Tag: gluten-free

Pot-roasted wild boar

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Boar with vegetables

A neighbour kindly gave me a leg of young wild boar recently. I find the traditional method of cooking boar here (marinating for 2-3 days in robust red wine and herbs, then braising) nauseating and indigestible. But this tender joint responded well to my adaptation of a Delia recipe for braised leg of lamb. In fact if you can’t get boar, you could substitute lamb (leg or shoulder) here. Serves 4-6 — this is almost a one-pot meal, although I served it with a little pasta to soak up the sauce.
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Lemon posset

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Lemon posset with cherry compote

I’m a sucker for anything with lemon in it — it’s my favourite flavour. Lemon posset is utterly simple: just lemon, sugar, cream. It’s rather indulgent, so make small quantities and pair it with something more virtuous; I added hot cherry compote to the chilled possets, so that made them part of our five a day. Choose plain glasses to show off the pale, creamy possets, and serve with crisp biscuits, such as tuiles, langues de chat, or Maggie’s shortbread thins.

Ideally, make it 24 hours ahead, but I’ve chilled it for only four hours, and it’s still set, if less firmly.
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Broad bean and bacon risotto

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Broad bean and bacon risotto

Our broad bean crop was decimated by frost, but I bought some lovely small, fresh broad beans from the market. To me, broad beans and bacon or ham are one of those marriages made in heaven. I had some stock from a roast chicken so risotto seemed an obvious choice to make the most of them.

The basic method of making risotto is a doddle; I don’t know why people make so much fuss about it. The hardest work in this recipe is preparing the beans, but it’s one of the few recipes where it really is worth blanching and peeling them; pilaff with broad beans and serrano ham is another.

Rice is one of the few things I always measure by volume. An ordinary mustard glass holds just the right amount for two people, and for risotto you can count on roughly three times the volume of stock to rice. Don’t bother making risotto with any rice other than Italian; the result won’t be worth the effort. Make pilaff instead. If you like stringy cheese in your risotto, use Gruyère or Comté; otherwise Parmesan, or even aged cheddar.
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French Country Kitchen, by Geraldene Holt: braised chicory with mushrooms

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French Country Kitchen is very similar in approach to Jenny Baker’s Simple French Cuisine. I was given Jenny Baker’s book around the time we bought our holiday house in the Languedoc, so I kept it here to provide inspiration. We had a very rudimentary kitchen then, so it was useful having a book of delicious recipes using local ingredients and requiring no fancy equipment. I tend not to pick it up much now; it may soon make an appearance in this neglected cookbook series!

Like Jenny Baker, Geraldene Holt is a British woman who came to southern France, fell in love with it, and being a keen cook, collected traditional recipes from friends and neighbours. I picked up a second-hand copy of French Country Kitchen recently; it’s out of print, so it can be bought for pennies on Amazon. I love the fact that the Internet has made it so easy to find out-of-print books.

This book is organised by ingredients — there’s a chapter on mushrooms for example, one on olives, one on chestnuts, almonds, and walnuts, more conventional ones on poultry and beef, and a whole chapter on the pig, covering every part of it of course., including making brawn and your own sausages.

I’m not a great meat-eater, so I decided to try the recipe for endive belge étuvée aux champignons, or braised chicory with mushrooms. Chicory is something I only discovered when I came to France, and I love its bitter flavour. The result was delicious and makes a change from our usual ways of cooking chicory (wrapped in ham and covered in cheese sauce, or braised with chicken). If you’re vegetarian you could leave the bacon out, although it does add an essential saltiness and a touch of fat to cut the bitterness of the chicory. I might add a splash of soy sauce if I left out the bacon.

The recipe specifies cultivated mushrooms, and that’s what I used. But I reckon it would be even better with wild ones — cèpes or chanterelles. If you’re making a vegetarian version I would recommend the tastiest mushrooms you can find. As fresh tomatoes are banned in our house from October to May, I used a spoonful of sun-dried tomato paste instead of the tomato, which turned out to be an excellent idea.

I like the homely approach of this book, and like the Jenny Baker book it is an excellent choice to take on holiday to France with you, if you like cooking and buying produce at French markets.
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Oven-baked frittata

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I first discovered frittata via the Cottage Smallholder site. I often cook one from scratch for a quick supper or picnic lunch, but it is a wonderful vehicle for turning leftovers into something delicious in their own right — providing of course that you are selective about what you put in it. Just throwing in the contents of the fridge without regard to whether the flavours and textures are complementary is not going to give you a good result.

Normally, I cook frittata slowly in a frying pan and finish it off with a couple of minutes under the grill to set the top. This time, I had some left-over roasted vegetables to use up, and was inspired to do it differently. It’s a very quick and easy dish if you have left-over roasted veg, but of course you can cook them from scratch. I always do plenty when I roast vegetables, because they are one of the best kinds of left-overs you can have. Toss them into a salad with rice, pasta, or Ebly and some toasted nuts, blend with some home-made stock and spices and make a delicious soup, use them to fill quiches or omelettes …
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Elizabeth David’s Christmas: potato, tomato and celery soup

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An Elizabeth David book in the reserve collection? Yes, really! This was a Christmas present a few years ago, and I confess I’d forgotten I had it, so I pounced on it with a cry of delight. It was actually published posthumously; in her preface her editor Jill Norman says they’d discussed the concept off and on for years, but it never came to anything, so after Elizabeth’s death she was surprised to find a box with a pile of notes and clippings for the book, and even an introduction. So she pulled the material together and published it.

Many of the recipes are from ED’s other books, but it’s nice to have all these seasonal recipes in one place. Not that ED was much of a fan of the traditional British Christmas. She got bombarded with calls from friends and family asking how long to to cook the turkey or the pudding, or saying they’d lost the recipe for Cumberland sauce so could she give it them again — to the point where she printed a pamphlet of the most popular recipes and handed it out to them. Classic ED:

If I had my way — and I shan’t — my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening.

What frenetic cook preparing for a family Christmas can’t empathise with that in the days leading up to “the Great Too Long”? It certainly makes a refreshing change from other Christmas cookbooks.

That being said, although there are token recipes for traditional Christmas food like mincemeat and Christmas pudding, much of the focus of this book is on simple but impressive small dishes that can be prepared ahead, pâtés and terrines that can be kept in the fridge for nibbling, and better-than-average ways of using leftovers (including one of my all-time favourite leftover dishes, émincé de volaille au fromage). And like all of ED’s books it is designed to be read for pleasure, not just to cook from. I happily spent an afternoon lounging on the sofa by the fire reading it while my untended bread dough bubbled over the edge of the pan.

Happily, the organic veg box provided all I needed for a simple soup of tomato, leek and celery. She writes “This is one of the most subtly flavoured of all these vegetable soups … a good soup with which to start the Christmas dinner.” It was indeed. Celery is something I don’t like as a vegetable, but as a herb it adds a nice peppery edge to soups and stews. My tail-end-of-season tomatoes weren’t the best, but they did the job — if I make it again at Christmas I’ll use tinned ones in preference to tasteless fresh ones (one day I’m going to start a campaign to ban the sale of fresh tomatoes between October and May).

Unfortunately, the box also contained parsnips, for the third week in a row. So I decided to give her cream of parsnips and ginger with eggs a go. I got as far as cooking and mouli-ing the parsnips and adding the ginger, and the result tasted so unutterably foul that I almost threw it straight in the bin. We just had soup and cheese and biscuits that evening. I don’t think I can blame Elizabeth David for this though — I just don’t like parsnips, and somehow mashing them makes them taste more parsnippy than just roasting would.

This book will definitely stay in my collection. And it’s a good Christmas gift for foodies as well, a reminder of how truly good food writing is impervious to fashion. So much so that the modish soft-focus photos that the publishers obviously felt had to be in any modern cookbook are entirely superfluous. Elizabeth David’s words are enough
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Bookmarked recipes: Chilli jam

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Spicy preserves 2

I bookmarked Jacqueline’s bookmarked recipe challenge, originally started by Ruth, a couple of weeks ago. I have tons of bookmarked recipes: a long list in my browser bookmarks, a few more stashed in Evernote, a box full of magazine and newspaper clippings, cookbooks bristling with Post-Its and bookdarts. Where to start?

Well, my recent browse through Margaret Costa’s Four Seasons Cookbook provided inspiration in the form of tomato and pepper chutney, now maturing nicely in the larder. There’s something very satisfying about starting out with a pan full of chopped vegetables, reeking of vinegar, and finishing with these glowing jars of glossy red chutney, and it kickstarted me into more preserving. After a quick detour into Delia’s famous mincemeat, which I’ve had a printout of for ages and never made, I was prompted by the Cottage Smallholder site, fount of all knowledge about preserving, to make some sweet chilli jam using a recipe from the BBC Good Food site, a frequent source of bookmarked recipes. I love chilli jam and jelly — they make a lovely relish for cheesy and eggy things, and I’m also partial to them with scallops. I bet both jam and chutney will go very nicely with turkey too.

This is my version of the chilli jam recipe. I found the original rather imprecise in some ways. For example, it gives weights for some ingredients but then just specifies “8 red peppers”. Mine were huge, at least double the normal size, so I used four. Then it says “10 red chillies”, without any qualification — a little dangerous in my view. Throw in 10 Scotch Bonnet chillies with their seeds and the jam will blow your head off. I did like one comment on the BBC site which queried the “finger-sized piece of ginger” because “I have big hands”! As always, nothing beats tasting and adjusting as you go.
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Avocado, orange, and roasted pepper salad

Veronica 2 Comments

orange, avocado, and roasted pepper salad

This recipe was inspired by a tapa in an Andalusian bar, in a village surrounded by thousands of avocado trees. The dressing is a version of a recipe I learned from Jim Fisher at Cook in France. There, we used grain mustard and served it on a salad of blanched spring vegetables and poached eggs. I toned it down a little here so as not to overwhelm the avocados. I like this colourful salad so much I’m already imagining variations: crumbled feta cheese on top, for example.
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Tortilla de patatas

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Tortilla de patatas

There’s an art to making a good tortilla, and I’m not sure I’ve cracked it yet (although I’ve cracked plenty of eggs trying). It’s the sort of thing where even the most detailed recipe is no substitute for being able to sense when you’ve got it right. Even if they aren’t up to the standards of the average Spanish tapas bar (can I do those rounded edges? Can I hell!), I have been pretty satisfied with my last couple of attempts.

The key points are a) the correct ratio of eggs to potatoes, and b) the right sized, heavy frying pan. I reckon you need about one medium potato per egg, but really you need to look at the mixture and know whether to add another egg. It should be neither too eggy (it won’t hold together) nor too packed with potato (too stodgy). The mixture should fill the pan to a depth of between 1 and 1 1/2 inches — thin tortillas are hopeless, and if it’s too thick it will scorch before it’s set in the middle.

Some people slice the potatoes, others cube them. I’m in the “slice them” camp at the moment, but I may change my mind. The onion is essential — it will be too bland without. The end result should be firm enough when cold to cut into wedges or squares and eat with your hands. At the same time it’s not nice if it’s so overcooked it’s gone leathery (another reason not to do a thin tortilla).
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30-minute roast lamb (sort of)

Veronica 6 Comments

gigot before cooking

This is a recipe I received from Jim Fisher of Cook in France. We didn’t actually make it when I was there, but he mentioned it and I was intrigued, as I knew that by the time I got home our friend Magali would have delivered half of one of her lambs, raised on the mountainside only a few hundred metres away from where we live.

Normally, we’d have gone out for a wild asparagus omelette on Easter Monday, to which all the village is invited, but due to circumstances beyond our control, it had to be cancelled. So it seemed like a good opportunity: we invited eight friends and got cooking.

The reason I say it’s “sort of” 30 minutes is because it only spends half an hour in the oven, but you need to put it in 2 hours before the meal. Our guests ended up being late and then we spent a long time drinking aperos, as you do in the Midi, so it ended up getting to the table about an hour later than our calculations had allowed for. Not a problem — it was delicious! This is an excellent way of roasting a leg of lamb, and I think I’ll always do it this way from now on. Apart from the flavour and the energy savings, the other big advantage of this method is that the lamb comes out of the oven very early, liberating it for other things (a gratin dauphinois and some roasted vegetables in our case). And as our experience demonstrated, it is very tolerant about timing.
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