Recipe: Cheese Biscuits

These are biscuits-containing-cheese, not to be confused with biscuits-to-be-served-with-cheese. To be consumed, preferably still warm from the oven, these are delicious (and very more-ish) with a glass of chilled white wine, or two, as an aperitif. Spicy and with a good 'edgy' flavour, they are best eaten just as they are; you can use them as a base for something spreadable, but I think the point rather gets lost in the process.

This is another of those recipes that's so simple and quick that it barely merits being called a recipe. A minute or so to make the biscuit dough, time to let it rest, and thereafter, the time it takes to roll and cut out the biscuits, and twenty minutes or so to bake them. You'd never guess the simplicity of the process, though, from the quality of the end result. First class!

For about 20 biscuits.

Ingredients: 60g Butter, cut into approx 1cm dice; 60g strongly flavoured hard-ish Cheese (extra mature Cheddar is good, or a strongly-flavoured Pecorino - I suppose Parmesan could also work well, but I tend to use it to make Parmesan Crisps for this kind of purpose), also cut into approx 1 cm dice; 75g plain Flour; 1 tsp Salt; 1 tsp Paprika; 1 tsp dry Mustard.

Method:
1. Process all ingredents together in a food processor, until they form one homogeneous lump - this might take 15 seconds or so. Wrap the ball of processed dough in clingfilm and leave to rest in the fridge for an hour.

2. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C.

3. On a floured surface, roll the dough to a 5 mm thickness and cut out 5 cm diameter biscuits from it; place these on a greased (or trennwaxed) baking sheet.

4. Bake for twenty minutes in the pre-heated oven until brown and crisp, then remove to a cooling rack, before serving.

How to de-bone a Chicken...

Or a Duck, or a Guinea-fowl, or a Poussin, or indeed any kind of poultry whatsoever; there are some minor internal differences between each of them, but nothing that need get in the way of this process, which is actually quite straightforward and is well worth mastering.
A de-boned bird goes much further than one which has been cooked bone-in ( a medium-sized Chicken will feed six people with ease, treated this way) and a bird which you buy whole and cut up yourself comes out to be much cheaper than the aggregate cost of all the parts, were you to buy them all separately. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a whole Duck, which I then de-boned, and used the carcase for stock, the breasts for a main course for four, the legs for confit, and the fat was rendered down into a generous amount that should last me several weeks at least as a delicious cooking agent. Bought separately, that lot would have come to around £18 - which was almost twice what the duck had actually cost me.

I can't remember when I first de-boned Chicken, but I certainly associate it with a Paul Bocuse recipe for boned-and-roast Chicken, which I first started to do sometime in the mid eighties (I think I saw him demonstrate it on a programme on the Food Channel in the States...) and it's been a standard in my repertoire ever since.

Two points to remember in de-boning a Chicken:

1. Make sure your knife is very sharp! In fact, I tend to use a vegetable paring knife rather than a proper boning knife - it's up to you to use whichever you find most comfortable to work with - but whichever it is, make sure you sharpen the knife freshly before you begin.

2. Always work the knife towards you when de-boning. And as I'm right-handed, I always start with the left side of the bird, freeing the rib-cage from the flesh, and then, when I've done that side of the bird, I turn it round, so that the side to be worked on is once more on the left side of the bird, which means I can continue working the knife towards me. Were I left-handed, then I presume I'd start with the right side of the bird and reverse the process, in order always to be working towards myself.

Anyway...the method:

1. Place the bird breast-down on the work surface, and cut through the skin just to one side of the back-bone. Then slide the tip of the blade under the flesh and free it up between the leg and wing on the left-side of the bird.

2. Keeping the knife blade as close to the rib-cage as you can, free the meat away from the rib-cage for about an inch or so, and then turn your attention to the leg and the wing.

3. Carefully, cut around the top of the leg, freeing it from the carcase, and find exactly where the leg joins the carcase. Sever the tissue that connects the two, and then cut down to free the leg completely from the main part of the bird. Repeat this process with the wing-joint.

4. Once the wing and leg joints have been severed, free the breast meat from the rib-cage in its entirety with a couple of good cuts (try and make your cuts as clean as possible, and as close to the ribcage as you can manage, to avoid slashing the breast meat as you do so - at first it's inevitable that the breast will emerge looking a little 'ragged', but in practice this doesn't matter, and your technique will hugely improve once you've done this a few times).

5. Once you've freed one side of the bird entirely from the rib-cage, turn it round, and repeat the process with the other side. At the end of this stage you'll be able to extract the entire rib-cage and drop it into the waiting stockpot.

6. Next, remove the lower bone in each leg, by cutting down and around the bone and severing it at the 'knee' joint (this is essentially common sense, and needs no special explanation). Unless I need the bird entirely boneless (for a galantine or a ballotine, for example) then I stop at this stage, and either roast the bird in this state (with a butter and herb stuffing pushed generously between the skin and the meat) or else cut it up into its constituent parts to be used in either sauté or fricassé dishes.

Once you've tried this a few times, you'll find you get very quick at it ( I find a decent sized bird takes me about five minutes to de-bone, these days) and the result is well worth the effort.

A Weekend of Consumption...

And about equally balanced between the cerebral and the calorific. If the ‘Beyond Babylon’ exhibition at The British Museum were to be understood in culinary terms, though, I think it would probably be a British Rail sandwich: more effort spent on the packaging than on the content, which turned out to be thin, tired, unimaginative, and entirely lacking in nutritional value. Perhaps when Neil Macgregor has finished churning out the series of intellectually-bereft extravaganzas with which he seems determined to burden the BM (and for which he was previously responsible during his stint at the National Gallery) he should consider a move to head up British Rail Catering. At least that way I’d be unlikely to trip over any more of his dreary and deeply depressing output.

The Palladio exhibition at the RA, on the other hand, would be a splendid Game Pie: four-square, robust, absorbing, and with a range of wonderful flavours contained within it. Deeply satisfying. Not much that was unfamiliar, but like a substantial slice of something one hasn’t tasted for a while, all the more rewarding in re-discovery!

And after that, an afternoon spent wandering the galleries of the Wallace Collection can surely only be compared with the myriad delights of an over-enthusiastic dessert trolley. In amongst the fruit salad, and the things with pink icing, and the garishly glazed strawberry tarts – to please the palates of the timid and the human young, respectively – the glories of a perfect Millefeuille, or a Paris-Brest, or a Pear poached in Sauternes! In the words of Noel Coward: “Gainsboroughs… and Lawrences…and some sporting prints of Aunt Florence’s…(some of which, were rather rude!)”
When we were finally ejected into the street, at closing time, it was with a sense of having been very well fed indeed.

In between times, the calorific intake included a celebration dinner at The Ambassadors in Exmouth Market - the Brancolis-in-London were marking one of their ‘zero’ birthdays with a Grand Dinner - which of course entailed a lateness of hour and quantity of consumption that was entirely out of kilter with the age that was being celebrated! (But then, isn’t that nearly always the case? I recall once catering a ninetieth birthday in Dr Johnson’s House, in Gough Square, where the steepness of the stairs combined with too many cups of tea meant that many of the guests – once they’d made a trip to the loo – found it easier to go home than to contemplate tackling the stairs up to the first floor once more!)

Tonight’s Dinner:

Egg-white Cheese Soufflé

Double-roast Lamb Shanks in Red Wine; Parsnip purée (with Sherry & Walnuts)

Tartes aux Pommes

Recipe: Endive with Orange

When serving a deliciously uncomplicated joint of meat, or a baked fish, or a spit-roast bird - where the freshness and sheer quality of the creature shines through, and the less you muck around with it, the better it is - there's an opportunity to offset this with a vegetable dish where there's clearly rather more going on. This is one of those dishes. I've experimented with an easier version, where I merely shredded and sauteed the endive, and added the orange flavouring at the end, and although it worked perfectly adequately, it was nowhere near as good as the version given here The concentration of flavours in the sauce and the slightly 'caramelised' texture of the endive lifts it to a higher level, but without it too obviously crying out for attention. If serving for a dinner party, prepare the endive in advance to the point where it's about to go into the oven, and then set it aside and put it into the oven as you sit to the first course.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 Belgian Endive; 2 oz Butter; 1 clove of Garlic, minced; juice and rind of half an Orange; 1 tsp Brown Sugar; 4 tbs White Wine Vinegar; 5 fl oz Water; Salt, to taste.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 190 degrees C.

2. Melt the Butter in a sauté pan (one that can subsequently fit entirely in the oven) and once melted, lightly colour the Garlic in the Butter.

3. Cut the Endives in half, lengthwise, and discard any obviously hard bits of central core. Place the Endives face down in the sauté pan and cook a couple for of minutes on each side, until slightly browned at the edges. Add all the remaining ingredients, and bring them to a boil, stirring all the time. Remove from heat.

4. Cover the pan with foil, and then place in the pre-heated oven for twenty minutes. Once the Endives are tender and cooked through, remove the pan from the oven and take the Endives out of the sauce. Place them on the serving plates.

5. Boil the sauce down for a minute or so, until it has noticeably reduced and thickened; spoon the sauce over the plated Endives, and serve

Eat Eggs!

It won't surprise any regular reader of this blog to hear that I don't have a lot of time for so-called food-health 'experts'. To my mind, they talk a lot of witless blather, and are closely associated with the mass hysteria that risk-averse governments (in the UK, particularly) engender every two or three years, in conjunction with the idiots from the health-and-safety police. Two or three months ago, it was Irish Pork that we were all supposed to be shunning...although, when closely questioned, the 'experts' quietly acknowledged that the risk associated with eating the stuff was about on the same level as the likelihood of winning the lottery.

In pretty much the same discreet way, it appears that the truth is now finally being admitted about the much-maligned egg. Ok, the advice that nobody should consume more than one egg a week was long ago acknowledged to have been the result of somebody in the WHO having got their decimal point in the wrong place. But it was only in 2007 that the idea was officially dropped that three eggs a week per person was a healthy maximum...and this was done in such a low key way, that it appears that 45% of the population still believes that eggs are somehow bad for you, and lead to clogged arteries and heart attacks. Equally quietly, the British Heart Foundation (spokesperson: Senior Dietician, Victoria Taylor) has now concluded firstly that the cholesterol in eggs has only a clinically insignificant effect on a person's blood-cholesterol, and secondly that in fact no more than a third of the cholesterol in the human body is in any way related to the cholesterol that they've ingested by way of food consumption. For the most part, it's generated internally as a direct result of various aspects of lifestyle. And to my mind, the mealy-mouthed acknowledgement of 'no more than a third' invites investigation to establish quite how much less than a third might be closer to reality.

In any event, this is good news for egg-lovers everywhere, who hitherto have felt constrained from going for their desired level of consumption (in which group I don't count myself, and the average weekly consumption of eggs in this household has always hovered around the dozen per person - if not more...) Eggs are stuffed full of proteins and vitamins (and apparently are also good sources of 'lipids', whatever they might be); they're low in calories (if you bother about that sort of thing); and there now appears to be no upper limit to how many you should eat, beyond exactly as many as you feel like!

Enjoy!

Recipe: Apples Baked in Cream

Delicious. This is a first cousin to the fantastic Italian recipe for Pears baked in Marsala, which is one of my favourite standbys: in both instances, the flavour of the fruit concentrates wonderfully as it bakes, surrendering its juices into the liquid in which it sits, and those flavours in turn mingling with the dark richness of the muscovado sugar. Home and hearth and self-indulgence, all in one!

Not the most elegant of dishes, this can still present well enough to serve to guests (as long as you haven't reduced the apples to complete road-kill in the process of removing their cores, that is) and the flavour of the end-result will definitely win you points. It also scores on the basis of ease of preparation...takes about five minutes prep in total, and is yet another of those dishes that meets the "What the hell amI going to make for dessert within the five minutes I actually have available?" criteria.

For two.

Ingredients: 2 large or 3 medium eating Apples; 6 tablespoons Muscovado Sugar; 6-8 fl oz Cream.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Peel the Apples; slice them in half vertically, and then carefully remove the core from each half, leaving you with an apple-half with a neat depression where the core has been removed.

3. Place the apple-halves, depression-side-up, in a buttered baking dish.

4. Sprinkle 4 tablespoons of Sugar over the halves and then carefully pour the Cream in and around the fruit. Place in the oven.

5. After 10 minutes, remove the dish from the oven, and sprinkle the remaining Sugar over the Apples. Return to the oven for a further half an hour.

Allow to cool down for five minutes or so before serving, so that the dish isn't too hot to be able to enjoy the flavours.

Gaston Lenotre...

...has died. And of all the places to learn of it, the fact that it was on the obituary page in last week's Economist magazine indicates just what a tour de force he became in his lifetime in the world of food. I hadn't particularly realised the stature of the man - until quite recently - and for many years he was no more than the face on the front of my battered copy of 'Desserts & Pastries' which has been the source of many good recipes and very reliable techniques over the past twenty five years or so. I think he's currently out of print - which is quite scandalous, when you consider the towering piles of second rate 'celebrity chef' tat available in bookshops the length and breadth of the land - and when I just checked on Amazon, the sort of prices being asked for second hand copies of his various books quite took my breath away.

In some respects, the Economist obituary got him absolutely spot-on: pâtisserie is about precision, and his explanations for making all different kinds of pastries and doughs are clear, concise ... and they work! And not in the ho-hum Delia Smith I-suppose-it-will-do way of 'working', but they are light and delicious and positively ambrosial. There were other aspects of the obituary which I think must have had him turning in his grave, though - a reference to using 'a cupful' of sugar, for example, instead of a specific measurement by weight would not have gone down well with Monsieur L...and I suspect he would have thought it rather sloppy to talk of eating Galette des Rois on January 8th, when any self-respecting frenchman knows that it is traditionally served on the Sunday closest to January 6th. January 8th this year was a Thursday... Yes, I knowI'm being a pedant, but it's that kind of pedantry which is necessary in good baking and which formed the underpinning to Lenôtre's entire approach to cooking.

Slightly eerily, although I only just came across his obituary, it was actually on January 8th that he died...which was the same day on which I served Pear & Almond Tarts for dessert, following his excellent recipe, and wondered aloud to the Technical Dept whether Lenôtre could still be alive "since he must be about 89, by now". In fact, he was 88 at the time of his passing. The World is a richer place for his having been around.

Tonight's Dinner:

Mackerel in White Wine, with Juniper, Shallots & Carrots.

Duck Breasts, grilled; Gratin of Turnips.

Cointreau-flavoured panna cotta (I'm out of Limoncello in London, and Cointreau is a delicious alternative)