Pearl Barley Pumpkin Risotto

Halloween isn’t one of the more popular calendar events in my house, it falls somewhere between Guy Fawkes night (5/11) and United Nations day, today, my birthday, which I unfortunately share with Manchester United’s primate striker Wayne Rooney. Who, incidentally, shouldn’t be paid quarter of a million pounds a week for kicking a ball into the back of a net, something he failed to do on Saturday during the battering that Man United took from City. This is rhetoric and not open to discussion.

Trick or treating for instance is one element that hasn’t caught on at home, not that we are scrooge like by any means, but the children who have rung our doorbell in the past demanding sweets are the same little shits that for the rest of the year deface the horse chestnut tree on our driveway and hurl eggs at the wall of our house, so for them to march up to the front door demanding Haribo in lieu of a devious trick is a little presumptuous. I would also add that these children appear to get older each year, a line needs to be drawn at some point and I suggest when Darren who works behind the bar at the Rose and Crown turns up in a wizard’s outfit to claim his Starmix, it’s probably time to draw it.

I will speak up for the Pagan date however and say that it is a wonderful excuse do dress like an idiot and get shit faced - at Uni I painted my body white before squeezing myself into a pair of horrendously tight skinny jeans, dying my hair black, donning a trilby and strapping a giant syringe to my arm to head out as the train wreck front man of the Libertines, P Dock. Only last year I visited a local pub dressed in fish net suspenders, eight inch platform boots, a tank top, a US sports jacket belonging to a Drum Major called Jill who attended Providence Rhode Island some time in the mid 80s, and a pair of Muay Thai shorts that proved less than insulating in the near freezing conditions. The night ended with me trying to carry my youngest sister to the car as she vomited all over ‘Jill’s’ white leather sleeves, which in a pair of heeled platform boots was challenging to say the least. A good night then.

Of the positives and negatives that Halloween brings, the best and most fun of all has to be carving spooky faces into pumpkins. Like chocolate eggs at Easter the pumpkin really is the highlight of my 31^st, so here is a recipe that’s a little bit different to use up your surplus flesh this weekend. Mwahahahahahaaaaaa!

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

240g pearl barley

2 large handfuls of cubed pumpkin flesh

1 handful of fine French beans, top and tailed, steamed

1 white onion, finely chopped

70 grams of parmesan, finely grated, a few shavings to garnish

1 tspn thyme leaves, four sprigs for garnishing

1 tablespoon of rosemary

2 large cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped

Zest of 1 lemon

Juice of 1 lemon

Extra virgin olive oil

Butter

1.5 litres of vegetable stock

1 glass of dry white wine

Method:

1. Put the Barley in a pyrex bowl and soak in boiling water for 10 minutes to let it soften, drain and set aside.

2. Steam the fine beans for 6 – 8 minutes, set aside.

3. In a deep thick bottomed frying pan melt the butter and a couple of slugs of olive oil, chuck in the onions, garlic and pumpkin and fry over a medium/high heat until softened but not browned. Add the pearl barley and stir through, then pour in the white wine and burn off the alcohol till the liquid reduces by more than half. Add the lemon juice and zest along with the thyme leaves and rosemary and stir. Now add the stock a bit at a time, continuously stirring over a medium heat, as the barley absorbs the stock add more.

4. It should take between 10 and 15 minutes for the barley to soak up all the stock, it will be quite sloppy by this point and would have doubled in amount. Chuck in the fine beans and stir them in, then add the finely grated parmesan and mix it through.

5. Serve in large bowls with a handful of peppered rocket, a sprig of thyme, some parmesan shavings and a drizzle of olive oil. Scarily tasty. 

The Joseph and Joseph "No Spill Mill" Pepper Grinder

When it comes to kitchen appliances quite often there is a line that’s not so fine between functionality and style, aesthetics fall by the wayside as ergonomics muscle through, dropping the shoulder of practicality as they dutifully serve their purpose. Vis-à-vis there are countless trendy accessories on the market that prove as useful in the kitchen as salmonella.

I was pleasantly surprised then when I came across the brand new Joseph and Joseph “No Spill Mill”, it is the first pepper grinder I have come across that tops the score board on both looks and usefulness. Sleek and simple the mill is modern but unassuming and will fit in almost anywhere, it is battery powered and highly efficient, but unlike many of its competitors it doesn’t leave pepper dust on the side, which in my opinion turns those competitors into subordinates.

One of these is the perfect accessory for any kitchen, so much so that I have just invested in one for my lucky sister for Christmas. If you head down to Selfridges on Oxford Street this Saturday you too can invest shrewdly in this invaluable appliance, you’ll find Joseph and Joseph’s very own branded floor space where you can view a myriad of their clever designs, and if you’re dedicated enough to be in the first 200 customers who spend over £50 you’ll get a free wind and grind worth £18.

Head down and make Christmas the season of seasoning. Best of luck. 

Goats Cheese Piquante Pepper and Spinach Filo Parcels

I admire the grit of Emily Pankhurst when she resisted the brute force of the prison guards as they tried to force feed her, she was standing up for what she believed in and as a result the role of women in society was changed forever, for the better (she was born in Moss Side in Manchester, I’ve driven through once by mistake and I’m not surprised she was a resilient soul).  Then along came the girls from Dagenham, who won the equal wage and furthered the status of women as equals in the workplace.

However, no matter how hard the suffragettes worked for equality, no matter how many strikes the ancestors of Stacey Solomon rallied for, there are still a handful of extremely important masculine things that remain sacrosanct that men can do that women can’t. Grow a beard for instance, sing the bass line in a barbershop group, or pee standing up. That is until I was privy to the dignified invention of the ‘ShePee’ at a festival a few years ago, when a girl came out of the urinal and shook out her “re-usable” funnel and stuffed it back into her handbag. I headed straight for the ladies; at that moment society had officially flipped on its head.

Gender can also be applied to food and drink in the same way, in a pub the majority of men will order a pint and the women a glass of wine, this is of course not universal by any stretch. In fact having spent a considerable amount of time in pubs I’ve noticed a vast majority of the girls also drink beer, yet fewer of the lads will tuck into a glass of Chardonnay. Partly to do with image and pride, but surroundings also play a key part in ones order, a pub in its truest form is not a place where men drink wine, yet women can indulge in both and their image will remain untarnished.

Goats Cheese then, to me, is like walking into The Nags Head, slamming my van keys down on the bar in between Barry and Steve, pulling up a stool, letting out a loud belch, and ordering a small glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Girls go mad for it, I only have to whisper the phrase “Goats cheese and caramelised onion tart” in front of my girlfriend and she drags me upstairs, admittedly to go on UkTvFood, but in the bedroom all the same. It has a pretty strong taste, unique in fact, but I think it’s the appeal it has to women that subconsciously puts me off, perhaps I’m jealous? I don’t know.

Perseverance is a virtue and I have, over time, warmed to the churned lactation of the world’s oldest domesticated animal. It is delicious with strawberries and pepper for example, and of course anything caramelised. So without further ado, here is my effort at taming the most aphrodisiacal of cheeses.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

4 wheels of goats cheese, 1cm thick each

8 sheets of filo pastry

200g spinach

8 sweet piquanté peppers, from the jar, patted dry

½ red onion, finely chopped

1 tspn cumin seeds

1 tspn medium chilli powder

½ tspn sugar

150g butter, melted

Olive oil

Salt and Pepper

Vine tomatoes for roasting

Frying pan, baking tray, brush for the butter

Method:

1. Steam or boil the spinach for 5 minutes until it is wilted, strain it thoroughly to get as much water out of it as possible and chop it up roughly.

2. Heat a little oil in the frying pan and fry the cumin seeds for a minute or so, add the onions and piquant peppers and fry for a few minutes until the onions soften. Chuck in the spinach and stir it around before adding the chilli powder to the mix. Fry for another couple of minutes, take of the heat and keep warm.

3. Lay out a sheet of filo pastry and brush all over it with the melted butter; line up another sheet on top and press down, sticking them together. Place a wheel of goats cheese in the middle and dump a couple of spoonfuls of the spinach mixture on top of it, fold over the bottom end of the pastry over the cheese and brush it with butter, do the same with the top and sides, making sure to butter them thoroughly. Repeat four times with the remaining cheese and mixture.

4. Wipe out the frying pan and return it to the heat with a little oil, fry the parcels cheese side down for a few minutes until they crisp up, whack them on a baking tray and put them in the top half of the oven at 220°C for around 10 minutes until they are golden delicious.

5. Season up the vine tomatoes and whack them in alongside the parcels to roast, serve up, bless up.

Indonesian Tiger Prawn and Soba Noodle Stir Fry with Pak Choi Hearts in Oyster Sauce

There are countless afflictions and ailments that effect human kind, not to mention phobias, rational or otherwise. I for one cannot stand heights, this may stem back to my big sister trying to lift me over the railings at the top of the Eiffel Tower when I was four years old in an effort to get some attention, eclipsed by the precious only boy. Subsequently I believe my fear of vertiginous situations to be rational and just, the terror I harbour and release when a moth approaches however, is not.

The aforementioned reside within our psyche and are open to theoretical debate and psycho analysis - In the red corner, weighing in at 220 pounds, Erik Erikson and his theory of psychosocial development! In the blue corner, the reigning champion who wants to make love to at least one of his parents, Sigmuuuuund . . . . . Freud!

What isn’t open to debate is the physiology of the human body (unlike my aversion to moths, the winged spawn of Satan), if you’re allergic to nuts, you simply can’t eat them. If you’re afraid of nuts, then you’re a nutcase. Worse still though, you could fall into the most unfortunate of categories, you could be allergic to shellfish, and to these people my heart goes out to, as to go through life without experiencing the joy of a prawn would be very sad indeed.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

20 Indonesian tiger prawns, cut down the back, veins removed

1 pack of sprouting broccoli

1 pack of asparagus

1 pack of young thin carrots

2 pak choi, leaves cut off and hearts cut into 4

2cm root ginger, finely chopped

½ a red onion, roughly chopped

½ red sweet pepper, roughly chopped

Small bunch of coriander, finely chopped, a little for garnishing

1 large red chilli, chopped into wheels

Enough Soba noodles for 4 people

Chilli oil

Ground nut oil

Dark soy sauce

For the Pak Choi Hearts:

2 tablespoons oyster sauce

2 tspns light soy sauce

1 tspn dark soy sauce

1 tspn Japanese satay marinade

1 tspn chilli flakes (I’ve started crushing my own as the supermarket ones are weak)

Small handful of crushed cashew nuts   

For the Prawn and Vegetable Sauce:

1 tablespoon mirin

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

2 tablespoons ketjap manis (sweet Indonesian soy sauce)

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1 tablespoon sweet chilli sauce

Juice of 1 lime

You’ll need a Wok and a griddle pan for this one.

Method:

1. Steam the broccoli, asparagus and carrots for 6 – 7 minutes so they still have a bit of crunch, set aside.

2. Mix all the ingredients for the pak choi sauce together, excluding the cashews, put the hearts in a bowl and pour over the sauce, make sure it gets in between all the gaps and put to one side.

3. Mix the prawn and vegetable sauce and coat the prawns in their own bowl with a couple of spoonfuls of the sauce.

Step 4 AND 5 to be done together

4. Boil the noodles for 5 – 6 minutes until slightly undercooked, strain and sift to stop them sticking together. In the wok heat a slug of chilli oil and fry the onion, the red pepper, and half the chopped red chilli together for a couple of minutes, throw in the noodles and stir fry for a couple of minutes before adding a dash of dark soy and frying for another minute. Position the noodles on 4 plates.

5. Whilst the noodles are cooking heat a griddle pan over a high heat and add the pak choi hearts, cook them on all three sides for a few minutes each and pour over the excess sauce from the bowl as you do. The noodles should be boiled and fried in about the same time it takes for the pak choi to cook completely, plate them alongside and crumble the cashews over the top.

6. Quickly wipe out the wok and return it to the heat, add a couple of slugs of ground nut oil and fry the pak choi leaves and ginger together, the leaves will wilt fairly quickly, throw in the broccoli, carrots, asparagus, prawns, and the rest of the sauce. Stir fry over a high heat for a few more minutes but don’t let it get too sloppy. It can completely ruin the food if there’s no crunch to it.

7. Take it off the heat, stir through half the coriander and whack it on the plate, garnish with the remaining coriander and red chilli wheels.

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Grandma Jac's Marrow and Courgette Soup

Grandparents are great, they are like your mum and dad, but where your parents are expected to teach you right and wrong and life’s lessons and how to behave and all that jazz, grandparents are exempt from distributing disciplinary action. So in short, they are like your parents, but more fun.

It doesn’t just apply to playing games either; the confusingly contradictory battle of double standards extends to the kitchen as well. Mum won’t let you eat some things and then force you to eat others (I recall several hours spent locked in the boot of our estate car for refusing point blank to eat my cauliflower, I didn’t even mind the stuff, it was a matter of principal), whereas Granny will feed you and feed you until you burst and let you get down from the table whenever you please.

I am happy to say that things haven’t changed!

I woke up at 9am this morning in West Sussex to the smell of bacon wafting up the stairs, I pretty much fell down them to get to the kitchen, knocking my already oversized head on the doomsday beams on the way down, and found Grandma Jac beastin’ out brekkie over the Aga.

“How many eggs would you like boy”?

“Oh, one’s en-ouef Jacco”!

The joke was lost on her the first time round as her hearing is somewhat lacking, it was, as you can imagine, still very amusing when she finally got close enough to hear me shout it at her. I didn't have the strength to crack another . . .

It conspired that she had good reason for being asleep at 8:30pm the previous evening, the alarm set downstairs, me tucked up in bed, no TV, sin signal. She had to rise at around half past six and begin making a pan of marrow and courgette soup, all home grown of course, that we could have for our lunch. Two meals ready by 9am is good going by anyone’s standards, the fact we were leaving at 11:30 hadn’t fazed her and out came the Tupperware so the soup could make the journey back to Hertfordshire, along with me, my big sister, her cat-mauling-chicken-killing but peculiarly affectionate Jack Russell, and a bag full of swiftly thawing cow thigh bones whose odour was rapidly masking that of the our lunch.

(Foodnote: Speaking of forbidden foods re: the parents, I was never allowed pushpops as a child as they are essentially one big sugary E number. I bought one the other day as I’m now a big boy and can make my own decisions; my finger was too chubby to fit in the hole. Bum out.)

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

450g marrow and courgettes, grated (a few courgette shavings to garnish)

1 pint of chicken stock

½ tspn curry powder

1 pot of Philadelphia (smaller size)

Butter

Double Cream

Salt

Pepper

Method:

1. In a saucepan melt a little butter and cook the marrow and courgettes for 1 minute, add the curry powder, seasoning and stock and simmer until soft. Add the Philadelphia and stir through until smooth, blend and season further to taste.  

2. Serve with some courgette shavings, a drizzle of cream and a couple of turns of pepper.

Honey and Mustard Glazed Duck on Parsnip Puree with Roasted Beetroots and Sweet French Beans

I’ve eaten duck twice in the last week; the first helping was in a Thai restaurant in Soho covered in sesame seeds and wrapped up in pandan leaves, the second was at my grandparent’s house on the staggeringly beautiful and equally time warped South Downs. Two very different dishes in two extremely different locations, but what they both did have in common was that firstly, they were off key delicious, and secondly, the ducks themselves were both reared on the Gressingham estate in Suffolk.

I visited their website and was more than impressed; a family business since its founding in 1971 by Miriam and Maurice Buchanan, it is now run by their two sons William and Geoffrey, both of whom strive to maintain the level of excellence set by their parents. Not only are the ducks raised in the lap of rural luxury, they are the only company in the world licensed to produce the Gressingham breed. The Buchanan brothers really know how to treat their birds well, and I can safely say, of all the breasts I have ever had the pleasure of covering in honey and searing in a thick bottomed skillet, Gressingham produce the finest of all.

http://www.gressinghamfoods.co.uk

The remaining ingredients were to be found in Grandmama’s sizeable vegetable patch, still fully maintained by the woman herself and pumping out a myriad of seasonal trinkets. In the picture are the beetroots, the French beans, the parsnips, and my sister’s Jack Russell Archie who tried to maul the neighbour’s cat earlier in the day. Good lad.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

2 Gressingham duck breasts

2 Medium beetroots cut into 1 inch chunks

Handful of French beans, sliced vertically

5 medium parsnips, peeled and chopped

4 tablespoons of clear honey

2 tablespoons of wholegrain mustard

100ml double cream

Butter

Olive oil

Balsamic glaze

Salt and Pepper

1 tspn sugar

Method: (1 hour approx)

Preheat the oven to 230°C

1. Pat the duck breasts dry with kitchen towel and slice lines across the skin horizontally all the way down. In a bowl mix the honey and mustard together and coat the duck in it, making sure to get the mixture right into the cuts you’ve made. Set aside.

2. Tear off a large square of tin foil and create a parcel, whack the beetroots in and season with salt and pepper and a few slugs of olive oil, toss to coat, close the parcel and put it in a baking tray before putting it into the top half of the oven for 40 minutes. Open the parcel and drizzle the balsamic glaze over them before returning them to the oven, parcel open, for another 15 minutes. This will crisp them up and give them a sweeter taste. (When you’ve glazed the beets and put them back in start the duck in phase 4).

3. While the beetroots are in the oven put the parsnips in a saucepan and boil for 10-15 minutes until soft (they should fall off the end of a sharp knife), take off and drain before returning them to the pan, add a knob of butter and the cream and mash thoroughly, add salt and pepper to taste. Parsnips are quite stringy so you won’t be able to push them through a sieve to create the puree, if you have a blender use that. Keep them warm when you’re done mashing / purayin’.

4. Heat a frying pan on a high heat with a little butter and fry the duck breast skin side down for a few minutes until they are crispy and brown, flip them over for 30 seconds before putting them on a baking tray and putting them on the shelf below the beetroots, cook for 15–20 minutes depending on how you like the meat.

5. When the duck in is in the oven boil the beans for 7-10 minutes, strain and add a little butter along with a tspn of sugar and toss them about a bit.

6. To serve put a dollop of the parsnip puree on the plate, slice the duck breast and chuck a few of those on top, beetroots on the side, beans on top, and finally heat the left over honey and mustard briefly and drizzle it over. This whole meal was incredibly rich and sweet, proper Downton Abbey shit.

Roasted Mediterranean Vegetable Pastry

If you’ve ever walked around a village square in Italy, Greece, the south of France, or any of the other wonderfully rustic countries that border the Med for that matter, you may have noticed just how many old people there are sitting around. The men in one group drinking chilled beer whilst remarking jovially about their respective other halves in a fashion far younger than their years would dictate, should they reside in the comparatively drearier and uptight climbs of Northern Europe. The women crowded under an olive tree at the other end of the square doing much the same.

Compared to the rather sad fate that befalls many of our elderly in England, the retirement home filled to the rafters with senile old biddies, the thieving carers, some of whom were exposed in the papers only this week by a geriatric spook and her hidden spyware, and of course the bone chilling weather that claims several lives each year, the lifestyle afforded to those in heaven’s Mediterranean waiting room is exactly the same as walking into a Bertolli olive oil advert, fantastic.

Sun along with diet plays a massive part in the elongation and quality of life for these children of the Med, and since over the weekend we had the former in abundance, the latter followed naturally.

(I added some baby corns as they were in the fridge, not strictly Meddish but tasty all the same).  

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

1 sheet puff pastry

1 carrot, chopped

1 red onion, chopped in half moons

8 babycorns

1 courgette, chopped

1 sweet red pepper, chopped

10 asparagus heads

3 cloves garlic, squashed but whole

Sprig rosemary

Sprig thyme

Bay leaf

1 tablespoon of sugar

1 egg, beaten

Extra virgin olive oil

Balsamic Glaze

Method:

1. Steam the carrots, babycorns and asparagus for 10 mins until tender, when they are done chuck them in a roasting dish along with the remaining chopped vegetables, garlic, thyme, rosemary and bay leaf, coat with a few healthy slugs of olive oil before putting into a preheated oven at 220°C for half an hour. Five minutes before the end take out the tray and sprinkle over the sugar and a drizzling of balsamic glaze, toss and return to the oven.

2. Whilst the Vegetables are roasting roll out the puff pastry and fold over 1cm on each side into the middle so it looks like a pastry picture frame, coat the pastry with the beaten egg using a brush and whack it in the oven for 10 minutes until its golden and risen. Pull it out and poke a little hole in the middle to let some of the air out, then take out the veg and randomly spoon it onto the pastry and cook it for another 5 minutes.

3. Serve it by itself of as an addition to another dish, the classic chicken in pancetta perhaps; it’s also great with cheese on top such as mozzarella or feta. Select your country and ingredients accordingly.