At the request of a vegetarian friend of mine here’s a short one today: Halloumi, what a cheese! Allowing vegetarians to pretend their eating meat since ancient Egyptian times; thanks Cyprus!
Check out my cheese flaps!
A go to super simple starter I’ve been cooking for years but that goes down really well is fried Halloumi with a lime, caper and coriander dressing.
The dresing
Start with the zest and juice of a lime or two and add them to a jar with some capers and their juice.
Jars for the saving of washing up.
Bung in some olive oil, I’m using home made lemon, ginger and chilli oil. Fresh ginger cut fine works well at this point.
Hat tip to my good friend Mike for this batch of oil.
Add a little sugar, a little Dijon mustard (optional) and a large bunch of chopped coriander.
This will keep in the fridge for a surprisingly long time so make plenty!
Done!
Halloumi
Cover a plate with about 3 parts flour to one part good paprika. I have a Hungarian friend who brings the stuff direct from source. Hungarian Paprika, I have been convinced, being the best in the world.
Seasoning mix, with a little salt and pepper.Hungarian Paprika, this is a seasoning variety. A meal sprinkled with this and served with a measure of my friend’s father’s palinka is a wonderful thing: egészségedre!
Slice the cheese and then turn in the seasoning mix.
Ready for the pan.
Shallow fry the cheese in extremely hot, good quality rapeseed oil aiming for that sweet spot where it’s crispy on the outside, gooey in the middle. If it goes squeaky through a tiny bit of over cooking then I think it’s just as tasty! The key is to move them as little as possible to allow a crust to form.
Like non-meat meat! for mighty boosh fans – “cheese is a type of meat, a tasty yellow beef!”
Serve A on B and enjoy!
Put the rest of the dressing on the table for the extra spoons that will inevitably go!
Other Halloumi recipes coming soon:
Tandoori fried Halloumi with veg curry and aromatic rice
Halloumi and polenta strips with tomato vegetable ratatouille
BBQ Halloumi, tomato and basil salad.
Charles
Tandoori Halloumi, veg curry and aromatic rice with home made raita.Halloumi and polenta with vegetable ratatouille.
Update: I used this as a quick starter for our valentines meal this year, disgustingly adorable I know but I’d been out all day watching rugby so needed to claw it back a bit!
same recipe but heart shaped with fried, buttered dough balls.
Butchery may not be the most appealing thing to some but there are many upsides. I have no formal training in breaking up carcasses apart from the odd day course but as a Biologist I have plenty of dissection and anatomical experience that can be applied; for example I once kept a frog’s heart beating outside of it’s body for 12 hours and removed locust testicles with a tiny ice cream scoop, not for culinary reasons however! I’m sure the pros would look at the cuts below with confusion but as an amateur with amateur equipment it works a treat and doesn’t destroy your knives. But first why bother? Chicken is the UK’s most consumed meat overtaking beef ~20 years ago and still rising.
Via the BBC, the ready meals line makes me sad 😦
That said most people pay over the odds buying it in portions with a massive imbalance in demand between breasts and the rest of the bird. On occasion I’m guilty of this too even as someone who only buy’s meat from the local butcher and never from the supermarket: however I know I ideally shouldn’t be doing it. For comparison, to buy all the main cuts of a chicken in pieces from a supermarket (Tesco in this case as it’s still the leading retailer…for now!) is more expensive than buying the whole chicken by £1.53 even when buying the bird from the same supermarket and without getting the rest of the carcass! I’m comparing the free range chicken here as if you want to get low welfare chicken you’re probably reading the wrong blog. However the pattern is the same.
Essentially you are burning money, wasting packaging and getting less meat.
Poor Liz!
The reason is simple, you’re paying for packaging and butchery. If you really like little polystyrene trays I cant help you but if the issue is the butchery it might be a different story.
The Chicken
Get a nice free range chicken from your local butcher and you can make a huge amount of food from it, my record is 14 servings from bits of the chicken. Get a clean board and a sharp boning knife. If you don’t have a boning knife your most ridged bladed knife will do.
oooo the potential!
First point is you should never be trying to cut through bone; aim for the joints, cut away the skin, meat, tendons and ligaments then snap and pop the joints away from their neighbours. That way you’ll find the process neater, easier and you wont wreck your knife.
Cut the skin between the legs and the breasts and around the sides of the main opening until you can see the bottom of the carcass i.e. the spine.
You’re actually cutting ventral to dorsal – bottom to top 🙂
Next step is to fold the chicken in half snapping the spine then cut through the break to remove the back end. Then remove the wings, cutting the skin then finding the point the humerus sits in the shoulder (glenoid) socket i.e. the shoulder or glenohumoral joint. Bend this until it pops out then cut away any more skin to free the wing.
On a quality chicken this should put up a fight. rapidly grown, poor quality birds fall apart easily, with a good bird you’ll have to give it some!
Next find the knee and hip joints, cut through the skin and muscle then pop these joints out too.
Dark meat off.
Put these cuts to one side, carcass and wings in the stock pot usually, then thighs and drum sticks to one side.
plenty of servings from these cut’s alone see the paella post
Now for the breasts. Find the sternum, the bone running down the centre of the two breasts, and cut down until you find the rib cage, follow the rib cage round to remove the breasts, repeat this on the other side for the other breast.
Use long smooth strokes to avoid shredding the meat, if you meet (or meat?) resistance you’ve hit a bone, back off and go round.
Once off, add the carcass to the stock pot and pack up the breasts for later use. If you want something big to do with the carcass and the dark meat see the paella post
Bag and freeze the breasts, don’t worry about the last scraps of meat, pick them off after the stock is cooked.
Once you’ve mastered this you will save money, make better food, make more meals per chicken, save waste and perhaps graduate to something bigger like my present from mum last Xmas!
An opportunity to butcher a pig with a New Forest butcher. Any day with crackling, trotters and chain-mail is going to be a good day!
For feeding a big bunch of people there’s nothing better than a big paella, filling, decadent, endlessly variable and if done correctly packed with flavour.
A previous go from a while back with prawns and squid.
The key is a really good stock and for that I make use of an entire chicken except, perhaps counter-intuitively, the breasts. These can be saved for a dish in their own right; nice and thrifty! Start with a good quality chicken, not too big as you’re using other meats/fish/seafood as well. Joint it roughly (separate post on how to do this), set the thighs and legs aside, freeze the breasts for another day and add everything else into a large pot.
A good quality small chicken part way broken down
To the wings and various bits of carcass add the standard stock ingredients plus a few to give it that Mediterranean edge:
2 Sticks of celery
A large onion
2-3 large cloves of garlic
Bay leaves
A large carrot
A pinch of saffron (if unavailable then some paprika and turmeric will be almost as good)
Salt
Don’t be shy with the garlic and salt as this is where a lot of the flavour which will end up in your rice is going to come from. Saffron is superb in this stock but also really expensive, a blend of paprika and turmeric will do if you don’t have/don’t want to buy those little red stigmas of joy. Bring to the boil and then simmer for as long as you can, a couple of hours minimum. For best results use a pan with a well fitting lid; you want the flavour to stay in the stock rather than giving your house that delicious chicken aroma. If you have one use a pressure cooker!
sieve off the stock after a couple of hours, resist urge to drink it neat!
While that’s happening prepare your other ingredients, finely chop:
Onion
Garlic (plenty, this is Spanish cooking and like their French neighbours they aren’t shy with it!)
Carrot
Red pepper
Pancetta
Chorizo sausage
The meats are vital to the dish providing huge amounts of flavour and most of the fat in the first stage of cooking.
The raw chorizo can be bought from any good butcher, the supermarket cooked ring stuff is an acceptable substitute but try and avoid the thin cut stuff for this dish as it will burn to easily.
Next prepare your seafood, this can be done while the Paella is cooking but that may take your eye off how much stock you should be adding. Rinse then ring up your squid and roughly chop the tentacles, (don’t even think about getting rid of them, they’re the best part!) and trim the longer antennae, pereopods and antennule of your Prawns so they are nice and neat. If you’re using the frozen shelled variety let them defrost and simply give them a rinse
Make sure you wash up after this stage, nobody likes fishy nasties where they shouldn’t be!
Your fishmonger should do all the hard stuff with the squid for you, even ringing it. If you’re using frozen I find it best to chop it into the rings before it’s fully defrosted as this is easier with a little more resistance.
Now you’re ready to cook!
All your ingredients ready to go in order
Pancetta and Chorizo (plus a knob of butter)
Chicken legs and thighs
Chopped onion, garlic, carrot and pepper
Paella rice (or other short grained variety)
A glass of white (one for the pan, one for you!)
Stock
The juice of half a lemon (the other half to be chopped into wedges and served on the top of the dish)
chopped flat leaf parsley (stalks and all)
Squid, fried for 2 mins maximum in butter, seasoning and lemon juice
Prawns, fried for 2 mins maximum in butter, seasoning and lemon juice
There will now follow a paella cooking montage, Imagine your own 80’s montage theme, I suggest Kenny Loggins!
Lightly fry to get the oil out, add butter for extra silky rice and because everyone likes butter!Add the chicken and brown on both sidesAdd the veg and soften, add the rice and stir to coat with the juices, add the wine and ladle in stock as the rice absorbs moisture. Burning the bottom a little is actually recommended in traditional Spanish versions; the crunch bit is seen as the best part! You can also add extra paprika here to give more flavour and colour if your chorizo didn’t do a good enough job.Once the rice is nearly tender, strip the chicken from the bones and mix the meat in, add some frozen peas (optional) the lemon juice, the parsley and the lemon wedges.Fry the seafood until the prawns are pink and until the squid is firm but not rubbery. Less is better with these guys!Serve on the Paella or alongside it if there are any allergic/fussy types in your party, no point wasting good prawns!Serve with a glass of pear wine!
Last year I tried growing beetroot; I have very heavy clay soil and as such a number of crops have not been too successful, but the humble beetroot was a very successful experiment. But what to do with it? Pickled beetroot is the obvious option but I think the least inspiring. Much better to use them as a veg in their own right, and best of all is a recipe from the river cottage veg series for beetroot tart tatin which I’ve made with the crop from the garden.
A few freshly-harvested beets.
The basic recipe from River Cottage is great but I add a few things to make it a more hearty feed. The vinaigrette, for example, really benefits from capers and the tart works really well when topped with a whole load of goats cheese.
The basic beet tart as per the recipePimp my tart!
Don’t forget the greens….umm…reds?
As a side dish to this the leaves of the beetroot can be cooked like chard or spinach. Lightly season the water, add a little cider vinegar and a little cinnamon then boil for 2 mins maximum.
However, there is a problem with this recipe: what do you do with all the beets that aren’t big enough to make a sensible contribution to the tart? As you can see above my beetroots aren’t exactly prize-winning quality; what can I say, I’m a lazy gardener! Well, here is a variation I think works well on the same theme using up the end of season, small or otherwise imperfect specimens:
Ugly beet-goat pie
Ugly, small or damaged veg is not the easiest to work with but can be nice and tasty as well as a real shame to waste. Start with your ugly beets and clean them up only as much as absolutely necessary.
Ugly beets – these were the last few worth saving harvested in January!The very end of a good crop!
Cook them as described in the original recipe: butter, oil, sugar, seasoning and cider vinegar. Due to low numbers of beets, I chopped up some celeriac for bulk and a nutty flavour and added a clove of garlic and a bay leaf.
Celeriac in first as it benefits from a few toasted edges.
Meanwhile, prepare a pie dish with filo pastry, laying each sheet 2/3 in the dish with 1/3 hanging over the edge. Spread the dish with melted butter before you add the first sheet, then spread each sheet before adding the next at right angles to the sheet below. Once you have been all the way round at least once (i.e. 4 sheets minimum), you might also want to reinforce the base by adding any offcuts into the bottom of the dish as the mixture can be a bit wet.
A messy pastry nest!
Add the beets leaving a good amount of the juice in the pan. Cover the beets with goat’s cheese (the single ingredient that smells the most like the animal it comes from….) making sure the cheese is evenly spread.
Take any greens you have lying around, maybe the tops of the beets, (I’m using some of the uglier purple chard from the garden) and fry them briefly in the remaining juice. You can add any extra seasoning to taste but take the fact the cheese is very salty into account.
Mangled chard
Add the greens to the pie, then fold in the sheets of pastry brushing each one with butter as you go. Give the top a good final spread of butter and place it in the top of a hot oven for about 30 mins or until the pastry is crisp and golden.
Looking less ugly by the second!Ready for the ovenJust out of the oven; turned out using the old two plate trick.and we’re in!
To serve: mix some mustard, golden sugar, vinegar, capers and chopped dill with a little seasoning as a vinaigrette. Serve with potato and perhaps some extra greens. I opted for a hearty mash (as it’s mid January) 90% Maris-Piper, 10% celeriac, seasoning and a good knob of butter. New potatoes are also an excellent option if in season.
Dressing: Just mix the ingredients in a container after roughly chopping the dill.The finished item, and it went down a treat.
“Drastic cost cutting measures take effect after sharp fall in sales!”
Regardless of the obvious economic cataclysm, stop buying the stuff! Home-made pizza is the easiest, cheapest thing to make from scratch as well as being significantly tastier, more varied and better for you (lower in fat, salt and sugar) than the bought stuff; with some smart cooking it can also be with you just as quickly. It has to be the number one thing requested of me by my partner. Also you never know what’s been happening to your food!
The no frills home made pizza
Firstly, the base. There is only one thing more pointless than buying pizza and that’s buying the anaemic little bases from the supermarket and pretending you made a pizza; come on, who are you kidding!?
A good basic base goes as follows:
300g strong white flour
170ml water
1tsp salt
1tbsp rape seed oil (or olive oil)
1/2tsp fast acting yeast
Mix everything together, knead until elastic, then leave to rest until you’ve finished the sauce. Good kneading is really important, as the gluten in the flour needs encouragement to come out and make your base nice and elastic. There is also some evidence the oil (an organic solvent) helps this process.
But why stop there? The base is a perfect place to pack in some extra flavour. good things to add include cumin seeds, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, dried herbs, or chopped harder fresh herbs (like rosemary or bay; the softer ones can stop your base hanging together and crisping up).
A tablespoon of cumin seeds in the base mix. They have the advantage of releasing a lot of flavour into the dough as they toast.
if you have a bread-maker they almost all have a dough setting which will do all the churning for you while you make the sauce.
Basic speedy sauce
To quickly pack maximum richness and flavour into your sauce while keeping it silky smooth, here’s my recipe:
Fry some chopped chorizo sausage in the base of a pan on a low heat. This will give all the oil you need for cooking the sauce and add a rich spiced meaty flavour. Chorizo is an amazing ingredient which is so cheap (as you need to use so little of the stuff) and makes such a difference to your dishes. Never be without some.
The oil alone absolutely makes the sauce.
Take a carrot, celery stick, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 bay leaves, some rosemary (without the stick), and an onion, peel and blend in a food processor to almost a fine chopped paste.
The pepper is for later although adding this to the blender works well too.
In case there was any confusion….
Add the contents of the blender to the pan as soon as the oil has emerged from the meat and fry until soft.
If you really want to you can add some good or flavoured olive oil here. This will add flavour but whatever you do don’t do it “from a hight” or you run the risk of turning into Jamie Oliver!
Add a tin of good chopped tomatoes, some tomato purée, some Worcester sauce (if you live in the UK), seasoning and a veg stock cube (optional).
Reduce this mix down to a rich, thick, delicious sauce. It will spit and catch so keep returning to stir it.
Construct
Now you’re ready to build. Roll out your dough into 2 bases the size of whatever baking tray or stone you have. If you really like that grainy quality that takeaway pizza has, the secret is to roll the dough out in raw polenta, or if you can’t get it then semolina; if you’re not fussed just use flour. You can also easily do stuffed crust at this point. Just roll the pizza bigger than the intended tray, drop it in and push whatever you want up to the edges. Then fold the excess dough over the top and bung the sauce over the seams. Add whatever you want and top with cheese.
For this simple example I’ve added chopped pepper and mozzarella, cheddar and parmesan. In that order; you want melted stringy mozzerela, melted cheddar holding everything down and a crispy parmesan crust.
Assembled pizza pre-parmesan; cheese order is all important!
Bake one pizza in the top of a hot oven and one in the bottom. They will cook at different speeds meaning you can serve one up out of the top and once everyone is done eating it serve the other while still piping hot. For a lot of pizza with a small oven move the bottom to the top and add new ones to the bottom to keep the timing regular!
Serve on the board for extra flare!
There we have it. NEVER BUY PIZZA AGAIN!!
C
Note: this can be done even faster as a ‘pan-pizza’ but that’s a separate post.
I’m new to blogging but I’m fairly sure this is the most uninspiring way to start a post since “nobody gets me” and “I just have so many feelings”. Sorry.
We love steak, but this inadequate gas delivery system we got with the house struggles to do it justice. The thing with steak, as I’m sure we all agree, is getting the searing heat to caramelise the fats and carbohydrate at the surface while leaving the middle in such a state a talented vet could get it up and mooing. Alas, many hobs in many houses simply don’t kick out enough heat in conjunction with a standard pan to do this – mine being no exception.
The problem is protein, specifically the actin and myosin that make up muscle fibres. Think of them as folded up scaffolding poles forming complex 3D shapes, with the folds held together by sticky tape (go with it!). Heat them too much and the tape melts, unravelling the protein and tangling them irretrievably with their neighbours, leading to tough meat. But how do you get a cold hob to sear the edges, making a tasty, juice-sealing caramelised outside, while leaving the middle pleasantly warm and still tender? The solution, as ever, is science; in this case namely specific heat capacity.
Specific heat capacity is how much heat energy it takes to make a material change temperature. For example, heating rock by 10 degrees takes far more energy than heating the same volume of air by 10 degrees. This means some materials hold heat: in short, get a massive lump of cast iron, stick it across two rings, suck up a large amount of heat from the trickle that is your hob and let it out in one burst onto your meat! Iron technically doesn’t have the highest SHC but a large lump will store enough heat to get a good steak out of a crap hob. This blog post goes into it in more detail but if you remember your school physics this shouldn’t be news to you.
So, cooking steak.
Get your massive piece of metal screamingly hot (figurative, actual screaming indicates a serious problem!) over two rings. A little oil will tell you when this is happening as it will start to smoke, in my case the oil I’ve used to season the griddle does this nicely for me. This takes ages, wait at least 5 mins, patience is key!
mmmmm delicious Physics!!
I’ve read loads of stuff about how to prepare and cook steak and they all have advantages, but there are just too many variables for one method to suit all: the hob, the pan, the type of steak, the thickness of steak, starting temperature, preferred cooking time etc. etc. Given this I’m not going to try to give definitive methodology but some principles I’ve found helpful.
Firstly, the steak needs to be room temperature before you start, or maybe even a little warmer. Directly from fridge to grill will leave you with a cold middle.
Secondly, seasoning: some say put nothing on the steak, some say drown it in oil, butter, pepper, salt, chilli, duck tears etc. My preferred method is a little olive/rapeseed oil on a plate, grind plenty of pepper into it and add a little salt. Put the steaks in the mixture and turn, then leave them to warm up to room temperature. The salt will draw a little moisture out of the surface of the steak helping the cooking; useful, given the hob heat situation.
Thirdly, cooking time: All steaks are different in shape, density, fat content and, crucially, thickness so there is no one method for getting your steak perfectly medium rare by using a stopwatch, unless you really know your hob and have created a conversion graph for thickness to time (I like graphs and meat, this sounds like fun…..). I turn the steak every minute onto a hotter part of the griddle until it’s reached steak perfection.
Lastly, steak perfection: What I use is a ‘handy’ rule of ‘thumb’ and a lot of poking. The muscle at the base of your thumb as you contract your hand mostly parallels how firm your steaks should be at each cooking stage. The more tightly the muscle in your hand is contracting the firmer it will be; similarly the longer you cook your steak, the more the proteins in the meat will have bound together.
Poke the thumb muscle with your index finger, that’s how a rare steak should feel. With your middle finger, medium rare (the choice of champions!). Your ring finger will give you the firmness of a medium steak (easy now) and your little finger will give you well done (but you may as well eat boot leather at this point!).
A ‘handy’ steak guide.
Simple as that. Once you’re happy with your well-poked steak, plate it up onto a warmed plate and leave to rest (important for letting the steak’s proteins move about into a moisture retaining shape!) while you plate up the steak’s delicious backing group.
Well poked but not well done, ever!
Usually I serve steak with chips, veg and of course, peppercorn sauce. A quality peppercorn sauce for me goes like this:
Chop and fry 2 large cloves of garlic in a little oil or butter.
Add a small pot of cream, a beef stock cube and a few tablespoons of peppercorns.
Grind some peppercorns into the cream as well to add an immediate peppery hit and add a pinch of salt.
The secret weapon: whisky! Nothing too good – a good drop of a blend will do. Chivas Regal or Famous Grouse are just fine. Incidentally, these are the same bottles I use to keep people away from my good malts – I refer to them as distraction whisky!
Heat but don’t boil until all favours are mingled, and pour liberally.
You can also add any meat juices you have managed to collect and for a slight variation some chopped parsley.
Steak on!
Steak with peppercorn sauce, steamed veg and home fried chunky chips.Steak with peppercorn sauce, sweet potato chips and baby spinach salad.
However, I annually take students on a field ecology course to an excellent outward bound centre in Snowdonia called Plas Dol-y-Moch (for the record, not against their will, I do teach them!). They have some healthy quince bushes and I managed to bag a few between freezing gorge walking and mark-release-recapture studies on the common periwinkle.
The fruit looks, for want of a better term, ‘gnarly’, but smells incredible. There are loads of things to do with them (serve them with meat, use them in compotes, swap them in for apples in various recipes etc etc) but I chose to go traditional and make some jelly.
Method
Fair warning: this looks horrible for the majority of this recipe, but it comes good in the end. I’m lazy so lots of prep was not on the agenda; I simply cut them up, ditched the stalks and really nasty bits, boiled them with 80% of their mass in light brown sugar (the caramel taste works well) added a little water to start them off and bunged in a cinnamon stick. Mash them when soft enough – do not be discouraged by the Indiana Jones eye ball soup look of the concoction… it’s all good.
Quince or eye? Quince or eye? Help me short-round!
Once you’ve boiled the hell out of it and the eyes…quinces have turned to mush, run it into a clean pan through a sieve; a colander lets too much detritus through and muslin doesn’t let enough flesh through to get the most from the fruit. Then boil until you reach set point. This is the point when you drop the liquid onto a freezing cold plate it forms a skin which rucks up when you push it.
For the jarring I use either boiling water to sterilise jars if I’m only doing a few, the advantage being you can sterilise the wide necked funnel you intend to use at the same time, or the oven if I’m doing a lot. The ladle should also be sterile, and then you spoon away. Once the jelly is in the jar, get the lid on as fast as your manual dexterity while wearing oven gloves allows. As the jelly cools it should contract, sucking in the lid and making that satisfying click noise. This is also good evidence that everything was hot enough to remain sterile.
Hot! In all senses (except the chilli one).
When done they will remain sterile in your cupboard like any other jam or preserve. My favourite conversation with my sister stems from opening a jar of one of my jams: she asked me “how do you get it to do the proper click noise?” to which I answered “Science”. She replied “that’s your answer to everything!” 🙂
Nice, if odd, variations in flavour come from replacing the cinnamon stick with any of the following:
Cardamom
Coriander seed
Chilli
Cumin
Basically any flavour you’d find in mango chutney. You might not want some of them on toast though!
Mmmm quince and chilli toast. Any chilled monkey brains?
C
P.S. if you’ve not seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ignore all the eyes and monkey brains!
If you’re reading this well done for finding this obscure scrapbook!
This is a place for recording various experiments in cooking, growing, brewing and foraging from a small terraced house on the edge of a town. I am a Biologist by training and a country bumpkin by upbringing. I grow, I cook, I brew and I forage without the luxury of much space, a big fancy kitchen or acres of countryside. Hopefully some of the things I’ve found out along the way will be helpful to other amateur brewers, cooks, gardeners, scientists and foragers.
microholding science 
