Father's Day: Jack Daniel's Dipping Sauce

I have inherited a lot from my Dad, including a very similar taste in food. Which means that having my Dad round for dinner is a great excuse to cook what I'd really like to eat, if only I could be bothered to make it. This recipe for TGI Jack Daniel's sauce is one I had bookmarked, but had been a bit weary of attempting in case it tasted like a bad fake. Fortunately, it was worth the effort. It is still not close to the original Secret Recipe, which is good for me - I like having the excuse for a meal out. This recipe creates a rich dipping sauce, but you must serve it hot. Once it cools it creates a tar like substance, but it will liquefy again if you warm it through on the hob.

Ingredients:

1 tsp onion granules

1 tbsp tabasco sauce

2 tbsp red wine vinegar

2 tbsp worcestershire sauce

120ml Jack Daniel's (doubled from the Original Recipe)

300g dark brown soft sugar (a little less than the original)

240ml water

4 beef oxo cubes

Instructions:

Place all the ingredients into a saucepan, and on the smallest hob ring, turn the heat up high till the mixture starts to boil, stirring regularly.

Once the mixture is bubbling, turn the heat down, and stirring every few minutes let the sauce simmer for 15 minutes.

Serve in a pre-heated dish to help keep it warm. 

Enjoy!

Chocolate Fondles

Forget music being the food of love. Oh no, the food of love is definitely chocolate. And if we can all agree on that, you should believe me when I say these Chocolate Fondants equal serious heavy petting. 

This is a fabulous, prepare in advance, wow your guests, woo your guests, recipe. They taste scrumptious and are very simple to make. You can even freeze them far in advance and cook them from frozen, which is great if your main course is a little more complicated, meaning you can take it easy for dessert.

First, before I give you the recipe, you must promise me you will treat this recipe to the finest darkest chocolate. I'm not a chocolate snob I promise you, but this fondant just knows when you're feeding her the cheap stuff. Any chocolate with less than 70% cocoa solids produces sad, sickly tasting fondants. I use Tesco's 74% plain chocolate which is perfect.

For this recipe (from Gordon Ramsay), you will need 6-9 ramekins, or disposable pudding tins like these if you're too lazy to do the washing up! The recipe makes 6 fondants for me as I only have 6 ramekins. Gordon recommends using 9 moulds, so perhaps I overfill my little dishes but they still turn out lovely.

The nice thing is, you only need a few simple ingredients, which should already be in your cupboards, meaning this doesn't make it too expensive a dessert either.

Ingredients:

50g melted butter

A sprinkling of cocoa powder

200g 70% or higher dark chocolate

200g butter

200g golden caster sugar

8 eggs (4 whole eggs and 4 egg yolks. Use the leftover whites for meringues perhaps?)

200g plain flour

Instructions:

First you need to prepare your moulds. Good preparation at this stage means your Fondants will just ease right out when you go to serve them.  

After you melt your butter, using a pastry brush - brush the insides of your ramekins giving them a good coating. 

Put your ramekins in the fridge, have a coffee and 10 minutes later butter the ramekins again - using the same butter which should hopefully have also thickened slightly. You are aiming for them to look a little like this:

Whilst the butter is still damp, hold the ramekins at an angle above your cocoa powder, and using a spoon sprinkle the insides, turning the moulds till they are all coated, tip out the excess. Put back into the fridge once they are all prepared.

Melt the chocolate and the butter together using a bain marie and once melted put to one side.

Whilst the chocolate is cooling slightly, seperate your eggs and beat together the 4 eggs and 4 egg yolks till the  mixture froths slightly and the whisk leaves a trail behind it.

Sieve the flour into the eggs and beat well together.

Then fold in the melted chocolate and butter - a third at a time till the mixture is well combined.

Divide the mixture between your ramekins and place into the fridge to chill completely, or freeze until you wish to cook them.

To bake your fondants, preheat your fan oven to 180°C, place the fondants on a baking tray and cook on the middle shelf for 10-12 minutes. (15 minutes ish if cooking from frozen.)

The fondants should have risen a little, formed a crust on top started to shrink away from their edges:

Using a knife, carefully ease the fondants out onto a plate (I've made 18 and haven't broken a cake yet so don't worry too much). Plate up and serve quickly and watch your guests have the joy of peeking inside.

They taste perfect served with some double cream.

Enjoy the adulation.

Mushroom Paté with Red Asparagus

I was in the supermarket the other day, and they had a glut of reduced mushrooms for sale. And not just your boring button mushrooms either. Posh ones. Proper ones. Ones which I don't let my husband buy because I don't know how to cook them.

You see, as you will know if you've had me round to tea - I don't like mushrooms. This is pretty unlucky as they are in everything. Everything. I've mastered the art of picking them out of dishes swiftly. However... I am somewhat blessed in that I love the flavour - I'll even order things that come with a mushroom sauce and pick out the mushrooms, so I really don't mind mind cooking with them.

I seized the opportunity to be nice to my husband, for once, and I bought a pack each of Chestnut, Oyster, and Shiitake mushrooms, and a pack of red asparagus to see what that was all about too. It all came to about £2.50... Bargain.

 I came across this recipe whilst deciding what to do with them, and it suggested all the mushrooms I had bought, and very tasty it is too. This would make a great starter, or a nice dish at a buffet if you've got a vegetarian coming. NB - You need to start this recipe a few hours before you want to serve it, or the day before.

Ingredients

100ml vegetable oil
400g mixed mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 onion, finely chopped
200g unsalted butter
A large pinch of cayenne pepper
1 tsp nutmeg
1 chopped garlic clove
Juice of a lemon
Cracked black pepper

Instructions

The Day Before: In a large frying pan, heat the oil over a medium heat and add the mushrooms and cook for 10 minutes. Stirring occasionally till everything has softened. Drain well in a colander, leave to cool for an hour and then put into a covered dish to go chill in the fridge, ideally for 24 hours.

The Next Day:  Use a food processor/hand blender to whizz half of the mushrooms with 125g of butter, the cayenne pepper, nutmeg, garlic lemon juice, and some black pepper till it is almost smooth.

Stir in the unblended half of the mushroom mixture.

Pour into 8 ramekins, or a terrine if you want to serve it at a buffet. (Bear in mind you wont decant this to a plate, whatever you put it into should be what you serve it in.)

Melt the remaining 75g butter to top the paté with, this will give it a nice seal. Put in the fridge till cold.

You can serve this with some chutney (after going to this effort you can easily get away with store-bought!) I have served it with the Red Asparagus I picked up next to it - which you eat raw, making it a perfect stress-free dish. Leave a pepper grinder out on the table so people can give the paté a bit more kick if they require.

Enjoy.

Vanilla Syrup

I saw this being used on Raymond Blanc's show Kitchen Secrets. I only managed to catch the one episode, as our Sky box has been packed away for some DIY (oh how I miss you!).  Thank goodness I didn't watch any more of his shows and fall in love with more decadent things. However, I was insistent I had to make some Vanilla Syrup of my own. I pretend to slightly regret that decision now, considering the cost of real vanilla - but making it is easily one of the favourite things I've done in this kitchen so far.

I didn't know I loved vanilla so much, we're all used to the faux-smell. Vanilla is used in air fresheners, scented candles and I've used the extract lots in cooking. But wow, the smell of this true vanilla as I was blending was something else entirely. Monsieur Blanc tells us that we can use it for poaching pears and peaches, I imagine it will be divine in home-made ice-cream - but I made some so I could make a Riz au Lait, which I will blog about soon.

So, to make this you're going to need some vanilla. He recommends 8 vanilla pods, which I'd have to re-mortgage for, so I only used 4 long ones (£8!) and hoped they would be enough.

In a sausepan, dissolve 110g of caster sugar in 100 ml of water and bring to the boil. Turn off the heat, let it cool slightly and then add the vanilla pods, roughly chopped with the hard ends removed.

Use a blender, and whiz together until smooth. I was only using a hand held blender and it wasn't strong enough to whizz thoroughly, so in the end I had to strain it through a sieve. This will keep in an small airtight jar in the fridge for months.

Enjoy. And try to resist from opening the jar just to smell it occasionally. 

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

I know, I know. A nice glacé cherry would really cheer this cake up - but I say - wouldn't that be a bit Eighties? A bit cliché? Actually, it's just because I don't like glacé cherries, which is a damn shame - they always seem so cute and filled with all the very best E-numbers!

This recipe for Pineapple Upside Down is really one of my favourites. It's very easy, very quick and quite forgiving. I believe the proper ones can take a good hour or two to cook - so this might not have the perfect sponge - but actually, you're only eating this cake for 2 reasons, the pineapple and the sugar crust and don't pretend otherwise! I use a bigger tin than the one from the official recipe, because then I can use the whole tin of pineapples, but you do get quite a scant sponge. I doubled the sponge for these pictures, but I don't think it tasted as nice. Serve with some whipping cream with a bit of the pineapple syrup stirred in. Then invite me round please!

For the Topping:

50g softened butter

50g light soft brown sugar

7 pineapple rings, tinned in syrup

Glacé cherries (optional!)

Instructions:

In a large bowl, use a spoon, or hand held whisk to mix the butter and sugar together till creamy. Spread out onto the bottom of a 20cm+ cake tin, smearing a little bit up the sides too. Drain the pineapple rings, keeping the syrup, and arrange into the tin, along with your cherries. 

For the Sponge:

100g softened butter

100g golden caster sugar

100g self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

 2 tbsp pineapple syrup

Instructions:

So simple - put all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk them all together!

 Spread out over your pineapple layer, put into an oven heated to 180°C for 30-35 minutes. Leave for a few minutes before you cross your fingers and flip upside-down! A great cake tin really helps with this. I use a spring form cake tin which makes this very simple.

Enjoy! If you do get any left over, it tastes just as lovely the next day with a cuppa.

Hint: I've been known to prepare the pineapple layer, and make the cake batter, a couple of hours before dinner. Then as I serve up our main course, I fix the two pudding layers together and slip into the oven. 

Quick Roasted New Potatoes

Just a quick post for today about a handy side dish of Roasted New Potatoes. Now normally these can take about 40 minutes to roast, or might involve some par boiling, but I've happened on a way to get it done faster and to fit in alongside your dinner. I hate it when it take longer to cook the potatoes than whatever it is I want to eat with them!

First - have a handy route inside your store cupboard/fridge. Have some oil? Good! Now, what do you like to have your new potatoes with? A bit of garlic? Lemon? Herbs? Bacon? (Again with the bacon I know... I'm obsessed.) Use whatever you have or like.

Add 500g new potatoes to a microwavable bowl with a lid. Add a couple of tablespoons of cold water.

On a high heat cook them for around 5 minutes till they go soft. Then add them to a baking tray of olive oil, and whatever additions you fancy.  I've used some chopped garlic and rosemary here - but you could easily try some lemon zest, or something a bit spicier. 

Add your potatoes and give it a good shake to mix it all up and coat well.

Cook for around  10-15 minutes in a hot oven (maybe 180C - whatever suits) till they go crispy.

Enjoy! Will put on a much more exciting (and deliciously simple) Pineapple Upside Down cake tomorrow.

Herbed Cabbage

I didn't like cabbage as a child. Realising I did actually like cabbage was a sign of maturity - I was 24.

Children aren't supposed to like cabbage. If other people didn't like it then I was just certain that I wouldn't like it either... Like sprouts. They're just "urgh" aren't they?!

Umm, no. Aside from being delicious, and good for you - cabbage is also very pretty. It shouldn't make a difference in whether or not something is edible, but it totally does. 

This recipe is another I have pilfered from BBC Good Food although I'd change it a fair bit. As flavoured as this dish was, it should be more. More herbs. More garlic. More yum.

There are 3 ways of making this dish, the way the recipe says, the way I made it in these pictures, and the way I will try next time. Sorry to make it all too complicated, I know it's only cabbage.

I didn't have any goose fat as per the original recipe. I'm a bit fed up of buying expensive only use once ingredients - but I think the plan here is that you make this cabbage on Christmas day and you would already have some for your roasties. (Have you that yet? You really should.) You can buy a jar and keep it in your fridge for months, so if I can find it I will try next time, I reckon it will add some va-va-voom.

Also - the original recipe says to remove the herbs you add in once you flavour the shallots. I did a bit of both for this dish - because I left in some chopped rosemary. Next time I'm going to crush one garlic clove and add that in with even more chopped rosemary. I didn't have shallots and I used leeks as they were in the fridge. It still tasted nice, but I will probably try it with onion next time.

Serves 4- 6

Ingredients

1 savoy cabbage

1 tbsp olive oil (or 4 tbsp goose fat)

1 medium leek. (or 4 shallots, or 1 onion)

2 sprigs of rosemary

2 garlic cloves

Instructions

• Finely chop your your leek/shallots, 1 sprig of rosemary and 1 clove of garlic. Leave to one side
• Quarter the cabbage, remove the core and shred thinly
• Quickly blanch the cabbage in salted boiling water for 3 minutes

• Then tip it all into a colander in the sink, and hold under cold water till cool. Drain well.
• Heat the olive oil (or goose fat) in a pan till hot and sauté the leek/onion/shallots, rosemary and one whole garlic clove and one crushed garlic clove for 5 minutes

• Discard the whole clove of garlic, and rosemary sprig
• Add the cooled cabbage and heat through. This gets steamy!
• Season & enjoy.

I'm trying to resist the temptation of adding bacon to this. You know it would taste SO good. In fact, the bacon might save you the purchase of goose-fat. Bacon flavour that also saves you money? Well all right then.