Recipe CXLI - Judias Con Bacon y Zanahoria

In the long run, we come to a point where we need to ditch the rice. Today's recipe is a simple meal I was supposed to do with my daughter for a school assignment. But she, like all kids her age, have something against anything that may have once grown in a field. 

Unless it's called a potato. 

Anyway... it's such a simple thing to put together but makes it a pleasure to eat healthy, which is often the biggest problem with vegetables: they're often a very hard sell when you're not a dedicated vegan or vegetarian. 

Ingredients:

200g green beans, cut to your preferred size 

250g carrots, diced, sliced or cut into matchsticks 

150g bacon strips

1 large onion

6 cloves of garlic

A glass of white wine 

Olive oil 

Instructions:

Heat up the olive oil, add the onions and sweat for a couple of minutes. 

Add the beans and carrots, sweat some more.

Then the garlic, and put the lid on your pan on a low heat for 20 minutes. 

Add white wine if you want, just for a bit of sweetness.

I had mine with an Ibérico cutlet, but it's fine on its own as a starter.

(By the way, the kids had yesterday's spaghetti ragu from the fridge)

Enjoy!

Recipe CVIII - Cheese, Leek & Bacon Quiche

So, how long does it take me to write up a recipe? All week, actually; sometimes longer, depending if I have thought of something to do or not. Which is why I don't post every week any more - I do a lot of experimenting and some weeks I don't think it's good enough to post. Anyhow, I'd say it takes up to 5 days for a recipe to ferment in my head, about 2 hours shopping (sometimes more, if I have to go to a city for ingredients), and most of the afternoon making it, taking photos that don't reveal the chaos that is my kitchen, but then a good hour to upload photos and type up the recipe on here. So I hope you appreciate this one - I have to say it's one of my top ten, and I thoroughly enjoyed eating it after!

Ingredients:

For the pastry:

220g of plain flour, sifted

a pinch of salt

130g butter, chilled and cubed

1 medium-sized egg, beaten

A roll of clingfilm

Some baking beans for blind baking

For the filling:

You can make up your own, but here are mine:

200g bacon lardons, finely chopped

60g fresh cheese (I used the French sheep's cheese Brébiou but Cheddar, Manchego, Mahon, Pecorino, even Stilton would all be fine - just taste a couple at the cheese counter and take one)

1 onion, 1 leek, 3 spring onions, 3 cloves of garlic, (some courgette, optional), chopped

Some chives (optional)

3 eggs

200ml double cream

100ml single cream

Some fresh herbs

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions:

Heat the oven to 180°C and grease your pastry tin.

Make some pastry by putting the flour, butter, fresh from the fridge, or it won't work, and the beaten egg together and kneading it into a crumbly dough. Alternatively, put it in the mixer and pulse. Then wrap it up in clingfilm and let it prove for 30 to 40 minutes.

Afterwards, spread clingfilm on the countertop, put more on top of the pastry and roll it out until it is as wide as your baking tray. Put the pastry inside carefully and cut off the excess. Fill it with baking beans and blind bake it for about 20 minutes.

In the meantime, cut up all your vegetables and cheese into blocks, fry the bacon (bit of black pepper too), then remove and put on some kitchen tissue to drain the oil; do the same with the other vegetables. Then take the creams and eggs and mix them together to make a consistent gloop. Put the other ingredients in there, and spread them about until there are no clumps of one particular ingredient. 

Remove the pastry from the oven and let it cool so you can remove the beans. It should be quite hard now, so that when you spoon the creamy gloop into it, the base remains unaffected by getting wet.

Put the whole into the oven for between 30 and 45 minutes - mine needed 40. Make sure the quiche is cooked through by putting a knife into the middle. If it comes out clean, it's done. If not, put it back for more time.

I like to keep the cheese bits a little bigger than normal, as it makes the pleasurable experience of eating melted cheese as real as possible.

Recipe CV - Chicken Breast in Creamy Bacon and Mushroom Sauce

Sorry for the recent lack of posts - I've had quite a lot to do recently renovating the house, painting and whatnot, and then there's the little matter of work. But now I have a dry run through to October, so I hope to pick up a little more momentum...

This recipe is so easy and a real crowd pleaser, going really well alongside the rocket salad recipe of last time. I bought a metallic frying pan last year specifically for meats. One of those that gets rustier the longer you use them. They cook meat really well and I couldn't ever imagine not using one for this type of dinner. 

Ingredients:

2 to 4 chicken breasts

Some thinly diced bacon

An onion

Some sliced mushrooms

Some cream

Some black peppercorns

Some Italian pasta or Greek krithiraki, potatoes or rice

*no salt!!!

Instructions:

Slice the chicken breast exactly as you like it. I prefer large pieces for this, but there is something to be said for fork-sized pieces. Fry the chicken breast in a little olive oil. Keep turning and pressing all the time. Season the chicken with some of the pepper. Add the bacon and onions for about five minutes before transferring them to their own pan.

Add the mushrooms and a little more pepper. After some time you will need to add the cream. Do you want to reduce the sauce? Put it in early. Do you want to have a lot of cream? Put it in 5-10 minutes before serving.

In the meantime, boil the pasta, and keep turning the chicken!!

To present, this is the perfect recipe to think about ways of making the dish attractive and appetising. I like to serve the sauce in a round mini-bowl on the plate, so people can make up their minds where to pour it. Some like it on their meat, some on their side dishes, me all over...

The sauce is salty enough, so don't worry about that. It is just the base - do some experimenting: you could also add ground or whole green peppercorns, white wine or so many other things to it.

Recipe LXXV - Tagliatelle alla Poverina

Italian food is notoriously "safe" when it comes to adding spices. But the humble red chili pepper makes an entrance in this dish. It is quick to make, if you're looking for something that takes only a few minutes of cutting. A lot of Italian food comes out of a packet, and in this case, the spinach I used was frozen, as it's currently out of season.

Ingredients:
400g tagliatelle
2 red peperoncini (chili peppers)
2 small-to-medium onions
150g-200g lardons (Speck)
4 blocks of frozen spinach, or a handful of chopped fresh spinach
Some cloves of garlic
Half a small pot of cream
Salt and fresh ground pepper



Instructions:

Cut up your ingredients in the way you like to eat them. I like segmented onions and round, chopped chili peppers. Heat up a frying pan with olive oil. Fry the lardons on a fairly high heat for a few minutes, turn the heat down to medium then add the onions and chili peppers. Once they have softened, put in the spinach and garlic and cover the pan. On a low heat, allow the flavours to run. About seven minutes before serving, add the cream.



Put some salted water in a pan and once boiling, add the pasta. You can either mix the pasta with the rest, or you can use the pasta as a bed. I did the latter.



Enjoy it with a nice glass of medium white wine!

Recipe LXIII - Apple and Bacon Salad

As I haven't done a salad for a while, I thought the sunny period we had a few days ago was the ideal opportunity to make one. Salads are, for me, pretty unappetising, for two reasons. Firstly, they contain stuff that makes my lazy, feckless digestion system spring into action as if it had to catch up with lost time (a lot of which I am still owed by it), and secondly because it doesn't really fill me up. If I served a salad as main course, I would not be surprised if my guests then went to get some chips or a kebab... So if I were to make a salad, I would at least make sure it had something solid in it, otherwise what's the point of eating for enjoyment?!


Ingredients for the salad:
250g-400g bacon, >1cm thick
2 cloves of garlic
1-2 apples
A bunch of seedless grapes (I didn't use all the grapes in the photo)
A handful of field salad (lamb's lettuce)
Some hazelnuts
Ground black pepper

Ingredients for the vinaigrette:
2-5 tsps of mayonnaise
Some olive oil *
Some red wine vinegar *
Some cream *
5 stalks of chives
2-3 cloves of garlic (crushed)
Some ground black pepper and salt
* Equal amounts of olive oil and vinegar, triple the amount of cream

Instructions:
Cut up the bacon into long, thin slices, and fry them in a frying pan in olive oil or butter, put in the garlic just before the end, and set aside to cool. Alternatively, you can heat it up again just before serving.



Cut up your apples, slice the grapes in half, crush your pepper, scissor your chives. In a bowl, put the liquid ingredients (*) together with the mayonnaise and stir until it is a consistent mix.



Add the apples, chives, grapes, pepper, hazelnuts, the garlic, some pepper, and a very little salt. stir it all in, to make sure everything is saturated.



To prepare your salad bowl(s) for presentation, put in the field salad first. Then, pour the fruity vinaigrette over the top.



Then add the bacon.
You can either spread the bacon over the dish:



Or you can put it in the centre, like a kind of thin inner layer:



In any case, serve with something like boiled potatoes and eat al fresco!

Recipe II - Log of Beef in Bacon

Ingredients:
1 log of beef, about 25-30cm long, salted and peppered.
8 streaks of pancetta bacon (or similar)
Rosemary
Thyme
4 large cloves of garlic
5 porcini mushrooms
1 onion
A good sprinkling of ground pepper and salt
Golden syrup, or honey (or similar - I used dandelion syrup at Christmas)


Instructions:
Cut up everything except the meat and put into a blender until pulped.

It should look like this by the end:

Spread the pancetta out in strips on a cutting board and cover the middle part with the pulp.
With the rest, cover the underside of the log of meat with the pulp.

Wrap the beef in pancetta bacon, and pour the sticky solution on top.
Cook in the oven at 170°C for an hour.
Serve with roast potatoes (parboil then in the oven with goosefat) and carrots in breadcrumbs (cut in quarters lengthways and then in half, parboil, dip in egg yolk then breadcrumbs, cook with the potatoes).

Serve with a nice red Primitivo from southern Italy. Done!