Beef Stroganoff (via Julie Goodwin)

I have already posted a beef stroganoff recipe, but I recently came across this version by Julie Goodwin, which with a slight reduction to the amount of tomato, and increase in the amount of mushrooms, produces a marginally superior result. I really like the flour-fried steak, even though it's a little more fiddly. I took her advice and used round steak, and I think this would also work well with skirt. Both need to be run through a tenderizer (ask your butcher), and benefit from being part-frozen (takes about an hour) and then sliced using a very sharp knife. These cuts are cheaper and tastier than the rump or fillet I suggest using in my previous post.

Ingredients

• 1 kg round or skirt steak, trimmed and sliced very thinly (see above)
• 1/3 cup plain flour
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp ground (white, if you have it) pepper
• 2 tsp smoked sweet paprika
• 500g (button, if you like) mushrooms, sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 tbsp tomato paste
• ½ cup beef stock 
• 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 300ml sour cream

In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, pepper and paprika.  Toss the beef strips thoroughly through the mixture. In a large, non-stick frying pan, heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil over high heat until it is just smoking.  Place half of the beef mixture into the pan and toss for 2 minutes until it is golden brown. If you have time, fry the beef in batches without overcrowding the pan, in order to get more tasty crispy bits and not have the beef stick together. If you're in a rush you can use a bit more oil and use a spatula to separate the beef, as long as it's not ALL lying on top of itself.

Reduce the heat to medium high.  Place the last of the oil in the pan and sauté the mushrooms and garlic until softened.  Add tomato paste and stir for a further minute.  Add stock, Worcestershire sauce and sour cream to the pan.  Return the beef and stir for a minute or two until well combined and warmed through.

Serve with pasta or rice, and steamed green beans or broccoli.

Seafood Chowder

I got back from Boston with a craving for MORE CHOWDER. I really should have a go at making a cob loaf to serve this in, but homemade breadmaker sourdough will have to suffice until the weather is cool enough to switch the oven on. This is also not as heart-attack-inducing as a proper Boston seafood chowder and can be eaten as lunch or dinner without pre-charging the defibrillator. If you want to up the ante, double the flour, reduce the stock to the absolute minimum that covers the vegetables, and top up with double the listed amount of the thickest cream you can find, just before serving. I can never make just enough for two so this (with bread) will do for four people.

Ingredients:

• 1 onion or leek
• 100g lardons OR smoked fish
• 1 medium carrot
• 1 stick celery
• 3 potatoes
• a bay leaf
• 1 tbsp flour
• 750ml litre chicken or vegetable stock
• 1 corn cobs, or a tin of sweet corn
• 500g marinara mix (a mix of white fish, salmon, squid, peeled prawns, and mussels)
• 200ml thickened or double cream
• Salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• a bunch of fresh parsley

Method:
Peel or clean and finely chop the onion or leek. Fry in a deep pan in a little butter or olive oil until translucent and soft. If using the lardons, add at the same time as the onions, so they cook and turn golden. (Don't add smoked fish at this stage!) Meanwhile, dice the carrot, celery and potatoes (no need to peel them). Add the vegetables and the bay leaf to the cooked onions, stir in the flour, then pour over the stock; bring up to a simmer and then allow the vegetables to cook to just past al dente -- about 10-12 minutes. If you like your potato to be falling apart, cook a little longer. Slice the corn off the cob (or drain the tin) and add, along with the marinara mix, and the smoked fish if using. Bring back up to temperature and allow to cook through, a matter of minutes for the fish and the corn. (Be particularly careful not to boil any squid in the marinara mix for more than 30 seconds, or it will go tough!) Once the fish is cooked through, stir in the cream and bring back up to temperature, but do not allow the chowder to boil. Serve in a cob or in bowls, scattered over with finely chopped parsley.

Butter Chicken

When I visited India, we had one particularly amazing meal out at a rather fancy restaurant, where the meals cost a whole $10! A friend of mine ordered this and I remembered that it's often cited as the measure of an Indian restaurant; if the butter chicken is good, then everything else is probably good too. His was excellent. We've had a couple of chicken breasts in the freezer for a while and I've been intending to do 'something Indian' to them. Then at the Good Food and Wine show I picked up a really nice 'butter chicken' spice mix and all the pieces fell into place. I don't normally use spice mixes but I tried a bit with some bread and olive oil and it tasted so much like the real thing from India that I couldn't resist :)

I used this taste.com.au recipe for a starting point, although we dropped the amount of yoghurt since I was worried cooking it would make it separate, and we found the overall result bit too tomatoey, so this recipe has a reduced amount of puree. We couldn't bring ourselves to pour in the amount of cream they said to use, but feel free if you weren't using those arteries anyway! We served it with some plain rice and spicy & sour green beans: perfect counterpoint.

Ingredients:

• two large chicken breasts
• 2 tsbp yoghurt
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp turmeric, 2 tsp garam masala, 1/2 tsp chilli flakes, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp ground cardamom, 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 2 tsp of paprika (or 4 tbsp of butter chicken spice mix!)
• 2 tsp grated fresh ginger
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 125g cashews, roasted
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 Indian bay leaf or normal bay leaf
• 200g can tomato puree
• 150ml chicken stock
• 125ml double cream (double the quantity for extra richness)
• fresh coriander, to garnish

Slice the chicken breasts into bite-size pieces. Put in a bowl and toss with the yoghurt, lemon juice, spices, ginger and garlic; marinade overnight, or for a couple of hours if possible.

Blitz half of the cashews in a blender until well-ground. Gently fry the onion in a little oil, then add the chicken and toss about until the spices are fragrant. Tip in the ground cashews, tomato puree, bay leaf and stock, and simmer for fifteen minutes, until the chicken is cooked. Stir in the cream and warm through; serve over rice, topped with a handful of coriander leaves and the remaining toasted cashews.

Chestnuts and Savoy in Cream and Juniper

I've been thinking about making something like this since we went shopping at the weekend, and tonight all the parts collapsed together to make a fantastic scrobbly combination of tastes and textures. It's an unholy union of a Nigel Slater cabbage recipe with a sprouts dish we make at Christmas. We had to use dried chestnuts, rehydrated by soaking overnight and then boiled for 45 minutes until cooked, but in the UK I used to easily find tinned or vacuum-packed chestnuts. Juniper berries were also a bit of a pain to track down over here, but eventually I found them in our local 'combined market' - a sort of cheap warehouse where the main floor sells veg and staples, and the side stands include a deli and a butcher. Neither are substitutable, I'm afraid!

Ingredients:

• 1 tsp juniper berries
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• 1/4 large Savoy or other very good winter cabbage
• 300g peeled, cooked chestnuts, broken up into large pieces
• 75g coppa or your favourite Italian smoked meat
• 100ml double cream
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp salt (to taste)

Crush the juniper berries and peppercorns in a mortar and pestle until they are a mulch. Wash the cabbage and thinly slice into long strips. Blanch in boiling water for just one minute, then immediately drain. In the pan that you cooked the cabbage, gently fry the juniper berry and peppercorn mulch in a little olive oil until fragrant. Return the cabbage to the pan, along with the chestnuts, coppa, cream, honey and salt. Warm through and immediately turn off the heat. Serve over hot mashed potatoes.

Beef Stroganoff - Quick Version

Mmm, great for a post-Zumba-workout day! There are two ways of cooking stroganoff - this is the 'quick-cook' method, for which you need to buy very good beef, so that it sears and cooks quickly, without becoming watery or tough. If you are using a cheaper cut, you'll need to stew it much longer - I'll try to make that version another time. Along with some simple steamed vegetables, we usually serve this with tagliatelle, but hot fresh bread or mashed potatoes would probably work delightfully. Wikipedia has just informed me that my version is completely un-authentic, and rice is the proper accompaniment. Oh well :)

Ingredients:

• 500g mushrooms
• 3-4 cloves of garlic
• 300g very good fillet or rump steak
• half a glass of white wine
• 1 tbsp sweet paprika
• 150g crème fraîche

Slice the mushrooms into 1/2-cm thick pieces, cutting parallel to the stalk to make them attractive. Fry over a medium heat until softened, then crush in the garlic and fry for a further minute. Remove from the pan. Slice the steak thinly into long pieces. Heat oil in the pan until smoking, then sear the beef pieces quickly on each side - about 10 seconds a pop if you have the pan properly hot and the beef nice and thin. Remove from the pan and rest on a plate for a minute, retaining any juices. Turn down the heat and deglaze the pan with the wine, then return the beef and mushrooms to the pan, and add the paprika and creme fraiche. Stir gently to combine and reheat - don't boil or the cream will separate. Serve over the pasta with a handful of chopped fresh parsley.

10th Anniversary Dinner: Crème Brulee

I love this dessert, and since I got a kitchen blowtorch for Xmas, I've been looking forward to making it for some time! I followed this recipe, swapping the vanilla bean for vanilla extract, but found that it didn't set. Still delicious, and the crispy brown sugar worked wonderfully with the cold custard, but it was just not jelly-like enough. From Molecular Gastronomy, I know that egg yolks harden when they reach 57 C. So whether it's my oven, or the latent heat of the dish I used for the bain marie, or the cream not being hot enough, I know that the reason they didn't set was that the custard did not reach and stay at 57 C. That seems quite incredible given that the oven was at 120 C, and the water I put in the bain marie was boiling, and that the cream was beginning to bubble in the pan before I added it to the eggs... but it must have been the case! When I get this recipe right, I'll post again with how I did it! Maybe I should hint that I'd like a kitchen thermometer as an anniversary present ;)

Cabbage with Juniper Cream

Another Nigel Slater tweak, this time a side turned into a main course. This is absolutely delicious and I encourage you to try it, even if you're not usually a fan of cabbage. The key is to cook the cabbage as minimally as possible, so that it retains bite and flavour, rather than degenerating into a sock-smelling mess. And use a big hearty cabbage like Savoy, not an insipid white ball from the supermarket. This is the vegetarian version, but you could easily snip in some grilled bacon or serve with a seared duck or pigeon breast.

Ingredients:

• 350g cabbage
• 2 tsp black peppercorns
• 2 tsp juniper berries
• a thick slice of butter
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 200ml crème fraîche or double cream

Set off any brown rice or other accompaniment cooking; the cabbage takes less than 10 minutes to prepare. Separate and wash the leaves of the cabbage, pile them on top of each other, then slice into finger-width slices with a big, sharp knife. Bring a large pan of water to a boil, salt it lightly, then cook the cabbage for 2-3 minutes; essentially as soon as the water is back to a rolling boil, you should be testing the stems for done-ness. Drain in a colander and return the pan to a low heat.

Pound the peppercorns in a mortar and pestle, then drop in the juniper berries and crush them lightly. Drop the slice of butter into the warm pan, allow it to melt, then drop in the spices and sautee them for a couple of minutes, until fragrant. Pour in the salt and cream, stir around so it doesn't separate, and heat through. Return the cabbage to the pan and bring everything back to piping hot, then immediately serve. Tonight we toasted pumpkin seeds to top and served with plain fluffy mashed potato.