Cooking "En Papilotte" (or easy baked fish)

The first thing to say before I go any further is do not be afraid of the French! This method of cooking delivers the tastiest result with the most minimal of effort. It is simple to master, and will impress with flavour time and time again.

 

So what is en papilotte? It literally translates as in parchment. It is a method of cooking where the thing being cooked is baked wrapped in a parchment parcel so it sort of steams in its own juices and the juices of anything else you throw into the parcel. It is most commonly used to cook fish and vegetables, but you can cook anything you like this way.

In practical terms, because I never have any baking parchment in the house, and I can never be bothered with the intricate folding needed to hold the parcel together, I always use tin foil. It works just as well. If I were using this cooking method for a dinner party, and wanted an impressive show stopper for the dinner table, I'd go with the parchment and serve it still wrapped up. However, as I never have proper dinner parties because dinner round mine always includes too much wine for fancy clothes or posh plates, I always just stick with tin foil.

So how do we make our parcels?

1. Take a piece of tin which is big enough to make a loose parcel around what you want to cook, making sure you've got enough spare to fold the edges over each other
2. Oil or butter the bottom of the foil to stop anything sticking
3. Throw in whatever you want to cook, and whatever flavours you want to add
4. Fold the tin foil up and around on all sides. Gather it together at the top and sides, folding one side over the other to make an airtight parcel. It should be fairly loose around the contents, but tightly sealed
5. Put the parcel onto a baking tray and throw it in the oven
6. Cook it for as long as you would if you we're baking/roasting it
7. Once it's done, I usually put the whole parcel on the plate, carefully open it and tip everything out, including the beautiful juices that will have gathered in the parcel
8. Job done!

Now, reading this, you might think it that it sounds like a lot of effort. I promise you that once you've done it for the first time and got your head around it, steps 1 to 5 will literally take minutes. If it takes you longer, you are welcome to come round my house and slap me.

Right, so what the heck can you cook like this? Tonight I'm going to be cooking smoked haddock, but any kind of fish is delicious cooked this way.

Smoked Haddock with Lemon and Chives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

• Smoked haddock fillet - I am using undyed, but only because it was on the cheap!
• Lemon
• Chives
• Olive oil
• Butter

Steps:

1. Preheat your oven to gas mark 6, 200 degrees C
2. Lay out your tin foil as described above
3. Drizzle a little olive oil over the tin foil
4. Finely slice the lemon and lay them on the tinfoil, slightly overlapping
5. Place the smoked haddock fillet on top
6. Dot with salted butter
7. Use scissors to snip fresh chives over the top of the haddock and butter
8. Season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
9. Seal your parcel up, plonk it on a baking tray and fire it into the oven
10. Bang it in the oven for however long you want to cook it. My haddock went in for twenty five minutes, but just follow whatever the recommended time is. Please, please make sure whatever you are cooking is cooked through before you eat it!
11. After cooking, leave to sit for a minute until the outer tin foil cools enough to touch. Now, this is the tricky part. I always tend to put the whole parcel on the plate, open it there, use something to slide out the contents and pour the lovely juices over tge top, that way nothing gets wasted. However, safety note here in the sense that it almost always ends up with me burning some part of my person, so be sensible!
12. Eat and enjoy.

Trust me, once you have tasted this, you will never cook fish any other way! Except perhaps barbecued. Or deep fried. But you get what I mean. Delish!

 

Chicken and Rice Soup

 

If I was told I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, and had to choose, I'd forego everything else for chicken and rice soup. Not chocolate, or crisps, or even Parma ham (I'm seeing a psychologist to deal with my addiction to air dried pig flesh). This soup reminds me of home and of family. Soup has a long heritage in my family (although we would always enquire into who had made the soup before agreeing to eat it!).

Currently, I have the pressure cooker (I love it, it's like taking your cooking life in your hands, that chuggachugga noise coming from the kitchen) on to make stock, and once I've made said stock, I will make soup. You don't need a pressure cooker to do this, but my impatience and love of feeling like a brave kitchen warrior mean I'm trying it out like that today.

So what do we need to start?

• Roast chicken carcass. I'm not going to specify what weight you need, just use what you've got left.
• As much chicken meat (brown and white) that was left on said carcass, stripped off the bones and left to one side. Feel free to sing the song from The Full Monty while stripping the chicken.
• Eight carrots, or however many are languishing at the bottom of your vegetable drawer
• Four onions, of half as many carrots as you had.
• One cup of rice. Long grain white, if you've got it. I don't, I only have basmati and that will do fine.
• Stock vegetables - this, for me, consists of any carrots, onions, celery, leeks etc that seem to have gone too far to actually cook with, but are not yet furry. Today I have some carrots and onions.
• Water.

Right, let us get underway.

 

Step one is - prepare your chicken stock.

 

• Roughly chop and peel the stock vegetables. Don't worry how they look, we'll be throwing them out.

nb: a little note on the waste of these vegetable. I hate waste, I really do, but we're taking all the taste and flavour and goodness out of these vegetables into the stock, so what we are throwing out is the empty shell of what the vegetable used to be. Don't tell them though, they think there's a gardener in the sky.

• Throw about a tablespoon of olive oil into a large pan and turn on a medium heat.
• Chuck in your stock vegetables and move them around in the pan for a few minutes until they start to soften and brown.
• Add the chicken carcass. I like to break the bones of mine up, but then I might have some unresolved issues.
• Cover with water and start to heat.
• Bring to the boil and skim any scum that appears off the top of the pan.
• Leave to simmer for as many hours as you can muster. Or, if you're using a pressure cooker, wang it on for forty five minutes.
• Strain through a fine sieve or a colander lined with some sort of cloth.
• Now, the next step is completely subjective because your stock will have some fat in it. You want a bit of that fat in the broth for your soup, but you don't want too much. How much is entirely down to personal taste. Also, how much fat is in your stock will depend on how much fat was in your chicken. This is trial and error. Normally I don't take much, if any out of the stock. Taste it.

At this point, get someone else to do all the washing up before you start to make another mess. Now, this is the basics of how I make chicken stock, but if I'm making chicken stock for the freezer or for any other dishes, I will add bay leaves, whole black peppercorns and sometimes a single star anise. Then I'll freeze it and use it for when I'm making something that needs homemade stock rather than a stock cube.

 

Step two - prepare your soup vegetables

• Dice your onions and carrots. It doesn't need to be a fine dice, just small enough that you'd be happy to put in your mouth and swallow. *insert dirty laugh here*
• Using the big pan that someone else kindly washed up for you earlier, pour in your strained stock and turn on a low heat.
• Add the carrots and the onions and simmer for ten minutes.
• Add the leftover chicken and the rice.
• Season as per your liking. I add thyme, salt and plenty of black pepper.
• Simmer for around half an hour, or until the rice is cooked and the vegetables are tender.
• Taste and season again.

There are lots of instances where I will use as many shortcuts as I can to get to the end of a dish as quickly as possible, but in this case, chicken stock cubes do not make the cut. The thing to remember is that while this might seem like a lot of effort for a simple soup, it's not very labour intensive. In fact, here is where I've spent most of my time while the stock and then soup has been simmering away on the stove.

 

Now, it's time to grab a steaming bowl, sit back in front of the fire and enjoy. I promise you, this will make your insides feel better than anything you can get from Ann Summers.

 

 

The Basic Béchamel

Ooh, Béchamel...

The fancy name for white sauce, but I enjoy any excuse to practise my impeccable French accent.

So what exactly is it? It's one of the building blocks of a lot of home made recipes, it's incredibly versatile and once you've made it for the first time, it's simple.

First step is not to be afraid of the Béchamel. If you cook with confidence, your food will taste of it! Actually, that's probably rubbish, but it's way more fun to attack any new cooking venture with gusto, because then if you fail, at least it's been fun. But you will not fail at Béchamel. I promise.

So what do we start with...

Butter. Love a bit of butter. In fact, some say my name should be Betty, because I regularly buy a bit of butter, but it's never bitter. I am a salted butter kind of girl, but whatever you normally use will be fine, so long as it is butter and not marg, or *inhales sharply* some sort of healthy butter substitute.

What's next...

Lovely plain flour. If you do not have a jar of this in your kitchen, get one! I use flour way more often than I realised until I rearranged my kitchen, and being a short arse, had to ask someone taller than me every single time I needed the jar. Which turned out to be twice a day.

Third and finally...

Got milk? I'm a semi skimmed kind of gal with my milk, but full fat works well too.

So the rules of the Béchamel...one to one to one. And whisk, whisk, whisk! Single men, this sauce will make use of muscles you thought only had one purpose. *cough cough*

The steps to creating the perfect white sauce are:

• Measure out 100g butter (it's normally marked on the bottom of the pack in 50g increments. This was an utter revelation when I discovered this!
• Measure out 100g of flour. What I (cleverly) did recently, was to weigh my measuring spoon, then weigh it full of flour. Now I know I have a big one that holds 60g of flour and a little one that holds 10g.
• Measure 1 litre milk.
• Place a fairly large pan over a medium heat.
• Melt 100g of butter in said pan, until it is all liquid.
• Throw 100g of flour into the pan, and whisk it together with the butter.
• Do not panic - it is meant to look like stiff wet sand.
• Ensure all the flour is combined with the butter, and continue to stir it for one minute. This is to cook the raw flavour off the flour. You can cook this stage for longer, which will give you a darker sauce.
• Take the milk and add it gradually. Now, when I say gradually, I don't mean one steady slow pour. I mean add about a fifth and whisk like a mad man to incorporate it into the flour and butter. It will go really thick, and quite fast when you add the first splash of milk. Once it has thickened, add the next splash of milk and repeat the process. You want to keep going until all the milk is used up. Once you have added about half the milk, I normally add the rest in two large amounts. Keep whisking! That's the secret to no lumps.
• Continue to whisk for approximately ten minute, until your white sauce has thickened to the consistency you are looking for.
• Season! If you're cooking Italian with it, grate in about half a nutmeg. You'll thank me later.

Béchamel done. Also, you know that wet sand stuff in step 6? That's called a roux. You can make that and whisk it into all sorts of stuff to thicken it.

But what can I do with my sauce? Anything you like! Melt cheese through it and add it to cauliflower for cauliflower cheese. Swirl pesto through it for lasagne. It's also nice smeared on ham and cheese toasties. That lovely rich, creamy sauce.