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Ham For Adults Only?

December 6, 2016 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

Spotted in Aldi, Carlow this evening.

Yes, that’s jamón serrano, which is Spanish cured ham. They’re selling a full size leg and miniature version in Aldi, which includes the ham holder stand and the knife. I suspect that they’ve labelled the ham as “over 18” because of the knife that’s included in the package. However it’s still a rather odd idea that ham would be considered for “adults only”.

So what happens if an “underage” ham eater wants some ham?

As one of my friends asked, are there queues of underage ham lovers lining up outside supermarkets asking adults to go in and get them their “fix” of ham?

Grocery shopping in Aldi can be quite amusing at times!

(I haven’t tried the ham so I’ve no idea how good or bad it is, but it is nice to see them selling this in the Irish market)

Home Cooked Lasagna With Homemade Roux

November 28, 2016 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

Yesterday was a “cooking day” for me. Apart from the very tasty roast lamb that I made, I also prepared lasagna. Why? Well I like lasagna, but I also like to make my own lunch during the week. I normally opt for a lightish lunch and have a heavier meal in the evening. Changing things around a little suits me.

So I made a trip to my local Tesco and grabbed a couple of the ingredients that I didn’t have in my kitchen. The main ingredient I was missing was the right kind of flour. Sure, plain flour would probably have worked out okay, but I was trying to follow one of several Italian recipes for the white bechamel sauce (roux) which required farina tip OO, which you can find in Tesco, but not in most other Irish supermarkets. It’s also the same kind of flour you can use for making your own pasta or pizza.. so it’ll definitely get used.

I also needed to pick up some butter, as I rarely use it. I ended up with some Glenstal butter, which was slightly cheaper than any of the other brands they were offering. (Tesco’s own brand might have been a little bit cheaper, but I like to buy Irish and support known suppliers when I can).

Lasagna is not a complicated dish to prepare.

You only really need three elements:

the ragù(your pasta sauce)
the lasagna pasta sheets (if you can get lasagna verde do – it’s wonderful!)
the white sauce and some cheese OR a white cheese sauce (the net effect is pretty much the same)

Making a ragù isn’t hard and there are literally hundreds of variants for recipes out there. Using some fresh herbs and a glass or two of red wine helps add rich flavour to the sauce.

Personally I like using ingredients like celery, grated carrot, garlic, onion, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes (chopped) and obviously beef mince. I also use my pressure cooker to make the sauce to save a bit of time.

I hadn’t made a roux in ages, but it came back to me fairly quickly.

A roux is a base sauce from which you can make many other sauces. You make it by melting butter and then mixing in flour and milk. You can add some ground nutmeg for a bit of extra flavour.

Melting butter over a low to medium heat. It’s tempting to turn up the heat, but if you do the butter can easily burn.

The end product, more or less. It was a bit thicker than I would have liked, but I could have thinned it out by adding more milk. I also need to get a better whisk! The fancy looking lime green one pictured is horrible to use.

Cooking the entire thing only takes about 25 minutes. I covered the top of it with grated mozzarella before popping it in the oven and it turned out pretty well

and after 25 minutes at about 180C

I tasted it last night and was quite happy with how it turned out. Today, however, was the real test, as it was my lunch for the day

Verdict? I’m very happy with how it turned out. The bechamel / white sauce / roux could have been thinner and that would probably have improved things a little.

Packing a reasonable slice of lasagna to bring it into the office I noticed that I don’t have any small container for grated cheese, so I had to resort to using quite a big one – another thing for my “todo” list!

Roast Lamb in a Rosemary, Garlic and Lemon Marinade

November 27, 2016 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

While I enjoy cooking it’s usually at the weekend that I’m able to set aside the time to do something a little bit more elaborate or time-consuming.

This weekend was no different and I picked up a bit of leg of lamb on Friday evening planing to cook it either Saturday evening or this evening, Sunday.

As things turned out I ended up leaving it until this evening.

I’ve done lamb roasts several times in the past. I usually slice up some garlic and put slivers of garlic into the meat and then brush mustard and herbs over it.

However I was a bit inspired after watching this video on using a mortar and pestle from Jamie Oliver, so I decided I’d try to do a marinade based on one of his recipes.

So I dusted off my mortar and pestle (literally!) and got to work.

The marinade I made used some fresh rosemary, a couple of cloves of garlic with their skin, some lemon rind and olive oil.

I’ll admit that Jamie Oliver makes it look a lot easier than it is, but like everything I guess it’s a matter of practice.

After some pounding and grinding with the mortar and pestle I got a fairly nice consistency and kept adding oil until it had enough volume to be of use. I then proceeded to coat the meat in it. For smaller cuts of meat it’d be quite easy to make up enough to let the meat soak in it for a while, but with a roast that wasn’t going to be an option.

I also decided to try and flavour the meat using some coarse sea salt and black pepper. The simplest way to do that is to put the salt directly onto your board or work surface and roll the meat in it. Doing it the other way around really doesn’t work!

To accompany the meat I had some baby potatoes and nice fresh carrots. The potatoes didn’t need any prep, so I just popped them in the roasting dish. The carrots I peeled and sliced up, so that they’d cook properly.

Here’s the entire thing before I put it in the pre-heated oven:

I let the entire thing cook for about an hour or so and then checked to see how the meat was coming along. Personally I prefer my meat to rare or medium rare if it’s beef. For lamb I like it to be bêlant ie. still quite red where possible.

Why bêlant? Over 20 years ago when I was working as a waiter in a restaurant in France one of my clients requested his lamb “bêlant” and the term has stuck with me ever since. The term comes from the French verb bêler, which means “to bleat”.

After a further 25 – 30 minutes both the meat and vegetables were done nicely and were thus ready to serve:

Plated up it was a very tasty dinner!

So was the mortar and pestle worth the effort?

Based on my experience with the marinade for this dish, most definitely. I can’t see myself using it every single day, but I’ll definitely be trying to use it more frequently in my cooking, as it does help with the flavour of the herbs and other ingredients.

My First Attempt at Cooking Rabbit Cacciatore

November 27, 2016 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

As a child we didn’t eat rabbit that often. I do, however, remember having it one time and getting a mouthful of buckshot! At least I knew the rabbit was freshly hunted!

Over the last few years, however, I have eaten rabbit several times in restaurants in France and Belgium. Getting rabbit on a restaurant menu in Ireland, however, doesn’t seem to be that common. You can get rabbit to cook at home, but to do so you either have to rely on friends who hunt rabbits or shops that stock imported rabbits. Yes, we actually import rabbits from other parts of Europe, as there currently aren’t any commercial rabbit farms in Ireland. Some butchers do stock wild rabbit meat, but most don’t.

In my case one of my staff was able to get me a wild rabbit.

Luckily for me they’d already skinned it and chopped it up a bit.

I like Italian style cooking so I made a “cacciatore” style dish with mine using a combination of Elise Bauer’s recipe and Antonio Carluccio’s “Coniglio alla Cacciatora”. I wasn’t sure which recipe to go with so I ended up combining them, as I’d already bought (or acquired) the ingredients for both.

You start by dusting the rabbit meat with flour

Then you fry it in olive oil to seal the meat

I love cooking with fresh herbs so I was delighted to get a nice big bunch of fresh rosemary from a friend’s garden, which combined with a few cloves of garlic add plenty of deep flavour to the meat.

The rich aroma of rosemary and garlic filled the kitchen, which is probably one of the reasons I enjoy cooking so much. Sure, I enjoy eating the food, but I really love the deep aroma as the food cooks.

Now to make it all the more interesting, and isn’t that what cooking is all about, I added about 2/3 of a bottle of dry white wine, as well as some tomatoes, some bay leaves, peppers and mushrooms into the pan and let it all cook for about an hour.

As an aside, I don’t usually drink white wine, but it would have been rude to ignore the glass or two of wine that was left in the bottle, so I obviously drank it ..

If you’re not a white wine drinker this guide is handy for helping select the right kind of wine for cooking.

I use a very big and quite heavy pan with a tightly fitting lid for a lot of my day to day cooking, as it’s very good at doing these kind of stew type things. Sure, I could cheat and use a pressure cooker, but for something like this I thought the extra investment of time in the cooking was worth it.

And here’s a really short video showing it cooking away:

A few minutes before serving I added a few black and green olives into the stew which adds a bit of colour and even more flavour.

After about an hour the rabbit was ready and I served it with some boiled new potatoes. There was enough left over for a second evening’s dinner, which saved cooking!

Overall I was very happy with how it turned out.

A few things I learnt, however, rabbit is a bit like chicken, in that there are some parts which are quite bulky but don’t have much meat. You’ll get most of the meat from the legs.

The meat is pretty tasty and quite similar to chicken, though a lot more “gamey’.

I’ve no idea when I’ll be able to get my hands on a rabbit again, but I’ll definitely cook it again if I can.

A Quick and Easy Introduction to Using a Mortar and Pestle [Video]

November 27, 2016 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

If you like cooking you’ll probably end up adding a mortar and pestle to your cooking arsenal at some point. I know I did.

But how do you use it properly?

While it’s pretty obvious that you put whatever you want to grind up or break down into the mortar and hit it with the pestle, doing it properly is another matter entirely.

A few simple tricks can make a big difference in how effective your usage and experience cooking with one of these ancient culinary tools can be.

This short, yet informative video, from Jamie Oliver does a very nice job of explaining how to use a mortar and pestle both properly and effectively.

The video is one of a series over on Jamie’s Home Cooking Skills.

If you’re looking to get your own mortar and pestle you’ll find them in any shop with a decent kitchenware section, or online via Amazon or eBay.

Getting Protein From Non-Meat Sources

October 24, 2016 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

I am not a vegetarian and I have no interest in becoming one. However I don’t need to eat meat every single day, but I do need to make sure that I get enough protein and other nutrients. This infographic (source) shows the top non-meat sources of protein:

Personally I like cooking with both beans and lentils on a regular basis. The only things on that list that I have little interest in are quorn and tofu. Sorry tofu but you’re boring!

Cooking Steak And Vegetables With A Cast Iron Skillet

September 16, 2016 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

I’ve always been fascinated by cast iron cookware. I’ve never really owned any of it, apart from some Le Creuset saucepans. Of course Le Creuset pans are usually enamelled, so a bit more refined, while “real” cast iron has that “rugged” thing going on.

While looking into cast iron cookware I discovered that most of the companies and brands were based in the US. There are a couple in Europe, but most of the better known brands were from some part of the US. In the end I opted for a Lodge pre-seasoned cast iron skillet.

I picked it up on Amazon for around €45. To say that it is “solid” would be an understatement – dropping it on my foot would probably result in broken bones!

If you want to learn more about how they make the cast iron cookware here’s a video about the entire thing:

So last night I was simply dying to try out my new “toy”. I had picked up a nice little steak as well as some vegetables.

I kept the cooking pretty simple. The skillet was new, so I gave it a rinse before using it. As the makers point out:

“consider that cookware is 400ºF in 4 minutes on medium heat and is sterile at 212º F, so soap isn’t always necessary.”

So basically unless you’re dealing with actual pieces of food etc., the simple heat will sterilise and kill everything that could harm you.

Once the skillet was hot I lightly grilled the vegetables (fresh chilli, onion, garlic, mushrooms and green pepper) for a few minutes before turning the heat up high to do the steak. As I like my steaks rare I wanted the metal as hot as possible to really sear the meat. It worked out really well and the end result was excellent. Admittedly I burnt my lips a bit on some of the chilli, but that’s the risk you run with chillis

I’ll be experimenting some more over the next few days..

Here’s what last night’s end result looked like:

Yes, it was damn good!

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