Treasure From England

I were brung up in Yorkshire, where we not only talk the most proper Inglish, we also invented t'world's best cuisine. Tha' knows, Yorkshire puddin, pease puddin, black puddin too, I shunt wonder, and o' course, t'world's best vegetable: mushy peas.

I've searched high and low for the makings of mushy peas (dried marrowfat peas, that's all) here in Madrid, but to no avail. You can get ready-made 'mushy peas' in tins, but these are bright green and not at all how they should be.

On my last two visits to England, trying to buy some marrowfat peas was a fairly high priority, but on both those trips I was in pansy London where you can easily get fancy foreign greenery like guacamole and pesto, but you really really can't get marrowfat peas.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine announced that he was shortly going to spend a week in Liverpool, and asked the usual question - is there anything you want? Normally this question is met with a polite 'no', but this time 'a kilo of marrowfat peas' was out of my mouth before I'd had time to think.

We met the other day so he could hand over the treasure. I offered him Britcoin in payment, but he was happy to accept a minced beef and onion pie instead. I was almost speechless when I saw what he'd got me though.




Four 250g boxes of Batchelor's Bigga peas. Wow. I didn't even think Batchelor's still existed. See, I worked for them one summer, about 1976? They had a factory in Sheffield, and for some reason they liked to hire people from our village and some of the surrounding ones, and bus us to the factory and back. My job was quite straightforward. Me and my buddies had to stand at the end of about four dehydration lines. These 'lines' were up a flight of stairs, and quite long. At the far end, trucks would deliver freshly-harvested things like peas or broad beans onto conveyor belts. Workers would pick out twigs, stones and other stuff that shouldn't be there, and the veg would slowly travel through long, open-ended ovens until they were all dried out.

The dehydrated vegetables would then sit patiently in a hopper until it was their turn to be bagged. This is where us bagging operatives came in. We had to fasten a big strong brown paper sack onto the end of a chute connected to the hoppers, pull a chain to release a bagfull of peas into the sack, unfasten the sack and lug it over to a kind of vertical sewing machine, stitch the top shut and then lug the sack onto a pallet.

And that was all cool and groovy, except when the sacks slipped off the end of the chute, or split when you lifted them, or you didn't stitch them shut properly. Whatever the cause, the result was dried peas all over the factory floor and remedial action involving a dustpan and shovel, and a fresh bag. Let's just say it wasn't terribly hygienic, and I'm sure any stray stuff was removed before the creation of a finished product to sell to the public..

But I digress. The day after I got these beauties, I made fish and chips and mushy peas. Very authentic, they were. You soak the peas for about 12 hours in water. Batchelor's supply a couple of tablets (probably bicarbonate of soda) to assist the soaking process. Strain the peas and cover them with fresh water in a pressure cooker. Bring to the boil, slap the lid on and give them 5-10 minutes. The peas should be soft, and some of them will have turned into an olive-green goo. And that's it, done, although you might want to add a bit of salt because they're somewhat bland if you don't.

Mushy peas. Ooh.

The Long Egg-speriment

This post is about Gala Pies and Long Eggs. If you don't know what either of these, I will now elucidate. A Gala Pie is a long version of a pork pie, typically baked in a bread tin and about the size, shape and weight as a brick. But far more tasty, unless of course, you're a troll. Gala Pies have a boiled egg running through the centre and are designed to be served in slices. Magically*, no matter where you cut the pie, you always get the full amount of egg yolk and egg white.

This is where the Long Egg comes in. Long hens became extinct aeons ago (possibly from exhaustion during the never-ending egg-laying), so these days we have to resort to magic technology to replicate their efforts. It seems that every commercial Gala Pie-maker considers the provenance of the Long Egg to be a trade secret, but my trawling of the Interwebz came up with solutions involving tubes of different diameters and the separate poaching of the yolks and the whites.

I rummaged around the kitchen and came up with a squeezy sauce bottle that seemed to be about the right diameter for the outer tube, so I cut the top off. The inner tube was more problematic, but I found some phallic pet feeder things that were only a little too big for the inner tube (I figured that was okay - more yolk, less white - only doctors like egg white anyway) in the local Chino.

I poured my yolks into one of the blue tubes, but was unable to seal the top so I had to rig up something with toothpicks and wire to keep the tube vertical while the yolks set. When it was done, I placed the long yolk into the wider tube, poured albumen around it and popped it back into the pan until it set. Getting the complete long egg out of the tube was a bit of a disaster, however. I hadn't thought to use any lubricant, and the egg white had become quite firmly attached to the polythene. So I had to cut it out with a knife and ended up with a somewhat mis-shapen long egg.

I had my pastry, jelly and pork filling all ready, and no time (or eggs) to make another long egg, so I chucked it in and baked it.



So the egg didn't look great, but the whole pie tasted fantastic.

That was a couple of weeks ago. I made another long egg this morning, using food-grade polythene tubes that I made myself using my heat-sealer. This one seems to have turned out pretty well, so I'll make another gala pie tomorrow. Wish me luck.

*Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke, 1961

An Interesting Discovery

Having lived in the Middle East, I'm a big fan of hummus, which is pretty much a staple of the diet there. In case you don't know, it's a puree of chick peas (garbanzos) and tahini and a little bit of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. I have bought hummus once or twice since we moved to Spain, but not been impressed. And I've made it once or twice, but the price of tahini here is incredible - €6 - €8 for a half-litre pot.

I don't know why, but today I had the urge to find out whether tahini was something I could make myself. I'd always thought it was made by some mysterious fermentation process, but a quick trawl of the interwebz proved me (happily) wrong. It is nothing more than ground-up sesame seeds and a bit of olive oil.

I got me a bag of sesame seeds today, so guess what I'm going to make tomorrow!

The Great Juniper Hunt

A friend of mine is going through a phase of liking gin and tonics - the more exotic, the better. He is enthused by G & Ts served with cucumber, strawberry, and whatever else the creative barperson can think of. But the definitive additive is juniper berries. He'd discovered this before Christmas and (as a dude who knows his way around food shops and markets), I promised to get him some. Well, it wasn't unlike the experience of trying to buy a goose - blank looks, shrugged shoulders, etc. We discovered that the bars that had the berries had been given them by their gin suppliers. So I asked my son to get some in London and smuggle them through Customs. He drew a blank too.

And so the matter was quietly laid to rest, until yesterday. I'd delivered the final batch of pies to The Lock Inn for their Burn's Night Pie Night (a stonking success, by the way), and had a couple of hours to kill before the event started. I got myself a haircut, and then wandered up and down Calle Fuencarral in Malasaña, possibly by most favourite street in Madrid. And I happened upon a newly-opened shop called Tiger. I think this is a Scandiwegian chain, but I've never come across it before. I was enchanted. They have lots of really stupid little stuff, but it's all quite well designed and very cheap (a combination of two of my favourite things). They have toys, gifts, cosmetics and bathroom stuff, toys for geeks, general household stuff and KITCHEN STUFF! I got myself a stupid little battery-operated 'milk foamer' which I think will be good for beating eggs and milk for my pie glaze, and then I saw the rack of herbs and spices. And would you believe it, bags of juniper berries. Only €2!

So my mate finally got his Christmas present.

Say Cheese!

I've never been keen on Spanish cheese, and the English and French cheeses I've bought in Spain never seem to have travelled well. Ho hum. And I've always been interested in the idea of trying to make my own cheese, but it looks pretty complicated, so I never did anything about it.

However, a couple of weeks ago, we had a Greek salad (at a Turkish restaurant - go figure). One of the essential components of a Greek salad is feta cheese, which I love, but I've only ever seen it in one shop in Madrid, at a higher price than I wanted to pay.

But it got me thinking. I looked up feta cheese recipes on the Interwebz, and it seemed fairly straightforward. I went to my local pharmacy and got some powdered rennet (cuajo, in Spanish), and my local Mercadona supermarket supplied some goat's milk. I was a bit worried, because supermarket milk is always highly sterilized / pastuerized / UHTd, and all the recipes say it's best to use fresh milk if you can.

Anyway, I followed the instructions as best I could, but I think I overheated the milk. Whatever the reason, I couldn't get a 'clean break' - it's hard to describe, but basically it's the point where the curds separate from the whey.

I left it overnight, but nothing much had changed, although it did taste like very good yoghurt. I poured it into a large plastic bottle and put it in the fridge, in the full expectation of having to eventually throw it away. But about five days later, my wife noticed some separation of curds and whey. We were travelling that afternoon, but before we went I poured the stuff into muslin cloths and hung them up over a pan, still not expecting much to happen, other than it making the apartment stinky.



But no! When we got back after four days, we had a pan full of whey, and two blobs of something that had the texture of a softish cheese. I cut the blobs into cubes and put them in a jar full of brine for a few days. And yesterday I tried a sample. It tasted just like feta cheese! There isn't a lot of it, and it's all going into a Greek salad tonight. I'd started off with three litres of milk, and finished up with about 250g of cheese, which makes it more expensive than the stuff I refused to buy from the shop, but the sense of accomplishment is indescribable.

I'll definitely try this one again.

The New Pi

You know my pork pies are fabulous (because I keep telling you they are), but just for a change, last night I invented the chicken and ham pie, and, oh my God, it is stupendous! Really, unbelievably fab. It's not the sloppy beige mush in pastry that you'd get from your local bakers. My chicken and ham is alternate layers of solid meat, seasoned with black pepper and fresh cilantro (coriander). Stuffed into a raised hot-water pastry case, surrounded by savoury jelly and designed to be eaten cold. Drool. I'm starting to sound like a marketing dude, but hey, these pies really are something else.



First of all, make the pastry and put it in the fridge to rest. Then prepare the filling - here I've packed it into glasses that are the same diameter as my glass mould. Press the meat down as much as you can (it won't stick together at this stage - that happens as the meat cooks and also the jellied stock helps to bind it).



Assemble the cases. Notice, I now put a tinfoil collar around the outside of the case - this stops the pies bulging too much during cooking, and also makes it much easier to release the glass former. I remove the collars about twenty minutes before the end of cooking.



Stick the lids on, paint with beaten egg, bake for an hour and a bit at 210 C. When cool, spoon the liquid jelly stock through the hole in the top. Chill in the fridge, and eat slowly. This is the best pie you're ever going to get (well, actually, sorry, you're not going to get one unless you come to Madrid and beg).

Perfect Pork Pie - Part Four

I gave one of the first batch of pies to a mate. He loved it, and told another dude about it. A few days later I was out with this other dude, who said he would pay a good bottle of wine for one of these pies. So I made another batch and gave him one (and first friend got another one). And they both got a little jar of pseudo-Branston pickle that I made. Got a text from other dude today, 'wow what a pie! D fucking licious!'.

I'm off to stay with some buddies in the sticks this weekend, so naturally, pies will be required. I've improved the production technique since the first batch. The jam jar is gone, replaced by a small, slightly tapered bistro glass.

Pack it with the meat mixture:



Then smear the outside with flour and raise the pastry round it:



Finally, use the upturned glass to cut the pastry lids:



This is just wonderful, because it means everything fits together nicely. The block of meat shrinks during cooking, leaving a goodly gap for the jelly to flow into. Oh, and I've started putting a few blobs of pastry on top of the meat before putting the lid on. These act as spacers, and make sure there's a gap between the top of the meat and the lid - again, for the purpose of good jelly flow.

Here's what this batch looks like:



Not a great photo, actually - they're much better-looking in the flesh. Off to pump them full of jelly now.

Perfect Pork Pie - Part Three

So, here it is:



I'm the first to admit there's room for improvement, but it was still better than edible. The pastry needs to be firmer to help it hold a better shape. The filling I think will be better once I've got me a grinder and can do it with proper meat. I actually put too much pepper in, and it could have done with a pinch of salt (I try to avoid using salt, but sometimes you've just got to). And the jelly, well, I should have left it alone.  Adding the soy sauce and reducing it more just made it unpleasantly strongly flavoured.

So, I may try this again next week. And given that the alternative in Spain is no pork pies at all, I'm quite happy.

Perfect Pork Pie - Part Two

The pork stock jelly finally looked like it was nearly ready - everything in it had disintegrated. At this point, you strain the liquid off, and then put it on a high heat until it reduces to about one-third. Then slap it in the fridge. Now make the pastry.

I don't do quantities, I do proportions, and I reckon you want about 2 parts flour to one part liquid*. Put your plain, ordinary flour into a bowl. Add as much or as little salt as you feel like and mix well. Melt your lard into some water (about the same volume of each). Make a well in the flour and gradually add the fatty liquid, stirring as constantly as you can. You'll eventually end up with a silky blob that doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl. Wrap the blob in clingfilm and stick it in the fridge.

Now you need to prep the meat. Most recipes I've seen have you grinding pork shoulder and pork fat, and maybe some pork belly and some even suggest adding some bacon. I don't have a meat grinder (yet!) so I'm using 'pork burger meat' from the supermarket (minced meat in Madrid supermarkets is always 'burger meat', which is probably a legal term indicating it will be 15% soy protein, 20% fat, 5% sweepings from the butchery floor, 10% breadcrumbs, and the remainder actual stuff from the carcass of a domesticated farm animal (including toenails, bristles, eyelashes and ground-up bones)). I've mixed some nutmeg into it and a LOT of ground black pepper.

The interesting thing about this not-really-a-recipe is the construction of the pie casing. In the video they use a thing called a pork-pie dolly as a former. Obviously I haven't got one of those, so I'm going to use a jam jar to form the base around. Wish me luck, off to try it now...

ONE HOUR LATER
Okay, 4 pork pies in da oven!

Cover the bottom and sides of your jam jar with flour to stop the pastry from sticking. Divide your pastry into bits that look big enough to form the bottom and sides of the pie-case. Roll one of these pieces into a ball. Then place it on your worktop and flatten it with your hand. Enlarge the circle of pastry until it's about an inch and a half wider than your jam jar. The pastry should be about a quarter of an inch thick. Pop the jam jar in the centre of the pastry disc, pick up the edges of the pastry and press them against the side of the jar. It's a bit like turning clay - infuriating at first, but eventually you get the pastry to stick to itself and then you can remove the jar.



The pastry will likely collapse in a heap, but don't worry. Take a ball of your meat mixture and place it inside the pastry case. Brush the lip and inner edge of the pastry base with beaten egg (this is your glue). Flatten a disc of pastry for the lid. Place it on top of the base and crimp the edges - try to have the edge raised slightly above the top of the pie.



Assemble the rest of your pies and preheat your oven to 180C. Now make a biggish hole in the lid of each pie - this is to let steam escape during cooking, and also for you to get your jelly in later. Brush the lids with beaten egg and slap 'em in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour.



Sit down and have a stiff drink. Bloody hell, you've earned it!

At this point, I took my jellied stock out of the fridge - it had set in a perfectly wobbly way, but I tasted a bit and it was slightly weird. Bland, like. So I'm reducing it a bit more and I've added some soy sauce.

ONE HOUR LATER

I think I might have to write a seriously honest cookbook. It'll be called something like 'What To Do When The Fecking Recipe Doesn't Work'. After 45 mins of medium temperature cooking, my pies were pale, uninteresting and probably lethally undercooked. I whacked the temperature up to 230C for fifteen minutes. At the end of which they had expanded horizontally and stuck together. So I've spread them apart and they're getting another fifteen minutes.

(There might well be a gap in the market for a cook-book that tells it like it is. It would have to be a big thick thing. If I was to write down this recipe, for example, it would be a helluva lot more concise than this blog post. Somebody once asked me how I got my spaghetti to taste so wonderful. I probably goggled at her like a goggle-eyed thing. It's astoundingly simple: bring a load of water to a rolling boil, chuck the spag in, stir it a bit, turn down the heat, wait eight point three five minutes, drain and serve. No, she said, how do you get it to taste so buttery? Oh, well obviously after you've drained it and before you serve it, you put it back in the pan with a knob of butter and give it a good ole whizz round and then serve it. Sheesh, do I have to tell you everything?)

And while I was writing that ^^^, the damn porkies were in the oven for another fifteen minutes: sides not done, see.

Any road up, as we like to say in Yorkshireland, here they are:



Nice colour on the tops, rubbish shape, but I expect they'll taste fab (presentation is nothing, do you see). It's gone midnight here. These babbies need to cool down before I try to jellify them, so they're going in the fridge and I'll attempt the jelly thing in the morning. I guess this is why pork pies are made in factories. Anyhoo, look out for Part Three, The Verdict.

And goodnight.

*In retrospect, I'd try 2.5 to 3 times more flour than liquid'n'fat. Stiffer, see.

Perfect Pork Pie - Part One

First of all, you might want to skip reading this if you're a vegetarian or in any way pork-averse.

Who's left? Probably only The Fat Expats.

I discovered yesterday (via bloody Twitter, of all things) that we are now into British Pie Week. Actually, BPW is a thing invented by Jus-Rol (makers of frozen pastry for lazy people) to increase sales. On Twitter, you can follow #britishpieweek.

Now, it's a well-known fact in some circles that I am a big fan of pies of all sorts (article here, about halfway down the page, and I also get a mention here), and also a bit of a purist as to what constitutes a pie.  Pie-filling placed in a ceramic dish and baked with an oval of Jus-Rol flaky pastry on top cannot be considered a pie (despite the fact that Jus-Rol's winning 'pie' for BPW was exactly that). A pizza is not a pie, and nor is a pastie, or a quiche, tart, flan or crumble. A pie is this: pastry top and bottom, tasty savoury or sweet stuff inside, sealed at the edges and baked.

By pure coincidence, I had a few chums round for lunch a few days ago, and for the main course I made a rather splendid steak and mushroom pie (it would have been steak and kidney, but one of the guests refuses to eat offal). And MamaDuck, who is currently in Bristol, reported they'd had lunch at a pie shop that goes by the wondrous name of The Pie Minister (there are some things you just wish you'd thought of). So, I've been thinking about pies. Unfortunately they're way too fiddly for me to make just for myself. But I thought I could make a bunch of little pies, and they'd be good for lunch. A couple of years ago I had a phase of making pork pies. They weren't the greatest things, but lots of people loved them. So, inspired by this video, I'm making pork pies right now.

You need three things to make a proper Melton Mowbray-style pork pie: hot water pastry, the pork filling, and the delicious jelly that fills the space between the meat and the pastry. Previously, I've used gelatine for this, but it doesn't really have any flavour, so this time I'm going to attempt my own. I've got onion, celery, carrot and leek which I'll boil up in water with bay leaves, maybe some garlic and certainly some black peppercorns, a sprig of thyme and a couple of cloves. And the magic ingredient, some pigs' trotters, which are high in gelatine and should make the stock set into a nice wobbly jelly.

And, bugger, I've just noticed I haven't actually got pigs' trotters, I've got sheeps' hands. Well, they'll have to do: if they don't work I can always slap some powdered gelatine in.

For the pastry, you need flour and lard. It came as a surprise to me that here in Spain, the pork capital of the universe, lard (manteca) is actually quite hard to get hold of and is surprisingly expensive. I've taken to making my own. Basically all you do is get some slabs of tocino (pork fat, usually attached to skin), cut it into chunks and throw it in a pan on low heat (3/10 on the electric hob). The fat will melt, eventually, and the remaining skin will go brown. (If you like pork scratchings, the skin is not a lot different).

I have made hot water pastry before, but I've never attempted the raising method shown in the video - in my previous attempts I've used a tin. Obviously, if your pie is not in a tin, the pastry will cook more evenly, although it could well turn out to be a funny shape.

I'm gonna post this now: I think the stock needs another hour or two. Meanwhile I'll prep the meat and the pastry. Another post later, with pictures...

Death By Chocolate

One of the things MamaDuck got me for my millionth birthday a few days ago*, was a bar of Lindt & Sprungli 90% dark chocolate. I've been consuming dark chocolate with red wine for a few years, ever since my buddy DubaiBilly (now QatarBilly) introduced me to the concept a few years ago. But I've never had 90% chocolate before, and now I know why. The stuff is inedible. It's basically compressed cocoa. MamaDuck tried a bit and agreed with me.

'But all is not lost,' she said, 'you can make a chocolate fudge cake.'

Like hell I can. People who know me are kind enough to say they enjoy my cooking, but I almost never do a dessert, and I've certainly never baked a cake in my life. But I woke up this morning and thought 'how hard can it be?'

I trawled the interwebz a bit for recipes, and thought this one from Nigella Lawson sounded pretty good. One problem: you can't get cocoa powder in Madrid supermarkets - although you can get something called ColaCoa, basically a kiddies choc drink with built-in milk and sugar. But Madrid does have a shop called 'The Things You Miss' in Chamberí which sells nothing but Brit brands - stuff like PG Tips tea, Wall's (Some Of It's) Pork Sausages, Oxo cubes and John Smith's beer. So I went there and got me some proper cocoa powder.

When I got home I started making the cake. I'd kind of thought of just making a small one to begin with, and assumed the quantities Nigella was talking about would result in something like that. But as I mixed this huge pile of flour, sugar and cocoa, I realised this was a much more serious proposition. I checked the recipe again. 'Enough,' it said 'for 10 servings, or one if you have a broken heart.'

Bugger!

I ploughed on regardless and baked about two-thirds of the mixture in a ceramic dish. After the allotted time I was surprised to see it had risen like a volcano, and even more surprised when I tipped it onto a wire rack and the whole thing disintegrated. There was a soggy mass in the middle of it that was nowhere near cooked. So I piled it all back into the dish and gave it another twenty minutes.

When that was done, I put the other one-third in to bake. This half-filled a spring-sided tin, and when the cake was baked I was able to get it out of the tin without trashing it. It did disintegrate a bit when I tried to slice it in half, but here's the finished result:



And here's the one I made earlier:



* 'The Resistance' CD by Muse, 'Nation' by Terry Pratchett, and a jelly-bean dispenser, in case you're interested.

Tortilla de Patatas

I posted about my early attempts at making this classic Spanish staple here and here.

A year later, I reckon I'm an expert, so here's how you do it.

You will need:
8 or 9 eggs
about half a kilo of spuds, peeled and sliced thinly
a generous pinch of salt
50% olive oil, 50% vegetable oil
possibly some lemon juice
a proper non-stick 20 cm frying pan
a circular dinner plate
45 - 60 minutes

And here's what you do:
Half fill the pan with the oil. Heat it gently. Put the spuds in the oil, and stir to make sure they are all coated. The idea is to soften the spuds without browning them. It will take about half an hour, and you need to give them a stir every now and again. When the potatoes are cooked, remove them from the oil. If you don't expect to eat the tortilla all in one go, you can sprinkle lemon juice on them - this will stop them from going grey over the next few days (there's nothing wrong with the spuds in your tortilla going grey - it just doesn't look very appetising).

Break your eggs into a bowl, throw in the salt, and beat with a whisk or fork until the egg whites and yolks are thoroughly mixed. Add the potatoes and stir.

Drain most of the oil from the pan, leaving a thin coating. Turn up the heat a little (about 60% of full), and pour the egg and potato mixture in. When the mixture has begun to set, pull the edges away from the pan with a spatula - you're trying to get a rounded shape to the edge of the tortilla.

Now we come to the tricky bit - turning it over. Traditionally this is done by holding an oiled dinner plate against the top of the pan, and turning them over. In Spain, you can buy a thing called a vuelca de tortilla, basically a plastic lid with a knob on one side for holding it.

Once you have the tortilla on the plate, slide it back into the pan and continue cooking and shaping the edge. Turn it two more times, so each side gets cooked twice, and when you have a nice golden colour on both sides, you're done.

It's important not to overcook the tortilla. I prefer ones that still have a little bit of runniness in the centre, but more sensitive souls prefer them to be cooked solid. Let it cool for a bit, and then cut yourself a wedge and serve with a hunk of crunchy baguette and a caffe con leche. Perfect!

Haggis

I'm not usually one for Burn's Night, not being Scottish, an' all. In fact it usually passes me by without me noticing it at all. This year is different, of course. It's the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robbie Burns, who wrote lots of unintelligible stuff like this:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

Now the thing you have to have on Burn's Night is a haggis (and also bashed neeps, tatties, lots of wee drams and a piper for the dancin'). Haggii were fairly easy to come by in Dubai, believe it or not. You could get frozen Sweeney's, or you could get a canned version. But here in sunny Madrid, not a chance. I thought, fleetingly, that I might make my own, and so I looked up some recipes on the interweb. Easy! All you need is a sheep's pluck, and its stomach. Hmmm, and what's a sheep's pluck, exactly? Well, it's the heart, lungs and liver. You chop 'em all fine and mix 'em up wi' some onions, oatmeal and spices. Then you sew them intae the stomach and boil fra long time.

Bleaghhh! I don't know if I'll ever be able to eat haggis again, now that I know what goes into it.

Winter in Madrid

Winter arrived with a vengeance yesterday. At approximately 4.40 in the afternoon. MamaDuck had arrived home from work at 4pm, and reported the weather to be fairly pleasant. I arrived home from shopping at 5pm, absolutely chilled to the bone. Horrible, it was.

Northern Spain has had snow overnight, and forecast temperatures for Madrid for the next five days don't get higher than 10°C, and go down as low as 2°C. Brrr.

So this is definitely Cocido season. Cocido Madrileño is a wondrous thing: soup and stew, all in one. Warming, filling, and almost healthy (it contains all major food groups except chocolate), it's absolutely perfect for lunch or dinner on a cold winter's day. Basically, it's a big ole stew. It contains scrag-end of unnamed meat, big lumps of fat, chorizo, morcilla (black pudding), potato, carrot, onion and cabbage, and loads of garbanzos (chick peas). There could also be a chicken in there. These are all stewed together for a few hours, and then some of the stock is drained off. You cook up some noodles in this stock, and serve it as the first course. And then you serve the meat and veg as the main course.

I've had it several times as a menu del dia, and usually been disappointed, mainly because the main course is bone dry, and I likes a bit o' gravy with me dinner. I had one today though, and it was very nearly perfect. They bring you a bowl with some cooked noodles in it, and an earthenware jug that contains everything else: you decide how much liquid you want with each bit of the meal.

Marvellous!

Wacky Food Meme

Jayne With A Why found this totally pointless but irresistible waste of time: 100 things you may or may not have eaten. It comes from Very Good Taste.

Copy this list, embolden the items you have tried, add sarcastic comments to taste. Then go to Very Good Taste and add to the millions of comments on that post.

1. Venison

2. Nettle tea (nope: I really only like tea that's made out of, like, tea)

3. Huevos rancheros (sounds Spanish - must o' done)

4. Steak tartare (only once though...)

5. Crocodile

6. Black pudding (fried and crunchy)

7. Cheese fondue (why?)

8. Carp (don't think so)

9. Borscht (beetroot, yeuch!)

10. Baba ghanoush

11. Calamari

12. Pho

13. PB&J (peanut butter & jelly) sandwich

14. Aloo gobi

15. Hot dog from a street cart

16. Epoisses (???)

17. Black truffle 

18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes

19. Steamed pork buns (how bizarre)

20. Pistachio ice cream

21. Heirloom tomatoes (???)

22. Fresh wild berries

23. Foie gras 

24. Rice and beans

25. Brawn, or head cheese (yueck: used to sell it when I worked on the deli counter at Sainsbury's - it was only ever bought by Martians)

26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (hottest chilli on the planet, thank you but NO!)

27. Dulce de leche

28. Oysters (snot on a shell - not doing it again)

29. Baklava (not doing that again either)

30. Bagna cauda 

31. Wasabi peas

32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl

33. Salted lassi (?? Lassi I think, yes)

34. Sauerkraut (yes, but, why)

35. Root beer float (root beer with a blob of ice cream? Yepp)

36. Cognac with a fat cigar (don't do cigars)

37. Clotted cream tea

38. Vodka jelly

39. Gumbo

40. Oxtail (one of my favourite Spanish dishes is rabo de torro)

41. Curried goat (half a point - roast goat, not curried)

42. Whole insects (no fucking way. Filleted is okay)

43. Phaal (not knowing)

44. Goat’s milk (made into cheese, yes)

45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more (wasted on me - I'd only put Coke in it)

46. Fugu (poisonous fish? feck off)

47. Chicken tikka masala (England's national dish - of course!)

48. Eel (not knowingly)

49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (bleuch)

50. Sea urchin (bleuch)

51. Prickly pear

52. Umeboshi 

53. Abalone

54. Paneer 

55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal 

56. Spaetzle

57. Dirty gin martini

58. Beer above 8% ABV 

59. Poutine (sounds good though - gotta lurve dem trans-fats)

60. Carob chips

61. S’mores 

62. Sweetbreads (I'd rather die)

63. Kaolin (strangely, yes (with morphine, right?))

64. Currywurst (made-up food)

65. Durian ('the smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust...')

66. Frogs’ legs (the waitress who served it was a vegetarian friend, and she explained exactly how they got the legs when she took the order: first and last time)

67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake 

68. Haggis 

69. Fried plantain

70. Chitterlings, or andouillette (despite liking haggis, I couldn't stoop to chitterlings)

71. Gazpacho 

72. Caviar and blini

73. Louche absinthe 

74. Gjetost, or brunost 

75. Roadkill 

76. Baijiu 

77. Hostess Fruit Pie (???)

78. Snail 

79. Lapsang souchong

80. Bellini 

81. Tom yum 

82. Eggs Benedict 

83. Pocky

84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant

85. Kobe beef 

86. Hare 

87. Goulash 

88. Flowers (the beer, yes, the plant product, no)

89. Horse (not knowingly)

90. Criollo chocolate (???)

91. Spam 

92. Soft shell crab (too much effort)

93. Rose harissa 

94. Catfish 

95. Mole poblano 

96. Bagel and lox

97. Lobster Thermidor

98. Polenta 

99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee 

100. Snake

I don't know how they could have omitted the pinnacle of Scottish cuisine:

101. Deep-fried Mars Bar

How To Make Fantastic Bread

My bread-making post is now on The Fat Expat.

Let There Be Bread

We have a friend who is seriously into cooking. We had a beer with her yesterday, and she asked me if I'd received the 'pie-making machine' yet. I told her I had, and she was drooling over the steak-and-kidney and chicken-and-ham pies that I've made so far.

'What about bread?' she asked, 'You do make your own bread, don't you? And not in a bread-making machine?'

I told her, I have been known to make my own bread, I'm not impressed by bread-making machines. I like to knead the dough by hand, stick all kinds of seedy, grainy things in it, and generally produce a fairly interesting loaf. We then had a long chat about the general crapness of Spanish bread: baguettes and chapattas that are good while they are fresh, but go rock-hard within about two hours; 'pan de molde' or 'Bimbo' that tastes of nothing and goes moudly in a couple of days; etcetera.

And then she explained her theory. She highly doubts that Spanish bakers use yeast to make their dough rise. Baking powder is suspected. Now this might be true, because both yeast and baking powder are apparently known as 'levadura' in Spanish. And while I've seen plenty of baking powder in the shops, I've never actually seen yeast.

The hunt is on.

There is a Pie

Long-time followers of this blog and my Dubai blog, will be aware of my fondness for 'proper' steak and kidney pies, big hunks of roasted meat and incidentals like Yorkshire Pudding and roast potatoes.

You need an oven for all of these things, and our mini-kitchen does not include one. We used to have a combi-oven (microwave, grill and convection oven) that we shipped from Dubai at great expense. But it stopped working about a week before Christmas. I couldn't figure out any way to get it fixed, and so everything I've cooked since then has been boiled or fried.

I've had a couple of attempts to get a steak and kidney pie in Madrid: once at the only 'British' chip shop in central Madrid, where they had microwaved it (this is an extremely bad thing), and once in an Irish bar where it was actually described as a 'meat pie' (unnamed meat, of course, and I still haven't worked out what animal it came from). The unnamed meat pie came without pastry. It was just some cubes of unpleasant-tasting meat, covered in mashed potato, mushy peas and gravy. Crap. Absolute crap.

I have searched in vain for a combi-oven in Madrid. There are plenty of microwaves kicking around, many of them with grills. And lots of DeLonghi Italian free-standing ovens. But no combis. Actually I did find some combis in an El Corte Inglés a few weeks ago, but the cheapest was 325 Euros.

But there is Good News! Yesterday, I took delivery of a brand-new combi oven, courtesy of UK Shopping in Spain. They will buy/order stuff from shops in the UK and arrange for it to be shipped to Spain. So the combi that I chose came from Curry's. The cost of the oven and the shipping was about 180 Euros, and it took about 11 days to get here. Once I'd unpacked it to check that nothing was broken, I rushed off to the shops to get some steak, and some kidneys, and some frozen pastry. Unfortunately we had a vegetarian buddy coming round for dinner last night, so the pie was delayed. But I did use the new toy to grill some goat cheese with cinnamon and brown sugar, and that was grand.

Con Salsa [With Sauce]

I'm a fan of saucy food - be it a curry, a stew, bistec con salsa 'gravy'. Sadly, most Spanish eateries think that a fatty slice of unnamed animal with a few underdone chips and not even a smidgeon of sauce is an acceptable part of a meal. This always disappoints me. So I was very interested to read about Momo in Chueca on Notes From Madrid - most of their main dishes feature a sauce and you get a decent helping of spuds. I went to check it out yesterday lunchtime and was suitably impressed: they will definitely be getting a lot more of my custom in future.

But it's a shame that there is such a dearth of sauces in Spanish café food when one of the key ingredients, a good stock, is widely and cheaply available. In Dubai I used to make my own stock, boiling vegetables with beef bones or chicken carcasses until you finished up with a flavoursome liquid. But it took hours to do and was generally a pain in the backside. If I had no stock to hand, I would use cubes: Oxo were ok, Knorr were lethally salty. Quality liquid stock is available in big supermarkets in the UK, but it's prohibitively expensive. In Madrid, you can can buy a litre of caldo (chicken, beef, fish, vegetable) for about €1.60 at any supermercado and lots of alimentaciónes. And it's brilliant: not salty, but really tasty.

It's still raining.