Cougette Carbonara - Comfort with a Twist

There are some days when I long for some comfort food. After the long, rainy week we’ve had (which, incidentally, I’ve spent working very hard catering in the North of Scotland!), it’s just what I need. My ultimate comfort food is my Mum’s spaghetti Carbonara. It’s not the traditional Italian recipe – we add cream and white wine.

Totally traditional Italian spaghetti Carbonara just uses eggs; bacon or pancetta; a hard cheese like parmesan or pecorino; and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. In fact, on a family holiday to Italy a few years ago, I mentioned to a local lady that I needed some cream because I was making Carbonara for my family that evening, and she was horrified!

Nevertheless, I’m not ashamed to say that I love a bit of cream in my Carbonara sauce, and even some white wine for that extra bit of flavour. This time, though, I wanted to take it even further. I felt like the comfort of Carbonara, but with a twist.

There was a courgette in the fridge, so I thought I’d inject a few vitamins into what is, let’s face it, not usually the healthiest of meals. I remembered a method of making courgette ‘spaghetti’ I learned recently, so I thought I’d try mixing the courgette stuff with the real thing. In fact, if you wanted you could even try doing the whole thing with courgette spaghetti. I think you might find it a bit squishy, though.

Then I noticed half a leftover bread roll lurking at the bottom of the bread bin and figured I’d top my concoction with toasted breadcrumbs, just to use it up. I liked the result so much I thought I’d write it down for you all.

One last note – Carbonara isn’t really a suitable dish for expectant mothers, the very old or the very young, because there’s a slight risk of the egg being undercooked. If you are cooking for any of these groups, it’s better to overheat the egg and have it scramble a bit in the sauce than to give somebody salmonella. Safety first.

And now that I’ve put you all off, on with the recipe!

Ingredients

(per person)

½ a courgette

Small handful of spaghetti (a bit less than you have of courgette)

½ a small bread roll or one piece of sliced bread

A bit of butter

2 rashers of bacon

A slosh of white wine

A bigger slosh of double cream

1 egg

Grated hard cheese such as parmesan or pecorino

Salt and plenty of ground black pepper

Recipe

First of all, get your bacon in the oven to cook until crispy. Put the bread roll in the oven at the same time, until it’s turning brown and completely dried out.

Meanwhile, you want to slice the courgette into long, thin strips about the size and length of your spaghetti. I did this with a knife, but a mandolin works even better if you have one. Set it to thin julienne and just run the courgette up and down. There are plenty to choose from here if you’re interested in one – and no, I’m not being paid by Amazon, or by a mysterious consortium of mandolin-makers. I just like mandolins!

Whiz up the bread roll in your blender or magi-mix to make breadcrumbs. If you don’t have any fancy electric gadgets, you can always wrap the bread in a bag or tea towel and give it a good bash with a rolling pin. When you’ve got some nice small breadcrumbs, fry them off quickly and gently in butter until they’re hot, brown and crispy. Remove them from the pan onto some kitchen paper to drain.

Boil some salted water for the pasta and get the spaghetti going. Once the bacon is ready, chop it into bitesize pieces. Put it in the pan you used for the breadcrumbs, get it hot, then add the wine and reduce it by about half. Add the cream and bring the mixture briefly to a simmer. Then remove it from the heat, let it cool for a few seconds, and add the egg, stirring well so that it combines into the cream mixture without becoming scrambled. The egg will be cooked by the residual heat from the pan, but it should remain liquid.

When the pasta is about a minute away from being fully cooked (when it’s just too al dente for your taste, in other words) add the courgette strips and let them boil with the pasta for the remaining minute of 30 seconds – that’s all they need to cook.

Finally, mix the pasta and courgette into the cream, egg and bacon. Season it well with salt and lots of ground black peppercorns. Plop plenty into your bowl and top with the grated parmesan and breadcrumbs, and maybe a sprinkling of chopped parsley for some extra colour. Comfort with a twist!

Some rather gourmet Granitas

Originating in Sicily, a granita is rather like a coarse-grained sorbet. It works well as a light option for pudding, or an accompaniment to some fresh fruit in summer. It also makes a wonderful palate cleanser between courses, especially when you want to make an impact. 

There are various kinds of frozen dessert created in slightly different ways; for example, ice cream is made by freezing a dairy-based mixture, such as cream or custard, while it’s being either regularly stirred or churned to break up the ice-crystals as they are formed. This creates a smaller crystal and therefore a smooth, creamy-textured ice cream. Sorbet-making uses the same process, but the mixture is based on water or fruit juice. The base mixture of a granita is very similar to that of a sorbet, but the freezing process involves less stirring. This means that larger ice crystals are allowed to form, giving granita a coarser texture than sorbet. 

Don’t think that a coarse texture means an unsophisticated dessert, however. There is a huge scope for subtle flavour combinations in a granita, and it looks fantastic piled up in a martini or wine glass with a couple of appropriate garnishes. Including alcohol in your granita is not an absolute necessity, although I've done so in both of mine. However, it does stop the ice from setting too hard, creating a pleasingly slushy texture rather like a grown-up Slush Puppy; and of course, the fact that it’s frozen doesn’t stop it getting you tipsy...

Granita really is a fantastic opportunity to get creative with flavours, so without further ado, here are a couple of suggestions to get you started.

Apple and Mint Granita

Lovely for summer (spring’s just around the corner folks!)

Ingredients

1 litre of apple juice, preferably unsweetened and not from concentrate

A few sprigs of mint

A couple of cooking apples

A squeeze of lemon or lime

200g sugar

A dash of calvados or apple vodka (optional)

Method

Chop up, peel and deseed the apples and cook them with 100g of the sugar and a little water until they are very tender or falling apart. If necessary, blend them until they’re sufficiently mushy. Leave to cool. 

Meanwhile, put the apple juice, mint and the rest of the sugar in a large pan with some lemon juice and your choice of alcohol if using. Bring slowly to the boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Leave to cool to room temperature so that the mint infuses, then sieve or pick out the mint stems and add the apple pulp.

Put the resulting mixture in the freezer (you can use the pan you boiled it in as long as it’s freezer-safe) and allow it to freeze, stirring every 20 minutes or so. You won’t need to stir so often if you’ve included alcohol, and the granita may take longer to freeze.

Before serving, fluff the granita up with the tines of a fork so that the ice crystals are of a roughly even size. Serve in a martini glass with a sprig of mint and perhaps a twist of apple or a couple of raspberries.

Mulled Wine Granita

This is a very easy recipe I did as a palate-cleanser on Christmas Day. It also makes a great light dessert. 

Ingredients

1 bottle of red wine

1 orange

1 lemon or lime

1 cinnamon stick

2 star anise

4 cloves

135g granulated sugar

125ml water

Method

Zest and juice all the citrus fruit. Put the wine in a large pan and add all the other ingredients. Gently heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Bring very briefly to the boil (take the pan off the heat as soon as it starts to bubble). Then put the pan aside for the spices to infuse, and leave it until it’s cool. 

Pour the wine through a sieve into a freezer-friendly container and pop it in your freezer. If the pan you boiled it in is ok to freeze you can use that. You need to leave it until set – for at least six hours, depending on your freezer. Give it a stir every one or two hours if you can. It will set eventually, but not particularly hard, as the alcohol stops it from freezing solid. 

Serve in a glass, decorated with a cinnamon stick if you've got enough. You could also use a twist of orange, a couple of skinned segments, or even a star anise of two (but don't let your guests bite into them!). This granita also looks very striking served over a scoop of vanilla ice cream, although I can't say that the flavour combination is everyone's cup of tea...

So that was granita. Remember to experiment, and Happy Freezing!

Risotto!

General chatter:

I LOVE a good risotto. By which I don't mean basmati rice overcooked with some sad looking peas added, but a proper Italian-style dish with arborio rice or similar, which takes time and attention to get right. Once you've got the basics of a dish like that, it'll repay you a thousand times by acting as a delicious blank slate on which you can draw up the exact meal you feel like eating. It's reliable in its basic ingredients, which are almost all things you have lying around in the average kitchen, and in its timing - my risottos always take at least 40 minutes, and never more than an hour. It's great as a starter or a main, if you're eating alone or with friends. If you haven't already, I hope you'll give risotto a good couple of tries, and come to love it every bit as much as I do.

A light risotto makes a lovely lunch, say with crayfish, crab, chilli and coriander (I ate this while out for lunch last week, and it was fantastic). A big bowl of risotto with bacon (pancetta if you've got it) and peas, liberally sprinkled with parmesan shavings, is my best friend when I'm curled up in front of the telly with a glass of white wine after a long day. Somehow it feels like more of an achievement than spaghetti and tomato sauce, although it takes about the same amount of effort (if maybe a touch more time in the kitchen)!

For a big dinner, I always think risotto makes a stylish accompaniment to your main dish - if you're sick of potatoes as a side, give risotto a go. Try something like thyme and wild mushroom risotto with lamb, perhaps, or a chilli-based one with asian braised pork belly. Pork belly's very trendy at the minute too, and it's quite a cheap cut. If you're serving your risotto as a side dish, it might be best to dole it out yourself - and think 'less is more'. You want the risotto to be a partner to your meat or main dish in this instance, rather than the main event - although, of course, it can certainly hold its own as a centrepiece if necessary. Try serving it in a roasted, scooped-out half of butternut squash.

Pre-cooking risotto (for dinner parties) 

Another little tip, which I learned from the Food Guru, is that you can actually part-make risotto in advance. PLEASE bear in mind when I say this that I don't mean days in advance - if you leave rice for too long before re-heating and eating it, it can harbour various very nasty little stomach bugs, which anyone who's picked at an ill-advised morning-after Chinese will vouch for. They don't just stop at a dodgy tummy either, and your life is (hopefully) worth more than a couple of grains of rice.

Bleak warning over.

Anyway, to pre-cook risotto just do the basics the hour before your guests arrive rather than the hour after they get there, when you're busy trying to be a star hostess (or host...). Make up the basic recipe (which I'll stick below in a bit - apologies to all who know it back to front, some people aren't so lucky!) to the point where the rice has nearly absorbed enough stock, which you'll know by tasting and feeling the hardness of the rice in your mouth. 

So you've got your risotto base and any other extra bits ready, and when zero hour comes you just need to mix it all together and reheat, adding extra stock and a bit of wine if necessary: it tends to thicken as it cools. You can do that after you've seated your guests, and they'll all be SO impressed that you whipped up a risotto by magic in five minutes.

Enough chatter. Here's a basic recipe, with tips on how to start making alterations:

Ingredients
(For one)

A small onion
Risotto rice - three small handfuls for a generous serving. Or three big handfuls, if you have small hands... Remember that it increases 3x in size while it cooks. Arborio rice is the easiest to get your hands on, I'm pretty sure they sell it in Tesco!
Glass of white wine
Stock - 500ml or so. The type depends on your flavours - chicken for a risotto involving chicken or other pale meats, vegetable for vegetarian risotto. I've never heard of risotto with beef stock before, but I suppose you could try it...
Grated cheese - cheddar is ok, but parmesan or really nice peccorino is best.
Salt and pepper


Method

This method will make you the absolute blank canvas of risottos. To alter them, you just put whatever ingredients you're adding in the following categories, and add them when I mention that category in the recipe. A lot of things, including all meat and vegetables like butternut squash, which makes a fantastic risotto by the way, need pre-cooking - just cook then however you like them most.

Category 1. Hard-stemmed herbs (thyme, rosemary, any whole or freshly-ground spices); onion-style ingredients (garlic and chilli are the most common here)

Category 2. Herbs which can be tough (mint is the main one, as it needs a bit of extra cooking time. Possibly also tarragon is you use it, but add some chopped leaves at the end too); dried herbs (All of them. But please don't use them if you can help it, they're honestly gross); vegetables which barely need any cooking (frozen peas, which you can add straight from the freezer by the way; spinach)

Category 3. Pre-cooked additions (pieces of chicken, beef, pork, fish or shellfish, vegetables with a long cooking time or which you want to roast before adding - No1 here is butternut squash, which makes a yummy risotto when oven-roasted in small chunks and added last-minute); soft herbs (for mixing through; examples are coriander, parsley (lovely!), dill)

Category 4. Finishers (a knob of butter just before serving makes it nice and shiny; some cheese, preferably shavings of parmesan or peccorino, is essential, either mixed through or scattered on top - or both; fresh herbs to scatter on top for a nice final presentation)


Bearing all that in mind (phew!), here's your basic method:

Finely chop the onion to about the same size as your grains of rice. Don't panic, it can be bigger if it must be. Sweat the onion and any ingredients from Category 1 in some butter or olive oil until softened and translucent. By this point your stock should also be ready and within reach. Add the rice, raise the heat a little, and mix around until all coated with the oil. Add the wine.

From now on, your rice is going to absorb liquid until it's cooked through, which will take around 40 minutes. During this time, don't just leave it to spoil, keep a close eye on it. For the next 40 minutes, this thing is your baby. Your job is to keep adding stock in small amounts, so that there's enough liquid there for the rice to absorb, but not so much that the risotto will be runny when it's finished absorbing. It shouldn't be swimming in liquid, but it shouldn't be sticking to the bottom of the pan either. It's a delicate balance and will probably be a bit scary the first time, but you'll get the hand of it!

The mixture will thicken gradually as the starch in the rice cooks. Just how thick it should be is up to you - various different regions of Italy have their own traditions. My favourite way of describing traditional risotto is "all'onda", which literally means 'like a wave' - the risotto should make little waves on the plate as you tip it up. This is traditionally achieved by adding cold butter and cheese at the end of cooking, but you don't need to worry too much about that with this basic recipe.

The most important thing is to keep on tasting. You know how pasta is best al dente, with just that touch of bite left in it? Well, when your risotto rice gets to al dente stage, it's about ten minutes before it's ready. This is the time to add your Category 2 ingredients. Be very careful with stock from now on - do add if it needs it, but beware of adding too much at once. If you do, you'll end up with rice soup, not risotto.

This point - just on al dente - is also the time to remove your risotto from the heat if you're pre-preparing it. Carry on from this point in the recipe later, once you've brought your pan back up to heat. You may need to add a little wine or stock to loosen it up a bit if you've let it cool.

When the rice reaches the texture you like best, add your Category 3 ingredients (they should be at room temperature, don't add chicken and so on straight from the fridge) and combine, cooking for a minute more just to heat them through and allow the flavours to combine.

Cheese, salt and pepper, and any Category 4 ingredients in, and serve straight away, topped with more cheese. Even the plain risotto needs some cheese stirring through before serving, and make sure you check your seasoning before you finish cooking.

With the babble removed, that's:
'cook chopped onions, rice in, stir, wine in, stir lots and add stock slowly (c.40 minutes), finish with cheese and seasoning.' 
That simple. When you've sorted that out, you'll have all the wonderful world of risotto at your fingertips. 

Happy exploring!

Mulled Wine: A Quick Christmas Cracker

Merry Christmas one and all!

Just one quick Christmas recipe, because I need to get to bed otherwise Santa might not turn up! Mulled wine, wicked for Christmas and very warming in this freezing cold too. You can personalise your spice mix as much as you like, but I'll give you the basics.

Ingredients:

Bottle (or more) of red wine
Per bottle:
Some peppercorns
3 tbs brown sugar
Two oranges and a lemon stuck with cloves (you might need to stick in a skewer first to make a hole, then pop the clove in)
A good grating of nutmeg
A cinnamon stick
One or two star anise
A sprinkling of Allspice
Anything else spicy you fancy




 Method:
1. Bung it all in a big pan
2. Leave overnight to infuse (optional)
3. Bring to a simmer
4. Simmer for 5-10 minutes
5. Ladle  it out and booze up
6. Fall asleep in front of the fire.


Merry Christmas! The blog will (hopefully) resume on Boxing Day.

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.