Lightly smoked salmon with asparagus, courgette rolls and mustard cream sauce

Put double cream, white wine and some mustard to boil and reduce.
Use a peeler to take strips the length of the courgette. Sit them on a dry fryingpan for  bout a minute, then roll them into coils.
Boil water and cook the asparagus. Refresh under cold water.
Cook lardons until crispy
Rub salmon with oil and pepper and grill until just done.
Grate cheese onto an oiled flat plate and grill until crispy.
Reheat veg under the grill.
Put the ricotta parcels in boiling water for two minutes.
Plate.

Monkfish Ragout

I thought of this dish when I saw a fine monkfish tail on a fish counter and found new Jersey Royals in the veg section. Monkfish can be tricky, but it's truly excellent cooked this way. Just remember to remove the outer layers of grey 'film'. It peels back towards the tail quite nicely.

Ingredients:

1 monkfish tail
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 yellow pepper
olive oil
salt & freshly-ground black pepper
large glass of white vermouth
splash of tomato passata
Fresh green herb (I chose fennel leaves, but tarragon or even thyme would do)

Remove the monkfish from the bone by cutting down each side of the spine. Chop the spine into pieces and set to simmer gently with about 500 ml of water. Half the potatoes lengthwise and throw them into the stock pot, making sure they're under the surface of the water. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a wok and soften the onion for a few minutes without taking on any colour. Add the garlic and sliced yellow pepper. When softened a bit, add the vermouth and passata and give it a stir. The spuds should be nearly cooked, so rescue them from the stock pot and add to the sauce. Strain some of the monkfish stock onto the sauce and stir everything together. After a minute or two add the monkfish, cut into bite-sized pieces. Stir it all together, making sure to break a spud or two. Throw in the green herb and check salt and pepper. Add drops of lemon juice if required.

Serve with mayonnaise and french mustard.

Yum.

Transport of delight

On very rare occasions something strange happens when I eat food: I can only describe it as 'being transported somewhere else'. I start to eat a dish and find some time later that I have eaten and been absolutely oblivious to time, people, sounds or anything else: the food has taken over my entire being. I can remember it happening when eating a few dishes in restaurants, some humble, some at the peaks of gastronomy, but I don't think I can remember it happening when I cooked something for myself. But yesterday it happened. I started to eat and then a short while after, I realised that I had been eating, but had been absolutely oblivious to everything else.

I started off making a dish I could describe as 'chilli prawn noodles', but that's the only concept I had in mind as I started to cook. I developed the recipe as I went along, and the result knocked my socks off. I'm not making any great claims to gastronomic pinnacles, but here it is, anyway:

I was cooking for myself, so the portion is for one. You can easily grow it to feed more people.

160g raw king prawns
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1 onion peeled, halved and cut into thin half-moons
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed with the flat of a knife
Splash of Soy sauce
half a red chilli cut into rounds
one green chilli, cut into rounds
half a packet of stir fry vegetables (mine had cabbage, onions, edamame beans)
Third of a packet of bean sprouts
2/3 packet of fresh egg noodles
2 tablespoons of oil (I used arachide, but sunflower would be fine)
2 spring onions, cut into 3 cm. pieces

Put the oil in a wok and add the cumin and coriander. Fry the spices for a minute to release their aroma. Add the half-moons of onion and fry until soft, but not too coloured. Throw in the garlic and stir it in. Add the shredded stir-fry vegetables and the chillis and stir-fry for about 2 minutes, flipping them over regularly to make sure they're all cooked down a bit. Add the prawns and bean sprouts, stir-frying for about 2 more minutes, until the prawns go pink. Throw in the soy and spring onions. Stir for a few seconds. Add the noodles and stir to heat them through.

Eat and be transported.

Interlude is over

I stopped writing this blog a few years ago due to appearing on the Irish Masterchef TV programme (I had to intensify my research and spent all my time creating and testing recipes, so had no time for blogging of any kind), and got out of the way of keeping it going.

Now it's back.

I have recently been baking bread. A lot of bread. And I have researched yeast, flours, recipes, kneading techniques, shaping, forming, proving and baking methods. I'm not too keen on fancy breads with lots of ingredients, so I mainly use just water, flour, yeast and salt, and maybe a little olive oil.

One of my most recent experiments was creating my own yeast (well, capturing it is more accurate) from the atmosphere and creating a 'starter' from that. Basically, you mix flour and water, then leave the bowl - covered with muslin - outside to capture airborne wild yeast spores. I left it outside for a couple of days (bringing it in at night) and waited a few days for bubbles to form. Once the bubbles started to appear I began a regime of feeding the starter (up to three times a day!) with fresh flour and water for around 10 days. This process of growing and strengthening the starter is very wasteful, with lots of surplus starter going on to the compost heap during this time. Once the starter is mature, however, it can be stored in the fridge and brought back to life over a couple of days before using a portion of it and then putting the 'mother' back in the fridge again. So it's really only the initial creation of the starter that's a problem. This process makes hard-core sourdough and results in bread with a thick chewy crust, a very open texture and great depth of flavour: quite excellent, and it's good to have done it, and it creates a benchmark. But not everybody has time or patience to go hard-core, so I have been experimenting with an intermediate technique whereby a starter is created using instant yeast and left overnight to mature a bit before using it as part of a more conventional process the next day. This results in an excellent loaf and I'll be describing the whole process soon.

I have been making home-made pizzas for many years now and I only recently bought some pizza stones. These ceramic disks are pre-heated in the oven and the pizza is constructed and then baked on top of them. The results are quite excellent, and I wouldn't think of making pizzas in any other way now. I also use them for baking other breads and rolls.

One thing that fascinates me about bread recipes is that each chef has their own technique for mixing, kneading, shaping and baking; each claiming that their way is the only way to do it. Some books explain the theory behind their techniques and certain nuggets of information keep reappearing, such as 'you need to knead for 15 minutes to strengthen the gluten'. There's no doubt that there's plenty of science behind these theories, and they consistently reappear, but I recently read about a no-knead technique for making pizzas, so decided to give it a go:

No-knead pizza dough

Ingredients:

1 sachet dried yeast

2 tsp olive oil

380g strong bread flour

10g salt

250 ml water

Method:

Combine yeast, flour, salt and olive oil in a bowl. Add water in stages, just bringing it all together. Leave for 15 minutes.

With a running tap, wet fingers then bring one edge of the dough to the middle with finger tips and press down. Repeat with 3 more corners. Do this 3 more times, wetting fingers as you go. Cover the bowl with clingfilm or a wet cloth and leave to rise until doubled in size.

It shouldn't work, but it does.

I have also used some leftover dough to make bread rolls and flatbreads, and I wouldn't trust it to make good stand-up boules or cottage loaves, but for pizzas it's very quick and easy.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

More potatoes

Sometimes I get ideas out of the blue, and this is a typical example. I was intending to make a potato cake from mashed potatoes which are pressed into a hot, oiled, frying pan to brown on both sides, but just as I was getting ready to put them into the frying pan I thought  "I wonder what would happen if I stirred an egg into these before I fry them?". So I did, and the result was a delightful, fluffy, light cake. They accompanied the Boeuf Bourguignon very nicely.

Ingredients

5 medium sized yellow potatoes, such as Rooster
1 egg, beaten
salt and freshly ground black pepper
oil to grease a non-stick frying pan (I used a wok)

Method

Peel the potatoes and cut into chunks. Put them into a pan of boiling, salted water and simmer until they are just tender to the point of a knife. Drain and then mash them, checking seasoning with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Oil a non-stick frying pan and put over a hot heat. Stir the beaten egg into the potato mixture and press the mixture into the frying pan, smoothing the top surface. Reduce the heat and allow the potato mixture to crisp and brown underneath (about 5 minutes). Put a plate over the frying pan and invert the pan so that the potato cake drops onto the plate. Slide the cake back into the pan so that the other side of the cake can crisp and brown for another 5 minutes. Slide or invert the pan again to put the cake onto a serving plate. Serve cut into wedges.