easy and delicious stew
21 Nov 2009 Leave a Comment
in food and drink Tags: jamie oliver, recipe, stew, wine
Winter is upon us, and the time has come to indulge in delicious comfort food. We discovered a great Jamie Oliver recipe (surprise surprise) and loved the result.
The best thing about it is that it is SUPER simple. There is a basic stew recipe and then you just vary the meat/booze/herb combo and the cooking time.
The proportions are the same: 500g diced meat, 500ml booze, 3 sprigs/leaves herb.
Combinations
stewing lamb + red wine + rosemary – 2.5 hours
pork + cider + sage – 2.5 hours
beef + ale/guinness/stout + bay leaves – 3 hours
chicken + white wine + thyme – 1.5 hours
Basic recipe
Roughly chop 2 carrots, 2 sticks of celery and 2 onions. Fry for 10 minutes with a couple of lugs of olive oil. Add a tin of chopped tomatoes and the booze. Bring to the boil. Stick a lid on and let it simmer or whack it in the oven (180 degrees C). Remove the lid 30 mins before the end of the cooking time.
Jamie is so clever and in his book Ministry of Food offers four topping choices: pastry, dumplings, hotpot and mash.
We haven’t yet done toppings but serve it with fluffy, peppery mash and of course a good wine – I recommend this Argentinian Punto Final Malbec with the beef and ale stew (pictured below).
Beef and ale stew with peppery mash
day of the dead
02 Nov 2009 Leave a Comment
in food and drink Tags: cabbage, day of the dead, estie thirion, jamie oliver, mexican, recipe, sauce, steak, sweet potato
Today is the Mexican feast of the Day of the Dead (El Día de los Muertos or All Souls Day) and so it was the perfect opportunity to join in the celebrations by cooking one of our favourite cuisines. We always have most of the ingredients for a Mexican culinary feast, so I didn’t put much thought into what we’ll actually have for dinner. The end result was not quite Mexican, but spicy, seasonal and deliciously tasty: rump steak with red pepper, chilli and shallot sauciness, sweet potato mash with chilli and delicious braised cabbage with bacon. Masterchef judges will probably say the dish doesn’t quite come together as one, but it was delicious and Chris and I both really enjoyed it, so I figured it was worth sharing anyway.
Spicy sauce for steak
Sauté a couple of chopped shallots in butter, along with a finely chopped clove of garlic, a thinly-sliced red pepper and sliced green chilli. Deglaze with a good glug of red wine and serve over steak.
We cooked our veggies for the sauce alongside the steak – I’m pretty sure this isn’t textbook but it made a pretty picture.
Sweet potato mash I can’t call this a recipe… I boiled some sweet potato until soft, added some butter, a dash of milk and seasoning and stirred in a chopped green chilli.
Braised bacon cabbage (Courtesy of Jamie Oliver…. I realise my blog is becoming a bit of a shrine to the man himself… this recipe is from the Ministry of Food book but I adapted it slightly to serve 2 people)
Wash the leaves of half a cabbage and slice finely. Slice up three rashers of smoked streaky bacon – the best quality you can afford. Fry with a lug of olive oil until crisp and then stir in a finely chopped clove of garlic. As it begins to colour, add a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, a knob of butter and your cabbage. Stir well, give the pan a shake and crank up the heat to high. Drop a stock cube in about 300 ml of boiling water (we use vegetable stock but chicken will work too), then add about half of that to the pan. Give it a good stir. Put a lid on your pan and let it boil away for about 5 minutes. Remove the lid and cook for another 5 minutes. Season with pepper (the recipe says to add salt to taste but the stock already makes it quite salty so we find it doesn’t really need any extra). Drizzle with some olive oil before serving. This is one veggie dish you will make again and again.
This mobile phone photo is pretty rubbish, not least because the portion of sweet potato is disproportionate and the steak looks incinerated… I need some lessons from my friend Estie Thirion…. food stylist and photographer extraordinaire…
jamie oliver’s excellent english onion soup
25 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in food and drink Tags: jamie oliver, onion soup, starters
We’re big Jamie Oliver fans and often rely on him to impress when having friends over for dinner. His portions always leave us scratching our heads though. We’re big eaters but there is ALWAYS loads of food left.
We recently served his English onion soup with sage and Cheddar as a starter for friends. To say the portions were generous would be an understatement, but there was loads left and we froze the rest. The leftovers were reheated last night and we think it might have tasted even better the second time around. I loved the fact that we could harvest the sage leaves for last night from our balcony garden – they are miniscule but taste brilliant… and they are OURS!
English onion soup with sage from our garden and Cheddar
make that SIX Jamie Oliver recipes
19 Sep 2009 Leave a Comment
in food and drink Tags: jamie oliver, lasagna, recipe
Jamie Oliver’s lasagna was a massive success. Highly recommended, even though the portion indication “4-6″ is slightly deceiving. Six people can easily gorge on this, with more left over if you serve with a green salad and crusty bread. Yum. We enjoyed this with a Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon called Isla Negra.
my top 5 jamie oliver recipes
19 Sep 2009 Leave a Comment
in food and drink Tags: jamie oliver, recipe
Jamie Oliver is a bit like Marmite – people either love him or can’t stand him. I’m happy to say I’m firmly in the fan camp. We own several of his great cookbooks and have cooked up many of his recipes over the years. I thought it might be a good idea to select my top five Jamie Oliver recipes. It wasn’t easy picking just five. His lamb rogan josh (from the Ministry of Food book) also deserves a special mention, as does his raspberry and ginger fizz cocktail. And his chilli. But here we go – my top five from Jamie Oliver.
First up is Jambalaya with chicken, chorizo and prawns. This recipe is from his current TV series Jamie in America and we tried it a few weeks back. We made this with half the ingredients because the original serves 8 to 10 people. In spite of reduced quantities, we managed to pig out on the first night (delicious, although we expected more spice) and then had leftovers two days in a row. This is a great recipe if you’re cooking for a lot of hungry people!
Strawberry salad with speck and halloumi is a dinner party staple in summer. It’s so easy to make and so different and tasty with the salty, slightly rubbery cheese, the sweetness of the strawberries, the sour tang of the balsamic and fresh salad. We once served this – unwittingly – to a friend who dislikes strawberries and he loved the starter (and no, he wasn’t being polite).
Jamie’s roasted peppers with tomatoes, chillies, olives and capers is another dinner party winner, but be sure your guests like spice. We once had to give a friend – who likes her chillies – a glass of milk with her starter to calm the sweat. This is a perfect little starter if you have vegetarian guests as you can leave the meat off for them. Oh, and it’s worth trying to find sourdough bread. Substitutes just aren’t as nice.
English onion soup with sage and cheddar is a bit of hard work because you have to slice up a LOT of onions. But oh my word is it worth it! When you sit down with your bowl of onion soup and it starts to permeate into the bread and the cheesiness looks all rich and gooey, all the tears from the onion chopping will be forgotten.
Butternut squash muffins? Yes please! Again, quite messy to make – it’s a shame butternut squash is such a pain – but once again, totally worth it. These muffins are reminiscent of carrot cake, but with more moisture. Decorated with delicious frosty topping and some lavender flowers. Perfection.
As I type, we have a Jamie Oliver lasagne cooking in the oven so watch this spot to see if it unseats one of these top five recipes!
strawberry salad, rabbit and a blueberry cheesecake to die for
09 Sep 2009 1 Comment
in food and drink Tags: blueberry cheesecake, jamie oliver, rabbit, recipe, strawberry salad
When it comes to food, I’m willing to try most things at least once. However, when Chris told me a while ago that rabbit was in season, I was rather apprehensive. See, where I’m from bunnies are pets. In meat-loving South Africa rabbit isn’t something that people just pop on the braai (bbq). So when we were contemplating menu choices for a getogether with friends and Chris suggested rabbit, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea. Cunningly, I thought I’d float the idea with our guests in the hope one of them would be opposed to it… only for John to reply: “It’s my favourite!” So rabbit it was.
Chris did the shopping on the Saturday morning, popping to the market for the ingredients while I baked the cheesecake for dessert. Unfortunately our guests called up while he was away to share the news that they were both down with flu. Chris and I decided to carry on cooking and just enjoy the food on our own. But unbeknownst to Chris at the time, the lovely butcher who quartered the little critter for us, sold him a frozen rabbit. Undeterred, we defrosted it while prepping the veg for our recipe from Valentina Harris and getting going on the starter.
The starter is a dinner party staple in the Webber household, especially in summer when we can get our hands on the plumpest, juiciest and sweetest British strawberries. The recipe for strawberry salad with speck and halloumi appears in Jamie Oliver’s cookbook Jamie at Home, but I also found this link to it online. Our version doesn’t look quite as nice as the one in the book, but I promise you it’s a taste sensation. It’s sweet, sour, salty and fresh, making your taste buds zing and beg for more.
Next up, the chopped veggies and the pieces of rabbit (which I kept calling chicken … must have been some sub-conscious thing) were arranged to go into the oven. I must admit that the tiny ribcage and Chris’s cruel jokes very nearly put me off my dinner, but I persisted… in the name of culinary research of course.
The end result was pleasing enough. The rabbit really takes on the taste of whatever you cook it with, which in our case meant a lot of white wine. The meat itself was tender and juicy, and tasted a bit like ‘wild’ chicken. It also took a bit of work to get all the meat off the bone, because the bones are so tiny (bless the bunny). I half expected to love the taste, but hoped that if I didn’t that I would actually dislike it. I am disappointed that I feel mainly indifferent about it. However, I’m willing to give it another shot, with a different recipe this time, just to make up my mind. I don’t see the point in obsessing about cute bunnies if the result is only a mediocre culinary experience.
We ended the evening with a bang. Having made a cheesecake thinking we were having guests for dinner, I realised soon enough that there was going to be a lot of cheesecake eating in our house over the next few days. I did not complain. We went for Rachel Allen’s ridiculously delicious blueberry baked cheesecake as demonstrated here. The result, if I may say so myself, was phenomenal. Light, creamy, sweet and delicious, with juicy, fresh blueberries exploding with each bite. It was heaven on earth. I served the generous slices with a few fresh blueberries, a dusting of icing sugar and some lavender from our balcony “garden”. Our friends SO missed out.
