The Spanish Grand Prix – A taste of Catalonia

I have to start off with a couple of apologies.  The first is for having been so quit in the last few weeks.  Although I have the best of intentions, and plenty that I want to say, I have been struggling to find them time to put my thoughts into words.  Moving has been great fun so far, and I’m enjoying myself very much, however I seem to be a lot more busy than I used to, I expect once things settle down a bit more I shall be able to write more regularly.

My second apology is to my local Carrefore as it seems I did it a dis-service.  Having had the time now to properly explore the aisles, I was amazed to discover in their local food section (which, alongside the halal meat and Japanese pot noodles, contains such delicacies as Colmans mustard) the shredded filo pastry I should have used for my künefe!  I now can’t wait to give this another go!

Anyway, onto the purpose of this post, what I cooked for the Spanish GP.  For the past week and a half I have been staying in a hotel with no kitchen (just a kettle!), but luckily I moved back in the Citadine on Friday so I have been able to cook again.  I’ll be here for the next four weeks, and although the kitchen is small and poorly equipped, after not having a kitchen at all I’m very grateful! The race was held in Barcelona and so I wanted to cook something Catalan rather than something generically Spanish.

What I decided on was the bruchetta like Pa amb tomàquet and a Catalan Sauté of Calamari in Onion Marmalade both fairly simple dishes that should contain a lot of flavour.

I started with the calamari and onion marmalade as this would take the longest.  The dish only had 4 ingredients: squid, onions, olive oil and a dried chilli (or cayenne pepper in my case!).  I had to guess all the measurements and went for 5 tubes of squid (of varying size!) and four small to medium onions.

The ingredients for my squid dish!

The cooking was equally straight forward.  I chopped my onions and cut my squid into rings.  I then cooked the squid rings for about a minute before setting them aside.  Next into the pan went some olive oil and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper (probably half a teaspoon if I had to guess).  Once the pepper had fried a little I added my onions and turned the heat down. To begin the slow process of cooking and caramelizing them.  This took place over the next 40 minutes.

Cooking the onions for 40 minutes

When the onions were finally ready I retuned the squid to the pan and heated it through before serving.

I then quickly made the pa amb tomàquet.  I cut two large slices of bread and toasted them lightly to give a crisp surface.  I then rubbed the surface with garlic and then with half a tomato each.

Rubbing with garlic and tomato

To finish them off I sprinkled over salt and olive oil and mixed everything together with the end of my loaf of bread and my second dish was finished.

The finished breads

My Catalan food all served up

I enjoyed both dishes a lot, although I’m not entirely sure they went that well together.  I had thought that the cool tomato would complement the spicy heat of the onions, but in the end I found the raw garlic taste on the bread overpowered both!  The squid dish was unusual but I really liked it.  Given its simplicity the flavours really shone for me and the sweet spicy onions were a great foil in texture and flavour to the salty yet sweet squid.  The amount I cooked proved to be more than enough for two so I shall be eating it again, although I do have slight misgivings over how well squid will re-heat!

Onto the race.  This was once again a thrilling race with an electric start involving home star Fernando Alonso coming through from 4^th on the grid to claim 1^st place in the 1^st corner.  Unfortunately for him his car wasn’t up to the task and although he held everyone off till the first round of pit stops he then lost his lead and eventually finished 5^th.  There were plenty of different strategies  being used and Jenson Button used his three stop strategy to claim 3^rd after a horrible time getting off the line.  Vettle won once again, but for once he also had to work for it.  He not only making some good overtaking manoeuvres for once, but he responded well to being under pressure from 2^nd place finisher Lewis Hamilton for the majority of the race.  A word of congratulations for Nick Heidfeld, who finished 8^th after starting 24^th due to his car dramatically catching fire in practice three.

One final foodie note, for our evening meal we decided to stick with the Spanish theme and give Carrefours paella in a box a go (I don’t normally go for this sort of thing but having spent a lot of time cooking earlier I didn’t feel like anything complicated!).  The box, it turns out, contains a tin of meat seafood, vegetables and juice, a packet of rice and a sachet of spices.

Paella in a box

This was all shoved in a pan together with some water and actually produced a pretty credible meal.  I was genuinely surprised to find chicken legs and real pieces of meat and fish in there.  Not bad at all for meals in a tin!

The finished box paella

A really excellent and reasonably priced meal at Côte

There’s some new competition for the Cafe Rouge down Cardiff Bay in the form of the recently opened bistro Côte.  Unlike Cafe Rouge’s shabby chic rustic decoration, Côte is both cosy and grown up.  The interior has a theme of cream and brown, the tables are a mix of marble and wooden and soft lighting abounds throughout.  A hint of the rural is present in the ceramic water bottles which are emblazoned with the restaurant’s name and pop alley topped.  It’s a great fun touch.  The large windows of the restaurant will open up in the summer to allow the outside in, however with the weather being pretty much as cold as it could get, these were firmly shut when I was there!

The interior of Cote

The cute water bottle

Cote was recently voted “best value restaurant in the UK” at the good food awards and I can see why.   From 12 – 7pm Monday to Friday they offer a lunch and early evening menu which costs £9.95 for two courses and £11.90 for three.  Strolling through the Bay on an afternoon off this menu is what caught my eye and prompted a booking to be made for later.  The normal al la carte menu seemed fairly reasonable as most starters are around £5/6 with mains priced between £8.75 and £13.50.

On the early evening menu there was a choice of four starters, four mains and four desserts, which although not a huge selection provided plenty of choice.  After much deliberation and hesitation I opted for a starter of warm ratatouille with goats cheese and toasted pain de campagane. One of my dinner companions also went for the ratatouille while another choose the mussels.

Starters of ratatouille and mussels

My starter was great.  The portion was fairly large, but the soft vegetables and cheese slipped down.  The ratatouille itself was very nicely flavoured with garlic and, I was able to taste each vegetable (corgette, pepper and aubergine). The goats cheese was very mild and creamy adding a richness to the dish.  My only slight complaint would be the crispiness of the bread!  The drier parts, untouched by the topping (admittedly not a large area!) were extremely crisp and some of my crust escaped off my plate as I tried to cut it.  Being in familiar company this was not an issue, but I would have hated for this to happen in a more formal setting.

For my main course I had roast sea bass with savoy cabbage and braised peas in a white wine and cream sauce.  This dish was the star of the meal and the description on the menu did not do it justice.  A star meal for the money.

Sea bass with garlic peas and cabbage

I received two perfectly cooked fillets of sea bass sat on copious amounts of peas, cabbage and tiny sweet onions.  This was topped with a ball of straw like crispy potato shreds and finished with a magnificent sauce.  The sauce was strongly flavoured with garlic (not mentioned on the menu, but it is a French restaurant so I probably should have guessed!).  Sea Bass being delicate I would never have thought of putting garlic with it for fear over overpowering the fish but this was the mellow flavour of slowly cooked garlic rather than the harsh powerful taste of the raw stuff and it matched the fish really well.  A pleasant surprise even if I did stink of garlic the next day!  The other thing I want to mention was the peas.  Hopefully without sounding too mad, these were strongly “peaey”. I have no idea where they got such fresh and strongly flavoured peas out of season (I suspect a large amount of air miles were involved), but they were great.

Being greedy I decided to go the whole hog and have a pudding as well (only in the interest of having a complete review you understand :-p) and so I chose a crème caramel.  This was a magnificent tower of silky rich cream topped with the stain of the burnt sugar and surrounded by the caramel sauce and some more cream (as if it needed to be more indulgent!).  Exquisite. The set cream was generously flavoured with vanilla and just dissolved in the mouth.

Creme caramel!

Overall I was really impressed with my trip to Côte.  The food was of a really high quality and was pretty exceptional for the price.  The standard of the vegetables was great.  I liked the relaxed atmosphere in the restaurant and the staffs were attentive.  It wasn’t too busy when I visited, I needn’t have booked but I’m sure it won’t be long till this place gets busy.  With a prominent position overlooking Roald Dhal Plass and the Wales Millennium Centre, this is bound to a popular destination once the warmer weather arrives and those windows can be opened.

Chicken Tikka Wraps

For tea last week I decided to cook some chicken tikka wraps.  I’ve made a few Indian marinades before, but I usual cheat a little and use a pre-made paste of spice mix.  After a little bit of research around the web I found that I had most of the common ingredients for chicken tikka in my cupboard. So I thought I’d have a go at making the sauce from scratch.

The ingredients for the chicken tikka marinade

Most of the recipes I saw recommended marinating the chicken for a couple of hours.  However being in work during the day, and figuring it couldn’t hurt, I started the day before giving the meat plenty of time to marinate.

Making the marinade

My marinade consisted of:

• 200g Greek yogurt
• 3 cloves of garlic (diced)
• 2 tsp ginger paste
• 1 tbsp turmeric
• 1tsp smoked paprika (I didn’t have any of the plain variety!)
• 2 tsp chopped chilli
• 1tbsp garam masala
• 2 tsp lemon juice

This was all mixed together before adding the chicken (around 450/500g) which I had chopped into inch cubes. This was then covered and placed in the fridge

Adding the chicken to the marinade

All nicely covered

When I was ready to cook I got the chicken out of the fridge to take the chill off, then heated the oven to 200C.  Rather than take off the excess marinade I decided to put the dish straight in the oven to ensure that the chicken had a good coating.  In the end I left everything in for 20 minutes and when I checked, the chicken was cooked though and still very moist – perfect!

Chicken tikka just out of the oven

While the chicken had been cooking I prepared some accompaniments.  I chopped up a red onion and two large shallots which were gently fried until translucent and shredded some romaine lettuce.  Looking back I think fresh baby leaf spinach would have been good as well, but I didn’t have any in the flat.

lettuce and onions

With everything ready I fished the tikka pieces out of the excess marinade and put them in a clean dish.  Plenty of the marinade clung to the chunks, which was wonderful!   Grabbing my garlic and coriander wraps from the cupboard I served up everything and got to work on constructing a wrap for myself.

Making a wrap

I was really pleased with how everything turned out in the end as it was a great alternative to fajitas.  The marinade was really fragrant and not too hot.  Although, with all the yogurt, it could easily take more chilli if desired.  I didn’t think it was  bad for a first attempt!  There was a slight bitterness from the garam masala, but the subtle sweetness of the slow cooked onions countered this well.  With everything else being soft the lettuce also added a much needed bit of crunch.

The final chicken pieces looked amazing.  I wasn’t sure about the colour of the marinade when I first made it as it had seemed a bit pale.  However once it was cooked it turned a deep orange which contrasted really well with the pale flesh of the meat.

My chicken pieces were too large to eat as one piece which meant I needed to cut them to go in the wraps. But I think keeping the pieces large helped keep the chicken moist so I will keep them that size when I next make this.  I also make far too much for two (the quantity would easily do 3!), but this was no bad thing.  The tikka pieces kept really well in the fridge and were consumed for lunch a few days later!

Really Tasty Italian Pork Belly and Beans (with some onions!)

Since it’s so very cold out, I decided that a nice warming meal was in order and so got out some strips of pork belly from my freezer.  I’m a big fan of pork belly; it’s one of my favourite cuts of meat and there is always so much you can do with it.  It can be extremely fatty, and although I always try to pick the leanest slices, even these are still about 50% fat. This can be both a positive (tasty!) and negative (bad for the waistline).  For this reason I always like to cook pork belly slowly so that the fat has time to render down leaving beautifully soft and flavoursome meat.

Italian style pork belly with cannellini beans

After seeing what I had in the cupboard I decided to go a bit Italian for this dish, rubbing garlic, fennel seed and rosemary into the meat and serving Cannellini beans as the accompaniment. In the end I used:

1 large clove of garlic

½ tsp fennel seeds

½ tsp dried rosemary

1-2 tbsp olive oil

3 red onions

50ml white wine

1tsp sugar

I started by crushing my fennel seeds, dried rosemary and garlic in my pestle and mortar. I then added the olive oil to form a nice marinade which was massaged onto my two strips of belly pork.  Next I roughly chopped the red onions and placed them in the bottom of an oven proof dish, before pouring over the wine and sprinkling with sugar.  The nicely coated pork went on top of this and then everything went into the oven at 140C for two and a half hours.

my marinade

The onions with wine and sugar, then topped with the pork ready for the oven

With half an hour to go on the pork’s cooking time I started the beans which were really easy.  To make these I needed:

1 tin of Cannellini beans

1 shallot

Another big clove of crushed garlic (keeps the colds away!)

½ tsp dried thyme

50mls chicken (or veg) stock

I finely chopped the shallot and gently sweated it off in a pan with the crushed garlic, till it had turned translucent. Then I added the thyme, the beans and the stock.  This was then simmered over a low heat and occasionally checked to ensure that it didn’t boil dry.  By the time the pork was cooked the chicken stock had all but gone, leaving just enough to flavour and coat the finished beans.  To complete the dish I poured the juices from the pork into the beans as I couldn’t let all that flavour go to waste. It was then given a good mix before serving.

Making the beans: frying the shallots, garlic and thyme; adding the beans, then the stock; the finished beans

The pork just out of the oven

This meal went was a hit with my other half and I really enjoyed it too.  As well as tasting great, the meat was divinely soft and succulent which is everything I want in my pork belly.  Although there was plenty of flavour from the herbs they weren’t overpowering and you could still taste that lovely meat.

I was pleased with the beans, they were a great accompaniment. The pork juices running through just lifted them and added some oomph that stock alone could not have done.  The onions cooked in wine turned out nice with both soft and crispy bits depending on where they had been in the dish and they had an interesting sweet/sour thing going on.

Squash, Roasted Garlic and Goats Cheese Lasagne

My unidentified squash

Back in Cardiff Autumn is well underway, the trees are changing colour and the shops are full of my favourite vegetable – Squash.  There are many different varieties of squash in a wonderful range of autumnal colours and sizes and I love to cook with them (even though I usually have no idea what variety I’m using!).  For this lasagne I was using a green and orange squash which tapered to a point (please let me know if you know what it was!) and weighed just under a kilo.  This gave plenty of flesh for a lasagne for two

My Ingredients

The rest of my ingredients (for 2) were:

• 50g goats cheese
• 6 cloves of garlic (nice fat ones!)
• 200g lasagne sheets
• A can/carton of chopped tomatoes
• Squeeze of tomato puree
• A small onion
• Tablespoon of sage
• About 250mls skimmed milk
• A couple of tablespoons of cornflour
• Salt and pepper

The first thing I did was scoop out the core, peel the squash and chop it into 1½ – 2cm cubes.  I then tossed the cubes in a couple of tablespoon of oil and the sage and mixed with the whole, unpeeled garlic cloves.  The whole lot was roasted them in the oven for 30-40 minutes, at 200°C, till soft and starting to brown.

Roasting the squash, sage and garlic

Once the squash was cooked I started on my tomato sauce first squeezing the soft middle from the garlic cloves, chopping it and gently frying the result with some finally chopped onions.  When the onions were nice and translucent I added the chopped tomatoes, tomato puree and plenty of pepper and left the lot to gently simmer for about 10 minutes.

The chopped cooked garlic, tomato sauce, and adding the roasted squash

I also made a white sauce by combining the milk with the cornflour, some nutmeg and seasoning and heating till this thickened and chopped up the goats cheese into small pieces.  All that was left to do then was assemble the lasagne layering up the two sauces, cheese and pasta.  This was all topped with plenty of white sauce and cheese and then baked in the oven for about 30 minutes.

Layering the lasagne, before going in the oven and after cooking

The resulting lasagne is filling without being heavy and full of flavour.  The sweetness of the squash is tempered by the deep garlic and tangy cheese.  It’s a favourite in my house and it’s also pretty easy to scale up (I’ve made it for eight) provided that you can get a big enough pan to cook it in!  I’m going to be making this quite a few more times before the winter is over!

Served up on the plate

A new cook book, and a meal goes badly wrong

An absolute disaster, so much for the romantic dinner idea.....

Before I begin I would like to apologize for the length of this post, it seems that I had a lot to get off my chest about this meal!  It’s been a cathartic experience writing this!

I have a new cookbook; one which I hoped would allow me to combine my love of posh food with my less than extravagant means.  It’s Jason Atherton’s Gourmet Food for a Fiver and the idea of the book is that you can create a two course gourmet meal from the book for £5 per person (still not that cheap I feel!).

The book itself is great, the pictures of the food look sumptuous, the recipes appear to be clear and direct, there are even tips on how to best present the food for that restaurant look (an area where I can fall down).  There is a good selection of starters mains (they actually appear together as a savoury section split into veg, meat and fish) and lots of desserts so plenty of options to choose from. Jason also provides some seasonal menu suggestions and other themes.  Most recipes are for four people, but can be easily scaled up or down as needed.   My only issue would be that, since the starters and mains run into each other with no division, you end up trying to guess from the portion size which is which.

However, to my dismay, my first attempt at a two course meal from there was a disaster, although without trying some more recipes I don’t know if the problem was me or the book.  For my two courses I had decided to cook the white asparagus, pasta and poached egg for starter and the confit chicken leg with chorizo and bean stew for main.

The problems started with my actual choices as try as I might I could not find any white asparagus, probably due to it’s being out of season. Rather than use the more bitter green variety I decided to abandon that element of the starter which reduced it to just pasta and a poached egg (which just doesn’t sound so “gourmet”).  The rest of the starter went well.  I managed to make the pasta with creamy mushroom sauce (Jason’s alternative to Macaroni cheese according to the book :-p) and poach my eggs (nice soft gooey centre!) then, adding the shavings of parmesan, I served it up. It managed to looked not to dissimilar to the picture in the book (minus some ingredients of course!).

The ingredients for my starter

The result was tasty but not really something I would have put together. However we were starving by this time (all is revealed later) and so wolfed it down.  I’m not really sure if the missing asparagus would have made the meal feel more coherent, but it would certainly have added to the variety in texture as both the pasta and the egg were a bit soggy.  I also had plenty of pasta spare despite halving the recipe, but this is not a complaint!  I think that maybe a few salad leaves could have improved this starter and the recipe does suggest a couple of watercress sprigs for garnish but I forgot these. It just didn’t occur to me at the time, my mind was full of the trouble with the main course!

The starter in the book (left) versus what I served (right)

Preparation for my main had begun the day before with the dry brining of my chicken legs.  This involved covering the chicken in 2 tablespoons of salt, x leave of sage and 2 stalks of rosemary and leaving it in the fridge for at least 12 hours.  Then, 4 hours before we were due to eat (the recipe involved a lot of cooking and resting!) these legs were submerged in a large quantity of oil into which more salt, sage and rosemary were added.  The book said that to confit the legs would take 2 1/2 hours on 90C and that I should turn the legs half way through cooking. So I dutifully put my pot in the oven and got on with my evening.

After around an hour and a half I returned to the oven to turn my chicken and noticed that it didn’t really seem to be cooking very much! Undeterred, I checked the book again, verified I was doing as it said and put the pot back in the oven to continue as before.  I was starting to get a bit uneasy about it, but knowing that confiting is not a quick method (and having never done it before) I assumed that this was all normal and the final hour would transform my rather raw chicken into soft succulent perfection.

Well I was wrong!  When 3 hours had gone by (I gave it a little extra to be sure) I checked on the chicken again, it did look a bit more cooked, but sticking a knife into one of the legs resulted in rather a lot of blood spewing forth which told another story.  At this point my sense of unease turned into a full blown panic, as with three hours now gone and the meat still only partially cooked, I knew this was never going to be done in time.

In my panic I decided that the best way forward was to apply more heat so whacked the oven up to 180C and stuck the pot in again before warning my partner that the meal may be a little later than initially planned.

At 180C the chicken still took another hour to cook and so it was getting quite late by the time I drained the oil and covered the legs, allowing them to rest while I prepared and ate the starter and got one with accompaniments.

The chicken at differnt stages; top is dry brining, left is after 3 hours at 90C and right is after an additional hour at 180C

The chicken would have two accompaniments: a chorizo and bean stew and some roasted garlic.  The garlic was to be created by wrapping in foil several cloves of garlic n their skin, thyme, sage and lots of olive oil.  This parcel was to bake in the oven for 35/40 mins at 180C.  The bean stew took less time and was prepared by frying chorizo to release the oil before removing the meat and adding stock and cream.  The liquor is then reduced before the meat is returned to the pan along with time butter beans and thyme. Pretty straight forward really but just to add to my many woes I managed to burn my first lot of chorizo and so had to make this twice!

The garlic ready to go in the oven

The ingredients for the bean and chorizo stew

Finally it was time to serve up this main.  You’re supposed to fry off the chicken legs before serving to crisp the skin, however my over enthusiastic application of heat meant that my legs were now quite fragile so this was not possible and I served them straight up (apologies for the photo, my heart just wasn’t in it by this time!) and then it was time to eat.

The main in the book (left) versus what I served (right)

It would be fair to say that this was not a success.  The chicken, though wonderfully tender and falling off the bone tasted only of oil and salt and was inedible (to give him credit my partner tried very hard to eat this having seen how much effort I put it).  The garlic was in the main part just black and solid.  There was the odd soft sweet part but these took much searching to discover.  The bean stew was okay, but that was all.

I have to be honest and say that this was probably the worst meal I have ever cooked. Given how long I had spent trying to cook it I was devastated and gave up eating all together.

I don’t want to blame the book, but I really did stick to the recipe closely, maybe my technique was out. Needless to say I won’t be attempting this again anytime soon.  I will however give the book another try, it may be that one recipe was off, but there are many more to try and who knows, maybe I’ll have more luck with a pud!

Gourmet Burger Kitchen, A Tale of Two Deals

http://www.gbk.co.uk/

Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) currently have a lovely offer on (ends 25^th April) where Sunday to Thursday you can have two burgers and a plate of nachos to share for £10.  Never one to miss a bargain, I printed myself a couple of vouchers and decided to use on at each of the locations in Cardiff (on different days mind you!).

First up, the newer of the two restaurants which is situated under Cardiff Central Library.  This is a wonderfully bright airy space decorated with flip flops and surf boards.  The huge glass front means that it is summery even on the darkest of days.

We ordered and the nachos arrived as a starter.  There was plenty of topping and my only complaint would be that the nachos themselves could have done with a little salt, however as there was some on the table, this was an easy problem to fix.

Onto our burgers, I chose beef with satay sauce and my partner in crime went for beef with avocado and bacon, both cooked to a lovely pink medium.   My burger was delicious, very sloppy and completely impossible to eat in the manner of a burger, but my God did it taste good!

The satay sauce was both salty and sweet and the beef was ever so tender.  I looked like a five year old child by the time I had finished, but it was worth every splattered drop!  I have no idea what the bacon and avocado burger tasted like (being too busy scoffing down my own) but it was consumed without complaint so I will assume it was good.

For the second trip, the same deal again but with different burgers of course!  This time we went to the Cardiff Bay venue.  This was a lot smaller and felt cramped inside.  There was more seating outside the restaurant, but this is April and no matter how sunny the weather looks it’s not warm enough to eat outside of an evening yet!  The potentially great view over the bay was unfortunately blocked by a coffee shop, but I did manage to peer around it a little to watch night descend.

So… Nacho comparison!  Theoretically they should have been the same, however this second batch had less toppings and the avocado was done in some weird kind of tiny cubes (my partner first guessed it was cous cous when we saw it!).  Not the best, the previous lot were definitely better!  In addition to the being a bit lacking, the burgers we had ordered arrived before we had had much of a chance to attack the nachos and so we ended up wasting some of these.

Burgers … This time I went for Mexican beef (spicy beans, avocado and sour cream), and he went for garlic mayonnaise.  Again the burgers were the delicious moist pink the GBK does so well.  Mine was even more pink this time, as it had been ordered medium rare.

My toppings were tasty but lacked a kick, the spicy beans were not spicy and the whole thing felt like it had not been seasoned at all.  On the other hand that garlic burger was amazing flavoursome.  I tried some and it was scrumptious.  I will admit that it was one for the garlic lovers and that persons not quite so enamoured with the flavour and odour of garlic, or those coming into contact with important persons the next day, should probably avoid this one.  Unfortunately my partner, whose burger it was, found a stray hot chilli somewhere (the nachos?) which left him unable to taste a good deal, much to his disappointment.

Overall the deal offers great value for money and both places were acceptable, but if I have the choice again I will keep visiting the GBK in the centre of town.  Not that the Cardiff Bay place was bad enough to stop me giving it another try sometime.  I’m looking forward to the next GBK deal so I can try some more flavour choices!  Next time chicken……?