Beetroot, Potato and Thyme Gratin atop a Smoked Kipper, Mustard and Celeriac Fritter with a Grilled Béchamel Stuffed Paprika Portobello and a Romanesco Cauliflower, a Serious Mouthful

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone on February 29^th 1876; Ja Rule was born on the 29^th February 1976. These two events have nothing in common except the date they took place on, exactly a century apart. With this in mind (rather strangely), I marched off to Waitrose to find a completely random collection of ingredients with no immediate thought as to what would come together in the kitchen. Now you may say that it’s impossible to select completely at random because to a degree everything you do has to be pre-meditated, and I agree; so let me rephrase. I marched off to Waitrose to find a collection of ingredients that I hadn’t used, or at least used together before, to make the evening’s meal more of an adventure to prepare.

Smoked Kipper: I don’t think I’ve ever eaten one of these, my lasting memories are of my father having them for breakfast a lot when I was a child, most probably a straight fortnight after a visit from the mobile monger.

Beetroot: Pretty colours, rich in flavour.

Celeriac: People are always waffling on about celeriac purée on Masterchef, for some reason they’ve become rather popular. I’ve only ever cooked one once so it seemed like a fresh choice.

Portobello: Sounds trendy, is trendy.

Romanesco Cauliflower: This is a beautiful looking thing that is half way between broccoli and cauliflower in taste, with a gloriously nutty edge.

I’m not the cleanest of cooks at the best of times, when I know what I’m doing that is. So when I’d finished this evening the kitchen looked like some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland that would have Thomas Stearns Eliot reaching for his quill. However this didn’t bother me in the slightest, there are ‘thems who cooks and thems who cleans’. I am the former.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

The ingredients are grouped into their respective components

2 smoked kipper filets

1 large potato, desiree will do, peeled and chopped into 2” cubes

1 celeriac, peeled and chopped into 2” cubes

3 rashers of oak smoked bacon

Handful of fresh chives, finely chopped

4 shallots, finely chopped

1 tablespoon of English mustard

40g salted butter

1 tablespoon crème fraiche

3 large potatoes, desiree again, peeled and very finely sliced

6 fresh red beetroots, peeled and finely sliced

2 tspns fresh thyme leaves, finely chopped

1 large pot double cream

Butter for greasing

4 Portobello mushrooms, stalks removed

Butter for grilling

1 heaped tablespoon of plain flour

50g butter

Semi-skimmed milk

100g Wookey Hole cheddar, grated

Smoked Paprika

Grated Nutmeg

1 Romanesco cauliflower

Salt and pepper for whatever needs it.

Method: (Pre-heat the oven to 180°C)

1. Grease a medium sized baking dish, 3” deep, with butter. Place a layer of thinly sliced potato on the bottom and then a layer of thinly sliced beetroot on top, sprinkle with a pinch of thyme, a pinch of salt, and a couple of turns of freshly ground black pepper. Repeat this till you have 3 layers, then finish with a final layer of potato on top, season with salt, pepper and a little thyme, then pour over the whole pot of cream, slowly, so that it seeps down through the layers. Put in the oven for an hour.

2. Put the bacon under the grill till crispy, take out and chopped into bits.

3. Whilst the gratin is cooking in the oven, put the potato and celeriac chunks into cold salted water and bring to the boil. Cook them until soft, take them off, add 40g butter, a tablespoon of crème fraiche and some seasoning and mash it roughly. Spoon it into a blender and add the smoked kipper before pulsing a few times so the fish breaks up into the mixture.

4. Spoon the mix into a bowl and add the chives, mustard, uncooked shallots and bacon bits and stir it all through. You will need to be fairly liberal with the seasoning and in particular the salt; there are some very strong flavours that need to be brought together and Salt, the most important ingredient in the kitchen, is the thing for the job.

5. Make a béchamel now by melting 50g of butter in a saucepan and adding a heaped tablespoon of plain flour and stirring it in till it gets lumpy. Add a little milk at a time stirring it in with a whisk till it thickens, keep doing this until you have a relatively thick sauce. Melt the Wookey Hole cheddar into the sauce, season with plenty of pepper and a little nutmeg, and take off the heat.

6. In a griddle pan (frying pan if you don’t have one) chuck a knob of butter in over a high heat, cook the mushrooms on both sides till they get a nice colour, a couple of minutes should do it. Take them out of the pan and chuck them on a baking tray bottom side up so they make a little shroom bowl, now scoop some of the cheddar béchamel into the mushroom and sprinkle some paprika over the top, before sliding them under the grill for 5 minutes so the spices infuse into the sauce.

7. Cook the Romanescos in boiling water for 5 minutes until tender, strain.

8. The final thing to do whilst the cauliflowers are cooking is to make small patties of the celeriac mix and fry them on both sides for a couple of minutes so they brown a little. Serve up the fritter with a slice of the beetroot and potato gratin on top, with the mushroom on one side with the beautiful Romanesco sat proudly on the other. You could dollop a little extra béchamel on for extra sauce, however the flavours of the creamy beetroot and sharper celeriac, along with the spectacular combination of smoky kipper and bacon, the nutty cauliflower, and rich mushroom covered in mature cheese, are plenty enough for your pallet. A success. RULE BABAAY! 

A Southern Scotch Egg

In 1954 West Germany defeated the Swiss in the football World Cup; in Morocco a swarm of locusts destroyed £10 million worth of citrus fruits in just six weeks, and on home turf in Blighty Roger Bannister ran the first ever mile in under four minutes. But even closer to home (for me anyway), in a small village just off the Great Cambridge road, a stone’s throw from the house where I grew up, a butcher named Douglas White and his wife Anna created a humble masterpiece – The Braughing Sausage.

For over five decades the people of East Hertfordshire have paid allegiance to ‘D.White Butchers’, and while many things have changed in the local area; the development of Stansted Airport, yours truly moving into town in October 1994, and more recently the welcome invasion of ‘Standon Calling’ festival less than one mile from the shop. The recipe for the sausages has remained the same. Unlike it’s bullying cousin the Lincolnshire Sausage, steeped in it’s history and aggressive in taste, the Braughing banger has a much smoother and more rounded flavour; versatile without being apathetic, chivalrous but not arrogant, strong and silent. By which I mean that it holds it’s own as a stand alone, but at the same time gets on with everything.

A while ago I read an article in one of the fall-out-sections of the Sunday paper about a man in the North West whose love of the equally humble Scotch egg had led him to repeatedly experiment in the kitchen to create the ultimate hybrid of the classic snack. ‘The Manchester Egg’ was born and has gone from strength to strength, and ever since I read the article I’ve been desperate to try one. It consists of a pickled egg, wrapped in spiced black pudding and coated with Japanese panko breadcrumbs, and is accompanied by the tagline – “A hearty commodity worthy of a gentlemen”. The words sold it to me and the pictures sealed the deal, yet although the Manchester Egg is on the up, it really needs to be eaten fresh, and East Herts is quite a way from Old Trafford. So it was up to me then, to make my own version of the savoury snack, with a little sweet chucked in for good measure.

So without further ado, I present ‘The Southern Scotch Egg’.

Ingredients: (Makes 9)

700g Braughing Sausages, skins removed

1 tspn thyme leaves, finely chopped

2 tspns fresh sage leaves, finely chopped

2 tablespoons chives, finely chopped

1 tablespoon runny honey

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

100ml water

Salt and Pepper

11 large free range eggs

150g plain flour

2 tablespoons hot chilli powder

200g fine white breadcrumbs

Vegetable oil for deep frying (1.5 litres)

Method:

1. Put 9 of the 11 eggs into a large saucepan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. When the water starts to bubble time for exactly 2 minutes, take the eggs off, pour out the boiling water and run the eggs under a cold tap in the colander for a few minutes. Leave them to cool down for a bit.

2. In a blender add the sausage meat and water and pulse until the meat is fairly smooth, remove and chuck it into a bowl. Add the chopped herbs, honey, the mustard and a pinch or two of salt and pepper. Mix it well until it’s evenly combined. Get a long piece of Clingfilm out onto the work surface and make 3 balls of the meat mixture about the same size as a snooker ball and put them onto the Clingfilm set apart about 8 inches, put another sheet of Clingfilm on top and push the meat out into disks about 5-6 inches across.

3. Take care to peel the eggs very carefully as they are only soft boiled and very delicate; when you got all 9 shells off pull up the top layer of Clingfilm and pick up the meat disks, one at a time, and wrap them around the eggs evenly so they make perfect spheres and none of the egg underneath is showing. Repeat this 9 times until you have nine meatballs with eggs hiding inside.

4. Get 3 bowls, in the first put the flour and chilli powder in and mix them together with a little salt and pepper. In the second crack and beat the remaining 2 eggs. In the third put the breadcrumbs.

5. Heat the oil in a deep pan till it pushes the 200°C mark, seriously hot basically. Roll the balls through the flour, then the egg, then the breadcrumbs. Deep fry them in batches of three until they’re golden brown, get them out with a slotted spoon and leave them to drain on kitchen towel. Serve with salad and Mary Berry’s ‘Special Mustard Dressing’ from Waitrose, the best dressing in town. 

Chicken Satay Momos

In June last year I had a near death experience; several near death experiences actually. All of which happened whilst travelling around the mountainous Northern echelons of the sub-continent in the back of a more than questionable bus, driven, or perhaps more aptly – hurtled, around the most indescribably terrifying passes on earth. They say that Bolivia is home to the world’s most dangerous road, they call it ‘El Camino del Muerte’; the road of death. Around 26 busses packed with tourists and locals alike plunge over the edge every year into the precipice of doom, not to mention the droves of thrill seeking cyclists who over shoot on any one of the 130km of unforgiving bends. It is a truly bone chilling experience that would have even the most hardened of atheistic nut cases reaching for the nearest edition of the King James. I know as I spent the best part of 50 hours stuck between two landslides on the very same road whilst journeying towards the Amazon basin.

The statistics speak for themselves; however I believe the title of ‘World’s Most Dangerous Road’ only applies because the Bolivians are actually keeping count of the lives claimed every year. The road, if you can call it that, between Leh, India’s Northern most town and final outpost before Tibet and Manali deep in the heart of the Parvati Valley, claims as many lives in a month as ‘El Camino del Muerte’ does in a whole year. The reason the deaths aren’t documented is because the Himalayas are so high that when a bus disappears over the edge, it is lost forever along with the doomed souls within.

Having stopped for a yaks milk hot chocolate at the highest service station on earth; no more than a handful of Tibetan yurts at well over 5000 metres above sea level, I climbed back into the bus and held on for dear life as we climbed further still to the world’s highest drivable pass at nearly 5600 metres, 1000 metres higher than anywhere in continental Europe. Even when we’d reached our highest point the mighty Himalayas loomed dramatically above us pushing well past the 7000 metre mark; nowhere on earth does one get such a humbling feeling of perceptive enormity.

We began our descent out of the sub zero summer temperatures into more temporal climbs, dramatic waterfalls cascaded out of the clouds down the valley walls and out of sight into the caverns below. We passed a large group of motorcyclists roaring up the gravel track astride their Enfield 500s, bellowing as they tore up on the inside line. The final biker misjudged the corner and flew past in front of our bus; as if in slow motion I panned across and watched in dumb founded horror as he disappeared over the edge drifting weightlessly away from his saddle and out of sight.

“Stop the bus”, I screamed.

The driver who hadn’t quite registered what had happened slowed down and drove aimlessly toward the edge.

“Stop the fucking bus”, I shouted even louder.

I pulled back the door and jumped out, running towards the edge and looking down into a ravine with a fast flowing stream gushing over sharp glacial rocks. It took me a few moments to focus on him, but when I did I saw two leather clad legs protruding from underneath a 200kg motorcycle; he was face down in the water with the bike lying on top of him.

With the adrenaline coursing through my veins I jumped off the edge into two feet of scree and slid manically down the fifty or so feet to the water’s edge, before clambering up the steep incline through the gushing torrent to where the bike lay with the man beneath it. The machine weighed next to nothing as I picked it up and threw it off him; by this time two of his riding partners had descended down the other side of the gorge and together we pulled him out of the water and onto his back. His eyes were in the back of his head, blood was pouring down his forehead and there was white froth coming from his mouth.

Did the froth mean he was breathing? Was it his last breath leaving his lifeless body? Had I just seen someone die right in front of me?

His eyes rolled forward and water spluttered from his mouth, he was delirious, but he was alive. I stepped back to give him some space and let his friends take care of him. They thanked me for reacting so quickly and I clambered back up the slope to where my terrified girlfriend stood next to the bus; by this time a hoard of apathetic locals had gathered to look on, some with apparent amusement, at the scene which had unfolded below.

Back on the bus we drove for another 20 minutes till we reached a plateau with a Chai shop, I sat down with a cup of tea and unashamedly shed a few tears. I’ve never felt so shaken in my life.

When we finally arrived in Manali another 20 hours and several peaks later I slept like a baby, never have I felt so happy to have my own two feet on the ground. The next day we sat in a café all day writing about our experiences, gazing out across the misty river valley, and eating some of the most delicious Tibetan food in town. Which brings me round, finally, to the Chicken Satay Momos.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

You’ll need a Chinese bamboo steamer for this, or a vegetable steamer

1 cooked rotisserie chicken, all the meat shredded

1 large red onion, finely chopped

3cm root ginger, crushed

1 red chilli, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushed

6 spring onions, chopped into 3cm lengths

2 tablespoons smooth peanut butter

2 tablespoons light soy sauce

3 cups plain flour

1 - 2 cups of water

4 tablespoons Sweet chilli sauce

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

Ground nut oil for frying

 Method:

1. In a bowl make a well in the flour and pour in the water, mix well into a dough (as for bread making), knead for 5/10 minutes until not sticky any more. You will need to dust your work surface with flour so your dough doesn’t stick. When you’ve done kneading it whack it in a bowl and cover it with a wet tea towel and set aside for half an hour.

2. In a frying pan add a slug of ground nut oil and fry the onions, garlic, chilli and ginger for a few minutes till the onions soften. Chuck in the chicken and mix well, then add the peanut butter and melt it through. Finally add the soy sauce and stir well, fry for another couple of minutes and take off the heat.

3. Now get the dough and roll it into a long sausage about 3cm thick, cut this into lengths about half the size of your index finger and roll each segment out into a thin circle about 10cm across, making sure that the dough is thinner at the edges. This is because when you come to twist them together they aren’t too thick and doughy on top.

4. Place a heaped dollop of the chicken satay mix into the middle of each dough circle, and pull up the edge over the top in a clockwise direction till the mix is covered, twist them closed. Do this to all of them and put them in the top segment of the Chinese / vegetable steamer. Pour a couple of inches of water into a wok and put the steamer on top. Cook them for 10 – 15 minutes or until the dough is dry to touch and not sticky. Then chuck in the chopped spring onions and drizzle a little soy over the momos, steam for a further 2 minutes and take off the heat.

5. Serve with the dip made from the sesame, sweet chilli and dark soy.

Real Nice Presents: HOT SINCE 82 @ Westbourne Studios 10th Feb 2012

Around five years ago I found myself in the basement of an enormous house in Bristol, a white house, inside and out. Although the particular room I was in was covered floor to ceiling in tin foil and had a budget laser whipping around in no particular direction making me feel extremely ill, to the point where upon being introduced to an exceptionally good looking girl, I vomited on my own shoe, explained that “usually I was much cooler” (only just), before making a swift exit. The night continued to go downhill and at 5am I woke in a gutter at least 800 yards from the house, wearing just my boxers. Strong.

Each time I ventured down to the West from my beloved Leeds a similar scenario ensued, in fact I remained in a state of perpetual miasma for the entirety of my further education. West Yorkshire doing it’s very best to break me whilst Bristol egged it on, and visa versa.

Even though I aged several years, put on several stone, lost more than a few marbles along with almost all my dignity. I have fond memories of my jaunts down the M1, around the dismal Birmingham and down the final, exciting stretch of M5 towards the promised land. One of the memories, or perhaps I should say many, that stick where others have faded, are those of watching Ben Real and Sam Nice graduate (not necessarily from Uni) from spinning in living rooms and basements, to taking down thousand strong crowds in Bristol’s Motion, one of the UK’s biggest nightclubs, with a  smelting pot of cranked Electro that would bring Rasputin back from the grave. Flat peaks and Fat Beats. Real Nice.

Time has lapsed, and like fine wine, cheese, and the Olsen twins, Real Nice have matured with class into the Dynamic Deep House Duo they are today. I would even accredit some of my reasonable mixing skill and taste for “the beat” to watching them having a hell of lot of fun behind the wheels of steel. The first song I ever attempted to mix in a club was done with the watchful eyes of both Ben Real and Sam Nice in Edinburgh, I did alright.

Tomorrow night you all have a chance to sample the vintage as Real Nice Presents Noir Music’s ‘Hot Since 82’ at The Westbourne Studios in Notting Hill. Not only will you be able to absorb some of the best Deep House and Future Disco on planet Earth, you’ll be able to hear it through Bassline Productions’ very own Opus Sound System. It’ll be crisper than Walkers.

Ya Dig.

http://www.facebook.com/events/325246734164060/

http://basslineproductions.co.uk

Paneer Tikka

Finally! Some cold weather has come to our shores after a frankly mincing few months of clammy tepidness. Meteorologists have finally got something to do other than twiddle their thumbs, and I don’t know about you but I’m hugely excited to hear the first MET office warning to stay inside and turn the heating up to full so the pipes don’t crack.

This will of course result, as it does every year, in my mother insisting we must go to Tesco and buy an abnormal amount of food in case we’re snowed in for months. The hyperbolic nature of here outlook on life has got so extreme in some cases, that she resides in a state of perpetual embellishment.

“Augustus, there are clothes all over your bedroom floor” - 3 socks and a t-shirt. 

“The kitchen is under water” – The dog’s bowl spilt.

“The television’s broken” – The television, mother, isn’t turned on.

I recall a couple of years ago after a mammoth 4 inches of snow, when the panic of impending starvation loomed like a slim line Damocles, the women in my family trudged off to the supermarket, tennis rackets under foot, with the intention of stockpiling enough bacon to see us through till August and the big thaw. Of course had they checked the chest freezer they would have found a bounty of frozen stuffs so vast it could have seen the Legions of the North through even the harshest of winters. In fact there’s enough bacon in there from the previous few years ice famines to line a rasher from here to Denmark.

It was after last years ‘Big Chill’ that I decided to clear out the freezer in question because I was sure most of the contents would be out of date, I was right. At first I thought Waitrose was bringing back vintage packaging, but it turned out the Salmon filets half way down actually were made in 2001. As I delved further still I found quiches whose labels were written in Olde English, Smileys that looked indifferent, and even a couple of three bird roasts from times of old. I began to question the point of freezing so much stuff in there if it would never get eaten; the answer, I found, was because the freezer is so large that it doesn’t operate efficiently unless it is full. So no sooner had I cleared out the food of the previous millennia, I had to fill it up with fresh goods that would inevitably get thrown away in a decade or so. Including plenty of bacon.

I still get on at my mother for buying too much food, however I fear it may be a losing battle. The ‘buy one get one free’ offers are largely responsible, or worse ‘buy two get one free’, because lets be honest you only needed one in the first place but a deal is almost impossible to shy away from. My dad’s the same, he recently brought two Brompton bicycles off EBay, having had his original bike stolen from the train. His logic was that this way he wouldn’t get too attached to either of them, but really it was the fact the second bike was extremely cheap – a good deal.

Is it perhaps a time for downsizing then? Mum is still shopping for six people, but very rarely are there more than three sitting down to eat. I’m in London for most of the week and with any financial luck hope to move down permanently in a month or so, my two younger sisters are in Gloucestershire and Africa respectively, my elder sister is dieting, or at least she was, and even the old girl herself only has a blended shake for breakfast, a disgusting cereal bar for lunch, and a glass of water for tea. Time I think to bid farewell to the freezer.

Ingredients: (Serves 4) 

2 packs of paneer, cut into 1” cubes (hard cottage cheese, available in the supermarket)

2 large tomatoes, chopped into chunks

1 red pepper, chopped into 1” bits

1 courgette, sliced

2 red onions, quartered

Juice of 2 lemons

2 tspns chilli powder

2 tspns amchur powder (mango powder)

2 tspns cumin powder

1 tspn garam masala

Salt and Pepper

Rapeseed oil

 Method:

1. Marinate / cover the paneer cubes in the spices and seasoning.

2. Make kebab skewers with the paneer, tomatoes, courgettes, onions and peppers. Brush the kebabs with the rapeseed oil and grill them over/under a high heat for a few minutes so the spices cook into the cheese, take them out and drizzle the lemon juice over them before returning to the grill for 10 minutes or until the vegetables are browned nicely.

3. Serve with rice and mango chutney. A winter warmer.