Category: Food

Lamb Tagine

Lamb Tagine needs harissa, and I didn’t have any in the fridge, so I made a batch. This is the red pepper being roasted so that it can be skinned. You just keep it in the flame, twisting and turning, until its skin is blackened in most places, before putting it in a plastic bag to cool. It will take ages to cool, and if you try to do anything with it before it has done, it will injure you with the steam from inside.
Here’s the pepper, waiting to scald the careless cook. Once it is cool, it has to be peeled, or you can look at it as scraping the cooked flesh off the burnt skin. The resulting chunks of cooked red pepper flesh should be chopped up. I didn’t chop this one, and discovered that the big chunks can somehow avoid the blades of the blender completely. I ended up having to fish them out and chop them.
Here are the coriander, cumin and caraway seeds, being toasted. Since I’m not giving you the full recipe, you can look at it here. There’s also chilli, garlic, lemon juice, and tomato paste in the harissa.

For some reason, no fresh chillis had grown in the garden, or appeared in the fridge, so I used dried ones, revitalised with some boiling water.

The tagine recipe is very similar to this Nigel Slater one. He must have a lot of money, to be able to put saffron in something that will totally obscure the flavour and colour, I think. My secret ingredient, that he doesn’t use, is preserved lemons, which you can see in the jar, here. They are wonderfully lemony, and you can taste them in the finished dish. They are also rather salty, so no extra salt is needed in the dish.

Dinner time! Cheers!


The cous cous is a good accompaniment for the tagine, but everyone seems to know their own way to make it. This one had our first broad beans in it, and a couple of runner beans. 

Yes, thank you, I did enjoy it!

Italian Sausages and Polenta with a Chilli Tomato Sauce

I was supposed to be following a Nigella Lawson recipe when I made this. It’s supposed to be “Italian Sausages and Polenta with a Chilli Tomato Sauce”.

Well, we had no Italian Sausages, so I took some Tesco 97% pork sausages, and attempted to shorten the links by twisting them, so they were about the same length as the ones in Nigella’s book. They’re supposed to be fried in chilli oil for five minutes, to darken the skins, which was fun. Watching them untwist themselves back into normal links was fascinating.

As well as the Italian sausages, I didn’t have two jars of “high end” ready made tomato and chilli sauce. Some red onion, olive oil, two tins of chopped tomatoes, and some chilli sauce sorted that out. Another thing that wasn’t in the larder was Marsala. Cheap Spanish red wine and brown sugar went in instead.

Polenta. I chose not to use the “instant” ready made stuff, which had to be cooked for 15 minutes, and made it myself, which involved stirring more or less continuously for 45 minutes, and dodging the lumps of molten lava that were thrown out of the pan when the huge bubbles burst.

I think I’ll make normal bangers and mash, next time, with ketchup…

Salad days!

A little hard to see, perhaps, but along with the iceberg lettuce from the shop are homegrown mint, parsley, rocket and spinach. The feta cheese is the good stuff, but the olives are disappointing ones from a jar I was intending to use for olive bread. The greens were spritzed with Cretan balsamic vinegar, and drizzled with Greek extra virgin olive oil.
A cucumber and tomato salad, with cider vinegar, more Greek olive oil, and a dusting of Cretan oregano. The celery was at the side because I thought somebody didn’t like it.
Tuna and mayonnaise, with more sweet smoked paprika than I meant to use. I was told I could have used more mayonnaise, though I think less, with more tuna, would have been better.

Today’s bread…

Today’s bread was rather amusing, to start with. I began making it yesterday, a  yeasted wholemeal loaf, and put it in the fridge overnight. When I got it out this morning, it had obviously carried on rising, and it seemed to me that the easiest way to get it out of the bowl was to flour the worksurface, and let gravity do the work. Then, I forgot it was there, and when I came back an hour or two later, I found it was now lifting the bowl up off the worksurface. At this point, I must say, I thought it must have finished rising, and would cook into a tasty brick. I shaped it anyway, and put it in a tin to see if it would rise any more.

Much to my relief, it hadn’t finished rising, and went from the state you see here to being at least an inch above the top of the tin by the time the oven was hot enough. So, I made the usual slash in the top to allow for oven spring, and banged it in the oven.
Here you go! Look at that stretched area on the side! There’s an enormous amount of oven spring! I will be very surprised if this doesn’t have a vast cave in its middle, but we shall see in due course…

Pulled Pork with Beans and Focaccia

Well, I hadn’t made it before, so it was really rather overdue. By this time, after all, it is no longer even trendy, and supermarkets are flogging it ready made.

Here is a mighty lump of pork, which has been marinating for about a day, in a mixture of spices. I could mess around and say it was a secret mix, but it was mainly mustard powder, smoked paprika, salt, and a few other spices that seemed like a good idea, but have now been forgotten. I suppose that makes it a bit secret…
Between that picture, and the next, you need to imagine the meat being sploshed with a mix of vinegar, water, and more spices, before being wrapped in foil, and put in a warm (about 100°C) oven for ages and ages. It must have been more than 8 hours…


While that was happening, I made a nice loaf of focaccia, as I didn’t really fancy the faff of making bread rolls.

And I made some beans in a tomato sauce. Those little Tetrapaks of cooked beans in your friendly Tesco are very useful for this sort of thing, although soaking dried beans overnight would have been more authentic. If only I had thought of that when I was marinating the meat!
The gravy boat contains the juices from the foil containment, with some added sriracha. It was a bit too runny to use in the meaty sandwiches, though. Next time I will boil it ferociously until it thickens.

It’s obvious I didn’t make a nice, green salad to go with it all, and it’s not just out of excessive carnivorousness. I just don’t think we would have been able to eat it. That’s a lot of food there, and I have since had to work out tasty uses for leftovers. No, dear reader, I cannot email them to you…

Pizza time

It was indeed time for some pizza. I made the dough rise faster than usual, by using a tad more dried yeast. On the left, you can see half of it, with tomato paste, pesto, anchovies, chorizo, and green and black olives. The mozarella is waiting patiently at the side.

Confession time. The dough recipe was for three or even four pizzas. Failing to read the recipe properly, I used half of it. So, it was natural I would be surprised by how much the dough had risen in its twelve minutes in the oven, on top of a hot stone.

This was my half, and I managed to eat almost all of it. I like the way the hot stone bakes the dough so evenly; there’s no sign of the soggy middle that can happen. In the next post, a dessert!

Rye bread – nailed it!

The Talking Squid wishes to remind you that what you see on the Google+ page is only the beginning of the blog post…
Yesterday, at last, I finally managed to make a rye bread that  I was completely happy with. I just followed the recipe in “Food DIY” exactly. No experimenting with turning it back into a sourdough. This one was made with dried yeast. 

Why is “Save the Deli” in the picture, though? It’s because it is mentioned in Tim Hayward’s book, where he talks about how a good rye bread really shouldn’t be something that you have to suffer to eat and digest. It’s a good read, too, although the earlier chapters are rather like a sequence of magazine articles gathered together to make a book. It has, quite unsurprisingly, a lot of Yiddish words sprinkled through the text, a thing that used to annoy me when I was reading Playboy in 1970. [Yes, I read it. The other people on the ship used to complain that I kept it for too long. I suspect some of them were only looking at the pictures.] Fortunately, there is a glossary at the end of “Save the Deli”, translating these words, and describing in enticing detail what the foods they refer to are like. It’s just a shame I didn’t realise that until I got to the end of the book…

In case you wondered, “Cooking from Cyprus” is there because there are some dishes in it that I want to make soon. Cypriot food is good, especially some of the cured meats, and I was thinking that it has been ages since I had a good slice or three of lountza…
Here is a gratuitous picture of a slice of the bread with a sardine on it. I’m the only one in my family who actually likes sardines. And besides, I have run out of pastrami, which I suppose was bound to happen, given the arrival of a suitable rye bread…

Merguez sausages

It’s that picture of sausage casings that I posted a couple of days ago, all over again!

I had intended to write this much sooner, but there was a pause while I sorted out a fairly major computer problem. I may have created all sorts of new problems by doing that, of course, but they have not happened yet…

There are quite a few Merguez sausage recipes online, and the usual misery-guts commenters asking why on earth would you bother, as you can buy cheap ones in shops? If that is the sort of thing you think, you are reading the wrong pages.


When home made food is done properly, it is better than the factory stuff. Take, for example, sausages. I just looked at a pack of quite good commercial ones. As well as meat, 85%, they contain calcium carbonate (chalk), brown sugar, sodium metabisulphite, and a few other mysterious things. Mine contain meat, herbs and spices. /rant



This is the larger size of sausage stuffer for our mincer, with some nicely soaked hog casing threaded on it. Merguez is often made with the smaller sheep casings, but I don’t currently have any of those.
Having mixed the minced Welsh lamb breast and shoulder with a good amount of my home made harissa paste, and some salt, I’ve started stuffing. I’m glad to say that I seem to be getting back into the way of doing this, as there are hardly any air spaces in this one. Bacteria can breed in the spaces, you see.
It always amazes me how strong the casings are, when I twist them into links like this. Beautiful little things, aren’t they? I believe I will have a couple for tea tonight.
This, however, is annoying. There’s always some of the meat left in the mincer that will not emerge because it has passed the end of the spiral thing that moves it along. Having thought about this, I think I can solve it next time, by putting something like stale bread through the mincer to push it out.

In the meantime, though, the solution is simple enough. One simply makes the remaining meat into a patty, and fries it. This is as good a way as any of finding out how the sausages are going to taste.

Here we go…

Yes, it was delicious. Really delicious.

A cherry cheesecake.

What would cause these cracks in the cheesecake, I do not know. Even more annoyingly, it turned out that I had the base of the springform tin upside down, so the cheesecake was very difficult to slide off it. Still, I managed to do that without too much damage.
I feel quite guilty that I just made do with a tin of cherry topping. It’s not too bad, but a lot of it is cornflour and sugar. Maybe next time I’ll do something a little more authentic… 









Anyway, I have tasted it, and enjoyed it enough to have another slice.

Lessons learned: assemble the tin correctly, try not to get too much air in the cheesy mix, and now go for a long, long walk.

Risotto, and a dessert.

Nearly ready!

Last night’s risotto, which I made with arborio rice, red onion, garlic, white wine, vegetable stock, parmesan, fresh parsley, dried porcini, dried mixed mushrooms, and fresh shiitake mushrooms. 

When it was finished, it looked like this. It was really quite good, as my wife said so.
I‘ve only just noticed that the spoon in the parmesan is one that was given to our son when he was a baby.

Yes, I really did make a dessert!

Nothing particularly fancy, really. Orange ice cream from a recipe by Nigella Lawson. One of Mr Tesco’s meringue nests, and some tinned mandarin segments.