Spicy Coconut Chicken Noodle Soup.

For once I actually have a genuine excuse for my absence from this little Blog. 

I got robbed. Literally. 

Two weeks ago, two young scallywags broke into the house, smashing far more windows that was really necessary to get in and swiped various things in the house including my laptop, iPod and all my car keys, making blogging a bit tricky. The crowning glory moment within this farce was probably having to pay to have my own car clamped so it couldn’t be driven away in the middle of the night.

On a more culinary note, I’m really into noodle soup at the moment. When I have my one treat-eat-out-at-work lunch of the week I have been experimenting with the various noodle soups on offer near my office, I can safely say the superfood sobas at Pod are superior to many out there.

This recipe lies somewhere between a tribute to my favourite Kare Lomen at Wagamama and the Vietnamese Pho noodle soup. It has real depth of flavour and is thoroughly heart warming especially given the arctic weather at the moment. Of course due to my chilli addiction mine was practically lava it was so spicy but the fragrance of the lemongrass and galangal along with the creamy luxury of the coconut milk turns this dish into a real, quick, easy week night treat.

Serves 2-3

For The Paste:

2 lemongrass stalks, outer leaves removed, bruised and roughly chopped

2.5 cm piece galangal root, peeled & roughly chopped

2 garlic cloves, peeled & finely chopped

2 onions, peeled & roughly chopped

1 red pepper, deseeded & roughly chopped

1 tsp sweet paprika

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 hot red chili, chopped

½ tsp turmeric

½ tsp curry powder

1 tsp shrimp paste 

1 tbsp vegetable oil

Enough noodles of your choice cooked to packet instructions

1 Can of coconut milk

Juice of 1 or 2 limes (depending how juicy they are)

2 chicken breasts, sliced into strips

½ pint chicken stock

For Garnish:

2 handfuls of beansprouts

Finely shredded cucumber and spring onion

Fresh coriander finely chopped

Roasted sesame seeds for garnish

In a food processor blitz all the ingredients for the paste until smooth. Add a touch of water to help it blend if necessary.

Sweat the paste in the oil and when fragrant throw in the chicken strips. When they have sealed add the liquids and noodles and bring to a simmer. 

When the chicken is cooked through ladle into deep bowls and serve with the various garnishes. 

White Chocolate and Raspberry Muffins.

Upon reaching this weekend all I really wanted to do was curl up with the latest episode of MasterChef. Seriously, work had been crazy and I was feeling rather under the weather. However I must say, when I do finally reach the weekend after a busy week I often find it hard to turn off and just allow myself to laze around. 

To keep myself entertained and housebound in an attempt to give my body the quiet weekend it obviously needed I decided to bake. It ended up being quite an elaborate affair.  

Amongst the homemade pizza, shortbread and various other culinary adventures I embarked on over this weekend these muffins were the stars. The tart raspberries marry wonderfully with the sweet white chocolate and the buttermilk keeps the muffins fabulously moist. The seal of approval for me was my dad eating 2 in one 4pm sitting.

Adapted from Lorraine Pascale’s ‘Home Cooking Made Easy’,

Makes 12 muffins.

350g self-raising flour

1tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

Pinch of Salt

250g Soft brown sugar, plus extra for topping

350ml buttermilk

2 eggs

150g butter, melted and cooled

200g raspberries

150g white chocolate in small-ish chunks.

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees C and lines your muffin tins with squares of baking parchment.

Put the flour, bicarb, salt and sugar in a big bowl and stir to combine. Add the buttermilk, eggs and butter and stir everything to get a smooth thick batter.

Fold in the raspberries and chocolate and spoon evenly into your tin.

Bake for 15 minutes until lightly golden then give each muffin a sprinkling of the sugar and put back in the oven for 10 minutes more to finish baking until a deep golden color.

Serve hot or cold. 

***For anyone who reads this far down this post - I now have around a dozen muffins for my dad and I to work our way through. If anyone wants to stop by and contribute to the eating effort it would be greatly appreciated. Well done for reading to the end.***

Meat and Two Veg. Fancy Style.

So despite my declarations of loyalty to my little Blog unsurprisingly something came along to bugger them. To explain my month long absence could be rather complicated but to put it simply, a full time London based job, whilst still trying to maintain my Brighton citizenship along with my sanity and some semblance of a social life is not cohesive with a large amount of free time.

Before you get me wrong though, I enjoy the busy-ness and the new job. It is film production orientated and Old Street based and a steady income whilst learning loads are some of the larger perks of the situation. However. It is also admittedly rather dangerous regarding my retail habits. I managed to spend £50 in Urban Outfitters yesterday and then a further £70 in Zara (must open a saving account and start doing sensible things with my money).

But anyway back to the case in hand. This recipe is firm family favorite and with my little sister heading back to boarding school Sunday evening it seemed like a fitting way to set her up for the week. It is absolutely delicious but surprisingly light, given of course you don’t stuff yourself, but I must say it probably doesn’t exactly fit the Indian summer we’ve been subjected to over the last few weeks.

Serves 4

4 Venison Steaks at room temperature trimmed and lightly covered in olive oil and seasoned.

1kg floury potato, Maris Piper or something similar

1 head of cabbage, shredded

a couple of sprigs of rosemary

½ a red onion finely chopped

½ a garlic clove finely sliced

2 good knobs of butter

400ml red wine

400ml good stock, ideally chicken

1 dessert spoon red currant jelly

olive oil

salt and pepper

Firstly chop your spuds so they’re about the size of a big walnut and par boil them for a few minutes.

Drain them and let them sit and steam for a minute whilst you shred your cabbage.

Tip the potatoes back into your empty pan, cover them in a couple of good glugs of olive oil, season liberally and gently rough them up a bit. The idea is to get the edges of each potato to go a bit flaky and floury but these bits to stay stuck to the potato with the olive oil because this is the bit that will go amazingly crunchy when roasted.

Tip them out onto a roasting tray and nestle a few sprigs of rosemary rubbed with olive oil amongst them. Stick the whole lot in a hot oven say about 220 degrees turning every 15 minutes until they’re gloriously golden and crunchy (around 30-40 minutes).

Whilst your potatoes are roasting get on with your sauce, in a knob of melted butter and a glug of oil sweat the onion and when soft add a sprig of rosemary and your garlic. 

Sweat that until fragrant, add your stock and wine and leave to simmer until it has reduced by two thirds. At this point stir you can sieve the sauce if you want, I couldn’t be bothered.

Stir in the red currant jelly and whisk in a cold knob of butter to thicken the sauce slightly. Leave to keep warm.

Steam your cabbage and when everything is ready it's venison o'clock. 

Fry for 5 minutes on each side for medium and 4 on each side for rare, if you must have it well done go ahead and massacre it but you might as well go and have a chew on a pair of old leather boots. Just saying.

(Apologies for how fluro the photos are. My dad's kitchen lights combined with a crappy camera don't equal the most forgiving photos. )

1 Steak, 2 Sauces.

Now that I’m officially a graduate I’ve been spending a bit more time than usual at my dad’s house in London. Free electricity, a full fridge and cupboards upon cupboards of cookery books being a few of the many perks. It also however means I get to raid my dad’s pantry. If you hadn’t noticed, yes, he probably gave me the cookery gene.

This cupboard is like my own version of an Aladdin’s Cave; Kaffir Lime Leaves, Smoked Paprika, infused Olive Oils, I mean you name it and he’s probably got it so, for me, it is TERRIBLY exciting. Recipes that previously have been out of my reach due to being hamstrung by my more meager Brightonian spice rack and budget are suddenly throwing themselves out of cookery books and hitting me between the eyes. This recipe threw itself at me particularly hard so I chose to make it last week. 

This is a Jamie Oliver concoction (with a few tweaks) and I largely undertook it because it seemed ridiculous.

Steak…with two sauces?! I mean, firstly, surely you are just going to loose your steak amongst all those flavors, which is a waste in itself, and secondly how on earth are a peanut sauce and a salsa verde going to marry up?

The answer?

Absolutely, flipping, fantastically. Seriously.

I’m not joking. I mean the peanut sauce is bloody awesome in itself (a week later my dad has STILL got the last of it in the fridge because it was so good he can’t face throwing it away), as is the Salsa (we finished enough for 4 between the 3 of us in one sitting) but put them together, in your gob, with a well cooked piece of meat, a crunchy chip and your literally reaching culinary nirvana. I’ll shut up now.

For the Steaks:

4x 200g sirloin or rib-eye steaks

1 clove of garlic, halved

For the Peanut Sauce:

100g roasted peanuts

50g seasame seeds

1 tsp dried oregano

1 tsp dried cumin seeds

1 tsp fresh thyme leaves

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

juice of 2 limes

100ml extra virgin olive oil

1 or 2 green chillies, chopped

1 tbsp honey

salt and pepper

200ml water

For the Mexcian Salsa Verde:

Bunch of coriander, chopped

Bunch of Mint, chopped

1 clove of garlic, chopped

1 red chilli, chopped

4 large spring onions, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

juice of 2 limes

Firstly get your steaks out of the fridge to bring up to room temperature while you make your sauces.

For the peanut sauce, in a dry pan toast the peanuts and then add the sesame seeds, oregano, cumin seeds, thyme, paprika, chilli and garlic and cook for another minute to release all their flavors.

Tip the whole lot into a food processor with the rest of the ingredients and whiz it until smooth. Taste and adjust, it may need more sweetness or sourness, it can all depend on how juicy your limes were and how hot your chili was etc. When your happy with it tip it into a bowl and move onto the salsa.

Throw all your chopped ingredients onto a big board and keep chopping until it is very fine. Then put it in another bowl, season, add the lime juice and a good lug of extra virgin olive oil. Again, taste and maybe adjust until you're happy.

For the steaks get a frying pan or griddle pan smoking hot and rub your steaks with olive oil and sprinkle with fine salt (no pepper, it will burn) then fry on each side to your liking, to add a bit of extra flavor you can rub the exposed side of the steak with the halved garlic clove between flips.

Let the meat rest, then carve and serve with the sauces and chips.

Venison Sausage Ragu.

So it’s been a while but I think I’m now back in the blogosphere for good (well, I can only hope). The last month has been crazy with getting degree results, two weeks of waitressing at Wimbledon Tennis and being in London for a bit. However I’m back in Brighton from next week for my graduation, (yes. GRADUATION. I feel so old. Sob.) so normality should soon resume.

This was a recipe I threw together as a result of getting very overexcited about some venison sausages I found on deal in the supermarket. Needless to say I indulged and inspired by the ‘pregnant Jools pasta’ episode of Jamie’s 30 minute meals I put together this ragu.

It delicious, meaty and rich meaning that the accompanying simply dressed salad is a really lovely addition, you could use any sausages you want really as long as they’re reasonably good quality, I just got very excited as a student with the prospect of venison.

Serves 4

6 sausages

1 large onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

½ red chili, chopped

handful of mushrooms, chopped

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

good glug of red wine

1 tsp sugar

fresh basil, stalks chopped and leaves shredded

enough pasta for 4, cooked to packet instructions with a ½  mug of the starchy pasta water saved

parmesan

bag of salad (I used a watercress and peashoot mix)

olive oil

lemon juice

salt

pepper

In a dry pan on a medium heat, squeeze out the innards of the sausages and break up with a wooden spoon until you have a mince-like-consistancy. When the meat has started to develop caramelized edges, reduce the heat, add a glug of olive oil, the onions and mushrooms.

Once the veggies have sweated down, add the garlic, chilli and basil stalks and sweat until fragrant.

Throw in the tomatoes, sugar, wine and a good tin full of water, season to taste and leave to simmer until the majority of the liquid evaporates.

When your happy with consistency of the ragu add the pasta and the pasta’s cooking water. This will help the sauce take on a velvety-coat-all-the-pasta vibe.

Serve with the salad drizzled with some extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice, scattered with parmesan shavings.

Baked Rhubarb and Ginger Cheesecake.

This is the third and final post from the meal I cooked my Mum for her birthday the other week. This is the dessert element. Mum had a vast amount of rhubarb growing in the jungle that is her veggie patch so we wanted to use that up. 

Coincidentally my mum is also completely obsessed with ginger (seriously, she must spend an absolute fortune on the ginger cordial she is hooked on) therefore I thought a rubarby-gingery dessert would be just the ticket and a perfect marriage of flavors. 

I decided on a cheesecake, having made a few over the last few months for various events, I’m a bit of a baked cheesecake wiz currently and therefore thought considering how much food prep I had to do that day it would be a safe bet.

I used the recipe I found here - http://www.waitrose.com/home/recipes/recipe_directory/b/baked_rhubarb_and_ginger_cheesecake.html

It was really refreshing to use the mascarpone instead of cream cheese as a change. I found it really gave a lightness and fluffyness to the cake.  I also chose to reduce the syrup created through poaching the rhubarb down much further than the recipe suggests to. This created a very intense, sticky syrup that I drizzled over the cake before serving it which really gave a zingy-spicy tang to cut through the creamy rich cake. 

It was all around just awesome if I say so myself, and potentially one of the most grown up deserts I’ve made in a long time. Definitely recommended.

Mum's Birthday Meal (Part 2)

So I re-read what I posted yesterday in preparation for writing up the rest of the meal and was struck by something. I referred to myself as a student, which, effectively, I'm not anymore.

Obviously after hyperventilating and having a mild panic attack regarding my rapidly oncoming middle-aged-ness (I mean I have a job interview next week, like for a real grown up person J-O-B, Lordy.) i’ve got back to this post but felt that I should point out my mistake.

Aanyway, this is the dip/condiment post of the meal.

First up, the spiced aubergine. This is how I would envision an Italian Caponata would end up if it had a roll around in your spice cupboard. Essentially it is a spiced auberigine stew, but cooked and reduced down so its more of a condiment to pile on crusty bread, I’m pretty sure you could also reduce it even further than I did and chutney-afy it. Might actually try that sometime soon. Good Idea.

Serves 10 (as a tbsp sized dollop)

2 tbsp olive oil

25mm cube fresh ginger, chopped

6 cloves garlic, crushed

800g aubergines, roughly chunked

1 can chopped tomatoes

1tsp fennel seeds

1/2 tsp cumin seeds

1tbsp ground corriander

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

1 1/4 tsp salt 

1. Toss the aubergines in half the oil and put under a hot grill turning periodically until brown on all sides.

2. Sweat the garlic and ginger until fragrant, then add the spices, cook for another minute then add the browned aubergines and tomatoes with an extra can of water and the salt and some pepper. 

3. Simmer until reduced and aubergines are soft. Can be served hot or at room temperature. 

 Next we have the sweet potato dip. This recipie, as are many that I feature on this blog are from the cookbook I received when I carried out a professional cookery training at The Grange Cookery School in Frome. From the entire month of cooking and eating, this is one of the dishes I made and ate which I really remember falling head over tastebuds in love with.  Like most dips it takes some palate intelligence, tasting and adjusting to your liking but its dream worthy when made well.

Serves 10 (again as a tbsp sized dollop)

2 tbsp olive oil

1 kg Sweet potato, peeled and cubed

1 small bunch mint, chopped

1 clove of garlic, crushed

2 tbsp tahini

juice of a lemon

1/2 tsp cinamon

2 tbsp pine nuts, lightly toasted

salt and pepper

1. In an oven pre-heated to 220 degrees roast the potato tossed in the oil until soft.

2. When roasted blitz all the ingredients apart from the pine nuts in a food processor.

3. Taste and adjust with more lemon/salt/pepper if necessary and serve with the pine nuts stirred in and drizzled with some olive oil. 

And finally we have some good old tzatziki. My little sister was appointed tzatziki lady for the day as she seems to have serious preferences when it comes to the dip. The cucumber has to be diced (rather than traditionally grated) and it can’t be too garlic-y in her book. Personally I’m more down with a slightly more traditional version but in all honesty there was SO much garlic knocking around this meal perhaps it was good that the tzatziki wasn’t of my usual garlic-bomb variety. Abbie didn’t really follow a recipe for this but this one I’m sure would suffice if anyone is looking to recreate this meal - http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tzatziki_13049

I’ll post the dessert recipe element of this blogging-meal-extravaganza tomorrow.