Orion Thoughts

Plus

Just while I'm thinking about it. I upgraded a United flight from CA to Manchester to economy plus on one of their 747-400s. It cost $109. Some part of me objects to having to pay extra for a seat that isn't cripplingly uncomfortable, but it was really worth it. Being able to sit back without having my knees crushed when the seat in front reclines (There is a special place in hell reserved for people that recline their seats in economy) was definitely worth the money. It's only about 5" but it feels like more. I shall be doing this everytime I fly.

Marmalade

I made marmalade. I try to make marmalade every year, but you need Seville oranges to make it and they're only in the shops for about a week at the start of January. Sometimes not even that long, so I quite often miss out. This is in fact the worst time that I could possibly post a marmalade howto, given that nobody will be able to buy the ingredients, but whatever.

n kg of Seville oranges (They're really bitter and offset all the sugar. Normal oranges are too sweet)

2n kg of preserving sugar (It's got extra pectin in it, I used 2kg)

2n lemons (rounded down)

Put the oranges and lemons in a large, heavy bottomed pan and simmer them in 2 litres of boiling water for 2 hours, with a lid on. I used 2 litres of boiling water with 1kg of oranges, you may need to adjust. Make sure the oranges are covered. The point here is to make the oranges soft enough that you can scoop out the middle with a spoon, they'll be ready when you can easily push a butter knife into them.

Take the oranges out, keeping the water in the pan.

Let the oranges cool a bit, then halve them and scoop out the middle. Put all the goop from the middle into some muslin and then squeeze all the juice out into the water in the pan. If you don't have muslin, you can always just use a seive. Whatever gets you the juice and none of the white bits. Throw away the middle bits that are left.

Slice the skins, these are going to be the bits in the marmalade. They don't seem to change size much, so cut them up as you want them in the finished product. I used the whole lot.

Now, bring the water back to the boil and dissolve the sugar in it. Then tip in the peel.

You need to boil the mix rapidly for 20-25 minutes until it's at the setting point. This is the tricky bit. If you don't boil it long enough, you'll get very runny marmalade. Too much and you might burn it. The trick I use is to keep a plate cold in the fridge and when I think the marmalade is ready, drip some onto the plate and see if it starts to set and form a skin. It's never going to set as well as in the shops, but it'll taste a lot better.

Once it's done, let it cool. You'll get lots of skummy looking bubbles on top. I'd scoop these out so your marmalade is nice and clear.

Once it's cooled a bit, put it in some sterilised jars.

Pie!

I made a pie. A proper pie, with a pastry top and bottom. If there is only pastry on top then it's a stew with a hat.

8oz of OO grade pasta flour

2oz of Beef dripping

2oz of butter

Tiny amount of water

Pastry turned out really well. The pasta flour gives it a nice golden colour and the two fats make it taste really good. I will be using the same ingredients again. I've also taken to mixing the fat and flour in the food processor,hands are too warm for mixing pastry as the fat melts too much.

The filling was a slow cooked beef and mushroom stew with a red wine and thyme gravy. I don't have a recipe for that as I was just throwing things into a pan. Although I can probably make one up if anybody wants it.

The other thing that was instrumental in the making of my pie was my new iPhone 4S. Siri is amazingly handy for cooking. You can say things like "Siri, remind me to check on the pie in 20 mintues" and it does. I wasn't really sold on the whole Siri idea, but I've been using it constantly since I got the phone.

Macaroons

Macaroons are great, they're a sort of cross between candyfloss and biscuits. There's all sorts of different types of macaroons, but when I make them, I like to try and make them weigh as little as possible. They're basically just meringue with icing sugar and ground almonds folded into them.

• 4 eggs
• 3oz of sugar
• 4oz of ground almonds
• 8 oz of icing sugar

1. Seperate out 4 egg whites (You can keep the yolks around to make lemon curd)
2. Put the egg whites into a clean bowl (any grease in the bowl will ruin the meringue) and whisk them(I use an electric hand whisk for this) until you get a stiff white foam. When you take the whisk out of the bowl, the peaks you make in the meringue should stay stiff and not fall over.
3. Whisk the sugar into the meringue, a few spoons at a time.
4. Fold the icing sugar and the ground almonds into the meringue, a bit at a time. The idea here, is to mix in the icing and the almonds without knocking any of the air out of the meringue. You need to be quite careful.
5. Line an oven tray of some kind with baking paper.
6. Then, spoon the mix into a piping bag (or a a zip-lock sandwich bag which you can then cut a corner off), and pipe out a series of 2 inch wide biscuit shapes onto the baking paper. Leave space around them, they will spread out a bit.
7. Leave these biscuits to sit for 20 mintues or so, a light skin should form over the tops of them. They might go a bit flat, but don't worry too much, they rise in the oven
8. Bake them on gas mark 4 for 15 minutes. They should lightly brown on the top.
9. Leave them to cool for a good hour and then carefully peel them off the baking paper.

Then eat them all and make yourself feel sick.

Making brussel sprouts taste nice

My favourite meal to cook is Christmas dinner. It's essentialy a simple and recipe free meal. The challenge comes in the timing and the little tweaks that can make a fairly plain meal special.

This year I was just cooking for two and I did all the usual things as you can see in the picture above, turkey, veg, roast potato, roast parsnip, pigs in blankets, sprouts, stuffing and gravy. A few things I did this year that I thought turned out well and might be worthy of note:

• I tried to make sprouts taste nice (They're in the little round bowl in the picture). I pulled the nicest looking leaves off a pile of sprouts (you can open them just like a mini cabbage). I fried these with some chopped shallots, some streaky bacon and some chives. Worked really well.
• We used a turkey crown as there were only two of us. Problem with this is that there is very little fat for basting, so I spooned some goose fat over the turkey at regular intervals. By the time I was ready to roast the potatoes, there was a nice layer of bubbling goose fat around the turkey to put them in.
• I made marzipan penguins. They didn't prove very popular as they're too cute to eat

ZOMFG You can make crisps in the microwave

I have a weakness for crisps. I've been craving them all evening but I've already been to the corner shop twice today for other stuff so I can't go again or they'll think I'm weird. 

1) Get a potato, slice it thinly. I used the slicer attachment on my food processor, but you can use a knife if you haven't bought a food processor yet.

2) Dry the potatoes on some kitchen roll. I didn't do this the first time and they didn't crisp up too well

3) Oil a plate. Just a very thin coating, not too much oil or they won't crisp up and will just sit there being oily.

4) Oil the potatoes, I put the slices in a food bag with some oil and rubbed them around. You want them lightly coated and not dripping. Too much oil == damp crisps.

5) Spread the slices out on a big microwave safe plate, in a single layer.

6) Microwave them. They took 8 minutes in my 800w microwave. I've seen people claim anything from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. Keep an eye on them and keep cooking them until they go a nice even brown colour. I didn't turn them at all. The picture above is from an early batch, the darker crisps are much more crisp like, the lighter ones are slightly chewy.

7) When they are done, very carefully take them off the plate and put them on some kitchen towel to dry. They will be hot, the plate will be amazingly hot.

8) Don't worry if  they are slightly bendy, they seem to get more crisp after a minute or so of cooling down. Now add salt or whatever you fancy.

Why did nobody tell me this before?!!!

Bread

I've always liked to make my own bread, it's way better than the supermarket crap and it takes no time at all to make. Recently my morning commute has gotten a whole lot smaller, so I've had time to make bread in the morning. Well, for the most part I've been making it the night before then leaving it to rise in the oven overnight and just switching the oven on when I get out of bed.

1lb of strong flour

A 7g packet of dried, fast action, yeast

salt, sugar, olive oil

Warm water.

Put the flour in a bowl, you can use white or a mix of brown and white. (Try not to go below 15% white, it comes out a bit heavy if you use all brown). Add the yeast and then a pinch of salt, a couple of teaspoons of sugar and a good dash of oil (this all depends on how you like your bread to taste, experiment). Then mix this up whilst slowly adding warm water (definitely not hot or you'll kill the yeast.) until the whole thing sticks together in a big ball.

What you need to do now is knead (repeatedly stretch and squash) the dough until it turns from sticky and bity into smooth and elasticy, this should only take a few minutes. Once this is done, put the ball of dough in a bowl, cover it with a cloth and leave it somewhere warm (like near a radiator) for a good 45-60 mintues. It should double in size.

Then, knead the dough again. The first time the dough rose, it will have had very uneven bubbles in it and quite likely some big holes. so you need to knead it again to even it out.

Then, make it into the shape you want and put it in your loaf tin/on a greased baking tray and leave it for an hour to rise again (I often leave it overnight in the oven, ready to be cooked in the morning).

Then put the dough in the middle of the oven and put it on 180C. I put it in for 20 minutes, then rotate the bread and put it back for another 5-20 minutes depending on how thick the loaf was. You'll have to keep an eye on it and take it out when you think it's ready. The test for readyness (other than thick black smoke) is to turn the load over and tap the bottom, if it sounds dry and hollow it is cooked.

Most pleased

I just found this word : Anatidaephobia

I know I'm late to the party, but I am unnecessarily pleased with this word.

(There's a really nice duck pond in the park near me, which is where that picture came from)

Lemony things

Spent a lot of time this weekend finishing up DIY odds and ends in the kitchen, building some box work around the edges and sealing a few gaps. No point building a nice new kitchen if you're not going to use it, though. So I made a lemon tart thing. I thought I'd make some chocolate pastry for a change. It took me a few goes to get the pastry right as It's dairy free so the Mrs can eat it and butter substitutes tend to melt at a much lower temperature, which is the last thing you want. When making pastry you need to keep everything really cold. I'll post the recipe for it here, but keeping in mind the variability in the sizes of eggs and lemons, you'll have to use your judgement if you want to make this.

Pastry

• 120g plain flour
• 25g icing sugar
• 25g cocoa powder
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• 75g of stork pastry margerine.

Put the flour, sugar and cocoa into a bowl, then add the butter and rub it into the powder until you get something the consistency of breadcrumbs. Beat the egg and the vanilla together and then slowly add this to the mix until it's sticky enough to press together into pastry. Once you have this, knead it briefly, cover it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge to rest.

Once it's had a rest for about half an hour, you need to roll it out and put it in to a 9" flan tin. It'll be quite sticky, so cover the surface, the rolling pin and the pastry in flour first, this should stop it sticking. Once you've done this, put it in the oven on gas mark 4 for about 15 minutes to give it a head start.

Lemony goo

• zest of 2 lemons
• 100g caster sugar
• juice of 3 lemons
• juice of 1 orange
• 90g of butter
• 2 tablespoons of cornflour
• 3 egg yolks and a whole egg.

Mix the sugar, zest and flour together and put it in a saucepan. Turn on the heat to medium. Slowly pour in the fruit juice, stirring constantly. Keep stirring this over a low-medium heat until it goes thick. This will happen really quickly and probably surprise you with how fast it happens. When it does, take it off the heat and stir in the butter (it should be plenty hot enough to melt the butter) and then stir in the eggs. Then put it back on the heat, briefly, stirring until it begins to bloop like porridge. Now, pour this mix into the pastry that you part baked earlier and put it back in the oven for 15 minutes (But keep an eye on it! My oven is no doubt different to yours.)

Once you're done, let it cool in the fridge and slice it when cold.

Awesome pizza discovery

So, I haven't been on here for a while. I got into the habit of writing about my cooking, but then I ripped out my kitchen and threw it into the garden. I've been really busy putting a new one in, and then I changed jobs and went to California and blah blah blah. It's been pretty busy around here. Anyhow, I have a new kitchen and a new oven and I've been getting back into it. 

I was making pizza for tea a few days ago and I was about to pour the water into the flour and I thought, hang on, water is boring. What else can I use? I considered beer, but I didn't think the alcohol would do the yeast much good. So I used chicken stock. It was amazing. So anyway, my new pizza base recipe is as follows:

50g of strong wholewheat flour

150g of strong white bread flour

splash of olive oil,

2 teaspoons of sugar,

No salt (the chicken stock has that covered)

1.5 teaspoons of fast acting dried yeast,

Enough warm chicken stock to bind it all together.

If you have time, I'd knead, rise for 40 minutes, knead again, rise for 40 minutes, before you roll out the base. If you don't have time for this, then you can get away with kneading and then rising for as long as you have before rolling out the base.

Also, here is a picture of America.