Christmas Cranberry & Clementine Trifle

Is this becoming an all-trifle blog? It's certainly looking that way at this point! I've seen a couple of people talking about A Return To Blogging as the newsletter sites and various microblogging sites that shall remain nameless aren't very satisfactory, but I am not willing to commit to any regularity. For one thing, I'm not doing much interesting cooking at the moment, and not really paying enough attention to it to write about it.

This trifle, however, was a grand project and the result was worthy of recording. I took my inspiration from the Cosmopolitan, which is a great drink even if it is out of fashion, and is very Christmassy with the cranberries and lovely winter citrus.

We had a big family Christmas lunch on Christmas Eve (big, for our purposes, is any more than the two of us and in this case was 7 adults and a 2 week old baby) and I muscled my way into bringing the dessert. Not that it took a whole lot of convincing; Paul's family insist he keep me around for my cooking.

It was constructed over 3 days, but that was a very unpressured approach which left me feeling fairly relaxed about everything. Other than the usual worries about whether the jelly would be rubbery, the creme diplomat ropy, the curd curdled, the sponge cracked, the cream split. But no time crunch. I thoroughly recommend only being responsible for one element of Christmas dinner, if you can possibly manage it.

Day 1. 

Groceries arrive. My preferred brand of eggs were unavailable but an alternative high-welfare option was provided, so that was OK. Everything else was supplied in the quantities ordered so I didn't have to risk going to the shops.

First thing was making cranberry and clementine curd. I reserved some of the prettiest cranberries for crystallising. I followed Nigella Lawson's recipe for cranberry curd in How to be a Domestic Goddess (very straightforward, uses whole eggs because I knew I was going to have eggwhites left from other elements and didn't want to have a freezer full of eggwhites) but I reduced the amount of sugar considerably (from 500g to 350g), substituted the juice of a clementine for some of the water and added the finely grated zest of the clementine. I also didn't entirely trust myself to recognise "cook until thickened" but various places around the internet agreed that 77C is about the right point, so I used the thermometer. Gorgeous colour, silky smooth and it set beautifully.

Glorious colour

Next up, I candied the zest of a clementine. I blanched the shreds twice, then made a syrup of 50g each of sugar and water and simmered the zest in that for 5 minutes (by which time they were almost transparent) before lifting them out and spreading them out to dry. When they were almost dry I tossed them in some caster sugar and left them on some baking parchment until they were completely dry and a bit crispy.

Then the jelly. I used a 330ml bottle of unsweetened, 100% cranberry juice and made it up to 450ml with the juice of the clementine I had zested to candy, and some homemade bergamotcello. The bergamotcello is a lot less sugary than bought limoncello, so I added the syrup the zest had candied in and then some sugar to taste - keeping it very tangy to balance the richer, sweeter elements. I heated it gently until the sugar had dissolved and then added 4 bloomed gelatine sheets.

While the jelly was cooling, I zested 2 more clementines and reserved the zest for Day 2, and peeled the membrane from the clementine segments. Usually I would cut citrus into supremes but I think clementines are too delicate for that sort of manhandling, so I blanched them in boiling water, refreshed them and peeled the membranes off. It was a real faff and they broke up into smaller chunks but worth it for the final result of little pops of juicy acidity. I stirred them through the cooling jelly and poured it into the trifle bowl to chill overnight.

This year I have seen a few trifles where the jelly is a bottom layer with the cake either in a layer over it, or, as I ended up doing, a row around the edge of the bowl on top of the jelly - it makes the cake less soggy, which is the biggest complaint among trifle naysayers, but also it keeps the pattern clean, if you use a rolled cake. Now I have decided that this is the way to go for the future, I might even contemplate doing a joconde collar with a stencilled design or some such elaborate nonsense down the track.

Day 2

I planned things around just having a couple of tasks in the afternoon, because I had an optometrist's appointment in the middle of the day.

Creme patissiere, made with the reserved zest from the two clementines, and a splash of vanilla and a splash of fiori di Sicilia, clingfilm pressed directly onto the surface and allowed to cool, then chill. The recipe I use contained 4 eggyolks, so I froze 3 of the whites and the 4th I reserved.

For the cake, I made it to Nicola Lamb's Buche de Noel recipe but with additional flour substituted for the cocoa, and the grated zest of a clementine (reserving the zested fruit for day 3) and a teaspoon of fiori di Sicilia added for flavour. My aunt gave me the fiori di Sicilia as a gift a couple of months ago and it was quite a process to actually get it to me, so I am busting it out wherever possible. When cool, I filled the cake with the cranberry curd, rolled it up, wrapped it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge.

I crystallised the reserved cranberries by lightly beating the reserved eggwhite, tossing the cranberries in the eggwhite then into some caster sugar before spreading out on baking parchment to dry. While they were drying I dusted them very lightly with some edible lustre dust for a bit of extra bling because honestly more is more with a trifle.

Day 3

First thing I sliced the cake, and was very pleased to see pretty defined swirls. Also, I had a piece and it tasted really good, always a bonus.

I put slices of the cake around the edge of the trifle dish, pushing them slightly into the jelly layer for stability, then I warmed some Corsican clementine jam and thinned it with a splash more bergamotcello and brushed it over the top and inside layer of the cake slices, and spread the last spoonful thinly over the surface of the jelly.

I bloomed some more sheets of gelatine and dissolved them in the juice of the reserved clementine from day 2. This was an expensive bag of fruit and I wanted to use every bit of them, OK? Then I whipped cream with the dissolved gelatine and folded it through the creme patissiere to make a creme diplomat. I scraped it into the middle of the cake border and nudged it down to mostly fill the gaps. Then it went back into the fridge to set while I had a shower and got dressed etc. 

Finally, just before we left to go to lunch, I whipped some plain double cream, not too much, because I have some family members who don't love too much cream, and then garnished wantonly, with some ridiculously blingy metallic cachous, the crystallised zest and cranberries, then another sprinkle of the cachous to fill in any bare patches.

It was very well received and I was extremely pleased with it. It tasted as good as it looked! Lots of different textures, different expressions of the cranberry and clementine flavours, all playing very well together. There was only a small quantity leftover for our host to have as her Christmas breakfast.

Merry Christmas, to all who celebrate.

Cookbooks 2019

This hasn't been a great year for blogging, from my point of view. Not a lot I have cooked has been worthy of a whole post, so I've mostly been sticking photos on Instagram as reminders to myself of what I have been eating, and making notes on Eat Your Books and hoping it's enough to replicate my results if I want to. But here we are, staring down the barrel of December, when people are thinking about what to get their food-inclined loved ones for Christmas. So here are the four cookbooks, released this year, that I have cooked the most from.

And just as a by the way, I don't have affiliate links or make any money from this, any links I have inserted are purely to help you find things. Also, I bought all of these myself and would do it again.

They all have really good recipes, but the main thing I love about them is the writing. Dishoom, Mandalay and Baan all tell stories which give context to the dishes in a way that I really love.  Diana Henry's writing is always delightful: evocative and inviting, but the other three give a sense of place to the cultures and cuisines they are writing about which I think is important when you are cooking from outside a culture.

Dishoom is a British chain of restaurants, modelled on the "Irani" cafes in Bombay. The food is a lot better than the majority of neighbourhood curry houses we've been to (there are excellent exceptions, but most of the Indian restaurants we've been to in this country haven't been very good), the atmosphere is relaxed and they are reliable. Even though you nearly always have to queue. It took me years to get Paul into one, and now he is a confirmed fan. When I saw that they had a book coming out, with the famous House Black Daal recipe in it, I had to have it.

Dishoom's garam masala is not like bought, ground garam masala

The Irani cafes apparently had their heyday in the 1960s, but Dishoom tries hard to capture the essence of them, and set a scene for when and how you eat the dishes in the book. I don't think my Kejriwal quite captured the grandeur of the Willingdon Club, but they tasted lovely.

Kejriwal - fried eggs on chilli cheese toast

It appears that I took no pictures of the daal - so imagine, if you will, a bowl of dark brown sludge that tastes deeply of hours spent perfecting it. It is rich, creamy, subtly spiced and utterly entrancing. If you think of a bowl of lentils as being penance in food form, this will show you how very wrong you are.

Spicy lamb chops

Everything I have made has been delicious, and well worth the extra effort of making my own masalas and making batches of fresh ginger and garlic purees. A technique I hadn't come across before, which is used in grilled meat dishes, is to do a short, first marinade in green papaya puree, before adding an aromatic second marinade. It's very successful - it seems to open the meat fibres so that the aromatics really penetrate, and it makes the meat incredibly tender. To the point that even with flat metal barbecue skewers, it's hard to turn kebabs because the meat just falls apart. So delicious!

Okra fries

MiMi Aye has become a friend through the magic of social media. She's a brilliant human - passionate and articulate whether she's pointing out racism and discrimination or being geekily enthusiastic about pop culture. Her first book, Noodle! is great and I thoroughly recommend it, but you can easily see that Mandalay is the book she wanted to write. It's deeply personal - which is not something you often say about a cookbook.

Duck egg curry - a long-standing favourite

Burmese food, apparently, tends not to be pretty food. Mostly muted shades, it makes up for the appearance with incredibly punchy, savoury flavours. I have shared some of my more photogenic pictures, but there have also been several intensely flavoured, aromatic bowls of brown and beige.

Tofu fritters like you have never experienced tofu before, ginger salad, chicken goujons and two dipping sauces

Goat and split pea curry, and Burmese coleslaw

Lahpet thoke - pickled tea leaf salad

Lemon salad

Baan is also a clear labour of love. Having read Kay Plunkett-Hogge's Adventures of a Terribly Greedy Girl, I was familiar with her Thai childhood, and adult love for Thailand and its food. It's interesting to juxtapose MiMi and Kay's experiences - one brown woman born in the UK and for years not being quite Burmese enough and one white woman born in Thailand but not quite Thai enough. I feel extremely fortunate to have their books in my hands.

Classic gai yarn - incredibly juicy chicken

 As delicious as the recipes I have tried have been, my favourite thing, I think, is the method of brining the chicken for the Classic gai yarn - I have used it many times since I first bought the book, and used the same brine for my most successful ever roast pork.

Northeastern-style [duck] laarp

This meal danced all over South East Asia, but the rings are Kay's Squid deepfried with garlic and white pepper

Diana Henry's last book, How To Eat A Peach, was glorious. From the tactile flocked cover to the stories to the carefully considered menus, the whole thing is a treasure: a fantasy of long lunches and expansive hospitality. From the Oven to the Table is a very different kettle of fish. You may not have noticed, but the UK is in a very tense and uncertain period at the moment, which I think has created a need to cocoon and seek comfort - this book certainly seems to be an expression of that.

Croque monsieur bread pudding

Of course, having previously heard that Diana plans several books ahead, she was probably considering this book well before the 2016 referendum. So it may not have been a response to the current climate, but it certainly seems to articulate the zeitgeist. These are dishes to give heart. To nourish the people you hold dear before you let them go back into the world.

Lamb chops with sweet potatoes, peppers and mojo verde

Not all the dishes are bung-it-in-the-oven-and-wait: some have a few stages, some are made by the final addition of a relish or sauce, but they all feel quite achievable. The recipes also aren't trying to be too clever - it's not about "I bet you didn't know you could cook THIS in the oven", it's about dishes that the oven is the right thing for.

Baked lime, passionfruit and coconut pudding

Baked sausages, apples and blackberries with mustard and maple syrup

Roast peppers with burrata and 'nduja

Tomato, goats cheese and olive clafoutis with basil

I honestly couldn't pick a favourite from these books, so don't ask me. I think I will go back to all of them again and again, whether it's to re-read a passage or to take inspiration or actually follow a recipe. And I can't imagine anyone being disappointed to receive any of these as a gift.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper for Cook The Books

It's been ages since I cooked along with Cook The Books Club - even when there's been a book scheduled that I was really keen to read or already loved, time has got away from me and I've missed it.

I thought this was a good time to come back though. Deb, from Kahakai Kitchen chose Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, which I have been wanting to read for a while. Fuchsia is a bit of a national treasure: she gets trotted out whenever people want to talk to an English-speaking person about Chinese food, or authenticity, or the migration of food culture. The broad strokes of her career (first Western person to train as a chef at the culinary school in Sichuan) are very well known but I was interested in the detail.

And the detail was very interesting. A snapshot of China in the early 90s, when things were starting to open up a bit. The experience that white people seldom have of being completely other. The deep, rich history of Chinese cuisine. The desire to break off the treadmill of being a clever woman on a predictable academic and career path.

Unfortunately, I found much of the actual food descriptions stomach-churning. While her desire to immerse herself in the cuisine and to learn to appreciate the foreign textures and flavours is admirable (it reminds me a bit of Anthony Bourdain "you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. You’re at Grandma’s house, you eat what Grandma serves you"), I found it very hard to deal with the things she found herself eating. The almost blasé approach to animal cruelty and eating endangered species (although she did say she may end up vegetarian and gives quite an interesting explanation for the animal cruelty) was a kind of cultural relativism that didn't sit well with me.

As it happens, the dish I personally most associate with Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan is 成都豆腐花 - Chengdu street tofu with soy chilli, peanuts and preserved vegetables as served at A Wong. Which is vegan. And Andrew Wong has shared the recipe.

Chengdu street tofu - not as pretty as Andrew Wong's.

The fish-fragrant aubergine that initially captured Fuchsia's imagination can also be vegan if you use vegetable stock, so I made that as our main course (following Diana Henry's recipe for Fragrant Sichuan Aubergine in Simple), along with some marinated mushrooms (which I reheated to serve). And then I let the vegan side down by serving it on egg fried rice. But it was delicious. And no endangered species died.

Urchin kept bumping my elbow - didn't get one single focussed picture)

Easter 2018

Happy Easter, to those who celebrate!

Paul's had a break between contracts, so the Easter weekend this year is the conclusion to a pretty restful few weeks. We had a chance to go to see friends, to see a movie, to get away for a few days to the Lake District, to sleep in and do some DIY. Nice.

And on Saturday we had friends over to lunch. Paul's volunteered us to cook at an event in the summer, and we're tentatively planning to do barbecued shoulder of lamb, so we thought this would be a good excuse to do a test run. Unfortunately the weather didn't play along at all. So I slathered the shoulder of lamb with wild garlic salsa verde, poured in some vegetable stock and wrapped it tightly in foil before baking it at 100C overnight. After about 13 hours I opened the foil and put it back in the oven to get a little colour before shredding it with a couple of forks, mixing it through the copious juices.

With it we had one of my new favourite things - the spinach and preserved lemon freekeh from On the Side, although I used a bunch of wild garlic leaves instead of cloves of garlic to add a seasonal twist. And to really amp up the fresh, herbal quality of the meal I also served Diana Henry's wonderful tomato and pomegranate salad with feta and soft herbs.

It was one of the best meals I have cooked in ages. And all doable ahead which made it very low effort. Low effort is definitely what you want for a low-key weekend.

A. Wong

Last autumn we went to a cookbook festival. Cookbook Confidential had a bunch of talks, demonstrations and panel discussions, and it was brilliant. Diana Henry and Kay Plunkett-Hogge talked about how to write a cookbook, in such an inspiring way we immediately went home and pre-ordered Kay's book Heat (which has now been released and is wonderful. Diana didn't have a new book out). And Richard Turner, Dan Doherty and Andrew Wong talked about their food heroes.

Paul fell a little bit in love with Andrew Wong. Something about the way he talked about his approach to food really captured Paul's imagination, and he's been keen to get to A. Wong ever since, but somehow dinner in Victoria has never quite been the right thing. But on Friday night we did it.

Harbin

I started with a Harbin cocktail, which was a take on a margarita - absolutely divine. I ended up having two, because the bottle of Gewurztraminer Paul ordered was so nice he didn't want to share...

We couldn't be bothered with menu reading or decision making, so we ordered the ten course "Tastes of China" menu. Which was, I think, an absolutely brilliant idea.

smoked halibut

Before the ten courses began, we were served a couple of snacks. A little bite of something crisp, with smoked halibut and crunchy jellyfish, and a prawn cracker. It's the first time I've had a prawn cracker that actually tasted of prawn.

Not your average prawn cracker.

Chilli sauces

We were also given a pair of chilli sauces - one made with fermented bean curd, one made with shrimps - but the prawn crackers had so much flavour we only tasted these out of curiosity.

Then the menu proper began. The (completely charming and lovely) waiter introduced each course explaining where the original dish came from and some information about that region of China. Tastiest geography lesson ever.

點心

Dim sum duo.

Dim sum duo

The menu began in Hong Kong, with an incredibly delicate har gau and delicious siu mai. I am not generally a fan of foams, but the light citrus foam on the har gau was a very good friend to the sweet, bouncy prawns. The siu mai was firm and very porky. Neither one bore a lot of resemblance to the dim sum we buy frozen in Asian supermarkets.

The second course was listed as 茶叶蛋 63 degree ‘tea egg’ with shredded filo and satay powder but we were told that Andrew wasn't happy with his eggs and so something else would be served. I'm always absolutely delighted to be told that - even if it is something I am looking forward to, and to be honest, this was the course I had my doubts about because of Paul's known soft egg aversion - it just shows that the chef really cares about the quality of what they are sending out.

Instead, we were served 成都豆腐花 - Chengdu street tofu, soy chilli, peanuts, preserved vegetables. 

Chengdu street tofu

The waiter told us how when he was growing up, little old ladies would travel through the streets with a yoke over their shoulders: fresh soft tofu on one side and a variety of tasty toppings on the other. This was so delicious. This was the dish that tofu naysayers should be offered to cure them of their heresy. The tofu was a light, soft curd, the preserved vegetables gave a toothsome crunch and deep savour, and the peanuts added another level of crunch, fat and flavour. I committed my first crime against table manners for the evening and drank the remaining juice from the little bowl. It was so good I almost wept. I did actually comment to the waitress who cleared our plates that I didn't see how the meal could get any better after a dish like that. It did.

上海小籠包 

Shanghai steamed dumplings, ginger infused vinegar. 

Shanghai soup dumplings

I have never had a xiao long bao like these. Never made quite as much mess with one either. The "caviar" on top was a spherification of something delicious, I think. Ginger maybe? And in picking mine up I ruptured the silky fine skin and ended up having to drink the broth off my plate. I like to think that the staff viewed it as an appreciation of their skill and not me being a complete pig.

红烧臭鳜鱼, 蝦醬什菜 

Anhui province red braised fermented fish belly with mixed vegetables and dried shrimps

Apparently the thing in Anhui province is fermenting fish for days. Which sounds a bit like Surströmming - so I wasn't at all disappointed when the waiter told us that this was an interpretation of the dish, with the fermented flavour present in the sauce, to be dabbed on the shatteringly crisp fish skin and delicate braised flesh. It was very good, but the best thing about the dish was the accompanying vegetables, cooked with dried shrimp butter. I want to eat those vegetables again and again and again.

What the dish really needed was a bit of bread so we could fare la scarpetta - the sauces were so good and it was sad seeing so much go back to the kitchen. Even a spoon would have helped.

白灵菇扒鲍片

Braised abalone, shitake mushroom, sea cucumber and abalone butter

Braised abalone

I like to think I am a pretty open-minded sort of eater, but  sea cucumber... When I was a child, we had a holiday in the Cook Islands and I am still traumatised by standing on sea cucumbers in the sea around Rarotonga. I was not a bit sure about this dish! But everything else had been so delicious, and the story of how abalone is prized in China for its resemblance to old Chinese gold coins lulled me into taking a bite. And it was very nice. I think the small brown squares were the sea cucumber, but I couldn't really tell. They certainly weren't horrifying. The slices of braised abalone and the slices of shiitake mushroom were very well matched for flavour and texture - tender with a subtle chewiness - the crisp shreds of deep fried greenery added a lovely extra dimension, and the buttery abalone juice was just wonderful. You don't tend to taste much butter in Western Chinese restaurant food, but it's a very nice addition.

肉夹馍

Shaanxi pulled lamb ‘burger’ with Xinjiang pomegranate salad

The Muslim population of Shaanxi have contributed lamb dishes, fragrant with cumin, to the cuisine. I've tried it in a couple of different forms: as tender slices of fillet, crusted with cumin; as a murky hotpot with firey sauce and luscious chunks of meat to be sucked from the bones. 

This version - pulled lamb in a rich sauce, with lots of lovely accompaniments, to be stuffed into little buns - was the nicest take on the pulled meat trend that is swamping London restaurants, and a really enticing interpretation of the flavours.

薄荷牛肉卷

Yunnan seared beef with mint, chilli and lemongrass served with a pulled noodle cracker and truffle

Technology came to the party for this course. Our waiter had an ipad and showed us a short clip of Andrew pulling the noodles for these crackers. Mesmerising. Mine lacked structural integrity (or Paul had a knack that I lacked) and crumbled all over the table and my face, but the flavours and the crunchy noodles topped with soft mushrooms were excellent. If the Yunnan black truffles on top were not augmented with truffle oil, they are the most intensely flavoured truffles I've ever had, I think.

The seared beef with mint, chilli and lemongrass was a tribute to Yunnan's proximity to Vietnam, and the exchange of flavours along that border. It tasted very much like a combination of Chinese and Vietnamese food, with a sweet-ish but not gloopy chilli sauce and the freshness of mint (both raw and fried to crisps) and cucumber.

四川香辣手撕茄子, 宫保雞丁

 Sichuanese aubergine with Gong Bao chicken, roasted peanuts and ‘hot pot’ essence

Gong Bao chicken

I'd lost track of the number of courses we'd had at this point, but as soon as I saw the bowl of rice I knew that this was the last of the savoury dishes. We were instructed to eat the Gong Bao chicken (and told that it was very definitely not Kung Pao or Hong Bao) first, with our fingers, and then the aubergine. Which was most certainly the right way around. The aubergine, perfectly silky and luscious, had so much of the málà numbing fire sensation that I wouldn't have been able to taste the chicken. The plain rice was very welcome as a bit of a palate cleanser before the desserts.

北京 酸奶, 菠蘿

Chilli barbequed pineapple with Beijing street yoghurt

Apparently the reputation that China has for not using dairy products isn't entirely accurate - in Beijing, yoghurt is a very popular street food. This was a very nice one. Tangy but not too sour, a little gingery syrup and a chunk of warm, sweet, spicy pineapple.

雪圓子, 荔枝, 檸檬雪酪

Poached meringue, lychee granite, mango puree and orange sorbet

The final dessert was a cheffy play on the idea that the Chinese finish a banquet with a fruit platter. An orange made from two hemispheres of poached meringue, filled with a blood orange sorbet and coated in a crisp sugar shell. A fresh, perfumed mango mousse, a crunchy lychee granita (definitely to my taste - the aroma of the lychee without the excessive sweetness or slimy eyeball resemblance) and a red envelope of sugared lotus root crisps. We were told that when lotus roots are pulled up they are very long and keep coming and coming, so they are seen as a symbol of longevity. And as oranges are seen as symbolic of wealth, it was a wish for us to be long-lived and prosperous. Which is just about the nicest thing a waiter has ever said to me.

Sugared lotus root crisps

There was one more little treat in store though. A white chocolate mah jong tile, filled with strawberry ice cream. So pretty and just the right touch to end a very memorable meal.