Happy New Year!
We know we’ve kind of disappeared. We got sucked in by the holidays; we had friends stay over, Christmas was CRAZY (when is it not?) and work for me has been super busy.
But, let me assure you, we are back. And we’ve gotten off our lazy butts and done a bit of work on the site. The about us section has been updated, and guess what? We’ve got a some new recipes to post starting tomorrow.
So about Christmas—I feel I should say a bit about how the day went, and what we made and ate and all that. We spent it with the almost-in-laws (no need to make that face, they’re nice people. Really. ) and we made chickens (yes, plural). We used the roast chicken recipe from our last post and they turned out great—moist and delicious. We also had cuttlefish in a red-wine reduction, lamb with mint sauce, roast vegetables, and various delicious salads. Do we have photos to share? Erm…no.
R. insisted that Christmas is special and that nobody likes to have a camera shoved in their face, which I thought was pretty fair.
The cool thing about this year was that all presents had to be hand-made. So R. and I made preserved lemons, orangettes, cucumber pickles, and flavored salts and sugars. We got plum jam, eggplant chutney, and biscuits in return.
And we ate so much panettone. I love panettone—it’s absolutely delicious. It reminds me of my mother and Christmas in Italy. If you’ve never had panettone, you need to go out and try some. It’s basically a type of leavened hand-made cake. It’s delicious. We’ve got a recipe using leftover Christmas panettone coming up soon, so stay tuned.
Thanks to all of you who’ve been checking out our site regularly—it means a lot to us J
Xo
-S.
So, we’ve had this organic chicken bouncing around the freezer for a couple of weeks and it spoke to me. It told me I should once and for all try roasting a chicken properly instead of just oiling it and sticking it in an oven for 2 hours. Enter Julia Child and Jamie Oliver. Yes, if JC and JO roasted a chicken together, this would be their love-chicken.
Be aware that this recipe is not for those short on time and attention span as it requires constant attention and patience –a virtue that S. strangely lacks outside of the kitchen; try watching a 2 hour movie with her! (If it’s not in the cinema where she can’t fall asleep or pause the movie then it’s a hopeless exercise).
On a side note, because this is Christmas and we couldn’t possibly have Christmas without the cats getting involved (and believe me they are very good at getting involved. Another Christmas installation was just knocked over as I was typing this up) here are some pictures of them looking cute/completely ridiculous. I should point out that our tree gets knocked over or has its ornaments pilfered about half a dozen times a day.
Now a few notes before we get to the recipe; the careful basting and turning of the chicken is straight out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking while the upstart changes and additions I felt were inspired by a Oliver’s Twist episode I watched recently. For the roast potatoes see our earlier Coq Au Vin post here. I added sweet potatoes too because I’ll take any excuse to roast them (mmm…). The carrots were added in the last half hour before the chicken was done, to keep them crispy.
Happy Holidays!
Well, S. has just started a new job and is flat out, nose to the grind stone busy and that leaves me in charge of the blog during the week; sounds like a recipe for disaster (pun intended), I know. So, please forgive me my ham-fisted attempts at writing, it’s not my area and after all I just take the pictures here.
The recipe I’ve chosen to share with you today is a simple and yet oh, so satisfying one. I make this quite a lot for S. and I when we feel like an all-in-one type of meal. A lot of people are put off by the idea of making their own pastry but it’s really one of the easiest things to do and a whole lot easier than baking something like bread or a cake. If you have a food processor (which we don’t, yet) then it’s even easier. Half the time I don’t bother to roll the pastry out if I’m putting it in a baking tin– I just mould it to the shape of the tin with my hands (if you’re going to do this then don’t chill the pastry). The reason I always make my own, other than it being simple and quick, is that most bought short-crust pastry is sweetened, which is terrible for a savory pie, and comes out of the packet grey half the time. Having said that there are some really good ones but let’s be honest here, it’s cheaper and more satisfying to do it yourself.
So, now that I’ve rambled on I’ll let you get on to the actual recipe. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
For me, potatoes are the ultimate comfort food. Baked potatoes, roast potatoes, fried potatoes, potato soup, potato salad, potato fritters… you get the idea. Potatoes are just so versatile—you can do just about anything with them, and they can be paired with most herbs and spices.
One of my favorite things to do with potatoes though is mash them. Nothing beats a bowl of creamy, silky mashed potatoes.
Mmmmmmm.
Anyways, about this post: R. and I were watching Jamie Oliver reruns and he made a traditional Irish dish called ‘Champ’, which is mashed potatoes with spring onions (also known as scallions in some places), milk, and a pool of butter in the center. We couldn’t help but notice how similar this was to the ‘Stamp-pot’ they make in Holland; mashed potatoes with milk and a pool of butter in the center with a giant dollop of wholegrain mustard (but there are variations of both of these dishes).
So we took a little bit of ‘Stamp’ and a little bit of ‘Champ’ and added our penchant for ridiculously decadent foods and came up with a ‘Champ-Pot’. It’s got cream and butter and mustard and spring onions and if all of that wasn’t enough it’s got bacon thrown in for good measure. It turned out obscenely rich and delicious. When we made it we had it with some Rookwurst sausages and a spinach salad with an orange-balsamic dressing (the orange complemented the bacon and the sausages really well, and apparently the vitamin C in it helps you absorb all the minerals and vitamins and goodies in the spinach).
I strongly recommend this for the next time you need some comfort food—it works great as a dish on its own, and it’s the kind of thing that you can make in a single pan in your kitchen. Bonus: less washing up at the end of the evening…
Here it is!
Okay, so:
I’m not going to go into the pronunciation of this dish. You can insert here whatever pun/rude joke with an emphasis on the chicken part (yeah I get it, it’s funny).
You KNOW what I’m talking about. Don’t be coy.
So about the coq (au vin):
R. pulled out a Delia Smith* book I own that I got for $2 at a sale. It’s this insane encyclopedic volume of how to make just about everything. Now, I should tell you that I am not a Delia fan, and I haven’t actually made anything out of said book. The reason for both of those things is because all her recipes are calculated down to the very last granule of salt. It drives me nuts. I tend to take a more liberal/spontaneous approach in the kitchen, substituting ingredients with what’s on hand, and adding a sprinkle of this or a dash of that where I feel it’s needed (or just if it’s something I want).
But I have to give the woman credit: if you ever make anything out of her cookbook exactly as she says you should (how dull), it turns out delicious. R has proven this on many an occasion. In fact, he made this gorgeous looking coq au vin with a few changes to the Delia recipe. It was divine. The chicken was tender and juicy and practically fell off the bone. He used regular red onions rather than button onions, and they added wonderful texture to the chicken and helped flavor and thicken up the gravy. The proportions are different, and we used mostly chicken thighs because the meat there is soft and not stringy at all.
*Delia Smith is like an English version of Martha Stewart, but just for cooking.
