Dinner tonight: leftover jambalya enchilada

Last night, we had blackened tuna with a “chorizo rice” recipe from the BBC. The rice dish ended up basically being jambalaya, particularly once I’d finished throwing celery, mushrooms, and some extra spices and herbs into it.

We had a lot left over though. Lacking inspiration, I idly asked my friend Scott how he thought I should use it up and he suggested a burrito. Of course, a burrito is good, but it’s sadly deficient in melted cheese; and hence we arrived at enchilada town. I bulked the rice out with some chunks of chicken seasoned with fajita seasoning and my wife Danielle made fresh guacamole and assembled the burritos for me.

It was delicious. It wasn’t as greasy as that photo makes it look either. The halogens in my kitchen are quite harsh, you see, and —- oh, who am I kidding. It was exactly that greasy. And definitely delicious. —Rich

Beef and chorizo stew with suet dumplings

Stew is something I’ve been cooking for years, and something I can knock together with approximately zero mental effort. But it’s also a recipe which is endlessly flexible and adaptable to your whims — and whichever wilting items of vegetation lurking in the bottom of your fridge are in the most urgent need of being eaten. Which is why, this time, I decided to search for a recipe which did things as differently as possible to my usual methods.

I came upon this recipe from Delia Smith which was unusual (to me at least) for a few reasons:

1. slow-cooked for five hours (I generally cook at medium heat two or so hours).
2. a gravy made from cider (I use stock, maybe with some wine).
3. the meat wasn’t fried first (I always fry mine to provoke the Malliard reaction and all its tasty, tasty byproducts).
4. beef suet dumplings (a bit of extra work, but a tradition that harks back to an earlier era of British cooking).

Obviously, being me, I didn’t cook Delia’s recipe as-is. I made some changes of my own, and I ended up with this recipe. It still turned out delicious, though. I think it’s hard to go very wrong with stew.

Beef and chorizo stew

(serves four)

100 g (4 oz) chorizo
600 g (1.5 lb) of stewing beef — shin or a similar cut
2 medium sized or 1 large carrot (about 220 g / 7 oz in weight)
Half a swede or rutabaga (same weight as carrots)
3-4 parsnips (same weight as carrots)
4-5 small onions or large shallots (same weight as carrots)
25 g (1 oz) plain flour, seasoned with plenty of salt and pepper
568 ml (1 UK pint / 20 fl oz) of premium dry cider (I used Stella)
2 sprigs fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp tomato purée
1 beef stock cube

Preheat the oven to 140 deg C (275 deg F).

First, the mise en place. Cut the beef into two-inch chunks. Cut the swede into half-inch chunks — it’s much harder than the other vegetables, so needs to be smaller to make sure it cooks through. Cut the carrots and parsnip into two-inch chunks. Skin the onions or shallots, but leave all except one whole. Dice the last onion and dice the chorizo too.

Put a little oil in the casserole pan you’ll be using for the stew and warm it a little. Add the diced chorizo and keep it on a low heat until it gives up its oil and aroma. Add the diced onion and fry slowly until softened. Turn the heat off and add the cider to deglaze and cool the pan. (Note that Delia’s recipe calls for quite a bit less cider; I prefer my stew to have a bit of sauce with it.)

Put 25 g of seasoned flour in a bowl. One piece at a time, dip the beef chunks in the flour. Make sure each one is well coated then put it in the pan. Once they are all done, toss the vegetables in any remaining flour, and put all that in the pan too. Sprinkle any remaining flour in on top.

Put the heat back on under the pan and start bringing it to a simmer.

While that’s happening, add the rest of the flavourings: the mustard, Worcestershire sauce, tomato purée, thyme, and the stock cube. Add salt and pepper too. Stir to combine. Once it’s simmering, put a lid on the pan (with a piece of foil if it’s not a tight fit) and put in the oven for four and half hours.

Go out, because it’s going to start smelling really good a long time before it’s ready to eat.

After four or so hours, check on the stew. The vegetables should be tender but hopefully not falling apart, and the beef should be cooked. You can serve it up like this, but there’s an optional step you can add if you’re feeling indulgent and/or nostalgic.

Caramelised onion dumplings

Suet is an incredibly old-fashioned British food, consisting of the hardest, most saturated fat a cow has — taken from around the loins and kidneys. It’s used as a shortening to make pastries and doughs, as well as being an important ingredient in the traditional version of mincemeat and Christmas pudding. Obviously, it’s incredibly unhealthy, so has rather fallen out of favour as dietry science came to understand the dangers of saturated fats. As such it’s not something I’d eat very often.

Americans — you can probably stop reading now. It’s almost impossible to find suet outside the UK, and there’s no substitution that is close in flavour or richness. Note that these dumplings don’t bear very much resemblance to the sort of ones you’d make for chicken and dumplings.

1/2 a small onion
100 g (4 oz) self-raising flour
50 g (2 oz) shredded beef suet — I used Atora brand
1 tsp mustard powder
1 Tbsp fresh chive

Ahead of time, finely dice the onion and fry in flavourless oil (groundnut or vegetable) over a very low heat for half an hour or so until caramelised and brown. Leave this to cool.

Once the stew is cooked, sift the mustard powder and flour into a work bowl. Add the suet and stir that through, followed by the onions and chives. Sprinkle over about five Tbsp of cold water and bring the mixture together with a knife or — if you have one — the dough paddle of a freestanding mixer. The mixer is a lot less work! Add more water if you need it to make a firm but soft dough.

Separate the dough into eight portions and roll them by hand into spheres. Get the stew out of the oven, pop the dumplings in the top so they are half-submerged in the gravy, and put it back in the oven for 20-30 minutes.

Now, this is where my advice parts ways from Delia’s. She suggests leaving the lid off the casserole at this point, and increasing the temperature. I tried this and found that too much of the sauce boiled away and the tops of the dumplings became quite dark, almost burnt, where there were tiny pieces of onion on the surface. You can see this in the photo at the top of the post. Next time I will keep the lid on the pan, which is the usual way to cook dumplings, to give a softer, part-steamed texture.

Finally, serve with some good bread and a glass of full-bodied red wine.

A post from me? It must be New Year.

We had a couple of friends over for New Year’s eve, and I wanted to do some cooking that would allow us to sit in the kitchen and eat things as they came off the stove, so I decided to put together a selection of things that were a bit more than a mouthful, but not something that needed us to sit down with a knife and fork.

With that in mind, I put together the selection shown in the picture. Clockwise from top left:

• ‘Tuna Nicoise’ - this was a slice of fresh tuna, seared on the outside, with a soft-poached quail’s egg sitting on top, and dehydrated olives, capers, and shallots ground in a spice grinder on top of that. Unfortunately the olives retained too much oil and the powders clumped a bit as a result.
• Steak tartare served on dripping-fried toast. Dripping is rendered beef fat, and frying the little toast slices in it adds a delicious beefy flavour while making the ‘toast’ crisp enough to hold the steak. The beef was skirt steak from Dexter cows (hanger steak in US terminology), finely diced with shallots, capers, and anchovies, seasoned, and bound with an egg yolk.
• Smoked salmon parfait with caviar. The salmon parfait was made that morning to give it time to set. It’s very simple - smoked salmon simmered with cream and a little water, then pureed. Bloomed gelatine is added, then more cream whipped until stiff is folded into the purée then chilled until set.
• Poached trout and black pudding. Because on paper it looked much too healthy, I poached the trout in butter until it was just cooked, then flaked it up with a little of the butter and served with a simple grilled chunk of black pudding (a British type of blood sausage). The richness of the black pudding and the lightness of the trout were a lovely combination.
• Not pictured was a garlic soup - as it was a white soup in a white cup. A whole roasted bulb of garlic, simmered with onions and cream, then pureed. Thick and powerfully garlicky.

I was thoroughly pleased with everything cooked there, and as such have a New Year’s resolution - cook more little things!

Happy new year, everyone. —Nick

Blackened seared tuna with cajun rice

This was our dinner tonight. Despite seeming very fancy, it took less than 20 minutes of prep time and only about 45 minutes to cook from beginning to end. I’d say this is pretty good cooking-to-impress food — although it does fill your kitchen with an alarming amount of smoke.

I’ve written up my recipe for O:S! previously. This one came out a lot prettier than the one I pictured there, though. —Rich

Lunch today was caprese grilled cheese sandwiches.

No recipe required, because it’s pretty obvious: cram slices of mozzarella, tomato, and pesto between pieces of bread, brush the outside of the bread with butter or oil, and lightly fry to melt the cheese. I found it worked better if I put a lid on the frying pan to trap more heat in and make sure the cheese was properly melted.

I also made my own pesto for this, because I don’t like pine nuts so pre-made stuff isn’t to my taste. Authenticity demands that pesto is ground by hand in a pestle and mortar, but I’m far too busy and important (read: lazy and inept) for that. Instead, I simply used a small blender to combine a handful of basil leaves, a few table spoons of grated parmesan, a diced clove of garlic, some salt and pepper, and enough decent quality olive oil to give a gloopy consistency. This worked well enough for the sandwiches, though I daresay it’s not the last word in pesto-ness. —Rich

Tex-mex weekend brunch: eggs roasted in sweet pointed peppers, with chilli and freshly made tortilla chips.

Both Danielle and I are pretty lazy and slow-moving on weekend mornings, so it’s usually 11 o’clock or so before we get around to eating anything, by which point we’re starving. So elaborate and hearty brunches are very much a thing for us — you can see some of my previous efforts.

This dish was inspired by a post by Delishy Town that I spotted on Tumblr’s food tag page.

It was easy to make, too:

1. Pre-heat oven to 180 deg C (375 deg F).
2. Dice half an onion, fry gently for a few minutes.
3. Finely dice a handful of mushrooms, add to the pan with the onions.
4. Optional: discover some leftover taco meat in the fridge from when your wife made nachos. Throw that in too.
5. Add a tin of chopped tomatoes to the pan. Bring to the boil, season, add spices if desired, and leave to simmer and reduce a little while you do the next bit.
6. Get some of those long, red, pointed peppers that most supermarkets sell these days. Halve them through the stalk and carefully remove the ribs and seeds.
7. Turn the chilli mix out into an ovenproof dish. Put the peppers on top. One by one, crack eggs into a small bowl, then pour them into the peppers.
8. Cover with grated cheese.
9. Put the whole lot into the oven for 10-15 minutes, until the cheese is browned and the egg cooked through.
10. Get a couple of tortillas and quarter them with a sharp knife. Dip some kitchen towel in flavourless cooking oil (vegetable or groundnut) and wipe the tortillas down. Put them on a baking sheet.
11. Put the tortillas in the oven for the last 5 minutes of the cooking time.

It was very tasty, and a nice change from the normal sorts of things we eat for brunch. —Rich

For dinner tonight, I made: roasted sea bass flavoured with lemon juice and fresh herbs, served with blanched runner beans and potatoes sautéed in garlic butter.