I've shockingly gotten ahead of myself... So I was aiming for a vegetarian friendly meal, while I was writing it out I decided I could push for vegan. I've to test a few of the recipes out before the meal but it should be grand. As of right now there's 4 spaces left at the table!
Once again another booked out supper! I'm going warm and Moroccan this week!
I've also got the next supper 'August 1st' decided on and 2 place are already taken. But i'll write up the menu and post it. Also updates of the previous suppers are en route.
So this was the rest of my productive day yesterday. I also count being productive as posting one blog post. >_> Maybe others are more productive. I have about 700g of rhubarb left over from a salad I made for the last supper. It was going on the soft side so it was decided it'd be a jam.
What you'll need:
Wash and chop the rhubarb. Place in a large bowl with lime juice and chopped ginger. Cover in jam sugar. You need jam sugar for this recipe because rhubarb has little to no pectin. Coat all the rhubarb with the sugar, cover. Leave for 2 hours, during that time pop back every now and then and give it a shake.
Once the 2 hours is up scoop all rhubarb mix and put it into a heavy based pot and stir till the sugar dissolves. Once the sugar has dissolved bring the mixture up to a boil. At this point the rhubarb will start to break down. The mixture will darken. If you have a sugar thermometer keep and eye out for when the mixture hits 'jam'. If not there's an easy test:
Place a saucer in the freezer at the beginning of the cooking down process, when the jam has been boiling for a while take half a teaspoon of the mixture out and place on the saucer. Give it 30 seconds and you'll see if it jams. If not keep heating.....actually put 2 saucers in the freezer.
Once it has gotten to the point of jam pour the mixture carefully into sterilised jars. Label. Let it cool. Then eat the next morning with the granola you also made while being productive!
So I had a somewhat constructive Saturday, I made this granola and some rhubarb & ginger jam. It had been a while since I last made granola so decided to make a new and improved recipe.
What you'll need:
*I've found the best way to get skins from off hazelnuts is to put 500ml of water in a deep pot and bring to the boil, once it's boiling add a tablespoon of baking soda mix and add in the hazelnuts. Let them boil for 3min then remove and run under cold water. With you hands rub off the skin or place them on a clean tea towel and roll it a few times. You should now have naked hazelnuts..
Preheat your oven to 120°C.
In a large bowl mix all your dry ingredients (except cherries) together with vanilla seeds and cinnimon. In a small pot on a low heat mix together honey, syrup and sugar till sugar is dissolved (i put in the left over vanilla pod for some extra flavour, remove before adding to the oats) Once it's dissolved and not too hot pour slowly over the oat mix while stir with a wooden spoon. Mix well. Once everything is incorporated place the mixture on a large baking tray, level it all out with the spoon and place in the oven.
Remove the tray from the over every 15min and turn over the mixture. Keep this up for 1hr 15min. The oats and nuts will gradually darken to a wonderful golden colour.
Once the time is up, leave to cool on the tray. Once cooled mix in whatever dried/preserved fruit you'd like and place in an airtight jar. I find with this amount that I'd get about 9 serving and will last for about a month.
So this was one of the many biscuits we made on our day of many biscuit making. The recipe was originally from Willie's Chocolate Bible with a few tweaks...
What you'll need:
Beat sugar and butter in a large bowl till light and fluffy. Pour in blossom water and cointreau. In a seperate bowl soft together both flours, mix them into the butter mixture till it forms a soft dough. Wrap in cling and chill in a fridge for 40min.
Preheat the oven to 150°C, line two baking trays with baking parchment. I rolled our the dough on a semolina covered surface. Roll it out to a thickness of about 1cm, get a 6cm biscuit cutter and cut out about 24 biscits. Space them away from each other on the trays. Put them in the oven for 18-20mins, until golden at the edges.
Remove from the oven leave on the tray for 5min then transfer them to a wire rack.
While they are cooling prepare the chocolate, for dipping biscuits it's best to temper by seeding the chocolate.
Split the chocolate up into 200g & 100g. Roughly chop the 200g chocolate and finely grate the 100g. Place the chopped chocolate in a heatproof dish above a pot of very gently simmering water. If you have a thermometer it really helps here, heat the chocolate to about 45°C and melted. Try not to stir the chocolate and make sure the bowl is not touching the water below it. Once at the correct tempature remove from the pot and stir in the grated chocolate. You want to keep stirring the chocolate till it drops to a temperature of 28°C for dark or 26°C for milk. Once at this temperature place back on top of the gently simmering water and bring the temperature back up to 33°C. Chocolate is now tempered. Taking the time to do this with your chocolate will make everything better in the long run.
*Seemingly 300g of chocolate is the smallest amount of chocolate to successfully temper. I've never really tried anything smaller.Place the wire rack over a baking tray.vTake each biscuit and dip the top into the choclate mixture, place back on the rack. Once the choclate is cooled. EAT THEM.
So this post is a bit ahead of other ones but I'm going to put it up, the suppers have been booked out before I've gotten a chance to design the menus.
We had a wonderful supper on the 11th and that will soon be posted, this supper is also booked out, I've upped the numbers to 8 for supper. It means I get everyone in. So this will be the supper for this week. Also this week a have a wonderful kitchen accomplice by the name of Danielle cooking alongside me. We can also thank her for the translation and the majority of this Japanese Inspired dishes.
Sorry about how far behind I am on these supper posts. It's been a bit hectic lately. So today, I hope to tell you about two supper that have happened! This was somewhat of a hurried supper, I had been working Galway at the Ocean Race and came back on the train to Dublin the night beforehand and was on a train back to Galway in the early hours of the morning the Thursday morning.
The idea for the dinner came to me while I was at Corleggy Cheese's farm preparing to go to Galway. I decided if I was going to be on the West Coast of Ireland I should mainly use what I could get my hands on there. I thought to myself that I'd just ask around the market and see who had the best mussels BUT everyone was talking about Marty's Mussels. So I went and found the number for them called and voilà, mussels. I talked to Catherine Nee (Marty's wife) she informed me all about their mussels, she also brought them to Dublin for me, which was very,very appreciated. They're rope grown, they've got a thinner shell and cook quicker than most mussels I've used in the past. I arrive in Dublin to find these waiting for me:
I got home Tuesday and began to prep, decided I was tired. So relaxed. I had my little sister over the next morning, so the Wednesday turned out to be a very busy day. The supper was easy and very manageable, the main prep came with the making of the ice-cream. The idea to infuse it with elderflower came when I was on the farm, the only problem was getting it to Dublin five days later. We had been infusing vodka with elderflower for some other fun projects so I decided to borrow some of it and make a syrup. I cooked down the vodka with some extra elderflower in it with 4 tablespoons of sugar, boiled off the alcohol. So I used the syrup as the sugar in the custard. Job done, I had elderflower custard. Left it to chill in the fridge for 8 hours or so. I got gooseberries from the McNallys and cooked them down with lemon juice and sugar. We served it with gingerbread people.
Cooking the mussels was simple, at Marty's they debeard nd clean all the mussels. I made my harissa and got a huge amount of coriander. In the bottom of my largest post I heated oil with chopped garlic and shallots. When te oil was hot enough I added the mussels with a glass of dry white wine. I didn't necessarily need the wine, but I want to get a good bit of steam to make sure I could get all the mussels cooked properly...I hadn't gotten around to cooking 5kg of mussels before..it went ok. There was a bit of pot shaking, but I just left them to it. IT was great with the thinner shells they cooked great. I put about 2/3 of the batch into a large hot pot and lay it out on the table, sprinkled chopped coriander over the top and it was ready to go.
As we worked our way through the mussels I served slices of sourdough bread to start to soak up the wonderful spicy juice in the bottom of the pot. With this meal we also had battered aubergines covered in honey infused with rosemary. With Aubergines I always try to get as much liquid out of them as possible before cooking with them. Battered aubergines are not the prettiest things in the world but that taste great. I also made a seaweed salad, with this salad, I rehydrated a mix of seaweeds and washed out a good bit of the saltiness. I then mixed the seaweed with spinach and some seared broadbeans, dressed it in a honey, lemon and dijon mustard dressing.
It all went well. The ice-cream was fresh and light, it was refreshing after a spicy and salty dinner.
Michelle arrived early Wednesday morning, I had just gotten back the evening beforehand. I had to get everything ready that night! So we had a bit of a busy morning. We got right to it..we went for breakfast. Then went looking for biscuit cutters. Then we decided to start getting ready. We got around to making 3 things.
So I stayed in a wonderful woman house in Galway named Patsy, Silke of Corleggy Cheeses was also there! So I promised them dinner and dessert for one of the evening I was there. So I decided that they'd appreciate this cake. So..i've used 'so' alot in this post.
What you'll need:
for the cake
for the icing
Preheat oven to 180°C/gas 4, Butter a 1kg loaf tin and line with baking paper.
Beat softened butter with both sugars in a large bowl till very pale and fluffy. Add orange zest and mix. In a jug crack in eggs break the yolks up a little with a fork. Slowly begin adding eggs to the butter mixture, beating till it's fulling incorporated.
Add the orange juice, salt and marmalade and mix very well. Sift flour over the top and mix just enough to combine. Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl to make sure you've gotten all the butter. Give it one final mix and spoon into the tin.
Bake for about 45min. Remove from the over and allow to cool for 10min in the tin. Once removed from the tin leave to cool on a rack.
While it's cooling make the icing. In a jug, whisk together the orange juice, zest, vanilla seeds and icing sugar (about 1 tablespoon at a time till it's slightly thick)
Pour over the top of the cake and let it run down the sides.
...wrap it nicely and bring to Galway on a train the next day.
Well we went shopping, found people shaped biscuit cutters and a new rolling pin. We decided it was necessary to have some kind of biscuit baked each time we do this, so this time round gingerbread people! I also wanted these buscuits to go with the Elderflower Icecream for that evenings supper.
Yes I'm aware of the spelling mistake.
What you'll need:
Preheat oven to 180°C/gas mark 4. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
Sift flour, ginger and bicarb into a bowl. Rub in the butter till you get a sand like texture, then stir in sugar. In a separate bowl whisk together golden syrup and beaten egg in a bowl. Mix it in the dry ingredients to form a dough.
Roll out the dough on a floured surface till is about 3mm thick. Cut out you gingerbread:
Place them on the prepared tin, with a tooth pick give them faces and angry eyebrows. Bake for about 10min or till golden. A tip also which I forgot with the first batch, give them a bit of space. Let them cool for about 5min on the tray then transfer to a rack.
So we decided Brownies and ginger bread men would be our baked goods for the day. We also made a Whiskey Marmalade Cake!
What you'll need:
Preheat your oven to 180°C/gas mark 4. Grease a 20cm square baking tin and line with baking paper, get it around the edges too. Place 300g of chocolate, butter and salt in a heatproof bowl over gently simmering water. Let it melt down slowly. In another bowl, break up the eggs and add the sugars and vanilla till its all incorporated.
Whisk it into the melted choclate mixture. Gently fold in flour and 150g of roughly chopped chocolate till just mixed. Pour into prepared tin. Bake for 25min or till it's set. Leave them to cool entirely in the tin. Cut into squares. Eat!
Well I'm away in Galway for the next 9days but going to leg it back ti Dublin for Wednesday. Same deal as last time. Let me know if ya want in! If there's a space consider yourself fed!
Well it happened! This is not the first time I've done dinner for people, we do it quite regularly. This will be the first of many I hope that I post about. The plan was to have 6 people over and feed them tasty food. In the end we had 4, the couple that was meant to arrive couldn't..damn work...what'll ya do! But it was fine, it meant I got the pleasure of sitting and chatting..oh and eating with my visiters!
So just to recap the menu was:
Supper:
Slow Roast Porchetta on top of French toast brioche with a side of pan-friend carrots, seasonal greens and caramelised apples.
Dessert:
Frangelico and lime jelly topped with dark chocolate blancmange.
and cheese...always cheese.
The slower you roast porchetta the better, it's salty and moist. I got my porchetta from Hicks in Temple Bar food Market. It was rolled with fennel, garlic and rosemary. At about 8am yesterday morning I popped it out of the fridge and let it come up to room temperature. When 10am rolled around I popped it in a preheated oven.....not that it was that preheated. I had my oven on at 90ºC for the entire day. That was it, I done nothing else for it. The pork was there till 8pm. I took it out 30min before I was to serve it, to let it rest. So within that 30mi gap I made the sides.
I get my carrots and leaves from McNally's also in TBFM, I washed and tidied the carrots. Set them in a hot pan with olive oil. The carrots take about 205min to cook I turn them every 5mins of so till they are good and roasted on all sides. For the last 5min I put a few sprigs of rosemary into the pan with a little balsamic vinegar and honey.
The leaves were a mix of black kale and spinach. There was meant to be catalongna but I forgot to pick it up. BUT anyway it was still tasty. It takes about 10 or so minutes to cook down such a large batch. I poured over olive into the base of pot and threw in some chopped garlic. When it was good and hope I put in the kale then the spinach. Poured in a cup of water mixed with salt, pepper and some nutmeg. Popped the lid on top, a few minutes in mixed the leaves around and that was it.
I got the apples from David Llewellyn in the market...I got everything for the main in the market. I peeled the apples, segmented them and placed them in a frying pan with some of the porchetta run off. I crushed some fennel sprinkled it over the apples with some brown sugar. I let each side caramelise nicely and that was that!
Last but not least was the French toast Brioche. The brioche came from Le Levain, it choose to use the sweet brioche, I thought it would sit well with the salty meat...and it did. I just mixed eggs and set slices of the brioche into it. Put some black pepper over it and placed them in a hot pan with butter.
That was it. The supper. Already to go.
To drink with had some ice-tea....I still have issues remember that I have to give people something to drink. I remembered just in time I guess this time.
Then we moved onto dessert.
What you'll need:
For the Chocolate Blancmange
The night before the dinner I began making the jelly. I juiced four limes, In a measuring cup I made 500ml of a mix of lime, frangelico and sugar syrup. I personaly am a subsriber to the "universal jelly principle" set out by Bompas & Parr. Which is:
Liquid + Gelling Agent = Jelly
I was not using moulds but making the jelly straight in to china tea cups. Which meant I had to use less gelatin. I poured a little of the liquid on top of my chopped gelitin and left it for about 10mins in a heatproff bowl. Once it was softened I set the bowl over a pot of simmering water. Stir till it's dissolved and that's about it, pour the rest of the liquid and give it a big stir. Pour into cup and that's it. It needs about 6 hours to set. The next day I started to prepare the blancmange. With milk based jellys you need less gelatin, this keeps the mouth feel pleasent for everyone eating. I done the same as before but this time while it was on top of the pot I added in chopped 70% chocolate also. No sugar and no water in this mix. This also sets pretty quickly but it's still better to give it a few hours.Something I forgot to do was place small circles of greeseproof paper or cling directly ontop of the blancmange, this stops it getting a skin. But it's no major deal.
We finished the night with chats over a large pot of tea and some cheese. We have the Creeny sheep cheese from Corleggy Cheeses. On the side and on top of everything we put two of my newest jellys of cheese. We had Port Jelly and Vodka jelly infused with elderflower, lemon and assam tea.
Well thanks for reading. I'll put up the next menu in the next day or so. If you'd like to come just let me know. Everyone is welcome.
Thanks
So this was what we began with this morning and it was the last thing to leave the kitchen this afternoon. I like making ice-cream. I make it a good bit. I also fail at making it a good bit. Some of the reason I fail:
Well anyway, I decided it'd be best if we started off with a nice simple one for Michelle sometine she could build from change and tweak for whatever reason she wants. I've been trying over the past few months to instill in Michelle the idea that everything you use in the kitchen as far as ingredients are concerned should be the best. Should be fresh. Should be seasonal and such. From her salt and pepper to the milk we use in the making of the icecream. I wanted a good full fat milk. So what better than the best milk you can buy in the centre of Dublin,so we popped up to Sheridan's on South Anne St and grabbed a 1ltr bottle of Teirnan Family's Raw Milk. We were ready. I was nervous. Michelle wanted a sandwich.
What you'll need:
With a sharp knife split the vanilla pods in half and scrape out the seeds. Put the milk, cream and vanilla seeds and pods into a heavy saucepan. Warm gently till just below boiling point, pop it off the heat and leave covered to infuse with the vanilla for about 15-20 minutes. In the mean time whisk the egg yolks with the sugar. Gradually add the warm mixture to the egg/sugar mix till it's all added. Return the saucepan to the hob and cook over a low hat stirring constantly. What you want to happen is the custard coats the back of your spoon. On a low heat and being terrified as I always am making this, it might take a while. I go from points of joy with the smell of vanilla floating around to anger and holding my hand back from uping the heat. Just take your time. Rush it and it over heats you'll have scrambled eggs.
Pour everything into a large bowl and chill.
Today I left this to chill for about 3 hours while we baked the rest of our things. I would normally leave it up to 8 hours. I made sure the mix was shallow so it would chill quickly.
I went and collected my freezer bowl. With the kitchenaid freezer bowls they have to be in a freezer for at least 15 hours prior to using them.
**TIP** Do not pour your mixture into the freezer bowl before starting the mixing. It's cold in there and it'll just freeze and cause a few issues **END OF TIP**
I poured my mix in as the arms were turn and waited. I can see were this tune of "I scream, you scream" comes from. It took about 25min before it started resemble ice-cream. I left my mixer on the slowest speed. After about 35min I was happy wit how it looked. Took it out, tasted. Was happy with how it tasted. If you have any left after making this just pop it in a box and leave it in the freezer.
So we were so prepared and moving with great speed and poise Michelle decided she'd make a batch of chocolate cookies. She had been given a recipe from a friend but decided to tweak and change a few things today.
What you'll need:
Beat butter and sugars in a bowl till it's nice and creamy. Add the whole egg and mix, the add the yolk and mix again. Sift the flour, salt and bicarbonate together and gently mix into the mix. Leave to once side. Place a bowl over a pop of gently simmering water and melt down the 150g of dark chocolate. Once with melted add the the mixture. Mix well to combine. The mix is stiff so don't worry if it's difficult to stir. Finally mix in chips.
Preheat your over to 180ºC/ gas 4. Line 2 baking trays with parchment paper. Using an icecream scoop pick up big helping of the cookie mix and place on the trays with a good with of space between each mound. we made rather large cookies today so we just had 10 mounds. You could easily half the size for more cookies in the end. Bake for around 25min if you are making large cookies, otherwise jsut 18-20 for smaller. They'll come out of the oven a little soft. leave them on the tray for 5min then place onto a wire rack to cook completely.
