Roast Chicken and a Whole Lot More!

My copy of Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson proudly bears a big yellow sticker proclaiming it to be the most useful cookbook of all time (as voted by Waitrose Food Illustrated) so with such a provenance it was only right that it should feature at the cookery book supper club. The style of taking one ingredient and offering various recipe suggestions was novel in 1994 when it was first published and there have been many imitators; the most recent being Bryn’s Kitchen.

So from anchovies to veal we are taken through a culinary alphabet of Hopkinson’s favourite ingredients and given a little insight about either the food or the recipe. We liked the fact that Simon gives you plenty of alternative ideas for a recipe and that the book is well indexed. There is a wide variety of dishes and the connections between chefs and the provenance of the recipe is explored to such an extent that it’s like reading a little recipe family tree. Some of the stories are amusing too. We thought it was a good manageable size and liked the flaps (great as bookmarks). There are some classics in this book that most culinary enthusiasts would agree should be in everyone’s repertoire namely the famous Roast Chicken and the St-Emilion Au Chocolate.

On the downside some comments are a bit outdated now (see Veal) and some recipes a little vague, 2 or 3 tomatoes? The surprise pudding was not a great success for Sarah and made her wonder if the recipes had been fully tested? Perhaps our sensitivity to recipes laden with cream and butter has been heightened since the book was published so some recipes can seem a bit too rich. Simon sounds a bit like a grumpy old man at times!!

Here are recipes we have tried and enjoyed-

Curried smoked haddock soup

Salmon in pastry with currant and ginger (a favourite dish for about 25yrs!)

Salade Frisee Aux Lardons (Rose had this in France)

Breast of Lamb Ste Menehould (confirmed not to be greasy at all)

Green Paste (highly recommended with the lamb)

Onion Tart (best to do the onions the day before or at least one hour ahead)

For our meeting we had a great selection of dishes these were-

Onion Tart

Poached Salmon

Oriental salad

Baked New Garlic with creamed Goats Cheese

Toasts

We are all enjoying Simon’s new TV series a no nonsense simple approach to good cooking and great graphics to boot.

Chipotles and chatter

There’s no doubt that Tomasina Miers has expanded our appreciation of Mexican cuisine and offered us a much more exciting range of recipes than was previously available in Mexican cookery books.

We have found in the past at the book club that sometimes a title doesn’t always live up to the promise and the “made simple” tag is a case in point. We are all enthusiasts but a recipe with 20+ ingredients, some of which could be challenging to find, doesn’t really resonate with simplicity. That said, we had a colourful and tasty feast at our meeting and a lot of lively food discussion.

We started with cucumber agua fresca, a refreshing bright green cooler that cleansed the palette and set us up for the courses to follow. Sarah who kindly hosted our evening noted though that this recipe was inaccurate, as it yielded two and a half litres not two glasses so be warned!

There’s never a wrong time for breakfast in my mind and the first dish we sampled was The great Mexican breakfast from the soul food section. A build your own affair with corn tortillas a rich and gently spiced tomato sauce, fried egg and crumbled Lancashire cheese. To accompany this Sarah also made Frijoles refritos (declared by Abigail, a new club member as the best she’d ever had) and My addictive sweet chipotle paste the Mexican equivalent of a sweet chilli sauce.

I have mixed memories of my backpacking trip through Mexico two years ago as three days into the adventure, just as I was starting to unwind, the swine flu pandemic started and I was foraging in the fabulous food markets for face masks instead of frijoles! However one Saturday evening in a town square in Merida I first tried real tacos made there on the street and so very different from the “tex-mex” variety that are generally found here. So with this fond memory spurring me on I decided to bring the Autumn tacos with onion squash and chorizo to our meeting.

The filling is straightforward to make, though a little oily, but finding authentic tacos unless you plan to make them yourself is a bit trickier. I didn’t have any luck at the Sweetmart based in Easton (though you can buy masa harina there) but they can be found at www.mexgrocer.co.uk . Alongside the tacos we tried green rice and the roasted almond and avocado salad a vegetarian version of the chicken and avocado salad on page 86 we all thought the textures and flavour of the salad worked well together so another hit.

The evening ended on a high as we put aside our rice pudding angst (hot or cold, thick or thin, skin or no skin) and embraced the light and delicately spiced Chilled Mexican rice pudding. This unusually calls for long grain not pudding rice and is cooked on the hob, so no sticky skin. Flavoured with cinnamon and orange zest it was a big hit. I could imagine having it for breakfast too with some fresh fruit and crème fraiche.

It always amazes me that whenever we meet we have such a varied selection of dishes that seem to work together really well, and so it was again this time. Breakfast at supper, Autumn tacos in Spring and cold rice pudding, a topsy turvy night that really captured the spirit of Mexico and not a chilli con carne in sight (although we all wanted to give Tommi’s version a try)!

Other recipes tried and tested

Chipotles en adobo p36 A must make preserve for the Mexican food enthusiast, the puree which keeps in a kilner jar for months will add real depth of flavour to your dishes and can be stirred into sauces, mayo and dressings to give a savoury and smokey hit.

Churros
Meatballs (a very unusual mixture that wasn’t recommended)
Vanilla Cheesecake (light fluffy and delicious)
Chopped chilli relish ( some chilli skins can be a bit tough, possibly sieve???)
Roast chilli salsa
Queso funditos
Chorizo potato and thyme quesadillas

The introduction and explanations of typical ingredients are really helpful and clear. I especially like the chilli page.

Also discussed - chilli festivals, hugely popular events for lovers of all things hot!

Moor, Moor, Moor

The Moro Cookbook is the first of three cookery books by the chef-owners of the well-known and award-winning Moro restaurant in London, Samantha and Samuel Clark.

The book focuses on the husband and wife team’s passion for Spanish, North African and Eastern Mediterranean food. Simple dishes with robust flavours and a Spanish influence are combined with those which are more exotic, fragrant, delicately spiced and Arabic in nature.

The combination of Spanish and North African cuisine is not a surprising one given Spain’s history. The invasion of Spain by the Moors influenced much of the Iberian Peninsula – the religion, architecture and undoubtedly the food.

That the recipes extend from such a wide-reaching geography makes for an exciting collection to match many a mood, budget and appetite; classic tapas and mezze dishes, hearty, peasant-style meals, rich meat and offal platters, delicate fish suppers and indulgent puddings.

Of course, there are recipes for favourites such as tortilla, chorizo al jerez (chorizo with sherry), baba ghanoush, tabbouleh and pollo al ajillo (chicken cooked with bay, garlic and white wine) but there are also some more surprising and interesting recipes like quail baked in flatbread with pistachio sauce, cod baked with tahini or bitter chocolate, coffee and cardamom truffle cake.

Some of the ingredients are mystifying and, for anyone outside of London, could be difficult to source. The lack of photographs amongst the recipes and almost 70’s look to those which are there mean that it’s quite difficult to imagine how some of the more unusual or unfamiliar dishes should look. Don’t be put off, once past these first hurdles, the recipes are quite simple to follow and the food, for want of a better word, delicious. Had we known just how soft textured and flavourful the torta de naranja (orange and almond tort) was or could have seen how beautiful it looked, we all would have baked it a lot sooner. It’s a regular from now on!

There’s a theme to many of the recipes; stages of long, slow cooking which are well worth pursuing as the result is an intensely flavoured and satisfying meal, even from the simplest of ingredients. The patatas a lo pobre (poor man’s potatoes) is just one such example, sweet, soft and extremely tasty and yet made from just a few ingredients – onions, garlic, bay, green pepper, potatoes, olive oil and seasoning.

One of the more surprising dishes was the sopa de setas (mushroom and almond soup with fino sherry). What started out as, albeit tasty, mushroom flavoured water was brought alive and thickened by the addition of crushed almonds.

The Moro Cookbook helps us reach a true understanding of Moorish food, an often over-looked and under-appreciated cuisine.

Our chef’s specials:

• Carrot and cumin salad with coriander
• Tabbouleh
• Sopa de setas
• Lentil soup with cumin
• Charcoal-grilled quail with pomegranate molasses
• Hummus with ground lamb and pinenuts
• Pollo al ajillo
• Patatas a lo pobre
• Moros y Cristianos
• Torta de naranja
• Bitter chocolate, coffee and cardamom truffle cake

A word of warning! The bitter chocolate, coffee and cardamom truffle cake recipe calls for 30g crushed cardamom pods. This is a tremendous amount of cardamom and the end result is intense. The combination works very well but if you’re not a huge fan of cardamom, we would recommend cutting back on the quantity.