Tag: food and drink

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Chicken a l’estragon

I don’t normally give French names to dishes I chuck together, but apart from the fact that this is very French-inspired, ‘estragon’ is such a good word. And it always makes me think of Waiting for Godot, a play I’ve never seen but which is quite famous.

Of course ‘tarragon’ is also a lovely word. Quite apart from the sound of it, it lends itself to the pun ‘Catherine of Tarragon’ (try and work that into a conversation). And is very nearly arrogant.

Cut chicken breasts into chunks. Oil and season them, then brown them in a hot pan (make sure they’re just about cooked through). Set the chicken aside and soften some shallots with butter in the same pan. Take most of the shallots out and put them with the chicken. Pour some Noilly Prat and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc into the pan and reduce down, scraping up the nice brown bits off the bottom. When there’s not much wine left, put in a little chopped tarragon (not too much, it’s quite a strong flavour) and double cream. Bring to the boil. Put the chicken back in the pan and warm through.

Obviously any old white wine would be fine, and you could either use all wine or all vermouth and that would probably work too, but this is what I did.

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simple pleasures

A good-quality chicken breast, sliced nearly through and opened out like a book. Oil it and place it between two sheets of clingfilm, then beat it flat with a rolling pin. It doesn’t have to be carpaccio thin, just flat enough to cook through quickly.

Season with plenty of freshly ground black pepper and salt and cook on a hot ridged frying pan. Just wait until the thin parts of the meat turn opaque before turning over and leaving for about a minute. Sprinkle the chicken with a little lemon juice and put on a plate to rest for two or three minutes.

Eat it, including the juices that have collected on the plate, with a few green leaves topped with olive oil and freshly grated parmesan. And a glass of nice white wine.

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Scallops with serrano ham and sherry

Based loosely on ‘angels on horseback’ and a Spanish dish. No pictures, I’m afraid.

Mix up a little olive oil, lemon juice and pepper. Dip each scallop in the mix and wrap it in a narrow strip of ham. Fry the hammy scallops until just done. Deglaze the pan with dry sherry and pour over the scallops.

I actually cooked it in a frying pan on the barbecue, but only because the kitchen is so hot at the moment.

It was a tad too salty but delicious. A thinner-cut, less salty ham (prosciutto, if you don’t mind dropping the Spanish theme) would probably sort that out.

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World Cup food blogging – Sweden

I’ve been trying to keep optimistic about England’s chances in the World Cup, but it’s not easy. Michael Owen was the only forward in the squad with a history of scoring lots of goals, so that injury is a real blow. Crouch actually did OK today in midfield areas, but I just don’t think he’s a real goalscorer. At least Rooney gave a couple of reminders of just how good he is. But mainly: we still haven’t seen a performance of conviction or cohesion from the team as a whole. As long as they’re still in the competition, there’s a chance that they’ll suddenly get their act together, but at the moment it feels like they’re just limping from one crisis to the next.

Anyway. The food blogging. I didn’t fancy herring or akvavit, so I poked around on the web and found a recipe for pepparkakor (ginger biscuits). I just don’t get why Americans insist on measuring everything in cups. I mean, flour – OK, although I’d still personally prefer to measure it by weight. But butter? Why would you measure butter by volume? They turned out quite nice, a bit like gingernuts. Apparently they improve if you leave them for a bit, as well. I doubled the quantity of spices, because it just didn’t seem very much, and they certainly aren’t overpoweringly gingery.

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World Cup food blogging – Trinidad and Tobago

Thankfully, we did manage to beat T&T, despite the fact that Peter Crouch just isn’t good enough to play for England and Sven seems to have sucked all the creativity out of the players like some Swedish football-vampyr.

Anyway, I cooked some Trini food today to mark the occasion. The recipe was from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian Cookbook which I think is excellent despite being non-veggy myself. The idea was something caled ‘doubles’, which is a Trinidadian fast food consisting of chickpeas in a sandwich between two deep-fried flatbreads (like puri). The breads are called ‘fry bakes’ in Trinidad, apparently, because they’re fried instead of baked. I didn’t feel like deep-frying bread today, so I made some T&T-style roti instead.

There were actually two Trinidadian chickpea recipes in the book; both are obviously based on Indian food, but the one I did was probably the less distinctively T&T of the two. The other one used rather un-Indian ingredients like thyme and chives; this one was made with chickpeas, onion, garlic, green chillies, tinned tomato, cumin, coriander, ground ginger, curry powder and turmeric.

The roti were made from half-and-half plain flour and bread flour, some baking powder, water, and a smidge of turmeric for colour.

So, roti and chickpeas. Have ’em with some mango chutney and pepper sauce. I rolled my roti into a burrito-y thing, which was messy (though delicious), but I didn’t get a picture of the rolled version.

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it feels like years since it’s been here

What could be better than a sunny day and ice cream in a cone?