Herring Salad

cropped-DSC_1756-2.jpgHerring Salad is one of those dishes I never quite like when I think of it. But when it is prepared, refreshing and chilled, a feast for the eye and a variety of textures and flavours, I just cannot get enough of it. Just look at it!

And the best of all: this goes perfectly with Bretzeln. Bretzeln and Herring Salad are made for each other, but you might also enjoy it with steamed or baked potatoes.

It’s pretty simple to make, but takes some time to prepare all the ingredients:

First, the herring. I buy packs of Herring filets, marinaded in oil. Rinse the oil, pat dry, and cut into large yet bite-sized chunks. One 400g pack will give a generous portion of salad for two (two main meal portions, maybe some leftover for lunch on the following day). The following is on the basis of 400g / two to three generous portions:

Peel two sharp apples (Braeburn or Red Kidds Orange). Cut into eights, then cut those into three or four pieces each.

Consider filetting one blood orange and one grapefruit. Add the filets (maybe cut in pieces).

Remove the bitter cores from two Endive salads, cut these into large chunks.

Remove the seeds from a medium-sized salad cucumber. Feed the skin to the Guinea Pigs, and cut the remainder into pretty chunks.

Very thinly slice one large red onion.

Very thinly slice one medium-sized bulb of fennel.

Add whatever else meets your fancy. For example, diced beetroot, rings of romana peppers, salmon roe and hard-boiled quail eggs work well.

Add a generous amount of freshly chipped dill (minus the stalks!).

For the dressing, mix 150ml soured cream with a teaspoon of crushed black pepper, a splash of cider vinegar, a splash of olive oil, half a teaspoon of mustard. Mix everything together, the add some more dill tips.

This needs to rest for one hour. Perfect for making Bretzels!

You might also be interested in our gorgeous Kippers Salad.

My Caldeirada

scan_00000075Caldeirada is a one-pot fish stew, simple yet rewarding.

Peel and cut a medium-sized onion into thin rings. Peel and crush two or three cloves of garlic. Sautee in olive oil, then add two or three large ripe tomatoes, diced. Add two or three firm and waxy potatoes per portion, peeled and cut into large chunks. Add a glass of cold water and bring to a gentle simmer.

Add half a teaspoon of ground coriander and ground cumin each, and a slightly smaller amount of turmeric, crushed black pepper and hot chilly powder. (Our German readers note we need cumin (Kreuzkuemmel), not German Cumin (Kuemmel) here.)

Also add a chicken or vegetable stock cube. Simmer gently until the potatoes are almost cooked, approximately 20 minutes. You may want to add some Chorizo or Linguica sausage, cut into thick slices after 15 minutes for deeper flavour.

Meanwhile, prepare the fish. Monkfish is an excellent choice if you’re patient enough to clean away all the skins. Red Bream, Snapper and most other whitefish will also work, or you could use seafood from the freezer if you were desperate. Cut into pretty large chunks.

Cut some stale or fresh nice bread into thick slices, rub with garlic, soak in olive oil and fry on the griddle until crisp, then cut into croutons.

When the potatoes are done, turn down the heat and wait until the Caldeirada no longer simmers, finish the seasoning, then add a handful of pitted black olives and the fish. Turn the heat off and poach for 10 to 15 minutes, then serve with the croutons and a chilled white or a fruity red wine.

Mackerel Tart

cropped-DSC_0746-1-1.jpgThis is based on a recipe published by Michel Roux Jr. It takes some time to make. We think it’s worth the extra effort, but not everyone may agree.

The idea is to serve a little crumbly tarte with a side salad. The tarte is filled with a Red Snapper Mousse and chunks of poached Mackerel, topped with a Tomato Fondue, and served with a Dill sauce. There are quite a few steps here, but none of the steps is particularly difficult, some can be done earlier, and there’s enough to do for two and a nice social cooking affair.

(By comparison, Michel uses Whiting for the mousse, puff pasty for the tarte, and serves with Beurre Blanc and a Chive butter. Other differences are in the mousse and tomato preparations.)

The steps are: make a solid vegetable stock. Poach the mackerels. Prepare the shortcrust pastry. Prepare the tomato fondue. Pre-bake the tarts. Make the fish mousse. Make the dill sauce. Assemble and bake the tarts. Prepare the plates cold with a side salad. Serve the works with a slice of white bread and a glass of wine.

The amounts in the following produce four tarts, one per diner. 

Pork Pies

DSC_0734Here’s our variation of Michel Roux Jr’s pork pies.

The concept is the same: make a pork pie filling from a mix of smoked and unsmoked ham and a fatty piece of meat, spice with apples and sage (Michel also adds chestnuts). Use ready-made puff pastry for the pie, bake and enjoy with a sexy herbal salad.

For the filling, I use 30% smoked ham and bacon, 30% unsmoked ham, and 40% belly of pork. Michel uses shoulder of pork; I find belly is easier to find and available in smaller portions.

Mince the lot, then spice it to taste. We like a very generous portion of freshly toasted then ground fennel and coriander seeds with added mustard powerder. Unlike Michel, we also add fresh white breadcrumbs. Not stale bread, but fresh, either torn into small irregular pieces, or diced really fine. Add one whole egg, and mix everything really well.

Line a cup or small bowl with a sheet of puff pastry and fill in layers of meat filling, thin apple slices, deep-fried sage leaves and whatever you fancy. Add a sheet of puff pastry for the bottom, seal around the edges and turn upside down for a nice iglo shape.

Apply an egg-wash made from an egg yolk and a similar amount of cold water, then carve a nice pattern into the surface. Bake at 190C for approximately 1 hour.

Bacalhau

DSC_0671 (2).JPG

Bacalhau is the Portuguese word for cod, commonly understood to mean salted and dried cod. Bacalhau is not a meal per se, but quickly transforms a humble bachelor meal into something delicious.

Well, OK, I say quickly because it takes only minutes to cook, but the preparation of salt fish takes some planning ahead. Salted cod, or Bacalhau, needs to soak in water for at least 24 hours, with fresh water and a rinse at least 3 times over that period.

As I discovered years after writing this recipe initially, the simple solution to making this a true quickie is not to use salted cod. In essence, don’t make Bacalhau. Instead we use smoked Haddock, the undied lightly smoked Haddock available from most fish counters in the UK. Just skin it and flake it into the potatoes a few minutes before adding the eggs.

It also helps to have some steamed potatoes ready, preferably young and clean ones of a waxy variety with their skin on. We often have some left-over potatoes, and this dish is just the perfect way to use them.

Heat a frying pan to moderate heat, melt a tablespoon of butter and an equal amount of olive oil. Cut the potatoes into chunky pieces and fry them gently.

After a few minutes, add a handful of cherry tomatoes, cut into halves, a handful of chopped spring onions, and flakes of soaked and rinsed Bacalhau. I use about the same volume of potatoes and fish. Add pepper, but be careful with salt, as your fish might still bring in more than enough.

Toss the mixture about for a minute, then crack two eggs over it.

I don’t want to scramble the dish, so I put a lid on for 3 minutes. This allows the egg to set through the trapped heat. Remove the lid and add a generous amount of capers. Allow some of the juices to evaporate and serve with a crisp white wine or, if the fish has a lot of salt left, a lot of water.

Simply, savoury and utterly delicious, cooked in minutes but requires some planning.

 

 

 

Savoury Clafoutis

DSC_1736.JPGAccording to Rachel Khoo, savoury clafoutis are ze very fashionable dish in Paris. I don’t know how accurate Rachel’s trend monitoring is, but the idea made immediate sense for me.

Instead of sugar and apples, pears or cherries, use savoury ingredients such as goats’ cheese, cherry tomatoes, girolle mushrooms, Swiss chard, a pinch of rosemary, a spoonful of mustard and a drizzle of chili oil.

Or, if you want to think of in in another way, you can think of it as a quiche without the base. To compensate for the lost support offered by the shortcrust base, you add two spoon full of white flour to the mix – e voila! a savoury clafoutis. Even less work than a quiche, and just as good (but a bit heavier). Here’s how it goes:

Make 1 1/2 pint of a mix from crème fraiche, yogurt, milk, double cream. I suggest using at least 50% milk so that it doesn’t get too heavy. You can also cheat with a small amount of baking soda. Add 4 eggs and one extra yolk.

Whisk in two tablespoons white flour, a teaspoon of good mustard, salt and black pepper to taste.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line your favourite baking dish with baking paper. I use a 28cm dish, 3cm deep.

Find all suitable leftovers: Dice or crumble goats cheese, blue cheese, Reblochon or Gruyere cheese. Add cherry tomatoes, olives if you like, Swiss chard. Asparagus might work, roasted peppers most certainly will. Peeled cherry tomatoes will keep it light and moist. Be inventive! Add a sprinkle of rosemary, then pour the batter over it.

Shake the dish a few times to let trapped air escape, then decorate the top with some slices of tomato. I add a generous drizzle of chili-infused olive oil, but that might not be to everyone’s taste.
Bake at 180C for approximately 45 minutes. The time varies with the depth of your dish and the temperature of the batter when you start. It is ready when it has risen over the entire diameter of the baking dish, bubbles a little (mostly towards the edges), and has a lovely golden colour.

Remove from the heat, and let cool down in stages: first, leave on the counter, in the tray, for about 10 minutes. Then lift the whole thing out of the tray, and put it on a cooling rack. Another 10 minutes later, see if you can remove the paper, so that the bake doesn’t get water-logged from the trapped steam.

Serve lukewarm or cold. It’s lovely, it’s like a quiche, but it doesn’t even require making a base: A Saturday lunch winner!

Quiche

DSC_0028 (2).JPGReal men don’t eat quiche. All right. Fine by me. I am a quiche-eater, guilty as charged. Not a real man, according to Bruce Feirstein, but I know how to make the finest and most rewarding quiche (and enjoy eating it).

A quiche is quick to make, and always scores with the womenfolk. What are you waiting for?

Take one roll of deep-frozen rolled-out shortcrust pastry, available in most shops. Your own base will be lighter, crumplier, better in short:

Put 200g white wheat flour, 100g soft salted butter and one medium sized egg into a bowl and whisk (using an electric hand mixer or blender) until you have even crumbles, then keep whisking while you add one or two tablespoons of cold water. This transforms the crumble into a homogenous lump.

Spread baking parchment onto your worktop. Put the very sticky dough on top and use your fingers to spread it out approximately to the size of your baking dish. Cover with another layer of baking parchment, then finish the job with the rolling pin. Try for an even 3mm thickness.

The baking parchment trick makes handling of the very sticky base a lot easier, and saves time.

Line a backing dish with your base, using a baking parchment as a carrier. I use a 280mm diameter round baking dish, about 25mm deep.

Start the oven to 200C. Prefer top and bottom heat over circulated heat. Weigh the base down wiht pie weights or dried chickpeas. Pre-bake for about 20 minutes, then remove from the oven. Reduce the oven temperature to 180C.

Meanwhile, prepare the filling.

Smoked Salmon Quiche

300g smoked salmon, cut in finger sized strips, 150g roasted artichokes or peppers (or both), a small bunch of dill. Just toss everything into the dish in a seemingly random distribution.

Quiche Lorraine

Cut two leeks into 10mm strips. Wash and rinse thoroughly. Fry up 250g of good quality dry-cure bacon or lardons. When done, add the leak, toss around for 30s, then spread the whole lot into the baking dish.

Others

A million of varieties are up for your to make. Mushrooms, spinach and bacon always hits the spot, for example.

… base recipe continued:

Now take 200ml double cream and 100ml milk. Add three free-range eggs (four if tiny), a teaspoon each of salt and pepper, and 1/3 teaspoon of ground nutmeg. Half a teaspoon of stock granulates or a small teaspoon of mustard if you like it very savoury, a pinch of saffron otherwise. Allspice to taste. Mix well, and pour over the filling. Optionally, sprinkle one finely chopped fresh red chilli pepper over the top (a nice kick with the smoked salmon quiche).

Shake the baking tray gently to let trapped air escape, and pop into the preheated oven for 35 minutes. Start to watch it after 25 minutes; it might need taking out sooner if it darkens too quickly.
Take out when done. Let cool down for 20 minutes, then remove quiche from tray (just lift it out by the baking parchment), then let cool down on a rack.

Transfer onto serving plate, cut into generous pieces, serve with a green salad and a crispy white wine. Scores every time.

 

Lamb on Green Pasture

DSC_1555.JPGA nice little amuse bouche, a culinary greeting. I call this a welcome in English.

The little lamb consists of a small white ball of spiced feta cheese spread. It rests on the green pasture, which is made from a walnut pesto, which in turn rests on a small piece of toasted bread – almost like a crouton, just not quite as crunchy.

For the feta cheese spread:

Crush 200g of feta cheese with 75g of butter and a good drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil. Add crushed or grated fresh garlic (at least one fresh clove), very finely diced spring onions, red peppers, and finely chopped dill. Salt, black pepper and nutmeg to taste.

Mix thoroughly, let cool in the fridge, then form the little balls and return to the fridge.

Note that the 200g base makes a lot more than what you need for this little teaser. It’s delicious for breakfast, lunch or support on the next day, provided you have fresh bread to go along with it, and you don’t need to meet with customers or other important folk in close proximity.

For the Walnut Pesto:

Chop a small bunch of Italian basil roughly. Toast a handful of walnuts briefly, then put everything into the blender. Add several tablespoons of freshly grated parmesan, two crushed cloves of garlic, a pinch of nutmeg, then add a very generous amount of extra virgin olive oil.

Blizz for a few minutes, and add oil if necessary. It wants to be firm-ish yet runny.

For the bread:

Half-stale white sourdough bread is ideal. Rub the slices with garlic, then with a ripe tomato, then drizzle with some olive oil and toast on the griddle. Cut into thumb-sized portions, ready for two-bite action.

Assemble everything and voila! A little lamb on a green pasture. Welcome to our house. Make yourself comfortable. Glass of Bubbly with that?

 

Italian-esque Bread Soup

DSCF7282.JPGSoup with attitude, Jamie Oliver called it. I’d say it’s soup with passion, because it’s a bit of a palaver to make, so you’d better really want it. But once you sampled it, you will love it.

This goes back to a dish Jamie Oliver once made on TV, so I shall claim only part ownership to this recipe – part ownership because I never saw or followed Jamie’s, but at any rate, it’s lovely, and the name Bread Soup is one of those lovely kitchen understatements…

Jamie called it Bread Soup With Attitude. It’s also a bit of a palaver to make, thus truly Italian, and lovely. Here goes:

Per person, find 250ml good stock. I cook a chicken with vegetables in just the right amount of liquid, set the chicken meat aside for something else some other day, skim and clarify the soup.

Then, per person, take two thick slices stale white bread. Stale, but not rock-hard. Remove some of the crust, pre-cut the remaining crust to make it easier to eat without a mess in the end. Gently fry the slices with garlic and olive oil, then rub a ripe tomato into each side.

Cut Savoy cabbage leaves and Cavolo Nero leaves into pieces roughly the size of the bread slice, and fry with olive oil for a two minutes or so. Crisp some bacon or panchetta, grind a good amount of Gruyere cheese. Stack bread, cabbage, bacon, cheese, bread, cabbage, bacon, cheese into s soup dish, and grill until the cheese begins to brown.

Shallow-fry whole sage leaves in clarified butter until they are crisp. Drain the fat and try not to break the leaves, which are now very brittle.

Now pour the stock over each portion, return to the grill for another minute or two.

Decorate with crisp sage leaves, maybe a remaining slice of crisp bacon, and a drizzle of the sage-infused clarified butter, and serve immediately.

 

French Onion Soup

french-onion-soup.jpgA delicious and warming French onion soup in 60 minutes.

This takes about 60 minutes. I know, because I timed it, because I disagreed with someone’s time-consuming method of onion soup preparation (http://blog.gauweiler.net/2011/10/14/french-onion-soup/).

Peel one large yellow onion a person, then cut into semi-circle or quarter-circle rings, 3mm thin. For every two portions, add a small red onion, peeled and cut in the same manner. Peel and crush one small clove of garlic each portion. (10 minutes)

Get a deep pan with a good amount of olive oil on high heat. Sweat the onions, then add crushed black pepper (1/2 teaspoon each portion), crushed allspice (1/4 teaspoon a person) and one crushed juniper berry each portion. Add two rashers of streaky bacon or smoked belly of pork (unless restricted by vegetarianism), add one bay leave for every two portions. Turn the heat down to moderate.

Close the lid for 10 minutes. This produces steam to cook the onions, so try to keep the lid closed. Then, open the lid, and caramelize the onions, stirring occasionally.

(You may now add a pinch of sugar if your onions are too sharp or just not the golden, sweet variety.)

Grate some Gruyere cheese, and make some chunky white bread croutons while the onions are working for you. I prefer using croutons over fresh bread. Fresh bread turns into a slimy mess, and I can spice the croutons with garlic and chili.

The onions should caramelize within 20 minutes. Set the croutons aside.

Dust the onions with a spoonful of white wheat flour, stir, then add liquid. Cold water is a good way to start, about 350ml per portion, but you could also use stock. Once you’ve got it back boiling, season to taste with salt, black pepper, allspice, a hint of nutmeg. Stir and let simmer for 15 minutes, tasting and seasoning as you go along.

Turn the grill on, discard the bay leaves, juniper berries, chilies and bacon rashers, if any, and dish the soup out into portion-sized, heat-proof soup bowls.

Sprinkle croutons on top of each bowl and top with cheese. Go easy on the cheese; you’re making soup, not pizza. Moderate application of cheese also enables your diners to eat the soup with a spoon but without making a mess.

Put under the grill for 5min (cheese bubbling and turning golden, occasional brown spots), and serve with a crisp white wine.

Done in 60 minutes, less for a small amount, and thoroughly enjoyable.