Category: stuff

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They’re back…

It would appear looking at the new menus from Café Rouge that started this April, their merguez sausage is back!

I lamented a few months back that

What I did notice was that the merguez sausage was no longer on the menu, which is a personal favourite.

Well it’s back!

In Café Rouge’s new Petits Plats assortment, one of the choices is

Merguez – spicy beef & lamb sausage with harissa mayonnaise

These Petits Plats look and sound a lot like Tapas.

You can also have them in a sandwich.

Tartine Marocaine £7.95
Open sandwich of sautéed spicy Merguez sausages & caramelised onions with houmous and crisp chicory on grilled sourdough bread served with a minted crème fraîche

I do like the Merguez sausage and therefore I may, just may go and try them again.

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Vegetable Risotto

I do like risotto and have in the past made a very nice lemon and rocket risotto.

Sainsburys do sell plain risotto rice, but they also sell a Mediterranean Style Vegetable Risotto Kit. At £2.99 I didn’t think it was value for money, however I did find it on offer recently for just £1.49, so I thought I would give it a try. It comprises arborio rice and dried vegetables.

It’s very simple to cook, virtually no preparation and then cook in the pan with stock.

It wasn’t that bad, quick and easy to cook and quite tasty.

However if it was £2.99 then no I wouldn’t buy it, for that sort of money I would prefer to buy the raw ingredients and make it from scratch. The preparation saved isn’t huge and fresh vegetables would certainly make a difference to flavour and the final dish.

I served mine with some grilled chicken.

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Devon Cream Scones

Recently at a conference I was able to enjoy these delicious cream and jam scones.

Devon Cream Scones

I am no expert on cream scones or the cream tea, but I certainly do enjoy eating them, something very nice about clotted cream. Though for me the freshness of the scone is paramount too, all too often I have had a cream tea and the scones are nowhere near fresh.

It would appear in Devon that they prefer their scones without dried fruit too, I do prefer my scones with dried fruit.

And finally when eating scones with clotted cream, it has to be for me a nice cup of tea… yes tea!

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Ich bin ein Berliner

Ich bin ein Berliner

The infamous quote from John F Kennedy was as any German will tell you translates as “I am a doughnut”.

So it was with this reminiscence in mind that I bought a Berliner doughnut from Waitrose that had been reduced.

It was the first Berliner I had ever had. Never had the chance to get to Germany for many years, and though through JFK I was aware of the Berliner it’s not something I had seen.

So what did I think?

Es ist ein schaler Berliner.

Yes it was stale.

So it was reduced and it was reduced because it had been out all day (maybe a couple of days) and as a result it was stale. Well I hope it was stale in some ways, as if that was how it was suppose to taste then I am disappointed.

So I didn’t finish it.

I will need to get to Germany sometime for a doughnut…

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The difference saffron makes…

Tonight I made paella, something I seem to do on a regular basis. Tonight though was different and the reason was I had no saffron.

Saffron is a spice derived from the flower of the saffron crocus and it imparts not just a rich golden hue to the paella, but also importantly adds flavour too.

So don’t get me wrong, the paella was very nice, what with onions, pepper and peas, but the lack of saffron was very telling and I think next time I want a rice dish, and I don’t have saffron in the house, I will be making risotto instead.

How my paella should have looked, a rich yellow colour….

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Fruity Waffle

Fruity Waffle

So what do you do when you run out of maple syrup? Well what I did was add some fruit to my waffle.

The raspberries were beautiful, wonderfully sweet. The strawberries (been well out of season) were okay, but nothing like proper summer strawberries. As for the blueberries, well they were rather tasteless, so much so I didn’t have those.

As for the waffle, homemade using an electric waffle iron. Made using a batter of flour, egg, milk, a spoonful of sugar and a few drops of vanilla extract. I use it for both breakfast waffles, sweet ones and with the addition of herbs to the batter it makes great savoury waffles.

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Fish and Chips

When travelling out and about I try as much as possible to avoid eating at motorway service stations. Either they are overpriced and overcooked, or they merely consist of fast food chains. One alternative is to eat at a supermarket restaurant where the food is usually a little better and generally much cheaper.

So it was that I found myself at a Morrisons supermarket last week looking for a bite to eat for lunch. As I hadn’t had it for a while I went with the fish and chips.

To be honest it was quite good and value for money at less than five pounds.

The batter was crispy, though for me a little too greasy, and the fish was only just overcooked. Generally I find in these places they well overcook the fish. The chips were crunchy with a fluffy inside. The peas were as expected frozen peas heated through and slighty overcooked as they were obviously cooked and kept warm over the lunch service period.

Well not bad, and to be honest what I expected from a supermarket café. Certainly it was better than what I would find at the motorway services.

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Scallops with Noodles

Scallops with Noodles

One thing I like about cooking oriental (inspired) food is the speed. This dish took about ten minutes from getting into the kitchen to putting food on the table.

Now I did cheat a little by using a pack of prepared stir fry vegetables, you can (as I usually do) prepare the veg yourself.

Once in the kitchen I put some water onto boil for the noodles, that take two minutes to cook.

I got the scallops and cut them in half through the middle to “double” the number of scallops. This is a trick I picked up from Gordon Ramsay on making scallops go further.

I heated a large frying pan and added a splash of sunflower oil. I let the oil heat through I then added a dash of Chinese Five Spice before adding the prepared stir fry veg.

In another pan I cooked the scallops. They don’t take long and you don’t want to overcook them.

Once the vegetables are nearly cooked, in other words still crunchy I added the noodles and some oyster sauce.

I then placed the noodles and vegetables on a plate and topped with the pan fried scallops.

For a variation I would have added some cashew nuts for crunch and some squid and prawns to complement the scallops.

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Marmalade Roly Poly

I have cooked many things in my life, but this was a first for me, a traditional steamed pudding. Yes I have heated up shop puddings, using steam or the microwave. But this was the first time I actually started with basic ingredients, made the pudding, steamed it and ate it!

So why marmalade?

Well we didn’t have enough lemons for a lemon pudding. No strawberry jam so “dead man’s leg” was out of the question. No dried fruit, so no spotted dick. But I did have marmalade… well it tastes of orange!

150 self-raising flour , plus extra for dusting
70 dried suet
45g caster sugar
finely grated zest of a lemon (well my lemon was a little soft so didn’t get too much zest)
100ml milk
some spoonfuls of marmalade

For the dough, mix together the flour, suet, caster sugar and lemon zest with a spoon. Stir in some milk until the mixture reaches the consistency of a soft pastry. Gather together into a ball, but don’t overwork or it will toughen.

This I then flattened out onto a flour dusted work surface.

I then spread the marmalade over the dough. Now to be honest if you try and spread like you do with toast then it isn’t going to work. Think of what you would do with hard butter on fresh soft white bread.

I then rolled the dough up. You can use a bit of milk to seal the edges.

I placed the rolled dough onto some greaseproof paper which I then placed on some foil.

I made a parcel of the greaseproof paper and used the foil to ensure it would retain it’s shape and sealed the edges. Leave rool for the pudding to rise.

Place the parcel in a steamer and steam for an hour and a bit, until firm to the touch. Allow to rest for a minute or two, unwrap, slice and serve. Custard is the obvious accompaniment.

Now as you can see it didn’t come out exactly to the shape I thought it would.

However once sliced it looked okay.

It was delicious served with custard.

It did need more marmalade, however I couldn’t use all of the jar as I wouldn’t have any for my toast in the morning…

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Cakes

These cupcakes (or fairy cakes) are based on a recipe for a traybake cake.

Ingredients

250g softened butter , plus extra for greasing
280g self-raising flour
250g golden caster sugar
½ tsp baking powder
4 eggs
150ml creme frache – the recipe calls for yoghurt, but I didn’t have any.
1 tsp vanilla extract
handful of choc chips

To make the sponge batter, beat the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, creme frache and the vanilla in a large bowl with an electric whisk until lump-free. Stir in the choc chips. Spoon into the tin, then bake for 15-20 mins until golden and risen and a skewer poked in comes out clean.