Garlic bread

Garlic bread
Garlic bread

I was tempted to title this post “F***ing fantastic garlic bread”, because when people taste it, they tend to say something along the lines of: “Cripes. This is f***ing fantastic garlic bread.” But my Mum reads this blog and has a habit of looking horrified and exclaiming: “Elizabeth!” if I so much as say “Damn” in her presence, so plain old “Garlic bread” it’ll have to be. Sorry, Mum.

I wooed a boyfriend with this stuff once (and swiftly thereafter wished I hadn’t, but that’s by the bye). It’s powerfully good; you won’t go back to shop-bought garlic bread once you’ve tried it. The trick here is to simmer the garlic in the butter to sweeten it up and release its aroma before you let it anywhere near the bread, alongside the judicious application of some herbs. Use whatever loaf you fancy here. Something reasonably open-textured to soak up all that butter is a good move. This recipe will make sufficient garlic butter to anoint a whole baguette, but you can make a smaller loaf and keep any leftover butter in the fridge for up to a week. There were just two of us eating when I made this, so I used a ciabatta and steeled myself for leftovers – if you put the remains back together into something that resembles a cut-down loaf, rewrap it in the tin foil and refrigerate, you can take the recipe from the point where you put it in the oven again the next day.

You’ll need:

450g butter
2 large, juicy heads garlic
15g fresh chives
15g fresh flat-leaf parsley
15g fresh oregano
½ teaspoon salt
Several turns of the peppermill

Peel the garlic, and use a knife to mince it until you have a heap of garlicky rubble in the middle of your chopping board.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over a very low heat, and spoon the garlic into it. Allow the garlic to cook very gently in the butter for about ten minutes, until it is soft and fragrant. While the garlic is cooking, chop the herbs and put them with the salt and pepper in a bowl.

Pour the hot butter and garlic mixture over the herbs in the bowl, and stir well to combine everything. Leave at room temperature for ten minutes, then cover with cling film and move to the fridge. Refrigerate until solid. (The butter doesn’t need to be rock-hard – a couple of hours should be sufficient.)

When the butter is stiff enough to spread, warm the oven to 150ºC (300ºF).

Slice the bread and spread each side of each slice generously with the garlic butter. Reassemble the loaf, and wrap it tightly in tin foil. Bake on a metal tray for 20 minutes, and remove from the oven. Unwrap and serve piping hot. You will be unable to avoid getting garlic butter all over your chin as you eat, and possibly on your elbows, so have napkins standing by.

Gazpacho

GazpachoI’m looking out of the window as I type this, and I’ve come to the sad conclusion that it’s definitely not summer any more. This will be this 2010’s final recipe for the contents of your greenhouse. This year hasn’t been fantastic for tomatoes, but the cucumbers have been glorious (full disclosure here – I didn’t grow any myself, but my parents have enough to club a small army to death with), and peppers are at their best now. It goes without saying that this recipe is totally dependent on the quality of your ingredients.

Most think of gazpacho as a cold tomato soup. Tomatoes do make up the dominant ingredient by weight, but a good gazpacho should take much of its flavour from the cucumber (surprisingly aromatic) and peppers. Get the finest, ripest vegetables you can find, and if at all possible, try to get your hands on one of those lovely, spurred, English cucumbers  – they’ve a lot more flavour to them than one of the smooth-skinned supermarket variety. Use your best olive oil, and enjoy the last of the sunshine. If you’re preparing this as part of a special meal, you can jazz it up something spectacular by shredding some fresh, sweet white crab meat, and putting a couple of tablespoons of it in the bottom of each bowl before you pour the soup over.

Finally, a word of warning. Your guests might have a baked-in dislike of chilled soups. Check before you serve this up. I remember the look of utter misery on my Dad’s face when we visited a friend’s house once and were presented with a choice of Vichyssoise and gazpacho to open a meal with. Dad, you’re a heathen, but for you I’d warm this through on the hob.

To serve four as a starter, you’ll need:

1kg ripe tomatoes, as fresh as possible
4 banana shallots
3 cloves garlic
2 red peppers
1 green pepper
1 large cucumber
2 slices stale white bread, soaked in water and squeezed
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt and pepper

Peel the tomatoes by scoring them around the equator and dunking them in boiling water to loosen the skins. Cut them open and discard the seeds. Blacken the skin of the peppers under the grill, pop the steaming peppers in a plastic box with the lid on for a few minutes to loosen the skins, peel and seed. Peel the cucumber, chop the shallots into quarters and mince or otherwise squish the garlic.

Blitz the vegetables and bread to a smooth purée in batches with the other ingredients. Taste for seasoning; you may want to add a little more vinegar or paprika as well as salt. Chill thoroughly and serve cold, with a little more olive oil drizzled over.

Smoked salmon and laverbread canapes

CanapesThe fine folks at Kinvara smoked salmon sent me a big goodie bag full of their organic Irish salmon last week. I get through quite a lot of smoked salmon at home (damn the expense, it’s full of brain-feeding, joint-lubricating goodness), and I was enormously and very pleasantly surprised at just how good the Kinvara fish was. The smoke is a gentle one, letting the flavour of the salmon itself sing, and the firm slices of fish have a robust and delicate flavour all at once. I don’t mention all the foods I get sent to try on this blog, but this one was a doozy, and I’ll be ordering more from them (smoked salmon by post – how splendid is that?) shortly.

Something this good deserved a special-occasion recipe, so here, just in time for the next party you host that’s posh enough for canapes, are some classy little nibbles to impress your boss with.

To make 20 canapes, you’ll need:

100g smoked salmon
50g pancetta cubes
1 x 125g tin laverbread (for more on laverbread, see this post – I am charmed by the fact that my spellchecker suggests that what I really wanted to type here was “weaverbird”)
75g medium or fine-milled oatmeal
1 large onion
1 jar salmon roe
1 jar lumpfish roe (or caviar, if you really want to push the boat out)
250g crème fraîche
Bacon fat (you really should be keeping a jar in the fridge; it’s amazing stuff for adding flavour) or olive oil to fry

Dry-fry the pancetta in a large, non-stick frying pan until golden, and remove to a mixing bowl, keeping the fat it has released in the pan. Chop the onion finely and saute it over a low to medium heat until dark gold and sweet. Dice the salmon and add it with the onion, laverbread and oats to the pancetta bowl.

Use a spoon to stir the mixture until everything is well blended. If you want to serve these canapes in the evening, you can prepare the dish up to this stage earlier in the day and refrigerate the mixture until you are ready to assemble them later on. Use your hands to make 20 little round patties from the mixture, and fry them in a couple of tablespoons of hot bacon fat or olive oil until golden, turning once (about ten minutes).

Arrange the crisp patties on a serving dish, and put a dollop of crème fraîche on top of each one. Spoon some salmon roe on half of them, and some lumpfish roe on the other half. Serve warm.

Samphire, scallops and black pudding

The samphire season has just begun, and with this in mind, we drove up to Norfolk at the weekend with a coolbag to try to find some at a fishmonger. Unfortunately, it being a Bank Holiday, everybody else and his mother had also driven up to Norfolk. The fishmongers were empty of anything you’d have fancied eating, as if picked over by piscine locusts, and every seaside town we encountered was so full of people that we gave up and decided to go for a hike into the bleak salt marshes near Stiffkey (pronounced ‘Stooky’) to get away from everybody. Picnic backpack hoisted aloft, legs encased in waterproof boots, we walked out about three miles until we found the perfect spot by one of the causeway bridges that punctuate the saltmarshes – flowing, salty water running through a sticky clay bed. This is perfect samphire territory, and sure enough, there were beds and beds of the stuff growing along the water margin. I scrambled down into the water, offering up a prayer to the makers of Gore-Tex, and picked enough, roots and all, to fill both our picnic napkins.

Samphire is a glasswort, sometimes called sea-asparagus. (See the picture below for a bowl of raw, cleaned samphire.) There are a few different plants which are called samphire – we’re after the best-tasting variety, marsh samphire, which is a spectacular bright green, and grows in salty mud. The samphire Shakespeare mentions in King Lear was probably rock samphire, which is comparatively bitter. Marsh samphire has an assertively salty flavour reminiscent of oysters, and is tender enough to be eaten raw in a salad. (Dr W and I found ourselves snacking on it raw as I picked, straight out of the mud.) At this time of year, the samphire is young and tender – aim to collect shoots about the length of your forefinger, roots and all. Wrap them in a damp cloth and they’ll keep nicely in the fridge for a few days. To prepare, just rinse carefully in cold water from the tap and snip the roots off with scissors. Older samphire may be a bit twiggy – use your judgement, and snip off anything that’s not a tender tip.

If foraging’s not your thing, Tig (who is extraordinarily good value on the subject of seaweed and other salty things) mentioned in the comments of an earlier sea-vegetable post that the Fish Society will send mail-order samphire to you, in season.

Samphire’s at its absolute best with shellfish, so I grabbed a bag of tiny, sweet queen scallops from the supermarket and came up with this dish, which makes the most of the odd affinity pork has with scallops and samphire, sets them on delicious crisp discs, and marries the lot up with a beurre blanc flavoured with dill and Pernod. This looks and tastes most impressive, and while it’s a bit of a faff to put together, it’ll go down a storm at a dinner party, or served to people you love for a special occasion. To serve four as a starter or two as a main course, you’ll need:

150g cleaned marsh samphire
200g queen scallops
4 slices white multigrain bread
150g slim black pudding (if you can only find the pre-sliced kind, buy 12 slices)
3 fat, juicy cloves garlic
100g salted butter, plus another 225g salted butter for the beurre blanc
1 shallot
1 bay leaf
3 peppercorns
3 tablespoons white wine
2 tablespoons Pernod
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon double cream
2 tablespoons freshly chopped dill

Preheat the oven to 220°C while you chop the garlic finely, and cook it in 100g of butter until it is a very pale gold. Remove the garlic from the heat. Remove the crusts from the bread and use a rolling pin to roll the slices of bread until they are squashed flat, then use a round cookie cutter to make three circles out of each slice. Dip the twelve rounds in the garlic butter, lay on a baking sheet and cook on the top shelf of the oven for 8 minutes, until golden brown. Put on racks to cool.

Cut the black pudding into 12 rounds, leaving the skin on for now. Fry it over a medium heat in the remaining garlic butter for about 5 minutes per side, until the outsides are crisp. Peel off the skin and keep the little rounds of sausage on a plate in a warm place while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

To make the beurre blanc, put the wine, Pernod and vinegar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the sliced shallot, the bay leaf and the peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and reduce until there are only two tablespoons of liquid left. Sieve the liquid to remove the shallot, bay and peppercorns, and return to the pan off the heat. Get the butter out of the fridge and cut it into cubes about the size of the top joint of your thumb.

Put the pan back over a low flame. Add a teaspoon of cream to the wine reduction and use a whisk to incorporate it into the liquid. (As I’ve mentioned in previous beurre blanc recipes, this addition of cream is cheating, but it does mean that your sauce won’t split.) Whisking vigorously, add the butter to the pan, three cubes at a time. When they are half-melted, add another three, still whisking hard. Repeat until all the butter is incorporated and remove from the heat.

When the beurre blanc is nearly ready, bring the remaining garlic butter and fat from the black pudding to a frying temperature and fry off the scallops for two minutes, until they are coloured and just barely cooked. Steam the samphire for four minutes.

To assemble the dish, make a little bed of steamed samphire on each plate, and put three discs of bread crisp on top. Put a slice of black pudding on each of these, pile the tiny scallops into the middle of the plate, and spoon over a generous amount of the beurre blanc. Serve immediately.

Tom yum soup

Certain foods are perfect for times when you’re feeling a bit under the weather. Depressed? You need hot wings. Exhausted and frazzled? Mashed potato. Hormonal? Chocolate cake.

Right now, I’m sitting here with a streaming nose and stuffy head. It’s not swine flu, it’s hay fever. And there’s one sure-fire way to nip a stuffy head in the bud: tom yum. This hot, sour Thai soup is flavoured with some of the world’s most powerful aromatics, spiked with tongue-numbingly hot chillies and should be served hot enough to melt your spoon. Fantastic stuff.

You’ll need to make a trip to the Chinese supermarket for most of the ingredients here. To save yourself time when making soup later on, you can freeze any leftover kaffir lime leaves, chopped galangal and lemongrass in airtight containers.

To serve two, you’ll need:

1 litre homemade stock – pork or fish stock both work really well here
1 tablespoon tom yum soup paste (available at Chinese supermarkets and some Western ones too)
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 lemongrass stalks
5 kaffir lime leaves
2 inches galangal
2 small shallots
3 bird’s eye chillies
1 tomato
1 carrot
12 fresh shitake mushrooms
8 fresh prawns (with shells and heads if possible – as usual, none of my local shops had any with shells on, which elicited loud cursing from me)
1 handful beansprouts
1 handful coriander
Juice of two limes

Wallop the lemongrass stalks with the end of a rolling pin until they are ragged, slice the galangal into thin coins, and remove the central stalk from the lime leaves. Slice the shallots finely, chop the chillies, dice the tomato, chop the carrot into julienne strips and slice the mushrooms. And breathe. Once you’re done with the chopping, you’ll be pleased to hear that you’ve done most of the work.

Bring the stock to a simmer, and stir through the tom yum paste and fish sauce. Add the lemongrass, galangal, chillies and lime leaves, and simmer for five minutes. Drop the tomato, shallots, mushrooms and prawns into the bubbling stock and cook for another five minutes.

While the tom yum is cooking, squeeze the juice of one lime into each of two soup bowls. Divide the raw beansprouts between the two bowls. When the five minutes are up, ladle the soup, aromatics and all (some people like to remove the lime leaves, lemongrass and galangal from the dish, but they will continue to flavour the soup once it’s in the bowls) into the bowls. Garnish with generous amounts of coriander and serve immediately.

Chorizo al vino

Chorizo is fantastically savoury, and makes a great tapas dish just frizzled up in its own oil in a pan, with no adornment. But if you feel like doing something a bit special with it, your chorizo will be even better cooked and marinated in red wine, creating gorgeously boozy, smoky, spicy, porky juices to dibble lots of bread in.

It’s worth preparing a couple of cured chorizos at once, even if there aren’t that many of you eating – this recipe keeps well in the fridge, the flavours becoming deeper and richer, so you can bring the dinner table to Spain again in a couple of days’ time. Once again, I don’t recommend that you use your best wine for this. A Spanish vino tinto (bog-standard red wine) will be absolutely fine.

To serve four to six as a tapas dish, depending on how many other dishes you are serving, you’ll need:

2 cured chorizos (I prefer a spicy one, but if you don’t like chillies, choose a mild chorizo)
1 bottle red wine

Prick the whole chorizos all over with a fork, and put them in a saucepan with the whole bottle of wine. The pan should be small enough to allow both sausages to be covered with the wine. Bring the wine to a gentle boil and continue to simmer it for twenty minutes with the lid on.

Remove the wine and chorizo from the heat, and set it aside with the lid on overnight at room temperature for the flavours to marry.

When you are ready to eat, remove the chorizo from the pan, reserving the wine, and chop it slantwise into chunks about 1½ cm thick. Put the pieces of chorizo in a large frying pan with half the wine, and cook over a high heat, turning the chorizo frequently, until the wine has reduced to a few tablespoons and the chorizo is crisp from the heat and dark from the wine. Pour the chorizo, the wine reduction and the savoury oil released by the cooking into a dish and serve with plenty of bread to mop up the delicious juices.

Padron peppers – Spanish roulette

One of the things I love about tapas is that they’re often so easy to prepare. Slice a chorizo, pour over red wine, stick in pan, reduce, eat. Slice some manchego and quince cheese. Eat. Place olives in small bowl. Eat. Put prawns in dish with olive oil, garlic and chillies. Make hot. Eat. Procure a ham. Slice. Eat.

Given that tapas are there primarily as a salty accompaniment to your drink, these simple, clear flavours make a lot of sense. The quality of raw ingredients in preparations like this becomes all-important, and often the best of those raw ingredients are the seasonal ones. Enter the Padron pepper.

These little green jewels are a deliciously sweet, fresh-tasting pepper which comes ready in the summer. They are, for the most part, delightfully mild – but one in every ten or so has a strong chilli kick. There is nothing better than a dish that engages your sense of danger. The Spanish have a saying: Pimiento de Padrón, pequeño pero matón. Translated very approximately, this means: “Padron pepper – teensy-weensy thug”.

To serve two as a nibble with drinks or as a starter, you’ll need:

150-200g Padron peppers (see below for suppliers)
5 tablespoons olive oil
A generous sprinkling of sea salt

Heat the olive oil in a large pan to a medium temperature, and drop the peppers in. Stir the peppers in the oil for about four minutes, until their skins are blistering. Remove the peppers to bowls with a slotted spoon, sprinkle over plenty of salt, and serve piping hot. To eat, hold the peppers by the stem and bite off the whole fruit. Keep a glass of something cold to hand in case you get one of the very spicy ones.

It’s worth getting your hands on some Padron peppers at this time of year, when they are at their very best. I’ve seen them in Waitrose, but if you don’t have a local branch you can also order them online in the UK at Little Green Men, where they have some great chilli products.

Halloumi wrapped in vine leaves

Halloumi wrapped in vine leavesI had a very nice halloumi and vine leaf nibble with drinks at 6 St Chad’s Place, a bar in London (a place I can’t recommend to you with my hand on my heart – it’s so appallingly noisy that you can forget meeting your friends there, because you won’t be able to hear them speak; the chips are frozen; and they made my very pricey Dirty Martini with olives in oil, which floated repellently on top of the gin). The halloumi was excellent, though, so I’ve come up with my own version to be eaten in the quiet calm of my own kitchen, with a Dirty Martini made properly with brined olives and a little of their juice.

Vine leaves and halloumi are excellent with this particular drink because they are both preserved in brine, like the olives; prepared with some aromatic herbs, sharp chilli and herby honey they go down very nicely indeed, and make a good supper dish or a posh nibble to serve with cocktails. To make 12 little packets of flavour (enough to serve three as a main course with some bread or couscous) you’ll need:

2 blocks of halloumi
12 large vine leaves
1 large red chilli
3 tablespoons runny Greek honey (thyme honey is great if you can find it)
1 tablespoon chopped marjoram

Any given pack of vine leaves will contain a mixture of sizes – you should be able to find at least 12 big ones in there. Discard or freeze the rest – piddling small vine leaves aren’t very useful.

Rinse the vine leaves beneath a cold tap and dry with kitchen paper. Chop the chilli into 12 slivers. Slice each block of halloumi into six pieces, and lay each piece on a vine leaf as in the picture above, with a piece of chilli on top. Fold the vine leaf around the cheese as in these pictures:

HalloumiHalloumiHalloumi
Heat a large, nonstick frying pan without any oil over a medium flame. Twelve little packets fit snugly in my largest pan, but it is unusually big, so you may find you need to cook in two batches or use two pans. Carefully place each little halloumi parcel, the side with the open leaf edges down, in the hot pan and cook for four minutes. The hot cheese will have sealed the edges, so you can be less careful when turning the parcels. Cook the other side for another four minutes, and remove to a serving dish.

Drizzle the honey evenly over the halloumi and sprinkle the oregano over the dish. Serve piping hot.

Peking dumplings

It’s nearly Christmas. The family is descending upon the Uptonarium, and this calls for finger foods which I can freeze and cook quickly, with the minimum of fuss. Not for me, though, the supermarket mini-samosa or the tiny quiche in a box. I’m making Peking dumplings; lovely little pockets exploding with Chinese flavours, which are fried golden and crisp on one side, and steamed soft and tender on the other. In the north of China, these are traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day. Here in the south of England, we’re going to be eating them on Christmas Eve; infinitely nicer than the traditional glass of sherry and a carrot.

These dumplings freeze, uncooked, brilliantly, and, being tiny, defrost very quickly for cooking. If you’re freezing them, you can do the final, cooking step once your dumplings have defrosted. Try them as an alternative to sausage rolls.

For sixty Peking dumplings (I am informed that Americans call these ‘pot-stickers’), you’ll need:

Wonton wrappers
You can either buy sixty wonton wrappers in the Chinese supermarket, or make your own, as I did, using:
1lb very strong white bread flour
1 1/2 cups water

Filling
1lb minced pork
1/4 white cabbage, chopped finely
15 spring onions, chopped finely
1 small tin water chestnuts, chopped finely
1 bulb garlic (about ten cloves), chopped finely
2 in piece of ginger, peeled and chopped finely
1 teaspoon caster sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon msg (leave out if you really must)
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons Chinese rice wine (substitute cooking sherry if you can’t find any)
1 tablespoon sesame oil

Start by mixing the bread flour and water into a soft, but not sticky, dough, adding more flour or water if your dough is sticky or dry. The resulting dough should be as soft as the plump bit at the heel of your thumb. Set aside in a covered bowl for the gluten to develop.

Chop all the filling ingredients to the same size. You should end up with around the same amount of vegetables as you have pork. Using your hands (I hope you took your rings off to mix the dough, or your diamonds are going to be set in a lovely crusty dumpling mixture), squish the whole lot together until it’s well mixed and holding together loosely. Don’t worry about adding eggs or anything else to bind; the wrappers will keep everything together for you.



Set the filling mixture to one side for the flavours to mingle while you prepare the wonton skins.

There’s a reason you used strong bread flour; the gluten in it will give you a very smooth, tough dough, which stretches easily and doesn’t break and snap. Looking at your ball of dough, I realise it is hard to imagine that you’ll get sixty bits out of it large enough to make into wrappers. Trust me; you will. It’s stretchy stuff. Start by dividing it into two, then divide each of those bits into three. The remaining small pieces are easy to chop into ten equal-sized bits.

Roll each piece into a rough circle on a floury board. You don’t need to be terribly accurate with these; the tops will be frilly anyway, so don’t worry if, like me, you suddenly start acting like someone with fewer than the full complement of fingers when faced with dough and a rolling pin. When you’ve rolled your little wrapper, put it on a plate; you can stack the others on top of it and they won’t stick together.

When all your wrappers are made, put one on the board and place a teaspoon of the mixture (this is quite easy to judge if you make the spoonful about the size of the ball of dough that went to make up one wrapper) in the middle of it. Moisten a semicircle around the edge of the dough (don’t moisten all the way round or it won’t stick), and push the two halves of the circle together, crimping the edges as you go.

I am full of admiration for dim sum chefs, with their lightness of finger and artistry when faced with wrappers. Some of them even make them look like fish or little bunny rabbits. My own are always functional, and never pretty. Anyway; crimp away, and if you’re even half good at this, you’ll end up with something that looks prettier than this picture.

At this point, you can freeze the little dumplings. Line a container with floured greaseproof paper, put a layer of dumplings in, cover with more floured greaseproof paper, add another layer and so on until the container is full. Defrost before continuing to the next stage.

To cook, heat some vegetable oil in a thick-bottomed, non-stick (there is a reason the Americans call these things pot-stickers) frying pan, and when it is hot, slide the dumplings in carefully in one layer, their bottoms in the sizzling fat and their frilly tops pointing upwards. After about five minutes, pour water into the pan until it reaches halfway up the sides of the dumplings. Simmer over a medium heat without a cover until all the water has evaporated. The tops will be delicately steamed and the bottoms brown and crisp. Remove with a slotted skimmer.

These dumplings are traditionally served with black vinegar. (Chinese black vinegar, not the stuff you heathens put on chips.) I enjoy them with a good, sweet, bottled chili sauce mixed with a little soya sauce, alongside a nice cold beer.