Carrot and Coriander Galette

- Alex Leave a comment

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This is really a very pared down version of Marcus Wareing’s recipe in One Perfect Ingredient. I’ve owned this book for ages and I love it. I’ve also been looking at this recipe for ages and never got around to making it. Either we have the coriander but not the carrots, or vice versa.

It turned out that we had plenty of both in the fridge and I thought this would be a brilliant way of feeding the baby carrot.

I was in a bit of a hurry (a small person was watching me, and dinner time was fast approaching) so I used just the outline of Wareing’s recipe. If he were to read what follows, he wouldn’t recognise it!

Preheat the oven to 180°C fan (200°C normal).

Begin by grating one large (peeled) carrot. I used the Magimix for this – you get carrot that’s like very fine spaghetti. Put the carrot in a frying pan with a generous splash of water (add more as necessary) and cook until the carrot softens and the water has evaporated. I also added some very finely grated ginger.

For the one large carrot I used 2 eggs and a handful of chopped coriander. Whisk the eggs, add the coriander and pepper to taste. When the carrots are done, tip into the egg and coriander and mix well (and quickly – you don’t really want the egg to start cooking). Pour into a baking paper lined baking dish (mine was about 20cm x 10cm) and bake for 15-20 minutes, until set. Serve immediately (or allow to cool, if serving to a baby!).

Even this very quick and dirty version of the recipe tasted pretty good. If I’d been eating it I would have had to add salt and more pepper, but the slight spiciness of the ginger with the sweetness of the carrot worked well. The coriander adds some much needed colour variation to the dish (even so, it looks very orange!) and the egg makes it filling enough for a quick snack.

Now I really do need to try out the proper recipe!

Spicy Fried Potatoes

- Alex 2 Comments

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Everyone loves potatoes (don’t they?) but sometimes it’s tricky to do something other than sauté them, mash them, turn them into chips and so on.

Last night I was faced with an Asian style fish dish (recipe to come) that needed an accompaniment. We’d had rice the night before, there were no noodles in the cupboard and we had just two potatoes.

This is a great way to stretch those two potatoes a little further.

Start by taking your potatoes, peeling them and cutting them into approximately 1 cm square cubes. Cook them in boiling water – slightly under is better than slightly over. Drain. You can leave them to cool or not.

Heat a generous tablespoon of ghee in a frying pan. If you have no ghee a combination of butter and a light oil (such as peanut, or a very light olive oil) will do. When the ghee is hot, add a little very finely sliced onion (I used about a quarter of an onion as that’s what I had left over – but if you love onion then a whole one will be fine!) and one clove of garlic, finely chopped. When the onion starts to take on a little colour, add 2 tsp of ground coriander, 1 tsp of ground cumin, about ½ tsp of turmeric and chilli flakes to taste. Fry these spices for a minute or so and then add the potatoes.

Now, this is best done a little in advance because you don’t want to be hurrying the potatoes. You want to get them plenty of frying time so everything gets good and crispy. You don’t have to worry about serving them immediately they look done – they keep hot very nicely. The only problem might be snacking on them while you finish off other things … if you do that you’ll find your potatoes don’t go quite as far as you hoped!

I needed to season the potatoes reasonably generously with salt. I almost never add salt to cooking so my idea of “reasonably generous” is probably nowhere near enough for many people. As always … season to taste.

Serve with whatever you happen to be eating. These would be awesome with any type of curry, or at a BBQ – any meal with robust flavours that can stand up to a bit of chilli. Delicious!

Book Review: Heat

- Alex Leave a comment

Mum lent me this book ages ago and it took me a long time to get around to reading it (to be fair, I was reading the mammoth The Wines of Burgundy at the time).

Heat is the autobiographical story of Bill Buford, a food lover – strictly amateur – who managed to score himself a “kitchen slave” position with New York’s Mario Batali. American readers, in particular, will know Batali from the Food Network where he’s on Iron Chef America and is the host of Molto Mario.

Buford began his adventure in an unpaid role, working in Batali’s Babbo restaurant on weekends. It seems like it didn’t take long for him to work his way up to more and more hours and more and more responsibility. He eventually heads off to Italy for various culinary adventures, culminating in spending a lot of time in Tuscany as apprentice to a butcher.

This is an entertaining book and I suspect you have to have more than a passing interest in food to enjoy it, but it is quite a lightweight read. And that’s not a bad thing – this book would make perfect aeroplane material for long haul flights and was a great antidote to the heavyweight (both physically and mentally) book on Burgundy.

One thing that puzzled me throughout the book was the stark absence of any mention of money, or even extended family. Buford mentions his wife a little – especially towards the end when they are in Italy together – but rarely mentions how his forays into the professional kitchen impacted his family’s finances and well being. I don’t know about you, but if I started working weekends in a professional kitchen Andy might have something to say about it – especially if I ended up quitting my job and gallivanting off to Italy. This makes Heat a very personal story because we do find out a lot about how Buford’s experiences changed him, but it’s also an insular story, because we never get a sense of the emotional relationships he has with anyone outside the world of food.

Criticisms aside, this is a perfect book for reading while you’re letting your Christmas dinner settle.