A few months ago in “Saturday Kitchen” Tom Kitchin was cooking a wagyu steak that did not come from Japan or Australia, it came from Scottish Highlands, where they know breed wagyu cattle.  Their website’s here :

https://www.wagyuhouse.co.uk/

I was initially put off by the prices, but having slept on it a few times I decided I’d love to order some burgers from them, as a birthday present for Florek.  I considered some steaks too, but at £15 per 100g of sirloin, ribeye or fillet, I only ordered the burgers.  They’ve arrived yesterday, 4 in a pack, 2 went to the freezer and 2 were devoured last night- with clear conscience, as on Florek’s actual birthday on Tuesday we’ll be dining in Pasta Ripiena in Bristol.

Easily the best burger I’ve ever cooked. Even while in the pan the smell was intense and promising great flavour. I tried to keep it simple, so that the burger was the star on the plate, so all we had on it was cheese, iceberg lettuce, some shallots and a slice of tomato. I held off any sauces, just toasted the brioche buns and made fresh fries from the oil.

Florek was very happy and agreed we’ll be ordering from Wagyu House again. 🙂

Ocado delivers my shopping on Tuesday mornings. I already had 2 duck legs on order, then watched Masterchef, where a dude cooked a duck breast, the look of which made me grab my laptop immediately and edit my order.  2 duck breasts cost £9, 2 legs £4.50. The whole duck, just under 1,5 kg was on offer at £6.70. I hesitated for a few minutes, as I’ve never taken apart a bird and I’d hate to make a mess of it. But there’s youtube.com, so I watched 2 videos of how to do that and ordered the bird.

I have to say that butchering the duck was not as difficult as I thought it would be and it made me feel like I’ve just learned a new skill, saved some money and ended up with both breasts, legs and extras as well. My mum often makes soups on turkey/chicken wings, so I saved mine and froze them for that purpose, then decided to use the carcass to make some duck stock. Another 2 minute video helped with that- never done my own stock before. I whacked the carcass in the hot oven for 25 minutes till browned.

When cooled a little,  it went in  the pot together with a shallot, some green celery, carrots, bay leaves, peppercorns, a few porcini mushrooms and cooked nice and slowly for over 3 hours.

Strained, it now cools in the fridge and will be used for sauces, especially to accompany duck legs.

I then went on to reward my good housekeeping by dining on a pan fried duck breast with fabulous daphinoise potatoes and green beans, washed down with a large glass of Argentinian malbec.  Yum.

We’re off to dine in Roka Charlotte St in 2 months time with Steve and Christina, I can’t wait. Had a good look at their menu and I think I’ll go for their set menu at £90, which might just take me to food heaven by the look of it! One of the several dishes on that menu are scallop skewers with wasabi mayo. I had some frozen scallops, so last night was the time to see what kind of combination it is. Obviously that was me executing it,  a certain Masaki Sugisaki was contacted in order not to cock things up.  Mayo and wasabi mixed did not taste particularly exciting,  Masaki suggested either salt or soy sauce, I added a bit of both and ended up with lovely creamy finish to my simply panfried scallops. As it was an evening meal , I made some panfried potatoes with chorizo, shallot and lots of spring onions too.  A glass of Gruner Veltliner completed the picture. 🙂

We’ve visited 2 local pubs recently, where food disappointed us on both occasions.  Hollow Bottom used to be our favourite place to eat not so long ago, now we were told “they’ve changed everything”, so no more San Miguel on tap, for instance, but the food was the real issue. I’ve eaten braised red cabbage there 2 years ago that blew me away. This time it did too- in a bad way.  I could only taste one thing- vinegar.

And just a week ago we went for a Sunday roast to The Slaughters Inn.  More expensive place, higher expectations. As mediocre as it gets, it turned out and cabbage- sour with vinegar.  Very annoying, I can’t imagine how can someone call himself a chef, put a piece of turd like this on a plate, send it off and expect people to happily pay.

My Christmas menu is almost ready and there will be braised red cabbage on it. Today I’ve made it according to a recipe I found in Good Food, one of the old special festive editions. As it sat in the oven, two duck legs on the stove, the house filled up with fabulous smell. Great recipe, did the veg the justice it deserves;

Shredded cabbage, quite finely, plus a large red onion fried on butter till soft. In. 200 ml of port. A juice and a zest of 1 orange. Some cinnamon. 2 tbsps of brown sugar. A generous handful of chopped prunes.  To the oven, covered, for nearly 2 hours in 140 degrees. Half way through the cooking everything gets a good stir and back in for the second half.

Once it cooled a little and I had a proper taste I decided it was a treat. Buttery, quite sweet, orange comes through nicely. Saved some for the ox cheeks I’ll be making for Steve and Christina this weekend. Thumbs up.

Saturday evening is my favourite day to cook.  The Child is having a bath with Daddy, I can take my time, open a bottle of wine and get creative. My duck legs today were one of the best yet, the sauce I’ve managed to produce though- outstanding. It was the kind of sauce I was licking off the spoon thinking- fuck yeah. 🙂  And also, as Christmas this year will be at ours, with Mum, Mariusz, Julia and Ron arriving, the plan was to roast a whole duck.  But those legs today made me think that maybe doing it the way I did today, 4 legs ( the Banks men don’t do duck!!!!) instead of the whole bird might be a better idea.  All the recipes I looked at hint at the risk of legs being tough while breasts succulent, if one screws up the timing.  This meal today made me wonder and most likely it will just be 4 perfect, stress free legs.

So, the best idea is to season the meat generously a couple of hours in advance, get that salt working, pepper too and some herb pepper and cumin too. Brown the meat nicely, transfer to a saucepan, while in the duck fat quickly sweat some shallots, leeks, carrots and garlic.  A handful of dried porcini mushrooms. And add to the legs. A glass of red wine in, mine today was one of my absolute favourites, Catena’s Malbec.  Then chicken stock, a couple of bay leaves, lid on and roughly 1,5 hour, till the meat is lovely and tender.

I took the meat out and blitzed all the sauce ingredients into a thick, velvety, luxury gravy, that hardly needed any seasoning. Maybe just a little butter and a sprinkle of pepper. I was really proud of myself. Duck is rapidly becoming my favourite meat.  On the picture it might not look the part, but I finished the sauce with a teaspoon. That good!

I’m so doing it again!!

I fancied noodles last night. Ken Hom was in Saturday Kitchen recently, making some chicken and telling the viewers that back in his restaurant days the Chinese chefs would serve chicken breast to the Europeans and the thighs to the Chinese customers. Well, for me it is always a thigh, unless I’m making chicken kievs. So much more flavour in a thigh! So it was only natural to go with Ken’s recipe.  The putrid shrimp paste has not made appearance in my pantry since that awful prawn dish, but that was a one off, there’s no doubt this boy knows his Chinese.

2  chopped boneless thighs sat in the marinade made of 2 tsps of soy sauce, same amount of Shaoxing rice wine, 1 tsp of sesame oil, 1/2 tsp of salt, quite a lot, and the same of white pepper.

Noodles cooked and drained sat drizzled with sesame oil, while I quickly stir fried the chicken, then removed it and threw 3 minced garlic cloves into the wok. Quite a lot of lovely, crunchy mange tout, chopped spring onion, noodles into that. Then a nice little sauce- exact same ingredients like for the marinade, plus a tsp of sugar and some extra sesame oil, just because I adore it. Chicken back in, a good toss of the wok and that was that.

The white pepper that I hardly ever use in my cooking was a revelation here. As was the rice wine. This is getting done again fairly soon!

I made it slightly different last night, inspired by a photo of a pizza in Florence I saw on the internet, with Ponte Vecchio in the background. It made me squeak that it’s only early October and we’re not going to Italy for months, but my pizza this evening was one of the best. The stuffed crust had nothing to do with it, though, maybe just the looks?!

I made it all the usual way, but wrapped up some mozzarella in the edges. What it needed instead was a stronger cheese, medium cheddar maybe, but the mild, modest mozzarella got lost and could hardly be tasted. So I just spread the tomato sauce, chopped mozzarella on top, parmesan and I baked it so plain. Once out of the oven, prosciutto di San Danielle went on, a touch ( ok, a bit more than a touch) of truffle salsa and a drizzle of truffle sauce. For me – food heaven. Florek said I’ve overdone  truffle flavour, but CAN YOU ACTUALLY OVERDO TRUFFLE FLAVOUR?????…..

Vanilla panna cotta with strawberry compote to finish with. Simple, sweet, indulgent.

Cauliflower used to be my food hell when I was a child.  I remember my Mum having to mash it into tiniest pieces not to be spotted on the surface of the soup, otherwise I would not go anywhere near it. Cooked pieces of cauliflower as a side dish made me sick just looking at it.  But that was a long time ago. Now I am a huge fan of cauli. Particularly love it as a side to meats, feed lots of it to my family and this lunch time gave them a soup, the recipe from latest Good Food.

A shallot fried on olive oil, small cauli cut in florets in, 3 small spuds,chicken stock, lid on and it cooked for about 12-15 minutes.  In the meantime I chopped some chorizo and some sourdough and quickly panfried it with a little bit of garlic.

When the cauliflower was nice and soft, I blitzed it all into a creamy goodness, improved the greyish colour with a splash of double cream, seasoned generously, added some chopped parsley and that was that. Izzie scoffed down a bowl of it minus chorizo, we enjoyed the whole lot. Yum.

Wiola and Marcin brought me 2 bags of fruit the other day from Wiola’s boss’s orchard. Lots of pink, juicy apples and some delicious plums, less than 3 kg of those.  It took me 2 days to decide to try and make  a plum preserve, similar to what my Mum’s been making for years.  Jars have been ordered, Mum has been consulted and yesterday I made a start.  Chopped and deprived of stones, they went into the pan with a splash of water.

The smell the plums gave out while cooking was fantastic. I fried them gently for about 4-5 hours yesterday, stirring often to avoid any burning, then restarted the process this morning, another 4 hours, till massively reduced, thick, darkened and making hot lava sounds. Towards the end of the cooking I sweetened it to taste. Kept on adding and kept on tasting, careful, as did not want to end up with too sweet preserve or worse- a sour one that I’d not enjoy eating.

And so, 2 hours after the postie delivered the jars, this is what I had on the island;

The jars were filled with 3 cm space from the top while preserve was hot, turned upside down and left to cool in this position. 4 jars of preserve from nearly 3 kg of plums. A very good start though, I’d say!

This year we have super hot summer, nearly 2 months of heat. It’s also the first year of my growing tomatoes, which struggle in the small greenhouse in 45 degrees plus.  As I’m a beginner, notes are being taken for things to be improved next year. First of all, much bigger pots will be purchased. Each one of my toms is standing in a 5 litre pot and needs to be watered up to twice a day. Not ideal, there will be bigger pots next year. And Florek is working on a computer controlled( obviously!:-/) watering system, so that we woudn’t have to ask people to water them, when we’re on holidays, like Jon did in June.

My dad in law argued a couple of weeks ago, what is the point of growing the tomatoes, if there’s plenty of them in a supermarket. Well, an hour ago I’ve brought 2 good handfuls of cherry tomatoes from greenhouse; they have super hard skins, but underneath….candy. Sweet, warm from the sun, bursting in the mouth goodness.

We eat lots of them served the simple way we tried in Italy- roughly chopped, sprinkled with chopped shallot-generously, seasoned with salt and pepper and drowned with good Italian olive oil. Once eaten, what’s left on the plate is a pool of tomato juice and olive oil, sponged off with crusty bread- food heaven. Next year- onwards with homegrown tomatoes and other veggies. 🙂