some people say i done alright for a girl

well, i think the kirsty-specific adventures in pot tossery have been running into the colossal slacker category lately. it isn't that i haven't been cooking, more that i haven't had any time to reflect on it. i know i always list my excuses, but they are as follows: being felled by some kind of massive plague that was doing the rounds at work, visiting papa mitchell for the first time since christmas at his sunny leicester residence, mountains of paperwork for my maths project at work, and entertaining my esteemed blogging partner here in sunny northampton. these have all been occasions to cook; the illness resulting in me dragging myself out of bed to cook only the fieriest pacific asian inspired food, visiting my dad being the first time i'd ever cooked for him ever (a most nerve-wracking concept in the extreme), paperwork meaning i created only the most sugry thigh-enhancing comfort baking, and ed visiting meaning i cooked for him for the first time ever, possibly even more nerve-wracking than cooking for my father. more nerve wracking, you ask? indeed, i answer. for those of you more attuned to gleaning gossip from the unsaid on the internet (tumblr contingent, i'm looking at you) may have noticed there is a relationship going on behind the scenes here at pot tossery. so normally the first-cooking-for-the-other-half-and-trying-to-impress thing is hard enough, right? imagine how much harder it is when you run a food blog with them and they're in the kitchen with you. yeah. exactly. still, i'm pretty sure i pulled it off. unless ed is actually a monumental liar in the name of tact. it did however firmly cement my belief that i am a cook of the never-going-on-masterchef kind, mostly cos of my lackadaisical approach to presentation, precision, and pissing about sharpening knives rather than just using a blunt one. but we knew that anyway.

so i'm gonna have lots to talk to you about on the rare occasions when i get to sit down and talk to you about them, it would seem. the backlog got a bit overwhelming, which hasn't helped me to sit down and write. i figured i'd start with the simple, what i made when i could feel myself coming down with something. my 'spicy food > all other food' ethos seems to be becoming a bit of a running joke around here, but it is never felt more keenly than when my throat starts to go. i think the last winter i spent in portsmouth, in what was the coldest flat ever, eating purely chilli--and-ginger heated foods in an effort to have the basic body heat required to do things like, oh, turn the pages of the books i had to read for university, and make enough coffee to stay up all night writing essays. when i wasn't drunk, that is. there also, i've noticed, since i started writing fo this blog, seems to be a recurring theme of me cooking Small Fried Things, be they falafels, pancakes, whatever, for dinner, mostly when i'm cooking for myself. these two obsessions dovetailed nicely with my cookbook buying/accumulating habit, when i found myself perusing a good housekeeping thai cookery guide from the mid 90's, that my late stepdad had given me. i have a fair few cookbooks of this ilk, actually; books that probably most other people might turn their nose up at, full of housewife-shortcuts and cheats, but i've found that if you are a serious enough cook to ignore these exhortations and say, enjoy making your own spice pastes or looking for the authentic ingredients that some of the cheat's shortcuts are intended to replicate, you can actually get some decent meals knocked out from the recipes. if nothing else, they're always written in plain english, and evn i tire of the sensual slater metaphor from time to time. and i have to admit, i do always have at least one mae ploy thai curry paste in my kitchen in case i'm in a bind (but that's okay, so do john torode and nigella lawson). so i idly browse these cookbooks from time to time after work, if i can't focus on literature, and i occasionally come across a gem that i decide to make. so, in this case i found:

sweet potato cakes with baked garlic

for the baked garlic:

2 heads of garlic, about 125g total weight
15ml dark soy sauce
15ml lemon juice
pinch of salt
pinch of sugar

potato cakes:

450g sweet potatoes
225g potato
15g fresh coriander roots
2 tbsp chopped fresh coriander roots
50g dessicated coconut, toasted
15g plain flour
5ml sesame oil
(2x chopped green chillies, and a pinch of chilli flakes, kirsty's addition)
flour for dusting
50g sesame seeds
oil for shallow frying

preheat the oven to 200 degrees c/gas mark 6. cut a small slice from the top of each garlic head and sit on a double layer of foil. combine the soy sauce, lemon juice, salt and sugar, then pour over the garlic. seal the foil and bake for 30 minutes. set aside until required.

for the potato cakes, peel and cube all the potatoes and place in a saucepan. scrub and chop the coriander roots and add to the pan. add plenty of cold water to cover, bring to the boil, and cook for 12-15 minutes until tender. drain, return to the heat for a few seconds to dry out the potato, then mash with a potato masher. allow to cool slightly.

stir in the coriander leaves, cocnut, flour, and sesame oil (and, if you're adding, the chillies). season to taste. with lightly floured hands, form the mixture into 12 small patties.

dip the potato cakes into the sesame seeds to coat. heat a shallow layer of oil in a heavy-based, non stick frying pan. fry the cakes in batches for 2-3 minutes until golden and heated through. drain on kitchen paper.

serve with the caramelized garlic cloves.

and here are mine, served with red lettuce from the garden dressed in honey, soy, and lemon:

okay, so before i give you the rundown on this, let's just take a moment to pause and admire my beautifully formed red lettuce. i had six of these in the garden two weeks ago, i am now down to half of one left in the fridge. i can't remember the variety but they were 'little red' oakleafs i planted from seed (the name may or may not have influenced my decision) and they were lovely. the stems tasted, as my dad put it, kind of like peapods. and since this crop was so successful so early, my gardening spirit has been massively buoyed and i am in a bit of a planting frenzy.

anyway, back to the recipe. the reason i decided to include chilli in mine was because the original recipe also included a how-to for nam prik, a thai prawn paste, which was obviously off the cards. i figured i'd be getting the salt and umami flavours in masses if i soy-dressed the leaves i was serving it with, so to make sure it wasn't lacking in dimension i went for my old favourite go-to: heat. it worked beautifully, and i don't think i'd make it without again, so i'll apologize in advance to the friends with no spice tolerance i still bizarrely have. i obviously didn't eat all the potato cakes, but i've frozen some unfried for a day when i can't be arsed (and they do occasionally happen despite all my talk of daily kitchen action, believe it or not).

i would love to promise you guys that it won't be as long until my next post, but since i'm going down to ed's on tuesday before we fly to barcelona on the wednesday, i'll cross my fingers that i can squeeze in another food-ramble before then, but i'm not hoping for miracles.

I'll eat my over-exuberance with the pork and beans

As you may well imagine, behind the scenes here at Pot Tossery there's plenty of discussion ranging from complimentary back-slapping on how amazing each other's food looks, future posting intentions and how we're not getting round to writing things, and really vain things like how many view we're getting, most recently how Kirsty's Tumblrs have completely besieged my introduction post after referring to me on there as massively talented.  More of them were interested in my introduction than the chipotle post also linked, despite insistence that there wasn't a massive picture of my face accompanying it.  But what can you do?  Anyway, the whole point to this waffle is that, in keeping with my Whim Based Cooking, when I get an idea I tend to build it up, mainly because I can't stop myself from talking about it.  Which is where this one comes into play.

Back in Pot Tossery's infancy, I was telling my friend Phil about it in the beer garden (and by that I mean large patch of tarmac) of the Bell and Hare in Tottenham.  He asked if I was going to just show my triumphs, or whether or not I'd include the fuck ups as well (this already sounds ominous, right?)  I said I would be, as it was intended to be a document of culinary experimentation, nay, ADVENTURE, and therefore I wouldn't be attempting to ignore the disasters and pretend everything went smoothly in my kitchen.  So far, despite seemingly constantly blustering into unchartered waters (just because I can, apparently) of things I've not done before and fretting about the consequences, everything has so far come out reasonably unscathed.  This all sounds like I should be building up to some spectacular failure, a plate of absolute shit that's impassable as anywhere near edible.  Not quite.  Some slight re-adjustments were in order, and having come out the other end relatively unscathed, my initial trauma at what was originally intended as the entire purpose of the existence of this post going to pot has morphed into a kind of "shit, I've actually got something I can really write about here" state of mind.

I last left these parts stating my intentions to get to grips with bits of animals that most people would turn their nose up at (and I think I have come to the realisation that what I said back in post number three about my liking some things partly due to other people's disgust at the mere thought of eating them carries a bit more weight than I initially thought.)  So think about bits I did.  I didn't want to just have a demonstration of 'I bought a new cook book and cooked something from it, well done me', and herein lies the first error on my behalf.  When effectively making up dishes, it's kind of advisable not to charge in and plan to use things which you've never eaten, let alone cooked with.  Like pig's trotters. 

I was originally intending something based upon Fergus Henderson's Pigs Trotter Stuffed With Potato, served with what turned out to be a fairly rigorous bastardisation of Nigel Slater's Soup-stew of Beans and Cavalo Nero from Tender Vol. I.  Instead I was going to stuff the trotter with a stuffing made from liver, anchovies, sage and garlic.  It would probably go really well with mash, or some form of purée, but I really can't stand root vegetables made to resemble a liquid more than a solid, so I went for beans instead given how versatile they are and how well they can stand up to other flavours.  Sorted.  Except for my underestimation of the pig's trotter, or in fact my overestimation of how much meat there might be on one.  I'm sure I remember on Masterchef: The Professionals when the contestants had to prepare one there was enough.  As it turns out, I was thinking of a trotter and hock in one.  Sails deflated.  So in the end I just got a piece of pork loin and thought "well there goes the whole purpose and reason behind this exercise" (other than to feed myself, that is).  In actual fact I think it would work better with a piece of belly rather than loin.  Belly would lend itself better to spreading the stuffing across the underside and rolling, and therefore being more similar in shape to the original intention of trotters.

So anyway, the recipe.  As I will say later, this could use a few tweaks, and in doing so could end up being really good.  It could also use some tweaks in the sense of actually knowing all the proper quantities, but as I almost entirely winged this, it's somewhat vague in places, so do bear with me.  At least my quantities will be more descriptive than a 'cup'.  This is how I made it, imperfections and all.

One piece of pork loin.  As much as you feel you can eat.
About a square inch and a half of liver.  Ideally pig's liver I suppose, but I used lamb's and it was fine.
4 anchovy fillets (3 would probably be better, as the flavour was probably a bit too dominant at times)
3 large cloves of garlic
5 sage leaves
Pork fat, enough to wrap around the meat.  Caul fat would be ideal, I used a really thin piece of back fat as it was all I could get hold of.  And it was fine.
60g dried borlotti beans (50g is probably enough)
Half a large white onion (or even a whole small one)
Half a large carrot (ditto)
2 bay leaves
Olive oil
3 handfuls of kale
Approximately 500ml liquid (water, stock, liquor from soaking the beans, or any combination of the three)
1 rasher of bacon (pancetta, or your own home cured bacon would be superb)
Salt and pepper

Soak the beans in plenty of cold water overnight.  You could use tinned though, in which case you don't need to.  Drain and rinse the beans and place in a large pan and cover with fresh, cold water.  Don't add any salt at this stage, as it will prevent the beans from softening.  Bring to the boil and skim any foam from the surface.  Add the bay leaves and a splash of oil (about a tablespoon or so) and boil for around 45 minutes, or until they are just softening. 

Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 6.  Meanwhile, finely chop the liver and anchovies and mix together with two crushed cloves of garlic, the sage leaves, also finely chopped, and some ground black pepper.  Cut a pocket down the middle of the pork loin, as if you were separating it into steaks but not cutting all the way through.  Spread the liver/anchovies mix into the pocket and wrap the meat in the fat.  It doesn't matter how neatly you do this - if you're using caul fat then it should all pretty much melt away, if you're using back fat like I did, you'll remove it later. 

Heat a splash of olive oil in a pan and get it really hot.  Sear the fat wrapped meat on all sides until brown but not burnt.  This is to seal the fat so that it keeps the meat away from direct heat, and holds the stuffing inside.  Transfer to the oven and cook for about 15 minutes.  In totally winging this, I didn't actually time how long mine was in the oven.  It was around 20 minutes I think, and it was just slightly over done. 

Drain the beans, reserving the liquor if you will be using some of it later.  Dice the onion, carrot and other clove of garlic and sweat gently in a pan until soft.  Chop the bacon/pancetta and add to the pan and fry until coloured and fat has been released.  Add the beans, kale and stock/water/bean liquor and, turning the heat up, cook until the beans are properly soft and almost all the liquid has evaporated.  Season with salt if needed, and lots of ground black pepper.  The meat should be ready whilst you're doing this, so take it out of the oven and let it rest for as long as you can before removing the fat casing (if need be). 

Slice the pork and serve on top of the beans and kale.

Usually you'd get step by step pictorial evidence, but in this case there's only one, just before I wolfed the whole lot down.  As I said, it needs some tweaking.  It could use slightly less anchovy, as their flavour managed to become prevalent over the other stuffing ingredients.  The beans and kale really benefits from having an awful lot of pepper added at the end (what I suspect a certain redhead would refer to as a 'fuckton').  I'm usually livid at myself if I ever overcook meat, but in this instance I'm willing to give myself a bit of leeway, given that I didn't really know what I was doing, and I didn't want to remove the fat only to have to return it to the oven.  I tried the old stick-a-skewer-in-and-see-what-colour-the-juices-run thing, but even though the meat was cooked it ran bright red because of the liver inside.  I think cooking meat whilst wrapped in fat for protection is definitely the way forward (or at least one of them).  If I'd taken it out of the oven a few minutes earlier it would have been spot on and moist as anything.  Above all else, though, this was actually really damn tasty.

And the trotter made a really good looking stock, too.

Head Nor Tail

So this is another post which I begin by explaining my recent lack of activity and why I haven't posted anything for ages.  Various things have left me out of the kitchen of late, partly due to being out of the country for a while where the closest I got to culinary activity was stuffing as many sausages into a baguette as was humanly possible to stem the flow of a ridiculously awful hangover, and the aforementioned Drunken Jaunt, about which I will spare the blushes of my Esteemed Blogging Partner™.

I had been vaguely intending on writing one of those structured posts where something happens which informs and influences what I do in the kitchen.  That hasn't quite happened, but I'll fill in anyway.

The other week I caught an episode of No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain's food and travel show follow up to A Cook's Tour on the Good Food channel.  I've previously stated my admiration, and indeed envy for Mr Bourdain here; he basically gets paid to travel the world and eat, what's not to like about that?  Far from being just Alan Whicker with an appetite, his mantra for A Cook's Tour was "I'll try anything, I'll risk everything, I have nothing to lose", coupled with a 'cut the bullshit, give me the good stuff' approach and you're on to a winner in my book.  And indeed, his own.

This particular episode featured two things which are seemingly synonymous with Bourdain shows, namely the consumption of large quantities of regional liquor and the slaughtering, butchering and eating of a pig.  As a result of this I ended up looking for more episodes on Youtube, and finding the one from the same series where he visits London and Edinburgh and spends time salivating and eulogising in Fergus Henderson's restaurant St. John.  Which made me think, why do I not actually own a copy of Henderson's book Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking?  Given my food ethos (although I like to look at it as something less rigorously structured as deserving of the term), espoused on this blog on several occasions, I should have been subscribed to the Church of Henderson far sooner. 

So I went and bought a copy, the reprint which appropriately contains an introduction by Bourdain.  This is where I should be diving into accounts of wonderful dishes made from all manner of livestock organs, bits of guts and bones and heads which would be off-putting even to most meat-eaters, let alone the squeamish type of vegetarians.  But I'm not.  I haven't actually cooked anything from it yet, nor been inspired into creating anything in it's vein.  In fact from hereon in, there is no mention of meat whatsoever.  A couple of days before leaving for Belgium and Holland I picked up Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple, a book I've not visited for a while.  It's the sort of book in which recipes will call for the use of something you've already made from another part of the book.  I love this in principle, but it doesn't sit too well with my often short-noticed what-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-cook? approach to cookery book use.

So the week just gone after consulting the suppliers section in the back I took myself off to Borough Market on a gloriously tourist-free day when seemingly everyone was there to actually buy produce rather than take photos of piles of food to show Facebook just how much they love markets, and returned with a mere fraction of what I was sorely tempted to buy.  These are the results of my endeavours.

Chipotles en adobo

200g chipotle chillies (about 65)
1 large white onion, roughly chopped
a head of garlic, cloves roughly chopped
3 tablespoons fresh oregano leaves or a few good pinches of dried oregano
1-2 tablespoons thyme leaves
2 fresh bay leaves
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, crushed
4 tablespoons olive oil
350ml good quality white wine vinegar
50ml good quality balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons tomato purée
7 tablespoons demerara or palm sugar
2 tablespoons sea salt

Wash the chipotles in cold water and drain.  Snip off the stalk end of each chilli with scissors, which will allow the water to penetrate their tough skins. 

Cover the chillies with water in a medium pan and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes until completely soft.  When the chillies are soft, rinse off any excess seeds. 

Put the onion, garlic, herbs and cumin into a blender (or a stick blender is just as easy) with 200ml water and six of the chillies.  Purée to a smooth paste. 

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan until it is smoking hot.  Add the chilli paste and fry for about 3 minutes, stirring continuously with a spatula to prevent it catching and burning.  Add the vinegars, tomato purée, sugar, salt and another 100ml water and cook for 5 more minutes before adding the rest of the chillies.  Cook, whilst stirring, for a further 15 minutes and at the end check to see if the purée needs more salt or sugar.  Store in clean, sterilised jam or Kilner jars.

This stuff is fantastic.  The flavour is initially sweet from the sugar, which then gives way to the taste of spice and the sourness from the vinegar.  It is a relatively potent heat, but not too hot, and it is a very well rounded heat.  It doesn't affect one particular part of the mouth as some do, rather gives it a lovely warming heat all around, which after the initial heat has dispensed leaves a really wonderful flavour.  The recipe states it makes approximately a litre, so I was glad to have bought two 750ml jars whilst filling them both up.

Afterwards I used some to make chipotle ketchup from the same book.

Chipotle ketchup

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 very large Spanish onion, or 2-3 medium-sized ones, halved and sliced
8 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
1.5kg ripe tomatoes (or tinned plum tomatoes)
1 stick of celery, chopped
125ml cider vinegar
70g demerara sugar
½ cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon celery salt
½ teaspoon mustard powder
½ teaspoon cloves
1 piece of mace
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
1-2 tablespoons Chipotles en adobo
sea salt

Heat the olive oil in a large pan and cook the onion over a medium-low heat until the onion starts turning translucent.  Add the garlic and keep cooking until the onion starts taking the merest hint of colour. 

Add the tomatoes and their juices to the pan, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a spoon.  Stir in the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil and then simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally.

After an hour, purée the mixture, and then continue to cook over a low heat until it reaches your desired thickness and looks like ketchup.

The ketchup can be stored in clean, sterilised bottles in the fridge for several months.

It's rather orange, rather than red, but I think this is because I used fresh tomatoes which tend to be less of a full on, deep red than tinned.  I got three 500ml bottles worth out of this recipe, and in true Pot Tossery tradition, one will be winging its way up to the midlands post-haste.  Unfortunately they don't lend themselves to stacking, otherwise the one labeled 'reserved for Kirsty' would almost certainly have been at the base of such a structure.  In the meantime, I need to get thinking about animal parts.