I spotted some osso bucco at Waitrose last time I went. Having never heard of it before I was keen to try it.
I cooked it roughly according to this recipe but I skipped the tomato, used proper beef stock and served it on a pile of mash with French beans.
It’s a beautiful silky, tender cut of meat and the marrow is the icing on the cake. I’ll definitely be buying more.
I adapted this from a recipe I came across about a year ago on a random blog found while Googling. This is the recipe I found. I do a similar thing with my sea bass but I make my sauce out of tiny spring onion circles fried lightly in a very small amount groundnut oil (too much oil and the sauce gets an unpleasant greasy top layer), then I add garlic and ginger paste and chilli and fry the mixture for a minute or so. Then I add fish sauce and lime juice and dissolve a little sugar into it. I don’t measure any of the quantities; the only guidance I follow is 1) make enough sauce to comfortably baste the fish and 2) the heat, sweet, salt and sour all need to be in balance. When you taste it you just know when you’ve got the balance right because no one flavour sticks out harshly.
When the sauce is done, I pour it over your whole (the bones make it taste better), gutted seabass. It’s best to use a container that fits the fish quite snugly so that the sauce doesn’t spread out around the fish too much. Then I put it in the oven at 200 degrees until the fish is cooked through, which takes about 20 mins. If I have some fresh coriander, I chop it up roughly and scatter over the fish before serving. A veg stir fry (again with very little oil) and unsalted rice are good accompaniments for the fish as the rice absolutely loves the sauce.
EDIT 1 Jul 2014: For one whole seabass start with 3 tbsp fish sauce, 2 tbsp lime juice. Add a little water to the sauce to stop it evaporating into nothing.
About a week ago I made carrot cakes from this cupcake book:
I was going to serve them with a pile of whipped double cream but it was suggested that I used a more tangy topping such as cream cheese frosting. These are the quantities I used, which I found to make enough for about 24 cupcakes:
100 g butter
200 g cream cheese
500 g icing sugar
Tonight I made baked lobster tails using this as guidance except that my marinade was simply butter and lemon juice. 12 minutes at 200 worked pretty well. Anyway, I served the tails with a salad and an approximation of ponzu dressing, which I first had at my in-laws’ who bought it from Waitrose:
I attempted to recreate the taste from memory. I knew there was an orange flavour, a fermented flavour and acid which is usual for a dressing. So I combined the juice of a tangerine, rice wine vinegar, dark soy sauce and light brown sugar. I wasn’t too far off if my memory serves me well but having checked the ingredients list on the Waitrose website it seems that I was quite far off the mark. Still, mine was a very tasty dressing. I don’t think Heston has anything to worry about just yet though.
I like watching Nigella on TV. I’m aware that she’s unbearably posh and her smiles are too forced and too many but there’s still something about the show that does make me more inclined to go and cook something. It could be the fantasy of having a kitchen like hers that keeps me tuning in. Last night’s episode contained some very odd recipe choices. Like Grasshopper Pie. Just looking at the recipe makes me feel a bit queasy. Then there was Spaghetti with Marmite, which as both a Marmite and pasta fan am sure is great but it’s not really what I want to my TV chefs to do. I want them to inspire me and teach me new things. I don’t want to hear about something that I’ve probably already seen in this:
Mr W is partial to dessert so tonight I indulged him. We had some sweet wine left which is horrible for drinking
so I used it to poach some peeled, quartered and cored pears, along with butter, sugar, ground cinnamon and a dash of lemon juice. The pear was then removed from the liquid which was left simmering to thicken.
The sweet pastry was taken from a chocolate tart recipe that I used in July. Back then I battled with rolling out the pastry for hours because it tore so easily. Tonight I cheated; I rolled out small pieces of pastry and simply patched them together in the orange silicon pie dish. It worked much better than I expected, though I did overcook the pastry slightly during blind baking. After the pastry case had cooled the poached pear segments were arranged in the case and the concentrated winey syrup poured over:
On cutting into slices the liquid escaped a little but no matter. I served each slice with a generous mound of whipped double cream:
22 Apr 2012
Poached some pears and found that 200g caster sugar for 4 pears is enough.
3 Mar 2013
I made the original recipe chocolate tart a few months ago and found that, when blind baking, some of the pastry came away on the naked baking parchment. This time I buttered the baking parchment but it still happened. I’ve just watched a Rick Stein programme where he says you should use a GREASEPROOF sheet after scrunching it up so it goes all the way to the edges.
I still can’t lift the pastry after rolling without breaking it. Mary Berry has a method that she uses when making tarte au citron but you need a loose-bottomed flan dish for that. Maybe I should roll the pastry out directly onto the scrunched up greaseproof paper?
Did a bit of cooking tonight. First I made a 400g bread blob using the split tin recipe in the Bread book:
I couldn’t be bothered to use a mould or tin. Sometimes it’s nice to let it all hang out.
Then, in accordance with Mr W’s request for curry, I made a lamb rogan josh:
Well, it was a ‘curry in a hurry’ version rather than the version I like to make from Veena Chopra’s book.
Tonight I used what is basically my mum’s all purpose meat curry recipe, except that I didn’t marinade the lamb overnight in the fridge but just for an hour at room temperature. I left out the aubergine and instead added ground almonds and (free range) chicken stock for consistency and flavour respectively. My mum’s recipe doesn’t contain sliced green peppers either but even a faux rogan josh must have them.
Started with
and ended with
I’d had this book for a while but hadn’t really used it. I tried making his haddock fish cakes with lime leaves and dipping sauce last night. They were pronounced to be good but as I used some lime juice as a substitute for lime leaves I felt that it dried the fish out somewhat. I’ll be making his French(ish) fish broth tomorrow. Went shopping for the ingredients last night. The book says ‘It is not cheap to make’…it certainly isn’t when you have to buy a bottle of Pernod (the recipe needs a tablespoon). Oh well, one must try new things.
In the book there are innuendos everywhere: ‘The aubergine is the sexiest of vegetables, just as a ripe fig is the sexiest of fruits. Both of them, coincidentally, purple’. He keeps going on about how much he loves goo. Sometimes he’s very Carry On; the Sausages section starts with ‘I love a banger’. It makes me smile.
Went to eat at The Vaults on Trinity Street last night. They make a real effort to use free range/organic ingredients so this place to going to be getting plenty of custom from me in future. There are places that boast of using free range eggs in a few dishes but they don’t often worry about chicken and pork. Here you could eat chicken, turkey, pork, ostrich and more without hurting your conscience. There were some decent wines on the wine list and we were happy with the service.
On Tuesday (28th July) Mark and I will have been married for two years. Yesterday we went for a meal at Cotto to celebrate. I had a wonderful night. The food was good, the service was excellent and there was a decent atmosphere. I’ll definitely go again but, for the same price, the standard at Restaurant 22 is higher. At Cotto the food was cooked very well but the menu isn’t as imaginative as at 22. It’s always good to try new places though.