Author: Patrick L

The Bread Baby

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Does anyone remember that craze back in the 90’s, where people gave each other little pocket sized computer thingies that you had to ” feed” and “bathe”, or they pinged in an annoyingly loud manner? Or that episode in “Frasier” where Niles attempted to simulate fatherhood by looking after an eight pound sack of flour for a week? No?

I had forgotten them too – but they all came rushing back to me in the early hours of the morning about a month ago, when I found myself under the glare of my kitchen lights, giving it the full Colin Clive and screaming, “It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!!”

That’s Dr. Frankenstein to you, thank you very much.

I was making my own sourdough bread.

Moreover, I was learning – all too painfully – that making your own sourdough bread is not about the baking the bread, but rather about making the “starter.” And making a sourdough starter is uncomfortably like looking after a small baby for an extended period of time. There’s a lot of feeding and changing, quite a bit of gas, the regular disposal of beige goop, some malodorous smells, and far too much fretting and crying.

How did I get to that darkly cinematic moment in my kitchen in those wee small hours? Not naturally or easily actually. Continue reading “The Bread Baby” →

The Spicy Truth About Vanilla

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Vanilla. We all know vanilla. Naturally warm and sweet, it’s the base note of dessert in the Western World, from the scoop of vanilla ice cream served with apple pie in the US to the warm custard poured over crumbles in the UK or baked into tarts by the Portuguese.

It’s that essential ingredient in cookies and cakes and puddings. It takes the edge off chocolate and coffee, and lifts a mug of hot milk to dreamy bedtime heights. One might even say that vanilla is the umami of the sweet palate.

Vanilla’s Bad Rep?

But vanilla gets a very bad rap these days. There’s a perception in this day and age that vanilla is somehow boring. In our quest for ever more exotic flavours of ice cream we’ve derided the humble but pure pleasures of a well-made vanilla ice cream. Other spices like star anise and  cardamom, lovely though they both are,  have become so achingly hip that good old vanilla seems like a dull, almost matronly staple in comparison. Vanilla has to be dressed up as “French Vanilla” or ” Genuine Madagascar Vanilla” or “Vanilla Bean”. We’ve even-horror of horrors- begun to use the term “vanilla” to mean boring, unimaginative sex. It’s as if vanilla has become the Doris Day of spices.

And that’s not fair. Continue reading “The Spicy Truth About Vanilla” →

Making Stock & Roast Chicken Othello

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This week finds me typing merrily away as my homemade chicken stock reduces over a low heat, ready to be labeled and frozen in one cup-size containers.

Also just in the freezer are the remaining three portions (in individual containers of course!) of the batch of Chicken Paprika that I made for our dinner tonight. I had made my Roast Chicken Othello on Sunday, you see, and had saved the carcass for just this purpose. As it was a small carcass, I also roasted a couple of chicken thighs and added them when it came to making the stock along with:

  • a couple of onions
  • a couple of carrots
  • fresh thyme – the remainder of which also went straight into the freezer for future use
  • two bay leaves
  • some black peppercorns
  • and a healthy dash of salt

Then let it simmer away for several hours. I always take the lid off for the last hour or so, so the stock reduces and intensifies in flavor.

The Roast Chicken Othello, by the way, is quite the nicest way to roast a chicken.

What you do is

  • blend together three tablespoons of runny honey and one tablespoon of softened butter
  • slather it over the chicken
  • roast at the highest your oven will go for the first 20 minutes – basting from time to time – or until the skin turns a very dark brown (hence the dreadfully un-pc name).
  • turn the heat down to medium for the remainder of the cooking time. This, by the way makes for a shorter cooking time, so check the chicken about fifteen minutes before you would usually.

It also almost hermetically seals the chicken, and makes for an unbelievably juicy and sweet bird, so much so that you don’t even need gravy.

Don’t stuff the bird, but instead shove a lemon half and a clove or two of garlic in the body cavity to balance the sweetness of the honey and you have yourself a feast o’ fowl.

One Man’s Attempt To Snack Like A Princess

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“Life,” the writer Shirley Conran once famously noted, “is too short to stuff a mushroom.”

Now however much I may disagree with her about stuffing mushrooms (gorgeous little button mushrooms stuffed with a brandied chicken liver mousse! meaty portabello mushrooms stuffed with brie and garlic and walnuts!), I must concede that Ms Conran was not on some anti-fungal crusade. She was, instead, making a much larger point about the uselessness of engaging in needlessly fiddly and time-consuming activities simply to prove their status or- even worse- their worth. Boiled down, if you think that presenting the world with a stuffed mushroom is what will finally show them all that you have it all and can do it all, you’ve probably got a very skewed idea of what having it all and doing it all actually means.

This thought, amongst a colorful array of others, occurred to me the other day when I faced up to the realities of a challenge I had set myself: making homemade potato chips. Continue reading “One Man’s Attempt To Snack Like A Princess” →

What American Food Means To Me

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Earlier today, on the eve of that Birthday of the United States of America, the 4th of July, Deborah posed a real, well, poser of a question:   “What is American food?”

On the surface, this was a very easy question to answer. “Hamburgers!” “Hot dogs!” “Apple pie!” “Chop suey!” “Barbeque!” “Pizza!” were amongst the most vociferously voiced suggestions. And despite the fact that each of those originated in another continent (if not country), I completely agree.

But as an amateur food historian, I could counter those with “Popcorn!””Peanut butter!” “Turkey!” “Cranberries!” as each of those foods are actually native to the USA. Well, … Okay, so peanuts are actually native to South America, and the peanut butter we eat today was possibly loosely based on a Cuban culinary practice-but it became peanut butter in the USA. And no, it was not invented by George Washington Carver, but I’ve covered that story here.)

And anyway, I started to think about the question in a different, more personal, way. Continue reading “What American Food Means To Me” →