I roasted some slices of pumpkin (or technically some kind of green pumpkin shaped squash) as a vegetable, and there was some left over. So I invented pumpkin and chocolate chip cookies:
It’s a fairly basic cookie recipe with oats, chopped roasted pumpkin and chopped dark chocolate. They’re not the most amazing thing I’ve ever cooked, but they’re OK. Might have been better with a slightly sweeter chocolate, but I just used what was in the fridge, which was very dark.
I did some baking yesterday.
There’s nothing especially Christmassy about the recipes themselves — ginger biscuits with candied peel and chocolate chip oat cookies — but I did make them sparkly.
It’s quite hard to photograph the glitter. It’s actually holographic rainbow sparkles, but in photographs it just looks silver.
* Note for Americans: not those kind of biscuits, obvs.
I wasn’t going to do World Cup food blogging for the Algeria gam, because I was out that night at a friend’s house, but as it happens I did a somewhat appropriate dish yesterday because I happened to have the right ingredients. It’s lamb meatballs in an aubergine sauce, and it’s based on a couple of dishes from Claudia Roden’s Tamarind and Saffron. I don’t actually know which part of North Africa or the Middle East they were from, but it’s close enough.
I know it looks a bit underwhelming in that snap from my phone, but actually it was nice; the aubergine made a sort of creamy sauce and it was quite a delicate sort of dish.
The meatballs are just lamb mince with egg and a bit of cumin and allspice; the sauce is roasted, mashed aubergine with a bit of yoghurt. And, you know, some of the brown lamby bits deglazed from the pan and some salt and pepper.
Well, that was a bit depressing: not so much because of the result, but the tendency to revert to long balls hoofed up the front, the lack of involvement of England’s wingers, the lack of controlled possession in midfield… all the usual England failings, in fact. Not to mention the further undermining of confidence in England’s goalkeepers. Ho hum.
However, World Cup food blogging must carry on. And so, my USA-themed food: cornbread and creole fried shrimp. The cornbread recipe I used was this one. Partially because it’s a British recipe, so I can weigh my ingredients rather than all that measuring quantities by the cup that American recipes do. And partially because it suggests substituting yoghurt for buttermilk, which is what I was planning to do anyway. I cut down the quantity of chillies slightly and cooked it in a pre-heated cast iron frying pan, though. It turned out rather nice, I must say:
The shrimp was a bit of an improvised recipe; I covered the prawns in a homemade creole-type seasoning mix — chopped thyme, dried oregano, paprika, crushed garlic, a dribble of pepper sauce, black pepper — and left for a couple of hours (the duration of the Nigeria-Argentina game, in fact).
Then I basically did the standard flour-egg-breadcrumb thing except with a mixture of cornmeal and cornstarch instead of breadcrumbs, and deep-fried them. Came out looking quite impressive:
But actually, although it tasted OK, the coating was a bit coarse and not very crispy. I don’t do a lot of deep-frying, so I don’t really know why… oil not hot enough? I think if I tried to do a cornmeal based coating again, I would use a wet batter rather than dry cornmeal coating. You live and learn.
I’d definitely do the cornbread again, though. Yummy.
So, roll on Algeria!
The filling is basically Raymond Blanc’s lemon tart recipe with passionfruit instead of lemon.
I put the passionfruit through a sieve to get the juice and then put a couple of teaspoons of the seeds back in for decorative effect and a bit of crunch.
Another thing I wish someone had told me when I first started cooking: you should cook potatoes in cold water. Obviously you do need to apply heat, otherwise you just get wet potatoes. The idea is to put them in a pan of cold water and then bring it up to the boil.
I think I learned this from a TV show where it was simply stated as Truth without explanation, but you can see why it makes sense: you don’t want the outside of the potato to be cooked while the middle is still raw. That’s not a problem with something like green beans, so those can be put straight into a pan of boiling water.
So for example, to make delicious boiled new potatoes: put the potatoes into a pan, add enough cold water to just cover them, and heat it until the water starts to boil. Add some salt, put a lid on the pan, and leave it on a low heat until the potatoes are cooked (test by sticking a knife into them). Drain the water off, chuck a bit of butter and some salt and pepper into the pan. Add some chopped chives or something, if you like. Swirl the potatoes around a bit to coat them with butter, take them off the heat and leave with the lid on for a few minutes so they absorb some of the butter and seasoning.
The potatoes will retain their heat for a surprisingly long time in a covered pan, so I often put the potatoes on the heat even before I’ve decided what else I’m cooking. They’ll still be fine after sitting around for twenty minutes or so.
The other cunning tip about boiling potatoes is: don’t just throw away the water you cooked them in. It serves as a sort of basic stock, just a bit more savoury than plain water. I always use it in the gravy when I’m cooking a roast, for example. I’m not suggesting you keep little tubs of it in the freezer; just don’t tip it straight down the sink, in case it comes in handy.
» New potatoes is © Jack Hynes and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.