Cooking with Booze: The Blog

Introducing guest editor Ed, with his excellent recipes from our grand day out at Nom Nom Nom:

Courgette Carpaccio

• Courgettes
• A lemon
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper

These courgettes were chosen for the main to help cut through some of the heaviness of the eggs. They are light, refreshing and add a really cool bright green colour.

Start with a courgette and a veg peeler (or mandolin). Keep peeling the same spot on the courgette until you start getting fairly wide, but really thin slices. Arrange these on a plate in a row until it’s covered. Drizzle a little olive oil over them, then a squeeze of lemon, a pinch of salt and a twist of pepper. Next, back to the veg peeler to create a new layer to overlay on the plate. Then more dressing. Continue until you have enough (I used 8 slices per person, but it depends how thin the slices are… or how hungry the persons are), and leave in a fridge for at least an hour for the flavours to develop.

Salad Cream

• Four egg yolks
• White wine vinegar
• Four table spoons of single cream
• Cayenne pepper to taste
• Pinch of salt
• Pinch of white pepper

The salad cream was a last minute panic addition to add some sauce for the egg. Salad cream seemed to continue the neglected British food theme nicely. It’s based on recipe from the original champion of cookery, Mrs Beeton. Don’t think Heinz. Brilliantly it tastes a bit like Hollandaise.

Add the cream, egg yolks and seasoning to a small pan. Give it a whisk to mix and place on a low heat. Keep whisking, whilst adding a desert spoon of vinegar. You now have to continue whisking whilst retaining on the heat, this can take a while but if you whack up the heat you get vinegary scrambled eggs. If not, you’ll end up with a sauce the thickness of double cream. Give it a taste, Rosalind of the cookery school got me out of a pickle when I’d added too much vinegar; an extra pinch of salt seems to reduce the effect, cheers Rosalind! Leave it to cool before serving.

Scotched Eggs (makes 4)

• ½ kilo of Pork shoulder
• ¼ kilo of Pork belly
• Seven large eggs
• A handful of sage, chopped finely
• 2 teaspoons of ground mace
• A good amount of pepper
• A desert spoon of salt
• A capful of Scotch
• A packet of breadcrumbs

Yes, it’s scotched, not scotch. The act of slicing meat finely is scotching, hence scotched eggs. I got far to into this in the run up to the competition, discovering Fortnum and Masons invented them at the turn of last century. So they have nothing to do with Scotland. However, in honour of Cooking with Booze, I have added some of its favourite export.

Start with the pork. Remove any skin, and immediately cover it in oil and a (un)healthy amount of salt. Place in a very hot oven for 20 minutes ish, by which time you will have finished preparing the pork just in time for a Chefs treat of amazing crackling!

Anyway, back to the main event. You can get skin removed and meat minced by your butcher, though I use a 1950’s Spong mincer, which gives a great coarse texture. Put the minced pork in a bowl and add an egg, the seasoning, spices, the Scotch and vitally, a good handful of breadcrumbs. Lots of people think breadcrumbs will make the meat drier; in fact they retain the fat as it cooks and keep it all moist and porky. Get involved with your hands and squidge it all together. Leave covered in the fridge for the flavours to infuse.
Meanwhile soft boil four large eggs for about 4 ½ minutes. Immediately dunk in cold water to stop them cooking and shell very carefully. Prepare an egg wash with the remaining eggs and a plate of breadcrumbs ready for rolling.

Now for the best bit! Take a small fistful of meat and pat out into a ½ cm thick saucer sized disk on your palm. Place a boiled egg in the middle of this patty and bring your fingers up to enclose the egg with meat. Smooth over the seams until no longer visible, the more care you take here, the less likely they’ll split in the pan. Gently ‘throw’ from palm to palm to sphereise your porked egg. Repeat for the other eggs. Next roll each one in egg wash followed by breadcrumbs to coat.

To cook them place an inch of oil in a frying pan and heat until a cube of bread just sizzles. Place the eggs in and immediately start spooning hot oil over them with a metal ladle. Keep this up, rolling them occasionally for at least 15 minutes. This way you should cook the pork through without burning and end up with golden brown eggs.

Serve, just cooked, on a plate with the courgette and a good dollop of salad cream. If all’s good, when you cut them open the warm yolk will run out. Yum yum.

I’d be lying if I said I’d actually been waiting until Shrove Tuesday to have another crack at these delicious pancakes, but if you’ve got to give up all those lovely things for 40 days and 40 nights, well… Yummy.

Recipe: cookingwithbooze.org/whisky/whisky-pancakes/

Music: Dennis Alcapone’s Power Version.

I didn’t think I’m come up with a way to distill my Cuban experience (well, some of it) into one dish so quickly, but then it hit me. Plantain is a staple of African and Latin American food - and available in most urban grocery stores these days - and what represents Cuba better than Rum? So let’s marry the two…

Fry a thumbnail of ginger in a little oil, and then add a couple of sliced plantains. While they’re frying gently, mix half a tbsp of brown sugar with 75ml of dark rum (I decided to use Cap’n Morgan’s in this case, as the stockpile of Havana Club 7yo seemed a little wasteful). Pour this mixture over the frying plantains, taking a lot of care as it may well ignite itself, as it did in this case (if not, set it alight yourself, and step back). When the fire dies down, boil the remaining juice hard to coat the plantain, flipping them over a couple of of times, then slide them off onto a plate and consume!

Lovely.

The music here is Cuban reggaeton, which is all you hear everywhere on the island outside the folk clubs. It rules.

Dominik Diamond gave away some copies of Cooking With Booze on Talk 107fm last week - check the MP3 for his enthusiastic response to some of the recipes - and his interesting take on quiz questions…

[MP3]

It’s apple time. In fact, it was Apple Day last week, in case you missed it. My landlady has a big apple tree in her garden, and she gave me a big bag of them with the advice: “They’re not very good this year.” Nevertheless, I immediately conceived a plan.

After deciding that making cider was a bit too much work, I realised I could make Black Butter….

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That was a pretty heavy weekend. After the Rugby on Saturday night, I was in need of some serious feeding by Sunday evening. This fat spinach pie, a bastard remix of Bulgarian Banitza and Greek Spanakopita, hit the spot.

• 1kg spinach, washed
• 200g feta cheese, crumbled
• 200g butter, melted
• 2 eggs, beaten
• Sheets of filo or similar ready-to-cook pastry

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas Mark 4. Wilt the spinach in a pan and drain well, then layer a well-greased dish with a third of the spinach, cheese and melted butter, covering with a layer of pastry. Repeat twice, then pour over the beaten eggs (could have done with more than two, to be honest), and make sure they’re spread evenly and soak in a little. Then pop in the oven for 30-40 minutes, until lightly browned on top.

A real treat, and a fine restorative. Anyone want to share their hangover cures?

Today is veg day at Bone Towers - I’m a member of Growing Communities, a fantastic vegetable box scheme in North London. Every Wednesday I get a big bag of veg for the week, and go to work trying to polish it off. This veg is always so much better than the stuff from the shops - because it all came out of the ground in the last day or so. Some of it’s grown within a couple of miles of my house - and I live in Hackney…

Above is this week’s haul: potatoes, parsnips, onions, carrots, lettuce, broccoli and sweetcorn. I also picked up some fresh eggs and some mushrooms - and a pomegranate, because they’re lovely.

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