Quesadillas Españolas

When I get the opportunity to lay in and don't venture from my bed until after 10, I am left with the dilemma of whether to have breakfast or wait until lunch. On these days I opt for breakfast quesadillas around midday as a happy compromise.

My usual recipe involves bacon and cheddar, but this afternoon when I headed for the kitchen, I remembered that there was no bacon in the fridge. Instead, I found soft goat's cheese and chorizo. And thus the Quesadilla Española was born.

First, soften 2 spring onions and a garlic clove in a frying pan with a knob of butter. Then add chopped chorizo (or 2 rashers of bacon for the original recipe), frying for a minute or two before adding half a red pepper cut in strips. Once the pepper has softened a little, remove the mixture from the pan and arrange on one half of a large flour tortilla.

In the pan, add a little more butter and pour in an egg beaten with a splash of milk and a grind of salt. Scramble the eggs then spread evenly over the pepper and chorizo mixture.

Break up about 30g of goat's cheese (or grated cheddar for the original) over the mixture then fold over the other half of the tortilla. Place under the grill for a couple of minutes then flip and grill on the other side (be careful, because it catches quite easily).

Serve with a dollop of Greek yoghurt.

A Week of Mild Experimentation

With my GDL course starting in earnest this week, I have been flying by the seat of my pants in terms of 'life outside study' and particularly so in feeding myself - catching a quick bite here, chucking whatever I've got in the fridge together, and keeping it cheap.  (As an aside, from my recent experience it seems that, far from being lazy, students actually have terrible diets because they're just too busy... Or maybe that's just me.)  Luckily, the results of this week's panicked approach to food - in between delving into the concept of property and learning about the history of EU law-making - have been pretty acceptable.  One could even go so far as to suggest successful.

First came an improvised Mediterranean chicken bake.  Chicken thighs are without question the best part of a chicken.  The meat to skin ratio is spot on, and the dark meat is more flavoursome and moist.  I coated the thighs (2 each) in flour and briefly fried them skin-side down in a drizzle of oil (the flour will be useful in thicken the sauce later).  I added peeled whole small onions (3 each) and fried these with the thighs, which I had now turned over.  I chucked in a chopped red pepper (big chunks), whole peeled garlic cloves (2 each) and some chunks of courgette.  I squeezed over a lemon and tore in some fresh rosemary and popped the pan in the oven at 180C (with the thighs skin-side up) for about 25 minutes, occasionally stirring around the vegetables.  Once it was ready, I checked the sauce and added a little further flour to thicken it up and served in bowls.  This would be good with mash for soaking up the sauce, but bread sufficed on this occasion.

My second successful experiment came last night in the form of a Thai-ish curry, upon my brother's request.  At the farmer's market I bought a basket of green beans and 2 large aubergines for £2 - total bargain!  I had chilli, garlic, ginger and other store-cupboard bits and pieces at home, so just needed to pick up coconut cream, fresh coriander and lemongrass.

Green Bean and Aubergine Thai Curry

Once home, I got the rice on.  I chopped up one of the aubergines and half the green beans and put them in a large bowl, sprinkling with ground cumin, ground coriander seed, smoked paprika and a splash of nam plah.  I bashed up two cloves of garlic, half a large red chilli, and about an inch of ginger, and mixed this in with the vegetables. I sliced along the length of the stalk of lemongrass, not cutting through the root, and then bashed this with the back of my knife.  This I added to my veg bowl along with a good handful or chopped coriander.  With 15 minutes to go before the rice was ready, I heated a little oil in a pan, and softened some roughly chopped spring onions.  I added the vegetable mixture and half a small tin of coconut cream, before pouring in about 200ml of vegetable stock.  I turned it down to a low simmer and left uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the rice was ready.

The result was a very satisfying vegetable curry with lots of interesting flavour and a hint of heat.  A perfect way to end a successful week of experimenting.

A Big, Yellow, Dirty Bucket

Dinner last Wednesday came in a big, yellow, dirty bucket.  I kid you not!

Having made dinner on Monday (see my Stimulating Summer Sea Bass post), and my brother and his friend providing dinner on Tuesday, my housemate offered to cook dinner for the group on Wednesday.  As it happened, she was busy with her farming - still harvesting - so I received a call as soon as I got home from work informing me that everything for dinner was at the farmhouse.

I popped my head round the farmhouse door and was presented by my friend's mother with a bucket of newly-unearthed potatoes.  I was then led up the garden, where we dug up a bunch of carrots and picked runner beans.  All of which went into the bucket.  Back in the kitchen, I was given a huge joint of beef, which took the contents of the bucket up to the brim.

And off I went with a big, yellow, dirty bucket full of dinner.  The joint was roasted atop a bed of carrots, garlic and onions.  The potatoes were roasted and (very bad) yorkshire puddings were made.  Job done.

As an addendum, we ate about two thirds of the joint between the four of us that evening.  I had already started making plans for the remaining meat the minute I'd served up.  All in vain, though, as Tim's friend polished off the rest of the roast after we'd left that evening.

Stimulating Summer Sea Bass

A bit late for a summer post, you might be thinking, but not true!  In Britain, we take summer when we can get it, whether it be after the end of British summertime or not.  And the end of British summertime was indeed one of those days that you have to be thankful for.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take advantage of the spurt of summer, being at work for most of the daytime, but coming out from a stuffy office into warm, bright sun inspired me to cook something refreshing.

I picked up two sea bass from the supermarket.  It was a poor girl's first day behind the fish counter and I asked her to gut them for me.  Her supervisor suggested I carry on with my shopping and the pair of fish should be ready when I'd done.  As it happens, having gone up and down all the aisles twice, the fish were still not ready and I had to wait a further 5-10 minutes.  Nevertheless, I am happy that I was able to be some part of someone learning something new today.  And, anyway, I can't talk - I didn't gut the fish!

My wait at the fish counter also caused me to pick up some sea aster - which looked like some sort of salad leaf, but sounded suitably exotic for the dinner.  I finished off my shopping and headed home to stuff and bake my fish.

An Overstuffed Sea Bass!

Once home, I swiftly chopped some spinach, sea aster, lots of ginger, some garlic and some cashews.  I squeezed in some lime and stuffed the open cavities of the fish with the mixture.  I put a little oil on some tin foil, then folded the ends round to make a little package.  The packages were then placed in a preheated oven at 200C for 30 minutes (15 mins per 500g + 15 mins).  Meanwhile, I boiled some egg noodles and put together a vegetable stir fry.

30 minutes later (or what should have been 30 minutes later, but my brother and his friends had things to finish off before dinner) - a delicious summer dish was served with a nice glass of chilled sauvignon blanc.  Perfect!

Desserts To Impress

Anyone who knows me, knows that if I had to choose, I would choose a starter and over a dessert in the 2-course set menus every time.  I like desserts, of course, but I have a greater fondness for savory than sweet.  The obvious exception to my starter/dessert maxim is the cheeseboard.  As the father of a french exchange student I stayed with rather crudely put it, "a dinner without cheese is like a woman without breasts."  Although, on these occasions, I would probably push the boat out and go with a 3-course set menu!

Last weekend, I was kindly invited to a BBQ being held by the Partner in the team within the law firm that I am working at.  Everyone who was going was allocated a task - some colleagues were to bring salads, others burger buns.  My task was to bring desserts.

Not being a strong pudding maker, and with all of my recipe books packed up in storage, I turned to my friend and the internet for inspiration.  Mary Berry provided a very good, relatively easy, recipe to impress with a lemon meringue roulade.  My success with this recipe was somewhat hindered by 1) not having an AGA (the recipe came from her AGA recipe book); and 2) not having a roulade tin - something which I feel I may now need to purchase.  As it happens, a similar recipe is available on the internet here.  My recipe did not call for raspberries, but I scattered them round the outside anyway.

Lemon Meringue Roulade

By using a roasting tin instead of the prescribed roulade tin, my meringue was slightly under-cooked I thought, a fact which became more apparent when the rolling process began.  Thus ensued the epic battle of wit and stamina against the once-used Christmas blow-torch.  Good triumphed, the blow-torch was duly subjugated, and the pudding was saved!

I also made little chocolate mousse pots with Grand Marnier twist.  Nigella Lawson's recipe can be found here.  I used Willie's Cacao chocolate (not cacao) for the pots and, while extremely tasty, perhaps this was a little too dark for the average taste.  I also made little chocolate leaves covered in edible gold luster.  For the leaves, you melt the chocolate (there is a more precise tempering method that you could use, but melting seemed to work fine for me!) and brush it onto the underside of a leaf with very visible veins.  Allow to harden.  Now, you're meant to give it a second coat, and I should learn to follow instructions, because I didn't and I think a second coat would have been good.

When the chocolate is hard, peel the leaf off the back and voila!  A pretty, easy decoration.  To top it all off, I brushed edible gold luster on the leaves.  I ordered mine on the internet, but I discovered that Waitrose also sells it - and very reasonable priced too.  I used very little of it, so it will do for many other days.

And there we have it, two desserts to impress that were embarrassingly simple to pull off!

A Quick Post About A Quick Dessert

What do you do about dessert when the main supermarkets are closed and the only option left is a corner shop with a dubious selection of Viennettas and assorted vegetables.  I grabbed a pot of double cream, a tub of normal and a tub of the new chocolate Philadelphia, and a packet of ginger nuts.

Once home, the gingernuts (about 200g) got boshed and then mixed with melted butter (50g), the cream cheese was beaten together with some caster sugar, and the cream was whipped soundly.

The gingernut mixture was squashed into the bottom of a springform cake tin, the cream was folded into the cream cheese, and then the whole lot was spooned on top of the biscuit base.  15 minutes later, the whole lot is in the fridge awaiting it's demise - after our roast beef dinner.

Chocolate ginger cheesecake.  Done.

Bringing Culture to the Countryside

As much as I would like to, I cannot take full credit for bringing culture to the countryside on Wednesday night. Instead, the initial responsibility for this feat lies with an enterprising fishmonger who has a stall at the weekly market in Wantage.

In a town that's centre is starting to look very bleak, with every other shop closing down (thanks primarily to some interesting local planning decisions), this fishmonger and his sign for 'sushi £4.50, 2 for £8' stood out like a beacon of decency. 4 trays promptly purchased, my mother and I took up the proverbial gauntlet and ran with it. Not literally, of course, or we might have dropped the sushi!

Showing Off Some Skills On My Birthday

Our family is one of confirmed Japanese food lovers. Our favourite restaurant in Edinburgh was Izzi (before it shut down), our first dinner out when we're in the states is sushi, my last birthday was at a tepenyaki restaurant in Lytham... Need I go on?

So, with our newly purchased sushi as a base, we set about preparing a Japanese feast for dinner.  We had some edamame (soya beans in their pods) in the freezer, which we usually have served with a good sprinkling of rock salt, so that as you suck the beans out of the pods you get a lovely salty, steamy taste.  When I was in Taiwan in 2010, though, I had tried edamame with raw garlic crushed through it.  Garlic being the one thing that is always on my shopping list, I was pleasantly surprised by this development and tried a variation out for our Japanese feast.  I warmed up a good amount of olive oil in a tiny pan and added finely chopped garlic, cooking it very gently, not allowing it to colour.  I poured the garlic and some of the olive oil over the cooked edamame and then tossed in a couple of pinches of rock salt.  First course done.

When you order set menus in restaurants, you tend to get a miso soup course accompanied with a sweetly dressed salad.  Using Clearspring Organic Miso paste, we made up the soup served sprinkled with finely sliced spring onions.  We made a quick salad of shredded lettuce, grated carrot and grated radish.  For the salad dressing we combined finely-grated ginger, a splash of soy sauce, a glug of sesame oil, a pinch of sugar, a slosh of white wine vinegar and a big tablespoon of mayonnaise.  I don't know whether this ingredient list is even close to that of the traditional dressing, but it certainly tasted like a good approximation.

The feast was completed by our market-bought sushi for third course and a small bottle of sake, poured into a jug and heated in the microwave.

We may not have slaved hours in the kitchen cooking sushi rice, we may not have trawled the south west sourcing ingredients, but we did have a very nice evening, with very tasty food courtesy of a fishmonger with a vision in the deepest, darkest countryside!

Either You Need To Change Or I Do

Ordinarily a meticulous planner of weekly meals, but recently frustrated by the demanding schedules of a harvesting farmer, I decided to ‘wing it’ in the supermarket yesterday.  Initially daunted by the thought of entering into a major shopping expedition unarmed and unprepared, I quickly embraced the new-found freedom of spontaneity.

Vegetables of all varieties found their way into my trolley, as yet unassigned to a particular dish or day.  Moving on to the meat and fish section, I picked up a few deals and made sure I had some fish for one dinner.  And so the shopping progressed.

It was only later, when I was in Wantage’s market square contemplating what to cook for dinner, that I realised that I had pretty much only bought pork.  I’d picked up some steaks, perhaps for a stir fry, some mince for some lean burgers or maybe to stuff a pepper, and some posh sausages – pork, leek & chive and pork with, wait for it, cherry wood smoked bacon.

I laughed inwardly at the irony – I had given myself a free rein in the supermarket and actually ended up limiting myself more so than if I'd had a shopping list.  I continued to muse this over as I entered the deli and absentmindedly selected three small cooking chorizo sausages for a lentil stew.

That evening I recounted the amusement of the day’s shopping to my beef-farming friend.  "I think I need to come up with a new way to shop," I said.  "Or I need to start farming pigs, Ellie," she countered.

With a freezer full of beef-farming perks in one of the farm sheds, I really have no excuse not to replicate this week’s ‘in praise of the pig’ with an ‘homage to the humble heifer’ next week.

Practice Makes Perfect (British) Paella

I wrote this for the Leith Open Space blog in October 2011, as part of our World Kitchen in Leith activities.  Thanks to Fay Young for her keen editorial eye!

I have always loved paella. How could anyone not love sitting in bright sun on aged wood decking, pale blue paint peeling off the beams, 10 feet from the sand and just 20 feet from the Mediterranean?  It really doesn’t matter what you’re eating, if you’re sitting at the back of Restaurante Kati on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by families enjoying the day, the view, the food and each other’s company.

Restaurante Kati is in a fishing village called Cabo de Palos in Murcia, where there is also a lovely Sunday market.  It is run by a family of fishermen.  The men bring back their catch after an early start, and their wives and sisters cook in the kitchen for locals returning from the market laden with bags of oranges and this week’s fashion must-have.

Shopping at the Edinburgh Farmers' Market for World Food Day

My father was the first brave soul in our family to attempt to replicate the paella that we know to be the best in Spain.  With a St Michael’s cookbook for guidance, the first product was delicious. But not quite a paella.

Dad persisted over a number of years, learning from Spanish friends the secrets to their paellas.  One would add ñoras, dried whole red peppers.  Another would prefer a fish-only paella.  All agreed that the golden yellow comes not from saffron, but colorante – the amount of real saffron you need would cost a small fortune and a herd of camels.

Unfortunately for Dad, he is British.  So even when he replicated the recipe of one Spanish friend to the letter, another would tut and say that it was a very good effort. But not a paella.


This is why I have always been anxious about making paella. However, for the World Food event on the 16th of October, I set self-doubt and fears aside.

I do not have the benefit of Dad’s Spanish master classes, but I have a good stock of cookbooks, the internet, and I know what the best paella in Spain tastes like.  Research done, I set about my trial run.

It seems the secret to a good paella is first the oil.  In 80ml of olive oil (from my friend’s very own trees) I separately cooked then removed a whole, unpeeled head of garlic, a ñora, a good bunch of thyme, chopped chorizo, chunks of pork belly, squid cut into rings, and chicken thighs.  Had I had the heads of some prawns I would have cooked these too.

The next important stage is a flavoursome sofrito. [see above].  I made mine with garlic, onions, and chopped chargrilled peppers.  Then I added 8 small, peeled tomatoes and cooked the whole mixture until almost all the moisture was gone.

Now the rice: Spanish Calasparran or bomba rice is added and cooked for a couple of minutes before half the stock is added, along with browned chicken, thyme, garlic bulb, ñora and, in this – but not future – cases, saffron.  A good amount of salt is added too.  Then the hard part.  Do not touch!  All I did was add more stock if it was looking a little dry.

15 minutes later, I added chunks of hake plus cooked chorizo, pork belly and squid.  Another 15 minutes later, with a touch more stock along the way, in went prawns [above] to simmer with the rest of the ingredients until just cooked.

Result? Almost spot on.  In future I shall use colorante and I will take a little more care about how much stock to add, but I think I am as close as I can get to the best (British) paella I will ever be able to make.  No sand, no Med but so far there is sun: Scotland’s October weather this year seems to be on my side to complete the experience!

Old Spice

Cumin can be the extra ingredient that is the making of a great dish, a fact that was highlighted during a palatable but decidedly uninspiring dinner last night.

I was making Valentine Warner’s Prawn Tangiers at my friend’s house, and was relying on her supply of spices for the aromatic kick that gives the recipe its exotic name.  Unfortunately, my friend had inherited her spice rack from a relative who had previously lived in the house.  Cumin seeds excavated at archaeological sites have been dated back to the second millennia BC, and I have suspicions that my friend’s stock may have been sourced directly from this find.

The first inkling I had that something was wrong was the absence of the warm, musty smell emanating from the pan usually associated with toasting cumin.  I tried adding more cumin to the pan, but to no avail.  At this point I noticed the conspicuous ‘RRP 59p’ on the side of the Schwartz jar.  Oh dear.  With similar jars now priced just under £2, this particular jar must have been purchased back when shoulder pads and neon was in fashion… the first time!

With a starving farmer desperate for dinner, and no available alternative, I had to press on with the recipe, complete with flavourless cumin.  I added extra garlic to make up for it, but the dish was just not the same.
I really enjoy this dish as a simple supper.  It’s clean and fresh but with the mysterious edge of an Arabian summer.  Take my advice, though, and do not underestimate how central the cumin is to the recipe.  And make sure your cumin is at least a decade younger than you!

This Prawn Tangiers was made on a previous occasion, but I thought you'd enjoy the illustration.