Tag: gordon ramsay gumbo recipe

Turkish eggs

I have been worrying a bit recently that the book of this blog, The Bad Cook (which is out TODAY, purchasable here)*, is going to be a disappointment.

This hadn’t crossed my mind until very recently – until recently I had always flicked through it sniggering to myself and going “This is great!!! Definitely worth £1.99.” But now I’m not so sure.

“Does it represent value to my readers?” I think as I sit with a cookbook on my lap, staring out of the window and trying not to pick at my cuticles because it drives my husband nuts.

So I have decided today to alert you to a recipe, which I would pay someone £1.99 to tell me about, which will assuage my feelings of fraudulence.

It is for a turkish eggs thing that Peter Gordon does at his restaurant brasserie cafe thing Les Providores in Marylebone High Street. It is NOT in fusion (sic), which is his cookbook, so I had to source the recipe off a New Zealand website, convert all the measurements, try it out and photograph it.

I’m sure that’s worth £1.99.

So these turkish eggs are poached eggs with yoghurt and a chilli butter. I understand if you think that yoghurt and eggs together sounds gross but I promise it isn’t. This is an incredibly delicious, almost addictive taste and it is very easy to put together for a light supper for you and someone you love. Or just for you alone.

Do not worry if you aren’t brilliant at poaching eggs – I am absolutely hopeless and mine came out just about okay.

So here we go – turkish eggs for 2

2 eggs – the fresher they are, the easier they will be to poach
200g greek yoghurt
1 tbsp olive oil
large pinch of chilli flakes
70g butter
some chopped parsley if you have it

NB – you will notice that there is no salt specified in this recipe. It is not an accident. You can, of course, add as much salt and pepper as you think this needs but personally, I think the lack of salt, the slight blandness, is a really important aspect to this – I don’t think the flavours need it. But you must do whatever you like.

1 In a bowl whisk together the yoghurt and olive oil. It is this whisking and whipping of the yoghurt that makes it so delicious, in my view. You CAN add here a small scraping of crushed garlic, but I don’t think it’s neccessary.

2 In a small pan melt the butter gently until it takes on a very pale brown colour – this takes about 10 mins over a low heat. Don’t be tempted to razz it hot otherwise it will burn. Once it looks to you like it has taken on some colour, add the chilli flakes and swirl around in the butter. Put to one side.

3 Now poach your eggs in some simmering water for 3-4 mins. If you add 100ml white vinegar to the water it should in theory help the process.

4 To assemble, divide the yoghurt between two bowls, then drop an egg on top, pour over the chilli butter and scatter with parsley.

We ate this with toasted sourdough, as they do in Les Providores, but I think this would also be terrific with any sort of flatbread or pitta.

* for Amazon refuseniks the book is also available from other sources:

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/bad-cook/id580194993?mt=11

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Cook-ebook/dp/B00ALKTWYY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363857002&sr=8-1&keywords=esther+walker+bad+cook

Google: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Esther_Walker_Bad_Cook?id=wGTySqj1u-wC&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImJvb2std0dUeVNxajF1LXdDIl0.

THANK you if you bought it. You don’t have to read it, I promise I won’t corner you and ask you what you thought next time I see you.

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Chicken and Andouille Sausage

A chicken and sausage stew made with skinless chicken legs and spicy andouille sausage simmered with flavors from the deep south – without the extra fat.

Today is Fat Tuesday, but any day is really a great day to enjoy this comfort dish. Traditional gumbos are made with a whole lot of fat and take hours to make. My lighter version you won’t miss the fat because there’s still tons of flavor. The stew itself is not very spicy, but the sausage is so you get a little heat each time you take a bite. If you’re not a fan of spice, a smoked turkey sausage or turkey kielbasa would taste great too.

To lighten this dish, I use lean skinless chicken on the bone (the bone adds great flavor) and lean chicken/turkey andouille sausage. It’s simmered with onions, bell pepper and celery, also known as the “holy trinity” in Cajun cuisine, and topped with scallions. This is the type of dish you may want to serve with a fork AND spoon, I served mine with 1/4 cup of cooked rice on the side, completely optional. Quinoa or farro would also work nicely.

I found the chicken a little tricky to calculate on the bone; I was getting discrepancies when I calculated it raw, vs cooked on the bone, vs cooked off the bone so I decided to weigh the meat off the bone cooked, I feel this is the most accurate. The chicken I purchased was from a small bird, so if you have really large chicken, the nutritional info will change. If you prefer white meat, be sure to use skinless breasts on the bone so your meat doesn’t dry out and you still get the great flavors from the bones.

Low carb, gluten free, and really good!

Chicken and Andouille Sausage
gordon-ramsay-recipe.com
Servings: 4 • Size: 4 oz chicken, 3 oz sausage + broth • Old Pts: 8 • Points+: 9 pts
Calories: 347.5 • Fat: 13 g • Protein: 8 g • Carb: 8 g • Fiber: 2 g • Sugar: 1 g
Sodium: 490 mg (without salt)

Ingredients:

2 tsp oil
1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper
1/4 cup chopped celery
14 oz (4) lean skinless chicken thighs, with bone*
12 oz (4) lean skinless chicken drumsticks, with bone**
salt and fresh pepper, to taste
1 tbsp all-purpose flour (rice flour for gluten-free)
2 cups water
2 links (6 oz) andouille chicken/turkey sausage (Applegate)
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup chopped scallion

Directions:

Heat a large deep non-stick skillet over medium heat. When hot, add the oil, onions, peppers and celery. Cook 3 to 4 minutes, stirring.

Push the vegetables to the edges of the skillet and add the chicken, season with salt and pepper. Brown 2 to 3 minutes on each side, then sprinkle the flour over the chicken and vegetables.

Add the water, sausage and bay leaf, adjust salt and pepper to taste, then cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer 30 to 35 minutes, remove bay leaf and top with scallions. Serve with rice or quinoa if desired.

*thighs were 10 oz total weight cooked, off the bone
**drumsticks were 6 oz total weight cooked, off the bone

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Treacle tart

I mean, what the fucking fuck do you call this??!

I have for a long time thought that treacle tart is a thing I ought to be able to make, but I have always been scared off by this “baking blind” instruction.

That’s that thing, that I’m sure you’re all terribly familiar with and do it all the time, (in the evenings and weekends just for a laugh), where you roll out your pastry into a tin and then cover it with ceramic beads or beans and cook it before the filling goes in and then cook it again with the filling in it. A more pointless, time-wasty and stupid instruction I’ve rarely seen and so have always avoided it.

But tonight we’ve got some nice people coming round for dinner so I thought I’d break my baking blind, treacle tart duck and do it because the alternative is to cower in darkness – and that’s only hilarious for so long.

So off I went to Waitrose brmm brmm in my little car, and got some sweet pastry and a tin of golden syrup and some creme fraiche to go with it and came back and blithely stumbled into the worst and most useless recipe for anything I’ve ever cooked, ever. Except for that gumbo, remember that?

GARY RHODES I HATE YOU.

Just bad. Bad and wrong and unhelpful and stupid and ill and presumptuous and irresponsible. While the tart was doing its final cook in the oven I sat down for a bit with Waitrose Kitchen and had a flick through and alighted on a Fergus Henderson recipe for treacle tart that was far more detailed, complex and basically entirely different from the Rhodes recipe.

I experienced a terrible bumrush, of the sort you get when you turn over an exam paper and realise that you have spent the last week revising for a different, wrong module, or that the person you have just been massively bitching up is within earshot, or that your period is three weeks late.

I knew then. I knew in that moment that my tart was a bummer. And so it was. I can’t be bothered to start listing the catclysmic death roll-call of things wrong with it, but let’s just say that the BEST thing about it is that sides are burnt to shit.

FUCK! What a waste of my time! I could have been doing loads of other things! I could have been asleep.

I have nothing else to add. There is no nice ending to this story.