#32 Parsnip and Watercress Salad

As Greg and I gorged ourselves on Bury Market cheese, we needed something to cut through the richness. I’d seen the recipe for the salad as I was flicking through English Food, and thought that I should only make it when able to get really good produce. Apparently, it’s an early Seventeenth Century dish, and it’s very easy to prepare. The recipe said to use one medium sized parsnip per person, so I doubled that for starters! They were boiled until tender in salted water. While they were boiling, I arranged a head of little gem lettuce in each of our bowls and made a vinaigrette. Jane recommended putting on some toasted nuts and to use the relevant nut oil in the vinaigrette. I used walnut, as I’ve made parsnips salads before that used walnuts. I made it in the ratio of 1 part walnut oil,1 part vegetable oil (as the nut oil by itself can be overpowering) and 1 part white wine vinegar. Then I seasoned it well. This was used to dress the parsnips. The dressed parsnips were arranged in a ring on top of the lettuce. Finally, a pile of watercress was placed in the centre of the dish along with a sprinkle of chopped toasted walnuts.

I’d forgotten how nice the walnut and parsnip combo is, and how lovely and peppery watercress is, I think that people poo-poo it has boring salad. FYI: watercress is one of the three indigenous vegetable to Britain. The others are kale and….Damn! I’ve forgotten the other one. I shall try and find the reference again. It’s weird to think that all other vegetables have been brought in from foreign climbs, including the parsnip!

#32 Parsnip and Watercress Salad – 8.5/10. This is a great salad. Certainly tasty enough to eat on it’s own. I’d have it with some granary bread to mop up any stray vinaigrette at the end!

Sunday Dinner – # 30 and 31

After a Friday night out on the razz and a hangover all Saturday, me and Greg thought we’d do a nice Sunday lunch and get Joff round. We decided to make pretty normal one – pies, gravy, peas, veg , Yorkshire puddings. But we thought the Grigson must have something we could do. Of course, she always delivers; (#30) Carrot and Potato Cake seemed straight-forward and unfussy. Simply fry an onion in butter and stir in 2 or 3 grated carrots along with plenty of salt. Spread half in a cake tin, followed by a pound of thinly-sliced potatoes and then the remaining carrot mixture. Bake in the oven until all has become soft – about 25 minutes. We had a slice of it with our meal and it was a much welcomed addition. The juice from the carrots and the butter made a lovely orange-coloured sweet sauce.

The pudding was an Eighteenth Century-style (#31) Baked Custard Tart. Usually the kind I have is made from eggs, milk, sugar and nutmeg, but this was made from 3/4 pint of single cream boiled with a cinnamon stick and 2 blades of mace. The cream was sieved and added to 2 eggs and 2 egg yolks along with 2 tablespoons of sugar. This was whisked thoroughly and quickly so that it didn’t scramble. Then 2 teaspoons of orange flower water was added, and it was all poured into a blind-baked sweet shortcrust pastry base, a flourish of grated nutmeg added to the surface, and baked on a low/medium heat for about 30 minutes until just set. Can’t wait to get my new kitchen in – hopefully will be starting it at the weekend. Watch this space!

#30 Carrot and Potato Cake – 7/10. An interesting and fuss-free way of making your typical Sunday veg a bit more interesting (and fattening, natch).

#31 Baked Custard Tart – 8/10. Lovely! Very creamy and fragrant. The orange flower water was a perfumed delight! However, I think I do prefer the recipe I know of – there is several recipes similar to this in English Food, so I won’t worry that I’m missing out!

Greg says:

“#31 Baked Custard Tart: 8/10. Woop! Bona to vada your dolly old tart. Me and Joffrey were dry humping over this one. I even gave Pugling a little bit and he made his scratty schnarfing gulp-sound which means ‘I like’. Despite Neil’s misremembering I’m sure this is the only pie of this kind he’s made me and thus is my fave of the breed so far.”

#26 Roast Parsnips

A quick one cos it’s a bit crappo really! Made a nice tea last night with Yorkshire Puddings (see recipe in blog). I bought some parsnips. Followed the Grigson’s guidelines which turned out to be what I do anyway! Par-boil your parsnips in salted water for about 3 minutes. Add to a hot roasting tin, season, and roast in a hot oven until they’re squidgy in the centre and crispy (but not too crispy) in the outside. If you’re cooking them with roast meat, stick them in the tin alongside it. Curiously enough, the Grigson doesn’t give a recipe for roast or mashed potatoes – maybe she assumes everyone knows how to do it; but then again, if you can do those, you can do parsnips… I’ve also noticed some other omissions from the book and will compile a list, methinks and add my own versions.

Anyway, sorry for the rather uninspiring post today, but it’s all I could muster this week – still have no money. Boo! However, it is Valentine’s Day very soon, so I’ll do something from the book then. I intend to go to Bury Market also and get some offal and weird things.

Here’s the score for the roasts:
#26 Roast Parsnips: 8/10. You’ve gotta love em. The Grigson didn’t give any new info on them though. Anyone know a better way to do them, or is this the best?

Christmas Dinner, numbers 21, 22

I planned to do alot more than I actually did for the Christmas dinner. It did all go down a treat though. However, only two Grigsons were done. Most of the recipes for the meal were taken from the brilliant Leiths Vegetarian Bible that I bought Greg a couple of years back; I would recommend everyone to buy it whether a vegetarian or not. This was the menu:

Starter: Mushroom pate

Main: Nut roast, (#21) Buttered Parsnips, Brussels Sprouts, Roast Potatoes, Minty Peas, Mustard Gravy

Pud: (#22) Little Pots of Chocolate with Rosemary

‘Parsnips need butter’ says the Grigson. And so right she is. Buttered parsnips is a way to make roast parsnips without roasting them it seems. Boil your parsnips until nearly cooked, drain, and then saute them slowly in butter. They go all nice and golden and chewy. Yumbo! Add some parsley and salt and pepper and you’re done.

The Pots of Chocolate with Rosemary were a strange affair; dissolve 8 ounces of sugar in 8 fluid ounces of dry white wine and lemon juice, add a pint of cream and simmer until it thickens. Now add either a stem of fresh or a teaspoon of dried rosemary (I used dried as they’d run out of fresh at the shop) and 5 1/2 ounces of grated dark chocolate. Simmer for 20 minutes until nice and thick. Pass through a sieve and pour into ramekins to set. All pretty easy. sprinkle with some slivered almonds. The Grigson did warn that it was a very rich dessert, and she was not wrong! Greg and I managed to eat half of one each!

#21: Buttered Parsnips.7.5/10 – A great way to eat parsnips, but are they better the roast!? I don’t think so!

#22: Little Pots of Chocolate with Rosemary Cream. 4.5/10. The combination of rosemary-infused chocolate works very well indeed. But the vast amounts of wine and sugar made far too rich even for me!

#14 Leek and Onion Pudding

It was a weird one, but Greg and I are running out of veggie recipes.

Start by making a suet pastry as for a steak and kidney pudding (I used veggie suet, natch). Line a 2 ½ pint basin with the dough. Chop a large onion and a couple of leeks. Layer up within with onion, leek, plenty of seasoning, butter and dried sage. Make a lid from pastry and steam for 3 hours. That’s it!

Sounds awful, bland and stodgy doesn’t it? Well, it was great. Surprisingly tasty. We had it with butter beans and onion gravy. Sorry for the rubbish picture – we only realised we hadn’t taken one til we were on second helpings. The video is true excitement, don’t you agree? Deffo a nominee for Best Short at the BAFTAs methinks!

Greg says:
#14 Leek and Onion Pudding – Witness how stupidly excited we are on the video. I didn’t quite accept that you could make pastry out of steam, apparently you can. The pudding is yum, the pastry is really flowery, as opposed to floury, because of the herbs, and the long slow cook just brings out the ordinary flavours of everything in abundance. I would never have the patience to make it myself though, obv. 7/10

#14 Leek and Onion Pudding: 8/10. Lovely crispy herby crust, surprisingly yummy within.

Recipe #5 – Pan Haggarty

Our mate Joff came round for tea last night so we had a very nice Pan Haggarty. The meal had to be veggie so the only change I made was to use groundnut oil with a dot of butter instead of lard to fry it in. Pan Haggarty is a North-Eastern dish (from Newcastle, I think) and is simply finely-sliced potato and onion layered up in a frying pan with grated cheddar, adding plenty of seasoning on the way, then frying it slowly until it cooks through and then popping it under the grill. The only difficult part would be the slicing-up of the veg, but luckily I’ve got a slicing attachment for my Kitchen Aid so it was all done in 5 minutes!

In Yorkshire, this dish is called a Pan Aggie – my uncle used to cook it. His way was to layer up potato, onion, garlic, butter and bacon, and bake it in the oven. This way is just as tasty and quite different, but it does take rather a lot longer to bake in the oven than it does to fry on the hob.

#5 Pan Haggarty: 4/5 – a great supper dish – particularly if you need to keep to a tight budget

Here’s what Joff said:
“I was very excited at the prospect of this dish and I wasn’t disappointed. I’m told it was simple to make but I couldn’t have done it! The spuds were particularly perfect. Its the sort of dish one should eat after a brisk walk on a cold, windy day. I shall give it a 4.5/5. Only reason the 0.5 is ‘missing’ is because there wasn’t any left over for a doggy bag!”

And Greg:
“My ruthless critique of Pan Haggarty is . . . yum! Basically it’s ‘I’m getting a divorce and I’ve lost my job’ style food. Comforting in the extreme. The stronger the cheddar the better I’d say and fanzy pickles/relishes are de rigour. I could a whole one to myself. I’d be sensational and go with garlic too though I reckon. Easy peasy too, esp with a Kitchen Aid slicing machine. 4/5. Well done chef.”

Recipes 2-4 – Glamorgan Sausages, Olde Worlde Mushrooms and Peas

I’ve been away from a computer for a few days – I still don’t have the internet at home and I had to go back to Leeds at the weekend because my brother Ady and his good lady wife Nads had a little boy called Harry. He’s the cutest and I’m NOT biased! Now I’ve got some catching up to do. The hat trick meal went quite well although I did get a little flustered and rushed through the making of the Glamorgan sausages – they were far too big and didn’t cook through properly. They were also a bit well done – au creole I should say – because I lost concentration when dishing up. However, they can be done well in advance, so next time I’ll be better prepared. They’re a definite veggie alternative. Doing them in the food processor makes light work of it too – although be careful, I’ve sustained my first injury on one of the blades! The fricassey of mushrooms was brilliant; the taste and aroma of the mace and nutmeg were warming and so very Medieval! The Grigson talks about the English way to cook (#4) green peas – i.e. with mint and sugar in with the water – as the only way to do them yet I had never actually eaten them this way. Well, I certainly agree and it will now be the only way I shall cook peas in the future!
For the Glamorgan sausages:

Start by mixing together 5 ounces of grated Caerphilly or Cheddar cheese, 4ounces of fresh white breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons of finely –chopped leek or spring onion and a generous tablespoon of chopped parsley. You can quicken the whole process by simply reducing those ingredients into breadcrumbs in food processor. Now mix in 3 egg yolks, half a teaspoon of thyme, a level teaspoon each of salt and mustard powder and some pepper. Bring the mixture together and form into around 12 small sausages. Dip each one in egg white and then coat in some dried breadcrumbs. Fry gently in oil or lard until golden.

The recipe for ‘A White Fricassey of Mushrooms’ comes from Hannah Glasse and I shall simply quote it as Griggers has done:

“Take a Quart of Fresh Mushrooms, make them clean, put them into a Sauce-pan, with three spoonfuls [tablespoons] of Water and three of Milk, and a very little Salt, set them on a quick Fire and let them boil up three Times; then take them off, grate in a little Nutmeg, put in a little beaten Mace, half a Pint of thick Cream, a Piece of butter rolled well in Flour, put it all together into the Sauce-pan, and Mushrooms all together, shake the Sauce-pan well all the Time. When it is fine and thick, dish them up; be careful they don’t curdle [ don’t let them boil]. You may stir the Sauce-pan carefully with a Spoon all the time.”

The peas were simply a cop out: make sure you boil them with plenty of salt, sugar and mint!

Here’s what Greg reckons:
“13th Sept: Glamorgan sausages, mushroom fricasee, minty peas, new potatoes. As a combo it works really well. The mushrooms are creamy, reminded me of the really nice chicken supreme we used to get at school, the peas are sweet n fresh, the sausages are comforting stodge, sits together a treat. The mace was most exciting , looks like pork scratchings, smells like sarsaparilla, gives the mushrooms an exotic little edge. I’d put more in than she says, it could take it. The peas were lovely, could eat a huge bowl by themselves, it’s not quite the same as just having peas with mint sauce either, you get all the sweetness first and a rush of mintiness last, totally moreish. Sausages were grand but recipe said make 12, which the monkey reduced to 4, bit of an error as they were not quite done through so still a bit leeky. The cheese will never fully melt anyway as it’s not fatty. Potatoes perfect complement. Sausages: 3. Mushrooms: 4 (my fave). Peas: 4. (I’m saving 5 for something amazing!)”

My personal ratings are:
#2 Glamorgan sausages: 3/5 – next time I’ll do them better and hopefully they’ll graduate up to 4/5!
#3 A Fricassey of Mushrooms: 4.5/5 – a brilliant way to serve mushrooms as a veg with a Sunday roast.
#4 Green Peas: 4.5/5 – quintessential English delight