Time for a coffee

May 1, 2016

Mushroom Pasta

I have been using the woodland mushrooms from Morrisons for a while now. Now I know they are not from woodlands, but are farmed, but they make a nice difference to dishes that usually use common mushrooms.

When it comes to mushrooms I usually buy chestnut brown mushrooms rather than the more common white ones. I prefer the colour and flavour.

The woodland mushrooms include oyster, and some others that I haven’t’ identified!

My recipe for mushroom pasta is relatively quick and easy. I have been using fetticine pasta, which only takes a few minutes to cook. For my pasta sauce I use some onions, chopped mushrooms (and for a non-vegetarian version of the recipe use some smoked pancetta) .

In a large heated frying pan, drizzle a little olive oil, then add the pancetta, until nearly cooked. Add some finely chopped onion, which is cooked until soft, I then added some chopped mushrooms. Once these were cooked, I added some crème frache and grated parmesan. The cooked pasta is then drained and the sauce stirred in.

This dish is as tasty as is, served with some additional parmesan on top. However I have been using the woodland mushrooms to add another aspect to the dish. I keep the mushrooms whole, or halved. With the … this is sliced.

I then in another frying pan, put it on a high heat, add some butter and cook the woodland mushrooms. The butter adds some colour to the mushrooms, once cooked, they are added to the top of the pasta dish.

There are some variations, you can of course, lose the pancetta to make a vegetarian version. Another thing you can do is to add is spinach and pine nuts.

I like the woodland mushrooms and I am pleased with how I have cooked them and their flavour. I have had trouble in the past with cooking wild mushrooms, but cooking them on a high heat with some butter, seems to do the trick.

January 8, 2016

Our Christmas Dinner

I usually document our Christmas dinner in December, in the main so that I can recall what we had and when, what we liked and what we wouldn’t get again.

In 2014 we went with an Aldi Four Bird Roast and though we enjoyed it, I wanted to have something different in 2015. Due to a range of reasons we didn’t pre-order any thing for lunch, so in the end it was a quick trip out to the local Morrisons. I bought a small turkey and a duck.

These were roasted in the over, taking about two hours. The flavour was pretty good and I managed to not over cook (or under cook) the roasts.

They were served with some traditional accompaniments, such as pigs in blankets and a range of stuffings.

The brussels sprouts were peeled and halved. These were then pre-cooked for a couple of minutes in boiling water. As we neared the serving time, in a hot frying pan I added a small amount of olive oil and fried off some pancetta. I then added the brusels with some pre-cooked chestnuts.

Overall a really nice festive meal.

January 3, 2016

Time for a Coffee: Top Ten Blog Posts 2015

So what food, drink and coffee blog posts were people reading this year? Interestingly none about coffee?

At number ten is an article entitled, Alba Ristorante Part Two. Back in 2008 when attending Handheld Learning, one evening we went to a local Italian next to the Barbican in London. I do remember the meal, it was delicious. This was a really nice upmarket Italian restaurant but with quite reasonable prices, especially for London.

The ninth most popular post was a Classic Heineken Advert from 1976.

The eighth post was about cooking Chorizo, Cooking Chorizo. as was the seventh post Chorizo Frito al Vino.

The post at number six was about Basil & pine nut marguerite and a simple pasta recipe was at number five, Pasta in Tomato Sauce.

The fourth most popoular post was not about just any pork medallions, but Marks and Spencers Pork Medallions.

Reminiscing about Newquay Steam Beer was the third most read post on the blog.

The second most popular post was one of the many on the blog about squid, this one was about the Chilli Squid from Wagamama.

The most popular post this year was Sirloin for Beef Wellington? This was a response to the high ranking of another post about using sirloin steak in a Beef Wellington rather than fillet steak due to the way people were (at the time) searching Google.

Well here’s raising a cup of coffee and wishing you all the best for 2016.

December 25, 2015

Reindeer Cupcakes

These are the Reindeer cupcakes we baked last year, we are intending to bake them again this year. Lots of fun to make and the salted pretzels add a little something different.

The first stage is to make some chocolate cupcakes, I have a simple recipe that I use for cupcakes and the quantity can be increased quickly and easily simply by increasing the number of eggs.

The recipe is based around a single egg.

Ingredients

One egg
Same weight of self-raising flour, butter and caster sugar
One tablespoon of cocoa powder

Cream the caster sugar and butter together until smooth.

Add the egg and a little of the flour. Mix until smooth and then fold in the remaining flour and the cocoa powder.

Place spoonfuls of mixture into cupcake cases and bake in a medium oven for ten minutes. Once cooked, cool before decorating.

The cakes are covered in chocolate buttercream icing. Pretzels are used for the antlers and marshmallows for the eyes, spotted with black icing. The noses are homemade biscuits with a giant chocolate button, except for Rudolph who has a red icing nose.

November 26, 2015

Baking Biscuits

I have a very simple recipe for some simple biscuits. The recipe is based around a single egg.

Ingredients

One egg
Same weight of cold cubed butter and caster sugar
Twice the weight of plain flour

Rub the flour and butter into breadcrumbs.

Stir in the sugar and then add the egg to bind the mixture into a dough.

The mixture should come into a dough quite easily.

I then form the dough into a large sausage shaped roll, about 3-4 cm in diameter. I then wrapped the dough in cling film and placed in the fridge for an hour or so. This is to firm up the dough and make it easier to manage when slicing into biscuit shapes.

Removing the dough from the fridge, I sliced it into rounds which are then placed onto a baking tray. Now you can placed them onto a greased tray, but I usually use baking parchment. One tip I picked up from Jamie Oliver was after cutting the parchment was to screw it up into a ball and then flatten the screwed up parchment. What this does is make it much easier to line the baking tray, otherwise the parchment as a tendency to roll back into a roll.

These are then baked in a moderate oven for about 10-12 minutes until film. I prefer my biscuits just cooked, not browned, so they have a softer crumbly texture. If you prefer a crisper biscuit then bake for a little longer.

Once baked, remove the tray of biscuits from the oven and place on a cooling rack.

Once cooled, you can then ice the biscuits or cover them in chocolate.

November 10, 2015

Quick Chimichanga

Looking for a relatively quick lunch, but also wanting to sit down I was intrigued by the recently new branch of Chimichanga in Cabot Circus. Initially I was put off by the prices on the menu, well this was supposed to be lunch and I didn’t want to spend too much money. It looked like they didn’t have a special lunch menu, but then I noticed a board standing outside advertising 40% of mains by downloading a code. So a quick browse on the phone I had a voucher code so in I went.

Inside there was a modern clean feel to the place. There was a choice of booths or tables. There wasn’t much of a Mexican feel to the place, some browns and oranges, but not much else really. It reminded me somewhat of Giraffe or Coal, nothing distinctive that made it feel different or that you were eating food inspired by Mexico and the Deep South.

It was quite empty, but was greeted on arrival by friendly waiting staff. I was given the choice of sitting where I wanted to. This was a nice option, all too often when visiting restaurants you are rarely given the choice of where to sit. Sitting down I looked over the menu. Yes I was tempted by the Calamares, well I really enjoy squid, but I had decided that I probably didn’t have the time for a starter so straight into looking at the mains. The menu is split into Tex Grill and Mex Kitchen choices, as you might imagine with a place such as this, there were the usual choices. In the Tex Grill you found the ubiquitous burgers, ribs and steaks. The Mex Kitchen had burritos, enchiladas, quesadilla sandwiches and the signature chimichanga. There are quite a few vegetarian options within the Mex Kitchen menu, based around beans or portobello mushrooms. In the end I went with a fajita dish.

A sizzling skillet of sautéed peppers and onions with marinated fajita steak. With fresh guacamole, jack cheese, sour cream and fresh salsa. Served with warm tortillas.

It wasn’t quite sizzling, I remember having a fajita dish at TGI Fridays back in 1999 and that sizzled. There was a good lot of peppers and onions, topped with a sliced grill steak. Personally I would have preferred if the steak had been cooked with the peppers and onions, but even so this was very tasty. Alongside the skillet, came four small warm tortillas along with some really nice fresh tasting salsa, proper chunky guacamole, as well as grated jack cheese and some sour cream. I did feel the torrillas were a little small making it difficult to wrap around a filling, so despite the fact this was finger food, I ate it with a knife and fork, otherwise I could see it going all over my shirt!

Overall I really did enjoy the dish, and with the 40% off, thought it was quite good value for lunch. I didn’t think it was as good as the tacos (with soft flour tortillas) I have had at Mission Burrito or at Barburrito in Paddington, however they were takeaway and one of the key issues for me was finding a place to sit down. There is a van selling those kinds of tacos and burritos by Bristol Bridge which I may try on another occasion.

October 31, 2015

Sorry, they also look disgusting…

These Kipling’s Witches Hat Fancies are described on the packet as: orange flavoured green sponge with a vanilla topping and black fondant icin.g

That whole combination really doesn’t appeal to me, but maybe that is the point..

In my previous blog post I said I wasn’t going to buy any, however on a visit to London, my sister-in-law bought some for the children as a Halloween tweet.

Now I didn’t eat any, but my son who did, said he enjoyed it, but then it probably just tasted of sugar! What put me off (apart from all the sugar) was that the combination of green sponge and black icing, meant after they were bitten into, they actually looked like they were mouldy French Fancies!

…and that may be the point!

October 17, 2015

Sorry, these sound disgusting…

…and that may be the point!

These Kipling’s Witches Hat Fancies are described on the packet as: orange flavoured green sponge with a vanilla topping and black fondant icing.

That whole combination really doesn’t appeal to me, but maybe that is the point.. though I suspect they will taste like other Kipling cakes with just a hint of orange, with the usual over sugared taste explosion.

The name also annoys me, well that I am sure the grammar is wrong. In the box there are eight fancies. If these are hat fancies then surely one on its own would be a witch’s hat fancy. As witches is the plural of witch, then eight witches is fine, but I do think eight hats would be eight witch’s hats. Though is this like courts martial (the plural of court martial) as a result it’s eight witches hat, but that doesn’t sound right.. Adding fancies onto the end seems to worsen the situation. Personally I think it should be eight witch’s hat fancies, or am I wrong and Mr Kipling is right?

Did I buy them?

No!

October 12, 2015

French Markets

Over on my “nowhere else to post, so it goes here” blog I have been posting some photographs from a trip I made to Normandy in the 1990s including visiting Honfleur and Caen.

I don’t recall which year I went, but one of my overwhelming memories of that trip, was a visit to the local market in Cane and the smell of tomatoes. You could smell them from some distance away from the stall.

I remember thinking how on earth did these tomatoes actually smell of tomatoes, it certainly wasn’t like the bland ones you got from supermarkets in England at the time. My memory of buying tomatoes from my local supermarket was that you had the choice of one kind, they all looked the same, they were all the same size and they tasted of, to be honest, nothing. Today you do have a lot more choice and I certainly try and buy tomatoes for their flavour.

Even today I have never found an English market come close to those that I found in Normandy on that trip. Certaiinly the Italian markets I visited at the same kind of time were similar, full of fresh produce.

There were things there that you would never find in the British markets (or supermarkets) at the time, but things have changed. There was vegetables and fruit that I had never heard of. As we were staying in a hotel I didn’t actually buy anything from the market, but I was so tempted…

I wonder if these markets still exist? If they do, are they much different from what I saw back then?

One thing we have much more now in the UK than we had back then are local farmers’ markets, full of local produce and great stuff you can get there too.

October 10, 2015