Black and Blue

One of the great cooking opportunities that the last days of August and the change of the season in early September bring is picking Blackberries. This year the local Blackberries have been a little behind and it was the second Saturday in September that, in the company of my parents' Airedale Terrier, that there were enough berries which were ripe for the pickings for putting in a fruit pie.

We braved a rainstorm to acquire some on a local walk and I made sure to treat them on my return home by pouring boiling water over them to kill off any germs from birds or other creatures that had tried to get at that them. One tip for getting good quality Blackberries is to make sure that you don't pick ones too low to the ground in case animals have fouled on them and avoid picking them from places by the roadside where fumes from cars may have infected them or from places where you know weed killer or other pest control chemicals have been used.

As is seasonal tradition I decided to put them in a pie and I made eight ounces of Shortcrust Pastry using eight ounces of Plain Flour, four ounces of Margarine and about five tablespoons of Soya Milk. I did the usual trick of kneading the Flour and Margarine together until it resembled breadcrumbs before stirring in the Soya Milk gradually to create a flexible dough that I rolled out without it sticking to either the rolling pin or the work surface.

A recent enjoyable discovery in the shape of Blur's first album Leisure was playing in the background as the pastry was rolled. Apart from containing great singles such as "There's No Other Way" it is chock full of songs driven by churning guitars that find the band residing in the Alternative Rock Neighbourhood light years away from the dross of the album "13" and its sentimentally pants single "Tender" both of which would blight the public in 1999 eight years after the great start to their career that they enjoyed with this record.

I greased with margarine a pie dish about an inch and a half deep and half a foot wide and used half the pastry to line the bottom, sides and rim of the dish. I then poured in eight ounces of Blueberries and the Blackberries which probably amounted to twelve ounces' worth.

I spread the fruit throughout the pie dish and sprinkled two teaspoons of Brown Sugar atop the fruit. I then used the remainder of the pastry to make a lid for the pie and put it on top. I cut three narrow slits in the lid to let the heat out during cooking and then used the remaining pastry to make two leaves that I stuck to the pie to decorate it.

Prior to putting it in the oven I brushed the entirety of the top of the pie with milk. I then put it in the oven at 230 degrees (220 for a fan oven) and cooked it for ten minutes. After ten minutes I reduced the heat to 190 degrees (180 for a fan oven) and cooked the pie for a further twenty minutes. After this I took it out of the oven and left it to stand for half an hour to cool down.

The results were positive as the Blueberries and Blackberries worked together as well as Coffee and Cream and the Blackberries seemed to taste better for being picked from the wild rather than being bought at a supermarket, while the hint of sugar helped offset the slight stodge but delicious taste of the pastry. With its use of handpicked wild fruit, this dish is certainly one that marks the change in the seasons.

Step one- add the fruit and sugar to the pastry-lined dish.

Step two- freshly cooked with complimentary pastry leaves on top. Now leave it to cool.

Step three- enjoy!

Middle Class Mash

The recent week consisted of an early get up, working very hard, arriving home, having tea, bed and repeat the process throughout the week. However it was one of those weeks where I felt positive and like I was making good things happen.

I was shattered by the time I got home on Friday and the weather had changed after the surprise heatwave that squeezed into the listed building that is my workplace during the working week. It was a lot fresher and the high winds and heavy rain made me start to think of kicking the falling leaves around as Autumn approached.

As a result of this something fortifying and hot was needed that evening. I had a pack of sausages that had been defrosting during the day that were purchased for, but not used in the end, my birthday party that had happened the previous month.

I made Bangers and Mash but decided to put a sophisticated twist on it by making the mash with potatoes, parsnips, rocket and carrots. I also decided on a different flavouring for the gravy.

The evening's music for the cooking process was something new in the shape of Blur's third (and best) album 1994's Parklife. When I say new I mean new for me as I had bought it second hand the previous month, as most people of my generation either own a copy or have heard it a lot as it was a key record of our school years together with the two Stone Roses albums, Suede, early Radiohead and Oasis amongst others. Blur are a band that polarise people as you either love or hate singer Damon Albarn's nagging southern drawl and sardonic lyricism. Still there's no denying the quality on this record with the great singles like the title track sandwiched between the Kinks soundalike "Tracy Jacks" amongst others while "This is a Low" tries to turn the thorny subject of depression into something anthemic.

The first job was to peel three potatoes and top and tail three carrots and two parsnips. I then sliced all these fairly thinly and steamed them for around thirty minutes.

While the vegetables were steaming I put the sausages under the grill on a medium heat and turned them regularly during the twenty-five minutes I cooked them for. I found the best tactic was to first pierce a hole in each of them before the grilling commenced as that way the fat didn't spit out of them and turning them regularly ensure they cooked very evenly on each side.

While the sausages and vegetables were cooking I gently fried a sliced up white onion with ten leaves of purple sage from my garden in my Le Cresceut in sunflower oil with some black pepper and did so for 15 minutes with the lid on the Le Cresceut. I made sure to stir the onions regularly to stop them sticking to the bottom of the dish.

Next I took a quarter of a pint of Old Golden Hen real bitter, but any blonde or mild ale will do, and poured it into the Le Cresceut. I stirred the booze in until it thickened the mixture and then added a quarter of a pint of vegetable stock. I left this then to stew steadily while the sausages and the vegetables finished cooking.

When the vegetables were done I mashed them with some margarine and make the dish a bit more interesting I added ten ounces of washed rocket leaves and stirred them in as well with a hint of real bitter.

The taste of this one made it feel like a deserved reward after slugging it out successfully during the week. The sausages were crisp but not overdone while the gravy added a pleasant charcoal taste that was in keeping with the dish and the mash mixture tasted of fortifying winter meals while the fresh rocket reminded me that summer was not over just yet...

One for the album, the crisp sausages go well with the alcoholic gravy and unusual mash mixture.

Prawn Again

The weekend had arrived, I had worked hard and pushed through challenges during the week and even though it was a four day week it had been a very busy one but the weekend was here and with it plenty of downtime and a new cooking project or two to, literally, get my teeth into.

Having recently visited the excellent and local Kathmandu Gurkha Restaurant, a restaurant that has the happy ability to make excellent quality curry without it being too rich, I was inspired to make a curry with plenty of prawns. Seafood, with the exception of squid, octopus and other similar sushi type food, is one of my favourite types of food. I also like spicy food so this dish was the opportunity to cook something with the best of both these worlds.

The ingredients for this one so you can give it a go too are as follows:

2 Garlic Cloves.
1 Red Onion.
1 Pepper.
1 Medium-Sized Chilli Pepper.
2 Teaspoons of Turmeric.
2 Teaspoons of Garam Masala.
2 Teaspoons of Coriander.
1 tablespoon of Tomato Puree.
10 ounces of pre-cooked prawns.
A tin of Coconut Milk.
8 ounces of long grain rice, or a rice of your choice.

After slicing the Garlic, Red Onion and Pepper up very finely I added them to my Le Cresceut dish with plenty of sunflower oil so that when I cooked them on the hob they did not stick to the bottom of the dish. I then added the spices and the Tomato Puree. I'm a great believer with curries that to get the best taste you must add the spices to the dish early on.

I left the food to sweat on the hob on a medium heat with the Le Creseut lid on for about twenty-five minutes on a medium light while turning them periodically as they cooked.

Tonight, as the sun was shining and I could see the sunny fields and hills from my conservatory, it seemed only appropriate to stick some country music on the player. I went for Area Code 615's eponymous debut, which is an instrumental record mixing bluegrass, country and a hint of hard rock on original tracks like the peerless opener "Southern Comfort" and the epic closer, which is a cover of Bob Dylan's "Just like a Woman".

After twenty-five minutes in went the Prawns to the dish and after another ten minutes the coconut milk. I turned up the heat on the hob and stirred hard repeatedly to make the coconut milk mix in with the other ingredients and make sure that by the end of the cooking, which was after a further fifteen minutes of stirring, the curry was thick and not too runny.

While I had been stirring the curry together I had also boiled up some Long Grain Rice which I now served up with the curry. The taste of the curry was not dissimilar to that when I've had curries at restaurants and the plan to put the spices in from the get-go as well as boil some of the coconut milk away and stir the rest in towards the end of preparation was the secret to making this end-of-week dish a success.

Brightness of the day- the Turmeric made this dish shine almost as brightly as the late summer sun.

Harissa Happening

It was a Thursday night, a day of going at full pace at work to give me a sense of achievement and well-being. I was also a touch tired, to say it was only a four day week it had felt very busy; perhaps because I was trying to cram five days' work into four days.

I wanted something quick for tea so I could get an early night and be up at the crack of dawn to push on with my work at the office prior to the phones starting to ring at 9am. I have recently become a fan of Turkish and Moroccan Cooking and it was a Morccan Dish laced with Harissa Powder that I decided to make. The ingredients were as follows:

10 ounces of Quorn Meat Strips.
2 Garlic Cloves.
1 Red Onion.
1 Red Pepper.
2 Teaspoons of Harissa Powder.
1 Tablespoon of Tomato Puree.
8 Baby Tomatoes.
1 Can of Chick Peas.

The artist and the album I was listening to were such a guilty pleasure that when I purchased the album for a pound earlier in the week, the shop assistant at the counter had to try and hide his laughter considerably as he sold me the record. Mind you, as a piece of undemanding but fun listening it did the job after a tiring day.

The first task was to slice very finely the garlic, red pepper and red onion. I then poured some sunflower oil into the bottom of my Le Cresceut dish and added these ingredients to the dish with the Harissa Powder and the Tomato Puree. I stirred in thoroughly the powder and put the lid on the dish. I left the vegetables and the Harissa Powder to sweat on a medium heat for twenty minutes, while stirring them occasionally to stop them sticking to the bottom of the Le Cresceut.

After twenty minutes I added the Quorn Meat Strips and repeated the above cooking process for another fifteen minutes. We were now thirty-five minutes into the cooking process and I added the Baby Tomatoes and the Chick Peas. At this time I removed the lid of the Le Cresceut stirred the food in the Le Cresceut for a further ten minutes as it cooked and allowed the water from the can of Chick Peas to evaporate a little. This meant that the mixture wasn't too watery when it had finished cooking.

I then served it and found that the Harissa gave the onions, garlic and pepper a stronger and more smoked flavour than they would otherwise have had. I'm a real fan of smoked food and this is the reason why I'm drawn to Moroccan Dishes as many of them include Harissa in their recipes. The Tomatoes and Tomato Puree also gave the dish a sweetness to stop the smokiness being too overpowering and the Chickpeas and Quorn Meat Strips gave plenty of protein to this dish.

If you want an alternative version of this recipe then instead of the Quorn Strips try using strips of beef and trying them separately before cooking them in the Le Cresceut with the vegetables.

A quick to make mid-week meal with plenty of protein.

Mediterranean Sea with added Bass

I went flat out at work on Friday having woken extra early to cadge the bus and train in which gave me the opportunity to make some early headway at the office, as well as allowing me to have a tasty beer or two after working hours had finished. The reason for the post-work beer was it was an old school friend's birthday. He is currently a student at one of the universities in the city where I work and he had decided on a night out on the Friday.

We went in one pub called the University Arms, which I had last drunk in as a student when I studied at the university myself nearly a decade earlier. I'm not a great one for looking back these days, however the walk up to the University Arms was an exception to this rule, as heading towards the pub I felt a little like the ghost of a student from semesters that had long since vanished into history. However when we entered the pub through the double doors I felt the intervening decade slip away and the memories of afternoons in there drinking after lectures and seminars came stampeding back to the front of my mind. The other punters in the pub were an eclectic bunch from fresh-faced youngsters who had not even finished school when I was last a student, a mature student with a laptop and a pint of something hoppy and a bloke in a tweed jacket and fedora combo who looked stoned.

Beer, whisky and chilli flowed through the late afternoon and early evening and during the celebrations individuals from key stages of my friend's life were present at different times; his parents and gran who were all there at the beginning and have always been there, two people from his original university days in the noughties, someone from his current degree and me from his schooldays. We spent plenty of time reflecting on nearly twenty-two years of drink, decadence, walking encyclopaedias and comedy before I barrelled off into the night suitably stuffed with alcohol as I zig-zagged home to my bed via the train and the bus.

Yesterday morning I woke with a slightly thick head that was cured by high-fibre cereal, boiled eggs and paracetamol. After a day of pottering and avoiding the heavy rain showers when walking the dog I settled on a suitable evening meal and the recent hot weather made me think of a Mediterranean recipe, which was roasted Sea Bass with vegetables. 

The album of choice was a throwback to the 1980s in the shape of Tears for Fears' excellent Songs from the Big Chair, containing the brilliant singles "Shout" and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" amongst others plus the expressive and powerful "Head Over Heels" and "Listen" not to mention a photo of the duo sporting fashionable (for the time) mullets. With all these obvious plusses what's not to like about the record?

The first job in preparation of the meal was to take a red onion, peel it and then slice it widthways. Next I diced an orange pepper and five cloves of garlic. I added them all to my Le Cresceut dish and fried them lightly in sunflower oil and black pepper with the lid on the Le Cresceut for about half an hour. The reason I did this was because although I was going to subsequently roast them with the Sea Bass there was a risk, if I did not pre cook them, of the vegetables being too crunchy and getting burnt in the oven.

In the meantime I sliced a whole lemon widthways into six or so slices and cut eight cherry tomatoes in half. Once the vegetables in the Le Cresceut were cooked I used them plus the lemon and tomato as the bed on which the Sea Bass was to lie. I was able to make this happen by taking an ovenproof dish and lining the bottom with foil onto which I poured sunflower oil and then spread the lemons, tomatoes and the vegetables from the Le Cresceut on the dish evenly together with a sliced up chilli I had grown previously.

Next I put two Sea Bass fillets on top of the dish and garnished the fillets with sliced green olives and sprigs of Rosemary and Thyme from my garden. I cooked it all on Gas Mark 6 ( or 200 degrees for electric ovens and 180 degrees for electric fan ovens) for half an hour. When I removed it from the oven I was greeted with the flavoursome smells of Thyme, Rosemary and Lemon. The pre-cooking of the vegetables was a sensible move as they were soft because the sunflower oil had kept them from burning and becoming crunchy. The Sea Bass flesh was tender and full of protein, a perfect meal to revitalise me after Friday's excitement and the meal was rounded off by a side of steamed new potatoes.

Finished off with the new potatoes.

The bed that they lie on- the fillets on top of the lemons, tomatoes and the vegetables.

Soup for the Weather

Yesterday was a good day. It had been one that began with a quiet walk early on with the dog in the nearby woods and then a great carvery at a well-known local pub which was followed by another walk that, although it took place in a familiar part of the world, contained much that was exciting and new.

Although the sun had shone a lot during the walk, the rain had arrived in miniature monsoons that bathed the leaves on the trees bordering the old railway tracks and parkland that the walk took in. This meant despite the time of year I knew that a good quality soup with plenty of body was in order.

Having already had some Game Soup as a starter prior to my carvery I concluded that a similarly substantial soup was needed for tea. I decided the make a sausage soup using a batch left over from a recent indoor barbeque.

The playlist for this weekend was an eclectic mix of mainly and/or introspective music and included Scott Walker (both the avant garde version and the easy listening version), ...and you will know us by the trail of the dead, Suede, R.E.M and at the time I was preparing the soup, Roy Harper. Harper is man who is his own genre as nobody has quite combined the worlds of progressive and folk music in the way he can. The two albums of his that followed each other on the playlist at this time were 1992's Death or Glory and 1988's Garden of Uranium. The former was a fighting response to his partner of some years running off with someone else and includes the track "Miles Remains" a reflective acoustic piece with a soaring quality that is one of the best tributes out there to late Jazz Giant Miles Davis. Garden of Uranium meanwhile is a worthy effort too despite having some songs undercut by synths that although appealing for nostalgic value to a child of the 80's like me, were probably a touch disconcerting for the fans who had been following the great man since he started out in the 1960s.

The Le Cresceut was back in action for today's dish and I started by slicing up finely four carrots, a white onion, two sticks of celery and two cloves of garlic. I added these to the Le Cresceut with some sunflower oil and three ounces of dried parsley. I stirred the ingredients well and put the lid on the Le Cresceut before cooking the contents of it on the hob on a medium heat for around twenty minutes while stirring the food occasionally to stop it from sticking to the bottom of the dish.

While the vegetables were cooking I prepared the sausages. They had been on ice in the freezer since the indoor Barbeque and had been defrosting on my worktop for the last twelve hours. I used a separate knife from the one I used to prepare the vegetables and cut the sausages into narrow slices. I then fried them in a frying pan for fifteen minutes on a medium heat while turning them regularly.

I have a bit of a phobia about undercooked meat; it stems from a time when I accidentally consumed on a night out some raw chicken, which on the face of it looked cooked, and got food poisoning that de-railed me for a good week. This was the reason I pre-cooked the sausages prior to throwing them into the Le Crescent as I wanted to be sure they were cooked properly first before adding them to the vegetables. After fifteen minutes the sausages were ready and I dunked them in with the vegetables in the Le Cresceut. Once the vegetables had cooked for the twenty minutes they needed I added half a pint of vegetable stock and simmered the food for another ten minutes to ensure the carrots were softened as I did not want them al-dente.

After this I added a tin of Canelli Beans to the food and after warming it through for five minutes the soup was ready to eat.

This is one of those soups that is more like a casserole or a stew than a soup, which after a nine and a bit mile walk that featured almost every type of weather known to British meteorology bar snow, was a perfect dish to have as the last meal of the day. The Cannelli Beans and the sausages gave it a rich edge while the parsley, onions and the celery gave a flavour to it that was powerful in the best possible way.

Freshly cooked, crisp sausages simmered in parsley with vegetables and beans- the perfect match for the unpredictable British Weather

Beef, beer, herbs and a school reunion

Last Saturday was already a positive day by the time I'd had a lie in and been to have my swede cut at the local barbers. The reason was that my dog and I had spent Friday night with great company who had made my weekend start in the best way possible.

After walking the dog in muggy heat it was time to prepare a fortifying tea. It needed to be fortifying because I was heading out that evening to a school reunion at my local where plenty of beer was going to flow freely.

I don't eat a lot of meat partly because when I still lived at home my parents were largely vegetarian and as a result I've discovered a wide range of vegetarian recipes that mean I don't need to eat a lot of meat. However once in a while I find the need to cook a meat dish as I think meat gives you much-needed protein that is not always available in vegetarian dishes.

I therefore decided to stew some beef chunks in herbs with ale. As the re-union I was going to was, without giving my age away too much, the class of 1999 some suitable nineties music was in order while I prepared my meal. I put Suede's 1997 effort Coming Up on the player, although not quite as good as their first two albums it does have some excellent melodic moments like "Trash" "Filmstar" and the "The Beautiful Ones" to name but three.

I took a box of beef chunks and fried them for five minutes turning them regularly until they were brown on each side. I also prepared a herb dressing comprised of diced Thyme, Purple Sage, Parsley and Black Pepper that I mixed in a measuring jug with some sunflower oil and half a pint of Tetley Bitter. All the herbs were plucked straight from my back garden.

I put the beef into a glass ovenproof dish with olive oil covering the bottom and then spread evenly over the beef the herb and ale mixture. I then cooked the beef in the oven at Gas Mark 4 for two hours. After two hours I took it out of the oven and turned each of the beef chunks. I then added another half pint of bitter to stop the beef getting too try and then cooked it in the oven for another hour on Gas Mark 3.

After an hour I served it with some steamed green beans, asparagus and butternut squash chunks. A good friend of mine, who was jetting to Vienna the following day, shared the dish with me and as with me it fortified him for an excellent night catching up with him and another close friend as well as meeting some wonderful people who it was great to see back in my life.

Well done, but still tender enough with plenty of herbs and bitter to make this beef come high up in the flavoursome charts