The boy (otherwise known as the ravenous teenager) has been pretty good about food. We've never been authoritarian about what he eats, but neither have I volunteered to buy and cook nutritionally worthless trash. OK, with a teenager it's a bit late to inculcate good nutrition by pure habit, but we've at least never allowed there to be any food conflicts.
I think it's easier because actually we eat some things like burgers quite a lot - but then we make them ourselves. If he wants a bacon double cheese burger then that's fine by me: we start with minced steak, dry cured bacon and local cheese and take it from there. It's the work of minutes and anyone whose taste isn't completely atrophied by sodium and sugar overload will always prefer a home made real burger to anything the fast food giants can serve up.
There has been one thing though that our angel (as in fallen) has occasionally pined for and recently I decided to see if I could satisfy his craving. He wanted chicken nuggets and fries.
Fries, well no problem - I cook them a quite a bit. But I persuaded him on this occasion to be satisfied with wedges because they're easier to produce and in any case I would be using the deep fryer for the chicken. He was so excited by the prospect of his nuggets that he agreed and didn't complain at all about cutting some floury potatoes (skins on of course) into wedges and dousing them with seasoning: salt, pepper and Tabasco on this occasion. I got on with the chicken.
I decided to use skinless breast for his nuggets but I wanted to fry some chicken for me and the big bloke as well and so I got some thighs (with skin) too.
The nuggets started with a quick bath in seasoned milk for one inch by two inch strips of breast meat. Once they'd absorbed a bit I dipped them in seasoned flour then seasoned egg and then finally when they were all sticky and gooey shook them up in a plastic bag full of - you guessed it - seasoned matzo meal (I used the fine ground). OK, so that's seasoned-just-about-everything but I wanted him to be impressed by them and I knew it was still less sodium than you'd find on the coating of any commercial nugget.
When they'd rested a bit, I fried the strips in deep vegetable oil for a few minutes in smallish batches and let them drain on kitchen paper. The wedges took twenty minutes in the oven at a quite high heat. To balance things a bit further nutritionally I made coleslaw to go with. (Carrots, white cabbage, onion and vinaigrette (mayo coleslaw is gross) or red cabbage, raisins, apple and vinaigrette).
Ravenous teenager loved them. I know because not only did he scarf two breasts worth of nuggets but he even told me so. It doesn't get much more rewarding than that.
Meanwhile, for those who are interested, our fried chicken went like this: poach the thighs in milk with half an onion studded with a few cloves, two bay leaves a few squashed cloves of garlic and some peppercorns. I gave them twenty minutes at a bubbling simmer. Why did I poach you ask? Two reasons: first, you'll lose a lot of fat to the poaching liquid and second the much thicker thighs on the bone (as opposed to the boy's breasts (fnar...boy's breasts!)) will be more difficult to cook through thoroughly by deep frying alone. If you poach them first you reduce the chances of biting into one and sucking blood. After poaching they got exactly the same coating treatment as the breast meat had and then I fried them off. I started them at a slightly lower heat in the deep fryer and then raised it towards the end of cooking (no more than 10 minutes) to get the colour right. If you're unsure about the cookedness of your chicken joints then just haul one out and poke with a nice sharp knife to the bone: you should see no red.
The big ravenous guy likes the fried chicken but despite recognising the nutritional superiority of mine over the Colonel's he sometimes observes that it's a tad drier (ie there's no fat dripping down his chin). To placate him, I make sure he's got a well lubricated salad on the side: it seems to work.
People have suggested that it's easier to bake the chicken joints, but then again they've suggested that I use the fast food chicken joint round the corner, so what do people know?
I'm not in this foodie life to treat food neurotically, as though eating in the modern world were some high risk occupation. I don't self-diagnose with allergies and intolerances; I don't think organic is necessarily healthier or plain better; I love red meat. However, I'm convinced that eating processed food on a regular basis is injurious to health and more importantly to taste. Weaning the ravenous teenager gently off the high sodium, high sugar, chemically "enhanced" diet he was used to has been surprisingly easy and we've done it without turning him into a life loathing, food despising health nut. It can't be a bad thing, surely? Maybe I'm just feeling defensive.
Monday 23 July 2007
Daube know why
I've sometimes wondered why I associate daubes with summer. They're pretty substantial slow cooked dishes that one might expect to appeal in winter but whatever the reason, it's in summer that I think about cooking them.
The perfect occasion to eat a daube is lunch when you have a free afternoon: you don't want to have anything to do afterwards. Probably lamb is the classic meat, but there are some recipes that use beef, probably a nod to the beef raised in the camargue. This is the daube that I remember most from childhood and that I cook most often now. It's not rocket science to cook this dish but it absolutely must be cooked long and slow, otherwise you will end up with tough beef. This is a slightly unusual version because there is no marinading of the meat.
The meat: I use the best steak short of filet that I can but with reasonably careful cooking chuck does fine.
The wine: a bottle of drinkable languedoc red - I've used fitou, minervois, corbieres.
Lardons.
Onions.
Carrots.
Olives: nicoises, pitted, around two small handfulls.
Stock.
Herbes de province or a bouquet garni: at least bay, thyme, parsley. Either of these work fine for me.
Juniper berries.
Two salted anchovies.
Orange peel.
Garlic.
Salt and pepper.
Flour.
Olive oil.
Cut the meat to the size that you like and dust it in seasoned flour. (I put the flour in a bag, season it, add the beef and shake).
A few pieces at a time fry the beef for a very few moments in the oil in a heavy bottom casserole. If you don't have a casserole you can use on the stove top use a frying pan.
Put the beef to one side add first the lardons then the onions to the remaining oil. When the onions are soft but have no colour add the garlic, the anchovies (you can chop them if you like) and then the sliced carrots.
Return the beef to the pan and add the herbs or bouquet garni, pound the juniper berries once to crack them and add them followed by the orange peel.
Let these all cook for a few moments on a gentle to medium flame and then add the pitted olives. When these are mixed in add one cup of stock and then enough red wine to cover the daube - I usually end up using around two thirds of a bottle but you can use more or less as you need or use more stock and less wine. You want it to come to the boil now just a minute.
Now you can add pepper, but I recommend leaving salt until you are close to serving - remember you have added anchovies and olives.
The trick now is to cover the pan, set it in the oven on the lowest flame and leave it for a few hours. If you do this then even cheaper cuts of meat will achieve a melting tenderness.
When you return to your daube you may find that the sauce isn't as thick as you would like, in which case you can add a lump or two of beurre manie - and bring the daub quickly to the boil on the stove top for the shortest time possible then simmering to cook out the flour. I don't usually bother - the two ravenous guys I cook for will slurp up the sauce thickened or not.
I would serve this with noodles or mashed potatoes or maybe rice (red rice of course...). As an alternative bulk out, I sometimes cut a good baton or baguette (or ficelle or n'importe quel pain) in to 3 cm thick slices, take the lid off the daube and put the bread on top for the last fourty minutes or so of cooking - it helps to baste each slice with a little sauce once or twice.
Looking at this recipe which is certainly typical of the daubs we ate at home when I was a kid, I realise that it's neither one thing nor the other. It's made with beef and olives but it's not boeuf guardiane nor is it marinaded like the typical daubes de Provence. But it's what my mother and grandmother (and all my aunts) served up regularly in summer. As if a plate of this with noodles wouldn't be enough to ensure a sleepy afternoon, I remember that we'd often have a salad before and sometimes another vegetable dish - fenouille braisee or les farcis and then cheese and fruit or dessert to follow. Heaven knows how we managed it without being obese as kids!
The perfect occasion to eat a daube is lunch when you have a free afternoon: you don't want to have anything to do afterwards. Probably lamb is the classic meat, but there are some recipes that use beef, probably a nod to the beef raised in the camargue. This is the daube that I remember most from childhood and that I cook most often now. It's not rocket science to cook this dish but it absolutely must be cooked long and slow, otherwise you will end up with tough beef. This is a slightly unusual version because there is no marinading of the meat.
The meat: I use the best steak short of filet that I can but with reasonably careful cooking chuck does fine.
The wine: a bottle of drinkable languedoc red - I've used fitou, minervois, corbieres.
Lardons.
Onions.
Carrots.
Olives: nicoises, pitted, around two small handfulls.
Stock.
Herbes de province or a bouquet garni: at least bay, thyme, parsley. Either of these work fine for me.
Juniper berries.
Two salted anchovies.
Orange peel.
Garlic.
Salt and pepper.
Flour.
Olive oil.
Cut the meat to the size that you like and dust it in seasoned flour. (I put the flour in a bag, season it, add the beef and shake).
A few pieces at a time fry the beef for a very few moments in the oil in a heavy bottom casserole. If you don't have a casserole you can use on the stove top use a frying pan.
Put the beef to one side add first the lardons then the onions to the remaining oil. When the onions are soft but have no colour add the garlic, the anchovies (you can chop them if you like) and then the sliced carrots.
Return the beef to the pan and add the herbs or bouquet garni, pound the juniper berries once to crack them and add them followed by the orange peel.
Let these all cook for a few moments on a gentle to medium flame and then add the pitted olives. When these are mixed in add one cup of stock and then enough red wine to cover the daube - I usually end up using around two thirds of a bottle but you can use more or less as you need or use more stock and less wine. You want it to come to the boil now just a minute.
Now you can add pepper, but I recommend leaving salt until you are close to serving - remember you have added anchovies and olives.
The trick now is to cover the pan, set it in the oven on the lowest flame and leave it for a few hours. If you do this then even cheaper cuts of meat will achieve a melting tenderness.
When you return to your daube you may find that the sauce isn't as thick as you would like, in which case you can add a lump or two of beurre manie - and bring the daub quickly to the boil on the stove top for the shortest time possible then simmering to cook out the flour. I don't usually bother - the two ravenous guys I cook for will slurp up the sauce thickened or not.
I would serve this with noodles or mashed potatoes or maybe rice (red rice of course...). As an alternative bulk out, I sometimes cut a good baton or baguette (or ficelle or n'importe quel pain) in to 3 cm thick slices, take the lid off the daube and put the bread on top for the last fourty minutes or so of cooking - it helps to baste each slice with a little sauce once or twice.
Looking at this recipe which is certainly typical of the daubs we ate at home when I was a kid, I realise that it's neither one thing nor the other. It's made with beef and olives but it's not boeuf guardiane nor is it marinaded like the typical daubes de Provence. But it's what my mother and grandmother (and all my aunts) served up regularly in summer. As if a plate of this with noodles wouldn't be enough to ensure a sleepy afternoon, I remember that we'd often have a salad before and sometimes another vegetable dish - fenouille braisee or les farcis and then cheese and fruit or dessert to follow. Heaven knows how we managed it without being obese as kids!
My cheating art
I'm not a great fan of processed food - at least not the mass produced, stacked high on supermarket shelves kind. It may be inconsistent or even reactionary, but at the same time I'm all in favour of the artisanal cured pig product/home pickle kind of processed food.
Despite this and even though this is my first foodiefan blog I have decided to talk about a couple of cookery cheats that proved useful recently and that involve buying processed products.
This weekend, I was called on to barbecue at short notice and with little time to shop. This late in the summer it's not always easy to come up with something new to grill. We've done burgers, ribs, steaks, lamb and so on. A quick trip to the supermarket (Sunday - no real shops open) could have been dispiriting but I realised that being alone and unobserved (thank you Oscar) I could ring the foody changes by cunning culinary fraud.
There wasn't much good meat on offer but I found some OK looking chicken breasts and leg quarters. Chicken has to be handled carefully on the barbie but I had an idea that just might make it worth it.
In the World Food section I found a selection of Patak's indian sauces. I chose the medium Tikka Masala. The ingredients list didn't look bad at all - two chemical additives mentioned but they were lactic acid and acetic acid - nothing that looks too scarey to me. On the same aisle I found there was a big choice of flat breads - rotis/chapatis, tortillas, khubz etc. I took the chapatis. Next I hit the dairy cabinet and picked out a 500 ml carton of Greek yoghurt (sheep's milk, naturally). In the vegetable section I got a a few onions, garlic, a bit of fresh ginger, cucumber, tomatoes, mint and coriander.
OK, now I can see some people thinking that this is a lot of ingredients to cheat with but I think cheating should be evaluated with respect to the goal: it's more effort to blag a PhD than a Microsoft certification but it's worth the extra effort.
Back home I skinned the chicken pieces; diced the breasts (biiiig chunks); jointed the leg quarters into drumsticks and thighs and slashed the flesh of each piece a couple of times. Then I mixed the jar of Patak's sauce with the yoghurt and added some chopped garlic, ginger, mint and coriander and an onion. Into this orange gunk went the chicken.
Now, I think that if you have acid in your mix you need to limit the amount of time chicken spends marinading. More than a couple of hours and the texture gets yucky as the chicken cooks in the acid bath.
After a couple of hours then, I had the grill fired up, the breast chunks were threaded on skewers and placed over the coals and the on-the-bone joints were laid out on the higher of the two grilling platforms. I let the skewers grill until they were cooked and showing typical tandoori style charring while the on the bone pieces, I cooked slower to start with and then moved over the coals to char after they'd cooked for a half hour. Never take chances grilling chicken - make sure it's cooked through thoroughly.
I served the lot up with chapatis that had been oven warmed (couldn't bother with the tava) and a tomato cucumber and onion salad with mint and coriander. They went down amazingly well. I allowed everyone to think that I'd been grinding spices all morning and hid the Patak's jar away.
My next cheating art event was an emergency dinner. I had a piece of pork loin boned and skinned but not rolled. I could have roasted this a la mode and served with roast potatoes and so on but I wanted something a little bit less obvious as we had guests. So, I was back at the World Food section and this time I bought two jars of Walkerswood Run Down sauce.
Back home I took a knife and stabbed the joint of pork a few times all around and then put it into a plastic bag with one jar of the run down sauce. I left this for most of the afternoon. When it came time to cook, I put the joint in a roasting tin with a couple of sliced onions and then poured the remaining jar of sauce over it. The joint went into the oven for half an hour a pound and every half hour or so I added a wine glass or two of water and stirred up the pan. I ended up with a really good pork roast and by deglazing the pan over the stove with more water a fantastic gravy. We ate this with rice and peas and steamed kale. I suspect that any Caribbean cooks will be horrified if they hear about this but it was a great meal and a real change from plain old roast pork for little extra effort.
So, that's it - confession time is over. I live with my shame only because my cheating didn't involve any tins of Campbell's mushroom soup. If you don't believe that cheating can work, you should try these two food frauds and see if it changes your mind.
Despite this and even though this is my first foodiefan blog I have decided to talk about a couple of cookery cheats that proved useful recently and that involve buying processed products.
This weekend, I was called on to barbecue at short notice and with little time to shop. This late in the summer it's not always easy to come up with something new to grill. We've done burgers, ribs, steaks, lamb and so on. A quick trip to the supermarket (Sunday - no real shops open) could have been dispiriting but I realised that being alone and unobserved (thank you Oscar) I could ring the foody changes by cunning culinary fraud.
There wasn't much good meat on offer but I found some OK looking chicken breasts and leg quarters. Chicken has to be handled carefully on the barbie but I had an idea that just might make it worth it.
In the World Food section I found a selection of Patak's indian sauces. I chose the medium Tikka Masala. The ingredients list didn't look bad at all - two chemical additives mentioned but they were lactic acid and acetic acid - nothing that looks too scarey to me. On the same aisle I found there was a big choice of flat breads - rotis/chapatis, tortillas, khubz etc. I took the chapatis. Next I hit the dairy cabinet and picked out a 500 ml carton of Greek yoghurt (sheep's milk, naturally). In the vegetable section I got a a few onions, garlic, a bit of fresh ginger, cucumber, tomatoes, mint and coriander.
OK, now I can see some people thinking that this is a lot of ingredients to cheat with but I think cheating should be evaluated with respect to the goal: it's more effort to blag a PhD than a Microsoft certification but it's worth the extra effort.
Back home I skinned the chicken pieces; diced the breasts (biiiig chunks); jointed the leg quarters into drumsticks and thighs and slashed the flesh of each piece a couple of times. Then I mixed the jar of Patak's sauce with the yoghurt and added some chopped garlic, ginger, mint and coriander and an onion. Into this orange gunk went the chicken.
Now, I think that if you have acid in your mix you need to limit the amount of time chicken spends marinading. More than a couple of hours and the texture gets yucky as the chicken cooks in the acid bath.
After a couple of hours then, I had the grill fired up, the breast chunks were threaded on skewers and placed over the coals and the on-the-bone joints were laid out on the higher of the two grilling platforms. I let the skewers grill until they were cooked and showing typical tandoori style charring while the on the bone pieces, I cooked slower to start with and then moved over the coals to char after they'd cooked for a half hour. Never take chances grilling chicken - make sure it's cooked through thoroughly.
I served the lot up with chapatis that had been oven warmed (couldn't bother with the tava) and a tomato cucumber and onion salad with mint and coriander. They went down amazingly well. I allowed everyone to think that I'd been grinding spices all morning and hid the Patak's jar away.
My next cheating art event was an emergency dinner. I had a piece of pork loin boned and skinned but not rolled. I could have roasted this a la mode and served with roast potatoes and so on but I wanted something a little bit less obvious as we had guests. So, I was back at the World Food section and this time I bought two jars of Walkerswood Run Down sauce.
Back home I took a knife and stabbed the joint of pork a few times all around and then put it into a plastic bag with one jar of the run down sauce. I left this for most of the afternoon. When it came time to cook, I put the joint in a roasting tin with a couple of sliced onions and then poured the remaining jar of sauce over it. The joint went into the oven for half an hour a pound and every half hour or so I added a wine glass or two of water and stirred up the pan. I ended up with a really good pork roast and by deglazing the pan over the stove with more water a fantastic gravy. We ate this with rice and peas and steamed kale. I suspect that any Caribbean cooks will be horrified if they hear about this but it was a great meal and a real change from plain old roast pork for little extra effort.
So, that's it - confession time is over. I live with my shame only because my cheating didn't involve any tins of Campbell's mushroom soup. If you don't believe that cheating can work, you should try these two food frauds and see if it changes your mind.
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