food, reviews and of course coffee
A different way of cooking potatoes.
Take a spoon, place the potato on it, and then with a sharp knife make some slices ensuring you don’t cut all the way through the potato.
Place the potatoes in the roasting tray and baste the potatoes with a blend of olive oil and melted butter.
Roast for an hour and then grate some parmesan on top (if you so wish) and roast for a further ten minutes.
Really tasty.
Take some skinless boneless organic chicken thighs, some supermarkets sell them like this, others you will need to skin and bone them. I prefer the thigh meat as it has a lot more flavour than the breast meat (and is cheaper).
Slice into strips.
Coat in flour.
Coat in beaten egg (free range and organic).
I did two different kinds of strips, one with seasoned flour and one with breadcrumbs.
To season my flour and breadcrumbs I usually use a mix of cajun spices.
Shallow fry for a minute or so, until brown.
Drain and put onto kitchen towel on a plate to drain any excess oil. Keep warm.
I served mine with spicy rice.
Quick and easy.
Yesterday I cooked a very nice Sunday lunch for the family.
We have stuffed chicken thighs wrapped in pancetta. I served this with hassleback potatoes, steamed carrots, green beans and brocolli. We also had roasted parsnips, sweet potato and carrots, we also had Yorkshire puddings.
It went down very well and very tasty it was too.
BBC Food has published what looks like a very tasty recipe from Saturday Kitchen, pan-fried calf’s liver with port and sage.
Probably like most people I am not a great fan of liver, probably down to the liver and bacon dish that I was served at school.
However I would quite like to try this, so I might.
This is a very tasty way of cooking pork loin steaks, however you can use other cuts of pork as well, I have done this recipe with thick slices of pork tenderloin.
Take your pork loin steaks. They need to be quite thin, about quarter of an inch (5mm). If you have thicker steaks, if you put them in the freezer to firm up you will find them much easier to cut into thinner steaks.
You now need to make some breadcrumbs, add some herbs and ground pepper to the breadcrumbs.
In a frying pan add some plain oil, something like sunflower, I used rapeseed oil, and heat up until it takes about thirty seconds to brown a cube of bread.
Take the steaks, coat in plain flour and then dip in beaten egg before covering in breadcrumbs.
Depending on the size of your pan, cook just one or two steaks at a time, otherwise too much in the pan will cool the oil down too much or the steaks will stick together.
Cook for a minute two on each side.
Once cooked, keep in a warm oven until ready to serve.
One of the benefits of cooking pork is that the pork stays really tender, whereas dry frying the steaks can sometimes toughen them up.
I have served this with rice and tomato sauce.
So which do you prefer milk chocolate or plain chocolate digestive biscuits?
I haven’t had any for ages and guess what I bought the ones I prefer less.
I much prefer the plain chocolate digestives.
Which do you prefer?
It’s Friday, time for fish, and for the fifth time this week the Guardian has published another excellent recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
The smoked pollack chowder sounds delicious.
This is a nice and simple yet tasty tomato sauce.
Take a small (or half a large onion) and dice finely.
Take half a red pepper and dice finely.
Soften the onion and pepper in a large frying pan with a splash of olive oil.
When the onion and pepper are nearly cooked you can add some chopped mushrooms (but this is optional, however they do add a really nice flavour).
Once the mushrooms are cooked add a good splash of balsamic vinegar and turn up the heat.
Now add a tin of chopped tomatoes or passata. I usually just use a tin of chopped (or whole) tomatoes and then whizz it in a blender. Add some tomato puree and cook for at least fifteen minutes.
It goes well with a lot of dishes, meat, fish or vegetarian.
I served mine with plain rice and thin pork loin steaks which I had covered in flour, then egg and then breadcrumbs and shallow fried.
Continuing their daily series of Hugh’s fish recipes, the Guardian today publish a very nice griddled squid recipe.
I do like squid and I have cooked squid in this manner myself and it is delicious. If you have only ever had pre-battered calamari rings then you are doing squid a diservice and you really must try freshly cooked squid.
The Guardian has published an informative and interesting article on the relationship between and the part food plays in films.
What is the most famous food scene in all cinema? Could it be Samuel L Jackson interrogating the men he’s been hired to kill about European hamburgers and the metric system in Pulp Fiction? Or might it be Debbie Reynolds jumping out of a cake to do the charleston in Singin’ in the Rain?