Hello and welcome back, dear reader. Today, I felt an overwhelming need for vitamins - a quick-fix diet of far too many crisps has left me gasping for something green and crunchy. Solution: a dash to the shops for as many vegetables as I could carry.
This simple, chunky and fresh-tasting sauce goes well with pasta or couscous, can easily be embellished with the herbs or spices of your choice, and, if you eat enough of it, pretty much deals with any 'five-a-day' problems in one easy swoop. As an inveterate carnivore, I added some smoked bacon lardons for that meaty kick, but my vegetarian readers can easily leave these out or replace them with some tofu pieces. Vegan readers, do this and then eat with egg-free pasta or couscous. Don't be overwhelmed by the fairly lengthy list of ingredients - they all go in together very easily, and the veg will only take a few moments to chop, I promise. You can replace any of the vegetables with your own favourites, and you don't even need to stop at five!
I won't include the pasta in the recipe, but some words of advice:
Use about 3 handfuls per person; cook in plenty of boiling water, very well-salted, as directed on the pack; and drain thoroughly before using. Al dente (still with a bit of bite there when you chew it) is the way to go.
Without more ado, then, on to the sauce:
Ingredients
(serves 3-ish)
Around 50g bacon lardons or cubes of pancetta (optional)
3 large spring onions
A good-sized courgette, washed
A medium head of broccoli
A red pepper, or pointed sweet pepper
2 large tomatoes
1tsp tomato puree
1 glass white/pink wine
1 pint tomato passata (or 1 tin chopped tomatoes)
Generous splash of balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
Shavings of Grana Padano/Parmesan cheese to garnish
Method
First of all, chop all of your vegetables into pieces (they don't have to be cubes - go with the natural shape of the vegetable) about 1cm square. This does mean cutting your broccoli smaller than you're probably used to, but it makes for a lovely, consistent sauce which is easy to eat.
Next, pop a good-sized frying pan with high sides on a medium heat and add the bacon pieces. You won't need oil - it's got plenty of fat in it already, which will melt as you cook it and lubricate the pan. When the bacon is beginning to brown, add the spring onions and the pepper and allow to cook for a couple more minutes. Then add the rest of the vegetables and the tomato puree, and again cook for a couple of minutes, turning gently to ensure everything is coated with oil and puree.
When all the veg is beginning to cook, add the white wine and let it bubble vigorously for a minute or two, then add the passata and balsamic vinegar. Simmer for ten minutes or so, or while you cook the pasta, then season to taste and serve on top of pasta, garnished with the shavings of cheese.
Note: if you'd like to add any herbs or spices, I suggest you add dry or ground with the onion, and anything fresh and chopped with the passata or right at the end. Some parsley mixed with the cheese shavings would be a great addition to the garnish, the bright green matching the fresh taste of the sauce.
Anyway - if you're ever feeling short of essential vitamins, you know what to do! Enjoy your daily shot of vegetables, folks.
Showing posts with label sauce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sauce. Show all posts
Monday, 4 April 2011
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
New Year's Catch-up: A Hollandaise Bonanza
Apologies for another hugely delayed entry - a combination of New Year, flu, and a weekend cooking job. Here, therefore, is the post which you should have had round about New Year's Day...my contribution to our big bash at home: Hollandaise (and Bearnaise) Sauce.
Hollandaise Sauce
Hollandaise sauce is probably one of the most offputting of challenges for the amateur cook. It can curdle at the drop of a hat, and if you're anything like me your hand gets hideously tired holding that bowl over a pan of simmering water. Annoyingly, as well as being the most difficult, Hollandaise, along with its close cousin Bearnaise, is one of the most delicious of sauces. The former is wonderful with fish or vegetables, most famously asparagus; the latter is, to my mind, almost indispensible with a good steak and chips.
Down to recipes, then. The classic hollandaise method is the one most at risk of splitting; Delia Smith's Foaming Hollandaise is a much less risky option; I use another recipe altogether. Mine is totally reliable, and originates from one by a friend of my mother's who runs cookery demonstrations: find her here. It's even more of a cheat than Delia's, since it uses creme fraiche, which has nothing whatsoever to do with a traditional hollandaise, as its main ingredient. It might not stand up in a direct 'sauce-to-sauce' comparison, but it tastes very, very similar to the classic version and is just as delectable with the same basic food groups.
Hollandaise is one of my absolute favourite things to eat, and in the hope that you'll end up as obsessed with it as I am, I'm going to treat you to a little info about the traditional method of making it before I let you in on my secret cheat's recipe.
Hollandaise sauce is an emulsion, like mayonnaise, only warm rather than cold. Most traditionally, this emulsion is formed by whisking egg yolk and acid such as vinegar or lemon juice over a low heat - use a saucepan of water, hot, but not even close to boiling, and put the egg etc in a bowl over this. You need to hold the bowl up rather than resting it on the pan, as you don't want the heat too strong. When the egg mixture is pale and creamy, you start to add butter - either melted butter, which you add very slowly on the heat, whisking constantly; or cubes of cold butter, which you add one at a time off the heat, again whisking constantly. In the latter method, acid is omitted from the recipe until the emulsion has formed, when lemon juice is added to taste.
These methods are for some reason usually considered the superior ones, particularly in professional kitchens: probably because they're more longstanding and traditional, and call for a steady nerve and some skill in the kitchen. They are both do-able, don't get me wrong, but there are several downsides, especially for the nervous or inexperienced cook. Your hands will get tired from whisking and holding up the bowl, which, incidentally, will get a bit hot, more and more greasy from your buttery fingers, and therefore harder and harder to hold. You'll panic because the butter isn't combining properly. You'll over- or under-heat the mixture, both of which are bad - too hot, and the egg will curdle; too cool, and the butter won't melt and emulsify. And at the end of it all, the ghastly thing will curdle anyway and you'll have to run around whisking frantically and adding dashes of cold water (this does save it though, by the way). All in all, it's classic French-style cookery at its best...and it's a bit of a faff.
Slightly more friendly is the blender method, wherein the eggs are blended with acid rather than heated and whisked, and the melted butter is then poured in in a stream as you blend. It can still curdle, but it's less likely as you're not operating over direct heat. Like classic Hollandaise, that made by the blender method can be kept warm for a few hours in a thermos, or on the very edge of the aga if you have one. Delia Smith's Foaming Hollandaise - there's a link above to the recipe - is another method close to the original, but suggests whisking in stiff egg whites to stabilise the normally volatile sauce. She claims that it can then be made the day before, or even frozen and re-heated. However, I've generally found that even my cheat's Hollandaise is not at its best when cooled and re-heated, and with the ordinary sauce you run all the risks of curdling and so forth all over again.
Recipe (The Cheat's Hollandaise)
So that, in what is admittedly a fairly large nutshell, is your traditional Hollandaise. Now for a grand finale, I'll take you through the very reliable cheat's method I used on New Year's Eve (we served it with some amazing rare beef fillet, by the way) and a couple of ways to play around with your new favourite sauce.
Ingredients:
(for 4)
A medium tub of creme fraiche (Tesco finest size, not normal Tesco size!) About 3 tbsp
Tbsp cornflour
2 egg yolks
Small splash of white wine vinegar
Even smaller splash (maybe two squeezes) of lemon juice
Pinch of salt
85g soft (but not melted) butter
Method:
Now you'll understand why this is great. So. Stick all your ingredients into a small saucepan and whisk together over a medium heat. Keep whisking until it begins to simmer, but don't let it boil. It will eventually thicken.
Once it thickens, take it off the heat and check the seasoning. Add more salt, lemon, vinegar if necessary. Incidentally, when increasing the quantities for this recipe careful with the vingear and lemon - you don't need quite the same ratio for more sauce, and I've added too much before. The sauce should taste creamy with a hint of a tang, but not like straight vinegar! Remember when you first add these flavourings that you can always add more at this second stage.
Now, while it's still off the heat, whisk in the butter. Yes, all of it at once. No, it won't go wrong. Done it? That's it. Job done.
Here are some fun ways to use your Hollandaise:
Pour it over grilled or steamed asparagus
Eat it with steamed baby carrots
Eat with any white or mild fish
Dip in some salty french fries (my personal favourite)
Eat with rare beef fillet
And a couple of more complicated ones:
Make Bearnaise sauce:
Use tarragon vinegar instead of white wine in the above recipe. If you don't have any, get some fresh tarragon and simmer gently it in some white wine vinegar to infuse. Stir in some chopped tarragon and/or chervil to the finished sauce. (NB: traditional Bearnaise also uses finely chopped and sweated shallots in the base before adding the butter, or even infuses these with the herbs and vinegar and then discards before adding the vinegar to the sauce. I think my version tastes wicked, and that omitting the shallots, while probably an insult to a purist, need not concern the everyday cook too urgently). Eat your Bearnaise with steak and chips or similar.
Make Eggs Benedict, Eggs Florentine, or Eggs Benedict Royale:
Eggs Benedict is a delicious and filling breakfast. Take half an English muffin, toast it, and set it on a plate and top with some slices of ham (fantastic use of your final shreds of the Christmas one, by the way), a poached egg (drop the egg, without shell, into swirling hot (but not boiling water) and cook. Or use one of those little poaching gadget jobbies), and a dollop of hollandaise on top. Utterly, utterly divine. I promise you, Eggs Benedict is God's answer to mornings.
Eggs Florentine is the same, but with spinach instead of ham - not my thing, but an excellent vegetarian alternative. Eggs Benedict Royale uses smoked salmon instead of the ham; a more luxurious version, great for those who like fish for breakfast (again, not me, but each to their own). Possibly more suited to a light lunch.
Finally:
Hollandaise is the basis, or 'mother sauce' for a variety of French 'daughter' sauces - there's Bearnaise, as described above, but you can also create a multitude of alternatives by adding different flavourings and seaasonings to the very basic 'acid, butter, egg' combination. Famous versions include Dijon sauce, or Sauce Moutarde, which adds a couple of tablespoons of dijon mustard to the basic recipe, and sauce noisette, which uses clarified and browned (but not burned!) butter in place of the fresh butter of the original. As far as I know, most of these variations should be just as possible with the more stable recipe above as with the classic sauce.
So there you are, Hollandaise explained. I really and truly am in love with this sauce, and I hope that after you've mastered your fears with the cheat's version, and maybe even had a go at the classic one if you're feeling brave (it can work, I promise; chefs wouldn't use it if it didn't) you will love it too.
Hollandaise Sauce
Hollandaise sauce is probably one of the most offputting of challenges for the amateur cook. It can curdle at the drop of a hat, and if you're anything like me your hand gets hideously tired holding that bowl over a pan of simmering water. Annoyingly, as well as being the most difficult, Hollandaise, along with its close cousin Bearnaise, is one of the most delicious of sauces. The former is wonderful with fish or vegetables, most famously asparagus; the latter is, to my mind, almost indispensible with a good steak and chips.
Down to recipes, then. The classic hollandaise method is the one most at risk of splitting; Delia Smith's Foaming Hollandaise is a much less risky option; I use another recipe altogether. Mine is totally reliable, and originates from one by a friend of my mother's who runs cookery demonstrations: find her here. It's even more of a cheat than Delia's, since it uses creme fraiche, which has nothing whatsoever to do with a traditional hollandaise, as its main ingredient. It might not stand up in a direct 'sauce-to-sauce' comparison, but it tastes very, very similar to the classic version and is just as delectable with the same basic food groups.
Hollandaise is one of my absolute favourite things to eat, and in the hope that you'll end up as obsessed with it as I am, I'm going to treat you to a little info about the traditional method of making it before I let you in on my secret cheat's recipe.
Hollandaise sauce is an emulsion, like mayonnaise, only warm rather than cold. Most traditionally, this emulsion is formed by whisking egg yolk and acid such as vinegar or lemon juice over a low heat - use a saucepan of water, hot, but not even close to boiling, and put the egg etc in a bowl over this. You need to hold the bowl up rather than resting it on the pan, as you don't want the heat too strong. When the egg mixture is pale and creamy, you start to add butter - either melted butter, which you add very slowly on the heat, whisking constantly; or cubes of cold butter, which you add one at a time off the heat, again whisking constantly. In the latter method, acid is omitted from the recipe until the emulsion has formed, when lemon juice is added to taste.
These methods are for some reason usually considered the superior ones, particularly in professional kitchens: probably because they're more longstanding and traditional, and call for a steady nerve and some skill in the kitchen. They are both do-able, don't get me wrong, but there are several downsides, especially for the nervous or inexperienced cook. Your hands will get tired from whisking and holding up the bowl, which, incidentally, will get a bit hot, more and more greasy from your buttery fingers, and therefore harder and harder to hold. You'll panic because the butter isn't combining properly. You'll over- or under-heat the mixture, both of which are bad - too hot, and the egg will curdle; too cool, and the butter won't melt and emulsify. And at the end of it all, the ghastly thing will curdle anyway and you'll have to run around whisking frantically and adding dashes of cold water (this does save it though, by the way). All in all, it's classic French-style cookery at its best...and it's a bit of a faff.
Slightly more friendly is the blender method, wherein the eggs are blended with acid rather than heated and whisked, and the melted butter is then poured in in a stream as you blend. It can still curdle, but it's less likely as you're not operating over direct heat. Like classic Hollandaise, that made by the blender method can be kept warm for a few hours in a thermos, or on the very edge of the aga if you have one. Delia Smith's Foaming Hollandaise - there's a link above to the recipe - is another method close to the original, but suggests whisking in stiff egg whites to stabilise the normally volatile sauce. She claims that it can then be made the day before, or even frozen and re-heated. However, I've generally found that even my cheat's Hollandaise is not at its best when cooled and re-heated, and with the ordinary sauce you run all the risks of curdling and so forth all over again.
Recipe (The Cheat's Hollandaise)
So that, in what is admittedly a fairly large nutshell, is your traditional Hollandaise. Now for a grand finale, I'll take you through the very reliable cheat's method I used on New Year's Eve (we served it with some amazing rare beef fillet, by the way) and a couple of ways to play around with your new favourite sauce.
Ingredients:
(for 4)
A medium tub of creme fraiche (Tesco finest size, not normal Tesco size!) About 3 tbsp
Tbsp cornflour
2 egg yolks
Small splash of white wine vinegar
Even smaller splash (maybe two squeezes) of lemon juice
Pinch of salt
85g soft (but not melted) butter
Method:
Now you'll understand why this is great. So. Stick all your ingredients into a small saucepan and whisk together over a medium heat. Keep whisking until it begins to simmer, but don't let it boil. It will eventually thicken.
Once it thickens, take it off the heat and check the seasoning. Add more salt, lemon, vinegar if necessary. Incidentally, when increasing the quantities for this recipe careful with the vingear and lemon - you don't need quite the same ratio for more sauce, and I've added too much before. The sauce should taste creamy with a hint of a tang, but not like straight vinegar! Remember when you first add these flavourings that you can always add more at this second stage.
Now, while it's still off the heat, whisk in the butter. Yes, all of it at once. No, it won't go wrong. Done it? That's it. Job done.
Here are some fun ways to use your Hollandaise:
Pour it over grilled or steamed asparagus
Eat it with steamed baby carrots
Eat with any white or mild fish
Dip in some salty french fries (my personal favourite)
Eat with rare beef fillet
And a couple of more complicated ones:
Make Bearnaise sauce:
Use tarragon vinegar instead of white wine in the above recipe. If you don't have any, get some fresh tarragon and simmer gently it in some white wine vinegar to infuse. Stir in some chopped tarragon and/or chervil to the finished sauce. (NB: traditional Bearnaise also uses finely chopped and sweated shallots in the base before adding the butter, or even infuses these with the herbs and vinegar and then discards before adding the vinegar to the sauce. I think my version tastes wicked, and that omitting the shallots, while probably an insult to a purist, need not concern the everyday cook too urgently). Eat your Bearnaise with steak and chips or similar.
Make Eggs Benedict, Eggs Florentine, or Eggs Benedict Royale:
Eggs Benedict is a delicious and filling breakfast. Take half an English muffin, toast it, and set it on a plate and top with some slices of ham (fantastic use of your final shreds of the Christmas one, by the way), a poached egg (drop the egg, without shell, into swirling hot (but not boiling water) and cook. Or use one of those little poaching gadget jobbies), and a dollop of hollandaise on top. Utterly, utterly divine. I promise you, Eggs Benedict is God's answer to mornings.
Eggs Florentine is the same, but with spinach instead of ham - not my thing, but an excellent vegetarian alternative. Eggs Benedict Royale uses smoked salmon instead of the ham; a more luxurious version, great for those who like fish for breakfast (again, not me, but each to their own). Possibly more suited to a light lunch.
Finally:
Hollandaise is the basis, or 'mother sauce' for a variety of French 'daughter' sauces - there's Bearnaise, as described above, but you can also create a multitude of alternatives by adding different flavourings and seaasonings to the very basic 'acid, butter, egg' combination. Famous versions include Dijon sauce, or Sauce Moutarde, which adds a couple of tablespoons of dijon mustard to the basic recipe, and sauce noisette, which uses clarified and browned (but not burned!) butter in place of the fresh butter of the original. As far as I know, most of these variations should be just as possible with the more stable recipe above as with the classic sauce.
So there you are, Hollandaise explained. I really and truly am in love with this sauce, and I hope that after you've mastered your fears with the cheat's version, and maybe even had a go at the classic one if you're feeling brave (it can work, I promise; chefs wouldn't use it if it didn't) you will love it too.
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Fish Pie (for the cousins)
My cousins are coming for lunch here tomorrow for Christmas Eve, and as a result I've been presented with some assorted fish by the Anonymous Bystander and commanded to make a pie. This 'Oi, Rosie, make a pie' thing seems to be happening ever more frequently. I can't complain, though, because frankly I love a good pie.
Fish pie, like a lot of cooking, is quite a personal affair in terms of what you like to include. Do you prefer white fish or salmon? Smoked or plain? Prawns, mussels or both? Do you like boiled eggs in your pie? Leeks? Tomatoes? What herbs do you add? Do you top it with potatoes or pastry? Mashed or sliced, puff or filo? Or just sprinkle the filling with crushed up crisps? There are a hundred and one variations on the basic pie, but they all involve the same key elements: filling (meat, fish, or vegetables and sauce) and topping.
You'll probably find, like me, that the pie you end up with is dictated as much by the ingredients you have to hand as by your own taste. Hence, for example, my recipe today contains hard boiled eggs, even though I generally think they ruin a perfectly good pie. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, there wasn't enough fish to feed six people and I needed to bulk out the pie's filling; and secondly, and more importantly, I'm not at home for lunch tomorrow so I won't have to eat it...
I chose mashed potato for a topping, because I love the way it soaks up the sauce in a fish pie. I prefer puff pastry in a meat pie, but mash for fish. To be honest, I'm pretty sure your preference has a lot to do with how your mum makes hers. For the filling of my pie, I used what I had available, which this time happened to be some unsmoked haddock from the freezer (skin and bones on); some smoked salmon (unusual, but it happened to be at hand); and some prawns, which I think are essential in a top fish pie.
The basic pie usually involves cooking your fish if it's raw (smoked salmon and frozen prawns already count as cooked, by the way) by poaching it in milk with a couple of bay leaves. The milk just needs to be hot, not boiling, and you'll find that the fish turns crumbly and opaque very quickly. This means it's cooked; fish takes no time at all. Once all your fish is cooked off, you can leave it to cool a bit and make the pastry or mashed potatoes for the topping, the sauce, and anything else you're including in your filling. I used the cooking liquor from my haddock where you'd usually use plain milk in a bechamel sauce, which helped to blend the flavours of the fish and sauce in the finished pie. Once everything's cooked, you need to separate the fish into bitesize chunks, either by cutting it or with your fingers, and take off any bones or skin at the same time.
Finally, the easy bit: mix all the filling elements together with the sauce, pop it in a dish, and cover with the topping. You can freeze it at this point if you like, or it will keep in the fridge overnight or for a couple of days (not too long, or the fridge will smell all gross). When you want to serve it, you just put it in the oven until the topping is golden brown and the filling is bubbling up around the sides. All it needs is some vegetables or salad to go along with it, and plenty of slices of fresh lemon. Yum.
Here's a rough recipe for the pie I made today, but bear it mind you can be very flexible with most of it.
Ingredients:
Around 1kg of whatever mixture of fish you fancy (best to avoid very oily fish though)
Around 1kg of assorted mussels, prawns, scallops, or other yummy things that you like. These should be cooked first.
Some butter
Some flour
A glass of white wine (and one for you)
Some milk
A couple of bay leaves
Lots of potatoes
Some butter and cream to go in the mash
Salt and pepper
About 5 eggs
A handful of parsley
Recipe:
1. Put your fish in a saucepan and cover with milk. If you don't have enough milk, make up the difference with water. Add some bay leaves and simmer very gently until the fish is cooked. This won't take long.
2. Set the fish aside to cool. Keep the cooking liquid for later. Make sure the rest of your filling is ready - hard boil the eggs if using, cut up the smoked salmon if using. Etc etc etc. Take a cooling sip of wine.
3. Cut and peel the potatoes, and boil then in another saucepan until they fall apart when you prod them with a knife. Drain and mash with butter and cream. Season, using more salt than you think is wise (another golden tip from the Food Guru there).
4. Separate the haddock into bitesize chunks, discarding the skin and bones as you go.
5. Make the sauce. Melt butter in a pan, add flour to make a roux. Pour in the glass of white wine and whisk until it's combined - it will be very thick. Add the haddock cooking liquid, very slowly and whisking all the time, until the sauce is the thickness you'd like in your pie.
6. Chop up your parsley and eggs, and put them in a bowl along with all the fish and the sauce. Mix together thoroughly, but try to keep the haddock in reasonably big chunks.
7. Top with the mashed potato (remember you can use pastry if you like), and make pretty patterns in it with a fork. These will turn lovely and crunchy when you cook the pie. At this point you can freeze it if you like.
8. To serve, cook in a medium oven (c.180) for 30-40 minutes, until the topping is golden and the sauce is bubbling up.
9. Drink plenty of white wine and congratulate yourself on a fantastic fish pie.
Fish pie, like a lot of cooking, is quite a personal affair in terms of what you like to include. Do you prefer white fish or salmon? Smoked or plain? Prawns, mussels or both? Do you like boiled eggs in your pie? Leeks? Tomatoes? What herbs do you add? Do you top it with potatoes or pastry? Mashed or sliced, puff or filo? Or just sprinkle the filling with crushed up crisps? There are a hundred and one variations on the basic pie, but they all involve the same key elements: filling (meat, fish, or vegetables and sauce) and topping.
You'll probably find, like me, that the pie you end up with is dictated as much by the ingredients you have to hand as by your own taste. Hence, for example, my recipe today contains hard boiled eggs, even though I generally think they ruin a perfectly good pie. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, there wasn't enough fish to feed six people and I needed to bulk out the pie's filling; and secondly, and more importantly, I'm not at home for lunch tomorrow so I won't have to eat it...
I chose mashed potato for a topping, because I love the way it soaks up the sauce in a fish pie. I prefer puff pastry in a meat pie, but mash for fish. To be honest, I'm pretty sure your preference has a lot to do with how your mum makes hers. For the filling of my pie, I used what I had available, which this time happened to be some unsmoked haddock from the freezer (skin and bones on); some smoked salmon (unusual, but it happened to be at hand); and some prawns, which I think are essential in a top fish pie.
The basic pie usually involves cooking your fish if it's raw (smoked salmon and frozen prawns already count as cooked, by the way) by poaching it in milk with a couple of bay leaves. The milk just needs to be hot, not boiling, and you'll find that the fish turns crumbly and opaque very quickly. This means it's cooked; fish takes no time at all. Once all your fish is cooked off, you can leave it to cool a bit and make the pastry or mashed potatoes for the topping, the sauce, and anything else you're including in your filling. I used the cooking liquor from my haddock where you'd usually use plain milk in a bechamel sauce, which helped to blend the flavours of the fish and sauce in the finished pie. Once everything's cooked, you need to separate the fish into bitesize chunks, either by cutting it or with your fingers, and take off any bones or skin at the same time.
Finally, the easy bit: mix all the filling elements together with the sauce, pop it in a dish, and cover with the topping. You can freeze it at this point if you like, or it will keep in the fridge overnight or for a couple of days (not too long, or the fridge will smell all gross). When you want to serve it, you just put it in the oven until the topping is golden brown and the filling is bubbling up around the sides. All it needs is some vegetables or salad to go along with it, and plenty of slices of fresh lemon. Yum.
Here's a rough recipe for the pie I made today, but bear it mind you can be very flexible with most of it.
Ingredients:
Around 1kg of whatever mixture of fish you fancy (best to avoid very oily fish though)
Around 1kg of assorted mussels, prawns, scallops, or other yummy things that you like. These should be cooked first.
Some butter
Some flour
A glass of white wine (and one for you)
Some milk
A couple of bay leaves
Lots of potatoes
Some butter and cream to go in the mash
Salt and pepper
About 5 eggs
A handful of parsley
Recipe:
1. Put your fish in a saucepan and cover with milk. If you don't have enough milk, make up the difference with water. Add some bay leaves and simmer very gently until the fish is cooked. This won't take long.
2. Set the fish aside to cool. Keep the cooking liquid for later. Make sure the rest of your filling is ready - hard boil the eggs if using, cut up the smoked salmon if using. Etc etc etc. Take a cooling sip of wine.
3. Cut and peel the potatoes, and boil then in another saucepan until they fall apart when you prod them with a knife. Drain and mash with butter and cream. Season, using more salt than you think is wise (another golden tip from the Food Guru there).
4. Separate the haddock into bitesize chunks, discarding the skin and bones as you go.
5. Make the sauce. Melt butter in a pan, add flour to make a roux. Pour in the glass of white wine and whisk until it's combined - it will be very thick. Add the haddock cooking liquid, very slowly and whisking all the time, until the sauce is the thickness you'd like in your pie.
6. Chop up your parsley and eggs, and put them in a bowl along with all the fish and the sauce. Mix together thoroughly, but try to keep the haddock in reasonably big chunks.
7. Top with the mashed potato (remember you can use pastry if you like), and make pretty patterns in it with a fork. These will turn lovely and crunchy when you cook the pie. At this point you can freeze it if you like.
8. To serve, cook in a medium oven (c.180) for 30-40 minutes, until the topping is golden and the sauce is bubbling up.
9. Drink plenty of white wine and congratulate yourself on a fantastic fish pie.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Cumberland Sauce
Cumberland Sauce is the one and only, best and brightest, one hundred percent winner of a sauce to have with your Christmas Ham. It's also pretty simple to make: the only time-consuming bit is julienning the cirtus peel, but if you stick on some Christmas songs or a DVD it'll pass in a flash. It is sometimes called Oxford sauce, and the internets would have me believe that they are pretty much the same thing. However, my Food Guru tells me that the difference is in the citrus peel, which is julienned in a Cumberland sauce and finely chopped in an Oxford one.
It's pretty much redcurrant jelly, melted, jazzed up with some alcohol, citrus and spices and reintroduced in a yummy Christmas disguise. Especially brilliant because you can serve it straight away, warm and runny, if you're eating a hot meal; or you can store it in a jar, like you would redcurrant jelly or jam (it sets slightly), and eat it later. It keeps as well as any other jam or jelly. Incidentally, it makes a killer Boxing Day ham sandwich or salad. A lot of people add mustard to their sauce - in fact, mustard is one of the defining elements of a Cumberland sauce - but I used cayenne pepper this year. You can use either: I'd recommend cayenne if you like a bit of bite, and mustard for a bit of a smoother, milder tone.
I've made my Cumberland sauce today so as to have something to say to you lovely people, but it's such a simple thing to do you could easily fit it into one of those periods when the Ham is soaking, or boiling, or cooling, or all those other time-consuming things you have to do with ham. Let's face it, in the time it takes to cook the ham you could make Christmas dinner twice over.
So, here's the recipe for your sauce.
Ingredients:
Makes about one or two jars full, depending on the jars and the size of your spoons
One orange
One lemon
8 or so big spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly (shop-bought is fine)
3-4 of the same sized spoonfuls of port (mmm...)
A sprinkle of ground ginger
A sprinkle of cayenne pepper
Some mustard if you like, probably instead of the cayenne
Method:
Firstly, if you're putting this in jars to eat later, you're going to want to sterilize the jars. This will help your sauce to keep for longer. Just boil them in a big pan of water for a couple of minutes, with the lids if they are metal, then fish them out (CAREFULLY, they will obviously be HOT) and dry them in a low oven while you do the rest of the recipe.
Now to the time-consuming bit. Get this over with while you watch something Christmassy on telly. You need the orange and the lemon, which should preferably be unwaxed - although if you shop at the same supermarkets I do, they won't be I'm afraid. You also need a vegetable peeler, or a nice sharp little knife. You need to peel the orange and lemon, as thinly as you can manage, taking off as much of the rind and as little of the sour white pith as possible. You can slice any pith extra pith off the rind. When you've got a pile of it needs to be julienned, which means cut into slices as thinly as you can manage.
That's the boring bit over; now it's a matter for twenty minutes or so and you're done. Put the citrus peel in a pan and cover it with cold water, then bring it to the boil and simmer quite rapidly for 4 minutes or a little longer. This is called blanching. Don't worry if the colour goes from the peel - it's meant to. The whole thing will smell gorgeous.
When it's done, drain the peel out, and get yourself a bigger saucepan with nice high sides. If the sides are too low, what happened to me will happen to you, and it's never fun to spend 15 minutes cleaning sticky redcurrant jelly off the sides of your parents' electric stove because the pan's boiled over.
Now, juice the orange and the lemon, and stick the juice, jelly and spices in the saucepan. You can add the mustard at this point if you're using it. Pop the saucepan on the heat and stir until the jelly has melted and everything has combined. Then add the port and peel, and turn up the heat. Boil vigorously for ten minutes, or until it's reached setting point (put some on a cold saucer, and if it forms a thin skin after a few moments you're sorted). This is the time to be avoiding the boil-over moment. Watch it like a hawk, and stick a cold spoon in if it looks like disobeying you. In extreme cricumstances, take it off the heat for a bit.
Now, pour carefully into the jars, if you're using them, or into a jug if you're serving it hot. You can always reheat it if it's cooled too much. Put the lids on the jars, screw firmly on, then turn the jar upside down and back upright to sterilise the lid (this is a trick I learned from 'Pam the Jam' - I kid you not - on River Cottage, with which, as you know, I am utterly obsessed).
There you have it. Cumberland sauce, to eat with the best Christmas Ham you've ever tasted. I hope you enjoy it as much as I will.
It's pretty much redcurrant jelly, melted, jazzed up with some alcohol, citrus and spices and reintroduced in a yummy Christmas disguise. Especially brilliant because you can serve it straight away, warm and runny, if you're eating a hot meal; or you can store it in a jar, like you would redcurrant jelly or jam (it sets slightly), and eat it later. It keeps as well as any other jam or jelly. Incidentally, it makes a killer Boxing Day ham sandwich or salad. A lot of people add mustard to their sauce - in fact, mustard is one of the defining elements of a Cumberland sauce - but I used cayenne pepper this year. You can use either: I'd recommend cayenne if you like a bit of bite, and mustard for a bit of a smoother, milder tone.
I've made my Cumberland sauce today so as to have something to say to you lovely people, but it's such a simple thing to do you could easily fit it into one of those periods when the Ham is soaking, or boiling, or cooling, or all those other time-consuming things you have to do with ham. Let's face it, in the time it takes to cook the ham you could make Christmas dinner twice over.
So, here's the recipe for your sauce.
Ingredients:
Makes about one or two jars full, depending on the jars and the size of your spoons
One orange
One lemon
8 or so big spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly (shop-bought is fine)
3-4 of the same sized spoonfuls of port (mmm...)
A sprinkle of ground ginger
A sprinkle of cayenne pepper
Some mustard if you like, probably instead of the cayenne
Method:
Firstly, if you're putting this in jars to eat later, you're going to want to sterilize the jars. This will help your sauce to keep for longer. Just boil them in a big pan of water for a couple of minutes, with the lids if they are metal, then fish them out (CAREFULLY, they will obviously be HOT) and dry them in a low oven while you do the rest of the recipe.
Now to the time-consuming bit. Get this over with while you watch something Christmassy on telly. You need the orange and the lemon, which should preferably be unwaxed - although if you shop at the same supermarkets I do, they won't be I'm afraid. You also need a vegetable peeler, or a nice sharp little knife. You need to peel the orange and lemon, as thinly as you can manage, taking off as much of the rind and as little of the sour white pith as possible. You can slice any pith extra pith off the rind. When you've got a pile of it needs to be julienned, which means cut into slices as thinly as you can manage.
That's the boring bit over; now it's a matter for twenty minutes or so and you're done. Put the citrus peel in a pan and cover it with cold water, then bring it to the boil and simmer quite rapidly for 4 minutes or a little longer. This is called blanching. Don't worry if the colour goes from the peel - it's meant to. The whole thing will smell gorgeous.
When it's done, drain the peel out, and get yourself a bigger saucepan with nice high sides. If the sides are too low, what happened to me will happen to you, and it's never fun to spend 15 minutes cleaning sticky redcurrant jelly off the sides of your parents' electric stove because the pan's boiled over.
Now, juice the orange and the lemon, and stick the juice, jelly and spices in the saucepan. You can add the mustard at this point if you're using it. Pop the saucepan on the heat and stir until the jelly has melted and everything has combined. Then add the port and peel, and turn up the heat. Boil vigorously for ten minutes, or until it's reached setting point (put some on a cold saucer, and if it forms a thin skin after a few moments you're sorted). This is the time to be avoiding the boil-over moment. Watch it like a hawk, and stick a cold spoon in if it looks like disobeying you. In extreme cricumstances, take it off the heat for a bit.
Now, pour carefully into the jars, if you're using them, or into a jug if you're serving it hot. You can always reheat it if it's cooled too much. Put the lids on the jars, screw firmly on, then turn the jar upside down and back upright to sterilise the lid (this is a trick I learned from 'Pam the Jam' - I kid you not - on River Cottage, with which, as you know, I am utterly obsessed).
There you have it. Cumberland sauce, to eat with the best Christmas Ham you've ever tasted. I hope you enjoy it as much as I will.
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