A little group round-up of books with a chicken and egg theme. It’s Easter you see.
“FIVE FAT HENS: The Chicken and Egg Cookbook by Tim Halket (Grub Street, £12.99)
“We love our eggs, not least because their essential nutrients keep our feather fluffed up, but we also love their producers, ie chickens. This month-by-month selection of classic and comfort food from a home cook and hen-keeper, satisfies both tastes. In a word:eggscellent.
“Recipe at you.co.uk Baked eggs with tarragon.”
RECIPE
I made a lasagne the other night. All exactly as you’d expect, but instead of minced beef, I used some roughly diced kobacha squash. Everything else – by the book. The lasagne was fabulous, but there was some of the stewed squash left over. I put it in the fridge – you never know.
Today, staring into the fridge, wondering about lunch, I pulled it out, blitzed it with a whiz-stick, warmed it though and poured it in a bowl. A lick of cream on top and a piece of toast on the side. A perfect lonely lunch.
Nothing spectacular, nothing out of the ordinary – just good honest home cooking.
RECIPE
Donkey Sauce – it’s been in the news lately. A potent name, certainly memorable. It simply tastes like a nice rustic version of Alioli, that’s lost it’s overly aggressive pungent punch. The garlic is mellowed by roasting, or a quick confit in olive oil as I’ve done here. Use it with almost anything that comes off the grill. Especially good on hamburgers.
Mine is a slightly mellower Euro-zone version of Guy’s. I use wholegrain Dijon mustard, he suggests “regular yellow mustard”, by which he means the mild American stuff, not English.
Make some mayonnaise by beating one egg yolk gently with a whisk as you add a slow drip, drip, drip of good olive oil. Add to this several crushed cloves of soft confit or slow roast garlic, finally season generously with wholegrain mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper.
Here I’ve made a sandwich for lunch with hand cut ham hock, a slice of tongue, some leaves and a slathering of Donkey Sauce.
New York Times review, www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html
Guy Fieri’s original Donkey Sauce recipe, www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/guy-fieri/straight-up-with-a-pig-patty-burger-recipe/index.html
MOVIE
I’ve just started another page on here called movies. Grandly titled, they’re more like videos. Some shaky home-shot stuff, and occasionally a real proper film.
This one is a beatifully made video portrait (of me) by Will’ Terran. My thanks to him and, as always, to Juliet Baird for being the best producer.
Video Portrait from Tim Halket on Vimeo.
RECIPE
I’m always trying to persuade my children that a proper apple crumble or steamed pudding is the thing to have for Sunday lunch. But it falls on deaf ears – when I ask them what they’d like me to cook, they unanimously scream Rocky Road. It’s their current crush. It’ll pass.
It’s a generic well-published recipe, with very few real variations. But, the top-tip I got from the Nigella Lawson recipe is to use rich tea biscuits. Most food writers suggest digestives, which are perfectly fine, but they’re not quite as crunchy and can become a bit too crumbly. I also like cherries in mine, my children do not – so instead of mixing them in, I dot them across one end (my end) before applying the final smothering of chocolate.
100g rich tea biscuits
100g little marshmallows
100g glace cherries
120g unsalted butter
3 tablespoons golden syrup
300g top-quality dark chocolate (aim for 70% cocoa solids)
Drip a little oil into the bottom of a shallow baking tray (mine is 12×8 inches and just 1 inch deep). Then cover with a large piece of cling film. The oil is there to get the cling to stick to the bottom, just a little, so it doesn’t slip about.
In a mixing bowl quickly break up the biscuits; the ideal texture is mostly shards, nothing bigger than a quarter of a biscuit, and not too many crumbs. Add the marshmallows and cherries, and mix it up a bit.
In a small non-stick pan gently melt together the butter, golden syrup and chocolate. Keep stirring it regularly with a plastic spatula. Once that has all melted, pour three quarters of the chocolate over the biscuit rubble and mix thoroughly. At first you’ll think there’s insufficient chocolate, but persevere and keep mixing – it’ll be fine.
Tip the chocolate coated rubble into the baking tray and smooth it down as best you can with the back of the spatula. Now pour the remaining chocolate over the top. Tidy up the top again. Place it, uncovered, in a fridge for a few hours, or overnight.
To serve, simply lift the whole thing out and cut into mean little slices (it is incredibly rich). Dust with a sprinkling of icing sugar or cocoa powder, if you like. Eat it as a cake with a coffee-shop sized cappuccino, or dress it up for pudding with ice cream, or crème fraiche, or perhaps some squirty cream.
RECIPE
This particular batch of mussels was a bit barnacly. They needed cleaning; use the side of your potato peeler, it doesn’t take long. Honor took this photo below, as I was cleaning them.
For four people as a main course you will need two or even three kilos of mussels – a bit less as a starter. I doubt that you’d really want to cook this for more than four; you’d need a really big catering sized pan and a gas burner capable of getting it hot.
Finely chop two medium onions and crush a couple of cloves of garlic. Soften these gently (and completely) over a low heat with plenty of butter. Add just one good glass of dry white wine and bring it up to a ferocious boil with the burner on its highest available heat. Tip the cleaned mussels into the pan and put a tight fitting lid on top. Every minute or so remove the lid and quickly stir the mussels, or give them a really good tossing-shake. You will find the ones at the bottom cooking more quickly – so mix them up a bit. They should take no more than two or three minutes, but are certainly done when the majority of the shells have opened and you can see the pale orange mussels inside. They will quickly overcook, so err towards speediness.
Using a slotted spoon take the mussels from the pan and dish them up into big deep soup bowls. It may seem a daunting number, but remember, the bit you eat is actually very small.
Now add a scant glass of double cream to the cooking sauce left in the pot. Taste it, and add a little lemon juice, salt and pepper. Keeping the heat on high bring it quickly up to the boil. As quickly as possible, ladle a little of this thin white broth over the mussels, using a sieve if you have a fear of any grit making it onto your plate. Pour the rest into a gravy jug, for pouring and slurping later.
I’d normally look for thick slices of crusty bread cut from one of those handmade, white loaves – but most recently had only soft white baps to hand. They were an amazingly good pairing. Either/or will be necessary for mopping up the soupy sauce at the bottom of the bowl.
REVIEW
Twitter reminded me about Gurneys. More specifically that it had been voted a very good fish shop. One of the best. It was listed, in a piece in one of those Sunday Supplement magazines. Raffi’s in our nearby hometown of Sudbury won a mention as the best place to go to for Indian spices in all of East Anglia (and is where I go). Gurneys got the gong for best fish shop in the whole rump of England.
When we’re up in Norfolk, we get some fish in either from Gurneys, or a little garage/shed on the coast road – mainly we go there for mussels and crabs, Gurneys for everything else. Years ago, Annie and I first lost our bowls of Moules Mariniere to the inquisitive children in one of the sheds on Mersea Island (we had to eat their children’s portions of Fish and Chips). Ever since then, mussels have been one of their favourite seaside dinners.
Another thing Gurneys do very well are the bits and pieces that come in pots. Things like potted shrimp, mackerel pate, crab pate, and dressed crabs, plain crab-meat, English fish cakes, and Thai fish cakes. And an invention – I think – of theirs; cray’n’aise. I think you can figure that one out. (I must say though, that the crayfish in the last one I bought were so overcooked everyone refused to eat them. Previously, it has been spot on.)
They have one counter for all those things, and another for wet fish. The wet fish is spanking fresh, and the shop certainly has the turnover to keep it that way.
There’s the full spectrum of smoked fish too. Inevitably, you can get all the extra bits and pieces for your fish frenzy: lemons, garlic, onions, homemade mayonnaise, pink sauce, tartar sauce, various exotica in jars and vast bunches of flat leaf parsley.
Gurneys Fish Shop, Market Place, Burnham Market, PE31 8HF, 01328 738967
REVIEW
It’s the curse of the internet. Now that everywhere has wifi you can take your laptop with you on holiday and do some work if you need to. You never get to switch it off and switch-off properly.
With Annie having to do something for a client that hadn’t been done by the time we packed the car up, I took the three children to the Deepdale Café for breakfast on Monday morning. We’ve been many times before. It is a real holiday luxury having someone else cook breakfast, especially a big proper cooked breakfast, before we head off to the beach for the day, or a long walk out to the coast, or something else that’s unfamiliar and wholesomely outdoorsy.
The place quickly filled up with people on holiday: a couple in their thirties without children or conversation, a grandfather and grandson – the older of them with a half-term excuse for a vast cooked breakfast (the full English, with extras), and a couple of other families on half term breaks.
Two of the children had hot-chocolates, the Starbucks variety; spray cream, sprinkles and marshmallows. One had a cup of tea, I had a limp cappuccino. To eat, two of them ordered stacks of pancakes with maple syrup (hold the cream, please), one had an egg and bacon sandwich. I didn’t have the appetite for a fried meat feast, so had two poached eggs on wilted spinach on granary toast with hollandaise sauce. If the hollandaise sauce had been a little better made, mine would have been perfect. As it was all the plates were cleaned. It’s friendly waiter service but you pay at the till on the way out.
The Deepdale Café serves breakfast between 9 and 12, then lunches and teas. It opens earlier at 7.30 on “high days and holidays” – on such days you may want to book a table, which seems odd for breakfast. Nobody told them we were on half-term, we had to wait for the doors to open at 9.
For breakfast for four we got a little change from £25.
The Deepdale Café, Main Road, Burnham Deepdale, Norfolk, PE31 8DD, 01485211055
RECIPE
It’s impossible to imagine eating a pint-of-prawns, or a crab sandwich without pink sauce. Classic cooks will call it Sauce Marie-Rose, and make the mayo from scratch and tit around with the seasonings. Either way, if it’s cold cooked shellfish this sauce is the one to have.
You need a big squeeze or a spoonful of mayonnaise – buy the full-fat version for the best flavour – make the mayo if you must. Add to that a much smaller squeeze of Salad Cream (about 1:4). This is important, it adds a little vinegar-sharpness to the finished sauce. If you don’t want it, you’ll need a few tiny splashes of vinegar or maybe a squeeze of lemon – some people favour Worcestershire sauce and a few drops ofTabasco. Add a half-shot of brandy if you like. Finally, you finish the sauce by stirring in a little slap of ketchup. Just enough to get it pink.
This really is a brilliant little sauce, easy to make and as unpretentious as a prawn cocktail.
REVIEW
I’m familiar with the Hoste – the Gastro Boutique Restaurant and Hotel in Burnham Market, Norfolk. I’ve been here many times before, first when it was still just a pub, some twenty years ago, and more recently for a night away when Annie and I somehow managed to arrange three concurrent sleepovers for the children.
On one of these nights out, I ordered the most bizarre starter; pigeon on toast with fruit jus and black pepper icecream – it was at least two courses on the same plate at once. I was expecting some genius revelation combo of previously unthought-of and unmarriable ingredients – but, it was even more awkward than pigeon and icecream sounds. You hope for more than the sum of the parts, what I got was an essay in subtraction. I spoke to a chef friend, and asked him why something so ill-conceived hadn’t been pulled straight off the menu? “Oh, no. Disasters like that can stick around for ages. Everyone assumes it must be brilliant so they’ll order it – once. Emperor’s new clothes.”
On this occasion though it was October, a damp late Sunday afternoon. I was with our six year old daughter. “I’m hungry, Daddy.” I’d thought to get her a fizzy orange and a packet of crisps in the bar, but it was packed and very loud, and it stank – I mean really ponged – of wet spaniels. We went through the back to the bizarrely African themed conservatory.
Kitty is very fond of ordering tea. I think it’s anAlicein Wonderland thing. She’s Alice, of course – I guess I’m everyone else. I ordered her the Jubilee Afternoon Tea, ‘a selection of sandwiches, a homemade scone with jam and clotted cream, a selection of cakes, and a pot of tea.’ It arrived, as you would expect on one of those triple-stacked tiered-plate arrangements. Square plates on this occasion.
The egg mayo sandwich was good enough that I didn’t get a look in, the same with the ham sandwich. The smoked salmon and cucumber sandwich failed. It is normally two distinctly separate sandwiches, it was not a happy combo. Kitty further turned her nose up at the idea of a scone with jam and clotted cream, so I ate it. The scone was hot from the oven, and had sultanas in it – always a mistake in a scone served with cream. Nice to have some proper clotted cream though.
The cakes where good, although the miniature meringue on top of the bite-sized lemon tart turned a decent lemon tart into a silly lemon meringue pie. A good eclair, a nice macroon, and a shortbread biscuit all devoured by a hungry six year old.
As I was paying the bill I asked the waitress why it was called a Jubilee Tea? “Why – it’s the Jubilee year! And it’s been very popular – so we’ve just kept it on the menu.”
Afternoon tea for one person £15, a small bottle of fizzy water £1.60
The Hoste Arms, Burnham Market,Norfolk,PE31 8HD,01328738777