Barney Desmazary's Lobster with Thermidor Butter

Okay, I wimped out in the end.  I just wasn't brave enough to buy myself a real, live lobster and so ended up with a pre-cooked one instead.  In my defence, living a fair distance from a decent fishing port means that live lobsters are hard to come by.  Some research on the t'internet revealed a fishmonger on a farm shop some forty miles from here.  As I was only cooking this for me, I really couldn't justify the petrol and expense of a huge, live lobster.  At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Pinchy's final mug shot

I've mentioned before how I'm a bit of a wuss and if I had to kill my own food, I'd be a confirmed vegetarian before you could say 'peanut butter on celery'.  Had I gotten my hands on a live lobster, I most certainly would've been tempted to be like Homer Simpson and turn it into a pet.

That particular Simpsons episode evoked memories of a holiday on the Isle of Wight with friends of my mother.  I was probably about five or six at the time and they drove an estate car which back then, we kids just used to ride in the boot of.  That particular summer, we got to share the boot with the world's most ginormous live lobster.  I swear blind that it lived in the boot of that car for most of the two weeks of our holiday.  I don't know why it was there or what was meant to happen to it but it definitely happened as there's a picture of us all sat in the back of the boot somewhere at my mum's house.

Anyhoo, having avoided the need to choose between stabbing the poor thing through the head or flinging it into a pot of boiling water, I turned to Dame Mary for advice on how to cut and clean the lobster.  There are a squillion and one online guides on how to do this, but the trusty 'Know How' section in Mary's Complete Cookery Book (the original one, not the re-released one Amazon now peddle) has a step-by-step pictorial and I just knew that I'd be safe with Mary at the helm.

One downside of having a cooked lobster was that the husband failed to be terrorised by it.  He's a bigger wuss than I am and will not remove spiders or moths from bedrooms nor will he collect seaweed with Miss A at the seaside.  On the other hand, Miss A wanted to play with pinchy and had a full on meltdown as I tried to explain that he was for tea.

It's lobster, not mini octopusses.  Or octopi??

I now also know that I wouldn't ever want to get into a fight with a lobster.  It was pretty easy to knife through the shell but ouchy - those claws have got some nasty sharp bits on the outside when you're trying to extract the lovely claw meat.

I'd originally intended to serve it with Thomasina Miers' pumpkin mole but forgot the coriander (next time I see langoustines, I'm so doing that recipe) so I went for thermidor butter instead.  Next problem was assuming it was possibly to change a nappy in the time it would take for the wine to reduce from 150ml to not much at all.  Wrong.  Burnt shallots do not taste good.  Nor do shallots burnt in white wine that has been open for several weeks.  Oops.  Did I mention I rarely drink?

I got there in the end.  I must say the mustard was slightly overpowering - but that may have been just the brand that I had (Waitrose own) or that I used a little too much.  Other than that, it was a really simple recipe and should I ever find myself cooking a meal for another lobster lover, it's great because you can prep both the butter and lobster well in advance of serving.  Chances of that are probably less than zero but hey - you never know what life may bring you.

You can find the recipe I used here.

Olympic Food Challenge: African Banana Coconut Bake - Equatorial Guinea

With a population of just 676,000 - making it the 166th biggest country in the world, Equatorial Guinea actually has the 29th highest GDP per capita due to recently discovered oil reserves boosting its economy.  Sadly, like most countries, the majority of the money lies in the hands of just a few.

Given the size of the country, I was unsurprised to learn that they sent just two competitors to the main London 2012 event (they left empty-handed) and they didn't field any athletes at the Paralympics.

So on to the foodie bit.  The detail from Wikipedia is as small as the country and gave me little help at all.  It did indicate that meat is very prevalent - specifically game, chicken and bush meat.  Knowing that I was unlikely to be able to source chimpanzee from Ocado, I went with fish.  Next problem, recipes are few and far between but eventually I happened across one for Pick a Pepper Stew which is basically fish cooked with peppers and herbs and served with rice.  Simple.

Well you'd think.  The recipe called for snapper but after a lot of effort by the fishmonger at my local Morrisons, they were unable to source any and recommended Tilapia instead.  I collected said fish yesterday afternoon and although it was gutted and descaled, I was left to my own devices to fillet the fish.  I should never have let the thought of 'how hard can filleting a fish be?' float through my head.

I've always had a bit of a fear of fish with their eyes in ever since my mother terrorised me with a dead trout when I was a child.  And then I owned a psychotic goldfish that kept jumping out of its bowl onto the kitchen floor.  I'm sure this is why I have a phobia of swimming in the sea. I really don't like fish.  Seriously. Unless they're battered with chips; in a fish finger sandwich; or in a meuniere sauce.

Tilapia must have the measliest amount of flesh to bone ratio of any fish ever.  Seriously, it's like a goldfish on steroids.  I managed to scrape two two-inch square bits of fish from it and was left with a massive fishy carcass, which I'm sure would make some fabulous fish stock if I didn't live in a house where the chief resident complains of any non-Captain Birds Eye fish smells.

So I ended up having to think on my feet and with a lack of bananas, I made Chef Jeena's onion bhajis. Fast forward to today and rather than doing the fish thing again with different fish, I settled on making African Banana Coconut Bake.  It's about the only dessert I can find with any reference to Equatorial Guinea.  The other choice was something containing raspberries and bread which sounds suspiciously like bread pudding.  At least this is vaguely exotic with its citrus fruits and coconut.

It's a really simple and scalable dish.  I made it just for me so rather than baking it in a dish, I just wrapped it all up in foil, a bit like a Cornish pasty, and baked it for ten minutes.  The sauce was amazing - although it made the coconut soggier than I would've liked.  Definitely one for the barbecue if we ever have sunny weather again.

And that is definitely the end of my Olympic Food Challenge contribution.  I only hope we finally hit the 204 mark on Sunday.  I'd like to say a mahoosive thanks to the team Coach - Ewan Mitchell - for letting me join his 'games'.

Chef Geena's Baked Onion Bhajis

With less than three weeks to go, I've realised there are a few things I still need to tick off of my blog to do list.  One of those was to make onion bhajis again.  I had a disaster with a recipe on day four (I have no idea where the year has gone) and vowed that I'd make them again so, having had this recipe in mind for some weeks, I finally got round to trying it.

The good thing about these bhajis is that they are baked and not fried.  Although there is oil involved to soften the onions and to give them a 'fried' taste, it's probably not quite as bad as slinging them in the deep fat fryer.  Plus there's much less risk of them disintegrating.

Bhajis with lime pickle

The mixture is pretty easy to make and, unlike my last attempt, came together and actually looked how I would expect bhaji mix to look.  I used two smallish onions - I didn't weigh them - and this produced two bhajis.  I'm guessing you'd get 6-8 decent sized ones from the 1lb of onions the recipe suggests.

On the down side, I used the full recipe quantity of spices, even though I was only making a fraction of the other ingredients but you couldn't really taste the spicing and I think it would be lost if you had more onions and flour.  I'd definitely recommend doubling the spices if you use the full recipe.

As for the baked vs fried bit.  They were okay, if a little stodgy in the middle.  Then again, if you can put up with the grease, things taste so much better when they're deep fried.  But we all know that's bad for you so let's not go there.

Far happier with this recipe than the last attempt.  I think they'd go well with a healthy curry meal if you're looking for that kind of thing.  I had them for tea with a random leftover Waitrose samosa which also snuck into the picture, just because that's how I roll on a Thursday night.  Sometimes.

You can find the recipe here.

Olympic Food Challenge: Botswanan Chicken Pie - Botswana

With four competitors in two disciplines at the main London 2012 Olympics, Botswana managed to gain a silver medal in the Men's 800m.  Unfortunately, Botswana had to pull its team from the 2012 Paralympics due to financial irregularities in their Olympic Committee.

Moving swiftly on to the food (sorry for the short post), Botswana has its own unique cuisine, but is also influenced by its neighbouring countries.  Having already made Pap and Chakkalakka (just because I liked the name) when I did Lesotho, and lacking a three-legged iron pot (commonly used for cooking), I plumped for Botswanan Chicken Pie as chicken cooked for a guest shows special hospitality.

Mmmmm....pie....

Sadly I had no guests and I was just cooking for myself.  The appeal in this recipe was that it was for individual pasty-style pies so I could make just one.  I must confess I cheated a little as I was trying to hone my pastry making skills which leave a lot to be desired (see the Apple and Rhubarb Pie and Quiche Lorraine trials) and so I'd a piece of Dan Lepard's Shortcrust Pastry lurking in my fridge instead of the pastry recommended by the recipe.

Whenever I make pastry, it's too short and consequently crumbles everywhere.  As a last resort, I put my faith into Dan.  This is the best pastry ever.  He recommends using half butter and half lard.  I didn't have any lard so went with the 'you can use all butter' caveat and it turned out to be the tastiest, butteriest pastry I have ever had the pleasure to eat.  I expected nothing less and yet again, Short and Sweet delivered.  Miss A even now refers to Short and Sweet as 'Mummy's favourite recipe book' even though I have never uttered these words in her presence.  I'm pleased her two-year-old mind is capable of forming such opinions already.

As for the pie filling - it's a mix of chicken, apple, onion, tomato and currants.  If it wasn't for the OFC, I never would've tried the sweet and savoury thing.  But I was amazed at how much I enjoyed it.  It just worked.  The recipe mentions the filling as being a little dry so I roasted a chicken breast at 190c fan for 17 minutes so it was barely cooked.  I immediately chopped this and popped it into the pan to fry, thus finishing the cooking and stopping it from being too dry in the finished product.

Do try these. My picture is a bit rubbish as I wanted you to see the filling of the pasty and the crisp pastry meant it shattered perfectly, but wasn't very photogenic!

You can find the recipe for the pie here and watch Dan making one of his shortcrust pastry recipes here although I used his basic eggless pastry from Short and Sweet.

Dan Lepard's Dark Chocolate Berry Cake

There are a few things that I've tried several different recipes for over the course of this year in the hope of finding the perfect recipe.  I've found my favoured recipes for naan bread, vanilla cupcakes, lemon cake and meatballs (this is a cheat because we settled on Waitrose ones).

Poor lighting - taken at 4.57am!

But good chocolate cake has eluded me.  Pre-blog, I had made Angela Nielsen's Ultimate Chocolate Cake and after a disaster with a vanilla cake, it gave me a back up base cake for this challenge.  I then tried Nigella's chocolate cake  which I really wasn't a fan of.  I had a disaster with Dan Lepard's Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake and a similar crisis with a chocolate and clementine loaf cake that Miss A and I tried to make the other day that I was too embarrassed to blog about.

So today, having made a bargain with Miss A that if she'd make a lemon cake for my Grandad's birthday on Saturday (he hates chocolate cake, she believes that all birthday cakes should be chocolate), we set about trying Dan Lepard's Dark Chocolate Berry Cake for me to take in to work tomorrow for my lovely colleagues on my Business Process Excellence course.

Having made a deal with the trainer that if we finished by 4pm today, I'd bring in cake tomorrow, I was a little nervous that I'd have a further disaster (I'm touching my laminate floor in the hope I don't now jinx myself and drop the darn thing on the way into work in the morning!).  But so far, so good.

I nearly forgot the butter - which is the very first ingredient - but managed to redeem myself at the last minute.  Then I didn't realise that if you start the timer on my mobile phone and then plug it in to charge, it stops the timer.  Thankfully I'd double checked the time on the cooker clock when I put the cake in so I was able to work out how much longer it needed and now it's nicely risen and cooling in the tin.

Hutch plays mother

Of course, by the time it's completely cooled I will have to be in bed, meaning that I need to ice it first thing in the morning.

My only comment (so far) is that the instructions are a little scant for the novice.  For example, with the icing, it doesn't tell you to melt the chocolate in a bain marie.  I'm partly tempted to do it straight in the pan but I could do without a burnt chocolate crisis at 5am.  Nor does it tell you how to cool the cake - in the tin or on a rack?  I'm going for the in the tin method.

Keep your fingers x'd for me and I'll update the post tomorrow with a picture of the finished article and some feedback.

You can find the recipe here.

Updated 5th September 2012 @ 19:58

Having gotten up at 4.30am to ice the cake this morning, I'm afraid it's not particularly photogenic and the picture is poorly lit.  However, I'm loving the chocolate icing with the subtle hint of berry coming through from the jam.  I used cherry jam with mine and I absolutely recommend buying the Mirabel jam that you can get in Lidl which I used for my cherry Viennese whirls.  It has a really strong, sharp cherry flavour and cuts well through the chocolate.  I find English cherry jams far to sweet and I think they'd be lost in the richness of the frosting.

One miniscule criticism is again surrounding the food photography.  This time, it's the Guardian's website.  The stylist seems to have used a buttercream type frosting rather than the chocolate/jam/icing sugar version that Lepard suggests.  The icing in the official picture is very smooth and thick, showing no hint of cherries lurking in it - which is a shame.  Or maybe they just used a sieved cherry jam?  Nobody's ever going to taste that picture so they probably only cared that it looks aesthetically pleasing.  And in this instance, there's no picture in Short and Sweet to compare it to as the recipe isn't in the book.

Anyway on to the reviews.  My chief cake tester is on his holidays at the moment.  The second in command (on the cake testing front) gave it the seal of approval, as did the rest of the course delegates and the assorted managers who came to review our final presentations.  In fact, I've now been invited to attend twenty training sessions taking place between now and Christmas by one manager who was told that I always take cake when I got to a training session.  He'll be lucky!

My personal opinion from the tiny sliver I had was that it was a good, flavoursome, solid cake that would stand up to a wide variety of fillings and could probably slice well into a three layer cake.  It was a little drier than I would've liked which is purely my own fault.  Partly because of the timer issue (see above) and partly because I was trying to juggle Miss A into bed around the time it was due out of the oven so it got a few minutes more than it should have had.

Nevertheless, I will definitely be making this one time and again.  Chocolate cake recipe?  Sorted.

And finally, thanks to Hutch who got press-ganged into having his pic taken for the blog - just to prove I don't eat all the cake myself!

Olympic Food Challenge: Chrov Plav - Kazakhstan

Out of all of my Olympic countries, I think Kazakhstan did best at the London 2012 Summer Olympics, gathering a haul of seven golds, one silver and five bronze medals.  Looking at the disciplines they got them in, I wouldn't ever want to mess with a Kazakhstani - they seem to excel at Weightlifting, Boxing and Wrestling (with a gold in Cycling and another in Athletics for a little diversity).

They've fielded seven competitors in three different disciplines at the 2012 Paralympics - some have already sadly not advanced, but they still have some hope left in certain categories.

Moving on to the food angle, their cuisine revolves heavily around horse meat and mutton.  Of course, eating horses is (thankfully) frowned on in the UK so I didn't have to go down that route.  According to the Beeb, the Kazakhstani team even tried to bring their own horse meat sausages with them as they believe that their protein rich diet is key to being amazing in the Powerlifting arena.  I couldn't find out whether or not the UK Borders Agency permitted to bring them in but based on their prowess from the stats above, either they did or maybe they'd have medalled (I hate myself for using that term!) even more than they did.

One of their most well-known dishes is Manti - or lamb dumplings.  Having already done the dumpling thin "in Nepal" a few weeks back and being tight on time, I went for a different, pudding based dish.  Chrov Plav.  I can't for the life of me remember how I happened across this particular recipe as most of my research turned up recipes in how to preserve mutton and lamb - very important to the Kazakhstanis  due to their historical nomadic lifestyles.  The ingredients for Chrov Plav reflect this with a heavy reliance on dried fruits and rice - all of which would transport pretty easily without spoiling.

Sadly, I'm not a fan of Chrov Plav.  I think it's because I probably wanted it to be like an English rice pudding - creamy and comforting.  The lack of full fat milk and/or cream and lashings of sugar probably makes this really good for you.  It is sweet, but the sweetness comes from the dried fruit and honey - I don't really like honey.  If for some bizarre reason I did try making this again, I'd probably throw some cardamom pods in to give it an additional flavour dimension.  I'd also think about swapping the honey for maple syrup and while I was at it, substitute the water for milk.  At which point it would be nothing like the Kazakhstan dish - and I'd probably just be better off making the Stovetop Coconut Rice Pudding I was so enamoured with earlier this year (ie a totally different dish).

If you want to make it, here's the original recipe.

Serves 4

• 1 cup Rice uncooked (it didn't say which kind of rice so I used basmati)
• 1/4 cup Chopped almonds
• 2 tbsp Currants
• 2 tbsp Raisins
• 6 each Prunes dried, pitted, & coarsely chopped
• 3 tbsp Dates chopped
• 4 tbsp Butter
• 1/4 cup Apricots, dried, pitted & cut into strips ¼"x1"
• 1 tbsp Honey
• 2 cup Cold water

1. Soak, dates, currants, & prunes in a bowl of warm water for 15 minutes. Then remove them, pat dry, and mix with the other dried fruits. 
2. Melt the butter in a large, heavy skillet over high heat. 
3. Add the fruit mixture and the almonds. 
4. Reduce the heat to low and stir for 4 minutes, stir in the honey, rice, and water. 
5. Raise heat to high and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 25 minutes. 
6. Serve hot.

Olympic Food Challenge: Non Bread - Tajikistan

Today, my Olympic Food Challenge journey has entered Tajikistan.  Formerly part of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan is a landlocked country in Asia, bordered by Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, China and Kyrgyzstan.  The cuisine is largely influenced by the food of these neighbouring countries with the national dish being pilaf.  

My non bread - but it is real, honest!

Meals are usually served with non, a flatbread found throughout Central Asia. If a Tajik has food but not non, he will say he is out of food. If non is dropped on the ground, people will put it up on a high ledge for beggars or birds. Legend holds that one is not supposed to put non upside down because this will bring bad luck. The same holds true if anything is put on top of the non, unless it is another piece of non (source - Wikipedia)

I loved the above bits of trivia and the beautiful designs shown in pictures that I found when I was looking for a recipe so I knew this was the dish for me.  Plus, it gave me some bread to go with the cauliflower soup that I made yesterday - and now I'm stuffed to the gills for the rest of the day.

Traditional non bread

The recipe was pretty easy to do, if a little time consuming.  My sponge went a bit bonkers and so I managed to short-cut a little of the time.  The resulting bread was nice and soft although do pay attention to the bit that says to have the toppings to hand for when you take the hot trays out of the oven.  I didn't and ended up flinging salt at them so had to brush quite a bit off when it came to the eating.  

I just wish I had a fancy bread stamp and had thought to find out what the traditional ones are glazed with to give them their lovely golden hue.  You can find the recipe that I used here.

As for their Olympic and Paralympic entries, they won a single bronze medal in the weight lifting at the Olympics and have one competitor in the Power Lifting at the Paralympics although their Paralympians have yet to win a medal.