A pot that is hot (6)

Forget Bodyguard or Strictly or Grumbleton Glump, or whatever it is you people are watching these days.

The best programmes on British TV at the moment are 1986 episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC4, and old Coronation Street on ITV3. No arguments, please, this really is as good as it gets.

Yes, it's a Hotpot!

If you haven't caught up with Old Corrie, we're in about mid-1990 now, a few months after Alan Bradley got killed by the tram, and probably a year or so before Alec Gilroy's fit granddaughter shows up and is sullied by Andy McDonald.

But we get two episodes every day from a era when they were broadcast at a rate of two per week, so that 'year' will pass by pretty quickly. And there's still a long, long way to go before it descends into an unwatchable retirement home for actors who can't get any other work.

Be transported back to a simpler time. A better time. A time when people were still with us.

20 minute recipes - Leek & Stilton Carbonara

Oh, hello there.

How are you? How's your mother? Yes, it's getting a bit nippy out, isn't it? Little bit parky, yes. Getting dark early. Still, soon be Christmas, eh?

Better than going out in the cold

Anyway, someone pointed out to me recently that I haven't actually posted a recipe for absolutelyfuckingages so here's something new I've been working on for the Winter season.


A warming and hearty pasta sauce that's quick and easy to make; sort of Italian with an Anglo-Welsh twist.

Perfect comfort food for an evening in. After all, you don't want to go outside, do you?

And, yes, I'll try to post recipes more often. I know you like them.

Leek & Stilton Carbonara

Ingredients: (makes enough sauce to coat four generous portions of pasta)

Pancetta cubes (or Guanicale if you can get it), about 1/3 lb
Leeks, 2-3, topped and tailed
Stilton, about 1/4 lb, crumbled
Garlic, 2-3 cloves, finely diced
White Wine, about 2 glasses

It's cheesy...

Butter, a very large knob, as it were 
Single cream, about 1/4 pint
Olive oil, a little for frying

To serve:

Tagliatelle, or other fresh pasta of your choice

Black pepper
Fresh Parmesan


Method:

Set a pan on a medium-high heat, and fry off the pancetta and garlic in a little oil for 4-5 minutes while finely slicing the leeks - it's best to use a high-sided saute pan if you're going to be making a decent quantity of sauce.

...and, err, Leeky

Add the leeks and cook for a few more minutes until they soften and start to disintegrate, before turning down the heat a bit. Whack in the crumbled Stilton and a little butter, and stir it about as the cheese melts and begins to coat the meat and leeks.

Pour in the wine a little at a time - if the cheese starts to burn or turn brown, the temperature is too high. It's also perfectly acceptable to add more butter at this point. Because we like butter.

Leave it to simmer for a few minutes while you cook your pasta, but, importantly don't add the cream until a couple of minutes before you're ready to serve.

Almost done!

Once you've added the cream, stir it in, and maybe turn up the heat a notch - you're looking for a consistency that is deliciously creamy but not too thick as it's got to coat the pasta easily.

With plenty of already-salty ingredients in the mix, you shouldn't need to add any further seasoning, but tasting the sauce will do no harm.

Finally add your cooked, drained pasta, ensure it's all well coated and serve right away with a healthy sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper and a little parmesan.

An Italian White will go well with this

Ben Appetit!

Food fit for Commoners

You probably haven't failed to notice that there's an Election coming up this week.

Who are you voting for?

Actually, if you live round here, you might very well have failed to notice. In this ultra-safe Labour seat they could, and often do, stick a red rosette on a steaming dogturd and it would still romp home with a huge majority, so nobody is bothering to make much of an effort.
 

As far as the wider electoral picture goes I shall, of course, be rooting for the Tories and hoping for the best, but I'm not at all confident now. We're almost certainly heading for abject constitutional carnage for various regrettable reasons that I won't go into here - I'm well aware that the stuff that fascinates politicos like myself is more of a turn-off to most people than the sight and aroma of a steaming dogturd with a red rosette on it.

Anyway, one of the advantages of an Election campaign is that the house isn't sitting, and that means that ordinary folk like you and I get a rare opportunity to see a bit more of the innards of our parliament than we normally would.

Places like the Members' Dining Room, which I visited last week, fulfilling a long-held wish.

Utterly Paphotic

Having an e-Passport is great.

It means you can breeze through immigration at Gatwick in no time, whilst pointing and laughing at the suckers in the lengthy queue with their manual passports.

'So long, losers!' you get to say, as you merrily scan your way across the border and into the Arrivals Wetherspoons.

Of course, as the new e-passports are phased in, the balance will shift. Soon we'll start seeing queues, and then they'll be the same length as the non-e queues. One day the last remaining people with old fashioned documents will be having the last laugh when 99% of us are waiting in line to scan.

But for now, it's the golden age of the electonric passport, and I fully intend to savour the schadenfreude.

MSG, Marinara and the magical fish

Way back in the long-long agos, when I were a wee sapling child and Feargal Sharkey was just launching his solo career, there was quite a lot of tooing and froing in the media about Monosodium Glutamate. MSG. Angel Dust.

These days it's all about Aspartame and how it makes Diet Coke actually more fattening than drinking melted butter because scientists on the internet proved it or something, but back in the late 1970s and early 80s the controversial food additive was MSG.

Worse than Heroin and Thalidomide, MSG was going to give us all cancer and turn us into Communists by the year 2000.

Thank fuck it's not around any more.

Although, in reality, it is. Probably more than ever, in fact. They just stopped calling it MSG and people stopped caring so much. People can be like that at times.

If you look closely at the ingredients, you can see that it turns up in loads of packaged savoury foods, from cheese and onion crisps to chicken wings to pizza to ready-made Marinara sauce. It's just called E621, or 'flavour enhancer'. these days 'Hydrolysed vegetable protein' is, I gather, almost identical too.

As rebranding exercises go, I think they can chalk it up as a success story. Bastards.

The Ultimate Roast Chicken Sandwich

People don't seem to have roast chicken as much as they did when I was a child.

I've no idea why. It's just one of those things that has changed over time. Back in the 1980s people would always be roasting chickens like there was no tomorrow.

Yep, that's a roast chicken alright

'Hey Ben, why don't you come over for dinner, my mum's doing roast chicken then we'll play on the Commodore 64.'

'I'm just going to finish driving my Ford Capri around whilst listening to Saxon, then I'm going to cook a roast chicken'

'That's right, kids, it's roast chicken again. Should be ready after Metal Mickey. Have a can of Quatro in the mean time.'

...and so on.

(Your memories may vary slightly, obviously.)

The ultimate Stroganoff

I was saying the other day, following the trip to Moscow, that I can cook a tastier Beef Stroganoff than the rather bland version I found in Russia itself.

Inexcusably boastful, I'm sure, so I wanted to back that up with something concrete. Something on a plate. Something you can actually fucking well eat!

Stroganoff

Now, it's not a dish I've cooked all that often, and my recipe has probably been slightly different each time. But now I've sampled it in Moscow, it's clearly was high time I came up with my definitive 'Strog'.

The influences are myriad, drawing upon research into very old and traditional Russian recipes for the dish, but I've added a wider Eastern European angle through the inclusion of chicken livers.

There's even a hint of the good old curry house about it, as I looked for ways to include tomatoes, which are apparently one of the traditional components, along with the wine and cream.

And so, this is what I've come up with. Enjoy.

Huzzah for the Hussar!

'There's nothing new under the sun', goes the appropriately old phrase, and it oh-so-often rings true. Except when it doesn't, obviously.

But, for grumpy, prematurely-old fogeys such as I, it frequently seems like that which is new is no fucking good, and that which is any fucking good is stuff with which I am already familiar.

Music these days? Shit. TV these days? Shit. Films these days? Shit with Ben Shitting Affleck acting all shit.

OK, so I'm exaggerating just a tad. Some stuff which is technically new, though not necessarily widely promoted, is actually pretty good. Look hard enough and you'll find decent music and films and everything else made very recently indeed. And some things - like beer - are probably better and more exciting now than they've ever been. New beers are good, they're fucking, shitting good!

But my point is that, if you often struggle to see the merit in the latest stuff and are baffled by the faddishness around it, there is another path to tread which is a bit more interesting than just sticking with what you know and never expanding your horizons...

Blog-o-nese

Spaghetti Bolognese is boring.

It's the most boring type of pasta, coupled with the most boring type of pasta sauce. 

Boring, boring, boring. Fuck off.

Actually, don't. Because I've been having a lot of thoughts on this subject lately. Sort of.

Wine Whine

We take it for granted that it’s pretty easy to buy decent wine these days – certainly compared to the experiences of previous generations.

Armed with a little knowledge and a little money, we can walk into a supermarket or off-license, make relatively well informed decisions and take advantage of the considerable choice available.

Fruity, new-world Merlot in the £6-8 range? You got it. Crisp, dry Chablis to go with that smoked salmon you’re serving as a starter tomorrow? On the bottom shelf – take your pick from these.

What’s probably harder for us these days than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago is buying bad wine. Cheap wine. Wine that your might, perhaps, not want to drink.

‘B-but you are a chap of exceptional taste and discernment’, I can hear the voices saying, ‘Why ever would you want to buy bad wine?’

Fairly obviously, for cooking with. I'll explain why. And buying good bad wine, or rather, buying the right bad wine is trickier than you might think.

Of course, you can use good wine to cook, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing so. If you’ve got a big Claret or Burgundy to drink with a joint of beef, I’d fully expect you to add a generous splash to the meat juices to make your gravy.

But if you’re cooking beef for eight hungry people and the quantity of wine required to make the gravy starts to exceed half a bottle or so, you have to question whether you want to waste expensive wine in the kitchen when you could be drinking it at the table.

I use wine in cooking a lot. Pasta sauces, risotto, casseroles, pot roasts. And after a few years of experimenting I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just foolhardy to use anything other than the cheapest suitable plonk you can get your hands on. Suitable being the operative word, mind.

In France, they get this. In the Hypermarkets there are little sections for wines that have the right characteristics for cooking but which you wouldn't really want to drink. They often come in square, ribbed plastic bottles. But in England it's a challenge, almost as if people don't want to admit that cheap wine has a use other than as sustenance for tramps.

It's all good

Taste the difference?

I’m the first person to defend wine ‘snobs’ from lazy philistine criticism, but outside the glass, the rules are different and the quality of wine becomes singularly unimportant.

Hell, I’m the kind of person that fusses about the quality of butter or olive oil I use, but the cooking pot is a mighty Dionysian leveller and will barely respect a Château Lafite Rothschild better than a Tesco’s own-brand Rioja.

There are some who say you shouldn't cook with a wine you wouldn't be happy to drink. And they can fuck right off.  Do they really think they can tell the difference when it's mingling on the stove with garlic, onions and Worcestershire sauce?

I challenge the wine buffs to prove me wrong on this one: Once the wine is absorbed into a sauce, you’ll probably be able to tell if it’s red or white and possibly, just possibly, guess at a grape variety, depending on sweetness, fruitiness, peppery-ness and so on.

But that’s it.

I don’t believe even the most knowledgeable expert would be reliably capable of identifying the region or vintage once the wine is in my pancetta risotto or chicken chasseur – and even I'm wrong, theirs are not the palettes for which I’m cooking on a regular basis.

So, having established that it’s not really worth wasting your drinking wine or paying over the odds for something to cook with, we face the conundrum in the supermarket – that dirt-cheap cooking wine to serve your purpose is actually pretty hard to find, at least at a price significantly lower than wine which is better. (Fairly obviously if a bad wine is the same price as a reasonable wine, you buy the reasonable wine because it gives you additional options viz what to with it!)

The problem is that it’s not just as simple ‘buy any cheap wine’ because most of the cheap ‘wines’ you’ll find on the shelves are aimed not at savvy chefs but at cheap drinkers, and are sweet, weak and sparkling, which makes them unsuitable for most culinary purposes, except possibly some kind of syllabub.

And yet, there are demonstrably acceptable cooking wines available at very low prices (e.g. £2.99 or less) – they just don’t seem to be widely promoted. ‘Acceptable’ will usually mean either a cheap Chardonnay, which is fine for your cheesy and fishy dishes where the acidity will temper the oils, and rough Spanish red which will do for almost everything else.

  

Be prepared to search high and low for them though. And unless you’re doing the chicken chasseur thing - which can easily require a whole bottle - you’ll probably want to make sure any cooking wine you buy is screw-top rather than corked, which limits the choices further.

(Oh, and if you ever plan to explore the world of wine enemas, you'll want the dry white. Don't ask me how I know, just trust me on this one!)

If you’ve been using drinking-quality wines for cooking, just try my advice for yourself, and if you don’t like it, you can go back to using champagne for blanching cauliflower, or whatever it is you do.

With the money you save, you’ll be able to buy better wine for actually drinking, or invest in other better quality for cooking in areas where you will notice the difference (like buying those long, pointy red peppers rather than the stubby ones),

Or you could even buy me a little present. Like a cheap Spanish red...

Mulled White or The Long Hot Toddy

Well, Happy New Year, folks.

The tenacious longevity of my coldy-fluey-swiney ailment has meant that I've been functioning well below 100% through the festive season and into 2011, but I think I've hit upon a tasty cure which I'll share with you today.

During the Winter months I enjoy mulling wine, as, I'm sure, do many of you. It's a simple way to rustle up some festive cheer - a rough red, heated up with some apples and oranges, and the classic seasonal spice combo of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. Mmmmm. Warms the heart, so it does.

I've also mulled ale and cider a few times over the years. Give me a naked flame, a handful of cloves and a cinnamon stick and I'll mull anything, me.

But the other day I began - ahem - mulling over a little vinous thought that just wouldn't go away. What about mulled white wine?