Algarve Carrots

A great party nibble -I admit I went a bit insane with the garlic - but utterly yummy next day snack after cleaning up all the leftover party rubble.


There's a recipe in the blog for this already but here's a quick easy take on that for the holiday weary:

Peel and cut up carrots. Simmer until al dente 5-8 minutes for tender carrots, more for the huge old style ones.

Meanwhile measure 4T extra virgin olive oil and 2 T white wine vinegar into a bowl. Slice or mince 1 or 2 cloves of garlic (no need to be insane like me and use 4 or 5 huge ones). Add garlic, a good pinch flaked sea salt or kosher salt, lots of freshly ground black pepper to the bowl. Vigorously mix with fork or whisk.

When carrots are cooked, drain and then dump them into the oil/vinegar mix and gently mix. The boiling hot carrots will absorb the tasty mix and with only an hour or so to rest, absorb, and cool down, they will be ready to serve.

Yum!

Chicken Matzoh Ball Soup

This recipe can be one or two days long, depending on your choices.

You'll need:

1 whole chicken

celery

carrots

onions

salt

pepper

matzoh meal

eggs

Prep your chicken for roasting- sprinkle the skin with some salt and pepper, then put in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes per pound. If it's a little underdone, that's okay, it'll finish cooking in the soup anyway. Take the chicken out of the oven and set aside. Remove all the fluids and put into a pyrex cup in the fridge for an hour or so.

By this point, the chicken should have cooled. Set up two bowls, one for the meat, and the other for everything else- bones, skin, everything. Put the meat aside, and dump all the bones and scraps into a pot. They'll be the base for your stock.

Roughly chop carrots, onions, and celery into the stock pot. These are used for flavoring, not for eating (unless you really want to...) so don't worry about anything more than a rough chop- quarter the onions with the skin on, half or quarter the carrots and celery. How much is up to you- I recommend being restrained with the carrots, as they have a lot of sugar, and the sweetness can overwhelm the soup. For a large soup pot, one of those giant costco onions, 4-6 stalks of celery, 3 carrots should be fine.

Add cold water until it is an inch below the top, then put the pot on to heat. You'll want something like a hard simmer/light boil, so a medium heat usually works. Let it keep going until an inch or so of water has evaporated- roughly speak, boiling for an hour or two. Give it a taste- the flavor won't be hugely strong but you'll know it when it's ready.

Separate the solids. If you really want to go crazy, you can use fine filters and such, but I tend to use a slotted spoon to get all the big stuff and a wire mesh ladle I have to finish.

You have an option now. If you want, you can stick the stock in the fridge overnight to solidify the fat and scum to scrape away. If you want to do this, now is the time, it's easiest. Otherwise, you can continue, but when uneaten soup is put int he fridge, it'll develop a layer on top. Not a big deal, but a little trickier to deal with to remove if you want to when there are soup components inside. If you do refrigerate overnight, put the meat you set aside into a ziplock bag and keep in the fridge overnight.

You now have your chicken stock- this is incidentally a great way to make stock for all kinds of things, so any time you roast chicken or something, it's a nice little something extra to do to make your own stock for dishes.

Set the stock pot on the stove to start heating, again to a light boil. Ready your chicken and vegetables (the same carrots, celery, and onions, but now cut for eating sizes) in amounts you feel comfortable with. While the stock pot is heating, prep your matzoh meal.

Now, I've had difficulty with this in the past. I always used to use manischewitz, but it got hard to find and I switched to streitz. I got leaden balls- sinkers, not floaters. Tonight I had a box of each and I ended up going to manischewitz, but in case it made a difference, I also added an extra egg. The balls came out perfectly- whether it's the brand or the extra egg, I couldn't say. I don't see any harm in adding the extra egg tho. If you like sinkers, that's fine too, but my family has always been firmly in the floater party.

You'll prep the matzoh ball mix similar to how it says on the box. Typically that will mean one pack of the meal, two eggs, and some oil or butter. We're going to make a couple of changes though. As I said before, add an extra egg. For the fat, instead of butter or oil, go to that pyrex cup I told you to put aside earlier. There should be a nice layer of fat on top, 3-4 tablespoons worth. Scrape that off and place in your small bowl and give it five minutes to come to room temperature. Then add your matzoh meal. Then add your three eggs. Whip together with a fork until uniform, then place in the fridge for 15 minutes.

By now, the stock pot should be boiling. Lightly salt and pepper the stock. You can add the rest of your solids now (further flavoring the soup) or wait until the matzoh balls are done, up to you.

Take the matzoh ball mix out of the fridge. Take enough to roll a ball about the diameter of a penny- they blow up to several times their size, so don't listen when the box says to make them an inch in diameter. You want maybe a half inch. Roll and drop into the rolling stock, roll and drop. This should be pretty quick, when you're done, you may see that not only have they started to balloon in the stock but that some of the first ones you did are darkening. Give them a gentle stir to turn them all over (that discoloration is from them drying out on that side, then cover the stockpot with a lid. Cook for 20 minutes, then uncover and add the rest of the solids if you haven't already.

Dump your solids in and add a little salt and pepper- you aren't done yet, so undersalt and underpepper. It will concentrate and develop and it's too easy to oversalt and overpepper.

Let it all cook for another hour or so, then do your final salt and peppering. Serve immediately.

You also have the option to cook the matzoh balls in a separate pot of water, sometimes salt water. I prefer to cook them in the stock so they take up the flavor of the stock. It's personal preference, but some folks find it easier to deal with and prefer the taste.

Also, this freezes really well. I always like to have some in the freezer, because when I'm sick is when I want and need it the most, but I'm least able to make it. Wheras when frozen, you can easily just dump the frozen block into a pot, add a little water and cover, turn the heat on low and have nice hot soup ready to go.

Cream Cheese

About a year ago, I moved away from New York to Virginia. Virginia has many things to recommend it, particularly over what New York has become in recent years. However, there is one thing Virginia doesn't have (although it's become damn hard to find in New York too): TempTee Cream Cheese.

If you've never had it, it's a completely different creature from Philadelphia (named for the city in New York, not Pennsylvania, incidentally). Even Philadelphia isn't quite what it used to be, and mostly you find the stuff in the tubs which has kind of a greasy feel and taste to it. I always thought of Philadelphia blocks as good cooking cream cheese, but not eating quality (just as you wouldn't pour a glass of cooking grade wine into a glass to drink).

In any case, I got a delivery of bagels and bialys (at an exhorbident price- going to need to start baking soon, it's just not worth it, and they're already old by the time I get them) and just had it up to here with the garbage cream cheese options. So, hell with it. I would make my own.

This recipe has gone through many rounds and tweaks. As I tasted this last iteration, I found myself thinking it was just a little too rich for my taste, trying to think what else I could do. It was at this point that I realized that I had licked the spatula clean and wanted more. So, while I do think it could use a little bit more tweaking, I think you'll still get a tasty product from it. A little bit of salt, sour, sweet, and creamy all nicely balanced together.

That said, this recipe is one of the rare ones that I would recommend you tweak very carefully- it is highly sensitive to proportion changes and believe me, it doesn't take much to turn something nice into something almost inedible.

You will need:
1. 6 cups whole milk
2. juice of 2 lemons (note: you can use the concentrate stuff if you have to, no shame in it- but be careful in adding it as you will tend to need to use less than the fresh stuff).
3. 1 level tsp kosher salt.
4. 1/4 tsp sugar
5. 3 tbsp heavy cream
6. 1/2 tsp egg yolk
7. 3 tsp whey (you'll make it yourself, don't worry- see below)

You will also need:
1. medium saucepan
2. rubber spatula
3. strainer (preferably the wire kind with the little metal tabs that let it rest atop a bowl)
4. large bowl
5. food processor

Add the milk to the saucepan and put on stove on a medium heat. Stir gently as it comes up to temperature. You want the milk scalded- just below simmering.

Set up your drying/filtering station. Bowl on bottom, strainer above, cheesecloth lining the strainer. I like to separate the layers of cheesecloth and lay one layer in one direction and the other 90 degrees in the strainer. This lets me make sure the whole strainer is covered by the cheesecloth (always a hair too narrow...) and doubles the filtration fineness. The strainer should be a couple of inches off the bottom of the bowl. If it isn't, you'll have a rough time of it.

Add 3/4ths of the lemon juice (you may want to just juice 1 1/2 lemons for now to make this a little easier, up to you, but reserve 1/4th of the lemon juice for much later) in halves- half the amount, stir for a few moments, then the rest of it. The curds will form very rapidly. How do you know when you've added enough? When the whey is clearly a green color and not just clear.

Carefully pour the saucepan into the cheesecloth-lined strainer. You may need to let some of the whey go through before you finish pouring it all. Make sure you get all the bits and blobs in the pot. Let the curds sit and drain for 15-30 minutes. You do not need to press or squeeze the curds, just leave them alone and they'll leave you alone.

Once the curds have drained, dump into the food processor. Add the salt, sugar, heavy cream, egg yolk, remaining lemon juice, and take three teaspoons (1 tbsp) of the green drained whey and add it too. Pulse the food processor and occasionally use your spatula to push everything back down again. Process until smooth. Taste.

If you plan to add chives, this would be the time to add them and process a little bit longer until they are well integrated.

As I said, I think it's a touch rich, but I'm so used to commercial stuff. The egg yolk is added because the fats don't entirely suspend in the mixture otherwise, leading to a grainy cream cheese. Egg yolk contains lecithin, which emulsifies the fats. Do not add the whole egg yolk, it will turn the cream cheese disgustingly eggy and suppress a lot of the delicate flavors you've created and added. If you follow this recipe, you'll have something smooth and tasty to put on your bagel. Enjoy!

Return of the Nieman Marcus Urban Legend Cookie

These are sort of the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. In the US, everyone I ever met knew the legend of the Million Dollar Cookie in one form or another. Here in the UK, no one seems to have ever heard of it. But they do love the cookies when I pass them around. They are easy to make, just follow the recipe step by step. They keep well, just store in ziplock bags.

I originally posted the recipe on this blog in 2009 and it remains unchanged so just pull it up, print up a copy and get baking.

I made a half recipe yesterday because there's only Alan and me and the neighbors to eat them now. It's very easy to halve the recipe; and then I divided that half before I put in the chips, etc. In 2/3 of the cookie dough I put loads of choc chips, pecans, and sultanas. In the other 1/3 I just put in a cup or so of sultanas because Alan had earlier announced to me that he just liked biscuits with sultanas (British for Raisin Cookies). Ok, no Begian dark chocolate chips, no pecans, no craisins. Fine, be that way. So I baked cookies and packed them up separately. In the morning, Alan discovered them before I woke up when he went to make early dawn coffee. So what did he think of the cookies? The Sultana Biscuits were very nice but the other cookies, they were amazing. Arrrrggghhh!!

So, grab the recipe and go forth and bake cookies.

Basic Perfect Gelato

Alan wanted gelato. Any flavor gelato as long as its vanilla. Of course.
So I found a recipe for Sicilian gelato that met most of my basic requirements and then I made some changes to fine tune it to our specific tastes and preferences. The result was pure heaven. Below is the exact final recipe that I used to make gelato last night. I think its perfect and hope you try it and agree.

Ingredients:

2 cups/ 500 ml whole milk*
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup/ 250 ml double/heavy cream
pinch salt
2 T cornstarch (cornflour) dissolved in a few spoonfuls of milk

*Pls note I used full cream, pure Jersey milk (5%) which is quite wonderful and very different from supermarket "whole milk" which is 3.8 - 4% at best. If you are in the UK, my favorite brand is Grahams Gold smooth which I buy at Sainsburys.

Method:

In a medium saucepan, bring 1 cup of the milk almost to a simmer with the sugar - heat it, whisking, until the sugar dissolves.

Add the cornstarch dissolved in a bit of milk and stir till it starts to thicken. Bring just to a simmer when the first bubbles show. Immediately remove from the heat, pour into a bowl. Add 1/2 tsp vanilla (or vanilla seeds, etc) and whisk to start cooling it down. Allow to stand and cool for an hour covered by a disk of parchment or cling wrap to prevent a skin forming.

When the base has cooled down, remove the parchment disk (You'll want to scrape off any custard sticking to the paper back into the bowl. Every drop is precious.) Pour in the rest of the milk, the cream and a pinch of salt. Whisk briefly to combine and pour into ice cream machine.

Freeze in the bowl of an ice cream machine. It took me 55 minutes to get the gelato to soft eating consistency, your machine may vary. The rest I put in a container in the freezer to firm up more for eating later.

This makes 2 plastic storage containers full, about 1 quart total.
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This gelato has a wonderfully clean, fresh, delicate taste. It's also a perfect base to add fruit, nuts, flaked chocolate, syrups, endless mix-ins to create the custom flavor of your choice. My next batch I plan to add cinnamon stick to the milk/sugar mix and let that infuse.

Did Alan like it you ask?  Yes, he actually liked the taste and texture fresh made. He had issues with it after it sat in our freezer overnight. He claimed he could taste a few ice crystals. I couldn't but Alan is our "Princess and the Pea" tester. I say just take it out of the freezer 10 - 15 min before serving and it will be perfect.  Or eat it fresh made and enjoy the best of the best.

Peeps!

Asti flew into London tonight for a brief visit. Always lovely to see her again and spend some time together. She handed me a small box of Peeps saying that she wasn't sure if they might be too stale. Too stale? Never, no such thing as too stale Peeps!

New York Cheesecake

Recently we had some rather nice cheesecake. It was nice but well, just nice and not what Id call a NY cheesecake. It wasn't Turf Cheesecake; but then, nothing is and its a bit much even for me these days. But I did know what I wanted, so because my daughter was flying in for a quick visit, I decided to make a classic NY Cheesecake so she'd have a tasty snack when she arrived tonight. Here's the recipe I used:

Ingredients:
*10 - 12 digestive biscuits 
80g butter
500g mascarpone
400 g Philadelphia cream cheese
2 eggs, plus 2 egg yolks
*2 lemons
4 tbsp plain flour
*150g caster sugar
20 cm/8 inch springform or loose bottom deep pan.

*Notes:
1. They don't have graham crackers in the UK.You can either just omit the cracker crumb crust or use some really good digestive biscuits. I used Dove Organic Wholemeal Digestive Biscuits. They are the closest thing to Graham crackers I ever tasted, actually tasty. Don't use store brand or the classic McVities, they are bland and awful.
2. Full Fat mascarpone only. In NYC I would have used all Philly cheese but the Philadelphia company here lies. What they sell as Philadelphia cream cheese is close but absolutely not exactly the same as what they sell in the US. Trust me on this. It's a tragedy.
3. Use a microplane and get every scrap of zest off those lemons and into your cake mix. Depending on the lemon variety you're using and your personal taste preferences, you may need an additional lemon.
*In the US this is called superfine sugar. I think you could probably use regular granulated but the superfine/castor sugar will yield a more delicate texture.

Method:

1. Butter the pan. Line the base with parchment/nonstick baking paper.

2. Blitz the biscuits in a processor (or put them in a plastic baggie and smash with a rolling pin) then dump them into a mixing bowl. Met the butter - 60 seconds in the microwave in a small pyrex bowl.
Pour the butter into the crumbs and stir it through. Press the crumbs into the bottom of the baking pan smoothing and pressing them with the back of a spoon. Place in refrigerator for 30 minutes to firm.

3. Heat oven to 160 F.

4. Dump cheeses into the bowl of your mixer (you can make this manually with a large wooden spoon but I wouldn't). Mix on low until the cheeses are smooth, fluffy, and well mixed.

5. Add the eggs and egg yolks. Beat eggs and cheese gently until they are thoroughly mixed.

6. Thoroughly remove the lemon zest with a microplane or zester and add to the cheese mix. Juice the lemons and add to the cheese mix. Lightly blend and taste. Add more lemon juice/zest if you want a stronger lemon taste but I'd suggest the zest more than the juice because you don't want the mix too liquidy. This is the art bit of baking.

7. Add the flour and sugar and then beat gentkly to thoroughly combine all.

8. Spoon the cheesecake mixture into the cake tin. Smooth the top. Slide into the oven and bake for 45-60 mins till the cheesecake is set but with a bit of a wobble when you gently shake the tin. (I turn the oven off at 45 min and just let the cheesecake sit in the hot oven for the remaining 15 min or so. This helps prevent surface cracks.) You can let the cheesecake cool slowly in the closed oven for an additional 30 - 60 minutes as well. This also helps prevent surface cracks.

9. Let the cheesecake cool at room temp. in the tin, and then chill till you're ready to serve - you can make it the day before you want to eat it.

You can serve the cheesecake as-is or spoon a fruit compote over the top like blueberry or strawberry.
You can also swirl in melted chocolate for a marble cheesecake. I wouldn't but some people really like chocolate.

How many does this feed? Ha! What a question. Polite people? Greedy People? Nostalgic people? Late at night with a cup of coffee when no one is watching people? Figure at least 8, possibly 12 or more. Did you really plan to share it?