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.

 

Make it Yourself Ready Meals

Now, I'll admit that even I have off days where I don't want to fire up the cooker, and look for an easy out. Sometimes, it ends up with me stopping at the garage on the way home, buying a ready meal, and forcing myself to eat some sort of indeterminable gloop. (That being said, I am also quite partial to the old "dine in for two for a tenner" deals, but I think the major pull on that is the savings you can make on the wine!).

What I like to do is make the most of the inclination to cook, when it arrives, and stock my freezer with lots of lovely home made "ready meals". I even bought some very similar plastic cartons with snap on lids to freeze them in, which adds to the appeal. Perhaps I'll try making cardboard wrap around labels too...

Anyway, there is nothing nicer than, when having said off day, you can come in, open the freezer, grab something and throw it into the microwave. My batch cooking favourites (which will have their own features soon) are:

• Beef bourginon
• Chilli con carne
• Lasagne
• Basil and ricotta cannelloni
• Lamb stew
• Chicken and rice soup
• Tomato based curries

I tend to favour whatever you can make without having to do anything more arduous than cooking pasta or rice (potatoes are a step too far when I am in the mood for one of my ready meals). On the evenings when you can't wait to get your shoes off and put your mammies on, the last thing you'll be looking for is haute cuisine, so imagine the food that feels like a hug, and throw it in your freezer.

 

Most things that I tend to freeze can be defrosted in the microwave and then reheated in said microwave. This is the beauty of cooking things completely before you freeze them - it substantially reduces the chance of poisoning yourself. It does mean that some things will get a bit dried out, but there is always a quick two second rescue job that can restore it to its former glory.

 

A little note on cooking for the freezer though, is that you should check out your local food standards agency (or equivalent) for their advice on what is safe to do.

 

If it saves you some hassle but means that you are still getting something better than a box of salt with added sugar, go for it.

 

Steak.

I love a good chunk of meat...

Again, search on the interweb for how to cook steak, and you'll find thousands of methods touting the "perfect steak". 

If you've read my chicken related rant, you'll know that I think the perfect way to cook anything is the way that you like it, not the way someone else does. Point in case - my grandfather wouldn't touch a steak unless you could bounce it five feet off the floor before using it to sole your shoes. Too many people judge, and would say that it is a waste to cook anything like that, but that's how he liked it - why would he cook it any other way?

I'm a rare to medium kind of girl - I like a good bit of pink, with a lovely crusty brown exterior. I don't like spots of blood ruining my sauce. 

Cuts of meat - there are so many cuts of meat for steak, that again, it comes down to personal preference. Some prefer the tender taste of fillet, others the meaty juice of a sirloin. Me? I like a bit of rump. Experiment with whatever is on special offer in your local butchers (or supermarket if, like me, petrol costs mean you've had to downsize on your steak offerings!). 

What to look for - I look for a nice light marbling of fat through the meat (although not too many thick veins of fat running through it). This essentially helps baste the meat from inside while it cooks, and if the marbling is thin enough, the fat will dissolve as the steak cooks so you don't end up chewing on it. Colour will depend on whether you can stretch to well hung meat. This will have a darker colour. If you can, get it - if not, it'll still taste good. 

Prep - take it out the packet, rub a little oil on each side, then sprinkle with salt and pepper. 

Cooking - the make or break moment!

• Get your pan smokin' hot!
• Pop your steaks in - mind out for splashes of hot fat
• Turn, turn and turn - every 15-30 seconds until you get an even colour
• Don't forget to turn your steaks on their side to get some heat into any fat running along the edge

How long to cook?

There are so many factors when you've got steak in the pan, that it's all about looking and touching. You're cooking for yourself, so there is nothing to stop you taking the steak out the pan and cutting into it to see how far cooked it is. 

Stop cooking it just before it's at the point you want it, because like any man after a hot time, it needs to rest. Stick it on a plate with foil over it. The residual heat inside the meat means it will continue to cook for a short while, which is why we want to take it out the pan just before it's ready. Resting lets the moisture inside the steak absorb back into the meat, and allows the fibres to relax, so that when you cut into it on your plate, it doesn't leak everywhere.

After five to ten minutes (depending on how late you're running with everything else, or how much wine you've drunk), it's ready to go! 

Remember, however you like it is perfect.

Rosti Rosti!

Beautiful, lovely, buttery, crispy potato goodness. Potato rosti has long been a favourite of mine. Eaten in fancy restaurants in a towering stack of tastiness, or as a wholesome meal when holidaying in mountainous terrain, the crisp crunch of potato cakes makes me salivate every time. So they are on this evening's dinner menu.

Originating from Switzerland, it was a breakfast commonly eaten by farmers in the canton of Bern (thank you Wikipedia).

It is essentially a potato pancake, but a quick search on the interweb proves to me what I've suspected all along. The Swiss are very secretive about their recipe.

Googling for rosti recipes will have your mind boggling - there are so many variations, and so many different cooking techniques that I started to doubt they were all for the same thing.

I guess how you cook your rosti depends on the vision you have in your head for the end result. For me, it is a potato cake about the diameter of a mug, a few centimetres tall, with crisp and well defined potato strands on the top. For others, it may be a slice of a large and thin potato pancake, but I find that the soft middle in mine is perfect for mopping up excess sauce. 

So, whatever way you plan to make it, the basic ingredients are the same:

(for two hungry people)

• 2 potatoes - around the size of baking potatoes. I've tried both waxy and floury and couldn't tell the difference, so use whatever is in my vegetable drawer. I'm not one for buying specific items to just cook my dinner.
• 1 small white onion - this is a disputed item, but I like the oniony bite it gives to the finished cake.
• Butter x lots - all down to personal preference, but I use lots of salted butter.

My Method:

• Peel the potatoes and onions
• Put your oven onto around 180 degrees C, or gas mark 7 if your oven is as unpredictable as mine!
• Grate the potatoes and onions - I use the grater attachment on my food processor but before I had one of those nifty gadgets, I used a cheese grater - just mind your knuckles!
• Wrap the grated potato and onion in a clean tea towel and gather up the ends, creating a tight ball.
• Head outside and swing the tea towel around until no more water comes out your potatoes (excellent workout for the bingo wings, but you can end up soaking your feet)
• Form your potato and onion mixture into cakes and press down well. I use metal chef's rings, but anything will work - cookie cutters, whatever. Metal ones are better because you can use them in your pan with direct heat. This is the point to decide how thick you want your cakes.
• Heat a heavy bottomed (all my pans are just like me) frying pan over a medium heat with half a tablespoon of olive oil and as much butter as you dare.
• Slide a fish slice under your ring (fnar fnar) and transfer it into the pan. Repeat with the other one.
• At this point, how long you need to cook it before flipping depends on how thick the base of your pan is and how hot you have it. You are looking for a light golden colour on individual strands of potato like in the photo above. For me, it's normally around five minutes.
• Flip your rings (haha!) - be careful! I use lots of butter, and every time I do this, I end up spattering myself with hot butter and oil. 
• Push your potato down inside the ring to ensure that the uncooked side is in contact with the pan. Add another chunk of butter into the pan. Cook for however long you cooked the first side. 
• Take the pan off the heat, and don't panic - you're not going to get raw potato!
• Oil a baking tray with a little olive oil and carefully move your rings onto it
• Remove the rings - the potato should hold its shape well.
• Put a knob of butter on top of each one, and wang it in the oven for fifteen to twenty minutes.

My favourite thing about this is that if you're running late with the rest of your dish, as often happens in my household, you can turn the oven off and leave them in there. I've left them in for a further twenty minutes with the oven off without them losing their crisp outer shell. 

 

What you should end up with, is a lovely crisp top and bottom, and an inside that is almost like buttery mashed potatoes. Except tonight, when I was too busy taking the above photo and burnt the arse on mine! Still tasty as hell though.

Dauphinoise without cream - Heretic I hear you scream!

Can you imagine my consternation when my other half announces that due to an upset stomach, he doesn't want anything rich for dinner? What a wanker. I was utterly disgusted. The best people eat through and sacrifice their tummy ache for taste. However, we still had to eat, and my mouth was watering for the beautiful layered potatoes and onions of dauphinoise. Adaptations had to be (grudgingly) made. I have eaten boulangere potatoes once before, but found them unsatisfying, probably due to the lack of heart stopping cream and butter.

I decided to give them a go for the sake of my relationship. After looking at several recipes and getting thoroughly confused, I thought "bugger it", just stick them in and we'll deal with the consequences later.

Ingredients:

• Potatoes (waxy preferred apparently, but I used what was in my vegetable drawer - don't have a clue regarding the type)
• Onions
• Chicken stock - whatever you have
• Milk
• Butter
• Parmesan cheese (any kind of hard cheese would work - I wasn't sacrificing all my calories for his tummy upset)
• White wine

I made this for two, so only used 2 potatoes (both around the size of a baking potato) and three quarters of an onion, but it depends on how deep your dish is because we'll be layering.

Method:

• Slice your onion as thin as you can get it - you can use a mandolin if you like, but I balanced out the time taken to slice the onion versus the time taken to wash the mandolin and added risk of losing a fingertip and decided to go with the knife
• Slice your potatoes - about as thick as a one pound coin. If you don't know how thick that is, visit the UK and take one home with you
• Butter your dish (liberally)
• Start with a layer of onions, then overlap the potatoes in a layer of potatoes
• Season with salt and pepper
• Repeat until you have no potato left, or your dish is full
• Add a splash of milk to your chicken stock (I used about half a pint of chicken stock and enough milk to make a cup of coffee)
• Pour the milk and stock mix over your layers until it is lapping at the underside of your potatoes like a cheap whore in a vegetable porno
• Grate your cheese of choice over the top and cover with foil
• Pop it into the oven. Cooking times will vary according to your oven. My oven is about as reliable as a cheesegrated umbrella in a downpour. I cooked it for 1 hr 30 mins on gas mark 6
• Drink the wine
• Remove the foil and put your oven temperature up as high as it will go - you are looking for the cheese to melt and bubble, and the potatoes on the top layer to start to crisp around the edges. How long will depend on your choice of cheese and potatoes, so keep an eye on it

End Result:

The potatoes should have absorbed most of the liquid, be crisp on the top, lovely and soft underneath, and look like a dauphinoise without the cream.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. My other half, the cause of such a hideous experiment, decided he likes them better than dauphinoise. Which means now I need to make awesome dauphinoise as I can't be giving them up. Still, like an inheritance windfall from an elderly relative, as lovely as they were, it was a bittersweet discovery.