Yes. Yes, you can, and it will look like this…
I salted it, and left it uncovered in the fridge overnight, because that gets the skin dry enough to crisp up nicely when it’s cooked. It only takes about 45 minutes to cook, too!
Duck, served with roasted parsnips, fried courgettes, and an orange flavoured sauce.
Nigella Lawson. Author of numerous cookery books. Star of a quite watchable cookery show, which tends not to be difficult stuff. Daughter of an utter git.
Rather than writing about her, I thought I’d just post some pictures of this morning’s bakery – pear and ginger muffins, from “Nigella Express”, a favourite in our house.
If Nigella, or her publisher, object to me showing this one example recipe, will they please tell me?
You will notice that I annotate recipe books, as how else can you remember how to make the recipe better the next time?
To save time this morning, I did the preparation last night.The bowl contains flour, sugars, baking powder, and ground ginger. The jug was in the fridge all night, and contains vegetable oil, yoghourt and kefir (instead of sour cream), honey, and two large eggs.
Muffin cases onto baking tray. The oven is already pre-heating by this point.
Pour the jug into the bowl after peeling and chopping the pears.
Mix it all together, and spoon the result into the muffin cases.
Sprinkle brown sugar on top, and put them in the oven for 20 minutes. You may have noticed that I annotate recipe books. It’s a good way to remember little details that make things work even better when you use the recipe again. I already said that, but I wondered if you were paying attention.
Hmmm, not too shabby! Thanks to doing the preparation the night before, I was able to do this even without having a coffee first. They do go rather well with coffee, for breakfast.
Sometimes, I just don’t feel like cooking a formal “meat and two veg” dinner. So we have what we call “bits”. Here we have stuffed vine leaves from a tin, a selection of charcuterie from Tesco, a few bits of artichoke, and four dips. The orange coloured one is made from our home-grown carrots, with yoghourt in the middle. Then there’s hummus with dukkah sprinkled on it, a beetroot dip I think I invented, with pine nuts on it, and (probably) an aubergine dip.
Clearly, what’s missing is bread and wine. See below…
Well, we ran out of the last bacon I made, a while ago. Even worse, Mrs Walrus bought some shop bacon, which we know just isn’t as good as the home made kind. You might suppose making bacon is difficult. You might even suppose it’s something to do with an old, vulgar joke, but that’s up to you. How come I know how to do it, then? Simple. I stand on the shoulders of giants…
Well, I had to nip out to the shops, as I had no mozarella, and it is Pizza Saturday. After that, I nipped into the butcher’s shop near the supermarket. (I would have given you a link to Deri Page, St Clears, but I don’t do links to Facebook pages.) There were only a couple of people waiting, and I enjoyed the conversations about their relatives who never eat minced beef, and make that two kilos, please, and what on earth is going on in Laugharne? Then I bought a nice bit of pork belly, complete with skin and ribs.
I used my favourite Sabatier boning knife to separate the ribs from the belly, trying not to cut too close, because when you’re eating ribs off the barbecue, it’s best if there’s a good amount of meat on them. I left the skin on, other bacon makers remove it now. That might give them a quicker cure, but I like the choice of whether to fry the bacon with or without it.
Of course, the remaining meat and skin were too big to fit in my plastic brining box, so I cut them in half.
The cure I used is mostly cooking salt, with some dark brown sugar mixed in, and this time, about half a teaspoonful of ground white pepper. Some of it gets rubbed fairly firmly into the meat, while the rest is kept handy to use as the curing proceeds in the fridge, which is usually about two weeks. I look at it daily, draining the liquid from the box, and checking that no mould is trying to establish itself. If it does, I wipe it off with vinegar soaked kitchen towel. It never comes back from that!
I used to put far more cure than this on at first, but it really doesn’t need that much, and you can end up with bacon that’s too salty.
There are actually two plastic boxes in the picture, the inner one has holes in it for the liquid that emerges from the pork to drain down into. It’s tipped out daily, more cure is added as necessary, and the meat gets turned over. If anyone knows a proper word for that liquid, please enlighten me!
End of part one…
I have washed the cure off, patted the meat dry, and put it back in the fridge, propped up on chopsticks to dry out for a week or so. Then I’ll smoke it. There will be pictures.
A day ago, I set up the ProQ smoker, filled with oak sawdust, in its specially optimised smoke chamber (it’s a galvanised dustbin from B&Q), hung the bacon up, and started the sawdust smouldering. I don’t mess with little candles to light it, a blast from my blow-torch does the trick. It burns for about twelve hours. Today, I went and got the smoked bacon. I’ll be slicing it tomorrow, and vacuum packing the results, before freezing them. I may also have a bacon sandwich.
I have a bacon slicer. It’s not a very good one, but it’s better than my previous one, which was Chinese, and had internal gears moulded roughly from steelmaker’s slag, or possibly something worse. The gears wore out within weeks. Anyway, I’ve sliced the bacon into a range of rashers, rough chunks, and indescribable bits and pieces. They will all taste lovely. And, in order to store portions without continuing to make everything smell like smoked bacon (I’m not saying that’s a bad thing), I have used this lovely little vacuum packing machine.
Forgive me Readers (if any) for I have not blogged about food for over a fortnight!
I just received an email from the Guardian’s Rachel Roddy, about mashed potato. Now I know many people think mash comes in a packet, and you just add water, and some of us are old enough to remember the Cadbury’s Smash robots laughing at our primitive way of making them… “they cut them with their metal knives”.
Normally, I might just read it, and perhaps some of the things it links to, but I was rather impressed with the way Rachel Roddy referenced, in one paragraph, all of…
Rachel Roddy mentions an Italian trattoria, that served
the puree di patate con lardo. It turned out to be a small mound of buttery mashed potato topped with three slices of cured pork back fat that had once been white, but was now translucent as it melted into its mountain. It remains one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten and summed up the joy of mashed potato: ordinary and luxurious, silly and serious. Mash, wonderful mash.
Now, I have wanted to make lardo for ages, but hey, it’s the 21st Century, and farmers in the UK are mostly producing damned skinny pigs, because everyone knows fat is dreadfully bad for us, so you can’t even get pork fat a couple of inches thick, even when you go to a real butcher. Part of the problem is that pigs are not kept until they have time to get properly fat before they’re rushed off to whatever food product factory has the contract for them. It’s the same problem when I make bacon, as well, there’s only just enough fat on it to be able to fry it properly. Once upon a time, you would put bacon in a pan, fry it, fry the eggs in the fat that was left behind, and then soak the fat up with a Staffordshire oatcake, and eat the lot. I once made a batch of Staffordshire oatcakes, and they were wonderful. I must make more, as I no longer live in Staffordshire, and nobody sells ready-made ones here in Wales.
Staffordshire? You know…
Duck is delicious. Sadly, it’s not cheap. But there are ways to make it less expensive.
Buy a whole duck. A whole Gressingham duck currently sells for about £9.
Meanwhile, two duck breasts cost £8, and two duck legs cost £4.50 or thereabouts.
Here’s a whole duck. I’ve pulled the plastic bag of giblets out, and put them in the stock pot, along with the wing tips. There will be more in the pan soon….
Now, with a very sharp knife, and considerable caution, I have cut one breast off the duck. Not very tidy knife-work, but I’m out of practice…
Eventually, one ends up with two duck breasts and two duck legs, for the freezer. When I have collected four legs, I will make confit duck legs.
The duck breasts seem to be smaller than the ones they sell separately. My guess is that they use their biggest ducks for the portions, and sell the smaller ones whole.
The rest of the carcase just gets broken up, submerged in water, and boiled for a while, resulting in a delicious stock. What can I use that for, you ask?
Well, I used it for ramen. There wasn’t quite enough duck meat on the carcase for this, so I quickly cooked a couple of chicken thighs, you can see it at the top of the bowl. This was a lovely dish for a cold, wet evening…
Sure, I find recipes online, and sometimes I change things when I don’t have the full list of ingredients. That’s normal, surely? But then there are these people…
“One lemon is sufficient. I added a big bunch of kale at the end as I felt it needed some green. I roasted the squash then added to the pan. I added almonds with the coriander at the end to give a bit of crunch. I made my own harissa paste using chipotle. Nice meal with a depth of flavour.”
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/squash-chicken-couscous-one-pot
This was a “one pot” recipe. If you want kale with it, serve it separately. Of course, you’ve defeated the one-pot-ness of it, but this really won’t taste good if you shove kale in it. And the squash was supposed to disintegrate to make the sauce, but you’ve got nice crusty lumps of squash. Did it even need “a bit of crunch”, what with being a stew and all that implies?
Also, you can’t make harissa with chipotle. You’ve made some sort of chipotle sauce.
Some of the comments are a lot more sensible.
5 stars from us, followed the recipe to the letter and really liked the freshness the lemon brought to it …. Like a tagine but without using expensive preserved lemons. Portions are huge, this made 6 generous portions so some bonus portions for the freezer 😊
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/squash-chicken-couscous-one-pot
Now, call me greedy (OK, I am), but two chicken breasts doesn’t seem particularly generous for six people. I suppose one reason for recipes like this IS to feed more people with less meat, though.
However, if you put cut up a lot of lemons and put them in a big jar with salt, you’ll find preserved lemons are actually not expensive. And they’re brilliant in a tagine! https://doctor-dark.co.uk/blog/lamb-tagine/
I had a little rant, a while ago, about the bizarre ways some recipes tell us to judge temperatures. https://doctor-dark.co.uk/blog/weird-stuff-in-recipes-part-94/
Many of them involve testing the temperature of hot oil by dropping in a cube of bread, and noting how long it takes to turn “golden”, which is generally described as being around thirty seconds. The size of the cube of bread is rarely, if ever, given. I wonder how many cubes of bread have been wasted in this way? My solution was to buy a cheap electronic thermometer, or perhaps even a quite good one, as the less cheap ones tend to give a reading more quickly.
If you’ve eaten at a commercially run barbecue, for instance, you will have seen the cooks poking a quick reading thermometer into the food, to see if it can safely be eaten, or will cause illness.
I was reminded of this, when I looked up labna/labneh in Claudia Roden’s “The Book of Jewish Food” recently.
The idea of poking your little finger in the food, and trying to keep it there while counting to ten (and how fast?) when the food is hot enough for it to “sting” is somewhat disturbing.
And don’t try this with hot oil! It will do more than just sting…
Roden, C. (1999). The Book Of Jewish Food. New York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc.
An Indian court is going to hear claims from two restaurants, as to which of them is entitled to claim they invented butter chicken.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/25/indias-courts-to-rule-on-who-invented-butter-chicken
In our recipe book collection, we have several recipes that are called butter chicken, here are just two…
I don’t know whether either restaurant has a valid claim, but if Rick Stein is right, it’s pretty much a standard Amritsari way to cook the beasts.
I wanted to make labna, the soft cheese popular in the Middle East. Basically, it’s strained yoghourt. It would clearly be expensive to make it from good shop yoghourt, like Fage, at about £5 for a 900g tub, our favourite from Greece, so I decided to start making my own. Cue intensive internet “research”…
It turns out that Lakeland are selling the Easiyo yoghourt maker for half price, which I took to be an auspicious omen. The internet says the charity shops of the country are full of the things, because people get fed up with buying the ready-made powder the makers want you to keep buying, but I got myself a clean new one, for about £10.
The internet kindly pointed out that I wouldn’t need to go to all the bother of heating the milk to a certain temperature, and then cooling it before adding a live starter. Instead, I’m using UHT milk, which somebody else has heated, cooled, and put in a handy box.
So, I put UHT milk and a couple of spoonfuls of Yeo Valley organic natural live yoghourt in the inner jar, filled the youghourt maker with boiling water, put it all together, and left it overnight.
The result was a good, set, yoghourt. Not very solid, but tasty. The next step was to put it in cheesecloth, and strain it. There’s three layers of cheesecloth in the picture, as I thought even quite thick yoghourt might run through it, but one turns out to be enough.
Now, the Mezze book says one of the things I can do with labna is make little balls, and keep them in olive oil, in the fridge, ready for use. I had a go, but only made a few, before deciding that the process was too messy, and wasteful. The rest has gone back into the fridge to dry out some more.