I don’t like Masterchef. To me cooking is about enjoying yourself not putting yourself under ludicrous amounts of pressure. Why on earth would home cooks go and put themselves through Masterchef? Also, what’s the stupid over-dramatic music about?
I made this today from How to Bake. I am so pleased with it even though I haven’t even cut into it yet. It’s exactly how it should look.
Unfortunately the texture wasn’t quite right. Mark said it was rubbery and thought it was caused by using the dough hook on the mixer, instead of bringing it together by hand and messing about with it as little as possible. So I have to make that improvement next time.
I enjoyed some articles in this immensely. Others I found quite dreary. Generally, the ones where she’s talking about anything (even loosely) political or individual celebrities are brillant and fascinating respectively. The Celebrity Watch and facetious rant ones I find dull.
There’s no doubt that Moran is a fantastic writer but I’d say that this is a book to dip into from time to time rather than immerse yourself in.
I took a chance with this one and used some double cream to semi-skimmed milk to replace full fat milk! It was fine though. The loaf was soft and sweet./ It reminded me a little of commercial sliced white loaves e.g. Warburton. I was worried about the soft crust but apparently you never get a hard crust when you add milk.
I made this based on the recipe from Rick Stein’s Spain. I made it using 2 large lamb shanks and halved the other ingredients in the recipe.
I didn’t have any fresh or dried peppers so just added roasted ones from a jar. I also substituted Parma ham for Serrano and I didn’t add it to the stew, just lightly fried to crisp it up as a garnish.
After 1.5 hours of cooking at 150C, I tested the meat – it was done. I took both shanks out and let them cool, then took the meat off the bones in large ‘natural’ segments. I also got rid of any stringy or jellyish bits from the meat and the bones. I then covered the meat and bones back up with the sauce and put the whole lot in the fridge to be eaten sometime in the next couple of days. The fat will rise to the top and solidify so it will be easy to remove it before adding peppers and gently reheating.
When I reheated this I added a chopped courgette that needed using up. The flavour of the courgette went with the stew but it had the unwanted side-effect of making the stew watery. Otherwise, apart from a lack of garlic – I forgot to apply my usual rule of always doubling the amount of garlic – this stew was quite nice.
I needed to use up some courgettes so made fritters using this recipe. They tasted good but there was way too much egg in it so they were more like mini omelettes. Next time I will only use one egg. I served the fritter-omelettes with king prawns fried in butter and a little olive oil, garlic and a smattering of chilli powder. When the prawns were just done I added a little lemon juice so the pan juices made a nice little dressing for salad leaves. To pimp your ride as Jamie Oliver puts it, I served with some greek yoghurt with hot paprika, a sprinkle of salt and a few drops of EV olive oil stirred in and also a wedge of lemon.
Normally I would use Nigella’s courgette fritters recipes but I didn’t have any feta. Though her recipes needs modification: you do need to add salt to extract water, not just lay them on a tea towel as she recommends.
Used Jamie Oliver recipe with the following changes:
I only used 60% of the amounts, apart from the carrot which I forgot to scale down!
Dark brown soft sugar instead of light
0.5 cups orange juice instead of zest and juice of an orange
Verdict: The cake was heavy and chewy but it tasted and looked good. Those qualities weren’t enough to redeem it though; next time I am going to follow the recipe!
