Tag: cooking

Cheesy stuffed butternut squash

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Serves: 2
Prep time: 5 mins
Cooking time: 1 hr
Total time: 1 hr 5 mins
Skill level: Easy peasy
Costs: Mid-price

This dish for two is easy to make, filling and a great twist on the humble jacket potato. Not that we have anything against good old spuds, but with butternut squash having hardly any fat, packed full of nutrients and practically half the calories, it more or less makes it our new fave vegetable. Even better with this recipe is that the preparation of the usually fiddly butternut is easy as there’s no peeling involved. Simply slice right down the middle, scoop out the seeds and voila – it’s all done. Sounds like a dinner time winner to us.

Ingredients

1 small butternut squash
1tbsp olive oil
1 sprig thyme, leaves only, roughly chopped
2 garlic cloves, 1 minced and the other sliced thinly
200g smoked lardons
200g chestnut mushrooms, each chopped into 8 quarters
80g mature cheddar cheese, grated
2tbsp fresh parsley leaves, roughly chopped
A handful of rocket leaves

That’s goodtoknow

Mushrooms are like little tasty sponges due to the fact that they soak up water easily. When preparing them, try to only give them a quick rinse under a tap to clean them instead of immersing them in water. That way, you can avoid them being soggy when sautéed.

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 375°C/190°F/Fan 170°C /Gas Mark 5. Take your butternut squash and chop right down the middle. Scoop out each half removing all the seeds and stringy, loose flesh. Combine the oil, thyme and minced garlic and then brush over the flesh of each butternut half. Roast for 35-40 or until the flesh is tender.
Towards the end of the cooking time for the squash, bring a large frying pan to a medium heat. Add in the lardons and gently fry for 4-6 minutes, using the fat from the lardons as you cook, until the meat starts to go brown. Scoop the lardons into a bowl, set aside, and using the fat left in the pan, add the sliced garlic. Cook for 3-4 minutes, stirring often until the garlic has softened but doesn’t colour. Add the mushrooms, and continue to cook, stirring occasionally until the mushrooms have browned – about five minutes. Add the cooked lardons, toss together, and turn off the heat, setting aside.
Pre-heat your grill to a medium heat. Arrange the butternut squash onto a baking tray lined with foil and fill each with the mushroom mixture, top with the grated cheese, and pop under the grill until the cheese has melted and is lightly browned. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper and serve, scattered with parsley and rocket.

By Nadine Brown

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Apple Tart Maman Blanc

The other day I wrote a piece for The Daily Mail and as the paper arrived and I saw that I was on the front page (ack!) with some dastardly headline I felt ill and squeezed my eyes shut and clutched at my pyjamas and waited for the whole internet to fall in on my head all day long.

It didn’t, thank god. Thank you. I mean, I’m sure there were 4,000 comments underneath the piece, all vile, but I don’t read those – (you simply cannot and stay sane) – but I did get one, single, slightly unhappy tweet. “I used to love your blog,” it said, “but now you just troll yourself. How much do the Mail pay you to write this stuff?”

And I realised then, that I should probably explain what happens. I lose track of how many readers I have, I forget that I’m not just writing to Becky B and my husband.

(Becky B’s just had a baby by the way. No pain relief. None. There was briefly a story going round that she had her stitches with no pain killer either, but that turned out to be apocryphal, like that one about how she once put a mugger in hospital just by giving him a nasty look.)

But for other readers, seeing me in the Mail like that must be strange, like if your boyfriend suddenly turned out to be a contract killer, or a pimp.

So this is how is happens: one morning, some devastatingly charming girl emails from Femail, (they’re all charming at the Mail, that’s their deadly weapon), wanting to run a piece that you have already written and to give you, in return, enough money so that you don’t have to work for the next two weeks if you don’t want to, and pay the nanny AND buy a bottle of neon pink nail varnish from Models Own.

And you stop and you think “Oh but my photo will be in there, and some really horrifying headline and there will be pictures of my children…”and then you think “yes but this is my job.” And then you think “money…”. And then you think how pleased your mother always is when you’re in the paper, no matter what you’ve said. And then your husband comes into the room and reads the email over your shoulder and goes “You’re going to ask for more money, aren’t you? Great job. Don’t forget to invoice!”

Then you file your piece and wait. Presently the “edit” comes back to you, which is where they run your normal words through their computer and it comes out in perfect MailSpeak. And you go “fine – can you change this and this?” and they go “sure”.

And then you deal once or twice more with women who, as the deadline gets closer and closer, sound more and more tense, as they sit at their desks, talking to you and eating their lunch at 8.30pm, tapping in tiny tweaks here and there – none of which matter because the headline is going to be MY KIDS ARE SO FACKIN BORING YAH???? so the subtle word changes you are insisting on are like dusting the rotary blades of a helicopter that’s just crashed into the side of a mountain.

Then the paper comes out the next day and you feel crushed and sick until your husband goes “GREAT job!” and your mother, who quite often looks at you blankly like “which one are you, again?” actually rings up and says “They’re talking about your piece on the radio!!!!!!” And then you remember: “money!”. And, eventually, you square it all away and forget about it. Until the next time.

It helps that I am basically a sloppy hack at heart and don’t really mind – not really, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. If my children find these pieces later in life and want to have a go at me about it I will simply start charging them rent.

Another girl in my life who doesn’t judge me for this kind of caper is a French girl called Amelie, once described to me as the “rudest girl in London” but I don’t understand why, because she is simply charming, she is just a bit brisk and French. I think she is terrific.

We went to see her and her husband this weekend for lunch and Amelie calmly went out to the shops to buy some ingredients for Raymond Blanc’s much-celebrated Apple tart Maman Blanc and made it while guests were arriving. She had never made it before! And, she declared “I ‘aven’t cooked anysing for years.” I cannot imagine how relaxed you have to be to do something like this.

Anyway it was just fantastic. I didn’t help in the actual preparation, I just provided moral support and read out the recipe as she was cooking, which she declared was very helpful but I think she may just have been being nice.

This is how it goes: the precise recipe, including instructions for the shortcrust pastry, can be found on p246 of Kitchen Secrets, or online.

Amelie, like all good French girls, just buys her pastry pre-made. I think she used puff (she herself couldn’t remember if she had bought puff or shortcrust – such insouciance!!!) but you really ought to buy shortcrust.

So here we go:

Apple tart ‘Maman Blanc’

1 packet shortcrust pastry
3 dessert apples (like a Braeburn or whatever, just not a super-sour cooking apple)
15g unsalted butter
15g caster sugar
11/2 tsp lemon juice
7g Calvados (if you like)
icing sugar, to dust
1 medium egg
100 ml whipping cream
50g caster sugar

1 Roll out your pastry to fit your tart case and have it slightly higher than the rim of the tin because pastry shrinks on cooking. Prick the base with a fork and put in the fridge for 20 min.

2 Preheat the oven and a baking sheet (or any old tin big enough to take the tart tin) to 220C

3 Peel and core the apples and cut each into 10. Lay them closely together and overlapping in a circle in the base of the tart case.

4 In a small pan, melt the butter and sugar, then take off the heat and mix in the lemon juice and Calvados if using. Brush this over the apples slices and dust with icing sugar.

5 Slide the tart tin onto your now hot sheet and cook for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down to 200C and bake for another 20 minutes until the tart case is brown and the apples look a bit caramelised.

6 For the custard filling, whisk 1 egg together with 50g caster sugar and 100ml whipping cream and pour into the tart 10 minutes before the end of the cooking time.

Et Voila! As Amelie almost never says.

pigtailsandcombatboots: I’ve been wanting to post this for a…

pigtailsandcombatboots:

I’ve been wanting to post this for a few days now, but there’s a lot of backstory involved and since I know I can get carried away with explaining things, I’ve been hesitant about trying to write a short and sweet summary. So here goes:

WARNING – I tried, but couldn’t make this short enough to appear readable at a glance (I know, I tend to skip reading long-winded posts because my ADD looks at them in horror.) I completely understand if you don’t read all or any of it. This has been in my drafts folder for several days now and I give up on trying to shorten it.

When I’m passionate about something, I throw myself completely into it. At some point I started watching Gordon Ramsay’s shows, andI discovered he wasn’t a jerk like the media makes him out to be. He is however, blatantly honest and straightforward, and has no patience for people that don’t try to always perform at their best. This perspective inpires me because I have a mediocre amount of motivation for anything, and I have a lot of difficulty using tact. Plus, tact is not very effective when it comes to motivating people, so why mess around and avoid getting right to the point?.This is the background of my passion for all things Gordon Ramsay.

Talented cooks amaze me, just like any other artist, except they do it with food, which at least to me, seems a lot harder. I enjoy watching cooking shows because I can’t comprehend how they can make something that tastes so good out of so few ingredients, in a limited amount of time. There’s so much technique and knowledge involved, I believe a very large part of it has to be instinctual. This puts me in awe.

I started watching Masterchef during season 2 and was hooked immediately. It’s like watching a REALLY interesting magic show (though I’ve never experienced a really interesting one), just without the illusion. I also enjoy seeing the varying degrees of passion and confidence in the contestants. I become involved in trying to dissect what can be interpreted from their psyches and their sources of motivations I don’t know how to explain it. It’s similar to the wonder I feel when I try to figure out how different artists see things the way they do, how they instinctually know how to mix colors, show textures, etc. It’s always interesting to know a little bit about the background of the artist to see what may have influenced their perspective. br />

As a result, I tend to ride the Masterchef wave with the contestants involved, and I was genuinely upset in season 2 when Ben was eliminated much earlier than I expected. His combination of talent and passion seemed the most genuine, but then the 3 judges Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot and Joe Bastianich know truckloads more than I do about food and cooking techniques, so by no means a source of an informed opinion on the subject.

At the beginning of season 3, they introduced the top 16 selected for the show with a little background about each one. Now, I’m always doing something else while I’m watching TV. I can’t just sit there and watch something, I have to be doing something like drawing or crafting at the same time, so I did a double take when I heard one contestant say he was from Brighton Park. Brighton Park is the little neighborhood I grew up in in Chicago, and where my parents still live currently. I chuckled, because the contestant, David Martinez, referred to it as “growing up in the ghetto”. There’s about a 10 year age difference between he and I and it wasn’t that bad when I was growing up, but the “ghetto-ing” was gradual. I went away to college at 17, but I came home every weekend to work for 7 years beyond that. I chuckled because my mom’s been calling it “the ghetto” for a long time, and I always thought she was being a tad bit overdramatic (as usual.) It’s harder to see when the change is gradual, I guess, but hearing David say it on national TV kind of smacked me in the face with the reality of my native ‘hood.

The point to all that is, neighborhoods are like badges of honor in Chicago. It’s not “I’m from Chicago”, it’s “I’m from Brighton Park/Gage Park/Lincoln Park/Wrigleyville/etc.” There’s over 200 of these neighborhoods in Chicago. It’s so rare to meet someone outside of the Chicagoland area that is from your neighborhood, and it’s even weirder to see someone mention it on TV. I immediately called my mom and dad and they started watching Masterchef in support of David, even though they have no idea who Gordon Ramsay is, because we support those that make it out of the ‘hood. (Seriously, not many do.)

Each of the Masterchef contestants have Twitter and Facebook accounts associated with the show, I’m guessing to help stir up interest. So, I sent a note to David on Facebook, basically saying, “Hey, I’m from Brighton Park too, small world, hope you win, etc.” He wrote back and via several messages we had some small convos talking about exactly where we lived, where we went to school, etc. I could ramble on easily here, but if you want to know more about David, here’s his Masterchef website profile – David Martinez.

Via convos and posts, I discovered that David was moving to Phoenix, oddly enough, this past week. I also discovered that Monti, another Masterchef contestant and another big fave of mine had already moved here and was now the morning host on one of the local radio stations here – “Monti in the Morning”. This past weekend, they both joined up with Season 2 contestant Ben Starr (my fave from that season, as I mentioned above) to host a fundraiser for Phoenix Children’s Hospital at Dave and Buster’s in Tempe. I wanted to meet the 3 of them, especially David, since we had been communicating online, and for the fact that he’s automatically my “neighborhood bro”.
‘
The fundraiser was scheduled from 11am-1pm and was $10 to get in, with raffles, free banana splits donated from Cold Stone Creamery and a free all-day gaming pass at D&B’s (score!) There wasn’t a lot of people there at the beginning, because it’s kind of a niche group of fans. Plus, they’re not celebrities, they’re real people with tons of amazing talent, which unliike a lot of people, is more of a motivation for me to meet them than any “celebrity status”-type.

The three of them walked up to the front door of D&B’s together where a few of us were standing because we weren’t allowed to go in yet. They put their stuff inside and then came back out to hang out with everybody and take pics. Before they went in, David saw me and subsequently ran over and gave me a big hug, saying that he thought it was awesome that we (me and Doug) came out to hang with him. We chatted, and that’s about the time we took the above pic, which is from left – David, Monti, me and Ben. (Ignore my hair, the misters at Tempe Marketplace were on so high, it was being in a scene from “The Fog”. Also, ignore this statement because I’m embarassingly self-conscious about photos and I hate that fact.)

We went in, bought a bunch of raffle tickets, got our banana splits, and had a seat by David’s wife because he said he wanted to sit with us after he made his rounds of meeting everybody. All I can say is that during those 2 hours I think I talked more than I have during the last 5 years of my life put together (I’m not by nature, “social”). David and his wife (who’s from Germany) are so down-to-earth, we clicked immediately. David is hilarious, much different than he’s presented on the show because of selective editing. It was like hanging out with 2 old friends, something we all agreed on at the end of the function. David gave us his phone # and we all promised we were going to hang out once David and his wife, Bee, were settled into Phoenix, which wouldn’t probably be until Sept. because of obligations back in Chi and such. David starts work on his PhD in September at ASU so he has no choice but to be back here by then. 🙂 He suggested we do a weekend thing together of quad-riding, barbecuing, etc. sometime soon when the temps get cooler. One of the raffles we submitted several entries into was for a prize of Monti and David coming to the winner’s house and cooking for them. I thought that would be so cool, because I could see the “magic” up close and David and Monti are both really fun people. When we didn’t win, and I made a sad face, David said “Eh, I’ll come cook for you guys, no biggie. Don’t worry about it.” I really can’t say enough about how nice he is.

We chatted a bit with Monti and Ben at the end because Monti was basically the hostess of the whole thing since her radio station sponsored the function. They’re both really down-to-earth as well, and sincerely grateful that people came out to see them for the purpose of this fundraiser. (Eventually the place was packed, standing room only in one of the party rooms.)

After David, Monti and Ben left, Doug and I hung out and made good use of our all-day gaming cards. So much so, that the next day my right shoulder and arm were sore from shooting invading Terminators and playing marathon sessions of air hockey. (I’m a tough air hockey-er.) 😉

Last week and this week’s episodes of Masterchef were reruns because of the Olympics. (Apparently the corporate sponsors realize more people will watch the Olympics if there’s nothing new on TV competing against it.) So after the high of meeting David, Monti and Ben, I didn’t get to watch a new episode a couple of days later, so by the time a new one is on, I’ll have forgotten most of this and it won’t be as interesting. That’s how my brain works. If not fed continuously with stimulating activities, it quickly moves on to find them elsewhere… which is also why I hop on and off social media so much, and why I’ll probably avoid it for at least a few days so I can work on my multiple unfinished art projects. 😉