Knife skills course

The index finger of my left hand is missing a small chunk. Are we downhearted? No. I´ve signed up for a knife skills course.

I can slice and dice with more panache than precision, and pretty quickly, but there comes a time when one must be able to tackle brunoise, julienne, baton, batonets, chiffonades. In order to never do them, probably, but what fun.

Venison and escabeche salad

I´m not very used to eating game, never mind cooking it. Even thouh my father is a keen hunter who feels that Bambi´s mother had it coming, he´s never been allowed to bring back meat that he´s shot.
So the piece of venison I was given yesterday has had me fairly flummoxed all day. Now it´s in the oven, simmering in a basic stewy sauce made the usual way, with bacon fat added. I figure if I can get the meat to go as tender as I like, the sauce will still be pretty terrific, which is good enough. One should never look at a gift of deer, etc.

In the meantime, dinner is done, leftovers from yesterday´s dinner party escabeche: a salad of lamb´s lettuce and avocado, dressed in the escabeche, with pieces of pickled mackerel and salmon, and a smattering of bacon on top. A winner, I feel.
And the pie crust from yesterday´s dried apricot crostata was too big, so I left a piece in the fridge and it´s yielded thirteen cookies (ok, I ate one, so fourteen) that we can have after dinner. Doubly thrifty, as I cooked them as the oven warmed up for the stew. I´m so proud of my green, responsible way with puddings.

The drawing is one I´ve done for a good friend, and has nothing to do with anything much, but I like it.

The Oscar slumber party

Starry starry night of the Oscars for us on this side of the Atlantic really means night. We stay up, in varying stages of wakefulness, and hope that a rush of sugar will make up for the Academy´s upsetting us, as they usually do.

Always on the menu: chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and this year also oatmeal-raisin, all done by the new exciting method of the giant squidgy cookie. And by the way, that stuff of letting the dough rest for days: it really works.

And now, fingers crossed for Kate Winslet, and let´s hope we don´t wake up baby Pía with the groans.

Giant cookies

Cookie eaters are divided between the squidgy cookie lovers and the ones who must have a snap.
Cookie bakers fall into two camps: those who have a reliable oven, thick baking sheets, a timer, concentration on the timer and a quick wrist inside the oven mitt - and the others.
Me, I just have the oven mitt. Which hasn´t prevented me from turning out some pretty darn great cookies in my time, but at the expense of years of life, I fear. Stress, burns, carbonized cookies, warped cookie sheets.

All that is over. I have found that if you bake all the dough at once, making one big cookie, you have the maximum squidge for the minimum fuss. No baking in batches, no anxiety. Not much in the way of looks, either, but who cares? These aren´t pretty golden cookies, but wedges of a massive golden cookie. They are crisp and golden only on a small portion of their surface.
I love them.

All you do is take a recipe for a favourite drop cookie, like this, and make one big cookie, 30 cm in diameter or so. You simply let it bake for longer, say, 17 minutes or so, always depending on your own particular oven.
Once it´s out quickly cut it as you would pizza, into triangular wedges. And that´s it.
If you must gild lilies, dribble some icing over it, as is suggested in that wonderful book, Big fat cookies. Otherwise, just go for them. They may not be pretty but they are seriously good.

Mush

Yesterday I made a puree of potato, leek, green beans, carrot, squash and chicken breast. No salt. It was bland and uninteresting, but it had deep historical resonance, being as it was Pía´s first ever savoury food.
She´s been happily eating a fruity mush made of apple, pear, orange juice, grapes and banana for a week, but this was the real test.
She spat most of it out, but apparently it´s a huge compliment that she neither cried nor treated us to some exorcist-style projectile vomiting. So it´s all good.
In the drawing, my sister María, Pía´s favourite aunt, and the one who wields the spoon with enough skill to make most of the food get into the baby´s mouth.

Bloody Mary

What´s better than whiling away a snowy Sunday morning with a bunch of friends watching Nadal win the Australian Open? Watching it while sipping a Bloody Mary, that´s what.

I wouldn´t presume to write a recipe for it, because the best Bloody Mary will always be the one you make yourself, just how you like it. I make mine easy on the vodka and strong on the lemon juice, with real celery salt (that´s to say, Maldon salt and celery seeds, crushed in a mortar) and lots of celery leaves peeking over the top of the jug.
And a recently learnt trick, via Nigella Bites: a splash of sherry. Makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Mary Tudor, the original Bloody Mary, was married to the King of Spain, so it´s only right to have something Spanish in the mix. What a wonderful PR turnaround, to go from hated XVI century queen to much-loved XX century cocktail.

Pizza fiorentina for Alejandro

Alejandro being a friend who professes to like Lobstersquad very well, except he can´t cook most of the stuff because I seem to be all about the lengthy process or the purpose-specific electronic equipment.

Well, here´s a winner trick for which you need neither time, skill, ecquipment or complicated shopping. It´s neither cooking nor ordering out, but some mixture of both. Let´s call it takeout fusion.
(If you don´t want to read the whole post, it´s just some steamed spinach with a poached egg laid on pizza margherita. The instructions are for the use of non-habitual cooks)

First, stop by a supermarket (see? easy) and buy a 400 gr. bag of baby spinach leaves and some good eggs.

Second, order a pizza margherita. When I do this, J goes to La vita è bella on Plaza de San Ildefonso and brings it home himself, but any delivery guy will be an adequate accomplice. Try to make this a good pizza and not some godforsaken thick soggy monster, if you can.

While the pizza arrives, take a pan with a lid that looks like it can hold at least half the spinach. Heat it, add a tiny drizzle of oil. While this heats up, wash the spinach and take out any tough stems (Spanish spinach growers tending to take the broad, sweeping view of what is a baby spinach. There are a lot of preschoolers in the bags I buy).
Shake it dry, but not too dry, and put it in the pan. Cover. Wash the other half, if your pan isn´t big enough to hold it all.
By the time the second batch is washed, the first will have wilted so much that the second can go in.
Shake it a little, and in a couple of minutes you´ll have a limp green mess.
Now salt it, see if there´s too much liquid, try a piece. Too irony and green? Leave it some more time.

When you think the pizza is almost home, make a couple of holes in the spinach, and crack eggs into them.
Cover, and leave to set over a low fire.

When pizza arrives, take it out of the box and put it on a wooden board. This is essential to the success of the dish. Looks are everything.

Now take a wide slotted spoon and put the eggs with some of the greens on the pizza, and then dot the rest attractively on the bald spots.
Drizzle with the tiniest dots of good olive oil, and tuck in. The best is to smear the yolk all over the pizza, if there are more than two people. If not, each gets his egg and can do what they want with it.

So there you go. It´s easy, it´s healthy, it´s good, it looks good.
And if you can´t be bothered to order the pizza, you can of course have the spinach and egg on hot buttered toast and save yourself the delivery time.

Easiest ever soup

Madrid was submerged in snow last Friday. J and I caught a nice little stomach flu that´s doing the rounds, so we´ve been eating plain boiled rice and chicken and broth for days. But now that we´re almost well again, this is the thing.

The easiest soup in the world, and so good. Also I´m fond of it because I associate it with Pía´s birth-day. My last act as a civilian was to stop by the post office and pick up a parcel of books, all Lindsey Bareham´s.
This recipe appeared in all of them, and as I lolled by the pool, I flagged it. It seemed to good to be true, but it was too hot. And then P was born and that was that, until I found myself one day with leeks and potatoes to hand, a sleeping baby, and half an hour.

All you do is clean and slice leeks and peel and cut potatoes while salted water comes to the boil. The vegetables go in, are covered and left to cook until the potatoes are coming apart. This takes somewhere around twenty minutes, and requires no action on your part.
When it´s done, you taste, and say, darn, this is nothing. I can taste leeks and I can taste potatoes, but I can taste a lot of water, and I´m bored.
This is when you follow the last step: add 10 gr. butter per serving. Move it around, watch it melt, swirl a little, try it again.
You won´t beleive the magic. The little atoms of butter galvanize that big pot of soup. The flavours are brought together into a harmonious whole, the water turns from pale to interesting, and you can taste leeks and potatoes, but mostly you can taste soup, gentle and invigorating.

As a lesson in the enlivening properties of fat it has no parangon. It is the soup I would teach a beginner cook, and a no-fat fanatic. Just a little spoonful per bowl, and it turns potatoes to gold.

The instructions are really and truly as simple as described above. The quantities:

500 gr. leeks (white and palest green only)
500 gr. potatoes
1.2 litres water (that´s a stingy five cups or a generous four)
40 gr. butter

Hot sauce for ice cream

Here are two useful recipes for Christmas. One is the stuffed chicken we do every year. Provided you have a good butcher who will debone the bird, it´s not difficult at all. It feeds a crowd and makes the house smell wonderful during the long baking time.It´s an essential part of our family Christmas, together with the film "Donavan´s Reef", which we always watch as the chicken cooks, after a siesta.

For more impromptu entertaining, the best thing to have always on hand is a block of basic elemental own-brand vanilla ice cream. If you have chocolate biscuits, make ice cream sandwiches. If not, a hot sauce tastes great and looks like you went to a lot of effort.

I always eyeball the hot sauce, so can´t help very much with quantities, but it´s something like this:

1 heaped spoonful of Nutella
50 gr. dark chocolate, chopped
a generous glug of cream

melt this in a saucepan, pour into a jug. If you have any, toast nuts briefly in a frying pan to scatter over.
If you have no Nutella, peanut butter can do. If you have no cream, a bit of butter and a splash of milk will do beautifully. And if you have any bonbons or chocolate bars around, chop them and throw them in at the end, so they melt but not all the way.

The ultimate lemon bar

First off, a new discovery: I have a food writer cousin in Palm Beach! She does great stuff, so go check it out. This is not one of those Spanish stretches of the word cousin, either, but an actual relative. We are both descended from same the great-grandmother who made American style biscuits for tea in Bilbao.

Simon Hopkinson says that good cooking is one third talent, one third skill, and one third good taste.
I think that´s probably true for high-end creative chefs. But for the rest of lowly mortals, it´s one third skill and two thirds repetition.
Take these lemon bars. They are without question the most wonderful morsels of tangy-sweet deliciousness known to mankind, but they didn´t start out this way. I tried several versions, all of which were good, but not quite as good as I hoped. Finally, after tweaking and trying and making them several times, I am now convinced that I have the ultimate lemon bar.

The biscuit base is from Belinda Jeffrey´s "Mix and bake". The lemon curd is from Donna Hay´s "Modern Classics 2". Both have been tampered with by yours truly, and adapted for that versatile and trusty old machine, the Thermomix 31*.

The ultimate lemon bar

Preheat the oven to 180º, and make the base

225 gr. flour
180 gr. butter
80 gr. sugar
zest of one lemon
pinch of salt

Put them in that order in the Th, program 15 seconds, speed 6. Turn out and let rest in the fridge for 30 minutes. It´s so buttery that it can be hard to work, so I just squish it into a 30x23 cm. tin, lined with greaseproof paper, and hope for the best.
Bake until pale golden, about 25'.

Meanwhile, make the custardy lemon filling.
Put 6 eggs,
1 and 1/2 tablespoonfuls of cornstarch
1 cup sugar**
1 cup lemon juice
zest of the lemons used for the juice
200 ml. cream

in the bowl. Program 5 minutes, speed 4, 80ºC.

This makes more than you´ll need for the size of tin. You can either do the complicated sums needed to cut down the recipe to four eggs, or have a bit of a lick-the-bowl fest, and still have some left for a couple of sweet little ramekins.

Let it cool a little, and spread it over the pastry base. Put in the oven for five minutes to set a bit more, then take it out and leave to cool.

To serve, dust with icing sugar and cut into squares. If you make the squares very small, nobody will even consider doing that annoying polite "oh, no I couldn´t" thing. They´ll come back for more and more.

*If you´re making them without machinery the best way to go will be to make the base as you would shortbread, and the filling as you would custard.

**I like my lemon desserts tart and not overly sweet, so just for your information, I will point out that the original filling in Belinda´s book called for two cups of sugar, and Donna for only 3/4 cup lemon juice.