Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's casserole, Jim, but not as we know it!

Last night I cooked a big load of chicken casserole - nice big chicken thigh pieces, browned in the pan first with seasoned flour on them, with a sauce of white wine, cream, chicken stock and mushroom stock. The rest of the ingredients were onions, garlic, butter beans, smoked streaky bacon, mushrooms (bought some normal, inoffensive close cup jobs, but enhanced these with some dried ceps) and leeks. I usually flavour a dish like this with tarragon but I went to the shop and it was tarra-gone, so I just used some thyme and black pepper. Served it with wild rice, for a change (as opposed to mash/baked spuds/bread). Was pretty good, though I say it myself.

I find the trick with any dish like this that involves bacon, or any really fatty meat, is to fry it first. This ensures it can crisp up nicely (bacon will never be crispy if you throw it raw into a pan full of soggy onions, mushrooms and whatever), and the fat that comes out of it can then be used for frying the rest of the ingredients. So I didn't need to add any extra fat for frying the chicken portions or the onions, and just added some butter when cooking the mushrooms because what's the point of mushrooms without butter?

Pizza tonight, nothing I've not described before so I won't bother.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
A misunderstanding at the fish counter meant that I walked out of the supermarket with 23 euros worth of octopus. So we will be eating octopus, white bean and veg stew for the next month I guess.

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Leo

Well-known member
Shakshuka with toasted pita. what an simple but amazingly flavorful dish, probably one of my top five.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Love shashuka. I use an Ottolenghi recipe - bit of saffron in there kills it.

Ollie, you do a bloody lot of cooking for a working man. Do you knock off at 3.30 or what?

I ate dahl last night. My poverty meal. Onions, garlic, whatever spices are to hand (cumin, fenugreek seed, chilli, tumeric it was this time) and red lentils. Delish if you salt it right (i.e. loads of salt when the lentils have cooked down to bring out all the spice flavour. It's a good base and you can stir through bacon, toms, okra or whatever really though I had it plain last night.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I ate dahl last night. My poverty meal. Onions, garlic, whatever spices are to hand (cumin, fenugreek seed, chilli, tumeric it was this time) and red lentils. Delish if you salt it right (i.e. loads of salt when the lentils have cooked down to bring out all the spice flavour. It's a good base and you can stir through bacon, toms, okra or whatever really though I had it plain last night.

I love stuff like this - I make an Ethiopian version with berbere, garlic, tomatoes, onions, most weeks. And as you say, it's incredibly cheap and there's usually easily enough for 2 days' worth.

Fenugreek seeds are the best, amazing how they totally transform the taste of a dish. Garo is this Georgian sauce for chicken with coriander leaf/walnuts/fenugreek/ground coriander/turmeric/chicken stock/garlic etc - it shouldn't work, but it somehow is amazing.

The other thing I've been making a lot of recently is Keralan fish - marinate white fish with loads of garlic, lots of chili, ginger, coriander seed and a bit of ww vinegar (I think that's all), roll in a mix of dessicated coconut and flour, and then fry on low/medium heat. Lush.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
Baboon - recipes please! Both those dishes sounds amazing. I should mentioned I like to liven that up with yoghurt on the side.

Have you tried fenugreek leaves? They're absolutely bloody delicious and taste of "restaurant curry" to me.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I was gonna say yoghurt actually - and I try and make fresh bread with the lentils too (dunno why I never had a breadmaker before, given they're pretty cheap), seems to go well.

I'll have to dig out the exact recipes, will get back to you on that. I never tend to measure stuff out, so will see what the original recipes say...

Fenugreek leaves - I tend to have chicken methi at restaurants when it's on the menu, but I made it once at home and it wasn't quite as good. Will try again - what else do you use the leaves for?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I too love shakshuka... also menemen, what's the difference? Perhaps in menemen the egg is kinda brojen up throughout or sonething?
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
yeah, I think so. It's scrambled whereas in shashuka it's baked. Goes so well with that Turkish bread.

Re. fenugreek leaves only ever used them as a flavouring in curries and dahls so can't comment but am sure they're a bunch of other uses.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think the basic difference is that one is Turkish and one is Lebanese (or Israeli - it's disputed in fact). There are no hard and fast rules to how you make either so I'm sure they pretty much overlap. Always have a slight preference for menemen for some reason... probably just cos I tried it first.
 

Leo

Well-known member
I tend to love dishes that include smoked paprika, a key ingredient in shakshuka (or the way my wife makes it, anyway).
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I think the basic difference is that one is Turkish and one is Lebanese (or Israeli - it's disputed in fact). There are no hard and fast rules to how you make either so I'm sure they pretty much overlap. Always have a slight preference for menemen for some reason... probably just cos I tried it first.

There's a continuum of these things, I think. From Piperade to eggs parsi or that sichuan egg and tomato dish that shows up from time to time. I think there's an Italian eggs and peppers dish, too.

Coincidentally, I ended up making shakshuka, or something like it, for dinner tonight.
 
There's a continuum of these things, I think. From Piperade to eggs parsi or that sichuan egg and tomato dish that shows up from time to time. I think there's an Italian eggs and peppers dish, too.

Coincidentally, I ended up making shakshuka, or something like it, for dinner tonight.

Kagianas / Strapatsada from Greece - also eggs and tomatoes.
 

Leo

Well-known member
out last night, hanger steak with fingerling potatoes garnished with stilton. the cut was slightly thicker and more tender than most hanger steaks, perfectly seasoned and charred.

I think charring is one of the things I'd miss most if I gave up meat, can't get the same effect with a vegetable on an open-flame grill.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I don't know that Greek dish but a lot of Greek and Turkish things are the same but with different names (eg Greek delight), is that the case here?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Another brunch - scrambled eggs this time, with smoked streaky bacon and potato cakes with mature cheddar, thyme and mustard in them.

brunch2.jpg
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Steak, ale and mushroom pie - YEAH BOYEEEEE!!!!

steakalemushroompie.jpg

Filling was a kilo of braising steak, 45 grams of dried mushrooms (doesn't sound much but that's equivalent to about a half a kilo fresh), two big onions, beef stock and most of a bottle of Theakston's Old Peculier. I actually made too much pie-juice, so have kept some back to use as a gravy for some future dinner.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I've been a little remiss in posting to this thread lately, apologies for that. Anyway, today seems as good a day as any to resurrect it cos we went out for dinner. There is a famous sea-food restaurant here called Ramiro which became massively popular (I lately discovered) cos Antony Bourdain ate there on some telly show and raved about it like crazy. And fair enough, it's a really fantastic place, one of those that you have here with just loads and loads of varieties of very-fresh seafood. Tanks of lobsters and crabs and prawns and stuff swimming around and loads more stuff that has just died - or may in fact be clinging on to life - glistening on piles of ice. Ramiro reminds me a little of Tayyabs in East London in that it does do good food in large quantities but it's mega fucking popular on weekends and, as with the Tayyabs crowd control people you used to get wearing hi-vis jackets to make the queue work on a weekend, there is a special system in Ramiro with tickets and so on, plus they serve beers to you in the queue. Both sort of feel like industrial food serving places with lines of people marching in step by step, lorry loads of meat/seafood being delivered every minute at the back and cheap and cheerful seating. Both great but sometimes I feel that they have become slightly impersonal as a result of their (not undeserved) success.
I do really like Ramiro and maybe it is better than most of the similar places in town... but the thing is, there are similar places here, plenty of them, and it feels as though, for people from out of town at least, Ramiro is unique in what it does and in terms of quality when it's really not.
There's a place called Marisqueira do Lis maybe 100m from Ramiro on the same street which costs roughly the same and offers roughly the same dishes - in fact to be honest most things aren't really dishes as such, you pick a lobster or whatever and then they kill it, grill it, cover it in butter, salt and coriander and slap it on the plate, what makes it good is just the quality of the ingredients. So today my girlfriend was upset and needed cheering up so we decided to treat ourselves to some seafood, as often in this scenario we plumped for M do L instead of queuing for two hours to get in the more feted one next door.
In fact, not just seafood, she had a craving for oysters which are less popular than in England and so are one of the few things that cost more here than in London. Anyway; ten beautiful oysters with lemon and tabasco, a huge dish of mussels (we normally go for other shellfish cos we'd had so many mussels in the UK but the pendulum has swung back and it seems exotic to eat these now) and then finally we had a huge scarlet prawn each... all washed down with sparkling green wine, the perfect accompaniment for this food.
No pictures I'm afraid but it was all lovely, at the more expensive end of Lisbon restaurants but well worth it for the change of mood it effected. We made sure to really make the most of the scarlet prawns cos they cost about fifteen quid each... probably in the past we would have just torn off the shell and ate the delicious tail bit but now we're a bit more experienced we happily broke it all open and sopped up the liquid brains with bread while chewing on each leg and licking the inside of the shell to get every possible bit of meat. Didn't actually suck the eyes but one step down from that.
Never seen scarlet prawns before moving here - is that cos I'm not observant or do they not sell 'em in the UK? Deliciously rich anyway... beginning to think that I might prefer them to giant tiger prawns

ScarletPrawns.jpg

Apparently for a lot of people it's traditional in these restaurants to finish off with a 'dessert' in the form of the famous pork sandwich known as a bifana cos all the delicious protein in the form of prawns and clams and so on ultimately don't fill you up that much. Today that wasn't necessary.
 
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