Another Food Blog

We’d travelled to Cambridge for drinks with friends to celebrate our engagement; the venue was the Allhusen Room at my old College – Trinity.

We served wine and cake; the cakes were lovingly made for the occassion (cakes by Mr Marks, icing by Mr Spencer…), and the wines were from the College cellars. That’s slightly less impressive than it sounds, as it wasn’t a bank-breaking rare vintage, but instead the house wine. Both were 2010-vintage Casa Roca – interestingly, this brand is in fact produced, as the label tells me, by Viña Maipo in Chile, and imported by Concha Y Toro. The white is a sauvignon blanc/semillion blend, and is lightly fruity and citrusy; the red is a cabernet sauvignon/merlot blend, and is a medium-bodied dry wine, with a deep red hue. Both were delicious, and come in at 12.5%. For the non-drinkers, College provided Cox’s apple juice, from the Royal Fruit Farms on the Sandringham Estate, which is absoloutely delicious.

After a few convivial hours with many of our friends, the evening ended with some of us heading for pizza at Strada. I enjoyed a speck pizza with gorgonzola, mozarella, and rocket. Taking advantage of a voucher from my ‘phone company, I enjoyed a free glass of Prosecco with my meal! It was, all-told, a most splendid evening.

I’d been saving these for a special occassion: Penfolds Koonunga Hill Autumn Riesling 72, and Heidsieck Monopole Gold Top Vintage 2002.

The riesling I’d purchased when I was in Adelaide in 2008. I ducked out of an afternoon conference session and took the bus to Penfolds’ Magill Estate cellar door. The Magill Estate is the original Penfolds location, and home to the Grange cottage after which their most famous wine is named. As it was a Monday afternoon in early December, I was the only person on the tour, so it felt like a private vineyard and winery tour! I bought a couple of bottles and smuggled them back in my suitcase, and had been looking for an opportunity to open the Koonunga Hill Autumn Riesling. The 72 in the wine’s name is a little misleading – it was actually a 2008 vintage, but the packaging and style were designed to reflect the original 1972 vintage. The tasting notes tell me that November 2011 was perhaps past the optimum occassion for this particular wine, but I still thought it excellent – not overly sweet, deliciously lightly citrus-tasting, and a pale straw colour.

The champagne had a much less arduous journey, not having been smuggled in a suitcase! It dates from my time as the Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, and was an extra bottle of the stuff I’d bought for the garden party. It was the 2002 vintage, and, if memory serves, it cost around £12 a bottle and – to be honest – would be worth twice that.  I’ve never been great at giving tasting notes for champagne, but I certainly enjoyed this. It was pleasing enough to drink on its own, but I imagine could have equally been enjoyed with food.

And the special occassion? She said yes…

To finish the jar of meaty mincemeat, I made a lattice mincemeat tart. The pastry was a standard short crust pastry (two parts flour to one part fat) with the addition of a good spoonful of ground cinnamon and two large spoons of icing sugar.  I combined these by hand to a fine breadcrumb texture before adding water to glue it all together into a ball. I rest my pastry for at least half an hour in the fridge if at all possible – this allows the fat to re-solidify and makes the pastry easier to work with. I used this pastry to line a greased foil pie dish.

I added a couple of spoons of sugar, and a good slug of brandy, to the mincemeat before putting it in the pastry case. To make the topping, I rolled out the excess pastry and cut it into thin strips laying it over the top in four stages. This is a cheaty lattice topping – lay the “vertical” strips at double the final spacing, followed by the “horizontal” strips, again at double spacing. Then, go back to vertical strips to fill in the gaps there, followed by the remaining horizontal gaps. It’s not quite a full inter-woven lattice,  but it’s easier than trying that; the “lattice-cutters” you can get are cheating – they just make holes in the pastry which you can pull apart to get a single layer of pastry with the lattice-style holes in it – not the layers a lattice dictates! Anyway, about half-an-hour at about 180C, till the mincemeat is bubbling away and the pastry crisp and golden. Well, mostly crisp and golden – you may find some of the lattice goes soggy where it absorbs the suet from the mincemeat, but that’s part of the fun.

I served it still warm with a brandy sauce – made from milk, sugar, cornflour, and another good slug of brandy. It was good, and was aided, as I suspected, by the addition of a little more sugar to things!

This was a good chili con carne, taken from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s meat book. In order to avoid what he describes as “a second-rate bolognese with beans”, more care goes into the preparation.

It started with the meats – lean minced beef, chopped pork (a shoulder steak), and chopped chorizo sausage. All of these are fried in batches to gently brown them, and set aside. Next goes chopped onion, cooked in the fats from the meat to soften. Then the meat goes back in, with tinned tomatoes, chili powder, chilies (de-seeded), a spoonful of sugar, a spoon of vinegar, and beef stock. After several hours of gentle simmering, the kidney beans go in for about half an hour.

It was definitely worth the effort – a rich and meaty sauce, with a variety of flavours and textures. The chilies I used were rather milder than expected, so next time I’ll add more. Delicious served, as we did, with brown rice, tortilla, and soured cream; equally delcious another night on a jacket potato with cheese.

I was browsing through the delightful Firebox website when I found something marvellous: Marmite chocolate! It sounds odd, but I can see their logic in likening it to the equally-odd, yet incredibly popular, strawberries and balsamic vinegar combination.

I’m a big fan of marmite, and of chocolate. I might just have to buy some. (Or, maybe, I could just smear some marmite on a piece of chocolate?)

These mince pies are the first to be made from the mincemeat I mentioned before. As it happened, this first batch was made using my friend’s beef and apple mincemeat.

The pastry was a simple shortcrust – two parts flour to one part fat – for the six small pies I made, I used three ounces of flour and added a tablespoon of sugar. I’d bought some silicone reusable muffin cases, and used these; despite the general warnings against baking pastry in silicone flexible moulds (apparently, it can go soggy) I found that after about 30 minutes at 200C, the pies were perfectly crisp. I’d rolled out the pastry thinly and put a generous dollop of mincemeat inside; after they were cooked, I dusted with icing sugar.

They were reasonably tasty, though perhaps not as sweet as I’d like (certainly far less sweet than commercial ones!); for those who might be worried about the filling – no, it didn’t taste of meat! Actually, the over-whelming taste was of orange, which was by no means unpleasant. Next time, I’ll add more sugar, probably to pastry.

For those interested in a recipe for mincemeat with meat, Mrs Beeton’s recipe is as good as any; Mr Google will direct you…

I must confess to, of late, having been rather too busy to find time to write here; not, that is to say, that I haven’t wished to, for I have eaten and cooked much I consider of note. To, in part, therefore, rectify the situation, I shall endeavour to post some of the culinary highlights of the past six months over the coming days and weeks.

To begin, though, I shall start with some of the more recent endeavours, all of which are to be considered as ‘works in progress’ for the next week or two. I refer, of course, to the preparations for Christmas here at home. The goose has been ordered (I, once again, triumphed in the goose-or-turkey debate) and shall be accompanied by the usual trimings – more of which another time. Christmas puddings have been made by my father and are maturing in the spare room. The excess mixture made a small pudding which was consumed before maturation; it was, however, delicious, and a hopeful indication of things to come.

I made Christmas cake and refined my previous modifications – this time, I substituted some of the flour for ground almonds. As always, there was more brandy in the soaking stage than the recipe demands. The cake has joined the puddings for maturation in the spare room, but is fed once a week with more brandy. Definitely not a cake to be consumed by those considering driving.

A new addition, for me, to the Christmas preparations has been mincemeat. I followed Delia’s recipe, which slowly-cooks the mixture in a low oven to ensure all the components are coated in suet. It too, has been maturing, and will be gracing pies before too long. I’ve also engaged in a little mince-meat exchange with a colleague – a jar of mine for a jar of his traditional mincemeat; the usual spices, apple, suet, and currants are married with beef. That, too, will be tasted soon; I must, of course, take care, for it contains partially cooked meat that has been stored at room-temperature. The suet should prevent it becoming dangerous in storage, but it must be cooked thoroughly when used! Watch this space for updates on the taste.

A recent trip to d’Arrys was a significant improvement on my last visit there. We started by sharing the baked Camembert and meat platter, which was excellent. The miniature Camembert was creamy and delicious and studded with just the right amount of garlic, and the meats – salami, chorizo, and prosciutto – suitably flavoursome. There were good green olives and large capers, too.

I ordered form the specials board for mine main course – tuna, monkfish, and scallop in a coconut sauce on pak choy with lemongrass rice. It was excellent : the scallop (singular) was disappointing, but the monkfish was good and the tuna – still pink in the middle – was fantastic. The rice, which was served in a minature Le Creuset casserole dish was also very good.

My friend ordered the smoked lamb, also from the specials menu, but decided on its arrival that he wasn’t hungry. Not being one to let food go to waste, I took one for the team and ate that too… It was tasty, and nicely pink inside. The smokey flavour was pretty good, but overall the lamb was a little too fatty for my liking. Which is odd, as it was apparently pan-fried and then roasted… It came with sautéed mushrooms and potatoes, which weren’t anything particularly special. We drank a Stump Jump with it, and I left feeling very full indeed!

We spied a bottle of Ramos Pintos’s Quinta de Ervamoir 10 y.o. tawny port in the Chop House and opted to head there for a post-prandial drink one evening.

It’s a light, almost orange, vibrant red, with the translucency one expects of tawny ports. The taste is surprisingly fresh and fruity, given it has had ten years to age (lending a woody taste). In fact the “10 years” is the average age of the various wines that have been blended in to create the appropriate taste.

I do have a soft spot for tawny ports, as I often find ruby can be heavy going. One advantage of tawny ports is that they’re barrel-aged, as opposed to the bottle ageing of ruby ports. The barrel, being permeable to oxygen, means that a ruby tawny port is oxidised before it hits the bottle – the older it is, the more it has oxidised. So what does this mean? Well, it means you can open a bottle of tawny and it won’t “go off” – it’s already oxidised, unlike a ruby which will start to oxidise as soon as it’s open. So, you can keep a tawny open without worry, and drink it over a few weeks, months, or even years. Not that we faced any such problem at the Chop House…

After being told to expect a forty-five minute wait at Jamie’s Italian in Cambridge, we were called to our table from the bar after a mere ten! My dining companion opted for the crispy squid with garlic mayonnaise, whereas my eye was drawn to something a little more unusual. Arancini (pictured below) are basically deep-fried balls of risotto; these were stuffed with mozzarella and mushrooms.

They were excellent – crisp on the outside, with the rice still having a decent firmness of texture. I would probably say that the spicy tomato sauce was too spicy for the dish, as the chilli tended to overpower the other flavours. For main course, I opted for the rabbit ragu – slow braised rabbit with marscapone and breadcrumbs served on parpadelle. Delicious, though rather unphotogenic.

My companion had the scallops, wrapped in pancetta and roasted, served in the half shell with a spiced tomato salsa and a fennel salad. The scallops, as with most of the fish, were proudly advertised as being “fresh” from the south coast; the scallops, apparently, were from Brixham. Not the greatest advert, then, for Torbay’s fish, as they were nowhere near as good as the tempura-battered Brixham scallops I enjoyed a week ago at No. 7! Too much sauce, would be my other criticism of the dish.

We had started a half-litre carafe of the house red at the bar, and followed it with the house white with the main courses. The wines, much like the food, weren’t amazing but were by no stretch bad – a solid middle of the road effort that I feel, sums up the Jamie Oliver culinary world view… The service was swift and attentive, and the surroundings – the Grade II listed Guildhall – were excellent.