A Single Meatloaf

This week our friend Dave turns 40, and to kick off proceedings we held a "secret cinema" evening, leaving clues around the flat:

The film, if you haven't guessed yet, was "A Single Man" (I know, cheery), set in 1962 Los Angeles. One of the reasons I love this film is George's beautiful modernist house that has many Barbican-esque features, including floor to ceiling wooden-framed windows and drool-worthy chairs.

There is absolutely no mention of food in the entire film, and the only food that makes an on-screen appearance is some frozen bread. So I decided to serve up a classic American 60s dish, plumping for meatloaf, using Delia's Evening Standard cookbook recipe. This must have been one of Granny's favourites too - there's still a handwritten bookmark! I like to add tomato ketchup to the top of the loaf before baking, a tip from present day cookbook New York Cult Recipes, which adds a little extra to the taste and also helps stop the meat drying out. Meatloaf is also a dish that benefits from being made in advance - storing it overnight in the fridge makes it more robust and easier to cut into slices, as well as leaving more time for dancing when your guests arrive. 

Ingredients:

(Serves 4)

500g minced beef

500g minced pork

1 large onion, finely chopped

1 green bell pepper, finely chopped

1 tsp dried thyme

1 tsp dried oregano

1 clove of garlic

3 slices white bread 

2 tbsp milk

1 egg, beaten

50ml tomato ketchup

Method

1. Mix together the meat, chopped vegetables, herbs and garlic in a large bowl

2. Cut the crusts off the bread and soak in the milk. Squeeze out the excess milk and add the bread to the meat mixture, mixing again.

3. Season and add the egg to bind the mixture together. Pack into a loaf tin, cover and store in the fridge until ready to cook 

4. Spread the ketchup over the top of the meatloaf and cook in the oven at 180C for an hour.

Slice the loaf into thick portions and serve with mash, gravy, creamed corn and coleslaw for a filling and tasty American feast.

Happy BirthDave! 

Chicken soup for "invalids"

"Wife, mother, sister, whoever does the Christmas catering must be able to enjoy herself with the others..." begins the Christmas chapter of my 1964 edition of Woman's Own cookbook. This latest addition to my collection of retro recipe books (thanks Dad!) is a true housewife's handbook that's not only massively sexist but also packed with colour photographs and recipes for all occasions.

The occasion I was cooking for this week was 'having a cold'... the Bearded Argentinian and I have both been suffering this month. Luckily this cookbook has an entire chapter entitled "Invalid cookery", featuring (allegedly) inviting food to tempt flagging appetites. The chicken broth recipe, however, is a bit sparse, using just the liquor from a boiled fowl, simmered for 2 hours with chicken bones, then strained. That's it. Still, rather that than Brain Scallop, the next recipe in the chapter...

So I decided we weren't that poorly and we could probably manage something a bit more substantial. And even better, to get to a chicken carcass, you've got to have a roast chicken first, haven't you? 

(Just showing off...)

Ingredients:

Serves 2-3

1 chicken carcass and any leftover meat

1 small carrot

1 small onion

1 stick of celery

1 bay leaf

1 bouquet garni

50g rice or pearl barley

Chopped fresh parsley

Method:

1. Peel and slice the vegetables

2. Put all the ingredients in a large pan and cover with water. Bring to the boil, season with salt and pepper, and simmer for 2 hours. Skim regularly to remove any scum.

3. To serve, either strain the soup and just serve the broth, or remove the carcass, bay leaf and bouquet garni and serve with all the bits in. Garnish with fresh parsley and a side of lemsip.

Get well soon!

Cate's Shepherd's Pie

As featured in Barbican Life magazine!! http://flickread.com/edition/html/584e5d1a464d0#1

This was my favourite meal growing up. Actually, it’s my favourite meal now. Shepherd’s Pie is supposed to be lamb rather then beef mince, but we’ve always called it Shepherd’s Pie, so I’m sticking to it. It’s hearty comfort food, perfect for winter, and if you make double and freeze one, it’ll be a blessing during the upcoming holidays when you can’t face any more cooking. 

Unlike most other dishes on my blog, this one is from memory: years of standing next to Mum at the cooker and watching for the secret trick to make the meat taste so rich. Apparently it’s not a secret – it’s Bisto gravy granules.

My mum in the 70s (same as now but with less perm. And better furniture)

Ingredients

(Serves 4)

1 onion, chopped

500g beef mince

1 stock cube, made up to 500ml with hot water

A few squirts of HP sauce

2 tsp gravy granules

4 large potatoes(about 1kg), peeled

1 tbsp butter

Method

1. Fry the onion in a little oil until starting to colour. Add the mince and poke it with a wooden spoon so it breaks apart and is completely browned.

2. Add the stock, HP sauce and gravy granules and bring to the boil. Taste and season, then simmer for about 30 minutes.

3. Chop the potatoes into even sized chunks and boil for 20 minutes until tender. Preheat the oven to 180⁰C.

4. Mash the potatoes and add the butter and some salt and pepper

5. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the mince, without too much liquid, to a pie dish. Layer the mash on top. Run a fork along the top of the potato to ruffle it up, which makes lovely crisp brown ridges. Sprinkle with cheese if liked.

6. Cook in the oven for 30 minutes until the potato is browning and the gravy is bubbling up around the edges (or freeze at previous step and cook from frozen for about 50 minutes).

I like my Shepherd's Pie with peas, grave made from the leftover meat juices and more HP sauce.

Jazzing it up

Shepherd's Pie can be jazzed any ways, especially if you want to up the vegetable count. 

Grating a carrot into the mince is a good way of hiding extra vegetables. Adding peas, sweetcorn  and chopped carrot to the mince makes for a colourful one pot pie, and you can use a little less mince. You can also play with the topping, adding sweet potato or swede to the mash. A crispy leek and breadcrumb topping is another alternative.

Unanswered Shepherd's Pie questions

Why does this taste completely different from "mince with mashed potatoes"? Even with exactly the same ingredients, something magic happens in the oven...

Why can I eat so much of it? 

Back to tradition with a batch of cheese scones

After last week's exotic excursion to South America, this week I felt like baking something simple (jet lag) and traditionally English. And what's more English than scones? My youngest sister Hatty makes the best scones in Yorkshire - maybe the best scones in England but it's hard to tell because they never last long enough to make it out of Yorkshire. If you want one/three, you can get them in her cafe, the Jam Jar in Ripon. I think cheese scones make a regular appearance on Thursdays, which is market day.

People often ask Hatty for her scone recipe, expecting it to be some long held family secret. In fact, it's from the free recipe book that comes with Be-Ro flour, although no one ever believes it. And as you'll see from my attempt, there's clearly some other magic involved...

Mum's had a well-thumbed copy of this book for as long as I can remember (i.e. the 70s!); my copy is a bit newer but the recipes are exactly the same.

Ingredients

(makes about 8)

175g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp mustard powder

Pinch of salt and pepper

25g butter or margarine

75g grated cheese

1 egg

2 tbsp milk

Method

- Mix the flour and seasonings together, then rub in the cold fat

- Stir in the cheese, keeping a bit to sprinkle over the top

- Mix together the egg and milk, then add to the dry mix to make a soft dough

- Roll out and cut out, either triangles or using a fluted cutter (but see the Tips section later on this). Brush with a little milk or egg and sprinkle with the leftover cheese

- Bake at 220C for 10 to 15 minutes until golden brown.

Now embarrassingly, you'll notice that despite the camera angle, these scones are biscuit flat! 

The Bearded Argentinian assures me that they taste delicious, but if I want to practice with a few more batches, he'll do his best to test them all. There I was thinking that scone-making was in my genes, and out come these failures... So I did a bit of research:

Tips for not making flat scones:

- Firstly, I had no idea there was such variety in recipes: raising agents, flour types, eggs vs no eggs, lard vs butter vs margarine...

- Most likely, the butter had something to do with it, as I only had spreadable butter to hand, and cold hard block butter is probably better

- Consulting the scone oracle Hatty, you don't need to roll them out either, just pat the dough down and leave them much thicker (can't believe this is against what the BeRo book says!). Then they might turn out more like these beauties:

(https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g209973-d3906140-Reviews-The_Jam_Jar-Ripon_North_Yorkshire_England.html?m=19904)

Four Hobs on the Road... and someone turns 70

It may come as a surprise, but the Bearded Argentinian is actually from Argentina and not Mexico as commonly mistaken. This week we are are visiting his parents in Buenos Aires, as his Dad turns 70, which is link enough for a 70's blog in my opinion. Below is the "recipe" for an asado, the closest translation being barbecue, but as you'll see, this is a million miles away (literally) from charcoal incinerated burgers...

The first step in this recipe is "Go to Argentina" as you'll never get the right quality or cuts of meat anywhere else. Also you need one of these:

I'm referring to the parilla, a brick construction found in pretty much all Argentinian gardens (not the man, who is Carlos, the birthday boy himself).

This asado took place two days before the big event (which was 4 times bigger) and was a kind of Sunday lunch for the family, including our friend Nico, who abandoned his wife and children for the weekend and travelled over 900 miles from Patagonia just to help us eat all this food.

Ingredients 

(serves 5, with leftovers)

10 chorizos

1 morcilla (a large sausage of black pudding)

Many kilos of asado (beef rib)

Many kilos of pork rib

Method

- Make a fire at one end of the parilla with dry wood (not green wood, which smokes too much. Yes, I have been lectured on this topic). Look, there's a separate bit for the fire:

- As the wood burns, move the hot white ashes from the grate of the fire to the grill. It takes about 2 hours to get enough ashes to start cooking. I strongly suggest opening a beer. 

- Add all the meat to the grill. The bars of the grill are v-shaped so that the fat runs away from the meat. I'm not proposing this is by any means healthy, but, you know, it could be worse...

- While the meat is cooking, have some picada - this basically means "food to pick on" so is usually cut into handy bite size pieces, and can be cheese, salami, olives, aubergine, breadsticks etc. Try really hard not to eat too much though, there is a lot of food coming.

- When the meat is golden brown on the bottom, turn and keep cooking. I'd be very surprised if you're not already on your third beer by now - it's thirsty work.

- Serve the chorizo and morcilla first, with green salad, potato salad and chimichurri. Oh, and some Malbec (nearly forgot, must be all the beer)

- Next, serve the beef..

... then finally the pork.

- Invariably, the meal will be followed by an intense conversation about politics and/or football. This is called "sobre mesa", literally "over the table", and is a good opportunity for non-Spanish speaking guests to quietly slip into a meat coma. I usually only respond to "un poco de vino tinto?" during this stage.

- Finish off with 6 flavours of ice cream. Not a choice of 6, a scoop of each. I'm not even joking. Here's an unrelated photo of our Goddaughter Amandita elegantly eating an ice cream:

Buen apetito! You might also need the phrase "estoy llena"... (I'm full!). Note, you will be asked at least three times if you're sure about this. 

Cook's tip: as a shortcut, just make friends with an Argentinian and they'll do all this hard work for you. I should point out that the Bearded Argentinian is *more than a friend* but there's no need to go to extremes.

Accidental bake off spin off: meringues

This week I thought I'd go back to basics and make meringues. I wanted to make them like my Granny used to, slightly chewy in the middle, so I used my newly acquired 1976 St Michael* "All Colour" cookery book, supplemented with some tips from Perfect Felicity Cloake. 

I can't tell you how rare it is to find a 70s cookbook with photos in! 

*St Michael used to be the M&S food brand for those too young to remember. And was always written in italics.

Ingredients

4 eggs whites (large) - possibly left over from making ice cream, see later

200g golden caster sugar

1/2 lemon

Method

- Spread the sugar on a lined baking tray and cook in the oven at 200C until melting at the edges. This makes the resulting meringues slightly beige rather than pure white but is worth it for the flavour

- Wipe the inside of a very clean bowl with the half lemon to remove any grease so the egg whites whisk up properly

- Whisk the egg whites (with a gadget if you have one) until foamy, then add the hot sugar, keeping the whisking going until the mixture is glossy and holds it shape 

- Spoon or pipe the mixture onto a lined baking tray and bake in the oven at 100C for 3 to 4 hours. This might be the lowest setting for your oven, and if they start to brown, open the door to cool down. If your oven is like mine, 60C is the "lowest setting" and they never cook at that temperature so turn it up a bit! 

I had nothing to do for 4 hours so here's a photo of them in the oven...

 - Serve with whipped cream or ice cream.  At the Bearded Argentinian's request we had made chocolate and dulce de leche ice cream (using lots of egg yolks, hence the egg white glut) which went brilliantly with the meringues, either as a classic sandwich combo or as a crumbly topping.

Meringues can be tricky (she writes, never having made them), but these turned out perfectly crunchy on the outside and a bit chewy tight in the middle. Hopefully those people on GBBO who struggled with their meringue in this week's Signature Bake have picked up some tips ;)

Having conquered the basic meringue, I might graduate to lemon meringue pie or even basked Alaska - watch this space!