Double Plum Jelly

There are going to be quite a few plum posts, as I seem to have gained an embarrassing excess.

This is a simple "technique" jelly, in which sliced plums are held in a plum jelly. The recipe calls for the plums to be simmered in Riesling, but I switched it to half water half wine, mainly because that was the amount of wine that was spare. Halve & stone you plums, add sugar to taste cover with wine/water and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Push the mixture through a fine sieve into a jar & make up to 500ml with water. Do the usual jelly routine of softening & melting the gelatine. Line your mould with halved plums and then pour in enough jelly mixture to just cover them. Fresh fruit floats in jelly, so if you want it at the top of your decanted jelly you have to let the first pour thicken. If you stand you mould(s) in a bowl of ice water the process goes that bit quicker.
After an hour or so the plum layer should be gelled enough to add the rest. Due to the slightly magical nature of gelatine, the top should set faster then you'd expect. Chill for a couple of hours & then serve. I didn't unmould this one, serving it instead in glasses, but it looked good & tasted great (quite a grownup taste due to the sourness that comes with plums)

Burgers

Since my first run of "Perfection burgers" I've been wanting to try a good restaurant burger to compare these too.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found that GBK was coming to town. At last something to measure my burger against, after all Gourmet is in their name. They claim a 100% aberdeen angus beef in the burgers, so it had to be worth a go. Unfortunately whilst the burgers are fine, they aren't great. I was asked how I'd like my burger so said (almost by reflex) "Rare please". Apparently that's not possible, would medium rare do. When the burger came, it was more medium than medium rare. In a nutshell that's what I found wrong with GBK. They go further than most burger providers but they don't go far enough to justify their pricing. The bun comes stacked with stuff, but its mostly salad giving the illusion of height, not a thick burger. Sorry GBK.

To cheer myself up I took a batch of "perfection burgers" along to our neighbour's allotment BBQ. Since they'd just started to harvest the onions it seemed rude not to turn one of them into a good onion relish , pile it on the Burger and enjoy it in the setting sun.

Gimlet

The Gimlet

a really old fashioned cocktail, great for warm summer nights.
It is just gin & Rose's Lime juice. Some people say 50-50, others (myself included disagree).

1 Part Rose's Lime Juice(*)
4 Parts good dry gin

stir over ice till brutally cold, serve.

There is a theory (quite a romantic one, which I like) that the drink is named after a royal navy surgeon, one Surgeon General Sir Thomas D. Gimlette, KCB  who introduced the drink to the officers mess as a way of making the scurvy preventing lime ration palatable. The ratings of course took theirs with rum, making grog. Alternatively it is named after the tool, due to the penetrating nature of the drink on the imbibers sobriety. Like I said I'm going with sir Thomas, because a drink this good has to be good for you.

(*)Rose's Lime juice is a cordial (also with a fine naval history) most authorities agree that it is required in a proper gimlet. Ersatz versions can be made with lime juice & gomme or other lime syrups and for those desperate to ruin a fine drink vodka can of course be substituted for gin, but why would you want to do that ?

Irish Calzone

In the pizza experiments, using the BBQ kept turning up as an idea. It is quite a reasonable one too, as the barbie gets a lot hotter than my oven. So I used the dough recipe to make some thin crusts and gave it a go. The main problem is wrestling the floppy topping charged dough on & off the hot grill. I simple answer is to fold your pizza in half. Ok its not a true calzone, but its close enough.

The  Prosciutto & potato pizza made a big impression, an excess of potato (yeah its the cheaper ingredient) & dough led to experimentation, I mean Ham & Bacon are basically the same right ? Getting to the bottom of the sauce led me to adding onions . Voilà  the Irish calzone. Bacon,potato,onion and cheese, grilled quickly over a high heat for a minute or 2 each side. The photo above doesn't do it real justice, but next time you are making pizzas give this one a go.

Lavender Lamb

I have a pretty small garden, with not even enough room for the number of roses I'd like to grow, so I appreciate multi-purpose plants, lavender fits this quite nicely. It can be used for more than toiletries though.

First get a leg (or part leg) of lamb, size depends on the number of people you want to feed (800g will feed 3 adults), then get it butterflied. You can do that yourself if you have the knives & the skill, but a decent butcher will do for you as part of buying the meat.

Next you'll need some lavender, you just want the flowers and since they are currently in bloom use fresh ones, you need a handful (if you have to use dried, they are more intense, so halve the amount), a couple of sprigs of rosemary and 4-5 garlic gloves. Grind it together with some pepper & salt and then add a dash of olive oil to bind it. Coat the lamb & leave it for a couple of hours.

You'll want a fairly hot BBQ/Grill. The lamb wants 10-15 minutes a side, I'm using a meat thermometer & its set at 65c which is the bottom end of well done. Normally I'd have lamb rarer than that, but I was cooking for a couple of other people that wanted/needed it well done. Once you time has elapsed or your chosen internal temperature is reached then take the lamb off & let it rest. It will produce a reasonable amount of juices, which can be used for sauce/stock/gravy. Most of the herb crust will have charred, so you can scrape that off, it's job is done now. Slice and serve

The lavender is quite a delicate flavour, which comes as a bit of a shock after the grinding (which can make your kitchen smell like a natural trust gift shop) and really complements the lamb well.

Jelly vs Jelly

In the yellow corner we have

Hartley's lemon flavour jelly.
40p a packet at Sainsbury's




In the other yellow corner we have home made lemon jelly

Needs a few more ingredients than the Hartley's and a bit more equipment, oh it costs more too, about £1:60 for the amount of ingredients used.

The packet jelly goes in the jug with 100ml of water and into the microwave for a minute, the water & molten jelly don't really mix, so when you make it upto 500ml (or a UK pint) you have to stir it a fair bit to get an even mixture. Then you pour it into your moulds and put it in the fridge, total time ?About 4 minutes. Over in the real jelly corner the first job is a simple sugar syrup. 125ml of boiling water gets 125g of sugar dumped in and stirred till its all dissolved. Actually I let it stand and stirred in between my juicings. The sharp eyed amongst you will have spotted an orange, this has 2 uses. 1 it dilutes the citric acid from the lemons.

Second it improves the colour, giving you a strong yellow, rather than a vaguely murky translucence. That's the jelly liquid on the left ready for actual jelling.  First of cut up 5 leaves of good gelatin and then just cover them with your jelly liquid. They are going to sit there softening for about 10mins. Whilst that's happening bring a pan of water upto simmer. The bowl with the softened gelatine is going to sit on that till all the jelly dissolves (another 10 mins) once that is done stir in the rest of the liquid. Pour through a sieve and or a strainer into your moulds and put it into the fridge. All the hard work is now done, spend the next few hours doing other things and not frequently going in the fridge to see how your Jellies are doing.

At this point I think its worth pointing out that the Hartley's jelly uses no artificial flavourings or colourings. Look at the packet closely and you'll see its lemon flavoured jelly. It doesn't use any lemons either. The citric acid might come from them I guess and the coyly named "natural flavourings" may use lemon oils, but the colour comes from beta-carotene and curcumin, thats carrots & tumeric to us. Here are the end results.

That's Hartley's on the left, and mine on the right. They are obviously quite different looking, fortunately a brave volunteer offered to do a blind tasting.

It probably comes as no surprise that the packet jelly didn't fare to well, at first it appeared to have a more subtle flavour than the home made jelly. On a second tasting this was declared to be a lack of flavour. The home made jelly packs a hefty citrus punch and has a much longer finish (and greater depth). Pretty much all my taste testers preferred the home made one. I'm not bothered by the fact its 4x dearer or that it takes about 10x as long to make, it is a glorious lemony summer dessert.

Mai Tai

I'm not normally a fan of Tiki style cocktails, since they are usually rum(s) disguised by fruit juice(s). The Mai Tai has a bit of a storied & complex history, the one above is Mr Boston's version of Trader Vic's. Minus golden rum as I didn't have any. The mix of lime,cointreau & orgeat gives quite a good base to the rum, the dark rum float gives it a bit of a hit. Not my normal fare, since I tend to like bitingly dry drinks, but not a bad summer sup.

Pizza !

Over at lifehacker they're pretty serious about pizza. Pizza is pretty nice, I can get one delivered with little more effort than opening a new tab on my browser, so what's the fuss about ?

Homemade pizzas

Turns out pizza is one of those things worth the hassle. Heston Blumenthal goes into his usual depth when he makes pizza in "Perfection" Kilos of tomatoes get used, dough is prefermented and so on. The main thing he talks about though is the temperature at which the pizza gets cooked. Wood fired pizza ovens are really hot, hotter than you can get out of a domestic oven. Fortunately there are some simple solutions to get you started.

First, dough. My pizzas were made with a simple flour,water,yeast and salt dough. It takes about 10 minutes & doesn't need to prove though letting it rest always helps. Toppings, cheese & tomato are glutamate rich, so a well made pizza should have a strong umami flavour. To get my tomato sauce I butchered a ketchup recipe leaving out the sugar & the final reduction and fiddling with the seasoning (Basically I left out the spices & added more herbs). Takes about an hour, though most of that is the sauce bubbling away on its own. The 2 pizza halves up top are potato & prosciutto (top) and Salami & mushroom (bottom). To cook them I used the skillet method, heat a cast iron pan on full heat for about 20 minutes, meanwhile get the grill going at full heat.

Slip the prepared pizza onto the bottom of the skillet(*) and whiz everything under the grill, 2 minutes later you have pizza. Really good pizza, OK it takes more than opening a tab on your browser (I had to do that to get the dough recipe) but the taste is worth it.

(*) Sounds simple, it's not. You are going to be wrestling with a floppy circle of dough, loaded with sauce,cheese & toppings and a ferociously hot pan. Get help, make sure you've got tools and take care. 

Dirty Dirty Martini

Funny how summer leads to ice cold refreshing cocktails.

This combines my love of Gin with my love of BBQ.
You will need, GOOD olives, a hot BBQ and a skewer or two.
This takes a bit of timing, but make up a very very cold version of your favourite martini.
Thread your required number of olives onto a skewer & BBQ. First they'll sweat, then they'll begin to char at this point take them off the heat. Drop the hot Olives into the cold martini they should split, dirtying up your martini nicely.

There you go one dirty martini.

(I mean it about good olives, thats why I'm using Kalamatas)

Cucumber martini

This dangerous concoction is courtesy of Larousse. They make it with vodka, but as you know, I'm a gin martini person.

Peel & roughly chop half a cucumber, you are going to muddle this with some sugar in the bottom of your mixing glass to get as much liquid out of the cucumber as possible. Having successfully muddled add a dash of dry vermouth (to counter the sugar), a very generous handful of ice and as much gin as you need(*) stir down for a good 30-40 seconds then double strain to serve.
Drink, very very carefully. On a hot day the refreshing nature of ice-cold cucumber will dominate pretty much everything, don't be fooled, there is a good dose of hard liquor in there which ever way you choose to make this one.

(*) Taking into account the number of them you are making (half a cucumber will do upto 4) and how strong/dry you want the final drinks to be.