good quality bouquets garnis, use these instead of the dried herbs and leave a comment telling us where you got ‘em. If you don’t live in the UAE, in Provence, for instance, don’t bother with the note, smartarse. As for olives, black are best but if you happen to only have green at hand (like the night I took this photo), I think St Peter may possibly overlook your transgression at the final reckoning.

You’ll also need some greaseproof paper, a casserole and an oven. I find a second glass of wine helps, too.

Ingredients
600g beef in small cube
70g smoked lardons or pancetta cubes
2 carrots, roughly chopped
2 largeish tomatoes, deskinned, deseeded & chopped
2 onions, sliced
6 cloves garlic, crushed
8-10 olives, quartered
250g button mushrooms, halved
2 bay leaves
2 tsp dried herbes de provence
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
250ml red wine
150ml good, strong stock
Olive oil

Heat your oven to GM2/150C/300F.

Heat up a good slosh of oil in a large frying pan and fry off the beef over a high heat. You’ll want to do this in batches, three or four of them, replenishing the oil as required. Space each batch of beef out in the pan so that it fries fast and hot and doesn’t ‘sweat’ and end up stewing. Turn it over when one side has browned, to seal it all around.

Sling the cooked beef into your casserole and sprinkle in the flour, stirring it in to coat the meat. Add some more oil to the pan (and, if you’re feeling ‘naughty’, a good sized chunk of butter) and fry off the onions, stirring them to stop them sticking and burning. Bring the mushrooms and then the lardons into the picture and stir fry them so that the onion softens and the mushrooms start to brown. Add the garlic and keep stir frying for a short while until everything’s looking browned (but not, please, burned), cooked and generally ready to heft into the casserole.

At this stage, I’d suggest hefting it into the casserole.

Add the carrot, the stock and the red wine, the seasonings and the herbs to the casserole and give it all a good stir. Place a sheet of greaseproof paper between the base and lid of the casserole and trim it around with a pair of scissors, then place it in the oven and leave it for 2 ½ hours while you do something more interesting, like compare that second glass of wine to the rest of the bottle (channeling Floyd, I know).

At the end of cooking, fling in the olives and stir them in, letting them heat through for a few minutes while you pour out the red and warm the plates.

Personally, I like to serve this with fresh vegetables (cauliflower, beans, peas) and chunks of warmed French bread with butter. But, as I said above, for a dinner party I'd do a rich, buttery mash.

Crispy "Seaweed"

2009-09-23T13:00:00.000+04:00

Alexander’s post below got me thinking about pak choy and a couple of things came to mind.

First of all we do have another pak choy recipe on the blog so check it out here .

Secondly the most common way the Chinese cook this vegetable is one of the most simplest, literally heat a wok over high heat, add 1 tbsp groundnut oil until smoking, throw in 3 chopped cloves of garlic and ½tsp sea salt, stir for 15secs, throw in roughly chopped pak choy, fry very quickly for 2 mins, tip out onto plate and serve.

Another recipe is for that old Chinese restaurant classic ‘Crispy Seaweed’, which isn’t seaweed at all but fried shredded pak choy. Thought I’d share.

You will need:

1kg pak choy
1 litre groundnut oil
1 tsp sea salt
2 tsp granulated sugar
50g lightly toasted pine nuts

And then you need to:

Heat an oven to 120C/250F

Wash and dry the pak choy thoroughly.

Remove the green leaves from the white stalks. Roll the green leaves up tightly and then finely shred them into thin ribbons. You can use the white stalks in a stir fry vegetable recipe.

Spread them out on a dry baking tray and place in the oven for about 10 mins. Remove and leave to cool.

Heat a wok over high heat, add the oil and when hot deep fry the greens in 3 or 4 batches. It will only take them about 30 seconds to turn crispy (don’t let them brown), remove immediately and place on kitchen towel to drain.

Once all cooked place into large bowl, sprinkle the salt and sugar and give it a good toss. Add the pine nuts and serve.

Pak Choi

2009-09-21T15:52:00.005+04:00

I'm a sucker for pak choi (or bok Soy or whatever else you want to call it). You can sometimes find it lurking in Spinneys' local herbs section, although it's frequently a slightly sad version of what, when it's fresh, is a vibrant green and white, crunchy bunch of leafy wonder.

The Greenhouse Supermarket (of which I have written reams and no, no emolument has been received by the author in consideration) imports pak choi from Thailand twice a week and these days are frequently the signal for a treat - stir-fried pak choi. Achingly fresh, nestled in threes and fours in their sealed plastic wraps, these grand, vibrant kings of Asian greens will be joined in the pan by whatever else my schoolboy with pocket money visits yield - perhaps Thai broccoli, celery leaves or garlic flowers, a handful of zingy, fresh Thai basil and chopped coriander. I chop the pak choi up and throw in some garlic, half a large red onion, thinly sliced and usually have a sauce of wine, soy sauce, perhaps a little fish sauce, sugar and a teaspoon of cornflour. The vegetables are stir fried until they have just started to wilt, then the sauce goes in to thicken and finish.

I'll usually do something Asiatic to chicken breasts to go with this, marinating them in lemon grass, garlic, ginger and chili or something similar, before grilling them and serving them on a plate of steaming green, crispy and fresh-tasting pak choi.

Iftar at Baker and Spice

2009-09-02T09:00:00.001+04:00

Baker & Spice, Dubai
Shop #16, Level 2, Souk Al Bahar, Old Town, Dubai (opp. Burj Dubai)
Tel: 971 4 425 2240
Open 08.00am to 11.00pm

I don’t ‘get’ vegetables. Or salads, come to that. Green things in general. My wife rails at me and describes me as the antithesis of a vegetarian. Fair enough.

So if I tell you that one of the things that impressed me most at Baker & Spice was the fruit, I’m not sure who was the more surprised, she or I.

But to backtrack. We were fortunate enough to have received an invitation to ‘Preview’ the Ramadan Iftar Menu – “Baker & Spice style” just before the Holy Month actually started, and as the event coincided with the last night of a UK-bound visitor, along we went. The location is certainly impressive, on Level 2 of the Old Town complex, front and centre on the lake and opposite the Burj Dubai. Between us and it is the Dubai Fountain. Sit on the terrace and you’ll have a ringside seat. You won’t eat a thing and conversation is rendered nigh-on impossible by the music and noise of massive quantities of water cascading back onto the surface of the Lake – that display is loud. No gentle relaxing water feature this.

That was outside. But I’m very happy to report that what was on display inside was every bit as spectacular, and a lot more edible. I can’t vouch for the regular offering, but this place presents itself with an engaging unpretentiousness, a refreshing antidote to the massively over-presented ‘international buffet’ found in so many of our 5-star establishments. There was food everywhere – big bowls of fruit so fresh they scented the air, great platters piled with lamb, quail, crab, chicken, salads. Waiters with trays of fruit juices and cups of lentil soup. The original feast for all the senses.

Baker & Spice is an operation with outlets across London, in Europe and now here in Dubai. The company produces what it calls ‘Soul Food’, and adheres to the mantra ‘organic / local / fresh / homemade’. On the evidence of this visit, they certainly achieve something radically different to the usual bland spread. Talking to manager Tim Hocks it is clear that their passion for ingredients runs deep indeed – it is a process that takes time, finding and supporting local suppliers that share the same obsession with quality and flavour. Tim was delighted to have found a chicken producer in Oman who understands ‘free range’ to mean his flock have their own field in which to forage and pens to rest in, a veritable chicken utopia.

There are elements of the Slow Food movement here, shades of locavore, a holistic, hedonistic approach that results in a style of food and presentation that is unashamedly homemade, rustic, substantial, singing with flavour, and above all, honest. It is the sort of food you would be pleased to have made at home on a good day, served up on shared platters and presented family style.

Reservations? I’d be happier if they managed to sort out a license and serve some appropriate oenological accompaniments. The central communal table is a bold statement of intent, but those it doesn’t suit will find plenty of more conventional tables for twos and fours. And this obsession with ingredients doesn’t come cheap. But the food we enjoyed on that night was some of the freshest, most flavoursome and satisfying I have had in this city in several years. Recommended.

NOTE
This review contributed by Fat Guest Jonathan Castle, AKA EyeOnDubai

Fitzpatrick’s Bar & Restaurant

2009-08-31T18:34:00.005+04:00

Fitzpatrick’s Bar & Restaurant
Rockmarshall, Jenkinstown
Dundalk, Co. Louth
Ireland
Tel: + 353 42 937 6193
Web: www.fitzpatricks-restaurant.com

Eating in Ireland is truly a roller-coaster ride that lurches easily from (if you’ll excuse the term) feast to famine. When it’s good, it’s very, very good but when it’s bad it’s usually so bad that it’s an experience in itself. Sometimes the simplest things delight – bacon, cabbage and potatoes, the national dish, sounds awfully plain, but at its best it’s a revelation: a golden ‘floury’ spud, tranches of steaming pink, tender bacon and a pile of slightly crunchy, slightly salty cabbage cooked in the bacon water and running every gamut of green from the pastel light green of sun shining through winter surf to the deep green of the fresh fields in the spring. Parsley sauce is a love it or hate it experience, but I love it, curly parsley chiffonaded into a butter-rich creamy thick sauce that drops rather than pours.

And then there are the awful disasters – these days from Irish chefs treading the same well-worn paths of wretchedness that the Brits have already blundered along - stupid cack-handed melanges of ‘Thai-style’ spices imposed on ingredients that deserve more respect, awful attempts at food with ‘molecular’ influences and, unforgivably, ‘nouveau Irish’ food – piss-poor attempts to serve classic Irish dishes in plates of clashing flavours and colours that revolt rather than delight.

This, then, is the gastronomic wilderness that is Ireland post ‘Celtic Tiger’ - it’s a dangerous place, people, a country in transition...

You will always find Cork’s Ballymalloe, the mother-lode of Irish cookery, a place of wonder. But I found an almost equally wonderous thing near Carlingford – a pub that looks so cod-Irish from the road that anyone but an American would shudder and pass it by. And yet the locals flock there in their hundreds, Les Routiers has slapped its mark on the place and so many awards decorate its walls you can almost see them in the sea of mad memorabilia that covers every surface – horizontal and vertical alike. And I include the ceiling – you have to duck at times to avoid being brained by low-hanging beams festooned in brass pumps, irons, cameras and, well, just stuff really.

Fitzpatrick’s pub should be a disaster. It’s famous, bang on the tourist trail and decorated outside with flowerbed jokes, bicycles, baths and bedsteads. They pour Guinness with a flourish of shamrock on the ‘head’, for God’s sake.

Eat there. It’s expensive (you’d better be ready to shell out €30 for a main) but I loved it. When food makes me laugh, I know I’ve ‘arrived’ – and I laughed my way through dinner at Fitzpatrick’s.

We ate in the restaurant (a small area to the back of the huge, labrynthine pub) which has its own separate kitchen and a ‘local’ chef. The main kitchen had a chef from Newry, but we decided not to take the foreign food. Service to begin with was a bit patchy – our Sancerre came warm and with a lot of mucking about with the glasses, but eventually things settled down and the Fleurie that followed was a delight. The wine list is basic, smartly compiled and good.

Breads were offered around, Irish brown, white, garlic and others – and then the kitchen sent out a tiny bowl of vegetable soup as an ‘amuse geule’ – a little taste of warm, mushroom-dominated thickness that was just right for the rainy night.

I took a starter of pan-fried scallops and black pudding, purposefully courting disaster. I have always hated ‘surf and turf’ dishes, believing (perhaps perversely) that if God had intended beef and shrimps to be in the same place he’d have arranged that rather than separating the two environments quite so effectively.

It was really good. It would have been stunning and world-class if the scallops had been slightly less cooked, had spent a couple of minutes less on the pass under lamps. But the black pudding was rich, crumbly and served with a creamy slightly sharp sauce that did it proud, almost a béarnaise but not quite. I was grinning by now, and it wasn’t the excellent Sancerre alone. Other starters taken included breaded mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise, which were pronounced good but would have been better fried and served dry rather than buttered as they were. Odd that you could get a black pudding scallop starter right and muff a breaded mushroom dish, but there you go.

My main was classic stuff – an 8oz fillet steak served on a celeriac mash (note no horseradish addition to the mash, thank God. Horseradish mashes are an invention of the devil) with a black truffle sauce and foie gras. I thought I’d go for the light option, obviously.

It was impeccably executed – a delight. The steak beautifully done and the little decorations of foie gras were fried off so they were crisp outside and yet wobbled, the sauce was rich and dark, pungently contrasting the rich, buttery mash and it was all topped with crisp onion rings in a light batter. The fries that came along with it were fat, crisp and floury when cut. A bowl of crisp, green spring vegetables with a rich cream sauce and another of new potatoes in butter arrived for each pair of diners. Others had sirloin steaks, a plainer serving of huge and beautifully cooked steak and then there were plates of fresh sea-bass.

Desserts came with an attendant cardiologist. I passed and selflessly ordered an Irish coffee (yup, a shamrock of brown sugar was dusted on it. I forgave them) but others took silly things like a walnut and banana crumble tart: rich, warm and gloopy, swimming in a crème Anglais, apple tart and ice cream and the ‘special’, organic strawberries and strawberry ice cream served in a little brass bucket alongside strawberry compote and cream. It looked outre, chi-chi and crass and tasted divine.

We went off to the bar for icy glasses of Tyrconnell (Ireland’s finest single malt and a whisky that eclipses much that Scotland offers, IMHO) afterwards. Because if you’re going to be this indulgent, you might as well go mad.

Good wine, outstanding food and the insanely opinionated Carrie - part entertainment and part expert guide to the menu, womens' hurling and the delights of working in a restaurant with the boyfriend (‘the boyfriend’, the barman, was of course stopped and shown off to us to his horror) meant that we all agreed our evening in Fitzpatrick’s was a one-off, a memorable evening of excellence in a convivial, warm place filled with laughter, cheer and delight.

Dishwasher Salmon

2009-08-26T18:46:00.005+04:00

I thought I would do something unusual here. Poaching fish in the dishwasher is a virtually foolproof way to shock your friends, prepare a succulent meal and do the dishes -- all at the same time. I tried it yesterday, trust me, it works. Pretty sure you can do this with other fish as well. You could probably also use ziplock bags, one small one for each piece

Dishwasher Salmon

1 tablespoon olive oil

4 (180g) salmon fillets, about 2 cm thick.

4 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heavy-duty aluminum foil

Cut two 30 cm square sheets of aluminum foil.

Oil the shiny side of the foil. Place two fillets side by side on each square, and fold up the outer edges.

Drizzle one tablespoon of lime juice over each fillet. Season with salt and pepper.

Fold and pinch the aluminum foil extra tightly to create a watertight seal around each pair of fillets. Make sure the packet's airtight by pressing down on it gently with your hand. If air escapes easily, rewrap.

Piquant Dill Sauce - This sauce will add some bite to your catch.

1 tablespoon butter

1 leek, white part only, finely chopped, then thoroughly washed

2 spring onions, minced

1 jalapeno or other green chili, seeds and membranes removed, finely diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

125 ml chicken stock

150 ml lightly packed fresh dill, stems removed before measuring

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

A little salt to taste

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

3 tablespoons sour cream

Melt butter over medium heat in saute pan.

Add leek, shallot, jalapeno and garlic, sauteing about five minutes or until the leek and shallot are translucent but not brown. Reduce to medium heat and add chicken stock. Simmer, uncovered,15 minutes. (Adjust heat as required to maintain simmer.) The liquid should reduce by half.

Remove from heat and let cool.

Transfer to a blender or food processor and add dill, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Puree until smooth. Reserve and reheat just before serving. Stir in sour cream at the last minute.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO COOK A WHOLE FISH!

Place fish packets on the top rack.

Add dirty dishes and lemon-scented soap. This optional step is not recommended for novices. However, as long as the salmon’s tightly sealed in its aluminum foil packet, it won’t absorb any soapy taste or smell.

Set dishwasher to the “normal” cycle. Modern dishwashers have “economy” and “cool dry” settings, which are undesirable since they conserve heat. However, on the other end of the spectrum, the “pots and pans” setting tends to overcook the fish. Run salmon through the entire wash-and-dry cycle — approximately 50 minutes for most models. When cycle’s complete, take salmon out, discard foil, place one fillet on each plate and spoon a generous serving of dill sauce on top.

From winexmagazine - Bob Blumer, thanks Bob

Classic Sandwiches 6 - Banh Mi

2009-08-26T02:21:00.005+04:00

The Vietnamse have many versions of this. Easy to make at home, especially if you keep the ingredients in the fridhge. The kind of liver pate that comes in a plastic sausage works just fine.

1 piece of ginger, about 3 cm x 3 cm, peeled and chopped fine

3 cloves garlic, chopped fine

75 ml soy sauce

75 ml rice vinegar

1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon coriander seed, ground.

2 tablespoons brown sugar

4 chicken breasts sliced into thin strips

4 slices of cooked ham

2 carrots, grated

1 piece of daikon, about 8 cm long, grated

5 spring onions sliced into long strips

Coriander leaves, washed

Mayonnaise

Liver pate

1 baguette, cut into 4 sections

Directions:

Combine the first 8 ingredients in a gallon ziploc bag. Mush around with your hand to mix well. Add the chicken and allow this to marinate for 30 minutes - 2 hours.

Grate the daikon and carrot first and put it in a small bowl and cover it with rice vinegar for 30 mins. Saute the chicken in a non-stick skillet on really high heat. Let it brown. Heat the baguettes up in the oven or a toaster oven just until the crust gets warm. Slice them down the middle and put mayonaisse inside on one side and the liver pate on the other. Now load the chicken on and then carrots, daikon, onions, ham and cilantro. Good stuff.

The Green House Supermarket

2009-07-26T18:10:00.004+04:00

We got an impromptu tour around the amazing complex behind Sharjah’s Green House Supermarket recently. The old supermarket, which used to be off Gamal Abdel Nasser Street, has now been closed down and moved to the front of the Green House Warehouse in the Sharjah Industrial Area. It's not a million miles from the London Dairy Ice Cream factory, in fact.

What do you mean, you thought it came from London? Next you'll be telling me you didn't know it was made with palm oil - cheap saturated vegetable fat used as a substitute for the more expensive cow-derived cream.

The Green House Supermarket is an occasional pleasure for me, a wander around this eclectic collection preparatory to a night's mega-Thai cookup and a freezer-packing session. The Green House stocks the strangest and most amazing variety of things, from extension leads through to mothballs as well as a brilliant array of Asian foods and utensils. From heavy granite pestles and mortars through blue-patterned Thai ceramics, woks and dim-sum steamers to black sticky rice, Thai curry pastes, bean curds, fresh lotus root and frozen frogs, the Green House has got the lot.

But the fresh vegetable section is where this place really wins out – Thai hot basil, peppercorns, chilis, kaffir limes, garlic flowers, pandan leaves, Thai coriander root and crisp, succulent pak choi and banana flowers are laid out in boxes, all air-freighted from Thailand. And they’re all draw-droppingly fresh, vibrant green and crunchy. The pak choi alone is worth the trip.

The Green House is actually the front end of a high quality food distribution organisation that not only supplies the UAE’s Thai restaurants with speciality ingredients, but also supplies supermarkets and hotels with a range of French and European foodstuffs. I hadn’t realised how extensive this side of the business was until we swung by and Sarah got spotted by the lady in the supermarket – who turned out to be the mother of a child Sarah had taught and half of the the husband and wife team (he’s Greek, she’s Thai) behind the operation.

As a consequence, we got treated to an unintended (and delightful) whistle-stop tour ‘round the back’, huge freezer rooms packed with boxes of food, cool rooms stacked with French cheeses, pallets of extra virgin olive oil, yoghurts and creams, milks and sauces, specialty flours and salts in a maze-like succession of rooms, walk-ins, cold stores and freezers.

It’s an impressive operation – but the most impressive bit for me remains the amazing fresh Thai vegetables, herbs and spices. Spinneys can barely manage to keep the fresh local herbs it sells from being a wilted mess and yet Green House brings them in from Thailand and manages to keep them so fresh you could just close your eyes and be in the street markets of Asia.

So if you want to create a Thai dinner party that has everyone gasping at your brilliance, buy great fresh ingredients - and you'll not find fresher than here. People travel from as far away as Al Ain to shop at this odd, poky little emporium of all things Thai.

You can find the Green House Supermarket by driving up Sharjah’s ‘main drag’, Al Wahda Street and turning right directly after the Crystal Palace Showroom – it’s down the road 100 yards or so, just in front of the Alena Warehouse. Alternatively, follow this handy Google Map link or find it here on Wikimapia! If, after all that, you're still lost, call 'em on 06 5332218.

The author asserts he has received no emolument from the proprietors of the establishment eulogised in this piece. Honest.

Notes - Marmalades

2009-07-21T20:49:00.008+04:00

1, Thick rind marmalade made with bahia oranges

2. Dark thin rind marmalade made with navel oranges

3. Lime marmalade, made with tahiti limes.

I have been experimenting with making marmalades; where I live, marmalade is all imported and ridiculously expensive, if one can find it. Oranges and limes, on the other hand, are dirt cheap, and there are many varieties available, ranging from unbelievably sour to tooth-achingly sweet. Strangely, though, lemons are unheard of here.

Most recipes for marmalade call for removing the pith from the peel, and slicing the zest into very fine strips. The pulp and seeds are also scraped out and placed in a muslin bag to cook with the zest to extract the pectin, without which the marmalade with be too runny..

The marmalades also tend to be very sweet, even when made with Seville oranges. I decided to go a different route, not too sweet, and keep most of the bitter pith. So far it has worked out great. These are made in 90 minutes, with only 20 minutes of actual work involved. I always make these in small batches. The spices added are optional - one can't taste them, but they do add depth of flavor. these are not quite right yet, probably due to variations in the local fruit, but we are getting there.

So here is the developing recipe for a rustic country style maramalade.

4 Oranges or 8 limes

750 ml water

30 ml corn syrup (optional, but it stops crystallisation)

a pinch of salt.

1 stick cinnamon (optional)

4 green cardamom pods (optional)

Sugar to taste.

Cut the ends off the fruit and discard, cut them in half and then into thin (2 mm max) half-moons. discard any seeds Place in a heavy 1.5 l pot and cover with water. Add salt and spices, if using and bring to a simmer, cover and leave for about an hour, stirring occasionally, and making sure the fruit is always submerged. Add water if necessary.

After this time the pulp should have dissolved and you will have a thin jam. the fruit skins should be nearly translucent. If you need to, reduce until the liquid just covers the fruit. Add the corn syrup, add sugar to taste. Simmer 10 minutes longer. Adjust the sugar if necessary. Let it cool, remove the spices if you used them, spoon into containers. Keep it in the fridge.

If you want to make caramelised marmalade, keep on the heat after adding the sugar, until it turns the colour you like. this only works with oranges, taste-wise.

You could try adding shredded ginger if you use limes, but to me pure citrus is best.

Prawns with Tomatoes, Chilies and Pepper

2009-07-15T02:05:00.005+04:00

Sorry, I have been adrift in the bush with no internet connection. More about that later.

I nicked this Thai recipe from the Seattle Times. It is quick and defintely a keeper. It also was scoffed up before I could get a picture. (camera was still in my luggage) Try it, you will like it.

Ingredients.

60 ml of vegetable oil

30 ml minced garlic

2 red bird's eye chilies, chopped

1 teaspoon of tomato paste

12-16 jumbo shrimp, peeled, deveined, with tails on

3 tablespoons of sugar

1 teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper

75 ml Asian fish sauce

100 ml fish stock or water

1/2 ripe tomato, diced

1 spring onion, sliced

1 small handful of cilantro leaves, minced

Then do the following:

Place the oil, garlic and chilies in a wok over medium heat; stir-fry until fragrant, 30 seconds. Add the tomato paste, shrimp and sugar. Toss to combine. Add the pepper, fish sauce, fish stock and tomato. Increase the heat to high; heat to a simmer. Cook until shrimp are cooked through and turn pink, about 2 minutes.

Transfer the shrimp to a serving platter; cook the sauce to reduce, about 2 minutes. Pour over shrimp. Garnish with spring onion and cilantro.

Makes: 4 servings

Pan Fried Salmon with creme fraiche and horseradish

2009-07-10T13:12:00.001+04:00

This is a delightfully easy mid week supper dish, you can get this on the table in less than ten minutes with a little bit effort. I served this to Lovely Wife with a small bowl of buttered new potatoes tossed with chives and a simple green salad.

You will need:

4 salmon fillets, skin on
200ml crème fraîche
3 tsp creamed horseradish
Juice from ½ lemon
Splash of tabasco
1 tbsp chopped chives

And then you need to:

Lightly score the skin of the salmon. This will stop it contracting when fried. Generously grind sea salt on the skin and leave it for a couple of minutes.

Heat a frying pan over lowish-medium heat, add 1 tbsp EVOO and when hot place salmon in skin side down. You will cook the salmon for about 80% of the time on the skin side. Fry gently for about 6 or 7 minutes, flip over and cook the other side for about 2 minutes.

Whilst fish is cooking mix together the crème fraîche, horseradish, lemon juice, Tabasco, chives and salt and pepper.

Place a spoon of the creamy sauce in the middle of a plate and place the salmon fillet on top. Serve with the extra sauce in a bowl on the table.

Caramelised Apple Tart

2009-07-07T14:13:00.002+04:00

This utterly divine soft set tart is something you might find in Normandy. In fact, whilst the recipe doesn’t call for it, the judicious use of calvados, that divine Norman spirit, at just the right time would be a winner here. You might even consider putting some in the tart as well.

This tart will feed 8.

You will need:

(For the sweet pastry)

225g plain flour
150g unsalted butter, softened
1 level tbsp caster sugar
2 egg yolks beaten with 1 tbsp cold water
Pinch salt

(for the filling)

900g Cox or Granny Smith apples
1 cinnamon stick
50g lightly salted butter
110g granulated sugar
200ml crème fraiche
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract

You also need a deep, fluted tart tin about 23cm in diameter.

And then you need to:

First make the pastry. Chuck all the pastry ingredients into a food processor and whizz until the mixture forms crumbs. Tip out and bring it together by hand, don’t overdo it though, light touches required.

Pop the pastry into a plastic bag and chill in the fridge for 45 minutes. The pastry, not you.

Once rested roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a circle at least 30cm diameter and carefully lift into the tart tin. Press gently into place and trim the edges.

Chill again in the fridge for a further 20mins. Heat the oven to 200C/400F

Line the pastry case with baking paper and fill with baking beans or uncooked rice, and bake blind on a baking sheet for 15 minutes. Remove the paper and the beans/rice and bake for a further 5 minutes. Remove from the oven.

Meanwhile prepare the apples. Peel and core them and chop into eighths. Place half of them in a saucepan with the cinnamon and 1 tbsp of water. If you have used granny Smiths also chuck in a small tsp of sugar. Cover and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes until softened.

Remove the cinnamon and beat the apples to a puree.

Then melt the salted butter in a frying pan, add the sugar and allow to bubble together to form a fudgy caramel sauce, then continue to cook it over a lowish heat until it darkens to a rich toffee colour. Add the remaining sliced apples and toss them to coat. It will go a bit messy at first but as the apples release their juices it will all go smooth again.

Cook for about 5 minutes then set to one side.

Spread the apple puree over the pastry base, then lift the apple slices out of the caramel sauce and arrange over the apple puree. In a separate bowl whisk together the crème fraîche, the egg and the vanilla extract, then add the caramel sauce. When well mixed pour over the apples in the tart.

Bake on the centre shelf of the oven for 20 to 30 minutes until the filling is softly set and golden on top. Allow to cool a little before serving.

Yummo!

Celebrating nationalism with cheese

2009-07-05T11:50:00.009+04:00

For those of you not well acquainted with the minutia of fine Canadian cuisine, one meal stands above the rest: a dish beloved by all as a symbol of our fair land. The Scots have Haagis and the Australians have Vegemite. We have Kraft Dinner, or, to use the the parlance of our times, KD.

Although more aptly described as pan-North-American, KD is a meal-in-a-blue-box favoured by single moms, children and college students. It contains about a serving of macaroni pasta and a pouch containing powdered processed cheddar cheese. The idea is to cook the pasta and then combine the cheese with butter and milk. The effect is a pasta covered with an orange sauce that resembles that nacho cheese stuff that comes out of the pump at 7-11.

To those not raised on KD, it is also absolute and total shite.

However, with Canada Day behind us, I have been craving comfort food. As KD is not available in the UAE, there has been only one recourse -- to resort to the Joy of Cooking. In that tome of all things traditional, I have learned to reconstruct the dish from its most primitive origins, using actual non-chemical ingredients.

So, dear readers, I present.

Highbrow KD

Ingredients:

-two cups of macaroni pasta

-two tablespoons of butter

-two tablespoons of flour

-one cup of milk

-two cups of grated cheese (cheddar, or as you like)

-spices: salt, pepper, bay leaf and paprika.

-one clove of garlic

Method:

First, get a casserole dish about six to nine inches across. Take a clove of garlic and spread around the dish's sides. Preheat the oven to about 350. Boil the pasta. Remove from heat and drain when it is just a little short of Al Dente.

In a pot, create a classic white/béchamel sauce. Take two tablespoons of butter and melt. Remove from heat and add the flour. Add back onto heat and add the milk, stirring constantly. Add salt, pepper, paprika and a bay leaf (All optional) and stir over low heat until the sauce thickens to the consistency of mushroom soup.

Include two cups of grated cheddar cheese (Orange cheddar to be traditional. White cheddar to be classy). I've also been known to add other cheese sitting around and in need of use ie; leftover feta, mozerella or gouda works well. I imagine Brie would too.

When combining the cheese with the bechamel, use a low heat and spend as little time as possible letting the cheese melt, otherwise it may become grainy. Take the cheese sauce off the element. Make sure the pasta is well drained and then mix with the cheese sauce until well coated. Put into the casserole dish. Top with bread crumbs and more cheese. Bake in the oven until the pasta is bubbly and the top is brown and crispy, about half an hour to 45 minutes.

Enjoy with crusty french bread. To get all Canadian, pair with a light beer. If you can't find Canadian beer, just take a German one and water it down.

Classic sandwiches 5 - The Hamburger

2009-07-02T01:56:00.005+04:00

The strange thing about hamburgers is that few people really think about them, though they are arguably the most consumed single item on earth. (let's leave India and China out of that equation) And they are probably the most ill-treated food as far as care in preparation is concerned. So let's give it some consideration.

Opinions about hamburgers are like *noses*, everybody has one. The general consensus, though, is that the patty should be crusty on the outside and rosy on the inside. It should be made from freshly ground beef, not ground scraps, with a fat content of about 15-20%. Use enough salt, beef needs more salt than you think.

The best way to get that crusty outside is on a very hot surface, like a cast-iron frying pan. Just sear it on the outside, and then finish cooking in the oven at 190° (a toaster oven will do) To prevent it from ballooning while cooking, make a dimple with your thumb in the centre. You could squash it down with a spatula, but then you lose all the juice. The bun to meat ratio by volume should be 1.5:1, and the bun should be light and fresh with a crackly thin crust. Toasting it will do that for you.

Anything else you put in there, like lettuce, pickles or tomato, should be fresh crisp and tasty.

Here's my version: It seems like a lot of trouble, but the result is not your Mickey D's mystery burger.

For each burger:

Enough freshly ground beef (for good flavour use 50% skirt steak and 50% top round, you may have to add some fat) to make a patty 2.5 cm thick that fits the bun.

One fresh hamburger bun made from brioche dough (or whatever kind you like) cut in half.

2 Iceberg lettuce leaves.

1 large slice of tomato (1 cm), or enough smaller one to cover the bun.

Ketchup, mayonnaise or mustard to taste.

Salt & pepper.

1 slice of your preferred cheese (0.25 cm), optional.

Get your cooking surface very, very hot. Season the beef, mold the patty into a flat round without handling it too much, and make a dimple in the top with your thumb. Oil the griddle. Sear until you have a crunchy crust, flip, do the other side. If you are using cheese, drape it over the top, place the patty in a toaster oven at 190° for 3 minutes, this should bring it to medium rare. Experience will tell you when it is the way you like it. In the meantime toast the bun halves, spread with your condiment(s) of choice. Place the lettuce, pickle and tomato on the lower half, salt & pepper, top with the meat, the other bun half and that is it.

Minted Pea Soup with Mint Pesto Crostini

2009-06-30T17:17:00.003+04:00

I made this last Thursday for a dinner party and it was a huge hit with the punters. I think I’ll do it again.

Soup is such a great starter if you are having a dinner party; it can be made way ahead, it doesn’t ruin if people turn up late (a very common occurrence in Dubai) and it’s easy to get into bowls and to serve.

I like my soups thick and creamy and although this might look like it belongs in the winter warmers category it has a really light and summery taste. This recipe is really worth giving a go.

You will need:

(for the soup)

50g butter
1 large onion, peeled and quartered
1 large leek, washed, trimmed and chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled
1 medium potato, peeled and chopped into smallish dice
½ tsp curry powder (or garam masala)
500ml good quality chicken stock
200g frozen peas
200g crème fraiche
3 tbsp chopped fresh mint

(for the pesto)

A good sized handful of fresh mint leaves
2 tbsp pine nuts
1 clove garlic peeled
20g fresh grated parmesan
4 tbsp EV olive oil
1 French baguette loaf

And then you need to:

Melt butter in large saucepan and add onion, garlic, leek and the potato. Throw in some sea salt. Cook, covered for about ten minutes over a lowish heat until the vegetables are slightly softened.

Add the curry powder and give it a good stir. Add the peas and the stock and give it another stir.

Cook, covered, at a slow simmer for about 20 minutes. Pour into a food processor, add the crème fraiche and the mint leaves. Whizz until a smooth texture is achieved.

Pour back into the saucepan and when ready to eat heat through over a low heat until very gently bubbling.

Whilst all this is going on make up the mint pesto.

Put the mint leaves, pine nuts and garlic in a food processor and whizz. Add the grated parmesan, some seasoning and with the motor running slowly add the olive oil. Scrape out into a bowl and put in the fridge.

Cut four thin slices on the diagonal from the baguette and put on a baking ttray. Place in hot oven for about 10 mins, turning them over after five minutes. Don’t forget to put on the timer!

When you are ready to serve, ladle the soup into warmed bowls. Spread a good dollop of the pesto onto each crostini and gently place on top of the soup.

Beef Wellington Recipe #2

2009-06-28T10:26:00.004+04:00

Alexander already has a fabulous Beef Wellington recipe on TFE but I thought I would throw in my version, which of course is soooo much more betterer than his. Hmmm.

Anyway, this is a pretty much direct steal from Gordon 'Effing' Ramsey with a few of my own add-ins.

Before I start I just want to have one little lecture. This recipe is all about MEAT, it’s showcasing beef in a very opulent and sophisticated way, and so you need to make sure that the beef you buy and serve is of the very best quality.

In Dubai the beef available to us is pretty dire so we need to make the most of a bad lot. I am very fortunate that I have access to some of the best beef I have ever tasted through a great SA chum who brings it up from home but that avenue is closed at the moment sadly due to nonsensical local custom restrictions. Anyway, you need to splurge here, get the very best beef fillet that you can afford, a nice long thick piece, tied if necessary into a good log shape. Make sure the butcher has trimmed off any membrane or fatty bits. I work on approx 175-200g of beef per person.

You will need:

700-800g beef filet
500g puff pastry
2 large Portobello mushrooms
200g button mushrooms,
3 cloves of garlic
6 slices parma ham
1 heaped tbsp English mustard
3 tbsp brandy
Flat leaf parsley

And then you need to:

Put the mushrooms and the garlic in to a food processor and whizz to a coarse paste.

Scrape out the mushrooms into a large dry frying pan (no oil) add 1 tbsp of brandy and over a medium heat cook the mushroom mixture until it is dry. Add the chopped flat leaf parsley, seasoning and put to one side.

Lay the beef fillet on a board and grind a generous amount of black pepper all over. In the same frying pan heat 2 tbsp olive oil over high heat and sear the beef one all sides. Cook it pretty quick, just sear and colour the outside of the beef.

When almost done splash in 2 tbsp brandy and set light to it. FLAMBE!

Remove the beef and set to one side. Scrape any bits and pour the juices into a small pan in which you are going to make the port wine sauce.

Brush the English mustard over the beef.

Roll out the pastry into a large rectangle on a lightly floured surface.

Lay out the parma ham in the middle of the pastry in slightly overlapping layers. With a palette knife smear the mushroom mixture on top of the ham. Lay the beef on top and roll the pastry around the beef making sure it is covered first by the ham and mushroom layer. Trim off any pastry not needed and neatly tuck the ends in and lay on a lightly oiled metal baking tray with the seam side down.

Brush the pastry with beaten egg yolk and then bake in a hot oven (400F/200C) for 40 minutes. This will produce beef medium rare.

I serve this delicious beef with these potatoes and with green beans cooked in a thick tomato paste. I also make a small bowl of port wine sauce to go with it.

Port Wine Sauce with Redcurrant Jelly

2009-06-28T10:17:00.002+04:00

This is a pretty good standard sauce and goes very well with both beef and lamb.

You will need:

200ml port
200ml red wine
400ml good beef stock
1 carrot, chopped in half
4 cloves of garlic, no need to peel
1 onion, peeled and quartered
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
3 bay leaves
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tsp Worcester sauce
2 tbsp redcurrant jelly

And then you need to:

In a small saucepan combine everything apart from the redcurrant jelly.

Over a low heat reduce to about half.

Strain through a fine sieve and return to the saucepan. Add the redcurrant jelly and heat until all incorporated.

Serve.

Grilled Pork Tenderloin Argie Style

2009-06-26T16:01:00.007+04:00

From Francis Mallman's new book "Seven Fires" - Grilling the Argentine Way. If you like grilling, get this book. Throw away your other books on grilling.

Try this outside (it's smoky) on a cast iron griddle. ( a Lodge 30 cm ridged pan works well) This is so striking and delicious. For so few ingredients it is deeply complex. First the burnt-ness of the sugar (not incinerated just burnt) really punctuates the other flavors. There is a bitter, fruity floral aspect to the orange peel (and its olive oil), and that floral herbal aspect is heightened by thyme. Then there's that funky thing you get when you bite down on pork, and as you naturally breathe out through your nose, it's a wonderful mix of herbal, floral, meaty.

Pork Tenderloin with Burnt Brown Sugar, Orange Confit, and Thyme

2 boneless pork tenderloins, about 500g each

6 pieces orange confit, about 5 cm each (see below)

30 mlfresh thyme leaves

15 ml coarse salt (or to taste)

45 ml light brown sugar

30 ml oil from the orange confit

Lay the pork tenderloins on a work surface. Flatten with the palm of your hand. Tear the orange confit into 2.5 cm pieces and distribute over the top surface of the meat. Sprinkle with the fresh thyme and half the salt. Sprinkle the brown sugar on top and pat it down firmly with your hand. Drizzle with 30 ml of oil from the orange confit. Preheat the grill plate (not a perforated grill) or a large cast iron griddle over medium heat until a drop of water sizzles.

Using a wide spatula, lift the pork tenderloins one by one and invert them sugar side down onto the griddle. Do not move them for 5 minutes. If the sugar begins to smell unpleasantly burned, adjust the heat by moving the griddle and lowering the flame. When the sugar side is well browned, turn the tenderloins. Cook on all sides for 10 to 15 minutes more, or until done to taste. The internal temperature should be 60 degrees for a rosy pink. If you dont like rare pork, take it up to 70 degrees (Celsius) Remove the meat to a carving board and allow to rest, tented with foil, for 10 minutes before slicing.

Serves 6

Orange Confit

4 oranges

3 bay leaves

12 whole black peppercorns

500 ml plus 45 ml evoo

200 ml cup white wine

30 ml coarse salt

Cut the oranges in half. Squeeze the juice and reserve for another use. Place the squeezed orange halves in a 3 litre saucepan. Add the bay leaves, peppercorns, 3 tablespoons olive oil, white wine and water to cover. Add salt and bring to the boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook until the orange peel is tender, about 25 minutes. Remove from the heat and allow to cool in the liquid.

When cool enough to handle, drain the oranges. Tear the peel into rough strips about 25 mm wide. Place a strip of orange peel skin side down on a work surface and, using a very sharp paring knife, scrape away every bit of the white pith.

Place the strips of orange zest in a bowl and cover completely with extra virgin olive oil. This will keep, covered tightly in the refrigerator, for at least a week.

To Profit or not to Profit; that is the question.

2009-06-22T15:56:00.005+04:00

This is the second in an occasional posts about wine from our very own resident expert Alasdair.

I’m sure many of you have heard about some people making lots of profit from buying and selling fine wine. The music and theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of many examples. Here was a very rich and successful amateur wine collector, who one day decided that he should sell part of, and in the end most of, his vast wine collection. I remember reading all about it in the Evening Standard, how he had spent many years building up his collection, to the point that it became more than he could ever possibly consume, even with regal-like and daily and frivolous entertaining.

Of course Lord Lloyd Webber had not amassed this cellar himself. Oh no, he was far too busy making another 20 million quid writing Cats. He had a full-time wine buyer, who for 60-odd thousand quid a year, (a goodly wage at that time), made offers on Lloyd Webber’s behalf for highly sought after parcels of super-rare wine, attended all the important Sotheby and Christie wine auctions, and buttered-up sales directors at all the various wine companies who imported the best kit. What a job! Until of course LW decided to stop buying and starting selling.

When I started out in the wine business it seemed as though most people bought wine to drink. Of course, I hear you say – that’s what you’re supposed to do. The only people I knew who at that time during the late 80’s purchased fine wine with the intention of keeping it for 3-5 years and selling it for a much higher price were the wine traders themselves – it was like a badly kept secret with more and more people finding out and doing the same.

I clearly recall the founder and buying director of Bibendum Wine, Simon Farr, diligently buying up all the stock of Le Pin 1982 that he could get his hands on. There was a pallet of the stuff, 50-odd cases, stored in the Bibendum duty-paid warehouse above their Primrose Hill offices.

Simon figured that here was an extraordinary wine, made in tiny quantities, no more than 500 cases at that time, that was positively cheap given the reports circulating the trade that it was the next Chateaux Petrus. Whenever a case came up for sale Simon would contact the owner and buy it. After storing the stock for some years he sold the lot for a handsome profit. But the best way to buy the world’s best wines is to buy them as soon as they become available, and in the case of Bordeaux wines, that means buying them ‘en primeur’.

This basically involves buying the wine before it has actually been bottled and packed into cartons. The vintage 2008 en primeur campaign is currently underway now, with buyers and merchants frantically communicating the ‘opening’ prices for the Grand Cru Classe Bordeaux wines. The best Bordeaux wines, the Premier Grand Cru Classe, inevitably rise in price immediately as buyers all over the world scramble to secure some stock of these half dozen or so wines. To give you an idea back in April 1985 a case of 1985 Le Pin was offered for sale during the early stages of the en primeur campaign for only 500 quid – 10 years later it was changing hands for 12K quid.

Nowadays, with wine investing becoming more widespread and seen as a relatively safe investment vehicle it has become necessary to hold the wines for at least 5 years to hopefully realise a healthy profit. Even better though, to keep it for up to 10 years if you can – this will inevitably result in your stock becoming rarer, and therefore valuable, as consumers around the world drink the limited stock available.

So there is money to be made through wine investment, especially with red Bordeaux, and there are many private collectors all around the world holding ‘investment’ stock. I can assure you from personal experience that this is the case. But in order to maximise your chances for robust profits and as a way of lowering your risk, here are some useful tips:

Always try to buy ‘en primeur’, or as soon as the wine is released by the Chateau or producer. Opening or ‘release’ prices are always the lowest.

Always buy the best wine you can afford, ideally Premier Cru.

Always have it stored by a reputable and established wine-storage specialist.

If you feel the need to take some advice from a wine trader, then do so.

And of course, let’s not forget two more excellent reasons to ‘invest’ in some fine wine – it’s free of UK capital gains and inheritance taxation, and, in the happy knowledge that you may have become so rich while your wine has been aging in the cellar and consequently you do not feel like you need to sell and release the profit, you can drink it! What can be better than that?

posted by Alasdair.

Dim Sum

2009-06-16T12:47:00.001+04:00

Dim Sum
Sing Woo Road, Happy Valley Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2834 8893

If you ever have the great fortune to find yourself in Hong Kong, Pearl of the Orient, then you absolutely must head down to this incredibly popular and renowned restaurant.

Located in Happy Valley, a short walk from the racecourse, this little restaurant serves dim sum all day and all night. Dim sum is traditionally eaten at lunchtime so it is pretty rare to find a place in Hong Kong serving it all day.

The restaurant was very popular when we lived in Hong Kong and on a return trip eight years later it remains as full as ever so they are doing something right. The restaurant does not take reservations, you have to turn up, give your name to one of the girls running around and then wait your turn. On a Saturday or Sunday lunchtime you may have to wait for up to an hour.

Inside this small restaurant tables are packed in whilst booths run down one wall. There are lots of carved rosewood tables, panels and chairs and old Chinese cigarette adverts adorn the walls. It’s all very 1930’s Shanghai.

Gweilos are given a big picture book with all the dishes in it and you place your order by filling in a little card by ticking the numbers that correspond to the pictures you like! The food is absolutely fabulous; the dishes probably lean more towards northern Chinese cuisine but all the old favourites are there, and they are very, very good.

They have a good selection of teas, though Gweilos tend to be served a pot of jasmine unless you ask for something different. You should try the ‘bo lay’ or the ‘tie guan yin’.

The food comes at you pretty fast and furious, lots of little bamboo steamers filled with divine morsels or little plates with their fried pastries or dumplings. Once you have managed to get your table you can sit and linger as long as you want, and you can keep ordering more if the mood takes you. Even though this is considered expensive for dim sum you will be very pleasantly surprised how cheap it is, certainly compared to eating out in Dubai.

This place is one of my most favourite restaurants in the world, a trip to Hong Kong would be wasted if you didn’t stop in here for lunch. Trust me on this!

Classic Sandwiches 4 - The BLT

2009-06-07T12:34:00.004+04:00

This is so simple and classic, it is almost needless to say. But , for the record...

75 g lean bacon, rind removed

60 ml good-quality mayonnaise

5 ml Dijon mustard

8 slices white bread, toasted on one side only.

175g iceberg lettuce, shredded

2 large tomatoes, sliced

Grill the bacon until crisp, then transfer to a plate lined with paper towel to drain. Combine the mayonnaise and mustard in a bowl. Spread the bread on the untoasted side with half the mayonnaise mixture. Divide the lettuce between 4 slices of bread. Add bacon and tomato. Top with the remaining mayonnaise, then top with remaining bread. Press down lightly.

A good candidate for deconstruction. Anyone?

Thanks to the Aussies for the picture.

Deconstructed Pizza Salad

2009-06-02T19:01:00.003+04:00

The contents of a pizza (sort of) in a fancy-looking dinner party starter that really does taste as good as it looks – and has an appealingly pretentious name, too!

Fat Expat Chris ‘Slimseum’ Viljoen’s comment on the gazpacho salad I posted up a couple of weeks ago set me to thinking about the concept of deconstruction (you know, the almost ritualistic fight between life and death in the reduction of an organic entity to highlight and celebrate each of its component selfnesses in the de-meshing of the quintessential life linkages of the whole’s fabric) and that led to pizza.

So here it is. A salad inspired by pizza.

Ingredients

1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
4 thin slices prosciutto or parma ham
25g parmesan, shaved
12 olives, pitted
12 slices ciabatta
Buffalo Mozzarella
8 cherry tomatoes on their stalks
4 tbsp olive oil
½ tsp dried thyme
12-16 leaves fresh basil
8 sprigs fresh marjoram or oregano

Grill the peppers, turning them every 4-5 minutes so that their skins brown and blister on all sides, then either place them in a pan with the lid on or in a secured plastic bag for ten minutes. Remove them and, under a cold running tap, remove the skins, the stalk and the seeds. Pat the peppers dry, then slice them into 8 pieces, following the natural line of the segments. Lay these in a container and drizzle with three tablespoons of the olive oil and thyme. Incidentally, these can be left in the ‘fridge for a couple of days to marinate and are great on crisp slices of bread toasted with a light brush of olive oil.

Brush the ciabatta slices lightly with oil and place in an oven at around GM4 to toast for 10 minutes or so, or until they start to brown and become crisp.

Pan fry the tomatoes in the rest of the oil, adding a good pinch of pepper and salt – this will only take a minute and you need to take care that you don’t overdo it or the skins will split and they’ll mush up.

Lay the peppers on a plate, with a twist of ham across them. Dot the plate with broken off chunks of mozzarella, the herbs, tomatoes and olives. Drizzle a spoon of oil over the whole lot, sprinkle with parmesan and serve with the toasted ciabatta slices on the side.

Classic Sandwiches 3 - The Pulled Pork or Barbecue Sandwich

2009-05-28T23:15:00.005+04:00

This sandwich is mainly known in the U.S. It is a classic there anyway, and is easy to make and delicious to eat. The filling takes time, but if you plan ahead, and make a double quanity, you can freeze half of it for another time. You can play around with the filling, try adding hot peppers or garlic. This is best with thick white bread or with hamburger buns - You don't want a serious roll that is going to interfere with the flavour of the meat. A PP sandwich should be messy, which makes it perfect picnic or poolside food. Cold beer with this.

Ingredients

1 boneless pork shoulder roast, about 1 Kg
125 ml chopped onion
1 bottle (350 g) barbecue sauce, your favorite
60 ml honey, or to taste
15 ml liquid smoke (optional)
Tabasco to taste
Coleslaw, optional
Hamburger buns

Place pork roast in a lightly greased heavy pot, just large enough to contain it Combine onion, barbecue sauce, honey, liquid smoke, if using, and Tabasco. Pour this over the roast. Cover and cook in LOW oven for 4 to 5 hours.

Take it out and either chop it into 1 cm pieces or pull the fibres apart with two forks. Add more barbecue sauce if it is too dry. Serve on buttered hamburger buns, topped with coleslaw.

Chicken with Lemon and Rosemary

2009-05-27T12:22:00.003+04:00

This is ridiculously easy to do and guaranteed to please - if you want to use a 'Brai pack' chicken (Spinneys' 1kg chook all cut into breasts, thights, legs and wings) then you can feed two and snack on leftovers the next day - just cut back on the other ingredients.

OK, the HDR shot is dead. Here's a traditional snap taken in the time honoured camera-top flash in the kitchen tradition!

This goes majestically with a rough sweet potato mash or a tomato and onion salad.

Ingredients

4 chicken breasts on the bone
2 bulbs garlic
4 sprigs rosemary, cut up
1 lemon, cut into 1/8th slices
25g Butter
Olive oil

Heat the oven up to GM7/22oC/425C.

Spread the butter over the chicken pieces and place them in a baking tray along with the lemon pieces, cut up pieces of rosemary and garlic cloves (leave them in the skins!). Drizzle a splash of oil over the whole lot and a dash of sea salt and black pepper, then slip 'em into the hot oven and leave 'em for 35-40 minutes to cook, crisp and brown.

Now you just have to quaff a cheeky chilled pinot grigio and read a good book while you wait!

Ginarek or Geranak

2009-05-25T10:12:00.005+04:00

It’s typical of Arabic accents that this fruit has two names depending on who you speak to, and at least three spellings. We shall stick to genarek or jinarek. Don’t worry too much about the Latin spellings: this is, after all, phonetic transliteration of a non-Romance language!

Ginarak (pronounced jenarek) is much loved in the Arab world. It looks like a wee green apple, almost like a crab apple – and has a slightly sour flavour, although by no means as bitter or astringent as a crab apple. It has a light, delicate taste that somehow reminds me a little of gooseberries and yet it has a most satisfyingly crunchy quality. All in all, it’s one of the Middle East’s best kept secrets.

It’s in season right now and you’ll find it in little trays in all the supermarkets – it’s traditionally eaten raw with, at the most, salt. Ginarak’s got a stone in the middle that’s pretty much stuck to the fruit, so it’s almost impossible to pit: you have to cut around the stone to remove the flesh. Although most people snack on jinarek raw, it stews well (you have to do it gently to avoid burning the fruit and then press it through a sieve: the resulting pulp can be used as a fruit puree - you'll need quite a bit of sugar but I've tried stewing it in sweet wine which is just diviiine and very Levantine Roman) and there are pickle recipes out there, buried deep in Levantine Mums' treasure chests. When I find one, I’ll share.

In the meantime, here’s a recipe for ginarek shots, an application for the refreshing, crunchy quality of the fruit that hit me just before a dinner party...

Ginarek Shots

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Ginarek Shots

2009-05-25T10:10:00.000+04:00

This is a little fiddly thing wot I served up in place of sorbet as part of a multi-course dinner – a little palate-freshener and a surprise for those who haven’t come across this slightly sour-fresh Levantine fruit. The mixture is crunchy, salty, sour and yet has little sweet notes. A real little explosion of surprising things, then...

Inrdedients

12 Ginarak, finely diced
1cm celery, finely diced
2 medium shallots, finely diced
Pinch salt
2 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp honey
2 tsp olive oil

In a small frying pan, fry off the shallot in the oil to soften, taking care it doesn’t burn. Add the honey and let it caramelise lightly before removing from the heat. Mix everything together in a small bowl and refrigerate. Serve the salad in cooled shot glasses, with perhaps a teaspoon of frozen tequila in each one and a finishing pinch of salt.

You’ll need coffee spoons to eat it with!

Classic Sandwiches 2 - the Jibarito

2009-05-22T07:17:00.004+04:00

Most people don't know this one, but it is fast becoming a classic. The only problem here might be to find plantains, but large green bananas would work. The plantains should also not be too ripe (just starting to go black)

From Wikipedia:

"The jibarito (pronounced hee-bah-REE-toe), a specialty of Puerto Rico and Chicago, is a sandwich made with flattened, fried green plantains instead of bread. It was invented in 1991 by Jorge Muñoz y Coquí Feliciano in Aguada, Puerto Rico in their famous restaurant named "Plátano Loco" (crazy plantain) where it is the king of the house. It was later introduced to Chicago at the Borinquen Restaurant, a Puerto Rican restaurant, by owner Juan "Peter" Figueroa."

So this is the way you do it:

1 large green plantain, peeled and sliced lengthwise and in half (4 pieces)

If you can't find plantain, try 2 very large green bananas.

oil (for deep frying)

30 ml butter

15 ml Olive oil

1 large thinly sliced onion

2 cloves garlic, minced

Pinch cumin

1-2 pinch cayenne or dried chipotle powder, to taste

200g thinly sliced steak (Skirt steak is best) or thinly sliced chicken breast.

salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste

4 slices American cheese

1 tablespoon mayonnaise

romaine lettuce

thinly sliced tomatoes or roasted red peppers

15 ml teaspoon melted butter

15 ml Fried minced garlic

You will also need 2 heavy cutting boards

Heat the oil, then fry the peeled and sliced plantain for 1 minute.

Remove the plantain from the oil, place on a heavy cutting board (if wooden, wrap board in plastic first, which will assist in the spreading of the softened plantain), top with another cutting board, and flatten the plantain between them.

Fry the now-flattened plantain in the oil again, until the outside is golden and crispy; remove from the oil, set aside on paper towels dry, keep warm.

Over medium high heat, melt 15 ml butter and olive oil together, then sauté the onions until just soft.

Add the garlic, cumin, and cayenne to taste, stir well, then add the meat slices and sauté until browned; season to taste with salt and pepper.

Spread mayonnaise on the bottom slice of flattened fried plantain, followed by 2 slices of American cheese, then the meat and onions. Top with lettuce and thinly sliced tomato (or roasted red pepper), then the remaining plantain top.

Combine 1 teaspoon melted butter with 1/4 teaspoon fried minced garlic, brush the upper plantain slice with the butter garlic mixture.

Makes 2 sandwiches

Tapenade

2009-05-19T15:36:00.006+04:00

I have an awful weakness for this dark, salty little snacky dippity thing and love digging up wodges of it with a flat bladed knife and slathering it on hot, crunchy toasted bread (preferably rough bread that's been brushed with garlic and oil and toasted in the oven).

Yes, yes, it's got anchovies in it, but you'll not know once the final mixture's been combined. If you can make it a day or two before you intend to use it, then do - the flavours meld together and richen - seriously. You can smooth it into pots for serving and top it up with a preservative layer of fine EV olive oil if you like.

If you want to be more refined, then tapenade is perfect with slithers of toast for aperitifs, smashing with big, ballsy balloons of dark, blood-red wine and a neat addition to your armoury of canapé toppings, too.

But on rough, rustic toasted bread, tapenade is simply great.

Ingredients

15g anchovy fillets
100g pitted black olives
30ml olive oil
1 tbsp brandy
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp (4 large) capers, chopped
1 tsp seed mustard

Whizz in a small blender.

Store for 24/48 hours.

Eat.

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Penne with Cauliflower

2009-05-18T21:16:00.019+04:00

Sometimes a recipe is so simple that it seems almost pathetic. But eating something that is all about one simple extraordinary flavour is what good food is all about. Important here is the freshness of the ingredients. Freshly grated cheese, (never the stuff in the green can) and black pepper straight out of the mill. Good quality olive oil.

This can be mushy cauliflower with macaroni or it can be something superb, depending on your ingredients and how you treat them.

Serves 6.

You will need:
125 ml EVOO
5 Cloves garlic, crushed
1 Head cauliflower, cored and separated into florets.
500g Penne pasta
125 ml flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
125 ml feshly grated parmesan cheese.
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
Red pepper flakes to taste.

In a large sauté pan, heat the olive oil. add the garlic and cook gently until softened and lightly coloured. Add the cauliflower. Season with salt & pepper, stir well and cook until softened, about 15 minutes. Lower the heat, and simmer until the cauliflower is very tender, about 10 minutes more. It will break up a bit, that's fine. Meanwhile cooke the penne as per the instructions on the packet. Drain the pasta and add to the cauliflower, stir in the parsley and red pepper flakes and toss for a minute over high heat.

Serve topped with the grated cheese.

Slow Roasted Lamb Shanks

2009-05-18T13:08:00.004+04:00

This is a Jamie Oliver recipe and is an absolute winner. For some extraordinary reason this dish is a big hit with my children, who are the world’s fussiest eaters, so double bonus points all round.

I serve this with a big pile of slightly sloppy creamy mashed potatoes.

You will need:

4 lamb shanks
180ml white wine
2tbsp balsamic vinegar
3 celery stalks, chopped fine
1 carrot, chopped very fine
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 can chopped tomatoes
6 anchovy fillets
Pinch of dried mixed herbs
Fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped.
1 tbsp fresh rosemary chopped fine
Plain flour
Dried herbs

And then you need to:

Heat a heavy casserole dish over a medium flame and glug some EV olive oil in.

Rub the fresh rosemary over each of the shanks and then dust with a little flour which has been seasoned with sea salt and pepper.

When the oil is hot brown the four lamb shanks and then remove and set to one side.

Turn the heat down a little and throw in the onion, garlic, carrot and celery and a pinch of salt. Gently sweat the vegetables for about 10 minutes.

Add the balsamic vinegar and reduce. Add the white wine and again reduce by about half.

Add the tomatoes, pinch of dried herbs and the anchovies, bring to the the boil, and put the lamb shanks back in the pot. Put on a lid and place in a preheated over (350F/175C). After 1 hour and 30 minutes remove the lid and cook for a further 30 minutes.

Place one lamb shank on each plate, stir the flat leaf parsley into the remaining sauce and then spoon over the delicious thick tomatoey stew and serve with creamy mashed potatoes.

Classic Sandwiches 1 - The Cubano

2009-05-15T14:16:00.016+04:00

There have been several posts here on sandwiches; we have here the Croque Monsieur, the Bacon Butty and I propose to post a series of classic sandwiches to continue the trend.

Sandwiches are classic in themselves. Everyone of course knows that the sandwich is attributed to John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, (1718 - 1792) who wanted something that he could eat while playing cards. I can only assume that his sandwich was very different from what is made today. Probably it consisted of sliced roast beef on heavy black bread, an imaginative cook may have added mustard, horseradish or some other available flavouring. Probably butter was not used. In any case, we all thank the good Earl for his devotion to his card game. The first in the series will be the Cubano, or sandwich mixto. This sandwich was first served to Cuban workers in the Tampa, FL area around the turn of the last century and the original contained Genoa salami. This is the Miami version, which is found everywhere, and dispenses with the salami. Apparently the Tampa version still contains salami, but nowhere else.

Ingredients

Cuban bread - as this is not available outside Cuba or Florida, substitute French bread but zap it in a nicrowave oven for 30 seconds before using.
Butter, softened
500g ham sliced - Use a good quality, sweetish ham.
500g Sliced roast pork
1 Kg Swiss cheese (Gruyere),sliced
Sliced dill pickles (lengthwise sliced are better)
Yellow mustard (optional)

Never use mayonnaise

Preheat a pancake griddle or large heavy frying pan. Cut the bread into sections about 8 inches long. Cut these in half and spread butter on both halves (inside). Make each sandwich with the ingredients in this order: pickles, roast pork, ham, and cheese. Don't be stingy here!

Place the sandwich on the lightly oiled hot griddle (or frying pan). Place a heavy iron skillet or bacon press on top of the sandwich to flatten. (You really want to squash the sandwich, compressing the bread to about 1/3 of its original size!) A panini press is also good for this.

Grill the sandwiches for two to three minutes on each side, until the cheese is melted and the bread is golden. Make sure your griddle or fry pan is not too hot, or else the crust will burn before the cheese melts. Slice the sandwiches in half diagonally and serve.

Thanks to 3 Guys from Miami for the true recipe.

New Orleans Style Barbecued Shrimp

2009-05-10T18:59:00.003+04:00

Barbecued shrimp, one of the best dishes in all of New Orleans cooking, is completely misnamed. They're neither grilled nor smoked, and there's no barbecue sauce. It was created in the mid-1950s at Pascal's Manale Restaurant. A regular customer came in and reported that he'd enjoyed a dish in a Chicago restaurant that he thought was made with shrimp, butter, and pepper. He asked Pascal Radosta to make it. Radosta took a flyer at it. The customer said that the taste was not the same, but he liked the new dish even better. So a legend began.

The dish is simple: huge whole shrimp in a tremendous amount of butter and black pepper. The essential ingredient is large, heads-on shrimp, since the fat in the shrimp heads makes most of the flavor. You can improvise on this. Sometime beer or wine is added, but I think it is fine as is.

The amount of butter and pepper in here are fantastic. But understand that this is not a dish you will eat often, although you will want to. You should to try it once, though.

Ingredients

1.5 Kg fresh large shrimp with heads on, about 40 shrimp.

50 ml lemon juice

30 ml Lea & Perrins or any worcestershire sauce.

3 cloves garlic, chopped

45 ml freshly ground black pepper

5 ml salt

750 g butter, softened

30 ml olive oil

15 ml Crystal or Tabasco hot sauce.

1 loaf French bread

This is how you do it.

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees C.

Devein the shrimp if you wish, rinse them and shake off the excess water. Put them in a large baking dish, and distribute the liquid ingredients over them evenly. Cover with a thin even layer of black pepper. Don`t worry, just do it, it is almost impossible to use too much pepper. Cut the butter into small chunks and distribute evenly over the top. Add salt over this.

Place in the oven for 10 minutes. Stir. Back in until shrimp are just done. You will have pink shrimp in a reddish-brown sauce. Serve in large bowls with lots of the liquid. No utensils here, use your hands. the bread is for sopping up the juices. Don`t check your cholesterol level for at least a month.

About 4-6 servings.

Honey Lemon Glazed Chicken with Fregola Sarda

2009-05-10T08:56:00.008+04:00

A possible result of the remarkable tides of culinary influences and ideas that wash the shores of the Mediterranean, fregola sarda is a relatively obscure Sardinian pasta - a similar idea to the north African rolled wheat-balls that we know as couscous. Some poor, misled bastards may only recognise the latter in its retailed form as Ainsley Harriott’s Couscous. I feel sorry for them.

There's another Mediterranean similarity in Lebanon's 'mughrabiyeh' or Palestine's 'maftoul', also little rolled balls of wheat about the size of a black peppercorn, although not toasted like fregola. Both are served traditionally as a filling accompaniment to meat, especially chicken.

Fregola sarda, then, are rolled balls of durum wheat semolina (pasta to you, mate) which are then toasted to give a distinctive and wholly delightful vignetted brown colouring ad a totally unique flavour, earthy and rich. It’s good old fashioned peasant food and, like so many good old fashioned peasant foods, is only now available in ‘artisan’ delicatessen packets. You can get it through the Internet, specialist stockists or, if you live in Dubai, from the little shop of rare delights that graces the Grand Hyatt hotel’s Panini, probably one of the nicest places in the city to have a casual and excellent coffee, sandwich and cake.

Fregola sarda should not be confused with ‘pepe’, the little pasta balls that make up one of the many (and confusingly named) varieties of ‘soup pasta’ the Italians are so fond of – although it can be used in that role (where it adds a certain cloudiness and a lovely thickness because of the loose starch that clings to the little balls of pasta after they’ve been rubbing about in their packet). It’s more distinctive than that – it’s great as a salad ingredient in place of orzo, for instance; it makes a smashing base for little piles of roasted vegetables and can be served in warm risotto-like mixtures, replacing the Arborio.

Fregola Sarda pasta

Here it’s a base for a Mediterranean-style marinated chicken breast, although if you want to serve two, you can ditch the chicken and just serve the warm mixture of pasta, bacon and courgette.

I love grilling meats – it’s by far my favourite treatment for chicken breast and striploin steaks – and I always line the grill pan with foil to save on washing up but also to collect the juices. It helps if you push the foil down between the bars.

A note on toasting pine nuts. I like to toast pine nuts in a small, dry frying pan, tossing them with such gay abandon that excited archaeologists exploring the far-flung and darker corners of my kitchen often discover long-lost pine nuts.

Ingredients

4 chicken breasts

Marinade

50 ml honey
50 ml vinegar
50 ml white wine
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil
Sliced zest of ½ lemon

Fregola Sarda

150 fregola sarda pasta
2 courgettes, chopped
25g pine nuts, toasted
25g parmesan, grated
2 rashers smoked back bacon, chopped
1 large shallot, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
50ml white wine

Mix together the marinade ingredients and marinate the chicken for as long as you reasonably can – ideally more than a couple of hours.

Boil a kettle of water and put the fregola sarda in a pan with a splash of olive oil.

Grill the chicken, basting with the marinade so that it browns and crisps, turning it over after about 10-12 minutes. When it’s done, allow it to sit for a short while.

While the chicken’s cooking, cook the fregola sarda. Pour the boiling water over the pasta and cook it for 12-14 minutes, stirring occasionally.

In a frying pan, fry off the shallot in the oil, adding the courgettes, the bacon and finally the garlic. Take the pan off the heat and add the wine. When the pasta has lost its hard, chalky core and is ‘al dente’, drain it off and then pour it into the courgette and bacon mixture. Toss it all together, adding the grated parmesan and, finally, the toasted pine nuts

If you’ve timed it right, the chicken will just be done and rested for five minutes – so you can slip the pasta mixture into a warmed plate, top it with a chicken breast (and maybe pour over some of the dark, sticky juices from the grill pan), serve it up with a fine pinot grigio and Robert’s yer father’s brother!

Pesce all'Acqua Pazzo

2009-05-04T00:58:00.007+04:00

You can do this with any kind of really fresh fish, or with shrimp. Or both. I sometimes put in some squid as well. Acqua Pazzo means crazy water, in the language spoken in the boot-shaped country. This goes well with lots of rustic Italian bread. It is easy, quick and delicioso.

Ingredients:

100 ml extra-virgin olive oil (yes, lots)

1 medium onion, cut into 1 cm dice

4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

30 ml fresh hot chiles

250 g fennel, cut into 1 cm dice, fronds reserved

1 large can tomatoes with juices, squished by hand

2 cups white wine (Corvo is best, Frascati will do)

125 ml S. Pellegrino sparkling water plus 5 ml salt

16 fresh large shrimp, peeled and heads left intact, or equivalent quantity of fresh fish fillets, cut into pieces. Or a combination.

5 ml Ricard, Pernod or Ouzo.(optional)

Freshly ground pepper

Do it like this:

In a large pot, heat the oil until smoking. Add the onion, garlic, chiles, and fennel and cook 8 to 10 minutes, until soft and light golden brown. Add the tomatoes, wine, and salted water and bring to a boil. Add Pernod if using. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Add the shrimp or fish and simmer until cooked through, about 7 minutes. Don't overcook. Check salt. Pour into a soup tureen, garnish with fennel fronds or lots of chopped parsley, and serve with plenty of freshly ground pepper, and Italian bread.

Serves 4 hungry people.

Gazpacho Salad

2009-04-27T09:56:00.005+04:00

Okay, so you've tried the soup. Now try the salad. The same ingredients just, well, treated with less whizzery!

This stupidly simple and utterly delicious, refreshing and generally polymesmeric salad is great with steak, finger lickin' with chickin' and the dish with fish.

Ingredients

6 plum tomatoes, chopped
1 cucumber, chopped
1 stick celery, chopped
6 spring onions, chopped
1/2 small bulb fennel, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely sliced
2 red peppers, chopped

Croutons

4 slices bread/ciabbata, diced
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp mixed herbs

Dressing

2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt

Toss the croutons in the oil and herbs and pan fry them until browned and crisp. Reserve in a warm place. Toss the chopped vegetables with the made-up dressing and serve scattered with warm croutons.

Or whizz the whole ingredient list with some water or good, clear cold stock and serve cold as a soup!