Entertaining

everybody makes the best chili

January 25, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

Or so you might be tempted to believe, given how people (and mostly these people are, in my experience, men) do bang on about it. Everybody who makes chili seems to have an opinion, everybody’s recipe is different, and people can get downright snotty on whether or it’s real chili if you use beans. Apparently vegetarians are banned entirely from being taken seriously as chili cooks by that standard.

My opinion is you are probably right, and I am making it all wrong, but I get no complaints, so I’m going to carry on doing as I please, as should you. And what I please changes with every single pot I make, and I have made many of them. Chili is more of a concept to me than an engraved-in-stone recipe, which is why I’m not going to give a specific recipe in this post. There are some things that never change with mine; plenty of garlic, onions and green peppers. Both fresh chilis and chili powder. There will be cumin, and probably plenty of it. I always garnish it generously, and I like it thick, with the tomatoes well-reduced. Oh, and there will always be tomatoes in it, somewhere, even if it’s only the garnish on a white chili, which is another controversial topic amongst purists.

When I can get them, either by growing them myself, or lucking into a deli that sells them in tins, I like using tomatillos and chicken in my white chili, although I’m occasionally willing to buy into the pork industry’s The Other White Meat marketing, if I’m in the mood. I also think you could make a pretty nifty version with white fish, and I think I will try that one of these days, as I have overcome my fear of cooking fish in the last year or so.

So what I’m basically saying here is I haven’t more than glanced at a chili recipe in years, much less followed one to the letter. My recently-acquired passion for what I suppose is best described as Mahgrebi and Mashriqi cuisines has led to some damn fine, if somewhat unorthodox chilis, as well as many happy and educational hours reading cookbooks and falling down internet rabbit holes.

And all this, from a woman who made her first pot of chili by following the recipe on the back of the McCormick’s packet approximately 30 years ago. It was pretty good, as I recall, and I don’t have the heart or arrogance to look down on salt-heavy, pre-mixed spice packets. Those things started me down the road, way back when.

It doesn’t matter, though; even if you’re an unswerving pre-mixed spice packet user, your chili is the best, because everybody’s is the best.

But back to my chili. I realised this weekend that it had been, for me, absolute ages since I’d made chili. So when I went to my awesome butcher to buy the meat for the weekend’s cooking, I got a goodly amount of their rare breed pastured minced beef (and oh god, is it good to fearlessly buy minced meat and not worry about it crawling with god knows what filth, and oh god, I’d forgot just how good beef is supposed to taste, and oh godx3, it really doesn’t cost all that much more than the [too-often literally] shitty supermarket beef, and it’s not pumped full of water, either, but this digression is getting out of hand) and brought it home, resolved to end this chili drought, which I did on Sunday, for dinner with Phil and his dad.

Please enjoy my pretty smoked paprika tin, and ignore the (now cleaned up!) disaster area in the background. — *Please enjoy my pretty smoked paprika tin, and ignore the (now cleaned up!) disaster area in the background, and my grubby apron.*

One recent innovation, courtesy of Spain (Olé!), is an outright obsession with smoked pimentón, which is one spice I’d managed to miss for most of my chili-making career, probably because I thought paprika was boring as hell, based on the probably well-out-of-date sweet paprika my mom tended to sprinkle on cottage cheese, when she was feeling fancy. I WAS SO WRONG. I also thought I didn’t like sweet red peppers, but it turns out, I only didn’t like their bitter, nasty skins, so it’s good to know I can still acquire new tastes in my oncoming dotage. (I learned to blister the hell out of them in the oven and slip their skins off, and hello, ambrosial red peppers, you are now on my short list of favourite foods in the world. Just hitting them with a fruit peeler works as well, if you don’t want them roasted.

So I whacked a bunch of that into it, and unless I am making white chili, in which case I’ll probably sprinkle a little of it on top as part of my elaborate garnish technique, picanté pimentón is joining the roster of permanent chili ingredients. Another new innovation: barring an emergency, in which case I’d just use tinned anyway, as god is my witness, I will never cook dried beans in anything other than my slow-cooker ever again, amen. (Exception: that toxin-killing ten minute hard boil needed for kidney/cannellini beans.) I much prefer cooking with dried beans, and being able to soak them all day, cook them on low overnight, and then use them the following day has totally been a game-changer for me. Why did I spend so long thinking that couldn’t possibly work, and using my super-scary (although perfectly safe) pressure cooker? I’ll tell you why, it’s because up until Nigella Lawson, bless her, offered up this technique in her most recent book, a pressure cooker was the only way I could manage to successfully cook dried beans. I don’t know why the hell I had some kind of terrible cook-it-on-the-hob luck, but I did, and my beans always had horrible hard, crunchy skins on them after like HOURS of simmering, until I tried the pressure cooker. Which is swell, and I’ll probably use it again, if I’m pressed for time, even if it screams terrifyingly, but it’s the crock pot for me from here on in, whenever possible.

So this is getting ridiculously long, so to come back to my original point, chili is awesome, and I am seldom happier in the kitchen than when I am making it. And then we get to eat it, and, as it turns out, my dining companions inform me that I, in fact, make the best chili in the world.

*A happy woman, with unfortunate hair, making chili for the people she loves.*

Except for you, obviously.

good things about january

January 18, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

The first that comes to mind is that you can’t go into a major supermarket without finding buckets of cheap daffodils, bringing a promise that spring will eventually arrive, for sale. I know these are, like, floral battery hens, but I cannot resist them. (Battery hen eggs, those I can resist. Gladly.) January is a hard month, without much to look forward to in the shops and markets, but those daffodils always buck me up a lot.

*Still life, with Seville oranges and daffodils*

Not, however, quite as much as their companions in that photo: Seville oranges! I love them so much. I’ve made marmalade before, but mostly, I buy as many of them as I can find and carry home, to zest and juice and stash in the freezer. It can be painful work, when your hands are as beat up as mine often are, but as long as I remember to put on a pair of latex gloves first, it’s not too bad, assuming I don’t bark my knuckles on the grater. I mix the zest with a bit of water, and freeze it, and the juice, in ice cube trays. (Separately, that is.) Once frozen solid, I pop the individual cubes into plastic bags, and then they’re easy to use, as one ice cube usually contains enough zest to flavour whatever it is I’m making. And, oh, that flavour, and that fragrance! There’s really nothing else like it, although you can fake it reasonably well with a mixture of unwaxed regular orange and lime zest. Not the same, but it’ll do in the months after I’ve run through my supply of bitter orange.

But before the zesting and juicing (and I am hoping to find another batch in the next day or two, before they vanish as suddenly as they appeared), I celebrated with one of my favourite cakes:

As a born midwesterner, cornmeal, better known over here by its Italian name of polenta, is something I grew up on. Cornbread and corn muffins were one of the few things my mother ever baked, although hers came from a box mix, and I say that without contempt: on the few occasions I’ve found Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix over here, I’ve cheerfully paid whatever extortionate price they wanted for it, because that stuff doesn’t even need nostalgia to make it taste good. A staple where I grew up, made, as it is, in Chelsea, MI. But, given that I don’t have ready access to the tasty cheat’s version, I have learned to bake cornbread from scratch. If I add blueberries to it, my father-in-law loves it, and Phil’s not really crazy about it in general, but he does love this cake, possibly because of the heady scent and flavour of the oranges, but most likely because I serve it with good Devon cream.

Most recipes for this cake contain a fair amount of ground almonds, but as anything made with ground almonds is far too reminiscent of marzipan, and both Phil and I utterly detest that shit, I had to do some fiddling and adaptation of a few recipes to come up with my own.

Bitter orange and polenta cake

For the cake:

250 grams of sweet butter, i.e., unsalted

250 grams golden caster sugar (I do have a preference for unrefined sugars, not because I delude myself into thinking they’re in any way nutritionally superior, but because I think they taste better. You can use white caster, though, if you prefer.)

4 eggs

Zest of three Seville oranges (sub 2 large sweet oranges, and one lime, if no Seville oranges available.) Juice the oranges, and set aside 125ml for the glaze.

175 grams polenta. I used the regular stuff, not quick-cook, but I would be surprised if it made any difference; it’s just what I had in stock.

175 grams unbleached plain white flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp orange flower water. Rosewater is dandy, too, or vanilla extract, if you like; I just wanted an overwhelmingly fragrant orange cake! All three are optional.

1-2 tablespoons slivered pistachios

For the syrup:

125 ml Seville orange juice

125 grams golden caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 170ºC, and grease and line a round cake pan. Mine was 22cm.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one by one, then add in the dry ingredients, plus the orange flower water, and the orange juice left, after you’ve saved 125ml for the glaze. (3 Sevilles really should give you enough for both the glaze, and a small amount for the cake, but if yours are small, or mean with their juices, juice another one.) Mix until your batter is incorporated, and then spoon into the cake pan, and smooth the top. This is a thick batter, as this is a fairly dense cake, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Begin testing for doneness at about 35-40 minutes. Mine took just over 50 minutes to be done, but everybody’s oven is different. You probably know the drill: when a tester/toothpick/skewer comes out of the centre clean, it’s done. Remove from oven, give it a couple of minutes, and then turn out onto a rack to cool.

Once the cake is cool, put the remaining orange juice and caster sugar into a small pan, and bring to the boil on the hob, then allow to simmer until reduced down to a nice syrupy consistency. Figure 5-10 minutes. Once done, allow to cool, and then pour over the cool cake, and sprinkle with pistachio slivers. Serve with single cream or Greek yogurt, as you please.

This cake keeps pretty well in the fridge; I’m on Day 4 of mine, with a couple of slices left, and it’s still doing fine, although that’s going to be one slice left, after I hit publish on this.

new year’s day

January 1, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

So we ended up having an unexpected guest last night; Phil texted his dad at midnight, to say happy new year, and invited him to drop in when he got back from his evening with Phil’s cousin’s family. He came in and had a drink and a chat with us, ’round the dining room table, then eventually pushed off and I went to bed. Phil obviously stayed up for a couple more hours, so come morning, I was up early, and he still slumbers on.

To keep myself occupied, and because we have his dad coming back tonight for our usual Friday dinner, I started mooching through the leftovers, looking for ways to give them new life. I had a bunch of filo scraps, many lemons, so many eggs, and as it happens, horrifying amounts of caster sugar, and a big pot of Fage Greek yogurt in the fridge, along with a vague memory from my baklava research, of something called patsavoura glyko, a sweet yogurt pie made with jumbled-up filo scraps. No delicate handling needed, just bunch ’em up in the bottom of a lightly greased pan, mix up the yogurt with oil, sugar, eggs, a bit of baking powder, and some vanilla extract (although I added some lemon zest, ‘cuz I think lemon zest improves practically any creamy sweet thing), which you then pour over the filo, and bake at about 200° C for 30-ish minutes or so. Then you let it cool, and pour over a hot lemon syrup, and voilà, you got your patsavoura glyko. Because I cannot leave well enough alone, or, seemingly, follow a recipe precisely, I cut the recipe roughly in half, as I’m only feeding three people, and there was the lemon zest, and there might possibly be some rosewater in the syrup, because I love rosewater.

It’s cooling now, and I am soon to take a break from writing to make the syrup. At the moment, however, I have some oxtails roasting in the oven, as a preliminary to making a good, hearty, beef stock. When I first moved over here, the BSE-era rules about beef on the bone were still strictly enforced, and this made it hard to make a really good stock. Happily, the ban ended some time back, but finding good soup bones can still be a challenge, and I was resigned to commercial beef stock (the liquid Touch of Taste concentrate is actually pretty good) until one day, in Sainsbury’s, I spotted some oxtails. Hello! I thought. Beef bones, and in a nice, compact form. I had absolutely no experience with oxtail, but figured they’d work, and so they did. You want an intensely flavoursome jellied beef stock, which freezes beautifully? Oxtail. Very strong, so it has to be cut with water, but it’s nice to have so much flavour for such a small commitment of freezer space, always at a premium around here.

So, to get rid of my stock of wilting herbs, some sad-looking celery, and a few flabby carrots (all still perfectly fine and safely edible, just nothing you’d want to bite into raw), I grabbed a package of oxtails when I saw them in the shop. I’ll pull them out of the oven, chuck them in one of my slow cookers (I, uh, have three of them, and I’d probably buy a mini if I could find one) with the veg and herbs, cover it all with water, and then ignore it for 12 hours or so, which is when the unpleasant part comes, and I have to strain it. Gack. Worth it, but I do dread that part.

There appears to be some kind of paleo/autoimmune cult around bone stock these days, and, well, I doubt it’s quite the miracle devotées of said cult believe, but it’s good stuff, and if people who invest it with magical properties create enough of a demand for it that I can find oxtails easily, without having to go to the inconveniently-located butcher, great! Unfortunately, this also drives prices up — see what happened to lamb shanks for an example — but every time I see a £3 whole chicken in the shops, I feel kind of sad and horrible, as I wonder what kind of conditions those chickens, and the people who raise and process them, must live and work in. Organic/free-range seem more realistically priced, but harder to find. Still, if your food budget is severely limited, there’s a couple of meals to be got from a chicken…and then I remind myself that I am being one of those middle-class people, the kind who is one patronising step away from telling economically disadvantaged people all of the time-consuming and skill-heavy ways they could be feeding themselves cheaper and more healthily, and I want to smack myself.

Right. So that bit up there was such a downer that I wandered off to make my rosewater/lemon syrup, which I duly soaked my cake with, and the cake tastes great, although it’s far from photogenic. You know what is photogenic? This:

I found Yorkshire pudding more intimidating than baklava. I don't cook much plain English, and it would be just like me to fall on my ass with something so simple. Fortunately, it was great! — *I found Yorkshire pudding more intimidating than baklava. I don’t cook much plain English, and it would be just like me to fall on my ass with something so simple. Fortunately, it was great!*

I made toad-in-the-hole for tea, as I think my father-in-law had kind of hit the wall with all the spicy stuff I’ve been cooking of late, and on a wretchedly cold and rainy night, stodge with onion gravy goes down a treat. I used some of my leftover onion confit as a base for the gravy, and got another couple of hundred grams of flour and 4 eggs out of my overstock — I made far too much batter, but it’ll keep well enough, so I’ll make something else of it tomorrow. Possibly some sort of clafoutis, depending on what kind of fruit I can scrounge up. I swear I am totally going off desserts as a regular thing, once Phil goes back to work, because god knows the extra kilo of holiday lard needs to be driven off as soon as possible, but in the meantime, the ugly Greek yogurt and filo cake tasted much better than it looked.

boxing day postmortem II: everything but the sweets

December 30, 2015 by Ana Leave a Comment

I keep waking up in the night, worrying about how I’m going to get everything done, and what I have to cook or bake or buy today. Then I remind myself it’s OK, I have no more to do for Boxing Day, and now all I have to do is repurpose leftovers. And that’s going pretty well! Plenty went straight into the freezer, and can just be thawed and heated up at a later date, and I’ve made two batches of soup so far, some of which went to feed us, some went to my father-in-law, and the rest will be eaten, or remade into something else, and frozen. It’ll be OK! I’m basically done! But my nervous system hasn’t quite got the message yet.

Back to the food on the day, though. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I had a roomful of people wanting to eat, Phil didn’t get a chance to take photos of the albóndigas or the chorizo a la sidra, but meatballs and sausages aren’t terribly photogenic anyway, and trust me, they were delicious. The sausage I bought from Lunya was perfection, and many thanks to Lunya’s chef, who came out of the kitchen, carrying sausages from his own stock, when the shop assistant kindly went back to find out which of their (many, many) sorts of chorizo I should use, in response to my query, insisting I must use these sausages, these were the sort they used, and unsurprisingly he was right, as they were fantastic. (Basically, you need to go with an uncured sausage, and they had only cured in the deli’s chiller case.) I can’t say enough nice things about Lunya. I’ve been going in there for years, and have never found the staff anything less than helpful and friendly and totally knowledgable about their wares.

Anyway! Outside of the hot dishes, everything got photographed, and so, with that, here’s the food porn.

Boxing Day Feast — Yrs truly, prying the lid off a jar of chutney. Clockwise from bottom: spanakopita, tortilla patatas, chorizo, jamón iberico, bread, cheeses, boiled ham for the timid, wild Alaskan smoked salmon, sausage rolls, mediterranean herbed steamed potatoes.

mezze! mezze! mezze! — *Muhummara, oh I am so pleased with that stuff. And so pleased I have the leftovers all to myself. Yum!*

mezze corner! olives, nibbly things, guacamole, hummus, muhammara, Greek salad (that was amazing; I’d been tenderly ripening those tomatoes for days, glimpses of spanakopita and mediterranean herbed steamed potatoes

And there it is, my culinary meisterwerk. No, not, strictly speaking, a purely tapas spread, as Spain was far from the only country represented, but we most definitely did not have the traditional British or American holiday spread. To me, the spirit of tapas and mezze and the groaning board in general is pretty universal; come, eat, be sociable, and happy. Yes, I totally overdid it, but what the hell: it was good.

boxing day postmortem: the baking

December 28, 2015 by Ana Leave a Comment

Well, so much for my plan to write about the experience as it was happening, because as it played out, I had absolutely no time whatsoever that was unaccounted for as I was going along. Holy shit, the last week as been frenzied, and time to even sit down at all, much less write something coherent about the experience, simply didn’t exist.

Spoiler: Nailed it, but it wasn’t easy.

TL;DR: I was overly ambitious, and made way too much food, which doesn’t surprise me, given my tendency to overdo everything, and my irrational, deep-seated fear of under-catering any dining event which I am hosting. So now I have a bunch of happy, well-fed people who have gone home, and a hell of a lot of leftovers, many of which went straight into the deep freeze, and some of which are going to be repurposed over the next couple of days. Most of the soups I plan on making will go into the freezer as well. And I have many, many eggs left, which will keep for a couple of weeks, in my experience, given that they were very fresh when I bought them, and well, all that cheese, so much jamón, endless chorizo…omelettes and fritatta, dead ahead, is basically what I’m saying.

But to the pretty pictures — taken by Phil, who busted his ass helping me get set up on the day, and heroically walked to Sainsbury’s and found leaf coriander and mild chiles on Boxing Day morning, thus saving the guacamole — which, alas, aren’t complete, mostly because there just was no time at all to get everything photographed individually, and on the table in a reasonable facsimile of on time:

First, I spent the evening of the 23rd and the afternoon of the 24th doing my cookies, candied nuts, and baklava. Oh, the baklava. The baklava that was my pride and joy, and to my utter, though modestly restrained glee, deeply impressed the actual Greeks at our party. So I was able to dump most of the leftovers on them, and get that delicious, gooey evil out of my house. But here’s what it looked like in its pristine state:

maple syrup walnut baklava — *Maple syrup walnut baklava. Look at that shine!*

I came up with the idea to use slightly reduced maple syrup to soak the pastry, and figured if I could come up with the idea, surely somebody else had before me. Google showed this to be true, so after reading through a few recipes, I hacked together something to my satisfaction. I hauled my ass out to the amazing and wonderful Liverpool 8 Superstore, utterly deserving winner, incidentally, of this year’s BBC Radio4 You and Yours Best Food Retailer Award, to get some hardcore awesome Turkish filo dough, and some lovely Lebanese walnuts, and that trip was worth it (mind you, it always is) because it is so, so, much better than frozen or (most; Theos’ is pretty damn good) mainstream chiller case supermarket stuff.

I think I’ve got the touch, when it comes to filo dough, because I had no trouble whatsoever with it, and the Turkish stuff was amazing to handle. It felt a bit sturdier than I was expecting, and I was very prompt in getting the waxed paper and damp tea towel back on it with every sheet, and in all, so surprisingly pleasant to work with that I decided to go ahead and make spanakopita with the remaining sheets. I had plenty of those, because I bought quite a lot of filo under the assumption that it was highly possible I’d make a cack-handed mess out of it. I didn’t, and now I think of it, my previous filo experiences have generally worked out just fine, so I don’t know why I was so worried.

*I go for a slightly rustic look to my shortbread; I am all about the texture, and this was perfect. Pro tip: make your flour mixture about 1/3 rice to 2/3 white wheat.*

sweets! — *Gingerbread, the baklava again, and a gingerbread crime scene on the baking parchment to the left.*

Anyway, along with the baklava, I baked many batches of cookies. Probably too many, as it turned out, because even though I was handing out huge bags of them, I still have lots stashed in the freezer. We will be having cookies for dessert in March at this rate, when we’re not having cupcakes. The remaining baklava I can slowly take care of myself. Today’s healthy breakfast (and oh god, I need to get back on the clean eating bandwagon like now) consisted of a leftover baklava diamond and a cup of coffee.

insulin!!! — *Sugar corner. Cupcakes, trifle, cookies, baklava. Off to the right, the two loaves of bread I baked on Boxing Day morning, to go with the cheese. All the fat. All the carbs.*

There’s the naughty corner of the spread, displaying the cupcakes (red velvet with cream cheese frosting, double chocolate), the cookie tree, and the enormously popular strawberry/rhubarb trifle. As if the trifle weren’t sinful enough, I beat some marscapone into the custard. Other than a couple of leftover scoops stuffed into the empty double cream pots which left with a happy, trifle-loving cousin, that was mercifully devoured on the day, so I haven’t got that sitting around, because holy cow, it was irresistible, and well worth stashing some good rhubarb and strawberries in the deep freezer while they were still to be found in the shops, in anticipation of making this for Boxing Day.

Also to be seen, the bread, and there will be a better view of that in the next post. I baked that on the day, because nothing goes stale faster than homemade bread (it is fleetingly delicious beyond any shop-bought loaf, and fortunately, toast is a thing) and I didn’t want to go to all that effort, only to serve bread at less than its best. I made one loaf of sourdough (the long, vaguely oval one) and one loaf of maple-pecan wholemeal, which is utterly gorgeous with strong cheese.

And there’s most of the baking for you. Next time, the savoury food!

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