Simmered Chicken

Cold autumn night? Need to cosy up to something warm, but just don't have a wombat handy? Try this.

The original recipe for this was 'Chestnut Simmered Chicken' but the damn chestnuts just make the dish infinitely tedious, increase the price and add nothing to the flavour or texture. So won't be adding them again! This is fantastic comfort-food with no preparation time whatsoever, and we all really liked it. Definitely on the menu (minus the chestnuts).

Ingredients:

• 1 whole chicken (Let's stick to free range, shall we)
• 500ml chicken stock
• 4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
• 1 celery stalk, roughly sliced
• 1 carrot, peeled and sliced
• 1.5cm fresh ginger, sliced
• 4 spring onions, thinly sliced
• Steamed rice to serve

Rinse out your chook and put it into a heavy saucepan. Cover with the stock, plus added water (frankly I used wine) to just cover it. Add all the veggies apart from the spring onions, season, and simmer slowly for over an hour.

To serve, put the whole thing into a a deep serving dish complete with juices (there'll be lots). Serve with steamed rice, the juices ladelled on top and furikake on the side. If you don't have furikake the recipe suggests merely pestle-and-mortaring some ground sea salt and toasted sesame seeds.

Coconut and Chili Seafood

This was meant to be just with prawns, but no prawns were on special so I just brought home some marinara mix. Now, not so sure about the mussles in this but fish, squid, scallops and prawns all worked beautifully, so any combination of those as ingredients would be acceptable.

Ingredients:

• Fishy stuff (as above) 700g for 3 people was loads
• Marinade: juice of a lime, salt, olive oil
• Grated fresh coconut (about 75g)
• chili (as you like it)
• some mint leaves
• coconut cream (a little)

Marinate your fishy stuff (reduced to chunks if not naturally so) for ten minutes or so, then grill or fry dryly (i.e. don't overcrowd). Arrange on plate. Mix the grated coconut with the chilli and the remaining marinade, fry briefly, put on top of the fishy stuff. Serve with a bit of coconut cream drizzled over the top and some shredded mint leaves.

I did this one with corn fritters on the side, which turned out quite nicely. Was really thinking green papaya salad but they didn't have any.

"Intestines" (Halloween Food)

(Pictured near the middle there...)

This is just long slips of puff pastry stuffed with whatever you want, squirreled up into a baking dish to look like neatly-packed intestines. The key point is that after you've packed it all in, you get a thin brush and paint on 'blood' with red food colouring - it's surprisingly effective.

The stuffing can be anything from savoury mince mix to nuts and custard. Just not too runny to be packed in. Could be fruity, could be sausagey, could be stuffing mix with apricots and pinenuts.

The sheets of puff pastry should probably be cut no thinner than about 15 cm wide, or you'll have trouble keeping the stuffing in. A lot of recipes for this insist that you lay the whole thing out into one long strip before winding it up - this isn't exactly necessary and makes it very difficult to transfer to the baking dish. Just flummox the seams in when you put it into the dish and save yourself a lot of trouble - spend a little more time painting on the fake 'blood' instead, much more worthwhile.

Mummy Dogs (Halloween Food)

Hot dogs, wrapped in pizza dough, and baked.
(remember to let it rise first after wrapping, of course).

You can make suspicious-looking eyes with dobs of mustard.

Perfect for the Halloween season.

Spider Bread (Halloween Food)

Just pizza dough (or really any bread dough you want), shaped into a ... yes... spider shape.

Well if you really want a pizza dough recipe...

450g bread flour
1 tsp instant yeast
1.5 tsp salt
1.5 tsp sugar
280 ml water
3 tbsp olive oil

Bread makers are usually best, aren't they?
Enjoy.

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.