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.

Florentine Food

A week in Florence (this was the view from our kitchen) entailed a number of interesting food experiences, which I will describe in more detail soon. The highlights were a tuscan beef stew with black peppercorns, osso bucco, wild boar papardelle, amazing focaccias, angry wafflemen, free limoncello shots, Grom gelati, prosciuto and olive bread and tomatoes from the market. Individual entries on all of these and more soon. And apologies for any terrible spelling mistakes in the above.

Baravin, Aberystwyth

I realise the picture here is not very appealing, making this very pleasant restaurant look as though its situated on the edge of a grim shopping complex somewhere in the east midlands, but if the camera was facing the other way you would see it has one of the best setting in the UK - on the promenade at Aberystwyth, with waves crashing juts a few feet from the door, and gorgeous sunsets sinking into the western horizon of the sea. Baravin means Bread and Wine, and the menu is very pizza and pasta orientated. But they are obviously of the school of thought that says there is no food that can't be improved by putting it on a pizza, because many of these pizzas resemble nothing you'll find in Sicilly or Tuscany. One is topped with shoulder of lamb, minted pesto and peas. Basically a sunday roast on a pizza. Another has bacon, black pudding, sausage and egg. Yes, breakfast on a pizza (where are the baked beans?) Another has duck and olives. Another prawns, laver bread and cockles. Inventive, patriotic and utterly indifferent to the heritage of the pizza. Never mind. I had to have the roast lamb one, thinking I might never have the chance again. It wasn't bad. The stonebaked bread base was excellent. What it lacked was enough sauce to bind everything together. The shreds of lamb and the peas rolled about as soon as you cut into the pizza, and everything fell off before it got to the mouth. The cockle and laver bread pizza looked very good. They extend their love of pizzas even to the dessert menu, which has a sweet pizza, topped with bananas and caramel. It's a fun place, and the service is great. It is proof that beyond the welsh border you never know quite what to expect from a plate of food.

Chines Beef Stew Revisited

A while back I wrote about a Chinese Beef Stew. The other night I made it again and it was just as nice as before, and this time I took a picture of the stew being cooked. This is late in the cooking process when the stew is nearly ready and the pak choi has just been added. To the left is the pan with the rice in, this time I was cooking the basmati rice in coconut milk, it went really nicely with it. At the top is the pan of sugar snap peas. Everything is about to come together to form one delicious meal. The other ring has serving bowls waiting to take the rice, and waring up in the hob. The ring beneath them isn't on, just the ambient temperature of the cooking area is enough to warm them up.