Cauliflower Arancini and Ratatouille with a Rocket, Basil & Wild Garlic Pistou

Spring is back, at least according to the Met Office it is, and with Spring comes the welcome return of Wild Garlic. It's quite abundant down in Devon already, though you'll have to know where to look. Our usual spot is only lightly covered at the moment, just enough for the wild garlic pistou from the title, but we have found huge amounts growing in another spot nearer Exeter - but that's for another story, and hopefully lunch tomorrow.

Two odd things about this dish, not only the wild garlic pistou but also the arancini, both of which were something of leftover specials, as befits the end of a busy week.

Arancini

If you've not come across arancini before they're an Italian speciality, made with leftover risotto. Quite simple to make, and sublime to eat - one of those things that somehow tastes much better than it deserves too, if that makes any sense! You simply take some cold leftover risotto, and pack it around a small cube of cheese (often mozzarella) or possibly some meat sauce (bit more tricky) to create something the same shape and size as a scotch egg. Next do the usual flour, then egg, then breadcrumb thing to coat (we usually do ours twice, for extra crispyness) and shallow fry for 10-15 minutes until well browned. By now the smell will be driving you too insane to cook any longer, so you'll have to stop cooking them anyway so you can get stuck in.

Ratatouille with a Rocket, Basil & Wild Garlic Pistou

This was a bit of an odd one really. A fridge with one lonely courgette, a half eaten pack of basil, some rocket which had seen better days, two peppers (one with a bit cut off which was ... well, you're getting the picture by now). Basically an ideal start to make something kind of like ratatouille and kind of like pistou.

First the ratatouille ...

1. First off cut a red onion into half inch sized pieces, and get these frying in a shallow pan with a little olive oil and butter. You're looking to get these quite caramelised to bring out the sweetness of the onion.
2. Once the onions are about 2/3rds done, add in the peppers cut into strips about 1cm wide (mixing my measurements a bit here!). I had a green one and a yellow one, but any will do. Green's a good idea though to add a little bitterness into the dish. These need to be cooked for about another 10 minutes, tossing now and then, aim to soften them and add a bit of colour.
3. When the onions and peppers are done, put them on into another deeper dish (this is going to be the one for cooking the finished ratatouille).
4. Now back in the same pan that fried the onions & peppers add the courgette sliced up into average thickness discs. Fry these till golden on one side, flip over and fry till golden on the other side, then into the same pan as the onions and peppers.
5. Now deglaze the pan you used for frying with a half glass or so of white wine, and put this into the other pan. 
6. Add a tin of tomatoes to the onions, peppers and courgettes and cook this mixture for about half an hour till the tomatoes are tender. Break up any large chunks as you do so, and check the seasoning is good.

Now the Rocket, Basil & Wild Garlic Pistou ...

Pistou is kind of like a French Pesto but without the pine nuts, so I'm taking liberties a bit with the name. Very simple to make, and easy to balance flavours to suit your own tastes - or (more likely) to suit what you have in the fridge!

Here's how I did mine this time:

• Half an ordinary bag of rocket
• Half an ordanary pack of fresh basil
• A good handful of fresh wild garlic
• About 25g of freshly grated parmesan
• Salt & pepper
• Olive oil

First mix all the herbs into a food processor together with a good glug of oil to get things started (this is the lazy method - though chopping or a pestle and mortar would be just as good). Give them a few good pulses until they're starting to form a very basic paste. Add in the parmesan and seasoning, a little more olive oil and start to blend until you've got a smooth sauce. The amount of oil you'll need will depend on how much of everything you've got, what you're looking for is a creamy consistency - it shouldn't take much work or much oil. On that note, it doesn't matter if the herbs are a little wet beforehand, it'll just get emulsified in the process.

Only one more thing to do - once the ratatouille is ready, just spoon a good couple of tablespoons of the pistou mixture into it and give it a good stir, and you're done. Lovely cripsy arancini with a herby and aromatic vegetable side dish. Healthy, tasty, cheap - who could ask for more.

P.S. Any pistou left over makes a great sauce for pasta, adding to pizzas, or just added on the side of a meat course. It should keep in the fridge for a week or so, but it depends on the wild garlic a bit.

Rib of Beef with Horseradish Dauphinois - and my Yorkshire Pudding Recipe

Not exactly a new combination this - I think I blogged about it sometime before - but this time around I did make an effort to film the important bits. And even made it into one proper movie as well. Thank heaven for tools like Picasa that make movie making so easy these days, and tools like YouTube which make distributing them just as simple. I may be a techy in many ways, but when it comes to video I still feel like a novice.

As you can probably see - I'm a lousy carver :-)

My Yorkshire Pudding Recipe

Here's how I make my yorkshire puddings - a recipe I've perfected over the years which suits how I like them. This is enough for 6 small yorkshire puddings. If you need more just double everything, works just as well. Timing is for small yorkshire puddings - larger ones will take longer to cook.

• 40 g flour
• 40 ml milk
• 40 ml water
• 1 egg
• pinch of salt

Put the flour in a bowl, add a pinch of salt (what on earth is a pinch anyway? Give it a good sprinkle, depends how much you like salt!). Make a well in the centre of the flour, crack the egg into it, start blending it into the flour with a fork (a wide toothed old fashioned one is best, preferably strong metal. Or just use a whisk.).

Next you're going to have to decide how fast to add the other liquid depending how watery/dry the egg/flour is. At some point you'll need to start adding the milk and water (makes no odds which is first, you can just blend them together and then add them bit by bit, that's what I do). Just aim for a thickish consistency all the time, beating out the lumps as they form - if you add too much liquid at any one point before the lumps are gone you'll never get rid of them. Soon you'll get to the point where you have a smooth paste, then the rest of the liquid can go in at once and be mixed in.

Now into the fridge for at least half an hour. I usually do mine first thing in the morning on a Sunday, and only take it out again when I'm ready to use it. The logic behind this is that all the molecules start to bind together I think, but whatever - it works for me.

When the beef comes out of the oven, whack the oven temperature back up high (at least 200ºC, preferably more, but depends on your oven - see my top roasting tips for more info on that sort of thing) and put in your yorkshires tray with the fat (either beef dripping from the roast, or some other high temperature fat) already in it. Give that at least 5 minutes to get really hot.

Now pour the yorkshire batter into the trays and back into the hot oven quick. And leave it - don't open the oven again for at least 15 minutes, you don't want to let in the cold air or they won't rise as well. They may be ready after 15 minutes or take 20 or so to get done, if you like them really crispy leave them longer.

P.S. My Mum tells of when she used to eat cold yorkshires with jam, and I still love them cold the next day myself, so have no trouble making too many. One tip though - if you're going to do this take the cooling yorkshires out of the tray once you've finished your lunch, don't leave them in the tray to get totally cold or they'll suck up too much fat and can become a bit greasy and nasty. Just pop them on a plate and put them to one side, and then in the fridge once totally cold. I just eat them plain like this, but you could take a leaf out of my Mum's book and spread some jam on yours first - wonderful stuff. Sweet batter puddings are a bit of an old classic, so this isn't as bonkers as it might sound!

Lemon & Lime Roast Chicken

I know some of my friends think it a little odd that I like to cook so much, but I generally find the whole process quite relaxing so don't mind spending what might to them seems like hours preparing food, just for 10 minutes eating it. I don't really think it's that simple (you are after all what you eat, and I kind of like to know what it is I'm eating!) but there is another really good reason to cook a Sunday roast at least - you get great food and save money at the same time.

You save money in two important ways. First off you usually get more meat for your money in the first place, as buying a whole piece (like a chicken) means you're not paying for someone to prepare different cuts, or for that matter extra packaging. Secondly, you've always got lots of leftovers which can make what seems like an expensive initial purchase go an awful long way. I reckon I spend on average about £1 on meat per portion of food that I produce, and I'm using pretty good ingredients.

Anyhow, why on earth and I going on about thrift and not about chicken? Well the other thing about leftovers and Sunday roasts is that they can work the other way around - often I'm inspired by what's lying around in the fridge needing eating, rather than having something special in mind. I'll usually buy a good piece of meat according to what I can find (and what I haven't had in a while), but what I'll do with it is usually a mystery until the day before - or even the morning before! And that's how I ended up with this recipe - Lemon & Lime Roast Chicken.

The Ingredients

The ingredients

So this is pretty much what I had left over that Sunday - cabbage, lime, lemon, red onion. Citrus flavours and chicken aren't exactly rocket science, but it can be tricky to get it right. Lime has a nasty habit of turning sour and lemons can be far too sharp and acidic in any quantity. Seeing as I had two limes, a bit of a lemon and some red onion I reckoned I needed something to sweeten the whole deal, and luckily there was also half a small pot of double cream left over.

I'd planned on making a creamy sauce with the leftover cream, the juices from the bird and the stuffing, so prepared all the ingredients ahead of time with that in mind. The limes were quartered lengthways, so as to maximise their surface area, the lemon chopped up roughly in to centimeter pieces, and the onions quartered and then sliced.

Chopping up the 'stuffing'

I love to stuff things inside chickens to get more flavour into the dish, but experience has shown you need to be careful with juices flowing out and burning. To make sure that the inside of the bird would steam in lemon and lime juice and the outside would crisp up I would need to close the bird up tight. Once everything was stuffed inside the seasoned cavity (well not everything, I couldn't get all the limes in!) I used largish skewers to close off the end.

Securing the end of the bird with skewers

That then went into a hot oven (180ºC) for 15 minutes per pound, this time on a trivet to hold the meat off the bottom, as I was expecting some dripping and didn't want the bottom of the bird to poach. I always leave the neck in the roasting tray - helps to intensify the flavour of the gravy.

The bird just out of oven, ready to rest for 20 minutes or so.

Once the bird had come out it was gravy time. First off I tipped all the juices and all the stuffing out of the bird back into the roasting pan, making sure I got everything out. Then into that went some white wine and some stock (pheasant this time, all I had left in the freezer) and let it cook down for a while.

The gravy being made with the stuffing from inside the bird.

Finally I picked out all the lemon and lime from the sauce (decided they would be far too acid to serve) but left in the onion and then added the half a small pot of leftover cream. And voila, one delicious sauce, and a perfect compliment to the slightly lemony/limey chicken.

The finished dish

Served this with the cabbage, which was lightly steamed, and three different types of rice cooked together - wild, red and brown. This was a revelation in itself - slightly pricey stuff, but totally delicious, and a great foil for the richness of the other flavours. All in all a great experiment, very tasty - and of course with lots of left overs! In fact we've been eating chicken practically all week, just finished off the last of the meat last night, this time reborn as a Chicken Korma with basmati and homemade naan bread - but that's another blog post ...