Stock

Nigella makes no secret of her use of stock cubes, and she reassuringly encourages us to do the same. However, she does have some crackin' recipes for home-made stocks and broths.

204. Italian Broth
209. Consommé

I suppose it might seem strange to make the complex stock recipes before making the basic one, but oh well.

329. Stock (Basics etc.)

Nigella suggests making a basic stock out of leftover carcasses from roast chickens. I fossicked around in my freezer, and found both a chicken carcass, and a goose carcass, which looked pretty good. So, you get your carcasses, put them in a pot with carrots, celery, an onion stuck with 2 cloves, peppercorns and parsley stalks. Then you cover it with cold water, bring it to the boil, skim the scum off the surface, and let it simmer for about 3 hours.


stock

I found that the goose/chicken combination resulted in a very golden, gelatinous broth. At this point, Nigella says to let it cool, strain it into measured containers, and then freeze it. I didn't want to make this stock, only to have it languish, forever forgotten, in my freezer, so I thought I'd use some straight away. (And besides, it smelled way too good not to eat!)

I couldn't think of any How to Eat recipes that needed stock, and for which I had all the remaining ingredients close at hand, so I looked to Giorgio Locatelli, and made his Radicchio and Red Wine Risotto. This also enabled me to use the sole radicchio which I'd bought at Leo's last week.

So basically this risotto is a very normal one, except that you sautee thinly sliced radicchio with the onion at the start, and use red wine instead of white. Then it's just a matter of gradually ladling in hot stock until the rice is cooked.


stock + risotto

Giorgio says to serve the risotto with a couple of grilled wedges of radicchio on top, which I did.


red wine and radicchio risotto

It was lovely! And a good, simple dish to show off the fabulicious stock. I have heaps of stock left... can't wait to use more of it!

Cream... Sh-boogie bop

As you might have gathered from my title, both courses of tonight's meal involved cream. And lots of it.

207. Cream of Chicken Soup
208. Risotto-Inspired Rice Pudding

These recipes are from the One & Two chapter, and they're pretty much storecupboard. Saturday night dinner found Mum and I home alone, and with no energy to shop, so I thought I'd give these a whirl.

I had some double cream in the fridge (leftover from the seven-minute steamed chocolate pudding), and a couple of leeks (intended for consommé... wait for tomorrow!) from which I could scavenge 200g for my soup. Technically, Nigella stipulates "dwarf leeks", but concedes that the white parts of ordinary leeks, "very finely sliced", will suffice.

This soup is a lot more trouble in real life than it seems on the page. You've got to cook the finely sliced leeks in butter in one pan, then in a second pan, poach a chicken breast in milk and stock, with a peeled garlic clove and some bay leaves. Then add some flour to the leeks in the first pan and cook until no longer raw and floury. Remove the chicken from the first pan and set aside, then add the poaching liquid to the first (leek+flour) pan, and cook for a few minutes. You then have to shred the chicken, add it to the mixture, and cook it for a few more minutes, before adding butter and letting it cook some more. After this, you blend the whole thing in a blender, (I removed the bay leaves first and left the garlic clove in, even though Nigella doesn't say to do either), before returning it to the rinsed-out saucepan, and heating through. To finish, you stir through (off the heat), a beaten egg and some cream. Are you still following me?

By this stage, you will have used 3 pans, 2 chopping boards, a ladle, a wooden spoon, 2 knives, a couple of little bowls, and endless spoons and forks.

I didn't actually have a chicken breast at home, and was so not in the mood for going out to buy one. So, I rummaged around in my freezer and found some chicken drumsticks, which I thawed and boned with a sharp knife, before chucking the scraggly bits of mutilated meat into the poaching liquid.

Now on the topic of chicken, I find that lots of people seem to be oddly loyal to either breasts or thighs. One girl I know, in particular, only goes for breasts, and will not eat chicken legs/thighs. Ever. At all. So just stop asking and get that thigh off my plate, Sarah. Others I know will only eat drumsticks, complaining that the breasts are dry and tough. You might have picked up the fact that I hold no particular preference for either, as long as it's tasty. And I couldn't see that it would make much of a difference anyway, seeing as it gets blended up in the end. Thighs also have the advantage of being done faster than breasts (especially when ripped off the bone into small pieces in my usual unskilled way).


Soup with toast (Phillpa's bakery's Corn Bread)

Mum and I ate this in front of the TV, (Futurama, of course), and I found it to be enough for two of us, with me taking the lion's share and with Mum supplanting her smaller serving with some noodles. It tasted good, and was everything you'd expect a good home-made cream of chicken soup to be. But by God it was an effort. I wouldn't recommend making this for a quiet dinner for one or two, unless you felt like some quiet pottering around the kitchen.

After dinner...

Me: Hey Mum, did you want me to make a dessert?
Mum: ears pricking up and eyes widening... YES!

I wasn't exactly planning on making a dessert at all, but looking at Mum's sweet face, I could hardly say no. So, the sweet risotto. It's also from One & Two, and comes under the title "comfort food". It reappears in Nigella Bites, (complete with photo) and I'm glad I had that reference with me so that I could check that my risotto was going right. I'm not always super confident with risotti, as I've said previously, my ones always end up taking at least double the time and with double the stock. Nigella said that the sweet one might take up to 35 minutes, so I was afraid I might be at the stove for an hour.

You cook this rice-pudding risotto with the same method as you'd use for a normal risotto. Start off with some butter and vanilla sugar in a pan, then stir in the rice, and add warm milk ladleful by ladleful until all is creamily absorbed and the rice is swollen and tender. It's simple, but it takes fucking forever. For some reason, rice absorbs milk much more slowly than stock. I started at about 9:00pm, hoping (optimistically) to be ready to eat by about 9:30pm, and then ready to leave my house at 10:30 pm to go out. Well, 9:30 came, and I was still standing there stirring. And I know a risotto needs constant attention and stirring, but make-up does need to be applied, hair needs to be blowdried, clothes need to be changed and MSN conversations need to be carried out. So it was about this time that I started multi-tasking - I'd add a scoop of milk, run to the bathroom, apply foundation, run back to the risotto, stir some more, go to the computer, back to the risotto, back to the bathroom and so on for the next 20 minutes, until the risotto was done. I was a bit worried that I might screw up the rice this way, but it didn't suffer for the lack of constant stirring.

I had only used about half the amount of milk when the rice was cooked, for your information. The end result is a pudding that is rich and creamy, even before you add the double cream.


Risotto - before the addition of cream

Even though it looked allright as it was, I added some double cream anyway, because we had it, and because Nigella says to. I multiplied the recipe (which serves 1) by 1.5 for my mum and I, and it turned out to be waaaaay too much. The recipe says 60g of rice per person. Halfway through cooking, the ever-expanding mass of rice in the pot was looking kinda suss, so I had a look at the quantity of rice I used in the last rice pudding I made. That rice pudding also uses 60g of rice... and feeds THREE. (It fed us pretty decently, too, as I recall). I suppose that when Nigella wants food for comfort, part of the comfort lies in the enormous quantity available. Mum & I ate just over half of this one.


Bowl of risotto

It was warm, it was sweet, it was soft, it was comforting. I loved it. But seriously, it's very rich, and a small taste was quite enough.


Typical, eating in front of the computer.

Mr. Brodo, Mr. Brodo!

From Monday to Wednesday this week, I had a much-needed three days off work, and decided that it really was time to do one of those time-consuming recipes for stock from Cooking in Advance that require hours of boiling.

204. Italian Broth

This one's not quite as time-consuming as the consommé (coming soon), as it only takes three hours to boil, and not seven. Nigella says it "provides a fragrant liquid base for tortellini or gnochetti di semolino (see below) or any other manner of culinary punctuation... It is also, pre-eminently, designed to make divine risotti".

The recipe says to boil a beef flank, 2 ossobuchi and a chicken carcass in water with assorted vegetables for three hours, skimming every hour, and a few times in between. I didn't know what a beef flank was, but I googled it, and discovered that it's a tough yet flavoursome, cut of beef. I was sick of asking my butcher for weird cuts of meat, so I just used the spindly bits of frozen oxtail that have been sitting in my freezer for the past few months.




Boiled

Then it's just a matter of straining it and letting it get cold so you can skim off the fat. I made this on Tuesday, and left it in the fridge until Thursday night, which is when I planned to eat it.

But how to serve it? I was definitely going to take Nigella’s suggestion and make the semolina gnocchi, but that wouldn’t be enough for a whole meal. So I decided to make a risotto as well. I've already made all the risotti recipes in How to Eat (2 mushroom, 1 pea), and even though they were all delicious, I wanted a risotto that wasn't too strongly flavoured, so as to show off the flavour of the broth. I've heard rave reviews of Nigella's Ligurian Risotto (from her "At My Table" column in the New York Times), and decided that that one would be perfect.

Back to the broth... this is what it looked like on Thursday evening.


Solid fat - mmm... tasty. I removed the fat with a lot of kitchen paper. Then I put it on the stove to heat up as I made the gnochetti.

205. Gnocchetti di Semolino (Cooking in Advance, even though they don't need to be cooked in advance)

I'm not really a huge fan of the traditional potato gnocchi that you get in restaurants, I always find them dense, heavy and filling, and they sit uncomfortably in my stomach for hours afterwards. However, of these potato-free gnocchi, Nigella says that "these are light, puffy things", so I wasn't too apprehensive. It's hot milk, with semolina whisked in, followed by an egg yolk, butter, parmesan cheese, nutmeg and a whisked up egg-white.


gnocchetti mixture

Then you just drop teaspoonfuls of the mixture into the hot broth, and let them cook. (They're done once they rise to the surface). Nigella says they take 10 minutes, but I found that they took much less time. They looked pretty messy. I suppose you could go all fancy and make quenelle shapes, but I don't really see the point because the mixture is quite sloppy and difficult to work with anyway.


gnocchetti

I let my family eat the soup at the table, while I ate mine at the stove, busily preparing the risotto. The gnocchetti were really good! They were light and puffy, and the cheese gave them a lovely, salty flavour, which is so much better than the bland shite gnocchi that I'm used to. And the soup itself was heartwarming and nourishing.


Soup

So the ligurian risotto is very simple - just an ordinary risotto with pecorino cheese grated in at the end, and served with fresh basil and toasted pinenuts.


Risotto


Ligurian Risotto

It was beautiful! And I think it was the right risotto to show off the home made broth. I have about 1.5 litres of the stock leftover, which I've frozen, so I'll be able to make another risotto with it. Woohoo!

Sarah Loves Ginger

I made gingerbread on Saturday afternoon, and we’ve been slowly working our way through it since Tuesday morning…

113. Stem-Ginger Gingerbread (Cooking in Advance)

One of the main reasons I chose to make this is that we had all the ingredients. Stem ginger was really difficult to acquire, but I found it at The Essential Ingredient a few weeks ago during my big foodie shopping spree.

It’s not a particularly complex procedure – just mix some ingredients in a KitchenAid (or use your fingers if you’re not so technologically advanced), heat some others in a pan, then mix everything together and bake in a lined and greased tin. Nigella says to grate the stem ginger with a drum grater but I took one look at the teensy pieces floating in the jar (it’s “baby stem ginger”, does that make a difference?) and realised that grating it by hand would result either in tears, or in big feral chunky bits of ginger. So I just whizzed it up in a Braun mini-blender. Easy.

I don’t know if my tin is too small, but the mixture expanded above it, much like a muffin in a muffin tin might. But not to worry, it didn’t spill over the edges. You have to leave it to cool in the tin, then wrap it up and leave it for a day (not an easy task). It smelled fabulous, and straight after it was baked, I showed it via webcam to my gorgeous friend in the states who was extremely jealous.


Gingerbread in foil – this sight tormented me for two days!

On Tuesday morning, I woke up to see Mum had already snuck a slice out! I’d told her “we can eat it on Tuesday”, and I think she was thinking the same as me, and got stuck in first thing Tuesday morning.





This was my Tuesday morning breakfast (following a bowl of minestrone, of course).

Headily spiced, moist, rich. It is a bit spicy, because of the stem ginger, I think. I also used allspice instead of mixed spice because that is all we had.

I gave a slice each to my friends Paul and An at uni. Paul, especially, liked it. He’s into that sort of thing you see.

Paul: Ooh, this is really good! It’s not as spicy as you said, but it’s definitely got a kick to it.

Tonight, I made a mushroom risotto for dinner (Yes, How to Eat has two), followed by gingerbread for dessert.

114. Mushroom Risotto (Feeding Babies and Small Children)

This one is basically the same as the low fat mushroom risotto , but it has marginally more butter, you cook the mushrooms separately, adding them at the end, and there are slightly different proportions of rice and liquid stipulated. (Not that it matters, as I always end up using double the amount of stock anyway…)

Anyway, this is your basic risotto, nothing too exciting to report with regards to its method or appearance. Except, of course, it took me about 50 minutes of constant stirring to cook it. 20 minutes my arse. I know this for a fact, as I listened to the entire new Tommy Heavenly6 album whilst stirring.


Mushroom risotto - this is quali'ee stuff, matey. It's the porcini mushrooms that give it the luscious depth of flavour. Also, I used Marsala as the alcohol (Nigella suggests it, and I'd never used it in a risotto before, so why not?), and it was fab - the dark earthiness of the alcohol is echoed in the mushrooms.

The rice I used was imported Italian vialone nano rice, which I bought (along with the stem ginger), from The Essential Ingredient. It felt a lot more special than using ordinary Arborio rice from a supermarket plastic packet. And I'm pretty sure I've seen this rice on the Nigella Bites program in Nigella's pantry.

Dad: This is very good. If you served this at a restaurant for an entrée, you could charge, like $18 for it!

Putting a price on something I cook is one of Dad's favourite ways of complementing me. I'm not complaining!

And here’s dessert – more gingerbread, with bought vanilla ice-cream, cinnamon and stem ginger. Fabulous.


gingerbread, ice cream, stem ginger

I’ve yet to try it, as Nigella recommends, with crumbly cheese (Caerphilly, Wensleydale or Lancashire), but I’m longing too. I’ve got the leftover cake sliced up and frozen, and as soon as I can get my hands on the correct cheese, I’m going for it.

Nigella says the gingerbread will serve 6-8. We’ve already got 8 slices out of it, and have another 5 in the freezer. I know she says to slice it thickly, but there’s only so much ginger a girl can handle at once!

Restrain yourself!

Today was the day of my hands smelling feral. Late last night, I made a triple quantity of Seaweed and Noodle Salad, so that I could have a stash in the fridge for mid-week consumption.

84. Seaweed and Noodle Salad

This salad is made from cold, cooked soba noodles, with some seaweed (Nigella says wakame and arame, but we only had wakame) and various Japanese sauces tossed through. I tossed it together with my hands, as I usually do, but then had a super-strong sesame oil smell on my hands for ages. Yurgh!


Here's my lunch. (Yes, I took my camera with me to uni! And looked like a total gimp photographing my lunch, hehe). I ate it just before a Japanese class, appropriately enough! It's very much the type of thing I'd regularly make for myself to eat. We always have all the ingredients in the pantry, and I've made it, or versions of it, many times before. It's salty, slippery, cold, grainily nutritious and totally slurpable. In other words, brilliant!

On the bus home, I suddenly realised that I wanted something hot and hearty and strongly flavoured and decidedly non-Asian. (I mean, I do love noodles and broths and grilled fish, but sometimes a girl needs a break!) And I remembered... Nigella has a low-fat risotto! Yay!

85. Restrained Mushroom Risotto
86. Roast Garlic and Lemon Dressing

On the way from the bus stop to my house, I bought some mushrooms (dried porcini, Swiss brown, button) from our local greengrocer. And when I got home, the first thing I did was make the salad dressing. You have to wrap head of garlic in some foil with a little Noilly Prat, and roast it for an hour. Then after it's cooled a bit, you mix the soft garlic flesh with lemon juice. I squeezed the garlic out of the skin with my hands, and I also tossed the dressing through the leaves with my hands - it's very thick, and you need to use your fingers to coat the leaves evenly. So my hands still smell totally feral.


Garlic and Vermouth Dressing

The risotto is just your ordinary risotto, but with only a small amount of butter and oil, and no cream stirred through at the end. You start by cooking finely chopped onions in a pan, then adding the sliced mushrooms, then the rice. I was kind of worried when I first added the rice, beacuse it looked like there would never be enough rice for all that mushroom. However, throughout the cooking time, the mushrooms do their usual incredible shrinking act, whilst the rice expands voluptuously. Just as I expected, it took much longer to cook (40 minutes of constant stirring) than the recipe says, and needed double the amount of liquid. (Just like when I made the Pea Risotto). I used a Thai Knorr Shiitake Stock Cube, boosted with some dried porcini mushrooms soaking liquid.

It's absolutely gorgeous, full of deep mushroom flavour, and surprisingly creamy thanks to the starch that comes out of the rice.



This one's definitely becoming a regular dinner.

Pea Risotto

I fully realize the idiocy of embarking on this project right in the middle of the exam period. It’s not that I’m on an incredibly tight schedule with these recipes. I could easily take a couple of days off, and still be on track. Theoretically, I should be able to fit in my cooking around all the study that I have to do. The problem, though, is that now I have an excuse not to study. With the cooking, and the blogging, I’ve just opened up another, enormous outlet for procrastination.

With that in mind, here is what I had for lunch today.

14. Pea Risotto

This risotto serves 2, and is, appropriately enough, from the One & Two chapter, even though the quantities “might be nearer those ordinarily specified for four”. I halved the recipe for myself, with no side dish and no dessert.

It's pretty straightforward, you just cook some peas in butter, and puree half of them with butter, parmesan and nutmeg. Then you cook the rice in the ordinary way, adding the whole peas halfway through and the pea puree at the end.

I used a Living Kitchen 1 Litre measuring jug, which I got for my birthday this year, to pour the stock in. Love it.


Risotto + Living Kitchen 1L Jug

The thing about risotto, when I cook it at least, is that it always takes much longer than the recipe says, and I almost always need to add extra water from the kettle. I think Nigella was being optimistic when said about 20 minutes, because it took me 45, even with halved quantities. This happens even when I keep the stock at simmering point on a nearby hob, as I usually do, so I don’t think it’s because of the temperature of the stock. Hmm…

And here it is, in all its green, fresh, Springtime glory.

Pea Risotto

It was fantastic. I found it to be great comforting food for a solo meal in front of the TV, but it wouldn't be out of place at a casual lunch party, a formal dinner party, an intimite supper, anything. I think it would make delicious arancini, but don't count on having leftovers. It was stodgy enough to fuel my exam-time need for more carbs, but thanks to the peas and parsley, light and fresh enough not to weigh me down intolerably with guilt and bloating. About parsley, Nigella says, “the lack of it won’t give you any grief”, but it adds a really nice touch, counterbalancing the heaviness of the rice, and enhancing the green freshness of the peas.

I think, though, that the taste depends a lot on the type of stock you use. I used a Massel Vegetarian Chicken Style stock cube, which I like, but it would probably taste even better with homemade stock. (By the way, homemade stock is on my list of things to make, so we’ll definitely be seeing a repeat of this recipe sometime soon... and yes, I might even share it around next time!)

You know what, I think I’m eating a lot better than my fellow students stuck in study mode who buy from Union house – sandwiches, sushi, soup, focaccias, kebabs, wraps, 2-day old brownies & cookies etc. Well, the sushi’s pretty good actually, but the focaccias and wraps? ICK!

Phew! With that done, I can get back to revising the crisis of cheap labour in South-East Asian economies! But wait, I think I'll make myself a coffee first...