Category Archives: Food

Baked parmesan and tomato polenta

This is the first food post on the new blog location. Hopefully the first of many, though my track record with foodblogging isn’t amazing. :-)

I cook very much on a whim. This is reflected both in how I cook and in what I cook. It’s also reflected in what I buy. For example, I bought some polenta a few weeks ago. Why did I buy polenta? Three very good reasons.

Firstly, it was an appealing colour.

Secondly, there’s an amusing polenta scene in Heat.

Thirdly, I’d never tried polenta before.

As you can see, a well reasoned purchase decision.

I’ve made it a few times since, usually frying it in butter, and it’s ok. I cook it with a fair bit of salt, and it has a texture and taste that goes well with that. But for today’s lunch I tried doing it a different way. Here’s how it turned out.

For this I used polenta, salt, brown sugar, crushed chilli, butter, parmesan, pine nuts, ripeish tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. I won’t even pretend I measured proportions. :-)

It’s basically very easy. To make the polenta, boil twice its volume of salted water, add the polenta and stir until what you have is very thick and gloopy. Stir in a knob of butter and the chilli (I’d have used powdered paprika but didn’t have any) and leave to sit for about 10 minutes.

Then spread very thinly (somewhere under 1cm thick I guess) over the base of a greased baking sheet (I used a cookie tray), coarse grate parmesan on top of it and put it in the oven for 15 minutes at 150C.

What I did next was finely dice the tomatoes, mix them with pine nuts, balsamic vinegar and sugar, then pour them on top of the baking polenta, turn up the temperature slightly and then bake for another 15 minutes.

I’d probably do this differently in the future. It resulted in the polenta getting a bit too soggy. I would probably recommend instead roasting them separately at a higher temperature for 15 minutes, baking the polenta for more like 25 minutes on its own, then adding the roast tomato mix to the top of the polenta and baking for 5. That’s just a guess though.

Regardless, despite the slight sogginess of the polenta, this was really good and rather easy to make. I’d definitely make it again.

More penne and cheese

My penne and cheese experimentation the other day inspired me to try more on the baked pasta theme. It’s quite different, and significantly more elaborate and… well, in fact bears no resemblance to the other recipe except that it contains penne and cheese (though a different type) and is baked in a glass dish.

What I used

About 300g of dried penne
One medium-large onion
One small aubergine
One yellow bell pepper
One red bell pepper
Three large (somewhat underripe) tomatoes
Ludicrous quantities of grated cheese (enough to cover the roasting dish)
One dried chilli pepper
About 1/2 tbsp coarse salt
Olive oil

The cheeses I used were turkish cheeses which the packages respectively claim them to be Eski Kasar and Kasar Peyniri. Kasar is apparently a kind of sheep milk cheese. They’re both semi-hard cheeses, with Eski Kasar tasting approximately like a milder parmesan and Kasar Peyniri approximating mozzarella. You could probably use those as substitutions.

What I did

There are quite a few steps in this, and it ended up taking a long time – about an hour and a half (though not requiring continuous attention).

I finely chopped the onion and peppers and cubed the aubergine. I roast this with olive oil, salt and the chilli pepper (which I flaked) at about 250C until it was fairly cooked.

Meanwhile I cooked the penne (deliberately undercooking it a fair bit). I coarsely chopped the tomatoes, and once the roast vegetables were cooked I added the pasta and tomatoes, mixed it up thoroughly and put it back in the oven at 200C.

After about 10 minutes I realised that the pasta wasn’t really cooking well enough, so I covered it in foil to keep the moisture in (you’d be surprised at how hard this is to do to a ridiculously hot glass baking tray…) and put it back in for another 15-20 minutes.

Once the tomatoes were looking suitably roast and the pasta was cooked I covered the top in grated cheese and put it back in to the oven until it was cooked (the desired end result was the top looking like a nicely cooked pizza topping). At that point, it was ready to serve.

Result

This made a huge amount of food, and it’s really filling. I think I’m going to get at least another 3 meals out of this, quite possibly 4. Fortunately, it’s very nice. Mmm…

I’d do a few things differently – I’d use a little more chilli. The vegetables were only very mildly spicy (I think my dried chilli peppers are getting old and losing flavour). I’d like to use a bit less olive oil, but my experience is that those vegetables don’t roast as nicely without. I’d probably use a bit less cheese.

In terms of timing, I think I should have put the tomatoes in before the pasta (but after the other vegetables) and let them roast a little bit, and similarly let the pasta cook a little more so that it was slightly hard but edible at the point it went in.

Still, definitely something to make again.

Food hacks

I don’t make much mention of it on here (see my other blog for somewhere that I do), but in my day job I’m a programmer. Counted amongst the weird and wonderful jargon that profession entails is the word hack.

There’s a particular sort of hack I’m particularly good at. Quick, and usually somewhat dirty, solutions that use what’s available in unexpected ways. Reactions to them can be anything from “Ooh, that’s neat” to “AIEEE! MY EYES!”, but they usually get the job done a lot faster than the alternatives. I don’t use them all the time, but I probably use them a bit more often than I should.

This post is basically an example of me transplanting that technique to my cooking. The results are… unusual.

Without further ado, some recipes.

Recipe 1: Macaroni and Cheese

I just got back from a trip to New York (well, technically Jersey City), to visit my girlfriend, Victoria. We both cooked while I was there, and one of the things she cooked was her macaroni and cheese recipe. It’s essentially the macaroni and cheese analogue of my brownies – do the simplest thing that can possibly work and the results are delicious.

Ingredients

Macaroni
Milk
Cheese (Victoria uses a Longhorn-style cheddar. “Lord knows what you call it on that side of the ocean” — Victoria. I used a mature english cheddar)
Something to serve it with. Victoria uses stewed whole tomatoes, I just used a hot sauce.

I don’t really know the proportions for this – I think it’s basically “make enough macaroni to serve the requisite number of people then add milk and cheese until it looks right”. Cooking is equally straightforward – cook the macaroni until it’s slightly underdone, cube the cheese, put the cheese, milk and cooked macaroni in a greased glass dish and bake until it looks cooked (at around 200C I think).

So, yesterday evening I thought “Hmm. What to make for dinner? Oh, why don’t I give Victoria’s macaroni and cheese recipe a go?”

I went to sainsburys to buy the ingredients only to discover, admittedly somewhat unsurprisingly, that they did not have any macaroni. This made me sad:

Oh well, macaroni is just pasta, right?

Hack 1: Penne and Cheese

Exactly the same as the macaroni and cheese, but with penne instead.

Result: Surprisingly nice. The macaroni is a bit better, but the penne is entirely acceptable here. It just has a slightly weird shape for it.

Anyway, I have a really evil recipe that I felt like making tonight:

Coney Island Fries

There seem to be approximately a million different distinct recipes each claiming to be coney island fries. Most of them involve some sort of meat. I call these coney island fries because the pub whose recipe I reverse engineered them from did. They’re evil because they’re really tasty but contain no redeeming nutritional or culinary value. I try to avoid making them too often, but occasionally I succumb.

Ingredients

Oven fries
Cheddar cheese
Guacamole
Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce

Recipe: Cook the oven fries as per normal. When they’re nearly done, add large quantities of grated cheddar. Serve with guacamole and way more sweet chilli sauce than can possibly be good for you.

Result: Mmmm.

So, having decided to make it I went to sainsburys for ingredients. Result: No oven fries.

At this point I was feeling like it was sainsburys’s mission to thwart me.

So, I wondered what I could substitute for the fries in order to get something resembling success.

At this point you would be right to have a sinking feeling…

“Ah ha”, I thought, “I have leftover penne and cheese at home, don’t I?”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Hack 2: Coney Island Penne

I hurried home to put my diabolical plan into action.

Ingredients

Leftover penne and cheese
A handful of frozen corn
Guacamole
Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce

Recipe: Heat up penne and cheese. Add frozen corn because I’m feeling guilty. Serve with guacamole and sweet chilli sauce.

Results: Well, hmm. Not exactly good per se. Interesting, certainly edible, and not nearly as bad as one might fear, but kinda inferior to its constituent recipes – I wouldn’t say no to eating this again, but I’d take the penne and cheese or the coney island fries over it any day.

Oh well. I did say it was a hack.

It’s Groun… err. Pancake Day!

Well, as you probably know today is pancake day. I thought I’d celebrate it with a nice festive nut roast, but unfortunately I didn’t have the ingredients so I decided to go with a less conventional choice: Pancakes.

The problem with growing up, I find, is that you’ve figured out your parents secrets. Well, some of them anyway. When I was younger my parents often cooked breakfast on weekends. Most of them my mother made, but my father cooked occasionally. In particular he specialised in cooking crepes. We called them english pancakes (to distinguish them from American pancakes). We always considered these a great treat, as we didn’t get them very often.

The secret? They’re actually really easy to make. The batter takes 5 minutes with a food processor. I mean, sure, his are probably a bit better than mine. But the basic principle is almost no effort at all (well, ask me again once I’ve washed everything up).

What I used

1 cup white flower
1 tsp salt
4 eggs
1.5 cups milk
A very small amount of vegetable oil (for frying)

What I did

It’s completely possible to do this without a food processor. That being said, I have a food processor and am lazy. Place bets on my not using it?

So, what did I do? First, I shoved everything in the food processor and hit blend until it was smooth. There, mix is done.

Now, I know you, and I know you looked at that ingredients list and thought “Bloody hell David, that’s a lot of pancakes”. Well, maybe you’re less inclined to casual blasphemy than I am and thought “Gosh durn Davey boy, that there be a lot of pancakes”. Same principle though. Well, you’re right. So the next thing I did was immediately transfer half the mix to a plastic container and stick it in the fridge. Pancakes for breakfast it is.

Cooking the pancakes was straightforward. I heated up a nonstick frying pan. It’s important to heat it up first. If you put the pancake on a cold pan it will die of hypothermia. Or possibly just stick really badly. Oh well, the first one stuck really badly anyway. Probably partly because I didn’t let it heat up enough, but I remembered that my dad usually put a tiny bit of vegetable oil in the first one to stop this from happening, so I added a bit after I removed this one.

Once the pan is hot, I pour a little bit of mix into it and rapidly tilt it round until the bottom of the pan is covered. You need to judge the amount right, but too much is better than too little – too much and you get thick pancakes, too little and you get mangled pancakes.

Once the bottom of the pan is covered, I left it on the heat, shaking the pan occasionally until the pancake moved freely on it (don’t worry if it sticks at first – it will do that until the base is cooked). Once it was at that state I peeked at the bottom every now and then to see what colour it was and when it was the right colour (it should be a light golden brown, but I’m sure you know what pancakes look like) flipped it over and repeated the process of occasional peeking until it was the right colour (this side shouldn’t stick).

I then served with lemon juice and sugar. I’d intended to try some sort of savoury vegetable filling as a nod to a balanced diet (with Ollie, my lunchtime provider of salads, currently in deepest darkest India, the vegetable content in my diet isn’t great at the moment), but I didn’t. Why? Because a) A savoury vegetable filling was more work and b) Lemon juice and sugar is just too damn nice.

Conclusion

Mmm. Pancakes.

What don’t you eat? (How to feed anyone)

I was out for dinner with a friend last night and she wouldn’t eat the squid in her seafood dish. Nothing wrong with that – we all have things we don’t like – but it, combined with reading through the latest post on Smitten Kitchen in a vain attempt to stave off the cravings induced by StumbleUpon being down today, made be think about the subject.

Which is not to say it made me think coherently about the subject. It is a saturday morning. So the following is more of a brain dump than a well thought out argument. Also it contains no cooking. If you were hoping for a recipe accompanied my fun filled antics and tomfoolery in the kitchen, you might want to give up and go back to bed now.

I think I’m pretty open minded about food. I’ll eat most things, within the restriction that I only eat a restricted subset of meats. I don’t eat Okra if I can avoid it (it’s the devil’s vegetable), and I don’t drink wine or beer, but that’s about it. I also don’t eat bad food, but that’s a separate issue related to me being a snob rather than food related. :-) On the other hand, I used to not eat dairy either, so I’m reasonably familiar with the difficulties of working on a restricted diet.

I know a lot of other people who are very fussy eaters, either by nature, moral choice or medical neccessity. Amongst my friends and family we have nut allergies, dairy intolerance, gluten intolerance. One of my friends can’t eat sweet peppers. Moral choice is more obvious – I know quite a few vegetarians of varying degrees and lived with a vegan friend for somewhat over a year.

Then there are people who have things which they just don’t like to eat (and things who have people whom they just don’t like to eat, but that’s a separate post). Some of my friends basically don’t eat vegetables, or don’t like specific vegetables. Mushrooms seem to be the fungi which everyone loves to hate. My brother’s girlfriend doesn’t eat anything which is purple.

There’s a tendency to roll one’s eyes and tell them to stop being so fussy. I’m certainly guilty of it (but then I’m judgmental and horrible. Ask anyone).

To some extent this is warranted – I can’t imagine not eating most vegetables, and I find it amazingly difficult to accommodate people don’t. But part of that is just me – I’m sure if I stuck a great big slab of bacon on their plate they’d be happy as a pig in… ok, bad metaphor. But you get the point. I’m sure they’d find it similarly difficult to feed me.

On the other hand, maybe we should think of restrictions as opportunities. In my presentation on vegan cooking I mentioned that there are basically two secrets to good vegan cooking: Variety and proper use of spices. Neither of these are particularly vegan centric – they’re just things which happen to be especially important for vegan cooking. Once you’ve learned them you can port them to any other style of cooking you like, and you’ll be a better cook for it.

I’m sure other genres of cooking are the same. In cutting something out of the mix you will expose limitations to your cooking style which its presence has helped to cover up and, in learning to deal with these limitations, you will become a better cook for it.

So. What don’t you eat?