Monthly Archives: October 2012

Garlic water

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Ottolenghi has a new cookbook out and whilst it will no doubt be in the house by the time we get past Christmas but I am conscious we are still cooking our way though the first two. The most popular recipe has been the Caramelized Garlic tart.

I cooked it this evening having got home early after getting up at 5.00am to drive to High Wycombe and back and then receiving a text to say the ingredients were in the oven if I wanted to start making it.

It is one of those recipes that blur the lines between cooking and making, a large part of it lies in the assembly of the ingredients into the pastry base and putting it into the oven for thirty minutes. There is not a great deal of cooking involved.

It was made easier by the ready rolled pastry, although that wasn’t quite big enough for the tart tin and needed to be rolled out a couple of inches to fit in.

Most of the cooking was done in caramelizing the garlic. The recipe suggested that the peeled cloves from two bulbs of garlic be blanched for three minutes to dilute some of their harshness. I did this, drained them and set the water aside. Once it had cooled I drank it, a garlic infused restorative after four hundred miles in the car.

The cloves of garlic were then fried for a few minutes in olive oil and then covered with more water and a good splash of balsamic vinegar. That boiled down for ten minutes and I then added some sugar, chopped rosemary and thyme and continued to boil it down until the garlic was soft and the sweet sauce bubbled fiercely and small puddle in the bottom of the pan.

It was then all assembly. The pastry base had been baked blind. I filled it with crumbled goat’s cheese, the garlic and its dark sauce and that was all covered with a custard of lightly whisked eggs and cream. That all went into a medium oven for half an hour to cook through.

We ate it with roasted new potatoes listening to The Velvet Underground.

I am now thinking of spending time at the weekend making some garlic soup. In the meantime my colleagues at work will have to put up with the vampire scaring vapours I will no doubt be giving off tomorrow.

Fish Pie

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It was a weekend of missteps. We thought the Farmers Market was on so made the trip to New Ferry on Saturday afternoon but the car park was empty and we will have to wait until next Saturday to buy our roast chicken. It appeared that someone may have taken on Strut Your Stuff  as the sign was being painted over.
On Sunday we walked down to Birkenhead Park to see the old car rally only to find that we had missed it. So it was a walk round the lake instead imagining the boats that would have parked by the boathouse a hundred years ago.

On the way back from New Ferry I stopped off at Wards to buy the ingredients for a fish pie –  a slab of smoked haddock and a mixture of salmon and cod ends- then into the greengrocers to get a bag of potatoes for mash.

I poached the fish in milk seasoned with a couple of bay leaves, an onion stuck with cloves, salt and peppercorns. I made the mistake of adding a large cup of cider to the milk which curdled it over the heat. I think I must do this every time I make fish pie.

Earlier that afternoon I had dug up my first horseradish root. We tasted a couple of thin slices, the fine heat of it clearing heads and noses. We will need to find something to cook with horseradish.

Once the fish was cooked I let it cool for a few minutes until I was able to handle it. I then peeled off the skin and put the bite sized chunks of flesh into the large orange Le Creuset dish, flaking the larger pieces. My fingers were sticky with the hot milk and the just cooked skin.

There was some dill left in the bottom of the fridge and that was chopped up finely and scattered over the fish.

I strained the split milk and cider into a jug and then started on making a white sauce. A good chunk of butter went into a hot pan and once that was sizzling I added a good tablespoon of flour. I beat the butter and flour with a wooden spoon and let it cook through for a few minutes. I then added some fresh milk beating hard with the wooden spoon to avoid any lumps. Once it had taken I added the milk and cider and brought it all to a slow simmer, stirring all the time until I had a silky smooth white sauce. Once that was ready I took it off the heat and stirred in three large spoonfuls of creme fraiche and a dash of mustard for flavouring and then a final seasoning of salt and pepper.

The sauce was poured over the fish and then dish was then put to one side in a cool place whilst I did the potatoes.

The potatoes were boiled until soft, drained and mashed with another good hunk of butter and some more splashes of milk. they were given a further seasoning of salt.

One of the most satisfying aspects of making a potato pie is laying the mash over the top and smoothing it down so that it completely covers the fish underneath. I got the amount of potato just right and there were no awkward gaps. I made a rough ploughed field pattern with the tines of a fork and scattered the top with some more small cubes of butter.

It all then went into the oven for 30 minutes until the white sauce started to bubble up through the potato. We ate it with green beans from Dad’s vegetable garden and Stokes Tartare Sauce.

We listened to The Poet by Bobby Womack on vinyl. Getting up every 20 minutes to turn it over. One of the kids asking if you can play the other side as well.

Southern Central Rain (I’m Sorry)

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…last week was Dexys’ turn and this week it is time for REM. The occasion,  the re-release – on its 25th anniversary – of Document, the last of the run of albums they made with IRS before defecting to Warners and the $ where they were never quite the same. All things grow up and REM lost their innocence with that move. Before that each album had been like the shedding of another layer of skin.

Murmer started off bathed in mystery, an opaque set of songs, difficult to pin down, like music seeping out of the bunker, odd hollered words hinting at an emotion before lying back down in the sonic murk. Reckoning carried on the theme but with more clarity, Harbourcoat was a clarion call. Tales of the Reconstruction was a step back into the mystery of Murmer although the bright sheen Can’t Get There From Here was a fore-shadowing of things to come.

After that the drums got louder and you had a band that knew it wouldn’t take much to take them over the edge, out of the niche within college rock, but they continued to hold back. Amidst some of the brashness of Its The End Of the World As We Know it and One I Love there was still room for mystery with Kings of Birds

I saw REM in concert 8 or 9 times over the years that they released those five albums. They were some of the best concerts I’ve been to. A combination of a band that I loved at the cusp of being great. The best time to see a band.

I saw them play at The Milton Keynes Bowl supporting U2. The Ramones were also playing along with Spear of Destiny and The Faith Brothers. I am still slightly proud of the fact we walked out as U2 took to the stage.

At about the same time they played The Summer Ball at Warwick University. The evening started with Jonathan Richman. I can’t remember what time REM came on stage. I stood near the front and somewhere I have a grainy photo of Michael Stipe in a hat. They played an old Creeedance Clearwater Revival song Have You Seen the Rain and it was one of my best evenings.

This is the set list for that evening.

After REM played Green on Red were on stage. They had driven down from Leeds that evening and didn’t start until early in the morning. Pete Buck joined them on stage to play along with the encore including a cover of Sympathy for the Devil. Dan Peters thrust the microphone into the crowd and we sang along to the OO OOS.

The re-release of Document comes with a extra disc of a live show they played in Utrecht in September 1987. It finishes with a version of So. Central Rain which I think I may have somewhere else on the back of a 12 inch single. It is just Pete Buck on guitar behind Michael Stipe singing. Mike Mills comes in on harmonies towards the end. For the coda he sings I come to you defences down with the trust of a child. I wish I had been there.

The tomatoes from the greenhouse

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At the cheese/food fair two weeks ago I had planned some oven baked Gubbeen. In anticipation I had sliced a Baby Gubbeen in half so that it made two smalls wheels. Onto the open side of the bottom half I scattered a squashed clove of garlic, some chopped herbs from the garden and a scattering of salt and pepper. I then put the top half back on and placed the cheese into a small terracotta bowl and wrapped it in foil.

I found it a few hours after everybody had gone on the side uncooked. In the great rush of people I had forgotten about it. So it went into the fridge until lunchtime today.

We had two loaves from the Bread Circle waiting to be eaten and a handful of red tomatoes from the greenhouse.

The cheese went into the hot oven for twenty minutes. I sliced up the bread and quartered the tomotoes.
When I took the cheese out of the oven and took off the foil the familiar smell of the farmyard rose up. The cheese bubbled and steamed in its red bowl.

I toasted the bread and we dipped knives into the melted cheese. The taste of the tart tomatoes cut through the rich cheese. A good early autumnal lunch.