Brewing up a storm.

Those who know me well will know that I gave up alcohol for 10 months last year and since then I have not drunk anywhere near the volume that I was for most of my adult life. The interesting thing is that I now enjoy the drinks I have much more than I did previously. I have also become very choosy when it comes to what I am drinking. I linger at the beer section, umming and aghing at the selection now available and look forward to tasting the beer I buy rather than just drinking it.
It was during one of these decision making exercises that I spotted a couple of beers from a company called BrewDog. 5AM Saint (an amber ale, full flavoured malty and topped off with the most amazing fruity, floral top notes.) and Punk IPA (described as a "post modern classic pale ale") were both superb handcrafted, complex and delicious.
Apart from the superb quality of their products, the thing which appealed to me most about this 5 year old company was the attitude of their marketing. They are unashamedly angry about the quality of mass produced, establishment beers, they describe themselves as "pure punk." In their own words "BrewDog is a modern day rebellion against faceless corporate bureaucracy and the bland, soulless beer they industrially produce"
Their website www.brewdog.com is a testament to this irreverent attitude.
In many ways I am very "establishment" and not a fan of negative promotional campaigns but we need many more companies in the ethical food movement like this. Its no longer good enough just to produce a great ethical, artisan or unique product; we need some serious anger in the marketing of these great products. We also need to get angry as consumers and stop settling for the bland, the over industrial, the globalised and the boring food and drink products that have been sold to us as the norm for the last few decades.
In conclusion, I quote again from the mass of vitriol supplied in all of BrewDog's copy - "BrewDog is about breaking rules, taking risks, upsetting trends, unsettling institutions but first and foremost, great tasting beers"
Amen to that!

Aaaaaagh!

I am incandescent with rage, I sit here stuttering with a combination of disbelief and fury. "So what's the matter, Cook?" I hear you ask. Therein lies a short tale.
We get a half dozen eggs delivered every Wednesday from the wonderful folks at Rent-a-Hen. We have been getting eggs from Anita and John since we moved out here. The concept is that you rent a hen from them. You don't actually get a hen but you are guaranteed 6 beautiful free range eggs every week. We used to collect them, but as their business has grown they now deliver and we rush home on Wednesday to scrambled eggs. I cannot recommend this company enough, they are exactly what the ethical food movements are all about.
"So" I hear you say again "What is the matter?"
Well, It appears that some lunatic has decided that you cannot now re-use egg boxes as it carries a cross infection risk. What are these imbeciles thinking? People have been taking egg boxes back for refilling for decades and I can find no incidence of contamination. Yes, yes I know the shell of an egg is porous but really people, get a grip. This will add cost to food production and will increase the need for re-cycling which is much more expensive than re-using. The only consolation is that most cardboard of this type is compostable.
I sometimes wonder if there hasn't been a release of gas over the offices of these bureaucrats. I shall, however, continue to enjoy amazing eggs this Easter with a clear conscience and only a little bit of anger at the lunacy.

Roast alternative.

When one cooks for many people the idea of a "Sunday Roast" is a simple affair. One buys a flipping huge lump of Beef, Pork or Lamb and applies heat. A short while later everyone at the table starts oohing and aghing as the said lump of flesh is served. When there are only two of you this becomes extremely difficult. Roasting meat is a strange thing - in order to be really delicious a joint of meat has to be be a considerable size, little pieces of meat simply dry up and turn to leather. This leaves the gourmet couple with a dilemma - miss out on the glory that is a full roast dinner or find yourself eating cold cuts for a week after the roast.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the cold cut and, in the interests of food efficiency, if we cook it we should eat it; but eating Roast Lamb followed by Shepherds pie, followed by lamb curry followed by Hot Pot can all get a tad samey.
The following recipe is a antidote to this sad situation and provides a remarkably inexpensive roast dinner for two.

Stuffed Chicken Legs
Two (free range, high animal welfare) chicken legs.
Two sausages (I've used Toulouse, but any high quality ones will do)
Two rashers of free range,dry cure, streaky bacon (smoked if you like)

Take all of the bones out of the legs from the inside of the leg. This will take a short time as it does take practice but its worth the extra few minutes, just keep going with little cuts till the bones come away. Make sure you keep the skin on. Level out any of the flesh. Take the sausage meat out of the skins and put about one third of each sausage on the drumstick end and the rest on the thigh end and wrap up the legs again. Secure the thigh end by wrapping bacon around it and, if necessary secure the drummer with a cocktail stick. Tuck the skin in if there is any overlapping. Roast in a medium hot oven for about 45 minutes. Allow to rest for about 10 minutes, slice into about 5 pieces and serve with all your usual trimmings.

Lamb course

Last Monday I attended a course of Lamb butchery at the Ginger Pig. For those of you who don't know of the Ginger Pig it is the most amazing butchers in the UK. What started as a bit of a hobby for Tim Wilson became a business and now sets the standard in terms of animal welfare and husbandry. They not only provide beautiful meat but taking it from field to plate ensures that they control the process.
The course was great fun with Perry and Borat guiding us through the anatomy, butchery and cooking of lamb. We each boned and rolled a shoulder to take home. The evening finished with a feast of lamb shoulder with mashed potatoes, followed by bread and butter pudding laced with chocolate. It was a great evening and my second of these courses - I've already started saving for the Beef course, or maybe I'll do the sausage making evening.
The message from successful ethical meat businesses such Ginger Pig is clear: Eat less meat, eat better meat and expect to pay a fair price for it.

The kindness of food.

Providing food for a person is an act of the purest kindness. The nurturing effect of food is obvious, but the nurturing effect of feeding a person is often overlooked. We hear about food being cooked with love but, let's be honest, that is usually an excuse for bad food being forced upon a long suffering family. However, recently I have seen two life affirming examples of what joy the kindness of food can bring.
One of the choirs in which I sing is the local Benefice choir -we meet up for four Sung Evensongs a year, one in each of the four churches in the Benefice. A few rehearsals before the chosen Sundays and a great leader enable us to provide a lovely service every 3 month or so. The highlight for me, as a foodie, is the "bring and share Tea". Between final rehearsal on the Sunday and the evensong we retire to the Church Warden's house, each of us carrying our "best dish" (millionaire's shortbread in my case) and we eat, share and laugh. The last time we sang, many of us we worried for our loved ones or sad through recent loss. The handing of food to each other, everybody a little proud of themselves, drove to the very core of human kindness.
The second kindness was from one of my new colleagues (he and his wife both work at the school - The Couple) after a few chats in the staffroom we discovered that we both have a passion for baking bread. I was delighted, ten days ago, to find a small present of a sour dough ferment waiting for me. I nurtured this, adding a little flour and water every day and at the weekend I baked my first ever sour dough loaf - what a feeling of success. This is the gold standard of home bread making and it was only today that I realised that this massive feeling of success grew from a small act of food kindness.

Simple, warming supper.

We have all had far too much rich food, I'm sure. So last night I went for one of my favourite winter meals - Risotto. A simple risotto can be made from store cupboard ingredients (rice, onion, garlic and a few good stock cubes) but it becomes much more fun when you add interesting bits to the mix.
Risotto is one of those dishes for which everybody believes they have the definitive recipe. "Well they didn't make it like that when I was in Milan", "No, no it has to be Carnoroli darrrling", "You can only stir clockwise, it simply doesn't work otherwise", "It has to be served at exactly 69 degrees centigrade"
As with many dishes there is a whole host of myths and rumours surrounding the making of a good risotto. The truth is, making a good risotto is easy and, lets be honest, we're only making a savoury rice pudding here.
So here are my tips for a stress free risotto (the purists and pedants can stop reading here).
Fry finely chopped onion in, what looks like, too much oil and butter (about 50:50) till it becomes transparent. Add a little finely chopped garlic and fry for just a minute. Add "enough" rice (as good as you can afford - make sure it is one of the risotto rices though - Arborio, Carnoroli, etc)and fry till it starts to sound like "frying".
Pour in a couple of ladles of hot (and I mean nearly boiling) stock and stir. Keep adding hot stock and stirring till the risotto is how you like it - oozy, stiff or soupy - the choice is yours but do make sure the rice is cooked. Add enough cheese (Parmesan is apt but a strong cheddar works) to make it smooth and silky.
Now that's the basic risotto, but the fun comes when you start to add interesting stuff. The Beautiful Wife love peas in her risotto and I'm a huge fan of little dice of salami.
Last night I made the risotto with peas and then popped some Chorizo, sliced and fried, on top. A trickle of the wonderful, paprika laden fat poored over the top completed the picture.
I am no purist so I am quite comfortable mixing Italian classics with Spanish ingredients.
Chorizo come in two types those which require cooking and those which do not, This was a "picante" cooking sausage bought from Tony at "What's cooking?" in Thame.

New Year's Eve

So here it is - tonight's dinner. So it looks quite pleasant, but nothing to get excited about. It is, however a landmark meal. This, my dear readers is the last of the turkey, in a pie. I bought the smallest turkey crown I could find and that along with an equally small gammon that I roasted has seen us through the entire post Christmas period.
One of the joys of being on holiday for the last two weeks has been the fact that we could take lunch rather than grabbing it.
Many of those lunches have been built around cold cuts. This added to a chicken liver pate and the great joy that is cold, sliced stuffing has provided a wonderful middle of the day break from whatever we were doing.
My brother, "The Stockbroker" was here for lunch twice during the last week or so and I didn't have the heart to feed him with the same stuff twice so I looked to provide something different on his second visit.
With a collection of root vegetables which were not used on the day and a little inspiration from my new Abel and Cole calendar I came up with the recipe below.
Indian Root Cakes
Root vegetables ( I used a small swede, two parsnips, a little bit of celeriac and two carrots)
1 medium onion
2 garlic cloves
1tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp coriander
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp chilli powder
1tsp ground ginger
1 egg
1 slug of milk
2 or 3 mugs of breadcrumbs
Salt and pepper
Flour
Oil for cooking

Peel and boil the root vegetables until they are all mashable. While these are boiling, finely chop the onion and fry it in a little oil until it is just starting to colour. Add the garlic and all the dried spices and cook for a couple of minutes. Allow this to cool. Take the roots off the heat, drain and allow to steam off in a colander for a good half hour. Mash the roots and add the onion and spice mix. Season and pop in the fridge for a few hours or overnight. Make an egg wash of the egg and milk and make the vegetable mix into tennis ball sized balls and flatten into disks so the resemble an old fashioned fishcake. Coat these in the flour and the the egg; follow this with the breadcrumbs. These can now be fried in a little more oil than you would normally use (it needs to come half way up the sides of the cakes). The key here is to make sure that the oil is hot enough to fry the coating to a seal fast. pop a little bit of bread in first to give you an idea of how hot it is. Fry the cakes until they are golden brown and crispy, then pop in the oven to enable you to fry the others.

I served these with some griddled broccoli with chilli and garlic (a recipe I adapted from the wonderful Ottolenghi cook book) Blanched broccoli was mixed with a little oil and then griddles on a cast iron griddle. This was added to some garlic and sliced chilli which had been fried off to release its flavours. A dash of soy sauce added a little salt. A lunch which deserves to be sat down and sat up to.

Happy new year!