A flurry of kitchen activity

All recipes copyright Anna Vaught.
 
Above: the tools of my trade: rustic, non?

Late afternoon today saw a flurry of activity in the kitchen.
First, I'll just tell you how we got to this point.
1. Roasted a chicken on Friday night -- a big fat free ranger. I always roast them breast down for the first half an hour: never again will you have a dry chicken if you do this. Served with bread sauce --as I mentioned in the last blog-- which I'd seasoned, as my mother before me, with both garlic and cloves, the latter of which were stuck into half an onion. New potatoes with mint from the garden, steamed carrots and, rather than gravy, just the juices from the chicken poured over. And petits pois -- frozen because, unless I'm growing them myself, there never seems much point....
2. That chicken then did us for Saturday night dinner in bed (see last blog).
3. Captain chicken is still going, because for breakfast this morning, Sunday, I had a sandwich which consisted of the leftover chicken and potato curry. It was slathered in hot lime pickle and I had a mug of hefty tea (as, in proper brewed, like). I was hiding from the children while I was snaffling this. And reading Madhur Jaffrey's The Curry Bible as I hid.
4. Tea tonight for two: found just a few more bits on the chicken and then mixed them up with crushed garlic and ginger, a tablespoon of Teryaki Sauce (I had run out of Kikoman soy sauce, so was improvising), chopped spring onions, a chopped red chilli, seeds and all and half a green pepper, chopped. Quickly cooked up a handful of green beans and some peas and, at the same time, enough basmati rice for two. Fried the vegetables and chicken in sunflower oil for a few minutes until sizzling, added the rice and a handful of mint. Stir fried the lot for a couple of minutes and all was done.
5. The chicken is now spent, so I'm making stock as I write. I've covered the carcass with cold water, added a few peppercorns and a bay leaf. Sometimes, I add half an onion, peel and all, for both colour and depth, but it depends on what you'll use then stock for later. bring to the boil and then simmer for an hour or so. Freezes beautifully.
6. Oh and the boys (7 and 5) and I made pulled toffee, which is as insane as it sounds and had me barking instructions at them all the time. We cook a lot, but the boiling sugar thing is a bit mad. Anyway, they went crazy over syrup on spoons and learning to identify soft ball and hard crack stages! Water everywhere from their test areas! The toffee is delicious -- except it's not toffee, more a sort of crunchy butterscotch. If you make toffee and it goes wrong, here's a tip: stick it in the freezer and you have something you can bash into bits and sprinkle on ice cream. And we made fairy cakes, which are garishly decorated and just gorgeous. Dripping, lopsided and gorgeous.

Inauthentically fabulous chicken and potato curry

All recipes copyright Anna Vaught. And, to tempt you, the pictures are of different curries I've been cooking. You can book me, you know.


Hello again.
Now, I can do you a super duper authentic (insofar as such a thing exists) chicken curry -- and likewise something with potatoes....but say you have a chicken carcass with some meat still to be eaten, a bowl of cold, cooked potatoes --because you over-catered on last night's roast chicken dinner for poor hayfever-stricken husband (with bread sauce --I don't care if some food writers think it's naff: it makes me feel like I'm home)... Well, here is what I did.

Inauthentically fabulous chicken curry for Saturday night in front of the telly. This served two.

You have your bowl of cold cooked pots. Taken them out of the fridge (there were about ten new potatoes in there). Now, in a wok or large frying pan, fry half a large onion until it is sweet and golden. Ghee or sunflower oil for your frying medium? I added two chopped cloves of garlic and a thumbnail sized piece of root ginger, finely chopped. When all was soft and sweet, I added a dessertspoon of cumin seeds, one of ground coriander, a teaspoon of turmeric and a big fat pinch of asafoetida. Also a teaspoon of red chilli flakes Then, to make this 'tarka' base, I cooked all these ingredients gently, before adding about a tablespoon of tomato puree and a tin of plum tomatoes. I had chopped these in the tin. Heat gently until it all thickens; if you don't, it won't work its magic and the toms will taste metallic. Salt and pepper to taste after, say, fifteen to twenty minutes and then in go two handfuls of frozen petit pois (or hell: just pois), the potatoes and as much chicken as you can strip. Mix well, bring to a high heat to reduce the sauce a little and then cook through for five to ten minutes -- enough to ensure that all is piping hot, but also depending on how well cooked your potatoes were to begin with. If they disintegrate a little, it's not the end of the world, though.
In the last five minutes I added a handful of coriander (cilantro) and the same of fresh mint --chopped. Check for seasoning again. You might want just a little sourness, in which case, add some lemon juice to taste or a couple of teaspoons of either amchoor (green mango powder) or anardhana (pomegranate powder - wonderfully aromatic). Mix well.

We had this --oh how slutty-- while watching a film in bed. And I served it with a simple raita which, in an unorthodox manner, I made from whizzing fresh mint (big bunch) in the blender with a pot of cottage cheese (had no yoghurt), a clove of garlic and a little milk. It was really good. You could also add finely chunked cucumber. The reason I didn't --big confession here-- is that I knew it would be a bit watery by the time I had the leftovers for a little midnight snack later. On toast!

And if you chucked out that chicken carcass, you're banned from my blog! No-- just joking: I'll write later on this subject.

Slob's sandwich

All recipes copyright Anna Vaught.

Hello. I'll call this the slob's sandwich. But man: it was good. Don't tell anyone. I had to do a lot of hard thinking this morning and then write a letter to the Bishop (did I say I had a lot of balls in the air and was mildly eccentric?) so starch was the aim of the game.

Slob's sandwich. For those under stress. (I may also refer you to Elvis Presley for the fried peanut buttter and banana sandwich one of these days...)

You need some good brown bread, which you could butter or not. Today, I didn't. Then, into a bowl goes a tin of tuna. I like it in oil because, to be honest, the calorie-saving-tune-in-brine varieties look like something I feed to our cats. So, the tuna. Drain it well (actually, if you have cats, they'd love this oil), mix in lots of chopped spring onions, green and white parts, some mayonnaise and some black pepper. Also, a good pinch of flaked red chilli. Now, to this -- this is the slob part-- I added a good handful of oven chips, which I had crisped up under the grill. Spoon the filling generously onto the bread and top with the chips. Eat with an appropriate degree of inelegance. I mean, I can give you cordon bleu -- but that's not always what you want, is it?

Chicken kebabs for a houseful

All recipes Copyright Anna Vaught.

Chicken drumstick kebabs for a household.

Fiddle with the spices below: you may like more or less chilli.

If you'd like to view last night's tea with its recipe, then take a look at "keema mattar", which is on the menus section of www.calcuttascarlet.com This is a simple minced lamb curry with peas and mint. You could add a little salad to it, of just finely chopped cucumber and carrot, dressed with some hot sunflower oil in which you have popped (in a frying pan) a dessertspoonful of brown mustard seeds.

For tea tonight -- for a household (by which I mean four children and two adults), we're having Tangri kabab -- a kind of chicken kebab. I'll probably have chopped up carrots and cucumber on the table, some hot lime or mango pickle, some lemons to squeeze over and maybe some pitta breads because I don't have any chapati or roti in the house and may be too lazy to make them today. I do think you want a bit of starch on the table, though. If you look at my www.calcuttascarlet.com site and go to the menu section, you'll see my simple naan bread recipe to follow. And it's a lazy lazy recipe, for which I apologise.

You can allow, say, three drumsticks per person. I say three, but my seven year old ate five in one go last week. In India, these would be skinned. Up to you. Right: you make slashes in the sides of the drumsticks with a sharp wieldy knife. The cuts you make should go deep, right down to the bone so that when these drumsticks are marinating, the flavours permeate properly.

In a big bowl combine about six tablespoons of natural yoghurt (not the low fat kind, ideally!), three cloves of crushed garlic, a finely chopped nut of fresh ginger, a dessertspoon of ground cumin, maybe a teaspoon of cayenne pepper or the same (I'd like more!) of flaked red chilli, a dessertspoon of ground coriander, a good pinch of sea salt, freshly ground black pepper and, if you want a little more colour, perhaps a teaspoon of turmeric. You could also add a about a tablespoon of lemon or lime juice. I experimented once with orange juice: you can always try.
Now, mix this lot well and then put the chicken in. I'd mix it and massage it in with my hands. I'm assuming that if you're happy to chew on a drumstick, you're not squeamish about this task. When the mixture is well rubbed into the meat, leave in the fridge --please: health and safety tells you that you gotta wash and dry your hands before you touch the fridge door!!!!-- for 12 hours or so or even up to 24 (see: you can do this in advance).

Later, put the chicken into a pre-heated hot oven, having sprinkled it with sunflower or groundnut oil first. Bake for about 25 minutes, turning half way through. And if you have any leftover juices and oil in the pan, leave them in the pan (removing any burnt bits) and then, next day, roast some little cubes of potato in them. These will be deeply savoury. Actually, now I come to think about this, I have recently converted the afore-mentioned potatoes into a salad, through adding handfuls of mint and torn-up greens from the garden. Get all the greenery ready first and then toss in the sizzling potatoes with maybe a bit more sea salt and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Spritz with lemon or lime juice, too.

You could make these kebab part of a larger Indian banquet for summer.

A simple salmon tea and maybe a mackerel...

All recipes copyright Anna Vaught.

Here's what we had for tea last night: I mention it only because it's a super quick supper. My auntie J would refer to this as salmon "devilled up", I think. So I'll call it

Bedevilled salmon with rice.

Right: allow one salmon steak per person (and frankly, use the cheapest cuts of raggedy salmon you can find). Into an oven dish the salmon goes (medium hot oven) and you sprinkle over olive oil, crystals of sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, lots of unpeeled smallish garlic cloves, a handful of capers (you can soak them, as I do, in a mixture of milk and water to debrine them a little) and, say, ten cherry tomatoes. I like chilli -- so I would also add a whole dried red chilli, torn into shreds. Yes -- you could use a fresh one, but you get a lovely smoky hit if you make it dried for this recipe. Into the oven and bake for about twenty minutes -- but flake a tiny bit off before then to try because you want the fish to be succuclent and not dry.

In the meantime, cook as much rice as you think you will eat each, cover it with as much water in volume again (long grain rice or basmati -- I'm assuming white, though), bring it to the boil, stir, salt, lid on tightly and then bring the heat down to the lowest possible setting. Will be done in 12-15. Actually, if you've kept the heat in, you could turn the heat off altogether. When it's cooked, fork it up. You could add some torn-up spinach leaves to the rice as you put it in the pan, too.

Mound of rice on each plate, salmon steak on top and don't miss the juices in the pan. That was easy, wasn't it? Spritz of lemon juice is good. And the garlic? Well, I love roasted garlic, so I tend to munch it skin and all. But you could squeeze the rich garlic paste out and put it on your salmon.

An another favourite tea down our way? One mackerel each, head on, tail on if you please, but gutted. I just rinse, pat dry and then roll in a light dusting of seasoned flour, sprinkling a little on the inside of the fish. I might make a kind of stuffing with chopped tomato, spring onions, a little olive oil and couple of handfuls of breadcrumbs per fish. They go into a hot oven, turned once and should be done in about 30 minutes. We devour these inelegantly with bread and butter. Great for camping, too. Accompaniments of any other sort seem wrong. If you want a salad, have it first or afterwards. You need to make sure these fish crisp up -- and I hope you don't think we're a bit savage if I say that we munch the tails, too.

Life is not too short to stuff an egg.

All recipes copyright Anna Vaught

You know that high tea I was telling you about? The waves of nostalgia? Actually, I'm not sure I ever ate stuffed eggs as a child, although I surely peeled a lot of hard boiled eggs. Something funny happened there. On with the show. Here is what to do.

Boil some good free range eggs for around three minutes. Rinse them under the cold tap and then tap them gently, pulling away all the shell. One of my earliest kitchen memories is of doing this with my mum. She liked to add halved, hard boiled eggs to summer salads. As do I. Now slice them in two and scoop out the yolk, mix it with a little mayonnaise (you could any leftover from that recipe I gave you the other day or from a jar of Hellman's), ground pepper (maybe white), a pinch of dried mustard powder and, if you like, some chopped chives. Put it all back in. Done. Note: if the yolks are too hard, then the filling won't quite work. It has to be unctuous.

Serve this with some ham sandwiches made with proper chunky brown bread. Clearly I am deeply predictable because when my Mr goes out to get bread for me he asks "the one with the open texture and the shiny crust?" I'm really specific about this. Can't stand floppy bread. Butter (marg if you must), good ham and maybe a little ground pepper. Not doorstops, but not too dainty either.

A cucumber salad. I forgot this before. Just slices of cucumber, marinated in vinegar (I actually like cheap old malt vinegar here), salt and pepper. Or do as the Georgian husband does: big bowl on a hot day: lots of sliced cucumber, left to steep for a hour or two with a sprinkle of salt and just a little water. Gotta be cold. If, like a fifities housewife, I were to have this for him on his hot and sweaty return from work, his eyes would go all misty.

A green salad? A proper floppy lettuce -- a butterhead, perhaps a cos lettuce? Come near me with a lollo rosso and you're banned. Ditto iceberg (although the other day.....). Just pull it apart, rinse it, dry it carefully and dress it (two parts oil to one part vinegar) at the last minute. Season to taste. Big slices of tomato on the table. Season yourself. Undressed. The tomato, not you: this is a kind of high tea, after all.

Big pot of tea. There you go.

Coleslaw like they make it down south.

All recipes copyright Anna Vaught.

Now, simple can be best. It can be sublime. It can be (I quote Elizabeth David, here) "the test of a good establishment". I hope I've learned that one properly. Here is a simple simple recipe for coleslaw.

I'm a bit of a devotee of Southern (as in Southern United States) food. You'll see me writing about it a lot here. I'm married to a man from Georgia (possibly you wondered what was connoted by 'Scarlet'?) and you know who is also from Georgia? Why, Damon Lee Fowler: he's my favourite American food writer and I urge you to get your hands on Classical Southern Cooking, in particular. Simple, sensible and wonderful food. And he's really funny. This coleslaw is dedicated to him -- with a little English (Welsh?) twist.

Right: the catch is, you have to make your own mayonnaise. It's not hard but, once you've done it, it's worth it! Then all you need is sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and a smallish cabbage. Experiment with green or white. I like green. And you need a wieldy and very sharp knife. Wot? Nothing else? Nope.

First of all, discard any tattered outer leaves and then slice the cabbage very finely. Damon Lee Fowler, when he writes about coleslaw, says there is no machine which gets the chips fine enough. In my experience in the kitchen. this is borne out. He tells you to sit down! If you want measurements, then think the length of a matchstick and just a little bit wider. So you cut your cabbage into quarters, say, and then get chipping. All you do then, is add your mayonnaise and season to taste. The twist I like, which is not authentically, Southern, is to do what my old daddy would have done, and add a couple of teaspoons of caraway seeds. But no onions or carrots, see?

For the mayonnaise: two egg yolks (large, I reckon): free range.
Oil: here you have a choice, partly dictated by economy. Either, 200 ml of extra virgin olive oil and 100 ml groundnut (you could also use sunflower) or go the whole hog and just use the olive. My mum always did. You could get by without using extra virgin, too, but in a dish with this few ingredients, it's the star.
Nice also to add the juice of one lemon -- but experiment. I've read that Old Southern recipes might add ground cayenne (to taste) and possibly some dried mustard powder -- in which case miss out the carraway 'twist'!
It is best, if you can bear it, to make the mayonnaise by hand, but in practice, here is what I do.
Put the eggs and the salt and pepper (plus the lemon if you are using it) into the blender/processor, then mix for about a minute. Now --keep the machine on-- add the oil in a gentle stream. Slowly. Take your time. Gradually, you'll see it thicken. Test for seasoning. Alchemy! If you have any left over, dip chips (I mean French Fries) into it, possibly having crushed some garlic cloves in there, too. Or hey: why not make double, get everyone else to out, put the garlic mayonnaise in a bowl, make some fries (oven chips are good enough) and then have it all on your lap in front of the telly? With some nice cold beer, maybe? If you think this is a bit slutty, watch something cultural.

To make a complete meal, how about some grilled chicken or salmon? If you are veggie, then it's also good with a bean salad.

A potato salad?

As a side note, my mother made fresh mayonnaise for every potato salad we had at home. It's really best with waxy little potatoes -- new ones. Just scrubbed, boiled, chopped as necessary, annointed with the mayonnaise (use your hands: no need to be coy), seasoned and then you add a handful of chopped chives. If you want to stuff an egg with a bit more of this mayonnaise, you'll have to read tomorrow. Because I just went to what was supposedly a high tea for my young children with my friend and former teacher, Nest. And we had stuffed eggs, proper ham sandwiches, big slices of tomato, a green salad and a pot of tea. And I ate like I had never seen food before. (The boys ate the sandwiches, wrinkled their noses at the eggs and then ate all the cakes in a frenzy. But the Jedis are young and they are foolish.)