Beef Stew with Organic Vegetables.

Shock! Horror! An actual blog post! This blog, despite my intentions of doing NaNoWriMo, and of using it for entries too long for tumblr, has lain abandoned for far too long (I ended up needing to google to remember what platform I started it on!) nevertheless, I'm back, and with a blog entry! With pictures!

Beef stew with pearl barley, portebello mushroom, swede, carrots, potatoes and spring greens.

We join the action fairly late in the game, I've already made the stew at this point, but stew is rarely photogenic. I browned the meat in one pan and onions and garlic in another (everything has to be separate for my love who has allergies) and then added half the meat to the onions once they had softened. You want to give the garlic less time than the onions so it doesn't colour too much and become bitter.  

Wait for the meat to become brown, without burning. The browning is Maillard reactions at work and that's what gives you the lovely colour and flavour. I was frying all this in butter, but a slick of oil will do just as well. For the next part you do want butter though, a nice pat of it to melt over the meat and the onions before you sift in some flour. I'll admit that at least half the time I just shake some in from the bag, but sifting will make it less prone to lumps. Stir this vigorously until all the flour is combined with the butter and the meat grease, it will coat everything in the pan and that's fine, look for a texture like wet sand. Some people find it easier to add more butter and thus have a wetter roux (that flour and butter mixture you just made, the thing that thickens most stews and gravies and sauces, such a versatile little thing) 

Now add boiling water, a little at a time until you have a floury paste, stiring often and breaking up any lumps. There will come a point where you can just add the rest of the water, just don't do it too soon or you'll end up with lumps of flour floating in your stew. (there are ways to fix that if it does happen, but it's a lot of hassle, small lumps are ok, they'll cook out) You want your pan about two thirs full. Add bay leaf, pepper corns (I tend to open up my pepper grinder and take a pinch of the crushed corns at the top) a glug of Worcestershire sauce, a couple of beef oxo (or other stock cubes) and a generous pour of dark soy sauce, pop a lid on and leave it to simmer.

Peel and chop your root veg, I try and add the ones that are hardest, and take longest to cook, first. So, swede, then carrots, then potato in this case. Leave that to cook for 30 mins or so before adding your pear barley and chopped mushrooms. the barley is a great thickener and grows quite a lot so don't add more than a handful or two. leave it for another hour and a half, checking that the water level doesn't get too low. I'd suggest going back every 20mins or so, once that barely is cooking it runs the risk of sticking, so make sure to give it a good stir and scrape everything up from the bottom!

Now, your stew would be fine, and mighty tasty, at this point, but I like to have something fresh and green in mine. So, grab your spring greens.

The first thing my grandmother allowed me to do in her kitchen was to tear the center stems out of spring greens and kale.

 I'm not sure she let me cut anything in her kitchen until I was at catering college, she's mightly particular about how things are done! 

Tear those centre stems out and any particularly thick veins. Lie the leaves flat on top of each other in as neat a pile as you can manage and then form them into a tight roll. This will help you get a nice thin shred (if you did it properly it would be a chiffonade this?...not so much.)

Wash it well and add it to your stew

At the back you can see the version missing onion, garlic, pearl barley, mushroom and greens. 

The things we do for love!

Then just pop a lid on and in five minutes you're good to go!

Hearty, meaty, warm. Just the thing we needed on a cold January night.

 

All it needs is fresh ground salt and black pepper, and maybe a swirl of good wholegrain mustard or horseradish sauce.

All the veg other than the potatoes are from my veg box that arrived today, from Riverford along with blood oranges (such a treat for me!) 

Day 1

Ok, I procrastinated for hours this morning, wondering why I decided to start this insane project. I half considered throwing it in and doing a free-write/erotic fiction...but that would be cowardly, I know this is going to be good for me, and I know I'll feel proud of myself afterwards. But damn is it hard. It didn't help that I woke up with an aching back, and no painkillers. So I've decided to treat this as more of a blog, so I can count my bitching and whining towards my word-count (this is possibly cheating...but meh...) but I have started reading. Tomorrow I will do my best to get something up on the side bar that will tell you what I've been reading...or maybe I'll set up (yet another) tumblr and just post the links there, and have a feed of that running to the site... either way, a project for when I really can't stand to read anymore and don't have the will to write.

But I have started reading. Just. So far what I've gleaned is that people are busy and it's really really difficult to make time for food and cooking, even when it's you passion. But I already knew that, and if you didn't you must have your head under a rock because there are dozens of people telling you the exact same thing. Chefs are notorious for not cooking and eating properly, and especially not for pleasure, they graze, they taste and they grab a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the fifteen minute break they have. And the last thing they want to do when they get home, or when they have a rare, glorious day off, is cook. Being cooked for is a joy, especially when people don't feel the need to impress, don't feel that cooking for someone who knows good food means that you have to stretch yourself. Basic, simple. Good food, of the sort we don't get to eat often is what just about every chef will tell you they crave in their off hours.

I should add a disclaimer here, I'm not a Chef, I grew up in a restaurant until the age of eight, my mother was a Chef, my father was front of house, I'm half Italian from his side. I did a year at catering college before I went to university. I think about food all the time, all the time. There is so much I want to try, but I'm in my 20's so what I actually end up eating is mostly things that are cheap, and quick and can be eaten while I use my computer. Some days I hate myself for this, I do really believe that food should be respected and focused on, that it should be a feast for the senses, accompanied by, if anything, light music and good conversation. But I guess we all have ideals we don't live up to, but at least I try to sometimes.

I need to make stock again, Carol's lamb stock post makes me so jealous and hungry all at once. Stock is one of the simple, beautiful things that make food so much better, and as Carol mentions, it makes your house smell fantastic.

http://bourdainmediumraw.com/

Wow, reading through the Medium Raw competition submissions is so rewarding. So glad that the email landed in my inbox telling me the competition was closed and pointing me towards the various essays submitted. The one I just read, On the Origin of Cooking articulates so well something I think about on a daily basis. What I am doing, the preparation of food, is something human being have been doing for thousands of years. It's why today, even though I felt crummy I made risotto, with peas and saffron my dad brought me over from Italy. And it filled me, it nourished me, it reassured me that even though I'd failed to write a single word so far I was still capable of creating something. Something good. Food connects us, it reminds us of people, places and times that are far off. And in a very real sense, it's part of what makes us human.

I get the feeling that reading summer inspired posts as the nights draw in and I have to wrap myself up in my fluffiest blanket with a cup of coffee is some sort of masochism. It's far to cold for me to actually want to eat ice cream, but I'm salivating at the idea of Banana Ice Cream For Breakfast. Such an awesome idea and if I'm ever considered responsible enough to have my nephews (or the children of my friends, seriously, about half my friends seem to have popped out sprogs without me noticing) I'm going to feed them this for breakfast in the summer, maybe with some toasted granola or nuts scattered over it. Especially in love with it because it doesn't require an ice cream maker. I've been pining after one for years even more so since the perfect scoop came out and the blogosphere was whipped into a Lebovitz driven ice cream frenzy. I hear tell that there are people who have been given ice cream makers as gifts and never used them. Who leave them in the backs of cupboards to get dusty and forlorn. If I knew one of these people I might strangle them...or at least pander to them until I could carry their ice cream maker away with me.

What I really lust after is a table top model, one that doesn't need you to freeze a huge bowl that wouldn't fit in my freezer even if it was empty for up to two days (!) before you make ice cream. Who has the forethought to plan like that? Or do people just keep it in there permanently just-in-case? Either way sooooo not appropriate for my lifestyle. I cook on a whim, which has lead to 3am brownies, and my mother waking up to fresh bread when I was jet lagged (surprisingly she didn't complain :P) so yes, a tabletop model that I can just plug in and within a short time have a couple of bowls of ice cream, oh how perfect that would be!

Until then granitas and ice-pops will have to suffice to get me through the hot months (which right now seem a million miles away in any case) I may have to go any buy some bananas however...

chestnut flour sounds amazing and versatile and makes me so curious. I've never done much with chestnuts beyond eating them roasted. I realise now in fact that I've never done that at home. I really must see if the market has any (possible) and try my hand at it...cob nuts too, though I'm pretty sure I'm too far north for them, maybe I can find someone who'll buy me some down south and hand them over when I visit (or I could try searching some out myself, but I'm often pressed for time)

Blood Oranges should be in season again soon, but they're another thing I rarely see up here. I should point out I live in a fairly small town in the north west of England and the locals are hardly the most...adventurous of eaters. But blood oranges remind me of winter and Christmas and my childhood, I can remember my dad peeling them, and being given segments to much on. They're one of the foods I can never get enough of and I'll eat until I glut myself.

Chickpeas are another food I basically haven't eaten outside of hummus since I was young, and looking at the recipe for chickpea salad I really don't know why. They absorb flavours so well and their firm yet yielding texture is really wonderful.

Prawn sandwiches sound like an excellent NaNo lunch for next week...

Biscotti are another childhood thing, they were just ubiquitous, I never thought about them much, though we always served Amaretti biscuits with coffee at the restaurant. I remember because I didn't like them much, but I always wanted to watch dad set fire to the paper wrappings so they'd float into the air like little lanterns. They came in huge, square, red tins. One of which sat on the bar, along with a huge slab of parmesan with two special little knives stuck into it. But back to biscotti, as a kid I always found them too hard, even dipped into coffee or milk, but now I love them. I think I'm going to have to make a few batches as Christmas presents. The word biscotti (and indeed biscuit) means “twice cooked” and these literally are, once as a large loaf and then again as individual slices which helps them to take on the characteristic dryness. I have blurred but fond memories of Italian delicatessens with the huge jars of biscuits lining the top of the glass counted, underneath which meat and salami glistened. Salami and prosciutto hung from the ceiling, as well as panettone and pandoro at Christmas. The big squareish boxes hanging up or stacked into huge pyramids is just another part of the closing of the year for me. It's the time of year when I can legitimately eat a slice of cake covered in a drift of icing sugar, dipped into sweet black coffee and call it breakfast. That makes me very very happy. The cakes are huge but they make excellent bread and butter pudding, decadent french toast, and if they hang around long enough to go stale they can be perked up a little by toasting them under the grill and spreading with butter (also a great way of using up left over brandy butter after Christmas)

salted butter caramels look like another wonderful gift idea, they're the sort of thing I absolutely love, but I worry that if I make a batch I'll practically inhale them before I get round to giving them to anyone. Plus I have an abject fear of candy making after seeing first hand the sort of burns you get from hot sugar. (it works like napalm, clinging and burning, and if you run it under cold water as you're supposed to for a burn the outside sets and forms a crust that keeps the heat of the inside in to continue burning you, seriously horrible stuff) but maybe this will be the year I conquer my fear. I'd need to buy a fair amount of equipment as well though, since I doubt the capability to hold hot sugar of any of my current pans.

I'm incredibly curious about Tonka beans, the flavour sounds too good to be true with notes of Cinnamon, vanilla almond and nutmeg. I'm going to do my best to track some down, the idea of them in cookies or added to hot chocolate sounds delicious. I'm intrigued (though a little dubious) at the recommendation to add them to an Italian tomato sauce, but perhaps I'll give that a go as well. Definitely going to track down the Thorntons tonka bean chocolate, perhaps as a reward for finishing the first week... sounds like a plan to me!

NaNoWriMo Project Outline

This is my NaNoWriMo blog.

From the 1st of November I will be aiming to post 2000 words a day on food and related topics. The plan is to read through the huge backlog of food and cooking related writing I have and write about what I learn, or find interesting. I might also end up writing some auto-biography or fiction, who knows! It's going to be an adventure and the main point is to get myself thinking/writing academically about food again. I'm not going to beat myself up about it if I don't reach the word target, though I'd dearly love to reach 50, 000 by the end of November; if I reach even half that I'll be pleased with myself, hell if I manage to read and write every day I'll be pleased with myself.

so there you are! more to come on November 1st.