Hello! After pretty much a two-year absence, I'm back! Quite a few changes over the last two years as i'm now the proud father of a three-month old baby, so there's a good chance that the emphasis will change a little.  However, I'm still cooking lots of great food, the more so as my fiance is pescatarian; so I'm doing bulk cooks of things like veggie chilli and bolognese for the freezer, while interspersing with my more usual fare.

No recipes today as Finn's given me a cold and we've invested in a Marks and Spencer meal for two for tonight, but thought i'd check in and say hi.  Will find something to post soon!

Dom

Bit of a tart... au chocolat

I've been asked to cater for my drama group's murder mystery night (a paltry hundred or so!), and this is one of the desserts i've chosen to do - pretty straightforward, can be prepped in advance and always goes down very well!  It's adapted from one I found on the BBC Good Food site, with a few additions... and to a friend of mine, this is what you missed the other night!

This can be served warm straight from the oven, but i actually quite like it as a chilled dessert - though i also like it with ginger and vanilla ice-cream which is a bit random i guess!  Hot or cold, the inside is nice and gooey and there's a few different textures in there.

Recipe (for about eight tarts)

About 500g sweet pastry - I use Richard Bertinet's recipe
1 bar of Green and Blacks 70% plain chocolate, of which about 2/3rds melted
50g plain flour

4 eggs
75g butter
100g caster sugar
4-5 pieces of crystallised ginger
Ginger and vanilla ice cream to serve
(you will also need fluted metal pastry cases and baking beans)

Roll out pastry til about 3mm thick and cut to make 12cm fluted pastry cases (leave extra overhanging as the pastry will shrink slightly as it cooks).  Bake these blind on about 170 degrees for about 10 mins until just golden.  Leave to cool for a few minutes, then trim the cases to fit the fluting of your cases so they're nice and neat (you can also east the of-cuts which are lovely!!).

Whisk the eggs, flour, sugar and butter together, then add about 2/3rds of the melted chocolate. Reserve the rest of the chocolate, keeping it melted.  Whisk the mixture together, then fill each case about 4/5ths full.  Bake these for 6-7 minutes until the top is slightly firm. Leave to cool slightly, then level each one off topping it up with rest of the melted chocolate (add more if you need to...).

Finely chop the ginger, into small square 1mm thick, then place decoratively on top and grate over some more chocolate.  You can either serve them now while still warm and the chocolate is largely melted, or chill for a couple of hours and serve it cold.  In either case, serve with a quenelle of the ice cream.

A wee bit o' culture... Burns Night

In an effort to relieve the long, dark, January days, I decided to liven things up by inviting some peeps round for a Burns Night.  Now, there was only one Scot in attendance (not me, despite the occasional accent drift when speaking to colleagues from glesca), and we totally failed read any Rabbie Burns, but that wasn't really the point.  It was a chance to introduce a few people to the Chieftain of the Pudding Race - the Haggis.

The thought of Haggis can be off-putting for many (one of the guests is still refusing to be told what's in it...) and some Haggis can be very bad...  but good haggis is fantastic - there's something visceral and rich about it, bloody goergeous.  So i took no chances and ordered it down from north of the border.   Found a great and really helpful online butchers - McLays of Glasgow - who shipped me down a couple of their finest.  It was served traditionally with neaps (usally turnip, but couldn't get any, so had to improv with parsnip and swede mashed together), tatties - creamy mashed potato - and an onion gravy helped along with some herbs and wee nip of Single Malt.

The main course was very simple to do - prepped in advance so i could be a bit more sociable when my guests arrived, and the Haggis simmered in it's 'cook-in bag' for an hour or so. Of the two i ordered, the general consensus, even among the Haggis virgins, was that the Warrior (apparently a more traditional, but smaller one) was the more flavoursome one - more highly peppered and richer, though the Sma' Chief was also rather good.

Aftermath...  note the mostly

empty bottle of Jura...

For starter i served a potato and smoked (scots) salmon on a slice of (scots) black pudding, with a white wine, dill and cream sauce. The rosti was baked slowly in the oven for about an hour, with some cheese grated over the top, then i cut rounds out to the same size as the black pudding and served it as a stack with the sauce over the top.  Wasn't a huge starter, but went down rather well - a prelude to the main event.

Dessert, was also relatively light.  At christmas I nabbed a Richard Corrigan Great British Menu recipe for an Irish Whisky vanilla ice cream (that time served with his Christmas Pud souffle). This time I Ben and Jerry-ised it, stirring in some crumbled up shortbread just before it went in the freezer.  This was served in a sandwich of two pancakes and topped with another nob of icecream, and a citrus and whisky syrup with some grated chocolate over the top.  Which took precisely two minutes for everyone to scoff down!