Cod Fritatta

Cod, Potato, Chorizo and Pea Fritatta (8 eggs)
- our dish of the week

With daughter in Berlin it was an excuse to eat some fish this week (forgetting that son isn't that keen either), so we started things off with fried whole mackerel on a bed of quinoa and tomatoes. The mackerel were 82p each in Asda, but they weren't as flavourful as the last time we tried mackerel, which were from Sainsbury's. Couldn't help feeling a twinge when I decapitated them, as decapitations are rather in the news at the moment. The fish stayed much more together this time, and I think the whole thing was quite well cooked, though son only ate half his fish. The next day I made a cheap version of Paella, with chicken, chorizo, peas and prawns, and a lot of paella rice, it was another Jamie effort, from the Save book I think. Really nice. On wednesday had more fish, this time a cod and potato frittata, to which I added some left over chorizo and peas from the paella, and I think they added a great deal of flavour to the dish which might have been a bit bland otherwise (it was a Gino D'Campo recipe). Very pleased with how it turned out, visually (see right). I think it was our dish of the week. Then on thursday with daughter back from Berlin and long trip to airport we had trash food, McDonalds and KFC for four, (not a very nice 3 piece KFC for meal, despite friendly server in shop who claimed she could read my mind and predict what I wanted - she was right about the Pepsi but wrong about the hot wings). On Friday we had Toad in the Hole. Made the batter a bit thicker this time, it worked really well. The key thing with the batter is lots of eggs and extra egg whites to ensure plump risingness.

slightly flavourless 82p Asda mackerel

Luxury Shepherd's Pie

What we ate this weekend  - it was the second weekend of our odyssey through Jamie Oliver's Comfort Food, and so it was a shepherd's pie weekend. Jamie's version uses a slow roasted shoulder of lamb, so went out on saturday morning to our darling butchers to buy one of these. The butcher didn't have any on display so had to retrieve an entire lamb from the fridge, and listened to him hammering and sawing away to produce the required joint. I put it in the oven and went out for the day, leaving it to slow roast for five hours. On returning (after a few anxious phone calls to my son who was at home,

Jamie said eat with lots of condiments

to check up on it) I found the most beautifully cooked piece of lamb I had ever seen, seemed almost a waste to put it in the SP. Still, this is what I did, after stewing it with vegetables for another hour or so, and then baking the completed pie for another hour, it was 8pm before we had dinner. But it was a deliciously special thing. Jamie insists on making it a 3D pie, so there is mash lining the tin as well as on top, an all-surrounding mash, which does make a difference, and was extremely comforting.
             Our meal on sunday was a pea risotto using left over peas, and with a strange side dish of reheated SP, which went surprisingly well with it.

Colonna and Small's

Colonna and Smalls is a little independent coffee shop in Bath where they take coffee very seriously. They have a changing menu of beans, divided between espresso and filter, with three bean types each. I went for a filter coffee, and was recommended a Rwandan Red Bourbon, washed (not sure what that means), but was also recommended that I didn't put milk in it, or sugar. C and M like to sell coffee according to the season, and Rwandan coffee season is apparently just coming to an end, so last chance to try this amazing coffee, until next year. It was also recommended I take it without sugar. I am someone who normally drinks milky sweet coffee, though I have recently got fed up with all the frilly frothy Starbucks caramel laced cream-topped coffees that have taken over our coffee culture, and like my coffee now to at least fill most of the cup, so was keen to try this spartan approach to coffee. The idea is that the coffee has nowhere to hide, and that the flavour speaks for itself with its own natural sweetness. It was quite a thrill to drink this cup of black coffee, "the flavour intensifies as it cools down' the waitress said. The taste was somehow more like a rooibos strong tea, with hints of apple or other fruit, no bitterness or acidity, very easy, palatable, and yes, a hint of sweetness. C and M's, despite being serious about coffee, is a friendly, relaxed place, with wooden benches and tables, spaces outside at the back, and a small array of cakes (had nice lemon cupcake), and about as far from the overkill of Cafe Nero as you could get.

What I ate this week

apologies, these are not my meatballs

What I ate this week. Well, the week ended with my own recipe sausage meatball papardelle, but instead of papardelle, which I can't get in Asdas, I used linguine. It's a recipe I've been using since we came back from Florence in August, and is so simple I have cooked it every week since then. Basically you get some nice italian or italian style sausages, extract the meat and roll into balls, say three per suasage, then you fry these for 20 mins or so, then you add a pint of pasatta, and a little cream, then you mix it with some linguine, mix it all through, and there you have it, sprinkle a bit of parmesan over the top, it's delish, and madly simple. Note I don't add any seasoning - that's because the italian sausages have all the flavour and seasoning you need, you don't need to add anything, though I suppose a few fennel seeds wouldn't go amiss.
           The night before I did another almost weekly favourite, which is a chicken tagine, taken from that book called every recipe you'll ever need, 4 ways to cook everything, I can't remember who it's by, but it's a great recipe - it's not actually in that book, this came from one of his Sunday Times (or is it saturday Times?) pages. It's another stunningly simple but brilliantly flavourful dish, you just fry some sliced onion and garlic for ten mins, add the special tagine spice mix ras-al-hanout, plus some ground ginger, add some chicken thigh fillets, just 200 mls of chicken stock, a handful of green olives, cover and simmer for an hour. You don't of course, have to use a tagine. In fact I never have. But in this the trick seems to be to use this small amount of liquid, and keep the lid on, because the end result has just the right amount of thick sauce, the thickening seeming to come from the spices themselves, and no reduction is necessary. But it's delish with some pomegranate-sprinkled couscous and a crunchy salad.
           Then on Wednesday I had another weekly standard (it's all been old-reliables this week, I don't know why, had a sudden panic when doing the weekly list) spag bol, but using Gino de Campo's recipe, he says its his grandad's, and it worked very well, the secret being to add milk to the usual ingredients, and to have it with taglietelli instead of spaghetti, which holds the sauce better. Probably agree. But the one trick I thought was very valuable was to break up the mince with your fingers before adding to the pan, that way you get a nice fine granular texture to the meat, rather than the worms or strings that minced meat often retains in cooking. His version was close to the famous 3 hour butter ragu in Hazan's essentials of italian cooking. Gino also said to cook for 3 hours, but I only managed 1. Still, the longer you can keep it on the stove, the better. What else - my wife cooked our other two meals this week - a fabulous minestrone which lasted for two subsequent lunches, and an aubergine and spaghetti thing, which seemed to remind the children that they don't like that particular vegetable.  

Chicken Tikka Massala

So Jamie Oliver has a new book out, Comfort Food, and I was lucky enough to have a wife who wanted a copy for her recent birthday. It was big thick comfortable book loaded with recipes, very much in the Jamie style, tearing and sharing, sploshing and splashing and chucking everything in. Some photographs just appear to show a complete mess eg the lobster macaroni cheese, or the hot chocolate, which shows a mug of the stuff amid a chocolate bomb site. We tried our first recipe on saturday, when we did feel the need of some comfort eating, and as always with new recipe books, chose to cook the first one in the book, with the plan of going through the whole volume in order, as far as we can. This was chicken Tikka Massala, which Jamie recommends you cook over a fire pit in your garden. Or, like us, you can grill it. Basically it is a marinated chicken skewered and chargrilled. The pieces then dropped into a sauce you have made (a load of spices, tins of coconut milk, plum tomatoes, yoghurt etc). The revelation for me was the ground almonds in the curry, which were, it seemed, the main thickening agent. My wife doesn't usually like almonds in any form but she loved this dish. We also had a go at making the paratha breads - which didn't turn out too bad. They are like little danish pastries, rolled and coiled then rolled again and fried. The key is to coil them quite tightly, otherwise when you roll them the spiral just comes apart. So it was a great start to the Jamie Comfort Food journey, though they are not daily meals, being mostly quite extravagant, so we'll be cooking only one or so a week. But will definitely try the CTM again. I had to admit it to myself, this probably tasted better than almost anything we've ever had in an Indian restaurant.