Showing posts with label fish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fish. Show all posts

Friday, 16 January 2015

Hints'n'Tips


When cooking Fish
If you don't like the awful smell, put a bay leaf in with the fish and that helps.


Clogged Drains
If your drain is clogged with grease pour a cup of salt and one of baking soda into the drain, followed by a kettle of boiling water.

Keeping Knives Sharp
Tip last week from an Italian Chef:  When you cut something acid, like a lemon or orange, immediately wipe the knife as otherwise it will go blunt faster.
Ways with Bread
When you buy a new loaf of bread and no longer fancy finishing the old one - wrap the leftover bread and put in the freezer then when you want breadcrumbs, defrost and mill in the food processor.  Or if you're feeling really efficient mill in food processor before freezing.  Useful for making stuffing, covering croquettes or schnitzels (flour/egg/breadcrumbs), also for making apple charlotte or brown bread ice cream.

Brown Bread Ice Cream Recipe
600ml whole milk
227ml double cream
4 large eggs
175g golden granulated sugar
75g wholemeal bread (crusts cut off)


Gently heat milk and cream in small pan until steaming.
In a mixing bowl whisk together yolks and 50g sugar until thick.
Pour onto the milk and cook gently 6 - 7 mins until it lightly coats back of the spoon.  Cool then place in fridge.
Preheat grill to high.
Mill bread into crumbs in food processor and mix with remaining sugar.
Spread on baking sheet, place under grill and watch, regularly respreading crumbs, until mixture is a dark golden colour (about 10 mins).
Remove and cool. Break into large pieces (rolling pin?).
Stir into custard mixture.
Churn for 20 mins (or buy an ice cream maker!)
Return to freezer for two hours, take out, whisk and freeze for an hour.  Repeat this until ready.
Allow to soften for 20 minsbefore serving.



My way of cooking Beetroot
Wash off worst of mud, don't worry too much, cut off top leaves, leaving about 1". Put beetroot in pan, covered with water, put on lid, bring to the boil, and simmer until ready. Leave to cool in pan. When cold, put on rubber gloves and rub off the skins. Then chuck water and skins onto compost heap, remove the rubber gloves and you should be left with beautiful beetroot and clean hands.
Today we made Jamie Oliver's Fish Pie, 
It's a great recipe as - the fish doesn't need cooking beforehand - and there's no white sauce to make which saves time and mess but also means fewer 'fishy' smells around the house and inside the microwave. 
His recipe makes 5 - 6 people, so we made one pie for us today and two go into the freezer to enjoy another day, with no extra cooking
As we now have lots of courgettes in the allotment, I grated in one just for fun.  Oh, and I didn't have enough potato for the top, so it's a mixture of potato and sweet potato, and there was some low fat cream cheese needing used up, so that also went into the mashed potato mixture, along with some pepper.
So, although it's based on Jamie's recipe, it's quite different ...


6.00pm: The combination of potato, sweet potato and cream cheese definitely works.

Tuesday, 7 October 2014

Just home from work (or long day looking after toddler grand daughter) and no time?

Easy quick fish recipe

1 small Onion
Basil stalks and leaves
1 tin Tomatoes
Fish

  1. In an oven tray, fry chopped onion with the basil stalks.
  2. Add a tin of chopped tomatoes and the basil leaves, season.
  3. Lay fish on top and add a glug of olive oil
  4. Cook in oven until fish turns white
  5. Serve with lots of creamy mashed potatoes


Wednesday, 14 November 2012

5th - 9th November was National Sausage Week* but I, along with most of the country, was busy enjoying Bonfire Night (about the 5th) and honouring the fallen on Remembrance Sunday (this year it actually fell on 11.11). 

So now, only one week late, it's time to celebrate one of Britain's favourite foods.  As a nation we spent more than £707million on sausages last year and we've been eating them for a very long time.

Sausages were brought to Britain by the Romans in around 400AD so sausage eating predates by a very long way our national dishes of fish & chips and curry+.  The dates at which these dishes became popular is a whole other story.

To celebrate the humble sausage sandwich, here's a Yorkshire recipe for this often-thought-of-as-humble delicacy:

  1. Cook the sausages (fried, grilled or oven cooked) the more cooked the better so far as I'm concerned
  2. Split the sausage(s) in half lengthwise and lay on the bottom of a Yorkshire tea cake (also known as large roll/bap/cob) cut in half.
  3. The top half should then be fried in the bacon fat until crisp and tasty.
  4. Dip into reduced chopped tinned tomatoes
  5. Carefully lay on the of the sausage.
  6. Serve, perhaps with brown sauce.

Incidentally, I'd never even heard of a sausage sandwich 'til I worked for BBC Local Radio in the mid 1980s.  It's what kept the journalists going when they were busy on a 'story'.

Other good ways to eat sausages include:
  • Sausage casserole with plenty of vegetables, beans, possibly with a scone mix on top, a cobbler-type of dish.  Here's a colourful version, complete with seasonal pumpkin.
  • Toad in the Hole, with the best Yorkshire pudding batter recipe (On from our very own Delia: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/english/toad-in-the-hole-with-roasted-onion-gravy.html)


*http://www.lovepork.co.uk/blog/article/sausage-week-2012

From an article by Brian Turner, Chef

+ Fish & Chips and Curry House, rather surprisingly the curry house came first:

  • Fish and chips is a popular take-away food that originated in the United Kingdom in 1858 or 1863. In 1860, the first fish and chip shop was opened in London by Jewish proprietor Joseph Malin.
  • The first curry house was more like 1809, see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8370054.stm