Fruit Crumbly Umbly

As promised, there was dessert at Jarratt & Evies. What's more, I made it.

Yes, you heard right. I made dessert. If you'll remember from my last post, Dessert Chef was feeling under the weather, but since we had already said we would bring dessert, my hand was all but forced.

I know I've already posted a crumble recipe this year, but most of that was shot by torchlight, and it was all about living off the land and wotnot. This is exciting because, as I might have already mentioned, I made dessert.

Did I mention that I made this dessert myself? Well, I did.
So I mixed up some stewed rhubarb, blackberries and apple,
made up a crumble from butter, flour and sugar, and took it all with me to assemble and cook after dinner. If you're not going to cook them straight away and you don't keep the two separate, you see, the flour goes soggy and then you have more of a stewed fruit mush than a crumble.
So the crumble goes over the fruit, like so, and it goes in the oven for about 20 minutes at 180c, maybe with a little bit of a grill/broil at the end.
So there you have it. If even a pudding-lummox like me can do it, it must be pretty easy.

(For the record, before you start pointing out continuity errors, the picture above is the little one I cooked at home for Dessert Chef and the little guy. I might have gone out and left them at home to be sick together, but at least I was good enough to make dessert before I went).
Jarratt's oven was a teensy bit more powerful than ours. But I have a good nose, so disaster was averted. Certainly nothing that ice cream couldn't save.
I had a little bit of leftover crumble, so the next day I stewed up some overripe pears we had sitting in the fruit bowl and made a pear crumble.

Two desserts in one weekend! That's like two eclipses in one year!

The Other Side of the Table

It wouldn't exactly be untrue to say that we don't get out much. (Did I obfuscate sufficiently there?)

So when, after six months of personal disasters and last-minute rescheduling, we finally managed to align all the stars together and take up the opportunity to drop the little guy off with the baby-sitters and go to a good friends' place for dinner, I would not be daunted.

Then aforementioned little guy got sick, and Dessert Chef wasn't feeling too well either. However, at risk of being branded a cad, I took up the torch and went out anyway.

I'm not used to being the guest, but it sure is nice once in a while. It was great to share dinner and a bottle of wine with Jarratt and Evie, and the Chicken Breast with olives and all those little baby veges (cherry tomatoes, baby beetroot, gourmet potatoes) all dressed up in mustard and maple (I think) were delicious.

Jarratt had had plenty of practice at this dish, of course. For every planned dinner that got scuppered, he still had all the ingredients on hand to make the meal. By the time I got to enjoy it, I'm pretty sure that they were well sick of it! How you could get sick of such a delicious dish, I don't know.

Thanks, guys. Sorry it took me so long to get to posting. Photos of the crumbly dessert action will follow shortly. Let me know if you post the recipe, so I can link to it.

I'm still trying to figure out how we didn't get onto Singstar that night. Ah, yes, the driving-therefore-not-drinking thing. It takes a certain minimum amount of wine before Singstar is really an option.

Maybe next time!

What the H@!! is this?

I have so much cool stuff to blog about, but this week is getting away from me and right now it's just gathering speed as it careens down a hillside.

So rather than burn the candle at both ends, I'm going to give you this simple question:
What the heck is this?

Please direct all guesses to the comments department. There will be a prize, perhaps an imaginary starship journey with an already maxed-out Starlight Express Credit Card to beguile and amuse your friends.

(No, seriously, I took this photo in my own kitchen and have no idea what it is. So, there is no wrong answer, unless it involves tofu. Tofu lovers: I've tried, I really have. But it just doesn't work for me.)

Enough. Must get to the sleeping.

Don't Call Me Pastie

I'll be the first to admit that I'm struggling with the witty, pithy Blog Titles right now. Please refrain from filling the comments section with this observation. I got there first.

Today I'd just like to write a post about why I love my Dessert Chef so very much. As far as this particular post goes, it's because even though she hates cooking, she still pulls things like this out of her hat:
Mince (Ground Beef) with carrot, tomato, onion,and fresh spinach.
Savoury pastry, rolled out and cut into circles...
...like so.
Mince layered with three cheeses and sealed off with a little milk.
Baked for about 20 minutes at 200C.
Served up with sour cream, and not a naughty vegetable in sight.

Who wouldn't love coming home to a treat like that?

Thanks, my lovely Dessert Chef. Now, what's for pudding?

Olive(r) Stew

I've made noises here about celebrity chefs before, and a little while ago I posted a meal I cooked out of a Gordon Ramsay Cookbook that I picked up at the Food Show.

Now, the guys at Kamikaze Cookery (Link junkies: Language may offend. You've been warned) have taken it upon themselves to expose the glaring discrepancies between what most people are capable of cooking compared with what the Ramsays and Olivers of the world think we can manage, so I won't try to outdo them on that count.

Instead, I thought it worthwhile documenting my own attempt to pull off a recipe for Peposo - famous hunter's peppery beef stew - out of Jamie Oliver's book, Jamie's Italy. I like to think of myself as a slightly more accomplished home gourmandiser than the average kiwi bloke, so I was not daunted by the challenge.

Perhaps I should've been.

Admittedly I was trying to cook about 600g of beef rather than the 2.5kg in the recipe (I mean, who really cooks 2.5kg of stewing steak at a time? There are only 2 1/2 of us, after all!), and I was using normal stewing steak rather than beef shin on the bone, but you work with what you've got, right? I made the effort to use real french red wine, at least. And anyway, the first thing you do according to the recipe is take the meat off the bone, so why not just use deboned meat to start with?
Simple enough. Meat, onions, rosemary, garlic, bay leaves, salt and pepper.
Layer it all up in an oven dish and cover in wine, topping with water to cover the meat if necessary. Then bring to a boil and place in the oven at 150c for 6 hours. Yes, I did all this. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?
Then at the bottom of the recipe (not at the top, not at the "when you're layering the dish" part) it says to skim off the fat and remove the bone. Aah. I see. So the bone was meant to go in? That bone I don't have? Right. Well, I didn't. Not only that but my dish didn't have any fat to skim off. It had virtually no moisture at all. Apparently it should have.
Yes, this was quite intensely flavoured as Jamie promised, and the meat was falling apart, if a little over-dry. I wonder if I had a small army to feed rather than my modest family, and I had cooked this in the five-fold quantity suggested by JO if this might have come out better. I can only guess so.

I dished it up on buttered slabs of fresh bread (also Jamie's recipe from his first book - I tried it once and have made it that way ever since), and we agreed that it was good that we had some nice bread for dinner.

So it's worrying that if even I, with my extraordinary powers of making stuff up on the fly and trusting my instincts to salvage the various disasters that arise from my untutored approach to cooking, can be derailed by a Jamie Oliver recipe that seems so straightforward, then how much paper is being wasted in this world in the printing of celebrity chef recipe books that people will simply never use? Or if they do, they'll be disappointed, and thus the book will sit on the shelf forever gathering dust?

I make an effort to make something from one of my many cookbooks every month or so, trying to learn new things and bring a dash of variety to our meals. But if the people who sell the most cookbooks on the planet - I'm looking at you, Jamie, Gordon and Nigella - can't come to terms with what average folk are really looking for in a recipe and capable of achieving in the kitchen, then I worry that even more innocent trees will die as a result.

Please, celebrity chefs. Take a moment to consider the trees. Then pull your heads our of your @rses and give us recipes that we can cook, damn it.

Mmmm Lamb...

Blogging both here and at The Podagogue has been a bit light this week, mainly on account of my having launched into writing my third novel. The first few chapters are surging around in my head, so I must get them down before either I go mad or they morph into something too warped and untouchable even for me to lock down in words.

However, for a moment I shall hide in the safety of foody goodness.

It's been a while since I last posted about lamb. I am a big fan of lamb, as you are all well aware.

Therefore, I'll keep this brief. Think of it as more of an indulgence than an education.
Lamb chops, herbs, freshly ground pepper and salt, fresh chopped garlic, olive oil.
Fry until lovely and brown over a high heat.
Grate with Parmesan cheese and grill (broil, my lovely North American readers).

Stick with me. A blog post of some substance will be forthcoming, I promise. In the meantime, imagine the smell of cooking lamb chops. That should fix what ails ye.

Mushroom and Sausage Soup

What do you do when your sister brings you a big bag full of delicious field mushrooms that only you will eat? And much as you would love to just fry them up with bacon and eat them, you're busy cooking sausages for dinner already?
Easy.

You make soup.
Chop up the mushrooms, and take some photos, pondering the odd nature of these particular mushrooms that seem to be slightly out-of-focus in the real world (couldn't possibly be the camera, much less the photographer...).
Since you're already cooking up sausages, simply keep the oily pan, add some butter and the chopped mushrooms, and simmer away while you're eating the afore-mentioned sausages, keeping one aside. There was also a certain amount of fried onion in the sausage pan, which we will just take as a given.
Chop up that lone spare sausage.
Add 2 Cups of light chicken stock to the mushrooms and bring to a rapid simmer, then add a 1/4 cup of cream.
Take a stick blender or pour the soup into a blender. Pulse it a few times so that you're left with some yummy chunky bits. Then mix the sausage through.

Sadly, this is the best "Final Result" photo I have, since I then took both servings to work for lunch, where there is no camera. *sigh*