Savoury Paris-Brest

Small amount of choux:
100g flour, 80g butter, 160ml water, 2 eggs 200c.

This is a marvellous discovery. It’s so unusual and tasty I’d definitely recommend it as a vegetarian dish that confirmed carnivores will be more than happy with. Looks cool, too. We served it with a mixed four-bean salad to make it a very rounded (ha ha, just saw the inadvertent pun) dish nutritionally – went together nicely, too.

OK, so what it is is a large choux pastry ring stuffed with roasted veg. I looked up the curious name, and found it was made (typical French style) in honour of one of those endless bicycle races they have – the ring is meant to look like (you guessed it) a bicycle wheel. Usually this is a sweet dish: cream, custard, nuts and stuff.

Further – and oh joy of joys – all pain has now been taken out of making choux pastry! I was encouraged to attempt this (after decades of leaving choux well alone) by the extraordinary prowess of Leo and his choux buns (six years old for anyone who doesn’t know and happens to be reading this). Hats off, Leo. However, I couldn’t be bothered to do the whole manual thing with the eggs, and instead bunged the roux into the magimix and tack tack tack add the eggs as it does the work. The other thing I hate about making choux is the horror of piping the sticky stuff through bags and getting covered with it, bags splitting, straining and puffing. Well, instead of that, I just tipped the stuff into the lovely Kugloph mould the Camel cave me a while back, and retired. It rose up beautifully – perhaps not quite traditional shape result but does one care? Looked cool. Ten minutes from getting the ingredients out to having washed up the dishes. Now that’s easier.

As for the roasted veg – the usual suspects. Aubergine, peppers, courgettes, roast, peel, chop up into bit-sized pieces. I mixed them on this occasion with some chopped basil and a good amount of sun-dried tomato. Cut the choux ring in half when its done, and stuff the bottom with the veg mix, top with grated cheese (I mixed ours with some fresh oregano, made it rather tasty), return to the oven until the cheese has melted and pop the other half of the ring back on. Serve.
Oh, some measurements: for the choux (I did half quantities of this for us three, it was more than ample):

• 10tbsp butter, 1 cup water, 1 ¾ cups plain flour, 6 eggs, pinch of salt.

Melt the butter with the water in a pan, bring to the boil, take off the heat and add all the flour to make the roux, mix until it forms a nice ball. Introduce to magimix. Stir a little to cool down, add the eggs one at a time. If you want you can pipe, if not spoon into the prepared tin, bake at about 200 in the first instance and turn down little after its risen a bit. Takes about 30 minutes in all. Make sure the pastry has had time to dry out properly on the inside.

I don’t think you need quantities for roasted veg, do you now :)

Corned Beef

Now by Corned Beef I mean the Australian style of corned beef, which is a large slab of beef that has been salt cured, just like a gammon – NOT the British tinned stuff. First time we cooked this we had no idea what it was, so we shoved it on the barbecue – actually even that was nice but by jingo dingo this’ll blow your socks off.

Like a gammon, it goes very well with cloves. Put the whole thing into a pressure cooker, brown it off, then add a couple of cups of wine and a cup or so of water, some onion cut into large chunks, some bay leaves, plenty of cloves, a generous dollop of golden syrup (yes you heard me), pop the lid on and go away for the next couple of hours. That’s it, really, extract and slice and serve with veg of choice.

You can also make a divine sauce with some of the cooking juices and some mustard and brown sugar – just thickened down, not a great deal else. It’s already so tasty you don’t have to do a thing. Absolutely lip-smacking.