The Accidental Vegetarian - Rosa's Hearty Chestnut Pie

Today, I developed a recipe I want to cook for Christmas. It's a vegetarian main, which tastes nicely hearty, meaty, even a little game-y. And it's plenty naughty, with a big glass of red wine and a good amount of butter.

Ingredients
For the base mixture
3 banana shallots (or 6 English shallots), peeled and sliced into rings
10g of butter (for frying the shallots)

200g cooked and peeled chestnuts, roughly chopped

200g chestnut mushrooms, quartered
1 medium-sized carrot, quartered and sliced into quarter inch pieces
2 sprigs of rosemary, stalks removed, chopped finely
20cl Bourgogne pinot noir
freshly ground pepper and sea salt

For the mushroom sauce
25g of butter (for the roux)
25g flour
500ml of mushroom stock (or 1 mushroom stock cube dissolved in 500ml hot water)

For the lid
a tiny knob of butter for greasing
20cm by 20cm piece of puff pastry
1 egg yolk

Cooking the base mixture
Fry the shallots in the butter on a high heat for approximately ten minutes, until soft and browned.

The shallots before they're browned	The shallots after browning

Remove the shallots from the pan and set aside. Add the mushrooms, chestnuts, carrots and rosemary to the still hot pan, with just enough butter to prevent it from sticking. Fry at a medium high heat until well browned, about 10 minutes.

The chestnuts	Mushrooms, chestnuts, carrots and rosemary after browning

Once the mixture is nicely browned, and the carrots have softened, add all of the wine, and let this reduce until it is a thick syrup. This takes about 10 minutes.

Adding the wine	The wine is reduced to a syrup

This is your base mixture for the pie. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside. 

The mushroom sauce

Now you are going to make the sauce. For this, you'll have to make a roux from 25 grams of butter and 25 grams of flour, as follows: melt the butter in a pan at a low to medium heat, then add the flour and stir continuously until it forms a dough-like ball.. Then, slowly add your mushroom stock, stirring continuously to prevent lumps, until the stock and the roux have combined into a smooth, silky sauce. Season to taste; be careful with the salt, because stock is already quite salty.

Stir butter and flour until a ball forms	Add stock and stir continously

You will now have a sauce you can add to the base mixture. Fold the sauce into the base mixture until well mixed, then add to a pie dish (I've used a 20cm round ceramic dish with high sides).

Added the sauce	The sauce will colour because of the red pigment in the syrup

The lid
All you need to do now is add a lid to the pie, and bake it. Preheat your oven to 200°C and start on the lid. Grease the sides of the dish your mixture doesn't touch. Then, cut out a 20cm circle, pinching in the sides to make it fit over the base mixture and sauce, and put it on top. Beat the egg yolk, and brush the lid with the yolk. Make a few holes to make sure the air can escape. Then, add the pie to the oven and bake for 45 minutes. If the lid gets a little too dark, cover with foil to protect it.

The lid	The lid brushed with egg yolk

The pie was finished so quickly, I didn't have time to take a picture of the finished product! :)

Sweetcorn and chicken soup

Last night, I dreamt I was making two kinds of soup - but my mother messed both of them up by putting in some extra ingredients, and they turned out horribly. Finally, I tried a third batch (some kind of black bean soup) and caught my mother throwing in some limes. The soup came out great. Thanks, dream mum! Next time I've got a batch of black beans, I have to try that.

It must have been the chicken and sweetcorn soup I made from scratch last night, sitting in the fridge, sending rays of soup-panic my way. Because soup is difficult; I think what I'm trying to capture in a soup is a food memory. That may be why I'm so picky. Chicken soup, for instance, isn't chicken soup without some sweetcorn. Vegetable soup isn't complete without potatoes. And tomato soup can't have any other veg in it. Why? I don't know. But the wrong kind of soup gives me a nasty headache. Or bad dreams. The problem is, food memories don't have recipes. So you have to make them from scratch, very patiently, and experiment.

Chicken soup done right - serves 6, takes 3 hours to prepare + left overnight
Carcass of a 1 kg organic chicken (back, neck, tail, bones etc.)
3 sticks of celery
3 medium-sized carrots
1 large onion
3 cloves of garlic
2 organic chicken stock cubes
1 can of sweetcorn (300 grams)
1 can of bamboo shoots (150 grams)

1 chicken breast

salt and pepper

Put the pieces of chicken carcass in a pot with a teaspoon of salt and cover completely with cold water. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to a simmer. A lot of white fluff (the impurities off the chicken carcass) will come to the surface. Skim these off until the surface remains clean.Then put the lid on the pot and let simmer for 1.5 hours. Then remove the chicken pieces and let them cool. Chop up the celery, carrots and onion into small cubes and put these in with the chicken stock. Add the stock cubes and stir. Let the soup simmer for another 1.5 hours. Once the chicken has cooled, strip off the nicer pieces of flesh and add to the soup. When the 1.5 hours are up, remove the pot from the heat and let it cool off before putting in the fridge overnight (don't put it in the fridge immediately, or the other things in your fridge will warm up and spoil quicker!). The next day, remove the layer of fat on the surface of the soup. Bring to a simmer again, then add the corn and bamboo shoots. Chop the chicken breast into bite-sized chunks and add these to the soup as well. Once the breast pieces have cooked, serve. This soup is nice served simply with artisan bread and butter.

Hash browns

I woke up yesterday hankering for a fry-up, so I made my own hash browns  They were tasty, crispy and salty and would go well with some sunny side up eggs with runny yolk and grilled tomatoes.

Ingredients

4 medium-sized white potatoes
1 small onion
sea salt and freshly ground pepper
1 egg
sunflower oil

Peel the potatoes and the onion. Use a food processor with grater attachment (or a simple box grater) to grate both the potatoes and onions. Put them in a clean tea towel and squeeze the excess liquid out of the veg by twisting the closed towel above your kitchen sink. A very satisfying experience. Repeat this motion a couple of times until the potatoes and onion are quite dry. Now put them in a big bowl and crack in the egg with it. Season generously with salt and pepper. Mix the ingredients well. Now heat about 1 inch of sunflower oil in a frying pan until a bit of the potato bubbles up as soon as you put it in (test this!) but before the oil starts to smoke. Put in a spoonful of the potato mixture and squeeze flat with a slotted turner. (I fried three hash browns at the time - this depends on how big your pan is. Don't crowd the pan.) Turn when the bottom bit has turned a nice golden brown colour, and remove to a plate lined with kitchen towel when both sides are browned (this took about 3 minutes).

Restaurant review: Allans, Hay's Galleria

Last Saturday, my fiancee wanted to buy me breakfast. Both of our favourite greasy spoon cafes were closed though, so we tried a new French bistro at Hay's Galleria (near London Bridge) called Allans. Why Allans? Well, it was nearest to our usual breakfast hunch. It looked alright from the outside. And a guy very convincingly, when asked "Do you serve breakfast?" said "Yes." then gave us a tasty bit of crepe with sugar to lure us in. Hurrah, we thought! But never had we been so wrong. Never.

We sat down upstairs in a cozy but distressingly kitchy and faux seating area, full of couches, mis-matched chandeliers (some of them with bits of wiring sticking out) and trapped tourists. We took one glance at the menu, then ordered two vegetarian breakfasts from the nice but awfully shy waitress. She gave us some 'freshly squeezed orange juice' which was most definitely not fresh. It came straight from a pack and it had a sugary aftertaste. Almost like, well, store-bought orange juice with sugar. Another far grumpier waitress came quickly, served us two plates of the most distressed version of an English breakfast ever seen, without even a word or friendly smile. She nodded, then left, as if to say: "Ahh, yu zilly peeple, orderink an Engleez brek-fast at mon love-ly Frènch restaurant, I will teech yu un lesson! I will zerve yu... an English monztrozity! Your fa-zer was a hamstèr et your mo-zer zmelled of le elderberries!"

The plate contained the following: 1 deep-fried store-bought tasteless vegetarian burger (instead of the vegetarian sausage on the menu); 1 big oilspil of beans that when tasted turned out to be extremely acidic and actually made us wonder whether 1) the stuff had gone off, or 2) the stuff had gone off and they had tried to mask this by adding a cup of vinegar; 1 pile of obviously tinned, grey-greenish, slightly warmed mushrooms that were especially foul-tasting (a bit like the beans, actually); 1 tiny omelet (this was one tasty omelet, we must admit, but we had ordered scrambled eggs); 1 very sad pile of iceberg lettuce with a slice of cucumber (instead of the tomato that was on the menu); 2 slices of brown toast with a cup of butter. We tried a little bit of each, then looked at one another, and raised one eyebrow (a move amusingly repeated almost exactly by the couple that came in after us and ordered the same).

When we told the shy-but-nice waitress, "We're sorry, but this tastes off," she did not attempt to argue, but immediately said: "Would you like something else?" Good service, that. We ordered two crepes, hoping for the lovely morsels that lured us into this odd restaurant in the first place. Then the grumpy lady came to our table, and with a graceful French arm movement produced a plate of cake. "On ze house," she muttered, then left. The cake, it turned out, was not as acidic as the beans. It was a bit... odd. Perhaps we were barbarians, under-appreciating a carefully produced French delica-zy, but we could've sworn there was something sour in the cake as well.

A few minutes after we finished our cake (in the meantime entertaining ourselves by observing a teenager handing out flyers for the cafe in the laziest way possible) we got our crepes. They were OK: the Nutella and banana one was mostly Nutella with some crepe, the plain banana crepe was alright. They turned out to cost about 5 pounds each, which was a bit pricey for our portion size. But, well, let's be honest and give praise where praise is due: the crepes didn't taste of vinegar.

Aubergine and potato winter stew

Once when I was still a student, me and my fiancee decided to check out a Turkish restaurant down the street from my flat. There was nearly no-one in there, but the food was excellent. One dish I still remember was an aubergine stew that was so tender and meaty it made me forget all the bad ratatouille I had ever had.
The tomato sauce it was sitting in reminded me of  a simple and beautiful dish I had in Antwerp one summer in what was then advertised as the cheapest restaurant in town. Basically, it was potatoes that had been stewed in tomato sauce until they nearly fell apart. Inspired by both dishes, I've made a hearty winter stew. It's vegan, but only by accident. If you do want to have some meat in it, try adding some cubed, fatty lamb neck or shoulder when you add the potatoes and add another 20 minutes to your simmering time.

Ingredients (serves 4)

An aubergine

4 medium-sized white potatoes
1 aubergine
2 400ml tins of peeled tomatoes
400ml can of cannellini beans
1 medium-sized onion
2 cloves of garlic
125 ml red wine
1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp cumin
3 tbsp olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Slice the aubergine into 1 cm thick slices and put on a plate. Sprinkle generously with salt in order to drain them of some of their bitter juices and make them more tender. This takes about 30 minutes. Just before this is done, roughly chop the onion and garlic and fry these on a medium heat in a large casserole pan in 1 tbsp olive oil. Peel the potatoes and slice into 1 cm cubes. When the onion is softened and slightly browned add the potatoes and the rest of the olive oil. Now carefully remove the salt and the juices from the aubergine with some paper kitchen towels. Slice the aubergine into 1 cm cubes as well, and add to the pan. Stir occasionally, and wait for the aubergines and potatoes to colour a little. Then add the peeled tomatoes, cannellini beans, wine, paprika and cumin. Once the stew comes to a boil, turn down the heat a little, put the lid on the pan and simmer for about 60 minutes. Serve with crusty bread (I used ciabatta).

Well-researched Pea Soup

Like I blogged a couple of days ago, I got a food processor for my birthday. But there were some other presents that went along with it, one of which deserves a recipe of its own -- The Flavour Thesaurus, by Niki Segnit. Highly recommended! Segnit has looked at 99 different ingredients (from cauliflower to caviar) and tried them in pairs to see what goes well with what. This results in some pretty nice-sounding combinations I've never tried before, so it's a great source of inspiration. The book doesn't include many recipes, so you're pretty much left to your own devices -- in my particular case, a pretty spiffy new device, the food processor! ;-) I'll be honest with you, I was at a boring meeting today and by the end of it all I could think about was how to use my new-acquired flavour knowledge in a recipe. This is the result: a hearty pea soup.

Ingredients (for about 1.5 litres of soup)

2 parsnips
1 medium onion
150 grams of potatoes
750 grams of frozen peas
1 chicken stock cube, dissolved into 500 ml of boiling water to give 500 ml of chicken stock
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
olive oil
some rashers of streaky bacon to serve

Slice the cleaned parsnips, onions and potatoes thinly and fry them in a large pan with two tablespoons of olive oil. (If they stick to the bottom of the pan, add a few tablespoons of water.) Once the onions have softened, turn down the heat and let these vegetables stew in their own juices for 10 minutes.
Add the stock and season well, then add the frozen peas. Turn the heat up, bring the soup back to the boil, then turn down the heat again. Now let the soup simmer until all the vegetables are easy to pulse in your food processor. (For a more rustic version, you could leave the soup as-is, without pulsing it.)
Fry the rashers of bacon in a hot frying pan until crispy and put them on the soup as croutons when you serve.

Spinach and ricotta lasagne

I made this lasagne because I really like spinach and wanted to focus on that flavour alone. It is a very easy recipe: you don't even need to make a bechamel sauce. I left the bechamel sauce out because I wanted this to be a relatively light dish, compared with the stodgy bechamel lasagnes you can buy ready-made. And on top of this, it's very quick! If you're multitasking you can have the lasagne in the oven within 15 minutes, and then it only needs about 25 minutes to finish cooking.

Ingredients
4 rashers of smoked streaky bacon

500g (frozen) chopped spinach
200g ricotta
1 big ball of mozzarella
1 clove of garlic
1 medium onion
200g dried (egg) lasagne sheets
nutmeg
olive oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Parboil the lasagne sheets by first bringing water to the boil, adding the sheets and then letting them cook for about 5 minutes. Drain and add some olive oil to separate the sheets. Meanwhile, heat some olive oil in a frying pan large enough for all of the spinach. Chop the onion and garlic finely and slice the bacon into inch-long bits. Add to the pan and wait for the onions to soften and the bacon to brown a little. Add the spinach and stir continuously, until either the spinach has wilted (if you're using fresh spinach) or melted (if you're using frozen spinach). Season well with the nutmeg, salt and pepper. Then keep on a high heat until all the excess water in the spinach has evaporated and you're left with quite a dry mixture. Now assemble the lasagne: use some olive oil to grease an oven-proof lasagne dish. First put in a layer of spinach, then a layer of lasagne sheets (covering the spinach completely), then a thin layer of ricotta (spread nicely using the back of a spoon). Repeat. The top layer should be spinach. Slice or rip pieces of the mozzarella ball to cover the dish. Put in a 200C oven for 20 minutes. Once the mozzarella has completely melted and the lasagne sheets are quite soft, turn on the grill of your oven and grill the lasagne for about 5 minutes. This will make the top layer nice and brown. Keep checking though, you don't want to burn the cheese!